How To Insult A Politician

Making Lemon Aide

2007-09-29T12:40:00.001-04:00

I would be very tempted to vote for them. Seven candidates for the new Women’s Party standing for election in the October 21st elections in Poland have posed nude for a campaign poster, shielded only by a sign that reads in Polish, “Everything for the future…and nothing to hide.” The party’s founder, Manuel Gretowska, explained, “We are beautiful, nude, proud.” But then she quickly added, “This is not pornography. There is nothing to see in terms of sex.” But then why point out that the ladies were not wearing bathing suits behind the sign?
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It sounds to me like a direct attempt to deal with that Madonna slash whore dichotomy that Madonna has exploited so well in her own career, and it shadows the absurd Republican noise machine’s alleged concern over Hillary’s cleavage displayed on the floor of the Senate. Women have been stigmatized as too emotional and too compassionate for executive positions for the last 4,000 years, while sex appeal clearly helped Jack Kennedy and Bill Clinton attract the bimbo vote, and probably got Warren G. Harding elected President as well. So why shouldn’t women, handed lemons by biology, use their tits to attract a few ‘Mimbo’ votes? (Which is not to suggest I have even noticed if Hillary has a cleavage, …which she doesn’t.) I would say the Polish Women’s Party is just looking for a little lemon aide.
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As anyone who has ever eaten at a franchise steak house in America can testify, a lot of what the menu defines as “steak” ain’t steak. (i.e.,Ground Round is never steak!) But as the price of real steak goes up retailers and customers are desperately searching for an affordable alternative. In Britain a suspicious investigative reporter for an ITV program (“Undercover, Mum”) actually subjected so-called steaks from 15 JD Wetherspoon’s and Greene King’s Hungry Horse franchise pubs and found that while the occasionally hard to chew product was beef it was not from the huge healthy British Herefords or Angus cattle the diners might of imagined. Instead the beef was from something called a zebu.
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Also known as “the humped cattle”, zebus originated in India and have been cross bred in North and South America and Central Africa. Their long droopy ears and dewlap chins are adaptations to hot muggy mosquito filled climates like central Africa and Brazil and Florida in the U.S. but that does not improve the palatability of their meat. The Hungry Horse denied that any of their rubber-like steaks were zebu. But JD Witherspoon’s took a different tact. They responded to the program by pointing out that the, “zebu is…taxonomically identical to any other bread of cattle.” Yea; and Hilary Clinton is taxonomically identical to George Bush, but that doesn’t make him any easier to swallow.
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People who call in sick to work on a regular basis are also taxonomically identical to the average person, but the average person is likely to consider these folks to be flakes or bums. But a Berlin psychiatrist has redefined all these lazy good-for-nothings as “laborophobics”, whom he identifies as people who suffer from an irrational work-related anxiety disorder which strikes people who do not suffer from general anxiety disorders; it is characterized by “…panic, hypochondriac fears, work-related worrying, (and) post-traumatic stress…”. In fact Dr. Micheal Linden suggests that laborophobia accounts for half of all workers on long term sick leave. Me, I haven’t had an honest job for years. And I’m a writer. Hillary is a politician. And I would say that George Bush is evidently a narrow minded, bone headed, self centered, self obsesse, idiot. And probably a laborophobic as well.
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Death can be a major employment challenge, even more so than laborophobia. Still when Judge Robert Barnet in Muncie, Indiana, received a faxed copy of an obituary from the local newspaper, the Star Press, for defendant Shawnda Hatfield, who was awaiting sentencing in his court after being found guilty of kiting a check against her former employer, he was a little suspicious. And when he checked the contact number left in the obit for the Florida crematorium listed in her obituary, to confirm Shawnda’s timely demise, he grew even more suspicious. The number had a 765 area code, which is the same code as that used in Muncie, and not a 239, or a 305 or any other area code used in Florida. The mystery (such as it was) was solved when sheriff’s officers knocked on the front door of Shawnda’s home in nearby Dunkirk, Indiana, and who should answer the door but the recently cremated Shawnda. Judge Hatfield then sentenced Shawnda’s ash to four years in jail.
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Sometimes the good Lord doesn’t just give you lemons; sometimes it rains lemons. Such was the fate of the citizens of the tiny Andean village of Puna, Peru. On September 15th something “glowing” smashed into the ground just outside the village, leaving behind a 44 foot wide crater, 16 foot deep, and something else as well, something that made 500 village families sick, dizzy, with headaches, scratchy throats and vomiting. Seven police officers, dispatched to collect samples of the space invader from the now water filled crater, also suffered from the same symptoms and had to be admitted to a hospital. Pravda, the Russian news agency, reported authoritatively that the object that fell to earth was the remains of a nuclear reactor from an American KH 13 satellite, spying on Iran. It was leaking radiation, said Pravda, and was what was making the villagers sick.
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But scientists from Peru’s Mining and Mineralogical Institute disagreed, identifying the object as a typical Chondrite iron meteorite. And while there clearly were odors emanating from the crater, they admitted, they said they detected no radiation. And people who had not visited the crater were suffering along with those who had gotten close to the hole.
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But any concerns about invading bugs from outer space or radiation from a spy satellite were forgotten as when Marco Limachi stepped forward. He was the district authority on the scene and he knew just what had to be done. First a roof had to be erected over the crater so it could be protected and "studied" year round because, “…we want to sell the crater’s image…”. Porfirio Aguilar, director of tourism in Puno, even suggested that Peruvian authorities should get together with neighbor and sometimes enemy Bolivia to cooperate in promoting tourism to the area. In fact, I can almost see the posters at the new “Puno International Spaceport, where everything is for the future…and nothing is hidden.”
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Except, as the old strippers used to say, you should always keep something hidden, else why should the audience come back tomorrow? Just ask Hillary; she knows how the game is played. And by God, this time she intends to play it to win.

- 30 -

UFO, and your momma, too.

2007-09-27T07:53:00.000-04:00

I am an atheist, and yet I have this fantasy that come judgment day God is going to send all the born-again-s and Catholic fanatics (like our current Pope) straight to hell, and, of course, they will go quietly because that is God’s will. And then he will send all other religious believers (Islam, Hindu, Jew and Methodist) one after the other, straight to Hades as well. And they, too, will go obediently because that is God’s will. And then, toward the end of the day, God will dispatch all the atheists to hell and we too will go quietly because we will have to admit that we were wrong.
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And then God finally gets to the agnostics and he pauses for a moment. The agnostics smile, thinking God will respect their respect for his greatest gift, the human mind, and how like Mother Theresa they are, since she too doubted. But then God simply orders them, “Go to hell.” The agnostics are outraged. “You can’t do that. It isn’t logical!” they shout. God ignores them and repeats his order; “Go to hell.” The agnostics shout even louder. “We lived good lives not because we feared you, but because we believed in the values of honesty and morality for themselves. And didn’t that make us more honest than all those simpering Christian and Islamic hypocrites?” And God says, “Go to hell.” The agnostics are shocked. “But we were good people”, they wail. “We were good for the right reasons.” And God asks, “Who told you that reason had anything to do with anything?” The agnostics whine, “But we thought…” and God shouts them down, one last time; “Go to hell.”
*
Okay, it’s not a pleasant fantasy, and it betrays my core Midwestern pessimism more than anything else, and my firm belief that no matter what I do right I’m going to get screwed in the end. But I’m getting better. In this fantasy everybody else gets screwed, too. Still, I think that most of the anger in this world (including my own) is because people never receive what they truly think they deserve to receive; i.e., this lunatic blogger, Black Velvet Buce Li, who is actually the dopey looking white dude on the right named Greg Letiecq. The guy on the left who looks like a night manager at Dennys is the Republican Governor of Virginia. Now Greg, or Bruce, thinks illegal Hispanic ice cream vendors are spreading leprosy across Northern Virginia and that five illegal Hispanics in Manassas gang-raped a white woman - I guess because Hispanic men are no different than black man – all they dream about is having forced sex with skinny whinny no-butt white women. I tell you, it seems to me at times that most southern white idiots aren’t just bigots; they are also obsessed with rape fantasies. These guys should see a psychiatrist, by court order if that’s what it takes.
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According to the Washington Post, a noted “liberal biased” newspaper, Bruce used to be an insurance salesman but now he works as a “computer programmer’ for the defense industry – a programmer being the modern day catch all description that could mean a multi-millionaire genius or a keyboard drone. And I just don’t think Bruce has the time to be a genius, he’s too busy trying to scare everybody within earshot. Of course, he thinks he’s a genius – which is usually the first sign that he is not. Says Bruce; “We’re inspiring people. A lot of people felt like there was nothing they could do.” Do about what, you may ask. I did. It turns out that what Bruce – or Greg – is worried about are illegal aliens. But the truth is Bruce has no idea what true aliens are. .
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Alfred Webre has an idea. It’s the wrong idea, but he’s still closer to reality than Bruce. On Monday of last week Alfred held a media event at the National Press Club and called for a “truth amnesty” for illegal aliens; extraterrestrial illegal aliens, that is. Alfred is talking little green men. He wants E.T. to phone home and use the federal government’s phone card. It is an idea, says Alfred, “…recommended by the extraterrestrials themselves.” Great; now we’re taking policy planning suggestions about the aliens from the aliens? Who the hell do these E.Ts think they are, Rupert Murdoch?!
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But, as I said, I don’t think even Alfred knows what a true alien is. The peasants in the little village of Carancas, near Lake Titicaca, along the spine of the Andes in Peru: now, they have an idea. A meteor landed in their laps over the weekend, and this “alien”, this extraterrestrial invader, left a crater 65 feet wide and 22 feet deep. And everybody who looked into the crater and breathed in the strange smells coming out of the hole got sick - and not the good sick, but the bad sick, with headaches, projectile vomiting and diarrhea. Okay the story didn’t mention diarrhea, but how often do national news stories discuss diarrhea? I’m sure it’s a lot more common than the national news media would have you believe.
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Aliens from outer space making people sick sounds a bit far fetched. But it seems the bureaucratic scientists at NASA are also worried. They shipped some Salmonella into space last September on the Shuttle, and when the little buggies got back they killed 90% of the mice who ate them, compared with a 60% death rate in the mice control group. That’s right; a short stint in micro-gravity makes the Salmonella bugs twice as deadly to mice. This is not good news for mice. As for humans, well Salmonella is never good news for us. It’s that old diarrhea problem again. And in the techno-babble of NASA induced talk, changes in 167 of the buggies’ genes were not directly caused by the micro-gravity of orbit, but they were indirectly caused by the micro-gravity of orbit - what ever the hell that distinction means.
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I swear to God, you can always find something to be afraid of, if that’s what you are looking for. Super Salmonella can still be stopped with proper cooking procedures and a little common sense. Just follow this basic rule; before you put something in your mouth, stop, look and smell it first. And when in doubt, don’t eat it. And the villagers in Peru are probably not suffering from a space virus, but mass hysteria, which can kill you just as dead as a real disease. But you don’t suffer from hysteria unless you want to. And with the unemployment rate among “legals” at 4.8%, it seems that every illegal in this country that wants a job has a job – sometimes two. What the hell are we worried about, Judgment Day?
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Hey, I’m an atheist and even I worry about Judgment Day. It’s not logical, and I don’t believe in it, but I still worry about it. Whereas Bruce is the one who ought to be worried about it.
- 30 -

GETTING SQUIRRELY

2007-09-22T03:15:00.000-04:00

I believe the horror officially commenced on September 6, 2006, and it began in the midst of a deceptive calm. Groundskeepers at the Forest Hill Cemetery in Eau Claire, Wisconsin had noted for some time that vandals were stealing the small American flags left to honor veterans’ graves. The assumption was, of course, that the offenders were hippies or communists or just local punks, perhaps the spoiled offspring of wealthy but inattentive parents or the troubled youthful offenders of local poverty plagued middle aged offenders. But on this late summer afternoon as Mr. Dave Ender mowed the grass between the tombstones he spotted a flash of red, white and blue amongst the limbs of a nearby tree. He investigated and discovered a large and intricate “drey”, or squirrel’s nest, constructed from the tattered and masticated shards of dozens of miniature American flags. The vandals had been identified. But Mr. Ender’s only reaction was one of admiration. “The little rascals”, he thought, “They’re just amazing.” Yes, rascals indeed; and not merely amazing, but horrible, too.
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Less than a year later, in August of 2007 visitors to the Manchester Crematorium, on Barlow Moor Road in Chorlton, England, were frustrated to discover their floral memorials to departed relatives were being ripped from their pots and devoured, leaving behind the scattered crumbs of chrysanthemums and carnations scattered about. The staff assumed the rodents were after the sweet nectary of these plants, as they would ignore roses or other non-nectar flowers. So they began to treat those flowers with pepper spray to discourage the rodent-al assaults. And it worked, for awhile. But this year no concentration of pepper spray is enough to discourage the bucktoothed little vegetarians. The “Super Squirrels” of Chorlton have become “pepper spray resistant” and there was no stopping them now. Botanist John Steadman, at the nearby Fletcher Moss Gardens, claims to have never heard of squirrels eating flowers before but says the local rodents have been known to eat entire sugar packets from lunch bags. Squirrels on a sugar rush; and they have even been video taped having consumed fermented pumpkins in America. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ikH9ZRcF2Q&mode=related&search) If anyone cares to take notice, it seems to me that the wake up call for doomsday has been given. It’s time to roll out of bed and meet your maker. And I think he’s pissed. And he may be a squirrel…a great big, grey one, with sharp bitey teeth and maybe a bazooka.
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Humans are singularly ignorant of the 300 + species of squirrels in this world. Webster’s dictionary gives a horribly generalized definition. Squirrels are either “any of various arboreal rodents of the genus Sciurus and related genera of the family Sciuridae, having a long flexible bushy tail…” or “…any of various other rodents of the family Sciuridae,…”. It is a definition that makes a mocker of the adage, “know your enemy”. The word itself comes down to us through French (1327) from the Latin (Vulgar) “Sciurus”, which comes from the Greek “slirouros”, meaning “beast that sits in the shadow of its own tail”. The verb “to squirrel” meaning to save something for later use was not recorded until 1939. Oddly, that same year saw the first use of the word as a second person perfect adjective, when Winston Churchill was quoted as saying, “Hitler seems a little squirrelly to me.” The problem is that the small rodents are ubiquitous and as such we assume we know them. It is a level of hubris that may well spell our doom.
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This year, on the playground of a Florida preschool, a small child and a Highway Patrol officer were assaulted by an average everyday squirrel, a creature most humans would take no notice of. According to Maritza Diaz, director of the Children’s Academy Daycare Centre, in Orange, the little grey assailant settled on three year old Kevin Santiago, perhaps because he looked helpless. The boy was innocently sitting on the swings when “The squirrel attacked him and didn’t want to get off…” Kevin was bitten 9 times, despite attempts by the staff to rescue the boy by “…throwing things at it to try and get it off,…” Thank goodness no one on the staff was caring a gun or little Kevin might have had his head blown off. As it was the boy was saved when the Florida Highway Patrol office who was attending a nearby accident scene heard his screaming and came running. When he arrived the squirrel immediately leapt on the cop. After biting the officer several times (and one other adult victim) the rampaging squirrel made his escape. Kevin was admitted to a local hospital for treatment. The adults were treated and released. And the incident was immediately forgotten; but not by the squirrels.
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In San Jose, California, on May 9th a single squirrel turned an entire First Grade classroom into a nightmare on Elm Street - except it didn’t happen on Elm Street. Just after 8:30 am, as students and adults at the Evergreen Elementary School were preparing to leave on a field trip, the small grey assassin slipped into the room via an open door and ran up the leg of one of the mothers. According to Will Ector, a school district spokesman, the first victim was “…trying to get it off and another parent was trying to assist…one was nipped on the fingertip and scratched on the arm and the other was bitten on the arm.” The errant rodent nibbler then “did a loop around the (blood soaked) classroom and ran out the door”, where he encountered his third victim, an innocent 11 year old girl, whom he immediately bit on the arm. He then made good his twitchy nosed escape. The school went into immediate lock down which evidently prevented any further assaults. The victims were given medical attention and treated with antibiotics, but not given rabies shots because, as the Santa Clara County Vector Control District Manager explained, “Generally speaking, squirrels are not the type of animal that can survive an attack by a rabid animal. They are prey animals…” It was the kind of comforting speech often given by movie experts to explain why Godzilla or the zombies or the Killer Squirrels are not going come back, usually just before they return and eat the expert.
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Nearby Cuesta Park has become a hotbed of insurgent squirrel activity, with six attacks in the last few months. This spring 4 year old Andrew Packard was on a picnic with his mother when she handed him a muffin. Instantly a squirrel assaulted Andrew. In the boy’s own bone chilling statement, “'My mommy said the squirrel sneaked down behind me and he was hugging me, but when he kissed me it was really a scratch.”. His Mother, Jennifer Packard, told the San Jose Mercury News, “'It was such a horror. To hear your child screaming the way you've never heard before - it was just bone chilling. As a little kid, …you just wonder if he'll always have fear.” The boy, now with red scratch marks all over his body, is probably too terrified to enter any park with trees. And local wildlife rehabilitator Norma Campbell offered no comfort when she warned against any futile attempts to cull the local squirrel populations. “For everyone you take out, two more will come in”. But is there really nothing we can do to defend ourselves?
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Apparently no: according to the newspaper “The Derrick”, last November ,30 year old Postal-woman Barb Dougherty was on her route in Oil City, Pennsylvania, when, stepping off a porch, a squirrel went postal on her. In dramatic testimony she explained, he “…jumped me.” Thinking quickly, Barb “…pulled him off.” She was treated for scratches and released. The squirrel was tested for rabies. A postal service spokesman said, “In the 230 years of postal history, I’ve never personally heard of another squirrel biting.” My guess is, he’s just not listening very closely and he’s not nearly as old as he implies. In Winter Park, Florida, the Orlando Sentinel reports, 3 year old Carson Cox was bitten several times by a squirrel assailant on the calf while playing soccer in the park, a few moments before 19 year old Dylan Osborn was attacked and bitten on the leg, and John Hindman was scratched and bitten on both arms, in what was spree rodent assault.
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And the Sevier County Courthouse in Arkansas was damaged by what the Texarkana Gazette called a “kamikaze rodent” that short circuited a transformer, causing an explosion and a loud bang. County Judge Dick Tillman downplayed the significance of this assault on a government building, pointing out the power never went off and the lights merely flickered. In a droll attempt at distracting humor, Tillman added, “The dispatcher said the computers have been acting funny with the monitors flickering. (But) I don’t think it’s going to cause a problem unless the flickering makes the dispatcher dizzy and she has a seizure, falls out and hits her forehead on the desk.” Less drolly, the Chief of the Billard Volunteer Fire Department, in East Texas, admitted it was a suicidal squirrel attack that caused a 30 acre brush fire that damaged 11 cars, a motorcycle and a house. He said the squirrel walked out along a power line and then jumped to a transformer. This caused an explosion which killed the squirrel and blew his smoldering corpse to the dry brush on the ground. The chief admitted, “I’ve fought several fires in the past that were started by squirrels.” So perhaps word of the secret war is slowly getting out.
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Squirrels have successfully shut down the NASDAQ stock exchange at least twice and caused numerous outages at prestigious institutions like the University of Alabama. On average about 25% of all power failures nationwide (about one in four) are inspired by suicidal squirrels. And yet we still refuse to recognize these rodents are at war with us, preferring to avoiding admitting their intelligence, instead refereeing to them, in the words of one expert, as “clever and persistent”, as if we were unaware that may be an even more dangerous combination than just smart. In fact squirrels are such a threat to our infrastructure that if Osama bin Ladin were a squirrel, we might actually be hunting him.
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In another terrorist incident with shadows of 9/11, a recent Americans Airlines flight from Dallas to Tokyo was forced to make an unscheduled stop in Honolulu, after the flight crew heard what they described as a “skittering noise” from above the cockpit. Wisely the crew decided to investigate. The passengers were put in local hotels for the night while mechanics tracked down the Texas squirrel bound for the Far East. He was found and killed, his murder justified as rabies testing. But could there have been another reason the authorities wanted no living witnesses to the squirrel conspiracy?
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It is clear that this is already an undeclared international war going on. In the German village of Passau a woman in her home was assaulted by a rambunctious rodent. In terror she ran outside and down the street, eventually literally shaking off her attacker, who next assaulted a builder, and when he proved too robust the attack-squirrel attacked a 72 year old pensioner. But this time the little bastard had picked the wrong little old man. Grandpa managed to beat the killer squirrel to death with his crutch. In Jyvaskyla, Finland an allegedly cute squirrel is displaying an amazing level of brand loyalty. He enters a chocolate shop twice a day to steal a treat called a “Kinder Surprise”. Still in the store he carefully opens the foil package, eats the chocolate, and then runs away with the plastic “surprise”. Exactly what he does with all of these surprises has not been reported, but I would advise the owner that squirrels can live anywhere from ten to twelve years. That could mean something like six thousand “Kinder Surprises” the owner will need to supply just to keep one squirrel happy over his lifetime. Why would any owner suffer such an expense?
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Perhaps the answer and the ultimate core of the attack squirrel conspiracy was revealed when Finnish baritone Esa Ruuttunen, perhaps best known for his powerful performance as Telramund, was viciously assaulted while on his way to rehearsals of the new Finnish opera “Kaarmeen hetki (Hour of the Serpent) at the Helsinki Opera House. He suffered a concussion and a broken nose amongst other injuries when yet another suicidal squirrel literally leapt into the spinning spokes of his bicycle. It was clearly a case of an excessively outspoken squirrel.

- 30 -

I'VE SEEN THIS MOVIE BEFORE

2007-09-19T05:57:00.000-04:00

I woke up from a nap Monday afternoon to a Faux News report that the FBI had labeled Britney Spears as a “person of interest” in their investigation of the conspiracy to hire O.J. Simpson to murder Kevin Federline. Okay, maybe I got that a little mixed up but…did somebody set off a daja vu bomb while I was sleeping or am I just a little late in developing my long anticipated schizophrenia? This O.J thing is like the ultimate re-run of a re-make of “The Press Frenzy that Ate Reality”. Good God, somebody put out a contract on Kevin Federline? Why? Like the puddles under the soft serve dispenser at Burger King, eventually Kevin will evaporate on his own leaving behind merely a floor stain. Why go to all the trouble of killing him? But in the meantime, assuming somebody was interested enough to plan a rubbing out the Fed-ex, was it Britney or just some music lovers? Or maybe it was some teenagers from the mall, looking to eliminate the one celebrity who makes them look committed by comparison. Or maybe The Juice was hired to remove that insipid smirk off The Fed’s face. I’m telling you, it’s been a hell of a week according to Faux News, and the week has barely started.
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It’s not like we have anything serious to think about right at the moment, like a war or anything. On Monday Faux Broadcasting issued the most amazing statement, that “Some language during the live broadcast” -of Sunday night’s Emmys award show- “may have been considered inappropriate by some viewers. As a result, Fox’s broadcast standards executives determined it appropriate to drop sound during those portions of the show”, as when Sally Fields, the ex-Gidget, took her Emmy in hand and said there would be a lot fewer “fucking” wars if mothers ran the world. At least that’s what I think she said.
*
Faux’s justification instantly brought to mind two questions. First: Faux has standards? They even have executives who are responsible for these alleged standards? Then where the hell were those standards when all that sluttish sex obsessed pseudo news was pouring out of Bill O’Reilly’s mouth over the last ten years? As everybody knows, Fox is the home for family values and titillation TV. And the second question that comes to mind, regarding the propensity of mothers to not start wars, evidently Ms. Fields has never seen the 1993 HBO film “The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom.” I saw it, and having seen it I would say the average Texas cheerleader’s mom is quite capable of starting a war, and that might even go double for a white trash mom from Louisiana now living cracked out of her bald head in sun baked Tarzana, California.
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Tarzana was carved out of Edger Rice Burroughs’ old estate, and named after his heroic ape man hero. It’s a drowsy sort of place, pocked marked with hidden multi-million dollar mansions surrounded by modest track homes. And the spine that connects Tarzana to the rest of The Valley is Ventura Boulevard, lined with nail salons and beauty parlors, always willing to loan a loony-tunes superstar customer a pair of Brittany shears.
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I think Britney might be about to start some new hostilities, since, according to Faux news, (and who could doubt the veracity of a network that employs Geraldo Rivera?) as of Tuesday afternoon Fed-ex was about to be awarded custody of their two children. That makes four kids he has sired by two separate women, one of whom he didn’t marry - and she is the happy one - and at the moment, according to Faux, he’s the sane choice as a parent; an unemployed 27 year old ex-dancer, ex-rapper, ex-actor and ex-whipper-snapper.

