If I had a mote of musical talent or ability, I'd be making music instead of churning out song parodies. I've been indulging in that vice since May 2004, when a friend of mine pointed me to amiright. After a few false starts, I discovered I have a facility (of which I stress the facile aspect) for crankin' 'em out. For better or worse, I'm a big fan of rhetorical and literary devices and polysyllabism, so I'm not reluctant to resort to them, often at the expense of pacing perfection's pursuit. Neither am I squeamish about neologizing. My themes are frequently unseemly--seamy, even. I'm also kind of a lex maniac. Occasionally I insert foreign-language fragments into my parodies or, worse, write entire parodies in pidgins. I know just enough French, Spanish, and German to be dangerous. I love mixed drinks, doubles, greens, grill, marriages, and media. But I love mixed metaphors even more. And I believe, to paraphrase Paul Krassner, founder/editor of "The Realist," that syntax is Silly Putty. That credo was alliteratively summed up by Bob Gomez, in a comment about one of my parodies: "syntactically strangled into submission." (Alliteration [to say nothing of parentheticalness] is my inamorata.) Conversely, or perhaps concomitantly, as an lapsed copy editor, I'm fairly punctilious about punctuation. Although some people insist that two-thirds of a pun is P-U, I believe that "pun" is half of "pundit," which I am not. But I do like to have fun with puns, the more punishing the better.