THE CANTURBIZZLE TALIZZLES

No.

It's finally come to this. In these days of endless war, rising energy costs, and fading pop stars appearing in public without panties five years after anyone wanted to see such a thing, the truest sign yet of the end of days is upon us. That's right folks, He Is Here:

Baba Brinkman, a 27 year-old, white, Canadian, "son-of-hippies" with a "master's degree in medieval and Renaissance English literature" is touring "high schools and colleges," performing rap music based on Chaucer's Canturbury Tales. A sample of his rhymes:

Ready to kill with their jagged-edged daggers drawn/The three aggravated braggarts staggered up the lawn/And without dragging on while the story is told/Beneath the tree they found a bag filled with glorious gold

Is he fucking kidding me? Apparently not:

"Chaucer and rap are both performance-based and they're both battles of words where your proficiency gets you by . . . My goal is that anyone who knows nothing about Chaucer would really be able to appreciate it"

But what about those who know something about Chaucer? Or about rap? Does he "appreciate" the fact that we may be on the verge of the first ever alliance between a bling-wearing gangsta' and a tweed-wearing professor, with the express goal of tracking him down to ram his mic up his ass?

"People have a narrow idea of what constitutes rap based on what they see on TV . . . Hip hop is all about proving your skills. About keeping it real."

That's right, he's keeping it real. Performing for auditoriums filled with snickering high school students and their enthralled English teachers, desperately hoping one of the over-18 girls will stop laughing at him long enough to join his Pilgrim Posse, becoming his very-own lustful Wife of Bath.

Think back to your high school days. Assuming you even went to the "performance," and assuming you weren't too stoned to follow your teacher's instructions to fill out the work sheet, identifying which pre-planned rap corresponded to which Tale, would you have managed to get the "Holy shit, this guy is the biggest loser I've ever seen" out of your head for even one second?

I hope Baba enjoys his 15 minutes of self-loathing fame before he puts his dream away, goes back to school to earn his doctorate, and realizes what the tweed-wearing professors figured out long ago: no need to rap, no need even to avoid Chaucer's Middle English to get the prettiest co-eds into bed. Just stand in front of the lecture hall, act smart, and tell the leggy lass in the front row he admires her ideas.

Then he can call MCs "aggrevated braggarts" and refer to bling as "glorious gold" all he wants.

And most importantly, he can call himself not Professor Brinkman, but "Baba Brinkman" all he wants. His students'll still laugh at him, but since he's sleeping with some of them, drinking with still more, and grading every one of them, it won't really matter, will it?