Brittney, the ex-singer ex-rehabber, the woman who according to the Washington Post walks the fine fashion line between vulgar and Bjork, now has an ex-lawyer and an ex-agent as well. The little onion head is a long way from her beginnings on the Mickey Mouse Club, and Walt Disney must be rolling over in his Frigidaire. He was the guy who wouldn’t let little Annette Funicello wear a two piece bathing suit in the Beach Party movies, and the last time Brittney was covered by that much fabric was when she used an umbrella to beat up on a photographer.
*
It’s enough to make your head spin. Especially after the LAPD found no substance to the murder contract on K-Fed and the judge

then ordered Britney to undergo twice weekly drug tox screens but otherwise did not modify the 50/50 custody split of their children. For all the angst and hoopla not a single headline about this young couple on Faux this week turned out to be correct

Later on Tuesday Faux began running the on screen

banner, “O.J; mentally ill or just arrogant?” On Wednesday morning local time the arrogant and or mentally ill O.J. Simpson was bonded out of jail and flew out of Las Vegas on a commercial flight while one of his alledged victims and accusers was arrested and jailed on an outstanding warrant for “stalking”. In other words, it was business as usual at Faux Network; just about as accurate as they are fair and balanced.

Good Lord, is the Faux audience ever going to wake up and smell the prosac?
- 30 -

BABY, I A' LOVE YOU

2007-09-16T16:06:00.000-04:00

I did not kiss my wife good morning this am because her eyes were puffy and she had a small knot of snot seeping from her nose. Through bleary eyes she warded off my attempts at affection, saying, “I have to brush my teeth. My mouth feels like it had Napoleon in it all night. And he did things.” What things the midget megalomaniac might have accomplished overnight in my wife’s orifice I did not inquire. But it reminded me that one afternoon Napoleon announced that he wanted to go rabbit hunting. He had never before expressed an interest in hunting, but his servants knew what to expect if there were no rabbits for the impatient emperor to execute come the dawn, so they bought up every available rabbit in the Paris markets, about 3,000 of them, and released them on the intended hunting ground. This might have been a reprieve from being hasenpfeffer on some French peasant’s stove, but unfortunately most of the rabbits had been hand raised in hutches and their sudden night of freedom must have been horrifying for them. So the next morning, when Napoleon stepped from the Imperial carriage musket in hand eager for the slaughter he was met by a stampeding hoard of desperate bunnies that saw him as their savior. Like Beethoven, they were mistaken. Disgusted by this mob of over fraught fuzziness, the Master of Europe beat a hasty retreat.
*
It seems as if nobody calls their babies “Napoleon”, anymore, but it may be coming back into fashion, as in Napoleon Dynamite. In ancient Celtic the name means “son-of the lion”, and what with 4 babies born every second and about 245 born every minute world wide, the chances of a new Napoleon at least in name would seem assured. But the world’s best shot at a genetically Celtic hare-a-parent just got a vasectomy. Mick Philpott, a 17 year old unemployed truck driver chose this ultimate form of birth control after the birth of his 16th child (by his wife, Mairead, age 26) and his 17th child (by his mistress Lisa Willis, age 23). Amazingly, these two ladies, who live with Mick in a 3 bedroom apartment, account for only ten of his children, while five other femme fete-gals popped out Mick’s remaining 7 offspring. And not one of the 17 is named Napoleon.
*
Mick’s apartment is provided by government welfare (in addition to about $72,000 in childcare payments) and he insists he is looking for work, if not an actual career. But I would suggest he’s already found what he’s good at, and he’s even found somebody who will pay him to do it. Meanwhile, in India, 90 year old Nanu Ram Jogi has just fathered his 21st child. Not only has he bettered Mick Philpott’s record numerically, but Jogi was married to all of the 4 women who caught his sperm, making him a comparative moral saint. He explains his accomplishment very simply. He says, “Women just love me.”
*
Out of the 10, 800 babies born every day in America a disturbingly large percentage are without a legally identified father. In Britain that number reached 50,000 newborns last year, and an English think tank has proposed a $450 fine for any birth certificate filed without a father listed. Allow me to point out the obvious, which is that everybody knows who Mick Philpott is, and fear of notoriety does not appear to have discouraged him, or his partners in crime from becoming a burden on the state.
*
There are about 60 million Brits at the moment with about 60,000 born every year, and yet 2 month old Katie-Lee can only be described as one in a million. Her mother, Steph Pleasance, says even the midwife asked if the newborn was wearing a wig. But there, atop the infant’s scalp is what cannot be described as a full head of hair, or even an ample mane, but a fright wig of orange fleece. This kid looks like she’s wearing a 1960’s shag carpet. She resembles the stand up comic Carrot Top. Her grandfather admits “I was shocked when I first saw her.” He also admits to having considerably less hair on his own head than his newborn grandchild did. And after two months the hair has neither fallen out nor changed color. One might almost suspect there was a clown in the woodpile, if that joke were not fundamentally offensive in so very many ways. .
*
Given a choice nobody would want a baby with orange hair, not even Bozo’s mom. In New York City, as in much of Western culture, the most popular sperm comes with an implication of blond hair and blue eyes. But suddenly those very genetic traits are in short supply because the U.S. Health Department has banned the importation of human sperm from any country that ate British beef during the “mad cow” scare, and that means that healthy Scandinavians cannot spill their seed on our soil. And that means that Americans looking to produce a test tube Scandinavian look alike are out of luck. The head of one of the six sperm banks in the big apple explained, “Our problem is we can’t get enough sperm. And the quality of sperm is not getting any better.” Now, where have I heard that complaint before?
*
The problem in Caracas, Venezuela, turns out to be not the start of life, but the finish. People, it seems, are just dieing to get out of the Caracas morgue, or so says Carlos Camejo, a 33 year old man who awoke after a traffic accident in horrific pain because the medical examiner was trying to sew him back up, after having started the autopsy when they realized Carlos was bleeding into the big gash they were making in his body, which dead people are not supposed to do. His wife arrived to claim the corpse, only to find him on a gurney in the hallway, complaining about the pain. My guess his wife told him, “You don’t know anything about pain, buddy, until you give birth to a baby.” And one with blond hair, I’m betting.

At the time of the accident Carlos must have been rubbing a very big rabbits foot.
-30-

SHAKESPERE LOW DOWN

2007-09-15T08:22:00.001-04:00

I am very unhappy with Sir Derek Jacobi. He’s the actor, probably best known as star of the BBC series “I, Claudius”, who has officially signed on with a group tying to sell the idea that William Shakespeare did not write the plays of William Shakespeare. And before your eyes glaze over allow me to explain that Will Shakespeare was not that different then the average person today. His father was a successful politician, wealthy and well connected and probably stuck up as hell. As a teenager Will got his girlfriend pregnant and was forced to marry her, and then, in his early twenties, he ran out on her and their three daughters, and then made a nice living as an actor and 14th century sex symbol and who probably had many meaningless affairs, perhaps with members of both sexes, but who also continued to provide for his family at great economic sacrifice to himself. And just because he lived before the invention of the iPhone he is not considered relevant. Posh! Not relevant: a bisexual philander? They are always relevant in the liberal arts community! Listen, if he were alive today Will would be just at least as big as Kevin Federline, perhaps bigger because Will could write his own name without moving their lips.
*
John Shakespeare, the father, was a landowner and politician, with a trophy wife and a coat of arms. As any good politician John liked to refer to himself as just a simple guy, a mere maker of gloves, in much the same way 350 years later Joe Kennedy liked to call himself a liquor importer instead of a bootlegger. But like old Joe, John was ambitious as hell. He served in almost every job in Stratford government, and as any good pre-capitalistic bourgeoisie his son got the best of everything. He was probably even educated in the King’s New School, a sort of junior college for civil service types. But young Will got sidelined by that thing that side lines most teenagers, sex. In 1582, at the age of 18, Will married Anne Hathaway and six months later she gave birth to their daughter. John must have been very disappointed. Then, three years later, Anne gave birth to twin girls. It was shortly thereafter that young Will ran away from home and joined a London’s theater company, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men. John must have been doubly pleased.
*
Most people in London knew Will as an actor, but we know he wrote poetry because there is a 1593 copy of “Venus and Adonis” and a 1594 copy of “The Rape of Lucrene” with dedications signed ‘William Shakespeare”. “Even as the sun with purple-colored face – Had ta’en his last leave of the weeping morn – Rose-checked Adonis hied him to the chase; - Hunting he loved, but love he laughed to scorn”. Okay, it’s not up to the standard of “Gimmie Some More”, but this was before the invention of white trash millionaires such as Brittney Spears.
*
Doubters like Sir Jacobi like to point out that there are no copies of Will’s plays or poetry from the 1590’s with him listed as the author, but over a third of all the plays published at this time listed no author at all. Authorship had just been invented and they didn’t have all the ramifications worked out yet. It would be another over 400 years before the RIAA sued any college students for downloading music. But a 1598 book written by Francis Meres does mention twelve plays defiantly written by William Shakespeare, including Two Gentlemen of Verona, A Comedy of Errors, Love Labors Lost, King John, Titus and Adois, Romeo and Juliet, and Henry IV, and what must be a lost work, William Shakespeare’s The Matrix Redux”.

The usual argument given by the antistratfordians is that Will was the front man for a nobleman who could not publicly admit to being involved in the theatre, not because being theatrical back then was considered “gay”, because there was no “gay” before 1968, but because being theatrical was, periodically, illegal. The general feeling at the time was that human actors on stage were a degenerate form of amusement, where as the other great public entertainment of the time, bear baiting, was wholesome and family friendly. Just not toward the bear’s family.

*

But Will’s plays were popular and profitable, with lots of violence and sex. Whoever wrote this stuff, this was not the average stuff. And the works have survived for 500 years because they are extraordinary and because in 1624, after Will’s death, Richard Burbridge, Will’s friend and fellow actor and fellow investor in the company, made sure the plays were preserved using the still novel invention of printing. Thank God he didn’t record them on Betamax.
*
But why does Sir Jacobi think that a common jerk could not have written “To be or not to be, that is the question…” (Hamlet) or “Out damn spot. Out” (MacBeth), or “Oh, ye fen sucked fogs!”(King Lear)? Considering that everything attributed to Will was based on earlier works by classic authors like Plato and Plutarch, not to mention that most prolific writer in the ancient world, Ann Ominous, it is clear that Will knew the first rule of good writing; steal only from the best and steal often.

In ten years in London’s theatre community, generally a hand to mouth existence then as now, Will made enough money to buy the second largest house in Stratford, to keep Anne and the children comfortable and quiet, even while he remained in London. If he was not the writer of plays, where did that money come from? Crack hadn’t been invented yet, nor had tobacco. How was Will able to afford a partnership in the Rose playhouse unless it was as compensation for the content he created for the company? And where did he get enough money to buy those snazzy little leotards everybody wore?
*
There are always other explanations and theories as to how and why Will Shakespeare could not have written all of these magnificent plays. But if not Shakespeare, then who; if not Shakespeare, then why: If not Shakespeare then Whatzzup? All other theories as to the plays authorship require a conceit of some kind, some slight of hand and trick of hidden identities and women disguised as men and men in horse suits with stolen credit cards, the kind of crap that Will used in most of his plays. Nobody would ever believe that crap. But always the simplest explanation is that Will Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. And that’s why every one at the time said he did.
*
In 1634, almost 20 years after Will’s death, a Lieutenant noted that his militia company stopped at Stratford where, “…that famous English poet, Mr. William Shakespeare, was born …”. Now, popular culture today may give credit to some who do not deserve it, (like Brittney Spears) and that happened in the 17th century as well. But, all those people are dead. And again, what is more likely, that in an age when the printed word was still subservient to the spoken one, that a writer known for his scribbled poems would be misidentified as the author of well known plays, or that Shakespeare was who we think he was and that Derek Jacobi is just full of hoo hoo?
*
In 1610, when the twins were old enough to be married and out of the house, Will returned to Stratford and, perhaps even to Anne. He died there in 1616, as proven by his will, which details the division a rather large estate, including several properties in London. The length and complexity of that document indicates a successful man but it also makes the petty little item about leaving Anne his “second best bed” stand out even more strongly. It just cries out for an answer to the question, “Who got his first best bed?”
- 30 -

GEORGE BUSH AFTER LIFE

2007-09-14T10:46:00.001-04:00

I am struggling to define the state of existence we shall experience in 15 months, after Shrub returns to the world of privilege and ignorance from which he came. His life will clearly be ‘deinde medium’ (an “afterwards life”) but what about the ones who paid and bled for this sanctimonious pampered prep boy’s adventure into politics? Shall they one day refer to the coming age as “postquam Bush medium”, our “because of” Bush’s life, or their preterea Bush medium, their “despite Bush’s life”? I think, having listened to what Slate magazine called “Bush’s Appalling Speech on Iraq”, we could best choose to define our future lives as the “Bush succresco suspiro saecula saeculorum; the bitter life lesson in maturity we got from Bush. And the lesson itself? That you are an idiot to vote for an idiot for president.
*
The number of Iraqi’s fleeing their homes in fear is now somewhere between 50,000 and 60,000 a MONTH. By best estimates are there are now some 4.2 million Iraqi refugees scattered around the Middle East, providing fodder for future wars. And Shrub’s primary achievement on the ground is that he makes the horror of living under Saddam look good by comparison. Who would have ever thought that America would have been better off if Shrub had just stayed the alcoholic drunk driver who was arrested in Kennebunkport, 41 years ago this month (making him the real Bush 41). How many people could he have killed with a car? Compared to the death toll he produced with the army and a compliant congress, Shrub the drunk and drug addict was a humanitarian.
*
According to Shrub we can now return from Iraq “on success”, since “the more successful we are, the more American troops can return home.” And yet, even this fabrication falls apart because “deinde” the Shrub surge” the summer of 2008 will see more troops in Iraq than were in country pre-surge. It’s a shell game, except these shells tend to explode. And the game makes sense only if you choose not to notice the callous sacrifice of patriot’s lives in the name of political expediency.
*
Not that it matters at all, as Republican leader Senator Mitch McConnell expressed confidence even on before the Shrub speech that Repubs can continue to block any efforts to end the farce sooner than Shrub wants to. Even John “Bone Head” Boehner, the Repub leader in the House failed to slow the Shrub juggernaut with his statement that American causalities were “…a small price to pay.” I’m sure, as another chicken hawk warrior, Boehner thinks it so. But I wonder if he had a son or daughter in Iraq he would be quite so flippant about the cost.
*
As the New York Times editorial put it, “Last night’s speech could have been given any day in the last four years – and was delivered a half-dozen times already:” And yet the Los Angeles Times headlined the story with a passive, “Bush says he'll start bringing troops home before Christmas”, when the facts are that Shrub has no choice; we have no more troops to send. But it was Repub Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine, facing a political accounting next November, who asked the key question about the speech the LATimes and the Washington Post did not ask; “When the President asks to buy more time,…more time for what?”
*

According to a White House aide quoted in the LATimes the “Shrub plan” (if it can be called that), allows Republicans in Congress to be “for success in Iraq and for beginning to bring troops home.” So that is what the next soldier in Iraq will die for, and the next, and the next and all those after that- to allow Republican politicians to declare victory and withdraw.
*
Meanwhile the Democratic leadership in Congress seems playing a game of statues. They do not speak above a whisper, they do not challenge they do not deny they show no perceptible movement or sign of life. And where there is no life there can be no moral outrage. Patriotism is charade, as even the Democrats seem to agree. If not why are they not defending those patriots who are dieing for the honor of Republican politicians?
*
Most politicians have at least a mixed record, but this president, with a record unblemished by success, has never been shy about demanding and expecting others to die to defend his honor. And from his investment in a losing baseball team to his invasion of a sovereign nation, Shrub’s chestnuts have always been pulled out of the fire before they were singed. It is unlikely his latest and largest misadventure will work out any different.
*
It is not that Shrub’s opponents underestimate him. It is that they underestimate themselves. And as long as they do, he will remain victorious in defeat.

- 30 -

CONGRESSIONAL CONSTIPATION

2007-09-12T08:14:00.000-04:00

I have asked myself many times that, given that the founding fathers (and mothers) could not have been smarter then we are, nor more moral than the current generation of Christians (and Jews and Muslims and Hindus, etc.), were not better or worse liars, crooks, thieves, cheats, idiots, fools or sanctimonious jackasses then we are, how is it they were able to create “a more perfect union” while the current congress doesn’t seem capable of creating origami? And at last I have stumbled upon the obvious solution. The founding fathers ate organic fruits and vegetables - and I’m talking real organic, not the modern marketing ploy organic -; fertilized with real animal and human waste and containing enough insect larvae to substantially increase the protein content. Add an occasional helping of slightly spoiled meat and a little lead in the water supply and they were eating the Breakfast of Champions, and the lunch of Nation Builders.
*
As an example, the current Repub leadership in Congress has adopted the strategy of constantly offering to every bill an amendment that would eliminate all public funding for medical care for illegal aliens. It’s another of the “wedge” issues they love so much, but if this was really such a good idea why didn’t the Repubs move on it during the last decade when they were running the Congress? The conceit is that not a single respected public health professional is in favor of such a scheme because it would create an incubator for all sorts of diseases which would, as they have done repeatedly in the past, periodically explode into the general population and sicken even legal citizens. The basic rule of public health is that it is much cheaper to prevent an epidemic than to stop one. Not that any of that is relevant to politics.
*
Every time the Repubs offer their amendment it must be voted on, and since amendments can be approved by a simple majority the Demos have to keep enough bodies on the House floor at all times to defeat the amendment, and the Repubs have to keep enough bodies on the floor to make each vote a viable threat. This strategy makes sure nobody gets much work done and leaves both sides of the aisle annoyed as hell, thus making it easier to fuel partisanship
*
So on August 2nd, when the Repubs tried once again to tack on their amendment to an agriculture funding bill, John Murtha, Demo from Pennsylvania who was filling in as temporary speaker while Nancy Pelosi was trying to get some actual work done, chose to not hear those attempts. And when the vote was taken the weary electronics malfunctioned, inspiring Repub charges that the vote on the amendment had been “stolen”. After stewing over Mr. Murtha’s “insult” for more than 24 hours, shortly after 9pm the next day, the Repubs offered a rambling motion of censure against Mr. Murtha, at which point an exhausted and frustrated House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (Demo from Maryland) took the floor and barked, “Madam Speaker, enough is enough.”
*
Rep Ellen Tauscher, also filling in for Ms. Pelosi, was distracted by the parliamentarian at the desk for a moment and then had to ask, “Does the gentleman have a motion?” Mr. Hoyer, now calmer, responded, “Madam Speaker, I move to table the resolution.” At which point Repub. Leader John Boehner (from Ohio) jumped to his feet and quickly asked a question of privilege, that , “…isn’t it correct that the gentleman from Maryland engaged in debate, which allows the House to then proceed for up to one hour of debate on this resolution?” But Rep Tauscher pointed out that, “The chair did yet rule that the question constitutes a question of privilege.” She then went on, “The question (under consideration) is on the motion to table. All those in favor say aye, (vote taken), all those opposed say no (vote taken). In the opinion of the chair, the ayes have it.” And that was the end of the motion to censure John Murtha. Sort of.
*
The next day House Repubs found a new reason to be infuriated (after a 90 minute strategy session) when the congressional record did not quote Congressman Hoyer fully, editing out the offending phrase, “…enough is enough…”. The question was, according to Boehner, “…a breach of trust between the Democratic majority and the American people…”, an overstatement given that few people had the time or the energy to consider the position of either party.
*
It was a tempest all right, a parliamentary war waged with motions and emotions, gambles and gamesmanship, privileges and priorities, minutes and minutia from Robert’s Rules of Order, a great sound and fury, as the poet says, signifying nothing except the ill-humor of the participants. And it all could be solved, I have come to believe, if the politicians involved could just have a good bowl movement. Everybody is more reasonable after a good bowl movement. Everybody is happier after a good healthy dump. And that is what I mean when I say that Rep. John Boehner is a real shit. I mean not that he is one, but that he should take one.
*
Now, when I say he is a real dick-head, that’s what I mean. - 30 -

TELL ME THAT YOU LOVE ME, JUNIE MOOOOOON

2007-09-08T09:50:00.000-04:00

I think it was the headline that first grabbed my attention: “Accused Says He Was Just Milking Goat”. Yes, on further consideration, it was certainly that headline, but the story out of Tacoma might not be just another sordid tale of zoophilia out of the state of Washington. This story might solve a mystery. According to a shocked female tour guide, on May 8th 2007, 63 year old Arthur Lawton was observed having sex with the aforementioned ungulate in a barn at Eatonville Pioneer Farm Museum, where he used to work. But at his arraignment on August 9th , Lawton insisted the witness was mistaken and he was just milking the goat, as opposed to the goat milking him. So it is now just a classic case of he said/she said/and she chewed her cud. Yes, it’s shaping up as an unpleasant future for animal lovers of all kinds in Washington State.
*
This current case follows the October arrest of a 26 year old Spanaway man allegedly captured on a cell phone camera having sex with a 4 year old pit bull named Sara. But in May a jury acquitted Patrick McPhail, even though the deputy prosecutor Brian Leech said he still felt “…the facts were more than sufficient to merit conviction.” The problem was the “facts” had come from Jesika McPhail, the defendant’s wife, and the jury didn’t believe her canine version of the Rape of the Sabine Women, in part because the alleged cell phone pictures evidently never made it into court, and in their absence the jury thought it more likely a wife would hate her husband enough to file a false police report than that a man would risk having sex with a pit bull. If so, they may have been mistaken, based on what has been labeled ‘The Great Enumclaw Colon-al Mystery.’
*

This Great Mystery (as if why anyone would want to have sex with an animal was not enough of a mystery to begin with) began on July 2nd of 2005 when a man drove up to the emergency entrance of the Enumclaw Community Hospital, seeking help for a companion. After medics rolled the unconscious companion into the ER they discovered he was not unconscious, he was dead; by which time the Good Samaritan had vanished. The deceased was identified by his driver’s license as a 45 year old Seattle resident, and an autopsy confirmed he had died of acute peritonitis caused by a perforated colon; an extensively perforated colon. Conversations with relatives indicated the only connection the deceased had with Enumclaw was that he was boarding two Thoroughbred stallions with “friends” at a farm near there.
*
They then executed a search warrant at the 40 acre farm and found the stallions, as well as other horses, dogs, chickens, sheep and goats. And they also found video tapes showing several men having sex with the horses. A search of internet chat rooms found that the farm was a well known location for bestiality and zoophilia, the love of animals. However, none of the horses (or the other any of the other animals on the farm) seemed to have been physically harmed, and so the story ends there because in 2005 having sex with animals was not a felony in Washington State.
*
Well, now it is. The Humane Society got into the act and Susan Michaels, a local animal activist, declared war on her organization’s web site, protesting the “cruelty” of all this animal/human sexual activity she perceives is going on. “It’s not natural for animals to do this,” she said.
*
Evidently Susan has never had her leg “humped” by a friend’s dog, or been sprayed by an amorous Tomcat. But having grown up in farm country I can testify (under oath if need be) to having seen a five legged calf – a young bull standing in a stream with his “excited member” dangling in the water. And when that doesn’t cool things off a young bovine Othello has been known to attempt to mount horses, tree, fences, tractors, farmers and other assorted animate and inanimate objects. (As was recorded in these pages a week ago, a woman in Australia was killed by her amorous young pet camel.) I guess a cow or pig being used for sex is more offensive than using them for food. But while a farmer might not be happy to be coated in bovine sperm I’m not sure I would describe him as “sexually molested”.
*
Washington State Sen. Pam Roach, (R-Auburn) drafted legislation making bestiality illegal in Washington State. She said, "This is just disgusting." And, yes it is. But arresting a human for animal cruelty because they had sex with a horse is as foolish as arresting the horse for homicide when they don’t stop because the human says, “Wait. That hurts.” (* Pun Alert!)Forgive me for mounting my libertarian high horse here but I find this application of Victorian morality to the animal kingdom to be a great big pain in the butt.
*
The few scientific studies suggest that something around 8% of humans think about, fantasias about or obsess about zoosexual activity. And how many of those are actually practicing animal husbandry is anybody’s guess, if anybody wants to guess. Good Lord, I find it a repellent idea. But this is a human problem. The idea that the animals are offended by or traumatized by it in some way is best described as absurd, and treating it as animal abuse leads to some pretty stupid problems.
*
In July a Dutch farmer called the police when he caught a man engaging in sex with his sheep, but the case was thrown out because the sheep could not testify she was not a willing participant. On July 31st, in Barre, Vermont, 56 year old Gregory Viens admitted to police he had sexually molested cows, but again, proof was lacking. A plea bargain reduced the charge to misdemeanor trespassing and Viens paid $601.00 in fines, but only because he had been convicted of the same crime in 2000. And in Yorkshire, England, recently witnesses observed a young man dressed only in black briefs “molesting” three rare English long horned cows, but he “ran off” when the witnesses shouted at him. The farmer, Richard Parish, didn’t seem to worried about his traumatized cows. He said, “English longhorns are lovely animals — but not that lovely.”
*
In Florida, in 2005, police were faced with an even more ticklish conundrum. Alan Yoder, a 29 year old blind man was arrested when he solicited a neighbor to join him in a ménage a trios with his guide dog, Lucky. When questioned by police he willingly gave them a detailed description of his and Lucky’s sexual adventures, with each other and third partners. He was arrested for animal cruelty, but a veterinarian could not determine if “Lucky” had been sexually molested or not. The charge was dropped to disorderly conduct “engaging in sexual activity with a guide dog.” Mr. Yoder pled not guilty and at some point the matter was quietly dropped. And I hope Mr. Yoder got Lucky again.
*
Perhaps the only case I have been able to document in which any kind of “justice” was actually obtained for the “dumb animal”, occurred appropriately enough just before Valentine’s Day in 2006 when, according to the Juba Post newspaper, a Sudanese man named Tombe was caught by a farmer engaging in sex with one of his goats. “When I asked him what are you doing up there? He fell off the back of the goat, so I captured and tied him up.” The farmer then called the village elders who decided that since Tombe had used the goat as a wife, he should be forced to marry it, and pay the farmer a dowry of 15, 000 dinars – about $50. “We have given him the goat”, said the farmer, “and as far as we know they are still together.”
*
There is no word if Mr. Tombe is still with his new bride, or if he has turned her into goat rump roast, which I’m told is not bad. Neither is there word from the animal rights world which they would consider more objectionable, eating a goat or…no, no, even I can’t use that joke.

- 30 -

PET NAMES

2007-09-06T08:25:00.000-04:00

I met Leona Helmsley in the late 1970’s, before she became known as “The Queen of Mean” and a tax cheat. I knew her simply as ‘that bitch”. I watched her scream at busboys and humiliate waiters while clients stood by, embarrassed. And just after the opening of the Hemsley Palace hotel I saw the brand new parquet floor of the small ballroom under an inch of water because, against the advice of her own engineers, The Bitch insisted on changing the chandelier overnight in the middle of December, thus exposing the pipes to outside freezing temperatures, as they had warned her. And so when the New York Post broke the story that after The Bitch died, the bitch’s bitch, Trouble, was in trouble. I knew the dog was unlikely to get much sympathy. I also understood why her brother said he would not take the dog or the $12 million Leona set aside for the pooch’s upkeep. She was that frigging unpleasant in person. But it got me thinking about the way we treat our pets and why.
*
There is a lady in Northern India today who breast feeds her monkey. And she has been doing it for four years, since her husband brought the sickly little bastard home. But this is now a full grown monkey. And he is still suckling at her tit. I think this now qualifies as animal abuse. The lady, Namita, insists that her two daughters do not begrudge the way she pampers the little bastard, even buying him “expensive cow milk” her daughters did not get. When she heard a photographer refer to the little bastard as a pet, Namita became angry. “This is not a pet, this is my son,” she snapped. “Please get that right. I did not have a son. God finally gave me one.” She insists she will continue to breast feed the little bastard as long as he wants. “He will always remain a little one for me.”
*
A woman named Haung, in the Chinese city of Qingdao, found a dove (a white pigeon) lying in an alley bleeding from wounds in its wings. She took it home and nursed it back to health. A week later she set the pigeon free. The bird rose into the air and disappeared. But within five minutes it was back. It now rests on her shoulder and accompanies her on her evening walks. Haung says she treats the pigeon as “a close friend” and that it can stay with her as long as it wants. Now that sounds like a healthy relationship.
*
Meanwhile, in Shenyang, in Northeast China, Ms. Li gives her Sonny a little smooch, for displaying his powers of deduction. She claims that Sonny, a 1 year old rooster, can read both Chinese and English letters and do simple addition and subtraction. There is no doubt that Sonny knows more Chinese than I do, but I do have to wonder if Ms. Li has never heard of “The Clever Hans Effect”.
*

Hans was an Arabian stallion owned by a Berlin high school math teacher named Wilhelm von Osten, who claimed to have taught Hans to add, subtract, multiply fractions and divide to the level of a 14 year old human. Hans could also read German, spell, tell time and follow a calendar, or so it was claimed. When asked a question Hans would respond by tapping his hoof. After years of free public displays in the 1880’s and 90’s, a 13 member commission was set up, including a veterinarian, a circus manager, a Cavalry officer, a zoologist and school teachers. They tested the horse and von Osten and concluded that “der Kluge Hans” was real.
*
Then in 1907 psychologist Oskar Pfungst figured out that “The horse was simply a channel through which the information the questioner unwittingly put into the situation was fed back to the questioner.” By strictly following the same non verbal clues that Hans did, Pfungst was able to achieve a 90% accuracy level, almost the equal of that achieved by the horse. Hans wasn’t reading books he was reading the humans in the room, which in many ways was more amazing than his supposed talent.
*
Von Osten never believed Hans did not understand the abstract problems he had been challenged with, and continued to display his Clever Hans to large and enthusiastic crowds until they were both old and gray. And I’m sure that Ms. Li believes “Sonny” is a genius cock, too. And he may be, but I suspect his talent is in translating chicken body language into human body language, as Clever Hans was able to do with horse language.
*
As for the lady and the pigeon, it would seem the little lost bird has a somewhat twisted sense of flock, and who can blame him. As a parrot owner (a love bird and a cockatiel) I can testify to the comfort derived from having another warm bodied creature huddling up against my face while I watch TV or read. But I respect my feathered companions too much to ever forget that they are closer to dinosaurs than to humans. Our connection speaks to the evolutionary value of affection over the last 4 billion years.
*
As for The Bitch’s Bitch in New York, that speaks to the talent that humans have for projecting their neuroses and sins on to their pets, like a witches’ “familiar” cat or kicking the dog when grandma farts.

And as for Namita the monkey lady, she’s just sick and needs to be locked up in a loony bin before one of her daughters is tempted to stab her in the tit.
- 30 -

THE REAL PIKER

2007-09-05T07:06:00.001-04:00

I can’t believe what I’m hearing. They are going to poison Lake Davis, AGAIN. Ten years ago the California Fish and Game Service poisoned the lake to kill the Northern Pike that some IDIOTS had dumped into the lake under the delusion they could co-exist with the Rainbow Trout the lake was famous for. A million dollars in annual business slowly dried up. Where fishermen once tossed back 4 pound trout in expectations of quickly replacing it with a six pounder, eventually it took an average of 4 hours to catch just one trout, and now it can take as long as 10 hours. And the Pike, well, they started to be found literally choked to death on the Trout fry they have been gorging on.
*
The state tried every way imaginable to kill the Pike in Lake Davis. They were shot. They were electrocuted, netted, hooked, cornered, dynamited, starved, suffocated and dragged from the water individually and beaten to death with clubs. Eventually, in 1997, the state was reduced to draining down the 4,030 acre lake and poisoning it with piperonyl butoxide, a “…broad spectrum insecticide and piscidide” which is “mildly toxic” to humans. Then they restocked the lake with oversized Trout fry, hoping those would eat any Pike fry that had survived. Instead the Pike fry simply started growing nine to fourteen times faster. They became super Pike: Franken-fry; Fry-enators; big nasty ravenous pike. These Pike aren’t on an endangered species list, they are on the ten most wanted list. They’ve got more people gunning for them than Osama bin Laden, with about the same results. And now, after ten years and some $35 million dollars spent, California is pouring another $17 million worth of poison into Lake Davis.
*
The 2,230 residents of Portola, California, 7 miles south of Lake Davis, used to draw their drinking water directly from the lake; crystal clear, ice cold fed by glaciers and so pure no filtering was required. Now they get their water from wells while public health officials assure them that the levels of pesticide present are perfectly safe. And while Esox Lucius Linaeus (the Pike) are thriving, Onocorhynchus clarki (the Rainbow Trout) are not.
*
The year after the lake was poisoned 600 pike were caught in the Fish and Game nets. In 2004 the number was up to 17,635. In fact, just since humans started trying to wipe out the Pike of Lake Davis, 60, 500 Pike have been caught in Lake Davis. In 2005 Pike were caught trying to find a way around the Pike guards on the spillways at the dam that forms Lake Davis. And in 2006 a heavier than usual snow pack melt brought the lake to within inches of the top of the dam.
*

The fear is that once the Pike escape from Lake Davis they will chew their way down the Feather River and start munching on the young Salmon spawn the state has spent several additional millions trying to coax back into the Sacramento River Delta. So the Pike must die. But why should Fish and Game be successful this time? Well, the state has a new chemical mix, CFT Legumine, which is just a remix of the same stuff they used back in ’97. And once the chemical breaks down in the water (which it will after a few weeks), come spring, Fish and Game will restock the lake with trout – again – and start a massive advertising campaign to attract anglers back to what was once one of the best Rainbow Trout fishing sites on the whole west coast.
*
This past week the notices went in the local weekly newspaper. As of September 4th: “…Lake Davis, the shorelines, all its tributaries, all land up slope…to the ridge tops of the Freeman lake watershed, and all campgrounds, boat launches and day-use sites…” are now closed. And they will stay closed until the water tests safe again. It all sounds ominous.
*
The potential catch is that Northern Pike are not only ferocious, but they can live up to 26 years. In that time even a fish can get clever. And those who survived the ’97 extermination attempt were probably the most resistant to the poison, and are probably still alive. Pike also scatter their eggs at random, so there is no single spawning ground where the poison can be concentrated. All-in-all the chances that the Pike will be exterminated this time are considerably less than certain.

*
And maybe a little humility is a positive sign.
*
The original treatment of the lake produced protests and a lot of bitterness. Now, one business owner asked, “What the hell took so long?” According to Suzi Brakken, director of the Pumas County Visitor’s Bureau, “The lake has been…empty of visitors for several years. People are tired of the issue. They just want it over with.”
- 30 -

BURKA STOCK

2007-09-03T05:52:00.000-04:00

I found a photo labeled “Burka Bikinni”. A lovely young woman was covered literally from head to toe in black, with only the pale oval of her face visible. And there was the fig leaf of a matching black skirt. Thus attired in her “burkini” she was ready for cavorting at the beach. To me the attire highlighted the hypocrisy of going to such lengths to avoid the obvious recognition that girls just want to have fun, and that it is a form of insanity to treat women as if they were infected with some Ebola-like virus capable of destroying the faith of all men who set eyes on them.
*
The name “burkinni” was invented by that ultimate hedonistic group, “Surf Life Saving Australia”, where every Shelia is body proud and dressed so you can plainly see her “map-pa Tassie”. These super-macho types only admitted women in 1980, so a Muslim woman Aussie life guard would seem tantamount to renouncing her faith. But after the December 2005 Cronulla Beach riot, when some 5,000 drunken Aussies stumbled about beating up anyone who even looked middle eastern, the life savers figured their country was drowning in ignorance. Thus the “burkinni”, intended to allow even a devout Islamic fundamentalist female to pull a drowning male from the waves and give him mouth-to-mouth.
*
Okay, the Aussies still have a few problems to work out. And among them is Ms. Michelle Leslie, an Aussie model and Islamic convert who was busted in Indonesia with two tabs of Ecstasy hidden somewhere on her emaciated frame -.they must have looked like bowling pins in her pocket. At her trial, like an American defendant wearing a new suit, she wore a burka as a sign of “public privacy and modesty” - in her own words. But the Muslim nation’s court still gave her three months in jail. Shortly after being released she was seen strutting down a runway wearing a skintight swimsuit that may not have shown her “map of Tasmania” but clearly displayed the total deforestation on her part of the island. Down under the relationship between west and east seems to be in a state of flux.
*
And the flux of Western sexual equality has even reached into Saudi itself, where 18 year old Farhad Qureshi, a student at the Sultan Ahmed Institute of Fashion in the city of Mizapur, showed the Christian Science Monitor her own designs for swimwear, jackets and skirts. Qureshi wears the burka herself but “…I can design for anyone.” The school only has about 100 students but by its very existence offers Islamic women a choice – not an easy choice but still a choice.
*
We in the West may smile at such developments within Islam because we stopped binding our women in whale bone corsets over a century ago. True, our women are still encouraged to hobble themselves in high heels and stress their backs through breast implants, but western women now have a choice. They don’t have to be popular if they don’t want to be.
*
But what I learned from my research is that the Burka is not in fact what I thought it was. It is not the full body robe: that is the Abaya. The head covering is called the Hijab and may be a simple scarf or a sort of balaclava. The burka itself is merely the veil. And, of course, there is a burka for every price range and inclination, from simply functional to simply ostentatious. It turns out that Muslims are just as hypocritical as Christians, Jews, Hindus and atheists.
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It’s nice to know we’re all sinners, isn’t it?
- 30 -

When Good Cannibles Go Bad

2007-09-02T08:38:00.000-04:00

I think I have finally figured out the solution to the old cannibal and missionary problem. Mathematicians have been teasing students with this one for a century, and any solution must involve some algebra and the kind of logic that makes my eyes spin in little tiny circles. The setup goes like this; three cannibals and three missionaries arrive at a river too wide and strong to ford or swim. There is one boat on their side of the river but it only holds two people. And should the cannibals ever out number the missionaries, it will be Christians for lunch. So how does everybody get across the river safely? See, my first thought was that the solution was simple; the Christians cook and eat the cannibals and then after a nice post lunch nap, row across the river. However I have been informed that solution is not permitted. To which I inform the rule makers, “Nertz”.
*
What brought this problem back to mind was a discovery last week in Vienna by a cleaning woman, also called a “reinemachen frau”. She entered a ground floor 2 bedroom unit in a subsidized apartment building for the indigent mental ill who had refused treatment to find 19 year old Robert Ackerman, a German from Cologne who had moved in this month, with blood and raw meat smeared around his mouth. He calmly asked her to call the police because he had murdered and eaten his roommate, 49 year old Josef Schweiger. When the cops arrived they found the confessed anthrophagus calmly waiting, and in a second bedroom the earthly remains of heir Schweiger, gutted like a trout from throat to genitals. The police insist that “no organs had been removed from the breast or stomach areas” but did admit that his brain and tongue were on a plate in the refrigerator. The Austrian cops said they think that Robert “may be mentally confused”, but that’s outside my expertise. All I know for certain is that Robert obviously likes leftovers.

Okay, clearly the first trip has to be two missionaries, (2xMM). Then one rows back to pick up…Three cannibals because they quickly ate the lone missionary left behind. And then they ate the one who rowed back, so that won’t work. But if, on the first trip, it’s one of each (1M + 1C) then the missionary can row back knowing his two companions equal the two cannibals left behind. Then he can take…wait. That won’t work either.
*
One neighbor told reporters that, “We were watching the television one night when we realized there was a sort of howling coming from outside…we saw him (Robert) squatting down on all fours, howling at the moon…he was not wearing anything. It was really freaky.” Another neighbor reported seeing Robert pouring blood out a window. And yet nobody called the police, or even notified the management. I guess living next to that kind of hostel you expect to make certain accommodations. The residents are supposed to receive weekly visits from a “mental health professional”, but it’s easy to imagine what those bureaucratic “check ups” likely consist of.
*
The Germans just retried their own anthropophagite, Mr. Amin Meiwes, who ingested a computer programmer who had responded to his online advertisement for a victim: talk about truth in advertising. After dissecting the vorarephilic programmer into individual packets Amin then packed them away in a freezer and feasted on gourmet versions of his victim over an entire summer. Speaking of his ‘passed on’ repast, Amin insisted, “He was closer to me with every bite”. Makes you all warm inside, doesn’t it? Still, couldn’t he have just called tech support? Amin didn’t attract any attention until he advertised for a second victim. And even then, since he’d fricasseed and consumed the evidence, he might have escaped arrest if he hadn’t video taped the whole process. And then there was the skull he kept in his freezer. As your mother probably warned, don’t play with you food: it could get you arrested.
*
Amin explained his rational to the court quite rationally: “I wanted to eat him but I didn’t want to kill him.” While the original court considered that a mitigating argument, a higher court ordered a retrial and this time Amin was sentenced to 15 years to life. Boy, you eat one lousy programmer…
*
Okay, 1M rows 1C across. That gives us 1C on the far shore. The M returns and a second C takes the third C across. Now we have 2 Cs on the far shore, 1C in the boat and 3Ms on our side of the river. The C rows back and lets 2 Ms row across. On M gets out and one C gets in, and the M&C row back. You know, I think I’ve cracked it.
*
It was Christopher Columbus, the intrepid explorer, who invented the term cannibal. But then he thought the “Caribs” – residents of the Caribbean - were Japanese. And since they weren’t Christian they must be cannibals. I can’t think of another explorer who misinterpreted more of what he saw until the invention of Captain Spalding, the African explorer, (Did someone call him Schnorer? Hooray, hooray, hooray!) After all, went the logic, no Christian ever ate another person. And that fundamentally flawed observation illustrates the golden rule of cannibalism, which is that the perpetrators are always somebody else. We never eat people. We just talk about it.
*
It’s called the Blood Libel, and Christians have been libeling Muslims, Jews, Hindus and Zoroastrians with this crime almost as long as there have been Christians, certainly longer then Uruguay has fielded a soccer team. And everybody else has returned the complement. But until you are starving, not just hungry from a skipped meal but starving to death, you cannot understand how true hunger could overcome a rather fundamental human inhibition against cannibalism. Unless of course you are just nuts: in which case just being in need of a little nosh could be enough justification to eat your roommate.
*
A Viennese judge ordered Robert moved to Goellersdorf, in lower Austria, where he will be kept, authorities felt required to add, in a solitary cell. I guess that also means he will be dining alone. That is the usual definition of a cannibal, I believe. Reinhard Haller, a psychiatrist who has studied cannibals, diagnosed Robert from a distance for the London Times as suffering from either, “…a psychotic reaction triggered by alcohol or other drugs, or severe sadistic derangement.” Thank goodness the Times located this guy, otherwise we would have never figured out what was wrong with poor Robert. Now of we could just find a cure for what ails Josep.
*
There are endo-cannibals and exo-cannibals, being those who eat their own tribe members (in some kind if ritual) and those who eat only others (often in a ritual). The cannibals in our problem with the missionaries are all exo-cannibals. As was William Seabrook, a self confessed occultist and writer for Vanity Fair and the New York Times, who, back in 1931, confessed to cooking and eating a human rump roast, which he claimed he got from a Paris hospital orderly. Seabrook favorably compared the taste to veal. Few others have been so broad minded, and the ultimate insult to cannibals was probably delivered by Democratic President Lyndon Johnston, who suggested that the only difference between cannibals and liberals was that cannibals only eat their enemies. But then Johnston didn’t live to see conservative Republicans turn on Senator Larry Craig from Idaho, fellow right wing paragon and public restroom encounter devote. His fellow conservatives ate his still beating heart (assuming he had one).
*

The addendum to any cannibal recitation must be the tale of the Tolais, a band of New Guinea natives who killed and ate a Fijian Methodist Minister and four missionaries in 1878. In the Victorian spirit of Christian forgiveness the Methodists immediately burned down a dozen or so villages and killed a lot of Tolais. But they didn’t eat any of them, which was the point of the lesson plan.
*
One hundred thirty-two years later, after the Tolias had enjoyed the introduction of poverty and invading diseases, they made an abject apology for offending Western morality. That ceremony is likely to mark the conclusion to the golden age of human cannibalism. In retrospect it can be said that they ate a few of us, and in return we almost wiped them out, and then we got them apologize.
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It makes you wonder who really ate whom, doesn’t it?
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ps.; the solution to the missionary and cannibal problem requires that you end up with one cannibal in the boat and two on the near shore. Good luck.
- 30 -

LABOR DAY 2007

2007-08-31T09:17:00.000-04:00

I don’t understand why we call it Labor Day when everybody takes the day off. We might better refer to this first Monday after the first Friday in September as “Men Cook Food Day.” Thanksgiving and Christmas, Easter and Passover and Eid-al-Fitr, the feast that culminates Ramadan, all embrace the image of hearth and home and Mother-in-the-kitchen. But in the United States, Labor Day is the one holiday when men traditionally apply heat to food for their families, which makes it the oddest holiday of all.
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Inside a kitchen the average male considers himself a chief if he can microwave popcorn without starting a fire. But on Labor Day those same men are mystically transformed into alchemists, capable of using a $600 barbecue to transform $75 worth of dead cow into something worth about six bucks at any McDonalds’. If women coked like this on Thanksgiving we wouldn’t have turkey until Easter. And then it would be chicken.
*
The barbecue was originally invented to allow cooking on a wooden sailing ship without setting it afire. But the practice didn’t become popularized until the Pirates of the Caribbean invented the first rudimentary barbecue sauce – made up of at least 30% rum - to disguise the usually rancid beef. But why did the modern barbecue become so closely associated with Labor Day?
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Perhaps Sigmund Freud said it best when he wrote, “Sometimes potato salad is not just made out of potatoes”. In short, burning meat is merely the context of Labor Day, but the subtext must surely be the so called male “Y” chromosome, actually a standard issue “X” chromosome with one leg missing. Scientists are still not certain what genes are in that amputated leg, but this hobbling has left the human male abandoned high and dry by the incoming tide of civilization.
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Cave men once gathered in hunting parties to track and kill wooly mammoths. In the process they bonded, sharing not only the bounty of protein but also the danger of becoming wooly mammoth toe jam. That bonding created the identity for men in their maleness, and allowed them to rank each other by accomplishments and toe jamminess. But a cubicle is not a cave and a production line is not a hunting party. And no males have ever bonded over a spreadsheet. Thus Labor Day was born of biological necessity.
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Each September the male of the species ( in North America) answers the call of the wild, and slathers the modern day equivalent of mammoths with the sacred sauce - usually consisting of 10% catsup, 40% beer, 5% mustard, 10% more beer or bourbon, 2% vinegar, sugar and steak sauce, and 60% of any commercially available barbecue sauce. It’s a social analogy in sticky goo.
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The Labor Day barbecue is as much a part of the modern male’s maleness, as a bar pick up line and urinating while standing alone before at a porcelain portal. Both processes tend to be messy and both define being a modern male. Women, in contrast, are much more individualistic, yet they go to the restroom in herds. Why this discrepancy? I have no idea. I am the owner of a “Y” chromosome, and this prevents me from understanding women. But whatever it is I don’t understand I know that it also discourages women from cooking on Labor Day.
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I suspect that if evolution has any say in the matter, it’s only a matter of time before our limping “Y” chromosome trips over something important and human males join the forearms of Tyrannosaurus Rex and Britney Spears’ musical career on the path to extinction.
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So let the kids play with those recalled lawn darts. Invite the neighbors over, even though you think they are annoying. Count on the dog getting diarrhea on your patio. And singe that poor dead cow so that even its own mother wouldn’t recognize it. And know that tens of millions of males all across North America are doing exactly the same thing as you. Revel in your unity while you can, men. It’s Labor Day!
- 30 -

LEAVE YOUR BIG WHEEL AT THE CURB

2007-08-30T13:03:00.001-04:00

I didn’t have to look far for this little story; it was in my hometown paper, the Lafayette Journal and Courier, Lafayette, Indiana. On Saturday night, August 25, 2007, Wendy Barrett in the Saddlebrook subdivision heard a car speeding around the corner near her home. She looked out the window in time to see it slide to a stop onto her property. She rushed outside to see if anyone had been injured. When she opened the car door she found 24 year old Holly Schnobrich slumped in the passenger seat, while behind the wheel was Schnobrich’s 5 year old son, dressed in his pajamas. Barrett asked the barely conscious Schnobrich, “Is this toddler driving your car? Schnobrich responded, “He’s a good driver”. The driver’s 3 year old brother was ridding in the rear seat, next to two unused children’s car seats.
*
Schnobrich pleaded with Barrett not to call the police, and then, when she made moves as if she were going to try and drive away, a neighbor grabbed the car keys. When the police arrived the boy assured them he was a “fine” driver, although he complained that his feet did not reach the pedals. Both boys were unharmed and in good health and placed in protective custody with Children’s Services. Their mother was arrested for two counts of public intoxication and neglect. She told police she had taken Percocet when the children got to be too much to handle. A 30 day prescription of sleeping pills was found in the car, almost empty. That label indicated Schnobrich had picked it up the day before.
*
Yesterday, August 29th, during her arraignment on the current charges, it was revealed that Schnobrich had pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of operation a motor vehicle while intoxicated on August 21st. Her probation on that charge has now been revoked.
It’s probably no surprise that kids are increasingly familiar with the mechanics of driving at an early age since studies show that the average mother spends 66 minutes every day driving the kids someplace – to and from school, doctor’s appointments, to friends houses – and where the moms go the kid’s go too. And in the case of one Buena, New Jersey nine year old, that experience lead to more than 70 runs with the law as he was caught driving a stolen lawn mower, 20 separate bicycles, a Ford Taurus and a school bus. After sealing the bus the boy managed to evade relatives who chased him on foot.
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Unfortunately this past January the adult neighbors who watched a 9 year old girl from Little Ferry, New Jersey drive off in her parent’s Montero, with a 4 year old in the passenger’s seat, did nothing to stop her or alert the authorities. The car finally came to a halt when she crashed into a car driven by an 84 year old, in Hackensack.

But the youthful offender who has achieved the greatest fame has to be 9 year old Semaj Booker, from Lakewood, Washington. He wanted to see his father, who lives in Dallas, Texas. In December he stole a car but crashed it in Tacoma, Washington. Then he stole a second car and got as far as Seattle before he ran out of gas. Then, in January, he stole an Acura and was spotted by local cops near I-5 and Highway 512. They gave chase, with speeds reaching 90 mph. The engine blew up as he exited on Ninth Street Northwest in Puyallup, Washington, and the coasting car hopped a curb and rolled into a tree. The cops had to break the window open to get him out, and after that adventure his mother left him in a shelter for several hours.
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So when he disappeared again his mom’s first call was to the local cops. But then she got a call that her son had been picked up…in San Antonio, Texas. Somehow the 4’ 9” tall boy had gotten to the SeaTac airport, through security, and boarded a Southwest flight to Phoenix without a ticket, changed planes, and boarded a second flight for Texas, also without a ticket, and, if he had not boarded the wrong flight he would reached Dallas where he wanted to go, instead of San Antonio, where he had been caught.
*
After giving the San Antonio cops a false name Semaj had ‘fessed up, and on Tuesday they sent him home. His mother says she wants to move the family to Dallas in a few months, but in the meantime she is thinking about shipping Semja off to her sister in Illinois.
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I hope she lives nowhere near O’Hara. - 30 -

CROSSING BOUNDARIES

2007-08-29T07:34:00.000-04:00

I seem to remember something about my civil rights ending at the tip of your nose, but there must be one jackass determined to test that proposal in every town in America. In this case it was Stuart Sugaman, a 48 year old hedge fund manager on Wall Street. This particular jackass simply could not suppress his vocal enthusiasm as he peddled his exercise cycle to pounding rock music in his “Spin Class” at the Equinox gym on East 85th Street, in New York City. Sugaman loudly grunted, he ‘whooped’ and he shouted things like, “You go, girl!”
*
And he continued to yell those things even after the man exercising next to him, 44 year old Christopher Carter, politely asked him to tone it down. Mr. Sugaman continued to cheer and chant and grunt even after Mr. Carter yelled at him to “Shut up! Shut the fuck up!” Mr. Sugaman says he was in “the zone”, and not able to respond until Mr. Carter announced, “If you don’t shut the fuck up, I’m getting off my bike!” At that point Mr. Sugaman did respond, chiding Mr. Carter, “Stop being a baby,” which was, evidently, not the correct response. Because at that point, according to Mr Sugaman’s lawyer, Mr.Carter dismounted his bike and shoved the boisterous Mr. Sugaman and his bike into the wall, dealing Mr. Sugaman a concussion and damaging six discs in his back. It was, says Mr. Sugaman’s lawyer, a clear case of “Spin Rage”.
*
Mr. Carter’s lawyer does not disagree, but he describes Mr. Sugaman as a “real piece of work. The first thing he does after the incident is hop on his bike and work out for another 40 minutes. And the second thing he does is hire a personal-injury lawyer and the third thing he does is alert the media. Who’s kidding who?” Mr. Carter has been charged with a misdemeanor assault. Mr. Sugaman says he may very well need more surgery, and he might just sue. I’m willing to bet on that last one. I’m willing to give odds that whatever the settlement offer from Mr. Carter’s side, Mr. Sugaman will feel he is entitled to a lot more.
*
The 53 year old frau from Mitterteich, in Southern Germany, only wanted to pay her respects to a dearly departed relative, but she’d had a little too much to drink and missed the entrance to the cemetery by several meters. Devotedly she refused to turn around and instead plowed through the fence and bounced across the graveyard, knocking over several headstones and eventually ending up jammed atop one of the graves, at which point a crane had to be called remove her BMW. Police figure that between the damaged headstones and the damage to the car, the frau is now in debt for about $24,000. Seriously, I think once a sick relative passes on you aren’t obligated anymore to visit them every weekend.
*
A lady in Moscow, recently, got so fed up with her husband watching television and passing out drunk on vodka that she set fire to his penis. Police say it is difficult to predict if he will make a full recovery, but they say it is likely she will be spending some time in jail. In this case they suggest that her right to a happy marriage ended at the tip of his penis.
*
Police didn’t mind when a member of Japan’s right wing fringe sent a letter of protest to the Prime Minster Shinzo Abe, for not attending a public ceremony at a Tokyo war shrine. It is the right of every citizen in a free society to petition their government. But the man also included in the envelope a video disc he had recorded, showing himself chopping off his own pinky finger. And just for good measure, he included the severed pinky in the envelope, because, he told police, “I thought they would ignore me if I just sent the letter, so I put in my little finger as well.” Good thinking on his part. Otherwise they might never have realized he was nuts. In this case his right to petition his government ended at the original tip of his own finger.
*
On a recent Wednesday night a Tacoma housewife was shocked to discover her husband on the back porch of their home, engaging in sex with a bitch, specifically with the couple’s 4 year old pit bull terrier female. The shocked lady retained the presence of mind to snap a couple of photos of the action with her cell phone camera, which she then used to call police. As a result, Michael Patrick McPhail has been charged with bestiality, the first such charge under a new Washington State law enacted after a Seattle man recently died after engaging in sex with a horse. Did you even suspect enough of this was going on to justify a new law? I didn’t. McPhail was released on $20,000 bail and the bitch has been picked up by animal control.

Hell, as they say, hath no fury like a bitch scorned. And that rule is not species specific. - 30 -

ADIEU, ADIOS, ALBERTO

2007-08-28T08:37:00.000-04:00

I believe it was Harry Truman who said, “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.” He might have added that then, when you leave town, put the dog down. But who was it who said, “If you can’t handle criticism you shouldn’t be in government”? Oh, yea. It was Fredo Corleone in the flesh, the man called Gonzo, or Alberto the fall guy, or Gonzales the delivery boy. It's bed time for Gonzo. President “Shrub” walked out onto the tarmac at the Waco airport at 10:50 am yesterday and announced,
*
“This morning, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced he will leave the Department of Justice…It’s sad that we live in a time when a talented and honorable person like Alberto Gonzales is impeded from doing important work because his good name was dragged through the mud for political reasons.”
*
And I was left to wonder if the little man pouting on the tarmac realized how cruelly he personally had treated Fredo, leaving him out there, in the words of that great political strategist Chuck Colson, “…to twist, slowly, slowly in the wind.” My, God, the Bushies can’t even kill out of kindness with competence! The last six months have been like watching Laurence of Arabia struggling to execute the hapless Gasim with shot after shot after shot. After which Prince Ali explains, “That that he killed was the man he brought out of the Nefud”, Auda replies, “Ah, it was written then. Better to have left him.” Or, as Herman Roth put it in “The Godfather II”;
*
“There was this kid I grew up with – he was younger than me. Sorta looked up to me – you know. We did our first work together – worked our way out of the street. Things were good, we made the most of it….As much as anyone, I loved him – and trusted him….This was a great man – a man of vision and guts….Someone put a bullet through his eye. No one knows who gave the order – when I heard it, I wasn’t angry; I knew Moe – I knew he was head-strong, talking loud, saying stupid things. So when he turned up dead – I let it go. And I said to myself, this is the business we’ve chosen – I didn’t ask who gave the order – because it had nothing to do with business! “
*
That should have been the statement from Shrub, and it should have been delivered weeks ago. Or, to quote another great political strategist;
*
"Well used are those cruelties…that are carried out in a single stroke, done out of necessity to protect oneself, and are not continued but are instead converted into the greatest possible benefits for the subjects. Badly used are those cruelties which, although being few at the outset, grow with the passing time instead of disappearing. Those who follow the first method can remedy their condition with God and with men...; the others cannot possibly survive." –
*
The writer of that was Niccolo Machiavelli, proving yet again the old adage that those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. Or as Fredo himself said, “Every time I put my line in the water I said a Hail Mary, and every time I said a Hail Mary I caught a fish.” Well, say a Hail Mary, Alberto. He was nominated on February 3, 2005 by the Republican controlled Senate by just 3 votes, with 60 yeas against 36 nays and four big “not voting” votes. And after that things went downhill for everybody.
*
Alberto is the son of a migrant worker and the grandson of illegal immigrants, raised in a town called Humble, Texas. And Alberto humbly served Shrub the way Lennie serves George in “Of Mice and Men”. As Crook explains in that book, “…A guy needs somebody to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody. Don’t make no difference who the guy is, as long as he’s with you. I tell ya, I tell ya a guy gets too lonely an’ he gets sick.”
*
I think we were all sick of Alberto by now. By the way, did you know that Alberto is yet another one of those twice married “in-defense-of-marriage” social conservatives?
*
Yes, Shrub kept him around long enough so he became just another Washington punch line. Jay Leno: “A new survey says that 58% of the people who follow the news think Attorney General Alberto Gonzales should resign. Of course, President Bush is not in that group.” Jon Stewart: “After weeks of mock testimony, there you have it. Alberto Gonzales doesn’t know what happened, but he assures you, that what he doesn’t remember was handled properly.” David Letterman; “President Bush has big April Fool’s day plans. He’s going to call Alberto Gonzales and tell him he’s doing a heckuva job.” Stephan Cobert; “Some Republicans in Washington are looking for a replacement for Alberto Gonzales, but apparently they need to find an experienced legal mind that President Bush is comfortable with. As a result, the number one candidate is Judge Judy.” And Jay Leno, again; “This whole administration is turning into a bad version of the “Wizard of Oz”. Cheney needs a heart, Gonzales needs some courage. Bush needs a brain”.
*
I was happy to see Fredo get in the boat with the assassin, because I knew his end was going to come while he was saying a Hail Mary, and that would give him some peace. Michael, on the other hand, was doomed to suffer, living with his memories and being forced to appear in “The Godfather III”. As Fredo himself said a long time ago, “You never like to say no to the President, but you have to.” Except that Fredo never did. I guess he should have learned to “Just Say No”. Sing with me, Alberto.
*
So long, farewell,
Auf Weidersehen, Goodnight,
I hate to go and leave this pretty sight.
So long, farewell,
Adieu, adieu to you and you and you.
So long, farewell,
Auf Weidersehen, goodbye,
I leave and heave
A sigh and say goodbye,
Goodbye,
Goodbye,
Goodbye.
Goodbye, Alberto.

- 30 -

And The Temple of Viagra

2007-08-27T05:04:00.001-04:00

I read that sixty-four year old Harrison Ford signed on to make the fourth “Indiana Jones” movie, 25 years after the original. The title I presume will be “The Temple of Viagra”, or perhaps “The Search For An Affordable Prescription Drug Plan.” Good lord, they stopped Sean Connery before he got old and cranky. Will no one do as much for Mr. Ford? Are we so desperate for celebrities that we can’t afford to find a younger man? Just what exactly is Dr. Jones seeking in this adventure – perhaps an answer the ancient question, “Will you still need me, will you still feed me when I’m 64”?
*
That answer has already been provided to the author, Sir Paul McCarthy, by his soon-to-be ex-wife, Heather Mills. And the answer was no. It is the same answer that Britney Spears gave to her louse, er, I mean, spouse, Kevin Federline. When Kevin-ney (or Spear-line or what ever they were labeled by paparazzi - or the paparazzo) when they first married he was identified as “a dancer”. Now he is called a “rap artist.” At 15 I was fired from a job at an ice cream stand. Did that qualify me to be labeled as a “soda jerk”? Mr. Federline is now at a crossroads and must answer the question…why is he famous anymore?
*
I’m still asking why Paris Hilton is famous, but it seems that debate has already moved on. She is famous and no amount of rational argument on my part will ever change that. She was born amazingly lovely, amazingly rich and with a moral center of chewy nugget. She is famed for her bar-fighting, drunk driving and restraining order generating “party ethics”, and her jail time. And yet she is credited with the crafty intelligence of turning wealth, good looks and desperate ambition into a career, which is like complementing Ms. Heather Mills-McCartney for turning her one leg into a limp. Good lord, Donald Trump is also rich and famous and he’s not nearly half as cute as Paris, thus proving that anybody half as rich, half as good looking and half as smart as the rest of us can be a celebrity if they want to.
*
We are now burdened with such a collection of pathetic celebrities that I wonder what the chances are we could trade them all in. Lindsay Lohan seems to be unhappy simply because she is famous. We can fix that. And what is Naomi Campbell so angry about? She treats her servants the way Dick Cheney treats his hunting partners. I think that woman needs a good meal.
*
We have an entire collection of useless famous people who don’t have enough personality to be famous all by themselves anymore. TomKat’s major claim to fame seems to be that one of them can get pregnant and the other one has far too much money. Then there is Brad-olina and Madonna-whoever-the heck-she’s-with; they all went to Africa in search of orphans. What a shame there weren’t any needy children just a little closer to Hollywood. And now the Kevin-less Britney has matched up with Paris Hilton, call them ParisSpears. They are a clear warning of an approaching Celebrity Apocalypto - which is similar to the “Calypso” except there is no bar to dance under. You just see who can go lower all on their own. My money is on Paris.
*

Clearly western culture desperately needs a celebrity transplant. I think we should dump all our famous flakes and just keep George Clooney. He’s the only current “star” who has charisma and talent and the brains to avoid ever having his picture taken with Paris Hilton.

-30 –

Blowing In The Wind

2007-08-26T10:07:00.001-04:00

I went looking for arguments against wind powered electrical generation. What I found is that the anti-wind people are full of hot air and not much else. Certainly wind power is not a panacea but then what is? Honestly; what the hell is a panacea? How many people have ever even seen a panacea, let alone tried to generate electricity with one. I don’t think you can do it, not unless you set one on fire, and buying a panacea just to burn it up is absurdly expensive, not to mention that nothing stinks worse than a flaming panacea, unless it is standing downwind from a coal, or methane (also called ‘natural gas’) or oil power plant. That will just kill you, eventually. And I’m sorry but ethanol just stinks. It makes the little hairs on the inside of my nose curl up. And I’m thinking that can’t be good for the environment.
* I admit that wind farms are just ugly, particularly up close. But they are not nearly as ugly as the Grand Canyon filled with soot, which is what a coal generating plant looks like from far away. And have you ever read what goes into making a solar cell? The proponents like to boast its mostly sand, but that’s just the sales hype. You have to refine the sand via “carbo-thermetic reduction”, which means heating it to 1,700 Celsius (3,000 Fahrenheit), which is expensive, and makes about 1 1\2 tons of carbon dioxide, which is tough to breath through. And then you add selenium, cadmium, copper indium gallium diselenide, or copper indium selenide, or maybe some gallium arsenide, and none of those things sound particularly eco-friendly, and they are not. They are all heavy metals, and like the music named after them they cause cancer and sterility and mental problems and eventually deafness; which is bad.
*
And then you’ve got wind farms, which are like free power, except of course that in Germany, which has been leading the wind power movement with 19,000 wind farms across the country, there have been a few hick-ups. Lately, the damn things have been blowing up, and catching fire and falling off. Ooops.
*
According to Der Spiegel newspaper, in an article entitled, “Wuthering Heights” (another example of that famous German sense of humor!) a wind gust in Saxony recently ripped a 32 foot rotor blade off a 328 foot tall turbine and dropped it almost 1,000 feet away, into a field. After an inspection the locals shut down six turbines in the group; metal fatigue, manufacturing defects and improper instillation were the diagnoses. And this by the anal retentive Germans; I can only imagine what kind of sloppy horse manure has gone at American construction sites. Did you know that we once installed a nuclear power plant, backwards? How did that happen?
*
The Germans had two turbines catch fire, and the local fire department didn’t have any ladders long enough to reach them. An entire tower simply folded up as if it were a Minnesota highway bridge, and another wind mill started throwing blades fragments like candy out of a piñata. German insurance companies are now requiring maintenance agreements before they will write paper for any more turbines. I guess this means that wind power has come of age.
*
Of course the industry has made some pretty outlandish claims up to now, about free power and freedom from foreign oil and a whole list of other manure. Basically this had been a rehash of the horse crap we heard from the nuclear power folks, with the primary advantage of wind power of nuclear being that should a wind turbine fall over on your house they won’t have to rope it off for two hundred years. But all those who bought the sales pitch for free wind power should be ashamed of themselves. I know I am.
*
The biggest problem is that the gear boxes in the turbines are burning out after five or six years, even though the manufactures insisted they would last twenty years. And then there are the vibrations that are transferred by the generators to the base of the tower, where, over time, the concrete foundation cracks and crumbles. But, hell, if we had known back in 1920 how corrosive gasoline was, and how often filling station gas tanks would have to be replaced, would we have been so impressed with Henry Ford’s Model T pricing system? I’m guessing the answer would be no.
*
So with all the problems with wind power, it still looks pretty good to me. I just wouldn’t want a wind farm in my backyard, of course. But one in your backyard sounds like a good idea to me.
*
And that is what is called “Passing Wind”. - 30 -

Praying for the Placebo Effect.

2007-08-25T09:51:00.000-04:00

I know exactly how God feels – assuming that I, an insignificant little ex-monkey, might comprehend even a small portion of the huge vastness that must be God. But then we must all be able to understand God, as Roger Bacon pointed out. Humans either invented God or we recognized the existence of God, so God must be understandable on some level of human understanding, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation. And since humans can thus understand God, thinking we can understand something of God sort of makes us all a bunch of arrogant self centered, ego-maniacal ex-monkeys, doesn’t it? I mean, who the hell do we think we are, gods? That’s fucked up thinking, man, but that’s not my point.
*

Every year a bunch of con artists make the rounds of evangelical churches, raising money from trusting Christians, claiming they want to climb Mount Ararat and find Noah’s Ark. And I can’t figure out what the hell these idiots are looking for. Yes, I know…Noah’s Ark, but that’s just stupid. In the first place, if they find his Ark, are they going to return it to him? And how will they know it’s not some other ark, left behind by some other holy man, from some other watery apocalypse? And even assuming it has Noah’ name carved on it some place, what do these born-again non-believers expect to achieve? Perhaps they expect a world wide religious revival of … Judaism – since the Ark would validate the Old Testament and not the new. And secondly, if the Ark isn’t up there, would that invalidate the Old Testament? Okay, it wouldn’t help, but why climb a 17,000’ high volcano to prove the nonexistence of God? Can’t you find lose your faith a little closer to home, like in Las Vegas, maybe? I think you can, but that’s not my point.
*
I read that a ten year, $2.4 million “Study on the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer”, or STEP for short, was recently concluded The money came from the John Templeton Foundation, and I guess you might call this the Search for Noah’s Bark, or Noah’s lark, or some other indirect evidence, because, again I can’t figure out what the hell these nominally religious and yet faithless people are looking for.
*
Allow me to quote from their mission statement: “…It is the Foundation’s purpose to stimulate a high standard of excellence in scholarly understanding which can serve to encourage further worldwide explorations of the moral and spiritual dimensions of the Universe and the human potential within its ultimate purpose.” See, I have no idea what that sentence means. I tried to diagram it, but what I get looks more like an application to a mail order art school than English. Or, to put it another way, whatever the hell these people thought they were looking for, I don’t think they didn’t find it.
*
Here’s how they didn’t find whatever the hell they weren’t looking for; they studied 1,802 coronary bypass patients at six different hospitals. Half (about 900) were told outside groups might or might not pray for their speedy recovery, and half were told nobody outside their families gave a damn if they lived or died. Then the first half were subdivided into “got prayers” and “not got prayers’ groups (about 450 each). Then each side was further subdivided into “Know you got prayers” group and “Don’t Know you got prayers”, “Know you don’t got prayers” and “Don’t Know you don’t got prayers” groups. So there were about 250 subjects in each subcategory.
*
Three Catholic churches, in St. Paul, Minn., in Worcester, Mass, and in Kansas City, Kansas started praying. Using the patient’s first name and last initials only they asked God for the patient’s “…successful surgery and a quick, healthy recovery and no complications.” Thirty days after each surgery everybody stopped praying.
*
This is the same methodology used by the Food & Drug Administration to study Viagra before it went platinum, and in gauging the effectiveness and safety of blood thinners and Botox injections in your forehead. Don’t look too surprised; it’s a purely statistical study, and says nothing about the moral value of any particular drug in helping any particular patient. A new drug that helps only 85% of patients is often considered a great success.
* Unfortunately this study found that, “Third-party Remote Intercessory Prayer…(was) not effective in reducing complications following heart surgery.” In fact, 18% of the ““Don’t know you got Prayers” group had post surgery heart attacks or strokes, while only 13% of the “don’t know you don’t got Prayers” group had serious problems. Being prayed for, the study seemed to imply, could kill you. And that could not have been the intent of the people funding the study.
*
Could it be this study has somehow pissed God off, and he took his anger out on the poor subjects who were hoping for divine intervention? Or could it be that God just doesn’t answer Catholic prayers? That might explain the complete failure of the “rhythm method” of birth control for the last 2,000 years. Maybe they should let some Protestants into the prayer groups, or Muslims or Jews. Or even atheists. Wouldn’t that be a kick in the pants; if praying atheists could cure people? That would screw with everybody’s head.
*
The Foundation itself darkly hints at their own disappointment in the study results, when they note questions about the methodology, and call for “…substantial resources (to) be put forth in order to advance methodological rigor in the design and execution of the new “blue ribbon standard” study.”
*
You didn’t think the staff were going to acknowledge you can’t equate God with Viagra and then give up their jobs, did you? Hey, they just came back from Mount Ararat, where on their final day on the mountain they saw something in the distance, through the blizzard, in the fading light of the setting sun. They took a picture but the light was so low, their camera was damaged and they had just run out of film, and they had a piece of the Ark in their backpack which they dropped off a cliff before it was stolen from their hotel room and then seized by the Turkish border guards, so if you could just cough up a couple of hundred dollars more next year…..
*
The Catholic Church has been selling masses for 2,000 years, and they have a ready explanation for the study results. God listens to all prayers, but he doesn’t answer all prayers. Yes, its a cop out, but it’s a good cop out, and being a cop out doesn’t mean it isn’t true. We’re talking faith, here. And faith means whatever the hell you want it to mean. And I know exactly how God feels about all of that. What a surprise, he feels exactly the same way that I feel about it. And who would have ever thought that would have been the case, especially since I’m an atheist.
*
And that’s my point.

- 30 -

ON THE FRINGE

2007-08-24T09:52:00.001-04:00

I have always wanted to attend the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, a three week pandemonium of theatre and performance art held each August in the Scottish capital. Its original intent in 1947 was to take advantage of the audiences drawn to the cities’ official arts festivals, but by 1960 it had grown to 2,000 separate shows, ranging from the legendary “Hole in the Meadow”, a literal hole in a city park in which a naked man gave a 45 minute performance (each audience limited to one because of the size of the hole) to this year’s ‘The Container” by Clare Bayler, a play about “asylum, racial and religious persecution”, staged in an actual shipping container (audiences limited to 20 per performance). With audiences that small the play had better be damned entertaining. And each day, on the Royal Mile along the High Street in Edinburgh, casts vie for audiences and attention along with acrobats and mimes, clowns and comics and street performers. It is a cacophony of joyous live theatre, drama and comedy blending into a seamless wave of insanity, culminating this year when a dwarf got his Willy stuck in a vacuum cleaner.
*

Famous and infamous performances abound; decades ago one theatre company staged a marital spat in a pub, in amongst the drinkers, without any theatrical lighting, curtains or introduction, nothing to separate the performance from the real life alcoholics arguing around it. At the other end of the spectrum, this year there was “Siren” by sound artist Ray Lee at the ‘Out Of The Blue Drill Hall’. According to the revue;
*
“The installation features some 20 blades mounted on tripods at different heights…. the rotors have a speaker at each end, as well as small, red lights. One by one, they are switched on by sombre-looking men armed with mini screwdrivers, until eventually the hall is filled with a collection of aural and visual swirls…The sounds vary from blade to blade …a mooing cow, a woman’s voice and even a Tibetan gong…Almost as interesting as the installation, is how members of the audience respond…Some sit transfixed against a wall for the entire 40 minutes, while others wander around …tilting their heads towards certain rotors to catch a specific sound. Expressions range from child-like amazement to vaguely perturbed,…A few minutes before the end, the rotors suddenly stop in unison, and gradually each speaker is switched off by the men with the screwdrivers…When the last speaker stops there is a brief silence…Then applause breaks out, before people wander into the night. Every guest will experience a different sensation, and each might well depart thinking that they have never witnessed anything like this on the Fringe.”
*

Last year there was a restaging of Macbeth, known in theatrical circles as ‘the Scottish play’, as a rock opera, ala Rocky Horror, and a few years ago there was a stage version of the movie “The Italian Job”, with all dialogue lifted from various William Shakespeare plays. This year you could sit through “Guernica Falls”, described by the producers as an “interpretation of the horrors of modern warfare” (“The narration is delivered through vocals and percussion – the absence of dialogue assists with its universal accessibility.”) or “Hari Krishna and the Philosoper’s Stoned”, or Artyfacts” by Becky Fawcett, “A collection of highly confidential, revealing and outrageous comedy artifacts from this country's elite. Well, not quite elite; more important than you anyway.” Or perhaps you would prefer to attend the “Circus of Horrors” where you can meet Captain Dan The Demon Dwarf, who crazy glued his penis to a shop vac.
*
It’s been a crazy year, even for the Edinburgh Fringe. Tom Clews, who was performing as the Hero Odysseus in a three man show, had cash picked from his pocket, and then chased the thieves down the street, shouting and waving his sword. Finally he threw it onto the ground tripping up the thieves and retrieving his money; leaving me with the question of just where did Odysseus carry his wallet? An 18 year old actor, Matthew Hastings, seeking to garner attention for his company’s performance, soaked his pants in gasoline and set them on fire. Matthew suffered 2nd degree burns and told reporters from The Scotsman, “The flames were huge”. And by the way, Matthew, it would have helped if you had worked the name of your show into the police report. Dan Blackner, the dwarf playing Captain Dan, who accidentally glued his penis to a vacuum cleaner, made certain the title “Circus Of Horrors” was prominently mentioned in every single article about his misadventure.
*
You see, at one point in his performance Dan must walk across the stage dragging the vacuum with him via his own special attachment inserted into another special attachment on the vacuum cleaner’s hose, designed so Dan can pull it off night after night without actually pulling it off. And last week, while rehearsing, the special attachment broke or split – reports vary. So Dan applied crazy glue to the cracked appendage, but failed to carefully read the glue’s instructions before reattaching it to his own appendage. Instead of the recommended 20 minutes drying time he left the glue on for only 2 minutes. At which point he could no longer unlatch the attachment, try as he might. “I was terrified that if I pulled too hard I’d rip it off,” said Dan.
*
Panicked, Dan called his manager, who drove him to the Royal Infirmary, along with the box office girl who had twisted her knee. “I don’t know what she must have thought,” said Dan. “She just sat there trying not to laugh. But I felt just like crying.” The paramedics met them A the front door with a wheel chair and they resisted the desire to get theatrical themselves. (Get me the paddles. Clear! Zap!”) Instead they rushed their wee patient and his wee-wee in the vacuum cleaner, into the E.R. where, according to Dan, the other patients were laughing, but the nurses saw how embarrassed Dan was. “I just wished the ground could swallow me up.”
*
An hour later, Dan was free. Said his manager, “It was one of the most bizarre accidents I’ve ever seen, and I work with a freak show.” But, on the bright side, after reports in the British Press on Dan’s tubular experience, Amazon said that sales of the little red Hoover used by Dan in his performance, increased by 400%.
*
Of course, I also can’t escape the feeling that Dan was just Dyson for some free publicity.
- - 30 -

SIT, HUMPIE, SIT!

2007-08-23T08:16:00.001-04:00

I suppose you have heard this story in the sanitized versions, but here it is in all the randy truth. Her name is – er, was - Pam Weaver and she had just celebrated her 60th birthday in March. On this occasion her husband Noel and her daughter had wanted to give their mother something special. They lived on a sheep and cattle station outside the small village of Mitchell, deep in the outback of Queensland; a place with few comforts and fewer rewards. And Pam was a real jillaroo, an experienced station hand trained as a veterinary nurse, who could and did repair fences, birth animals, sheer sheep, herd cattle, look after the books, cook and do the housework, too. So Noel wanted to make this birthday special. The initial plan had been to buy Pam a llama but they proved too expensive. So father and daughter decided instead to buy their mother a camel, and a young male because they were cheaper then females. Little did the family know that with this choice of birthday gift they had set in motion a tragic chain of events that would result in droma-cide.
*
Mitchell is village of 1,200 souls between Roma and Charlyville astride the Warrego highway (the A2) which cuts west to east across Queensland. Mitchell features wide tree lined streets and “classical colonial architecture” against a bend in the “delightful Marona River”. Up the road apiece is the Camarvon National Forest. Brisbane, the territorial capital, is a distant 600 km or 372 miles away to the East.
*
This is the heart of Booringa Shire, “…a busy rural district,…”which has dreams of one day becoming “…an important stop on the tourist route to the outback of Queensland.” But to date the biggest tourist attractions in town are the Courthouse at the Western end of Cambridge street where the “last of the Bushrangers”, Patrick and James Kenniff, were brought after their capture, and the Frank Forde Room at the Maranoa Art Gallery and Library, named after the local boy who became the Australian Prime Minster famous for having the shortest tenure in office, just six days.
*
Pam’s exotic new 5 month old baby still required bottle feeding when he first arrived, but with each passing day, as he grew to 152 kg, 335 lbs, and more mature, his behavior became “bizarre”. He took to assaulting the pet goat, crowding him and forcing him to the ground. ‘Humpie’ was now 10 months old, and more than once the Weavers had to rescue the goat from suffocation from beneath him. If the Weavers had been more familiar with camels they might not have described ‘Humpie’s’ behavior as bizarre.
*
Camels were introduced to Australia beginning in 1840, and thousands were used to carry supplies for railroad and telegraph line construction across the wastes and empty places known collectively as the outback Today there are perhaps half a million feral camels wandering the deserts of central and west central Australia, and their populations are increasing. To quote from a study of Camel behavior;
*
“The male is normally docile and easily controlled, however, in the rutting season he can become so aggressive that he is dangerous and cannot be handled. He is extremely restless. He blows a balloon-like flap out of the side of his mouth which is called a palatal flap …The lips are often covered with saliva. The glands between the ears secrete a dark, bad-smelling, watery secretion. This area is constantly rubbed against all objects in the surroundings…The back legs are spread, and the tail is then beaten against the penis…courting and mating can be very violent. If the male selects a female and she will not go down quietly…he will bite at her neck and eventually force her to the ground. There the female utters her guttural protest, while the male…straddles her. Copulation lasts for about fifteen minutes.”
*
It’s not a pretty picture. And yet I wonder how many women and girls found that this description of male behavior sounded more than vaguely familiar. But, as the Arabic proverb says, “Death is a black camel that lies down at every door. Sooner or later you must ride the camel.” Or, it seems, sooner or later the camel must ride you.
*
On Saturday, August, 18th, 2007, Noel Weaver returned home about 6:30 pm (Australian Standard Time) after tending to his stock and found the house empty. Dinner was cooking in the oven, a cup of half drunk tea was on the table and a tea pot was whistling on the stove. Noel assumed Pam was in the back yard attending to the chickens and other household livestock. To his surprise the camel was out of his pen and wandering about the backyard. And crumpled on the ground was Pam’s lifeless body.
*
Detective Senior Sergeant Craig Gregory of the Roma police, who were called to the scene, said that Noel was devastated. The Sergeant surmised, “She was out doing her chores of feeding all the other animals. From the condition of her body and the ground around it Gregory said it was likely “she hadn’t been there very long until he got home”.

*
It was clearly, he said, death by dromedary. Pam Weaver had "one definite footprint" on her face and one on her arm” and the camel had then "rolled around the ground a bit". Either Pam had been smothered or she died of a heart attack. In short, she had been humped to death.
*
It‘s not a funny way to go. Anyone who has ever suffered having their leg “humped” by an overly friendly dog can imagine having the same experience with something three times the size of a St. Bernard, twice as insistent and producing four times as much saliva and other bodily fluids.
*
And now we know why Catherine the Great never drafted camels into the Russian cavalry.
- 30 -

The Legacy of Mr. Yancey

2007-08-21T08:41:00.000-04:00

I have been seeking a good analogy for Congressman Tom Tancedo, Republican from Colorado. Tom wants to build a 700 mile long high tech wall built between the U.S. and Mexico, much like that other expensive failure, the Great Wall of China. And what the heck ever happened to the Berlin Wall, not to mention the rest of the Iron Curtain? If they had worked, don’t you think they would still be around? Tom considers all 12 million estimated illegal immigrants to be felons, and wants them arrested and locked up. Tom considers a ‘Guest Worker Program” a form of surrender. Not that Tom is xenophobic or a racist. He insists he is not.
*
But, Tom, that just leaves stupid.
*
But exactly what is Tom’s felony-ship of America supposed to achieve? He told a crowd in Iowa last weekend, where he is running second in the polls to Mit Romney, “This is our culture. Fight for it!” And in that call to the culture war I suddenly realized who Tom Tancedo reminds me of; William Lowneds Yancy, another firebrand who considered compromise a form of defeat.
*
Yancey’s South Carolina family were strongly pro-Federalist, and at an Independence Day celebration in 1834 the young man told a crowd, “Listen, not then, my countrymen, to the voice which whispers…that Americans…can no longer exist…citizens of the same republic…” And he championed the Federal Union as editor of the “Greenville Mountaineer”, at least until 1835, when he married an Alabama widow with an Alabama plantation and 35 slaves. The ownership of slaves converted Yancey to pro-slavery, and the Panic of 1837, which wiped cotton prices and Yancey’s newfound fortune and social status and converted him into a radical.
*
Yancey went back to what he knew, and in 1838 he bought a failing paper and his first editorial was a passionate defense of slavery. He even favored reopening the slave trade with Africa, which had been closed down by British Naval patrols since 1819. Yancey opposed the compromises of 1850, which sought to establish a balance between slave states and “free” states to avoid a civil war. Anything short of total domination by slave states was not a victory, in Yancey’s view.
*

The true nature if the man was revealed, also in 1838, when an alleged political insult led to a street brawl between Yancey and his wife’s uncle. He wrote later, “, Reared with the spirit of a man…and taught to preserve inviolate my honor…”, Yancey shot the man dead on the street. He was convicted of manslaughter but served only a few months before being pardoned. His reputation as a hot head did nothing to prevent him from being elected to first the Alabama legislature and then, in 1844, like Mr. Tancredo, to the House of Representatives.
*
In 1858 Yancey wrote what Horace Greeley called, ‘The Scarlett Letter’, in which he pledged that he and the other “fire eaters” would, “…fire the Southern heart – instruct the Southern mind - …and at the proper moment, by one organized, concerted action, we can precipitate the cotton states into revolution.” This was why Yancey was called the “Orator of Secession”. He worked hard to split his own (Democratic) party on the issue, believing the election of a Republican (anti-slavery) presidential candidate in 1860 would radicalize the south. He was, in the words of that genius Bruce Catton, “…one of the men tossed up by the tormented decade of the 1850’s (John Brown was another) who could help to bring catastrophe on but not do anything more than that.”
*
That the North had twice the population of the South, that the North had ten times the industrial and agricultural capacity, that slavery was already dieing in the South, that the North would not fight to end slavery but would fight to preserve the union, that Lincoln did not believe the Federal government had the power or the right to outlaw slavery, all this meant nothing to Yancey. Yancey wanted secession not despite its self destructive effects but, it seemed, almost because of them.
*
Once war broke out Jefferson Davis sent Yancey to England to seek recognition. The Prime Minister eventually met with Yancey, asking if he had been serious about his call for a resumption of the slave trade. Yancey denied it, but that question was the end of any chance that England would recognize the South. Yancey returned home and served in the Confederate Senate, opposing Davis’ power to draft troops and blocking Davis’ attempt to form a Confederate Supreme Court in the spring if 1863. It was during debate over the Court when Yancey and Benjamin Hill of Georgia got into a brawl on the Senate floor. Hill grabbed the only weapon at hand, an inkstand, with which he hit Yancey on the head, to stop Yancey from pulling his gun. The Confederate Senate censured Yancey and took no action against Hill. So it must have been William Yancey whom Davis was thinking of when he said the epitaph of the Confederacy should be, “Died of a Theory.’

*
Yancey immediately returned to Alabama where he died in July of 1863, just 2 weeks before his 49th birthday, having lived just long enough to see the double defeats of Vicksburg and Gettysburg that doomed the Confederacy which Yancey had done so much to create. The product of his life’s work was the deaths of 600,000 young men and perhaps a million civilians, total abolition of slavery in America and the ultimate victory of Federalism over State’s Rights. It is an estate Representative Tancedo might take note of, had he the intellectual honesty to do so.

- 30 -

The J-I-N for the I-E-Ds is S-H-I-T, Part IV

2007-08-19T11:47:00.000-04:00

I suppose the story of Ionatron’s IED zapper could simply be seen as a good idea that just didn’t work out. It happens all the time in the business and scientific worlds. But there is a very good argument that Ionatron never had a good idea in the first place, but stole it. Mr. Peter Schlesinger, President of the small San Diego based HSV Technologies, Inc., says that in early 2002 he was approached by Joseph Hayden, who represented one of the world’s largest defense contractors, Raytheon, about the possibility of a partnership for joint licensing of “directed energy technology”. Any agreement would be contingent, of course, on Raytheon first having a look at HSV’s proprietary material. HSV had a patented system to disable a fleeing car and short circuit hi speed police pursuits through what HSV called “…electrically conductive air” created by “multi-photon and ‘collisional’ ionization”; a laser.
*
Three meetings with Hayden and Raytheon staffers followed, at which the HSV staff shared with the Raytheon folks their most intimate secrets. But the third meeting, on May 31st at the Raytheon facility in San Diego, was interrupted by a man who identified himself as Robert Howard, and whom Joseph Hayden explained did research and development for Raytheon. Howard then boldly announced that all of HSV’s patents were “worthless”, and that Raytheon wasn’t particularly interested in them. Hayden and Howard informed HSV that Howard had a meeting on Monday with Raytheon and HSV must agree by then to sell their patents at Howard’s price or the deal was dead. But in fact, the following Monday, June 3, 2002, Robert Howard was on the other side of the continent, in Delaware, filing incorporation papers creating Ionatron. And a few weeks later Ionatron hired Joseph Hayden and other ex-Raytheon employees, to develop “…laser guided technologies”, with an 8% share to each of the new employees. Raytheon says they have no record of Robert Howard ever having worked for them.
*
Then, in March of 2004, in a ‘reverse merger’, Ionatron swallowed up the shell of a failed lawn care provider, U.S. Home & Garden, Inc. What could a research and development firm, interested in “energy beam weapons” find interesting about a lawn mowing and fertilizer service? Could there be some secrete laser application to control crab grass? Or could it be that H&G was listed on NASDAQ, and Ionatron wanted that seat. The entire Home & Garden board resigned along with the CEO, after issuing 48,452,240 new shares of stock, diluting existing shares by well over half, and then exchanging them all for outstanding shares of Ionatron. And the new board of the new U.S. Home & Garden were all familiar faces - Robert Howard as President, James Hayden and Stephen McCahon (both from Raytheon) as V.P.s, Thomas Dearmin as the new CEO and CFO, and David Hurley and George Harlin. All they kept was the name, and they quickly changed that back to Ionatron; same company, same name but now $9 million richer, thanks to all the paper shuffling.
*
And about a month before this merger of power mower and the laser became public knowledge Terese Dearmin, wife of Thomas Dearmin, the new CEO/CFO, bought and sold H&G stock, making a very nice profit when news of the merger broke of $13,178. Unfortunately, Terese was also a chatty Kathy, and told so many people about the merger in advance that the SEC made her forfeit the profit and hit her with a $25,000 fine. They also fined her father, with whom she had shared the info, $10,000.00; and her mother; and yet another business partner.
*
With the merger, Robert Howard’s salary went from $69,000 in 2004 to $148,000 in 2005, just as the stock was peaking at $10.71 a share. And then, in March of 2006, Howard announced his retirement. At 83, he told shareholders: *
“Because of my age and health concerns, my ability to travel is becoming restricted and I can no longer devote the time and attention to company matters that Ionatron deserves… Since I remain the largest shareholder and biggest believer in Ionatron’s future, I am always available to help in any way that I can and believe the best years are still to come for Ionatron. I plan to focus an increasing portion of my energies on…the Robert Howard Philanthropic Foundation.”
*
When Robert Howard had founded Ionatron all he processed was experience and patients filched from HSV. The stock he issued had literally been worth one cent a share, and was now selling for around $9.00. Luckily for Howard he had already cashed in on his creation, back when investors still believed that an IED zapper was a possibility, selling off large chunks of stock. But he remained the largest single stockholder in Ionatron, even if it was now selling for less than $4.90 a share. And in early August 2007 he filed with the SEC when he sold 11,000 more of his shares of Ionatron at $5.37 a share. The buyer was not identified.
*
Meanwhile Ionatron has just announced they have a $3 million contract to develop some lasers for the U.S. Navy. They are no longer even talking about their IED zapper.
*
Ionatron, Inc.
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- 30 -

The J-I-N for the I-E-Ds is S-H-I-T, Part III

2007-08-18T11:29:00.000-04:00

I wonder how many of you, dear readers, have detected yet the primary problem with Ionatron’s Joint Improvised device Neutralizer, their IED Zapper? Let us review;

The JIN is an oversized “Battling Bots” robot with a hook jutting out from the nose, to be “…driven in front of a military convoy (and controlled by)…a remote-control console that troops can use from a safe distance, directing it like a radio-controlled car. A metal boom that extends from the vehicle's chassis emits high-powered electric pulses…”, as one general described it, setting off the IED's blasting cap from a distance. According to reports it disabled 90% of the practice IEDs on the Yuma testing grounds by LIPC, laser-induced plasma channel technology. A one billionth of 1 millionth of a second long laser burst heated a narrow corridor of air into a plasma, which could transmit an electrical charge as if it were a “virtual wire”. That charge would then set off the detonator on an IED. Sounds great, doesn’t it? So what went wrong? Why did the most informed investors, 50 spooks from In-Q-Tel, dump the stock? Why, with all those fabulous test results, did the DoD never order any combat units? Have you figured it out yet?
*
The issue is not what the IED Zapper can do, the issue is what it doesn’t do. It doesn’t find IEDs. It doesn’t disable any IEDs unless it targets them. But the problem with IEDs in Iraq is not blowing them up harmlessly but spotting them before they go off. And when a population is not inclined to warn you that the third car parked on the right or the second pile of trash on the left hides an IED, having a Buck Rogers hi-tech device you have to stop to deploy, and then guide by remote control to approach the suspected bomb is worse then useless. Because in Iraq, stopping a convoy or even slowing one down is like walking through a dog kennel with a ham hock hanging around your neck.
*
I suspect what the Pentagon really wanted was a golf cart that would roll down the highway or street in front of one of those long lonely supply convoys that wend their way from the gulf to Bagdad and beyond, and disarm any IEDs as they pass, as if by magic, sort of like the shield the Martians used in “War Of The Worlds”, or “Independence Day”. But those are just make-believe, the fantasies of children and screenwriters and Neo-Cons desperate to find a solution to the mess they created in Iraq. And what we need when thinking about Iraq is not less reality, but more.
*

Ionatron figured they could build 17 zappers a month for $200,000 each, but at that price the units would not be disposable, which they would really have to be since, when the Zapper set off an IED, the IED explosion would likely take out the Zapper. And besides the Army already owns a remotely controlled device that could destroy an IED, once it has been detected; for $1,500 a shot you can buy an AT-4 one shot shoulder launched anti-tank rocket, more than powerful enough to take out an I.E.D. in a car or truck from 1,600 feet away, which is a hell of a lot farther away than the IED zapper can zap. So why are we spending $18 million of the taxpayers’ money to build the electronic equivalent of a big stick to poke IEDs with? Well, the answer is, we aren’t.
*
When curious Ionatron investors started asking how the system actually worked and when the Pentagon was actually going to order some zappers, and when their investments might actually start to pay off, the company’s Executive VP Joseph C. Hayden, responded that “Ionatron has been asked to remove this information from the website by the U.S. Government…” And if any then thought about asking by phone or mail they were informed that “…we must give the responsible U.S. Government office at least 30 days notice prior to release of any information regarding contracts or LIPC technology.” In other words, don’t ask, don’t tell; the memo announcing this new policy by Ionatron was dated, April 1, 2005, April Fools day.
*
By June of 2007 some investors gotten fed up enough to sue, charging in U.S. District Court in Arizona that;

“… the Company had concealed the fact their much-heralded vehicle was at best an improvisation of “off the shelf” platforms and components, incapable of meeting U.S. Government specifications…As such, its purported efforts to demonstrate the vehicle as a prototype for a large order from the government would inevitably fail… (Regarding the March 24, 2006 resignation of Chairman Robert Howard): While defendant’s press release appeared to signal to investors that a transition…was underway, in reality the Company was grappling with…the failure of its “deployment-ready” technology. Worse, following his resignation but prior to defendants’ shocking disclosure, Howard had engaged in highly suspicious sales of over one million of his shares of Ionatron, for proceeds of $13.5 million, …(and furthermore) the price of Ionatron shares plunged more than 39.5% over the four subsequent trading days…”
*
I am tempted to add that, oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive. But I won’t. I will simply add that in tomorrow’s chapter we will zero in on Mr. Robert Howard, and ask some questions about how he got into the death ray business in the first place. After all, it’s a long way from dot matrix to death ray tricks.

- 30 -

The J-I-N for the I-E-Ds is S-H-I-T, Part II

2007-08-17T12:33:00.001-04:00

I am not surprised that the CIA has a penny stock investment arm. Leonardo DaVinci was a similar gamble. He didn’t eat much, and if his parachute and tank and flying machine were not the Star Wars of the 15th or 16th century, his “looker” worked just fine. That rudimentary telescope allowed the Medici’s to spot inbound ships and buy or sell short before the competition even knew new shipments had arrived. But when George Tenet created In-Q-Tel Inc. in March of 1999, he could not have known that in two years the Medici would creep into the White House, a collection of greedy, voracious, grasping, gluttonous bastards who had one failing the Medici’s did not share; they were also inept.
*
In-Q-Tel was supposed to invest the paltry sum (by Washington standards) of $35 million in start ups in the highly speculative penny stock market. Employees (mostly ex-CIA workers) were looking for concepts that might benefit the nation, and as an incentive they also received shares in the various firms In-Q-Tel invested in. This was supposed to be a “blind” investment, of course, but it seems that was not so, because in March of 2005 about 50 In-Q-Tel employees decided to unload their trust shares in one company in particular; Ionatron, Inc. Did these ultimate insiders know something the average investors did not know? Nobody is talking because since 9/11/2001 In-Q-Tel, Inc. has become a black box project.
*
The new man in the spotlight was Ron Howard, the man who invented the dot-matrix printer. In 1984 he founded Howtek, to market his color jet printers and scanners (another invention), and in 1987 he and his son founded Presstek, to produce and market a one step laser guided color printing technology. In 1994 Howard was fined $42,000 by the S.E.C. for giving insider information to a friend and 1997 he was fined $2.9 million for making “false and misleading statements” hyping Presstek while they were negotiating a partnership with a German printing company. In 1999 Howard stepped down as Pressteck’s chairman and in June of 2002 he incorporated a brand new company, Ionatron, which shortly thereafter crossed paths with In-Q-Tel.
*
Ionatron wasn’t interested in printing, but they were very interested in lasers, the kind of lasers that guide a “pulsed energy weapon”; Buck Rogers, science fiction stuff. And within a year Ionatron had hired the powerful Philadelphia law and lobbying firm of Blank Rome, whose chairman, David Girad-diCarlo, was a power in the Republican Party. It was Blank Rome (with a $200,000 payment) that opened a lot of Washington doors to Ionatron, specifically the door of Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman, Thad Cochran, who “penciled in” a special “earmark” for Ionatron for $18 million. And shortly after that Ionatron became a favored investment for In-Q-Tel. And Senator Cochran got a $9,000 campaign donation and Ionatron has promised to move from Tucson to the Senator’s home state of Mississippi.
*
According to the company’s web site, Ionatron is selling “man-made lightening”, LIPC, laser-induced plasma channel technology. A femto-second (1 billionth of 1 millionth of a second) laser burst heats a narrow corridor of air into a plasma, which is then used to transmit an electrical charge as if it were a “virtual wire”. That charge can then scramble a warhead, a guidance system or a soldier’s central nervous system. Or, it has been proposed, set off the detonator on an IED.
*
The Improvised Explosive Devices became an issue of import in October of 2003 when the General in charge of Iraq, General Abizaid, wrote a memo, calling them the greatest single killer of American soldiers in Iraq. By 2006 that memo had become JIEDDO, the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization., with a staff of 360 and a budget of $ 3 billion. All they needed now was a method to defeat the IEDs.
*
Ionatron’s technology had not originally been designed to combat IED’s, but, as is preached to junior Army officers, you should never turn down a combat assignment. What Ionatron came up with looked like an oversized “Battling Bots” robot with a hook jutting out from the nose, instead of a hammer over its head. It is designed to be “…driven in front of a military convoy or operated separately…has a remote-control console that troops can use from a safe distance, directing it like a radio-controlled car. A metal boom that extends from the vehicle's chassis emits high-powered electric pulses…”
*
According to official military circles the IED killer was a smashing success, disabling 90% of the practice IED’s it went up against. And yet “…only about a dozen…units have been produced.” And despite repeated “leaks “about bots deployed and or “married with their combat units”, the system remains merely a test bed. What’s going on? Well, you’ve got a stockholders’ lawsuit, a plummeting stock price, and still no plant in Mississippi to build this mini Star Wars solution to a home made bomb.
*
More, tomorrow.
- 30 -

The J-I-N for the I-E-D is S-H-I-T

2007-08-16T10:19:00.000-04:00

I know and you know and anybody not in need of surgery to remove their head from between their own buttocks knows that the Bush administration has f—ked up in Iraq. But they didn’t mean to f—k up. They meant to be heroes. And how these Boys From Bureaucracy turned tragedy into farce – and a damned expensive farce at that – helps explain how the Bushies screwed up.
*
Our guide down this road to destruction is a paper prepared for the Joint Forces Staff War College, titled “Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization: Tactical Success Mired in Organizational Chaos; Roadblock in the Counter-IED Fight.” And the length of the title offers the first clue was to why the IED problem could never be solved by the Pentagon. These people can’t wipe their butts without using forty rolls of toilet paper to print up instructions, where five simple words would describe it all; How We Lost The War.
*
First, what the hell is an Improvised Explosive Device? Is it a bomb? If it sits there quietly until somebody lights the fuse or pushes a plunger or calls it up on their cell phone, then it’s a bomb. The why the hell not call it a bomb? Or, if you step on it or drive over it or past it and it blows up, then it’s a mine. The guy who was blowing up buildings in New York City during the 1940’s, wasn’t called the “Mad Improvised Explosive Devicer”, they called him the Mad Bomber and everybody instantly knew who and what the hell we were talking about. We had a perfectly good word to describe these damn things, why the hell did we start calling them IEDs? I think we lost this war because the idiots running it lost track of what the hell they were taking about!
*
And while I’m on a rant, what the hell is an enemy combatant? Would you call an enemy civilian a non-combatant? Sorry, stupid question; the military actually does call them that.
*
Now, where was I? Oh, yea, how we lost the war. The paper was written by Lt. Commander Richard Ellis, USAF, Major Richard Rogers, USAF and Lt. Commander Bryan Cochran, USN, and records that this particular disaster began in October of 2003 when the guy in charge in Iraq, General John Abizad, sent a memo to SecDef Rummy and JCS Chairman General Myers identifying the Improvised Explosive Device as the “number one killer of American troops” and asked for a “Manhatten-like Project” to defeat them. It was a memo that could have been a press release, and, what a surprise, it became one. This how you get promoted to big jobs in the Pentagon – you send home memos that give your bosses handy press releases, like when President Shrub says he gave the generals everything they asked for, be sure to ask for something expensive and l avoid asking for something cheap and sensible, like a MISSION THAT MAKES SENSE!
*
By the way, the Pentagon loves the Manhattan Project because it was run by General Groves, the same guy who built the Pentagon, and it was big and expensive and it worked. What’s not to love, from a bureaucratic stand point? So, if you ever become a general, in any Bull S—t memo, be sure to referrer to the Manhattan Project when ever possible.
*
Okay, the Pentagon immediately formed a 12 person taskforce under Deputy CoC for G3, LT. General Cody to look at the problem, but before they really got started Paul Wolfowitz came up with a bright idea; let’s make it bigger. So, in July of 2004 the 12 person team morphed into the Joint Integrated Process Team to see if there wasn’t some way to spend more money on the problem. And oddly enough progress was made, for awhile, like improved body and Humvee armor and robot bomb disposal robots – off the shelf solutions. And those were clearly not spending enough money. So in June of 2006 the AssSecDef created the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization. At last the Pentagon and its civilian members had a big enough name to justify spending some REAL money.
*
As the authors of the paper explain on page two; “…JIEDDO, as an organization possesses neither the structure nor the authority to effectively prosecute the war against IEDs…lacks the agility to quickly react to a changing enemy and has no legal authority to compel other DoD entities to act.” But, it did have a four star general, and a staff of 360 and a budget of $3 billion.
*
General Abizaid himself, the guy who started this whole mess, would complain later that JIEDDO’s “emphasis on multi-million dollar contracts to develop high-tech sensing equipment has been ineffective at curbing attacks by homemade bombs.” Well, hell, general, it was your idea in the first place. What did you think Rummy and Wolfie were going to come up with?
*
But the story is much more sordid than all of this, because this is Washington, where stupidity and incompetence are nothing if you don’t add greed and deceit. And in a future column we shall tell you the story of how the safety of American ground combat troops was sacrificed in the name of profits for a bunch of ex-CIA boys on the penny stock market. If you like blood sport and lasers and liars, you’re going to love this story.
- 30 -

GOD'S GREAT PLAN

2007-08-15T08:21:00.000-04:00

I think the religious right is proving once again that although they do not believe in evolution they still obey its laws. Look, bacteria may be a part of God’s great plan but we still require restaurant workers to wash their hands before leaving the restroom, not because “cleanliness is next to Godliness” but because it’s easier to stop hepatitis B with soap and water then with a catechism. And there are over 100 Human papilloma-viruses (HPV) that we know of, of which only about 30 are passed primarily through sexual contact and only about six of those can, eventually, develop into cancer. But it’s impossible to know when you have even been exposed to any of them because the viruses remain dormant for years, even decades. At worse there may be an outbreak of genital warts soon after exposure but not always and usually if warts do develop they clear up by themselves whether their specific virus can later cause cancer or not. But 99.7% of all those diagnosed with cervical cancer world wide have also been first infected with at least one of the six deadly HPVs.
*
None of the HPVs want to give you cancer. It is not a choice that 8,000 base pairs of adenine – cytosine and guanine- thymine strung along a ladder of pentose sugar between some phosphate bonds are capable of making. But put these little buggers in a warm salty liquid (like a human cell) and they release a couple of proteins, labeled E6 and E7, which suppress the proteins the cell uses to control its growth and division. After that the HPV is steering the bus and the cell goes where the HPV tells it to go.
*
All of this is a series of chemical reactions produced by an entity that doesn’t have a nucleus, let alone a brain, let alone a moral imperative. It’s not even alive, technically, until it infects you. Before that the HPVs are just a bundle of chemicals. But in 2004, almost 25,000 women in America were hospitalized with cervical cancer, at a total cost of $186 million; four thousand of those women die every year because of that bundle of chemicals. Worldwide over 230,000 women died last year - almost a 50% mortality rate - of an infection that can be prevented by three simple shots given over a six month period.
*
According to the magazine “New Scientist” 80% of parents want their children inoculated against the HPVs. The Australian government has mandated the vaccine for all girls beginning at age 11. The American Food and Drug Administration has licensed the vaccine in America as safe. Two of the largest evangelical groups in America– Focus on the Family and The Family Research Council - have backed the vaccine - at least publicly. And the vaccine is 100% effective as long as it is administered before a woman is exposed to HPV. It is much less effective once she has become infected. According to the American Medical Journal only one in four women between the ages of 15 to 49 has not been infected with an HPV. Clearly, inoculating girls before puberty (9 to 11) would eventually save almost 10,000 lives a year.
*
And yet: Bridget Maher, from The FRC, warned, “Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex." And Sadie Fields from the Georgia Christian Alliance warned, “We think it sends the wrong signal to young girls.” And Dr. Reginald Finger, who sits on the President’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, has said the HPV vaccine undermines the administration’s “abstinence only” policy: “With any vaccine…distribution would certainly be a factor, and it is something we will have to pay attention to…”
*
Send a signal? I thought we were trying to save lives. And where do you apply for premarital sex license, City Hall? And if the city charges a fee for that, does that make the city your pimp? What it seems to boil down to is that Evangelical Christian leaders have decided to quietly kill this advance in medicine even if it means murdering their own children to punish them for failing to just say no to sex.
*
It becomes increasingly clear that the only way every American will be free to chart their own moral course is to vote for a Democrat in next year's presidential election, which is a silly proposal since all politicians are more alike than they are different, but the Praise Jesus crowd doesn’t seem willing to be reasonable. That makes the calculation simple: Survival of the Strongest. The handful of religious dunderheads will slowly be wiped out by cervical cancer while those humans who use their brains will survive and multiply and inherit the earth; i.e. God's plan.
*
The HPV incubates in no living creature except humans. We could wipe out this scourge in a single generation. No more young mothers would ever have to say goodbye to their babies because of cervical cancer, ever again. There is only one problem: make the vaccine optional and the dunderhead kids will be infecting your kids till the end of time.

- 30 -

Und der weiner sprecken, nien, du ist ein campfire girl.

2007-08-14T11:17:00.000-04:00

I get the feeling that Germany is trying to refine their Teutonic sense of humor. Perhaps they hope to replace England as having the best sense of humor in Europe. And its going about as well as you would think. As an example, a waitress at a hamburger joint in Mainz was about to hand a bag of cheeseburgers to a customer at the drive-up window when a man suddenly appeared and grabbed the bag out of her hand “slightly injuring her” in the process, and then fled from the scene. Based on her statement the cops released the following description of the villain; a male, 1.7 to 1.8 meters tall, wearing a full-body ape costume and mask.” So far there are no arrests, but it seems to me the would-be practical joker missed the point. He shouldn’t have stolen the cheeseburgers from the lady’s hand while wearing an ape costume. That’s so 1970’s. He should have handed her a bag of cheeseburgers. A deliver to a drive-up window: now that would have been funny.
*
Some Germans understand the basic rules of joke construction. A couple of weeks ago special overnight train from Leverkusen was jammed with cheerful (i.e. drunk) football (i.e. soccer) fans, headed to a match with Hamburg (i.e. an excuse to get plastered) when some swinehund broke the tap on one of the beer kegs. Ach du Leiber! Ein booze ist kaput. Gotterdam! Swinging into action with typical German efficiency the rail company, Deutsche Bahn, halted the train at the very next station. Fans piled out of the suddenly dry conveyance. Would there be a riot? That wouldn’t be funny. Instead, puzzled commuters (it was 9:30 in the morning) were treated to twenty-five minutes of loud and enthusiastic and drunken football songs and chants until a special taxi arrived from a local beer hall with a replacement spigot. The fans then happily re-boarded the train and resumed their jovial journey with all kegs working. God only knows if the fans would have been so complacent had the handle on one of the toilets broken.
*
Of course the true test of a nation’s sense of humor is not how they tell a joke but how they take a joke, and Poland has recently been playing some ‘pranks’ on their neighbor, almost as if to test this experiment in funny krauts. The cover of the Polish magazine “Wprost” recently featured a photo of the German Chancellor, Ms. Merkel, naked above the waist, breast feeding a pair of Polish politicians, President Lech Kaczynski and his twin brother, Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kacyznski. The magazine’s editor explained, “We thought of it as a little joke,” or “…skromny m figiel” in Polish. In German this translated as, “Fuck you, you strong German rolling in shit pig (ficken Ihinen, Sie starke deutsche sich uberfressen). The Germans are still unsure how to react to this, although some of the nationalistic and conservative parties have made a few suggestions. And, of course, the neo-Nazi’s would love to respond but in Germany, they are still illegal.
*
But the true test of the new humor spirit in Germany may be what the United Nations has done at the memorial site, officially labeled the “Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration and extermination camp.” You see, at the urging of the Poles, this year, 62 years after the war ended, the U.N. agreed to change the name of the memorial by inserting the word “German” right before the word “Nazi”: just in case anybody forgot who started the Nazis. And it seems the Poles were a little concerned that some people might think that anti-Semitic Poles had helped the Nazis murder the one million victims of the camp. Whereas, anyone familiar with Polish Church history would know the Poles never chased the Jews out of Poland, or burned any at the stake, or officially blamed them for murdering Jesus. The Polish Church has often spoken out against anti-Semitism, often. Not always, but often. As a church spokesman, Father Jozef Kloch, explained, “…you can’t expect us to take a stance (against anti-Semitism) on every occasion.”
*
Good, point, Father. And how do you feel about anti-Catholicism? How about abortion and divorce, Satanism and secular humanism? And do you feel that way on every occasion you hear about them? Because, I was just wondering.
- 30 -

TULIPS, TWO EYES AND DEAF AS A POST.

2007-08-12T07:18:00.000-04:00

I am sorely disappointed with the Washington Post’s editorial writers. These pseudo –intelligential and born-again conservatives remain pro Iraq war and anti-Democrat, to the point that at Times (pun intended) they don’t seem to read the front page of their own newspaper. As a result they are not merely often mistaken but are often simply wrong. Their Saturday editorial compared the Dutch Tulip Mania with our current sub-prime lending bust. According to the Post, financial stability is only a matter of government officials keeping their “nerve”. It is a sad suggestion, reminiscent of similar editorials from 1929. Well, read my lips, Washington Post; reality ain’t that simple.
*
The beginning date is clear; 1593, but exactly what happened that year is not. One story has it that Ogier de Busbecq, a Turkish scientist, sent some tulip bulbs to Charles de L’Ecluse, who bred the impudent little exotics to survive the Northern European climate. Or it may have been the year Conrad Guestner , the Dutch ambassador to Turkey, brought the odd looking flower back home. Yet another story says it was Carolus Clusius, a botanist at the University of Leiden, who was the instigator that year. He was looking for a medical breakthrough but he didn’t get one because, so the story goes, capitalists broke into the professor’s garden one night and dug up his experimental bulbs, selling them for an immediate profit to avaricious collectors and thus unleashing “tulip mania” on the new nation. Any one or a combination of all three stories might be true. But what followed is singularly infamous.

After the happy discovery in 1621 that exposure to the mosaic virus, carried by European green pea aphids, caused tulips to form multi-colored flowers (hence the title “mosaic”), breeders began producing whole ranges of tulip varieties; and the newer the breed of tulip, the rarer the tulip bulb, the higher the price. By 1624 the Dutch were paying as much as 3,000 silver guilders for what the Turks called “Laaleh bulbs”, which grew like wild onions from Turkey to Afghanistan. Whereas, for only 1,500 gilders, you could get Rembrandt van Rijn to paint your image into something big, like “The Night Watch.” But the tulip bubble was just beginning. Ten years later, in the winter of 1637, one bulb sold at auction for 5,200 guilders.
*

Special tulip notaries and clerks recorded the well regulated sale of bulbs. Entire tulip stock exchanges were created in scores of Dutch towns and newspapers were filled with the minutia of trading in “tulip futures”. Vast fortunes were won and lost without ever seeing a tulip bloom. But the winter of 1637 was the top of the market.
*
Bubonic plague returned to Amsterdam in 1636, the same year the French under Cardinal Duc de Richelieu sided against the Catholic Habsburgs, in the Thirty Years War. And in November of 1637 the Guild of Dutch florists decreed that all contracts for tulips written after November 1636 were void. In a flash, tulip mania collapsed. In 6 weeks a bulb that had just sold for the equivalent of $76,000 was suddenly worth less than one dollar. In two years, from 1635 to 1637, the number of bankruptcies in Amsterdam doubled.
*
This is the wonderful morality tale the editors of the Washington Post want you to hear; boy meets tulips, boy speculates in tulips, boy panics, boy losses tulips. Ah, if only the story was that simple.
*
Let’s take a couple of steps back, to 1628, eight years before the peak of the tulip mania, when the Dutch privateer Piet Heyn captured an entire Spanish Treasure Fleet, transporting 12 million guilders in stolen Inca gold and silver, and re-deposited it in the coffee house banks and trading corporations of Holland. And that was the profit from just one of the dozens of Dutch and English raids on Spain’s Caribbean properties that brought fortunes of pieces of eight back to Holland. But, because Heyn was acting as a privateer the Dutch government could deny his actions and remain at peace with Spain. But the truth was that Spanish doubloons not only fed and clothed the Catholic armies in the Thirty Years Wars but their Protestant enemies’ troops as well.
*
In short, Holland was awash in cash and at peace, which drove down interest rates to historic (read artificial) lows, a phrase we should all be familiar with from economic reports over the last six years, until the Dutch were themselves were dragged into the wars and began spending to support an army and navy. Then both the government and the tulip investors were competting to borrow the same guilders; instant liquidity crunch.
*

So the story of tulip mania is really of the story of a booming economy that could afford a little insanity, such as the tulip speculation (or a lot of sub-prime mortgages) until a war soaked up all the credit that the speculation had been fueled by. And that sounds very familiar, doesn’t it?
*
I think the economic gurus at the Washington Post ought to be a lot more nervous. The Bush vision of economic-horticulture of “don’t tax but spend” is about to go bankrupt. And a pretty big chunk of the world is about to get stuck with the bill.
- 30 -

In Memorium: William Huskinson, M.P.

2007-08-11T06:11:00.000-04:00

I hate to admit it but Marcel Proust was probably right. Even people who know history tend to repeat the same idiotic mistakes their grandfathers made, who were, of course, repeating their grandfather’s mistakes - Etc. ad naseum. As proof of this dismaying lack of a learning curve in humans I give you the noble sacrifice of the Right Honorable William Huskisson, Minister of Parliament. If Christ died for our sins, then William Huskisson died to prove that the human species are morons.
*
On September 15, 1830, the first steam powered passenger rail line opened between Manchester and Liverpool, England. Riding in the inaugural train from Liverpool was Mr. Huskisson, stewing over a political beef he had with the then Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington. (Get it? Stewing over Beef Wellington?) When the train stopped at Parksdale station, 17 miles outside of Liverpool, to take on water, Huskisson disembarked, the better to harass the Duke, who was riding in the last car of the same train. As he reached through that car’s window to shake the reluctant Dukes’ shoulder the inaugural train out of Manchester roared through the station at the unheard of speed of 25 miles per hour. Mr. Huskisson froze in a panic. The Duke tried to pull Huskisson into his car but the westbound train was faster. It crushed Huskisson’s foot and pulled his leg under the wheels and further mangled it. His death later that night in great agony made headlines across England - Train Kills Man. And William Huskisson was the first.
*
In the 175 years since it has become a given that to be killed by a train you have to be an idiot. I mean, it’s not as if trains swerved and hit people at random. Pretty much you have to be on the train tracks to be hit by a train. See tracks, look for train. See train, get off tracks. But according to the Department of Transportation some 2,027 stupid people in this country were killed by trains in 2003 – the most recent year for which numbers are available.
*
But are people stupider for being hit by trains, or are the rest of us stupider for not noticing the consistency with which people avoid crossing guards and ignore flashing warning lights or who look but don’t see a huge locomotive barreling down upon them? Could it not be that perhaps having several thousand tons of steel, which may take a mile to stop, rushing through our neighborhoods “at grade” for the last 170 years constituted a fundamental design flaw? Perhaps being hit by a train is never entirely the victim’s fault. After all, just how smart are the engineers who don’t design for human stupidity?
*
I bring all this up at this particular moment because the geniuses who operate the lovely Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco have finally decided to consider some designs for a suicide barrier on their lovely bridge. The idea is put something between the potential suicide and the empty space hundreds of feet above the cold ocean water besides a simple waist high railing.
*
Since the lovely Golden Gate opened on May 27th, 1937, an average of 20 people a year have jumped from the lovely span. That makes around 1, 369 people who were so stupid they thought suicide was romantic, and didn’t connect a graceful swan dive with hitting the cold water at something over 100 miles per hour. At that speed water behaves like concrete and if you haven’t seen a jumper who has hit concrete I have, and I highly recommend you avoid seeing one or being one.
*
But is committing suicide anywhere near as stupid as the fact that there was no serious proposal for a barrier on the pedestrian walkway until the 1970’s, after some 600 people had already clambered over the railing? Of course, once the idea was suggested the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which operates the bridge, and the citizens of San Francisco who own it, they all slapped themselves in their collective foreheads and said, “Well, duh!” Unfortunately, they did not.
*
The idea was rejected. And rejected again in 1998. And the arguments against a barrier were just….well, stupid. Said the opponents, “If people can’t jump off this bridge, they’ll just jump off some other bridge”. That may be true but so what? Do we NOT put STOP signs at an intersection because if people don’t collide here, they’ll just crash at some other intersection?
*
“Why should everybody pay for a barrier to save the lives of a small minority?” You know, that it may be the most un-Christian and immoral question I’ve ever heard asked. To even ask that question is to be willfully stupid. And yet it remains an argument made by members of the MT.C, who agreed to a barrier to prevent pedestrians and bicyclists from falling onto the roadway, but remain opposed to one to prevent people from jumping in the bay. Stupid.
*
So why did stupid San Francisco suddenly get smart? Recently a filmmaker announced he was about to release the ultimate snuff film staring the lovely Golden Gate Bridge. Over the past three years he had inadvertently captured on film 19 suicides. When his film is released the public image of the lovely bridge wouldn’t be so lovely anymore.
Suddenly the M.T. C. found $1.6 million to study a suicide barrier. It’s not enough to complete the study. Certainly it’s not enough to build a barrier. But it’s a start.
*
Screw you, Marcel. And, Mr. Huskisson? Perhaps your death had meaning, after all.
- 30 -

NoBodies' Perfect

2007-08-10T11:04:00.000-04:00

I suppose you’ve heard about the 108 year old woman in Deal, Kent, in Britain, who has been told she will not qualify for a new digital hearing aide for another 18 months, when she will be 110. This is proof, say those Americans who are either stupid or on the Insurance and Drug company payrolls – mostly members of congress and that idiot in the White House – of how terrible the British health care system is compared to ours. The argument is, of course, B.S. The little old lady currently has a working hearing aide she got from the National Health Service five years ago. What she wants is a better one. In America she would be learning sign language. A spokesman for the Eastern and Coastal Kent Primary Care Trust was quoted as saying, “The priority is given to patients who do not have an existing hearing aid.” Meanwhile, in American, the priority remains in obtaining a golden parachute for CEO for some drub company.
*
Still, it must be admitted that the English have become very attached to their “red tape” way of life. June Trumbull is a 79 year old volunteer who has tended a flower bed for the last 8 years in her little village of Urchfont, Wiltshire. She cycles ½ a mile to the spot beside the road into the village, bought flowers and compost out of her own pocket, and works on the little garden, “…when the weather is fine and I have a moment to spare.” And then one day last week a highways inspector saw her at work and the compost hit the red tape. Ms. Trumbull must stop her work at once, say the regulations, until she and the village receive a Section 96 Safety License, erects 3 warning signs, dons a bright yellow “Safety Jacket” and has someone else act as a “lookout’”
*
Ms. Trumbull’s response is, “I don’t care what they do to me. I will continue working on the flower bed…They can send me to jail, if they like. I just want to be left alone to do it.” But the highways manager for Wiltshire was not moved. “We require that people undertaking this type of work follow the same safety procedures as our own staff…” And then as a further sign he kind of missed the spirit of the ladies volunteerism, he added, “We provide both signs and jackets free of charge to any volunteers.”
*
It all makes you wonder what happened to the Luddite tradition in England, and how the residents of that “septered realm “ keep from blowing something up or burning something down every once-in-awhile in an act of sanity saving anarchy. Well, they don’t. Mr. Richard Atkinson, age 31, recently celebrated his Luddite heritage by climbing up a pole in the dead of night and using a circular saw to remove one of those little video cameras that record anyone speeding on a public highway. Americans would, presumably, never stand for such an invasion of our public privacy, which is probably just as well since they found the beheaded camera in the shed behind Mr. Atkinson’s house. Mr. Atkinson then discovered that the life of a solitary Luddite is difficult at best. He had to pay a $16,000 fine and served 2 months in jail. But at least he was allowed to plead guilty to “perverting justice”, which sounds a lot more fun than what he would probably have been charged with in the United States; vandalism. Who wouldn’t rather be a Luddite than a Vandal?
*
And then there is the English love of the odd balls and the strange, like Charles Sherwood Stratton, better known as “General Tom Thumb” and Joesph Merrick, aka “The Elephant Man”, and now the late Mr. Mark Bamber, who died last week at the age of 38. He had diabetes, but that didn’t kill him. What killed him was his weight. At death Mark Bamber weighed over 700 pounds, or 50 stone. They couldn’t find a hearse capable of carrying him, as his coffin was 7 feet 11 inches long, 4 feet 6 inches wide and 30 inches deep and weighed well over 1,000 pounds, so they hired a farm wagon pulled by two horses dressed out with black plumes atop their bridles. A forklift stood-in for the pallbearers.
The funeral director was quoted as saying, “It really was at the edge of what was dignified.”

The edge? Oh, I think we passed the edge about 400 pounds ago.
*
His brother Ray noted “He was a very large man, very large, but he had a big heart.” Okay, I restrained myself from commenting there.. I was willing to feel bad for the man and his family, especially his 9 year old son who looks devastated in the photos. (Read the story and photo’s at;
http://www.metro.co.uk/news/article.html?in_article_id=60828&in_page_id=34
And http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=474295&in_page_id=1770
*
But then I read the other quotes from Ray. He admitted that he, himself, is obese. And then he said, I don’t like the word obese. I think it’s a terrible thing to call someone” And then Ray went way over the line. “Everybody is getting larger”, he argued. “If we can’t fix that then we’ve got to start catering for it, like they do in America.”
*
Excuse me, fatso? We’ll pass over the little line about “catering” to fat people because you are grieving, but what the hell did America have to do with this? We’ve got fat people too, but it ain’t like we invented them. Our Jeffery Dalmer ate his victims, but does that make us responsible for Idi Amin! I mean, George Bush is an idiot, as I already admitted. But does that excuse Tony Blair for acting like one too? You know, maybe we really are two peoples separated by a common language. I think you can over stress just how much we have to learn from each other, I really do.
- 30 -

The Evolution of Paranoia

2007-08-09T06:26:00.000-04:00

I believe in the general rule that the level of mental stability amongst most politicians goes down as you descend from federal to state to local representatives, if for no other reason than that national politicians have more opportunities to be publicly revealed as raving, grass-eating moon-baying anti-Semitic lunatics – which tends to weed out the craziest ones as they run for higher office. The most recent example of this is a quietly disconnected state representative, Ben Bridges, a Republican from White County, Georgia, zip code 30528.
*
If you drive north from Atlanta on I-85 to exit 113 in Gainsville, (most famous nationally as the home of the 47 year old woman who married a 15 year old boy. Thank goodness neither of them was gay!), and then follow state road 129 North until you turn left on Underwood Street in the small community of Cleveland, and you arrive at “Babyland General Hospital”, where Cabbage Patch dolls enter the world. Just down the street is the largest Yamaha Golf Cart dealer in Georgia, and the Gateway Health and Drug Rehabilitation Center. You have now reached the navel of Representative Bridges’ 10th district.
*
This used to be Cherokee land but in 1828 somebody found gold in Dukes Creek and the native Americans were quickly were shown the Trail of Tears out. The almost 20,000 folks who now reside in aptly named White County (less than 2,000 in the county seat) are 85% Caucasian, 10% African-American and less than 2% Hispanic And from the top of Anna Ruby Falls, through the faux-Bavarian streets of Helen and the village of Mount Yonah, along the gentle canyons of the Nacoochee Valley to the Testnatee Gap, the 10th district is inbred Southern Baptist, ad nauseous.
*
In 1966 Ben Bridges traded in his life as a small town barber to join the Georgia Highway patrol, rising over 20 years to the rank of Captain, and credited with saving 4 lives. He was elected state representative in 1996 and during his second year of service (1998), Rep. Bridges introduced House Bill 1133, the intent of which was…
*
“To amend Part 2 of Article 6 of Title 20 of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, relating to…core curriculum in elementary and secondary schools, so as to provide for the presentation of certain scientific evidence…”
*
The object of 1133 was to equate the scientific theory of evolution with the religious dogma of creationism. But it engendered little enthusiasm so the next year (1999) Bridges reintroduced the measure, and the next year, and the next. In 2006 the bill was labeled HB 179.
*
“(a) Whenever any theory of the origin of human beings or other living things is included in a course of study offered by a local unit of administration, factual scientific evidence supporting or consistent with evolution theory and factual scientific evidence inconsistent with or not supporting the theory shall be included in the course of study.”
*
Now, there is nothing extraordinary about Bridges’ repeated attempts to deny the logic of Charles Darwin’s postulations: madding, but not extraordinary. But what is extraordinary is that when Marshall Hall, the husband of Bonny Hall, Bridges’ long time campaign manager, asked to distribute a memo under Ben Bridges name and reputation, Bridges agreed. And that was extraordinary because of the memo itself. It read:
*
“I, like others, have made several attempts to challenge the evolution monopoly in the schools. These attempts have been in vain…the courts have ruled that “creation science” (I.D.) has a religious agenda and thus is in violation of the “establishment clause” of the U.S. Constitution…All that can now be changed! Indisputable evidence — long hidden but now available to everyone — demonstrates conclusively that so-called ‘secular evolution science’ is the Big-Bang 15-billion-year alternate ‘creation scenario’ of the Pharisee Religion. This scenario is derived concept-for-concept from Rabbinic writings in the mystic ‘holy book’ Kabbala dating back at least two millennia. Evidence…shows conclusively that “Evolution Science” has a very specifically religious agenda, and (as with “Creation Science”) cannot legally be taught in taxpayer funded schools, according to the constitution.”
*
The memo directs the readers to visit three web sites to examine “evidence” consisting largely of badly spelled anti-Semitic self-contradicting hooey, what the Huston Chronicle called a “…mix of nonsense, free-floating anti-Semitism (and)…seemingly obliviousness…”, much of it contained on “The Fair Education Foundation, Inc”, of which, it turns out, Mr. Hall is the president of: “Exposing the False Science Idol of Evolutionism, and Proving the Truthfulness of the Bible from Creation to Heaven since 1973”. The site insists that the earth does not revolve around the Sun, and neither does it rotate, and warns that evolution is actually a secret plot to indoctrinate students in an ancient Jewish sect. The memo then concludes:
*
“I hope you will join me in presenting a BILL (sic) with this content in your state. It will WIN (sic) in the courts. Together we can stop the misuse of billions in taxes now funding a deception that is causing incalculable harm to every student and every truth-loving citizen. (The solution for future science instruction after science is expelled from the schools is also contained in the…links.) Feel free to copy and forward this memo to others you know.”
*
If I were a skeptic I might inquire as to why, after 33 years of “exposure”, evolution is more popular than ever, but that would be cruel and the point is that after Mr. Hall forwarded his little bombshell to like minded state legislators in California, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Texas, the creation manure really hit the fan.
*
The bomb arrived on the desk of the “second most powerful” politician in Texas, chairman of the Texas House Appropriations Committee, Rep. Warren Chisum, who immediately forwarded it to anybody and everybody on his e-mail list. Inevitably somebody with two active neurons to rub together read it and figured it was time to tell a responsible adult. They “leaked” the memo to the Jewish Defense League, which was officially offended. “Your memo”, the JDL wrote to Chisum and Bridges, “conjures up repugnant images of Judaism used for thousands of years to smear the Jewish people as cult-like and manipulative,” and demanded a public apology.
*
Like cockroaches running for cover when the lights are turned on, every politician on the forwarding list now claimed they never saw the memo, never read the memo or were offended by it. Charlie Howard, a “religious conservative Republican” from Sugar Land, Texas (Tom Delay’s old base), announced, “I don't agree with bashing Jews, that's for sure. I don't agree with bashing any ethnic or religious group."
*
Chisum claimed he was just being “A Good Samaritan” in forwarding the memo. "If that's a sin,” he said, “well, shoot me.” But he also distanced himself from the anti-Semitic “goofy stuff” on the web sites, which he insisted he had not visited, “…which I understood maybe I should've done." He added, “The stuff that causes conflicts between religious beliefs, you know, I'd never be a party to that. I'm willing to apologize if I've offended anyone."
*
If, did he say?
*
But poor old Ben Bridges was going to have a harder time getting out from under the mess because, after all, his name was on the memo. But he tried. “I did not put it out nor did I know it was going out. I’m not defending it or taking up for it.” Still, to the JDL, Bridges had no apology. “I regret that these people have been offended, but I didn’t offend them because I didn’t put the memo out.”
*
However Mr. Hall refused to play the fall guy for Bridges. “I gave him a copy of it months ago,” Hall said. At which point Bridges was forced to admit he “doesn’t necessarily disagree” with the missive. “I agree with it more than I would the Big Bang Theory or the Darwin Theory. I am convinced that rather than risk teaching a lie, why teach anything?”
*
And that could be the fall back position for the entire anti-evolution movement: just don’t teach anything. Back to the cabbage patch, people!
- 30 -

The Wisdom Of The Ages; Duh.

2007-08-08T11:54:00.000-04:00

I guess we file this item under, “Well, duh”. The Annals of Plastic Surgery, one of my favorite publications, says that women who get breasts implants are three times more likely to commit suicide. This opens up the whole field of bad humor, such as: I’ll bet they didn’t throw themselves in the river, because they would float. But the author suggested that many of the women who ordered bigger breasts had “psychological problems” before getting the implants. Really? Well I wonder who didn’t suspect that, other than the surgeons who got rich inflating those woman’s chests, I mean.
*
And here’s a really stupid idea. Denmark held a ‘street soccer tournament’ last week for the homeless and homeless contestants from 48 poor countries were flown in for the week long contest and now… they can’t find 15 of them; 7 Burundians, 4 Liberians, 3 Cameroonians and one Afghan. The spokeswoman for the group sponsoring the event said, “We’re surprised because 15 players is quite a lot.” Duh, again.
*
And consider this equation: parents dumb enough to shell out hundreds of dollars for those damn “Baby Einstein” tapes and books and flash cards and other crap, usually produce dumb kids. Shocking, isn’t it? After 8 to 16 months worth of worthless “Brainy Baby” crap pounded in to those tiny plastic minds, according to a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington State, and those unlucky infants with success driven parents actually know 6 to 8 fewer words than those disadvantaged children with the “normal” parents who used the stone age technology of reading and talking to their kids. They got dumber!
*
Of course the addendum to this study is that the percentage of parents who read to their kids and talk to and around their kids is absurdly low, which is why so many kids learn at a very early age that learning is dull and pedantic, which is, of course, not a description of learning, which is a process, but is actually a description of the people who designed our education system, the same people who gave George Bush a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration; Yale. They should have stuck to making locks, because his brain sure reminds me of one – rusted shut. I would think that he was a “Baby Einstein” baby except the rest of his behavior cries out for attention, indicating that his parents wrote him off as an idiot and a lost cause before he was even toilet trained.
*
And here’s another shocker; the brains of people who are addicted to the game of Mahjong develop wiring problems. And why is this? Well, Mahjong was invented in China in 1850, and is played with suite tiles (dots, bamboos or characters), honor tiles (wind or dragons), flower tiles (plum, orchard, bamboo and chrysanthemum) and some other tiles I forget. First they deal out 17 tiles to each player – unless they are playing with 152 tiles, when everybody gets 19 tiles – and then somebody shouts “teen woo”, which is Cantonese for “frig you”. Everybody then gives him all their money and the game starts over again. No, really, that’s how it was explained to me. And it makes developing seizures sound like a perfectly predictable out come.
*
The Hong Kong Medical Journal has reported 23 cases of people with Mahjong induced seizures, which they claim is a unique form of epilepsy produced by up to 11 hours of intense continuous Mahjong playing. Good, God, please tell me, Doc, what you could do for 11 hours consecutively without having seizures? But, say the Doctors, to cure the seizures the afflicted merely have to avoid playing Mahjong. Please say it with me; Duh.
*
And finally, here may be the biggest “DUH” of the last two decades; after 1,300 suicides, and after fourteen years of a press black out that he had urged, Marion County California Coroner Ken Holmes has decided that officials really ought to extend the four foot high railing which is all that inhibits people from jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. At last count 23 people have jumped to their deaths this year, alone. Last year the total was 34. And the only reason a higher barrier has not been erected so far, other than some B.S. about there being no “proof” it would work, is that it would damage the aesthetics of the bridge, which is like saying “Lovers’ Leap is such a pretty name, why change it?”
*
Here is why - a study of the leapers has exploded all the romantic myths. Suicides are not drawn to the bridge for the romance; 92% of jumpers are from Northern California. It’s convenient for them. Name another spot in San Francisco where you can get that high with that low of a railing between your urge and the payoff; there isn’t one. At impact the idiot – excuse me, the foolish depressed person – is traveling at 75 miles per hour, which turns their flesh and bones into gooey hamburger, and is like jumping off a 25 story building, except there is nowhere you can find a 25 story building that lets people on the roof with only a 4 foot high railing to climb over. The fall lasts 4 seconds, and as one lucky survivor tells it, he spent all that time thinking, “Why did I do that? I don’t want to die.” Duh, too late.
*
What I don’t understand is why some survivor, wife, parent or friend, hasn’t sued the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation Company, because the bridge is an attractive nuisance. If some kid comes into your yard to pet your dog, and gets bit, that’s what your insurance company will say; the dog was an attractive nuisance and you will pay the bill. In this case the nuisance is 8,981 feet long, 90 feet wide, 220 feet above the water with a four foot high railing that people have been climbing over since August 7, 1937 (41 days after it opened) when Harold Wobber, a psychiatric out-patient at the Palo Alto Veterans Hospital, turned to a friend midway across the bridge and announced casually, “This is as far as I go," and leapt over the railing to his death. One lawsuit and all excuses about a railing would evaporate.
*
Building a higher railing seems like such an obvious idea it makes me wonder why it hasn’t been obvious before now. When does an idea pass from “interesting” to “Duh?”
- 30 -

Burka Stock

2007-08-07T10:15:00.000-04:00

SEX AND THE SINGLE SURRENDER MONKEY

2007-08-05T11:24:00.000-04:00

I now know what the D.C. in “Washington, D.C.” stands for; DEMOCRATS are COWARDS.

I have begun to think of Democrats the same way I imagine the mammals just after the asteroid term-limited the dinosaurs. They are the inheritors of the planet, the new dominate life forms, but they are still scurrying about in the underbrush, still terrified that a Trano-Cheney is lurking behind every tree ready to snap them up, or that a Bronto-Bush will crush them as he lumbers past on his way to the salad bar. WAKE UP, PEOPLE! King Bush is dead. He died in his sleep, of course. Queen Cheney is toothless. Let’s form a line to piss on his grave and down his throat. It’s fun. It’s easy. It’s even safe. Instead, the Demos have yet again surrendered to the Lord High Executioner and his paper sword, and allowed themselves to be driven like a herd of those movie cattle that seem to be in a constant state of “about to stampede.” These guys could have been in Saddam’s Army. They are starting to give surrender monkey’s a bad name.

Look what is going on in the real world, where the reality based media are continuing to avoid talking about the FYI Messaging collapse. A “well-connected Republican political firm” with close ties to the Bushies, that raises cash for the RNC, the National Republican Senatorial Committee and John McCain, is hanging up their brand new call center in Phoenix and layingoff 60 staffers. Fund raising calls for McCain, made to those who had previously supported him were greeted, said one FYI staffer, “like illegal immigrants crashing a Lou Dobbs dinner party”. Ouch.

But blaming the whole drought for the GOP on McCain feels like an easy out; said an FYI staffer, “We weren’t making a profit at it, and we really didn’t see that we were going to turn the corner as soon as we’d intended.” Like, ever? Republican fundraisers not making a profit? That’s un-American. It’s unheard of. And the punch line for this little Republican Horror story, is that FYI had just taken over the business after the RNC closed their own call center this year.

So why, in God’s name, did the Demos in the House fold up like a Fortune Teller’s tent at bachelor party - like a workshop on birth defects at a baby shower? 227 to 183 was the best they could do. Wow. This is like Sitting Bull surrendering to Custer. It’s like Popeye seeing Olive Oil off for a weekend at a swingers club with Bluto. It’s like Hillary Clinton buying a parting gift for Monica Lewinsky.

Meanwhile Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas), the lone anti-war presidential candidate on the Repub side has raised more money from active duty military service members than any other GOP candidate. Hello? Hint, hint, Repubs. The idea that the military supports Bush, or stands behind our draft dodging idiot President is a myth! And I have to wonder how much Paul would raise if he were to get a little more publicity.

And the latest Zogby pole says 54% have no confidence in Shrubs abilities as CIC, and 60% say they don’t trust his judgment. Only 38% have any faith in him, which, I believe, is about the same percentage that refuses to clap to save Tinkerbell.

But only 3% have any faith in Congresses’ war. Yea, me too.

Censor and Censorship

2007-08-04T12:44:00.000-04:00

I subscribe to the theory that those who call the loudest for censorship are usually hiding the most. Confirmation came recently when the British parliament declassified the proposed “talking points” intended to justify the government’s attempt to stop Penguin Books from publishing the unabridged “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”, in 1960. D.H. Laurence had written the book in 1928 but because it used “that word” (the word was FUCK), and because it was about a working class lad “fucking” an upper class lady, it offended a lot of people who thought they should determine what obscene. In his closing the prosecutor asked the jury if this was the kind of book they wanted their “wives and servants” to read. There hours later the jury delivered their verdict, the equivalent of, “Fuck, yeah. Why not?”
*
Worse, the verdict produced exactly 30 letters of protest, hardly a public outcry. So how could the politicians explain why they had so misjudged the public desire for censorship? The memo suggested they should say that to second guess the prosecutor would be wrong (after which someone within the government had had written on the memo, “This is balls.”), and that the prosecutor had done the public a service by pushing for a definitive judgment, (after which that same someone had written, “This is balls, too.”) D.H. would have undoubtedly agreed.
*
Roman political history follows the evolution of the Praefectura Morum (Prefect of Morals) from a castigatores (a chastiser) to the “censura”, a pair of elected officials responsible for keeping track of the Roman publius and patricians, how many of them there were and how much they owned and their “regimen morum”, what they were doing and saying Originally both Censura had to be patricians, but in 131 BC, for the first time they were both plebeians. After 49BC, when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, the duties of Censura became just another part of the Emperor’s powers.
*
In England the censors were usually from the upper class, while in the United States they more often come from the middle classes. German author, Ms. Rotraut Susanne Berner writes and illustrates best selling children’s books which are published in 13 countries, but one of her more popular books will not be published in the U.S. because Boyd’s Mills Press is concerned about one illustration of adults and children visiting an art gallery, in which there are statues of a naked man and woman. Ms. Berner told the German press, “The man’s penis is about half a millimeter in length and the naked woman is clearly part of a work of art and not a real person.” Still, the publisher refused to print the material, perhaps under the theory that what you don’t see can’t hurt you. Der Spiegel magazine headlined their story on the censorship, “Micro-Penis Excites US Publishing House”. Presumably, an excited micro-penis would be even more objectionable to Boyd’s Mills Press.
*
But in Mexico the censors come from the church. The Archdiocese of Mexico City doesn’t wish to censor Harry Potter, but the Reverend Pedro Mendoza, the diocese’s official coordinator of exorcisms, warns the Potter books have done a “lot of damage”, because they allow the devil to enter children’s minds. “If you put all these ideas in a child’s head, that he can become a wizard,,…that is an avenue through which the devil can get in.” Father Mendoza was holding a five day conference for about 280 priests and civilians on exorcism, at the end of which he explained, “There are many demonic influences, infestations, curses, witchcraft, “ where Satin is active. He warned, “Without strong, faith-bound families…people lose touch with God and seek magical solutions to modern problems.” Do you think he meant “magical solutions” like transubstantiation or chanting a rosary? Well, luckily, not only has Catholicism identified the problem, they also have the solution, Father Mendoza’s course in exorcism for just $280.00.
*
And if an established faith won’t sell you the uncensored truth you can always invent your own, as did Manila Judge Florentino Floro. The judge opened his court each day with a reading from the Book of Revelation. Every Friday he changed from his black robes to blue ones, because they recharged his psychic powers with which he could foretell the future, heal or inflict pain upon others, and transform himself into the Angel of Death. Florentino knew this was all true because he and his loyal sidekicks, three invisible dwarfs named Armand, Luis and Angel, had a covenant together. He told a superior court that “From obscurity, my name and the three mystic dwarves became immortal.” Immortal, perhaps, but Florentino is no longer a judge. The higher court deemed him unable to carry out his duties because of “mental unfitness.”
*
A new book published in Switzerland alleges that censorship hid the murder of the servant girl Anna Goldi for 225 years. When her head was hacked off in the village of Glaris in June of 1782 Anna was not merely the last woman to be executed in Europe as a witch, but also one of the first suffragettes and a martyr for the sexual equality of women. In fact Anna was beheaded exactly 101 years before Susan B. Anthony was fined $100 for trying to vote in the 1872 Presidential election.
*
In 1781 the book alleges, the 42 year old Anna became pregnant by her boss, Judge Johann Jakob Tschud., while working as the nurse for his 8 year old daughter. Since adulterers could not hold public office, the judge was in as much jeopardy as Anne. So he immediately fired her, but then, either because his wife found out about the pregnancy or because he worried she or somebody else might find out, an arrest warrant was issued accusing Anna of using witchcraft to produce needles in the daughter’s stomach. Anna was tracked down in the village of Degersheim on February 21st, and returned to Glaris, where she was encouraged by the Episcopalian Church to pray by the girl’s bedside. When on the third attempt the child showed improvement it was decided that, “…If Goldi had not bewitched the child then she could not have helped her.” And this was two hundred years before the book Catch-22 would be written.
*
On the 21st of March Anna was submitted to the church court for “interrogation”. She was hung up by her wrists and questioned for three to four hours. Then, while again being suspended, she was shown the tools of torture (the first degree). Suspended again she was shown the tools and this time a heavy stone was also suspended from her ankles (the second degree). In the third degree she was suspended between the stones and those tools of pain were used upon her. Only then did Anna confess that the devil had come to her as a ‘wild black animal’ and enticed her to feed the child white poison and yellow worm seed.”
*
The choice now was to either imprison Anna or execute her. Since Glaris had no jail she would have to be transferred to Zurich, where prison officials might ask too many questions. So the decision was made to execute her, at 10AM on Monday, June 13, 1782.
*
The public’s outrage over the details of Anna’s execution, smuggled out of Switzerland after the trial, made certain that she was the last woman to suffer such a fate in Europe. And although the book on Anna, “The Juridical Murder of Anna Goldi” is now number three on the Swiss best seller list, the village of Glarus does not support a reexamination of the case. She has already been rehabilitated in people's hearts and minds." And the Swiss Protestant Church says, "History has made its judgment on the case and we need to move on. It would be better to focus our energy on the more acute problems of today."
- 30 -

BANKRUPTING BILL GATES

2007-08-03T07:00:00.001-04:00

I notice that while Siberian tigers are almost extinct, billionaires are proliferating like pimples on a 13 year old. Do you think there might be a connection? According to Forbes Magazine there are now 946 billionaires in the world, and the good news is that once you’ve got your first billion its damn near impossible to lose it. Fewer than 17% of them got poorer last year and only 32 were reduced to the humiliating status of “multi-millionaire”.
*
One billion is one thousand millions. One billion seconds ago it was 1959, one billion minutes ago Jesus Christ was alive and one billion hours ago it was the Stone Age. If you were paid one dollar an hour, 24 hours a day, you would be a billionaire in just…1,901 years. If you were paid one dollar per second you would qualify for the Forbes list in only 31 years, 259 days, 1 hour, 46 minutes and 40 seconds. If you spent nothing and made $1,000 a day you would be worth $1 billion in 2,740 years. And if you spent $3,000 a day you would be flat broke in only… one thousand years. That’s what a billion dollars is.
*
Bill Gates, age 51, and henceforth known as ‘The Kid’, is worth $56 billion, just ahead of Warren Buffet, age 76, who is worth $53 billion. Carlos Helu of Mexico, age 67, is worth $49 billion, Ingvar Kamprad, who owns Ikea, is 80 years old and is worth $33 billion, and Lakshmi Mittal, age 56, who owns steel mills in Europe, is close behind with $32 billion. Those are the 5 riches people in the world. They are all white males.
*
One billion dollars is the profit Exxon Mobil makes about every 9 days. One billion dollars is the profit Apple Computer makes every 180 days. One billion dollars is how much we spend every year to incarcerate Americans for marijuana use. And one billion dollars is how much the U.S. has accepted in foreign aide for Hurricane Katrina victims
*
Charlene Carvalh-Heineken, who inherited 25% of the family beer business, is the richest woman in the world with a paltry $7.2 billion. The Koplowitz twins, Esther and Alicia, inherited daddy’s Spanish construction business, and are each worth between 5 and $6 billion, each. And farther down on the list of the richest women in the world is Oprah, worth $1.5 billion, and Harry Potter’s mommy, J.K. Rowling, who is worth just $1 billion.
*
One dollar is 6” long and 2 ½ “wide. A one foot high stack of $1 bills are worth approximately $3,000. A stack about the size of a box of copier paper is worth about $72,000. A pile 5’ high, 10’ long by 6 ½ ‘ wide is worth about $9 million, which is about 4 times what the average collage graduate will earn in their life. And a stack of one billion dollars would be 74 and ½ miles high.
*
The average American is worth $144,000. But the average Japanese is richer, with $181,000 net worth. More than a third of the wealth in America is owned by 1% of the population, while 40% of the U.S. population owns less than 1% of the wealth. And even with the Bush tax cuts the top 1% paid 34% of the total Federal personal income tax while the wealthiest 10% of Americans paid 66% of all personal taxes.
*
Corporate taxes are different: last year Cisco Systems, which had $23 billion in sales and $2.7 billion in net income, paid nothing in federal income tax. The published corporate tax rate is 35%, but a study by Citizens for Tax Justice found that the 275 most profitable American corporations paid an actual tax rate of just 17.3%. And by the IRS’s own numbers corporate taxes paid fell from 4.8% of GDP in the 1950’s to 1.6% in 2004. If corporations paid the same tax rate they paid in the ‘50’s the treasury would now be richer by $380 billion each year.
*
As it is, every 8 hours and 20 minutes the federal government spends another billion dollars. Oddly, under the “tax and spend” Democratic President Bill Clinton the national debt rose 4.3% a year, while under conservative Republican presidents (Reagan, Bush, and Bush) the debt rose 10.8% a year.
*
Americans owe almost 9 trillion dollars, mostly to themselves, and the debt goes up another $2 billion every day, meaning that in less than a month we could bankrupt Bill Gates.
- 30 -

A MOST LUCKY WOMAN

2007-08-02T09:35:00.001-04:00

I think it would be headlines anywhere else, but when a bear climbed into a Ford Wind Star minivan in Anchorage and “had a old big party” it was just business as usual in Alaska. Judith Lewis uses her van to distribute food to the homeless, and when the newspaper delivery man arrived at about 4AM a 5 foot bear popped his head out the van window and at least felt guilty enough to clamber out. But when he realized the delivery man wasn’t getting out of his car, the bear squeezed back in and continued shredding donated coats and eating his way through bread, snacks and Top Ramen Noodles, and soiling everything in sight. An assistant state biologist repeated what I would have thought folks in Alaska knew by heart, that leaving food in your car in bear country, “(is) like leaving your purse on the front seat…Sooner or later someone’s going to smash in and take it.”
*
Well, on Wednesday the bear apologized. Representative-at-large, Don Young (R-Alaska), and one of the most arrogant S.O.B’s from the “Ancien Regime” told the Republican Study Committee that he was very sorry for attacking his fellow Republican, Scott Garrett, of New Jersey. But like the marauding bear in the van, he was obviously only apologizing because he’d been caught.
*
Just two weeks ago Mr. Young threw a hissy fit on the floor when the Congressman from the Garden State suggested cutting special benefits for Native American school children in Hawaii and Alaska. “Apparently, “ranted Young, “the students in New Jersey are trying to take money from Alaskan students…We are a new state. I have poverty you don’t even think of. And yet you want my money. My money. For my students that need to be educated….If we continue this we’ll be called biting one another, very much like the mink in my state that kill their own. There will always be another day when those who bite will be killed, too. And I’m very good at that.”
*
It’s always a sign of an outraged dickhead when they combine a whine and a threat in the same breath. Of course it wasn’t Don’s fault he was behaving like a raving dick-head. He blamed his recent prostate surgery, and his wife Lula’s recent surgery. And the fact that the entire Alaskan Congressional team, all three of them, are under criminal investigations by the FBI. They’re all Republicans, of course. And as required when dick-heads apologize, Rep. Young, cried. He sobbed, “I come to you as a weakened man whose weaknesses are greater then my strengths at times.” Ah, poor Don. Do you feel sorry for him yet?
*
Of course, we all blow our stack once in awhile, but the Congressman-at-large has a reputation for often being a dick. Congressman George Miller admits that, "Sitting next to this guy for 18 years is like sitting next to Vesuvius….I'm never quite sure when he's gonna go off, I'm never quite sure if he's gonna pull a knife, I don't know if he's gonna stick it in my leg, or what."
*
And what was the Congressman’s recipe for success? He copied his fellow Alaskan, Senator Ted Stevens; Pork, pork, and more pork. "I'd like to be a little oinker myself" he said, comparing himself to his ideal. But the apologist is most infamous for his transportation bill in the recent Republican Congress, renamed “The Transportation Equity Act – A Legacy For Users, or TEA-LU, so Don could work his wife’s name into the title. (I’ll bet she is now so pleased that he did that.) The bill funded the bridge-to-nowhere, the “no-where” being Gravinia Island (population less than 60) and the “to” being Ketchikan (population 8,000), and the bill being $223 million. It was supposed to be as long as the Golden Gate Bridge and 80 feet taller than the Brooklyn Bridge. As Congressman dick-head explained the bill, "I stuffed it like a turkey." It even contained funding for another bridge in Anchorage, to be named “Don Young Way.”
*
What a shame that all the publicity killed the project. But when historians speak of this period in American history, when a collection of greedy dick-heads captured our government and ran it for their personal benefit, at least Lulu’s name will always be prominently mentioned. Up until the TEA-LU bill, Lula was best know for producing two daughters for the Congressman, and for winning diamond jewelry door prizes two years in a row at fundraisers.
*
Now that is a lucky woman.
- 30 -
-

THINGS NOT TO DO

2007-08-01T12:03:00.000-04:00

I read that a 22 year old butcher, Alan Elliot from Northern Ireland, has won the “Best Haggis Recipe in Scotland”, and I have a few questions. First, how in God’s name do you judge a cooking contest where the ideal is a food group best described as “regurgitated meat by-products boiled in a sheep’s stomach.” Oh, yum, yum. Just how do you tell the difference between the winner and the loser of a thing like that? If the first bite makes you want to vomit, is that the winner or the runner up? And my second question is, how do they find qualified judges for that contest? Do you advertise in magazines that appeal to war veterans who have had their taste buds shot off? And what would the name of such a magazine be? And, third, I must ask…just, why? Haggis is one of those “foods” which is perfectly named and I wonder if the best recipe was not the one that read simply, “Don’t do this.”
*
And while I am on the subject of doing things you probably shouldn’t do, there is the decision by the Supreme Administrative Court in Stockholm that jailed rapists have as much right to pornography as any other prisoner in Sweden does, which is that they do. They don’t get videos or “adult web sites” or child porn, but dirty photos are pretty much okay, in Sweden.. But those old maids, the prisons authorities, felt that allowing rapists to view hardcore pornographic magazines would increase the risks of violence and assaults in the prison, not to mention increase the likelihood that a prisoner might relapse or commit repeat behavior. But Sweden’s highest court has decided that the Swedish Prison and Probation Service are just a bunch of old ninnies. It’s shocking, I know. Don’t these liberal, tree hugger socialists see how much better things run in America jails, where we don’t allow any pornography at all? There are almost never any assaults or rapes in American prisons, because we have a zero tolerance for pornography and drugs. And that has worked out so well.
*
You would think that after 10,000 years of crime and punishment we would have perfected one or the other. The fact that we haven’t would seem to indicate that whatever we’ve been doing hasn’t worked very well. We’ve applied torture, mutilation and execution as a punishment for everything from religious tolerance to religious intolerance, murder, treason, segregation, integration’ wife beating, adultery and childishness, and so far we haven’t gotten better at doing any of those things, nor do we do any of them less often. So maybe we should try making the “punishment” more humane and maybe the criminal act, too. What could that hurt?
*
In Boston the question is phrased as follows; should a convicted murderer get a $20,000 sex change operation, paid for by the tax payers? If you listen to talk radio the answer is a resounding no. And what better place to go to for an opinion on the subject of sexual identity than to an idiot whose primary qualification is that he or she is capable of operating a push button telephone. That’s where we went to for thoughtful advice on immigration reform!
*
Not that it is relevant to the current discussion, but in May of 1990 Cheryl Kosilek was strangled to death by her husband with a wire planter hanger. Then her dear hubby dumped Cheryl’s body in the back seat of her own Hyundai and left the car parked at the mall in Attleborough. Then he went home, shaved off his beard and ran for New York State.
*
Robert Kosilek was caught speeding and driving drunk in New Rochelle, and told the cops, “I can’t call my wife. I murdered my wife.” Then he pled innocence and it took Massachusetts five months to get him extradited. Once back in Massachusetts he claimed he couldn’t get a fair psych evaluation at Bridgewater State Hospital because he had once been a guard there. He claimed he had been fired for reporting other guards had beaten patients, but state pointed out he had also concealed a three year sentence in Illinois for theft and attempted burglary. During the trial he grew his hair down to his shoulders, and began wearing a dress and calling himself Michelle, who claimed she had murdered her wife in self defense. (It was almost as if she had seen this act someplace before.) The jury convicted her in 3 ½ hours, I presume with a long lunch break.
*
When the Sheriff refused to provide Michelle with female hormone treatments, she launched a write-in campaign for sheriff, labeling herself the “New Woman Party”. Then she sued the state, and a federal judge ordered the state to provide her with hormone treatments. And now that same judge is hearing arguments that the state should pay for the sex change operation because “Michele” has testified that without the operation she will commit suicide.
*
So if I understand the situation so far, the convicted killer is saying that if the state doesn’t give him an operation she is going to kill someone, i.e., herself, which would make the state a co-conspirator before the fact in a suicide. Which I think is illegal, and which should bother the right-to-lifers and the law and order types who seem to be, generally, the majority of those folks who are saying “Screw her, I’m not paying for that!”
*
Actually it’s a nasty little conundrum if you think about it too much. So don’t do that. Listen to some talk radio, instead. You’ll be surprised at how much better you feel.
- 30 -

LIARS, CROOKS AND THIEVES:

2007-07-31T06:51:00.000-04:00

I am writing a book, a dictionary or encyclopedia of politics, tentatively titled “LIARS, CROOKS & THIEVES: Politically Important People In History”. And it occurred that you, my dear readers, might enjoy a little taste of that work And so today I begin with the great Amos Kendall, the Karl Rove of his day, the first great “diabolical genius” in American history; a puritanical hypochondriac workaholic with a real talent for venom. Yes, he was emotionally unstable, but he had one of the best minds of his generation.
*
AMOS KENDALL was born in Dunstable, Massachusetts in 1879. In 1814, at 35, an age when most men of that day were at the peak of their profession, Kendall was tall, thin and prematurely white haired. He was also a puritanical workaholic hypochondriac with a talent for venom. He moved to the frontier of Kentucky to officially become the tutor for the children of Henry Clay. But in 1816, with Clay’s political and financial backing, he became editor of the Frankfurt, Kentucky, Argus of Western America and crafted it into one of the most influential newspapers of the day, thanks largely to its editor’s poison pen. In 1824 he threw his paper’s support behind Henry Clay for president, even though Clay had not supported the Reform Party – see PANIC OF 1819. But Clay’s subsequent deal with John Quincy Adams – See JOHN Q. – angered so many of Kendall’s readers he reluctantly shifted his support to Andrew Jackson.
*
In 1827 Kendall, along with his assistant editor Francis P. Blair, proved himself invaluable to candidate Andrew Jackson. Kendall became the center of a public relations machine that spread innuendo and smear throughout western newspapers so expertly that Martin van Buren, Jackson’s official campaign manager, took notice. It was the first time such a nationwide media campaign had ever been attempted, and the first time a political party coordinated their talking points nationwide. Kendall and his fellow political journalists thus helped found the DEMOCRATIC PARTY which elected Andrew Jackson President in 1828. Kendall was rewarded with a Federal job - Fourth Auditor of the Treasury, which was a cover for his real work in Washington. According to Rep. Henry Wise, (W – Virginia), Kendall was…the President’s thinking machine and writing machine and his lying machine…chief adviser, chief reporter, amanuenis, scribe…Nothing was well done without (him). He was the Karl Rove of the second quarter of the 19th century.
*
In 1834 a grateful President Jackson named Kendall the Postmaster General. Kendall then proceeded to perfect the spoils system. There were wholesale firings of workers who were not Jacksonian Democrats, and they were replaced them with loyal Jacksonians. In an eerie pre-echo of Tom Delay’s “K” street project, Kendall even decreed that any company that had Post Office contracts had to hire Democrats exclusively, or just need not bother to apply for any future Post Office contracts. He even fired companies that already had contracts but kept Whigs on their payroll an action which was clearly illegal. One such stage line, Stockton & Stokes, sued when Kendall cancelled their contract to carry mail, but Government (i.e. Kendall’s) lawyers tied the case up with delaying motion after motion.
*
When Martian van Buren replaced Jackson as President in 1836, Kendall stayed on as a powerful advisor. But Van Buren had lost his passion for politics, and when he proved considerably less popular than Jackson, Kendall was forced to resign his job as a Postmaster and return to P.R. work for his party. He started up a new newspaper in Washington, Kendall’s Expositor, which supported van Buren for a second term. But van Buren was a lost cause. Van Buren had lost his interest in politics, and when he lost the election to William Henry Harrison (who died sixth weeks later) both the paper and Kendall went bankrupt. Worse, for Kendall, in 1841 Stockton & Stokes finally got their case heard before the U.S. Supreme Court, which awarded them $162,000 in public money for their illegally cancelled contracts, and an additional $11,000 to be paid personally by Kendall.
*
But Kendall was too connected to stay broke for long. In 1845 he became Samuel F. B. Morse’s business manager, helping that paranoid lunatic to create and run the International Telegraph (which would later become International Telephone and Telegraph – or I.T.& T company.) Kendall retired in 1860, fabulously wealthy, but disgusted that the Democratic Party he had help found was supporting successions. He died on November 12, 1869, with the party he had helped to create in ruins.
- 30 -

Two Hedgehogs Walk Into A Bar...

2007-07-29T10:09:00.000-04:00

I can only imagine what the Bremen, Germany cops were thinking when they responded to the report of a disturbance in a suburban neighborhood. Whatever was going on, it was loud enough that a crowd in their nightclothes had gathered about the back yard. And, truly, it sounded as if children were being tortured somewhere in the dark. But when the police switched on their spotlights they were shocked to discover in the harsh glare…two hedge hogs engaged in passionate sex. And when they were hit with the spotlight, trapped and surrounded by dozens of gaping humans in bathrobes, this spiky little pair of Erinaceinae insectivores merely became louder and more… passionate. The cops reported that, “The hedgehogs were loud and uninhibited in their actions…”, and that “…”The many observers didn’t deter the hedgehogs in the slightest, in fact they intensified their activities.”
*
The police shouted, the owners of the house stomped around and waved their arms, but nothing interrupted the delicate but intense, and loud, “fornication.” Eventually the cops and the crowd decided to switch off the lights and go back to bed, hoping privacy would discourage the pint sized exhibitionists, as it did. Still, they had to wonder, what had caused such uncharacteristic boisterous and raucous behavior.
*
It could be blamed on global warming, I suppose, as was the arrival amongst the canyons off of Monterey Bay California of hoards of the six foot long, 110 pound carnivores, the Humboldt Squid. This vicious creature normally lives off the Baja peninsula, but since 2002 in their thousands they have become permanent residents off of Northern California and have been seen as far north as the Gulf of Alaska. The Humboldt are the smartest of the invertebrates and are ravenous eaters, eagerly turning cannibalistic if the opportunity presents itself. They have already begun to rearrange the food chain in their new home, decimating popular commercial fish like tuna and hake. So if the price of fish sticks goes up, blame it on the squid, and global warming. Unless you think there could be another, more ominous explanation…
*
It is in Isaiah that the lion lays down with the lamb, sort of. What it actually says in Isaiah 65;25, is “The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock,” This is not exactly an apocalyptical vision, but then the good book doesn’t say anything about cows eating chickens, which is what has happened in the village of Chandpur, in West Bengal, India. Villager Ajit Ghosh was convinced the neighbor’s dogs had eaten 48 of his birds, but last Tuesday night he and his wife sat up to guard what was left of his flock, when, “We watched in horror as the calf, whom we fondly named Lal, sneak into the coop and grab the little ones with the precision of a jungle cat.”
*
The story was confirmed by a local television station which video taped Lal wolfing down a desperately chipping baby chick as of he were a kernel of popcorn. (youtube.com/watch?v=c2eEGiU8vD8) Okay, it wasn’t exactly like a jungle cat but I’ll bet the baby chick was impressed. Mr. Ghosh was quoted as saying, "The local vets said the cow was probably suffering from a disease but others said Lal was a tiger in his previous birth.”
*
And I suppose that the fish in the Neuse River near New Bern, North Carolina, were, in a previous life, fish. But as of July 20, 2007, they were dead fish; dead perch, dead trout, dead flounder and aptly enough, dead croakers, all dead along a one mile stretch of the river. Members of the Neuse River Rapid Response Team responded to the incidence, and, according to the New Bern Sun Journal, “Team members estimate the total number of fish dead at 6,666”. Could this be a sign of the approaching apocalypse? How could it not?
*
Perhaps the ultimate proof has come from the isolated Gough Island, a volcanic bump atop the mid-Atlantic ridge, midway between South Africa and South America. It was New England “sealers” in the 1820’s who wiped out the fur and elephant seal populations and abandoned the only land animal to invade the island, the lowly house mouse. The island is home to the only breeding populations of Tristan Albatross and Atlantic Petrel, perhaps 10 million of them. And, since 1957 the only human occupants have been a seven person South African team serving year long tours at the weather station.
*
That meant the only law in effect on Gough Island was Darwin’s Law. In 2001 an errant infrared video camera accidentally captured mobs of “…giant, flesh eating super mice…” attacking and eating Albatross chicks. Now, “giant super mice” is a relative term, but The National Geographic web site described the situation this way;
*
“Nearly three feet tall, a Tristan albatross chick can weigh up to 22 pounds, or about as much as a turkey. Gough Island mice weigh just 1.2 ounces on average. Video cameras revealed one pack of ten mice feeding on a Tristan albatross chick's wounds as it nested on the ground. Footage also showed mice devouring Atlantic petrel and great shearwater chicks. The birds did not fight off their attackers, even as some mice fed inside the body cavity of one albatross chick. Researchers say the footage provides the first hard evidence that mice previously thought harmless to seabirds are willing to attack prey more than 300 times their weight. Geoff Hilton, a U.K.-based biologist with the Royal Society…has compared the mismatch to a house cat attacking a hippopotamus.”
*
And in this case, the house cat is winning because the Hippo does not defend itself. The Pretoria News of July 25th, 2005, detailed,
*
“More than one million albatross, shearwater and petrel chicks …are being eaten alive every year by mice. The mice attack at night, singly or in groups, gnawing into the chicks' bodies as they sit on the nest, and eventually killing them through blood loss or destruction of vital organs.The scale of the killing has astonished the ornithologists who discovered it. … "The albatross chicks spend eight months sitting waiting for food from their parents," Dr Cuthbert said. "They are 250 times the weight of the mice, but are largely immobile and cannot defend themselves. For a carnivorous mouse population, it is an easy meal of almost unimaginable quality. The result is carnage. We think there are about 700 000 mice." Scientists suspect the mice are also eating the eggs and chicks of the rare, ground-nesting Gough bunting, a small finch found nowhere else in the world.” http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/bigphotos/17586752.html
*
So this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with the twitch of a little pink nose and a little squeaky, squeak, squeak.
- 30 -

Christopher Hitchens is Such a Bone Head!

2007-07-28T06:50:00.000-04:00

I believe the world can be divided into an infinite number of two set groups; i.e., The fools and the foolish. Fools think that obviously the world is screwed up because a secrete cabal is running everything. The foolish prefer to believe that the world is screwed up because, obviously, nobody is in charge. Under these definitions the foolish tend to be romantics and fools tend to be narcissists.
*
But in “Cat’s Cradle” my fellow Hoosier, Kurt Vonnegut, created the religion of “Bonkonism” which divided humanity between groups who do God’s will without knowing what they are doing - a “Karrass” - and false groups that are meaningless to God’s intentions, known as Grandfalloons. According to Vonnegut, Hoosiers are a Grandfalloon. And a “Wampeter” is the pivot of a karass. In this view of the universe everyone is a romantic but none of it matters.
*
But in either ethos there are those rare individuals who by dint of intellect and ego may be a member of various groups at various times, but who always form their own distinct sub-set within all others. They are always narcissists. They are always the Wampeter of their own Grandfalloon. These are the boneheads, represented by Christopher Hitchens.
*
I caught this limey neo-con groupie on “Hardball” last week, and yes, I swore I would never watch Hardball again because he shouts so much and after Chris Mathews suggested repeatedly that revealing the name of an undercover CIA agent was just “hardball politics”, but I do occasionally hit the wrong button while channel switching and there was Chris Mathews with his mouth open but silent for once, nonplused, as Hitchens said, and I quote, “that doesn’t prove there were no weapons of mass destruction, it just means we didn’t find any…” And this was not a repeat program from 2004. This was Christopher Hitchens fresh out of Pandora’s box proudly wearing his denial of reality like an infected nose ring. What a bone head.
*
Well, what to you expect from a guy who was a Trotskyite while at Oxford. Trotsky was a cold blooded killer who was absolutely convinced he was right every time he changed his mind – sort of like Hitchens. Trotsky killed anybody who disagreed with him, which could be anybody since he changed his mind so often, sort of like Hitchens. And Trosky managed to reduce himself to a comic figure in a larger tragedy, much as Hitchens was doing on Hardball.
*
Geez, Christopher, even Cheney isn’t beating that horse anymore, at least not in public. Do we have to call the ASPCA on you?
*
I don’t know, but maybe Hitchens proclaimed himself a Trotskyist just to get laid. You know how Oxford and Harvard women love intellectual ‘bad boys’. But come on Christopher, enough with the “Don’t I sound outrageous” act. You’re approaching sixty, man. You don’t sound outrageous anymore, you sound like you’ve got Alzheimer’s. You sound like you walked into the closet and then demanded to know why it was so dark outside, thus proving that what you have in common with the neo-cons is that you’re all too arrogant to admit you walked through the wrong door. Again.
*
You were wrong about Iraq, you were wrong to call Clinton a rapist, you were wrong to be an atheist (and I say this on behalf of all atheists on God’s green Earth) and, God knows, you are wrong about being Jewish. Circumcision does not make you Jewish, Christopher, unless you do it in public, and I’d pay to see that.
*
Besides, have you not noticed, Christopher, how many of your manifestations have proven profitable to you? It’s almost as if you have been searching for the truth along the Laffer Curve.
*
Mr. Hitchens, you have become living proof that intellect without a moral compass may be entertaining to watch as it spins round and around, trying to point at all Norths at the same time, but it doesn’t get you anywhere. Trying to follow it will just make you dizzy.
*
And how are we ever going to know if Christopher ever figures out what he actually stands for, if his last position could be just the last “outrageous thing” he said before he died?
*
Give it up, Christopher. We haven’t found any weapons of mass destruction….the dream is dead, Chris. The U.N. found no radioactive by-product residue even before the war started. And chemical weapons all have the shelf life of your last book. And I suspect your current conversion to neo-crony atheism may have been your last flip, simply because another flip will require that you turn yourself so far inside out, I’m betting the zipper on your costume would snap.
*
You bought a lemon, Christopher. Don’t make Lemon aid with it. Put it on some fish, and then throw the fish away.
*
I think you know now that would be the right thing to do. And maybe you’re trying to do it. That would explain why you were on Chris Mathews’ show, saying something so unbelievably stupid that you actually shut Mathews up. I didn’t think that Richard Nixon could shut up Mathews.
*
Now who do we find who could shut up Christopher Hitchens?
- 30 -

Cow Chips

2007-07-27T13:40:00.000-04:00

I bare sad news. Shambo is dead. The big boy passed on to another plane of existence sometime Thursday night. He will be missed at the temple of Skandla Vale near Llanpumsaint, Carmathen, where he was the sacred bull in a herd of about 50 sacred cows and bulls. His traumatic loss and the confrontation that produced it left religious scholars, historians and linguists pondering this cultural collision between the Sanskrit faith and the Welsh language, both of which had to be sort-of translated into English for the encounter to even happen. The resulting confusion may have been best summed up by an American observer who, though nominally an English speaker, pleaded, “I’m not even sure what the hell we’re talking about, here. Is the cow dead? Why is the cow dead? And, is this going to happen again?”
*
The answer to the first question is, yes. The cow is definitely dead, depending on how you define death. And cow. But it only took about 30 Dyfed-Powys police constables to methodically work their way through the 100 pacifists who had sworn to protect their sacred bull, as evidently the cops anticipated a certain level of non-violence on the part of the devout believers, and the cops were proven correct. Hindus are so dependable.
*
There were no rocks or bricks thrown at police as they used bolt cutters to snap the pad lock on the 8’ gate to the temple compound. Then, after shutting off Shambo’s “Moo Cam”, the cops led the six year old Friesian from his tastefully decorated pen onto a trailer, in which he was driven to his Samsara, followed for a short distance by unhappy, chanting harmless Hindu monks. Some hours later Shambo got the needle and became one with the universe, again.
*
This confrontation had its roots in the 5570 BCE kidnapping of “Sita” by “King Ravana”, and then later, at The Battle of Lanka, when “Rama” joined forces with the monkey army and rescued her. This earlier encounter left a lot of bruised egos. And then, more recently, in April, Shambo tested positive for Bovine TB.
8
Last year some 22,000 cows in Britain tested positive and they all immediately became “one with the universe” in order to hinder the spread of the “Mycobacterium bovis”, which is the scientific name for the tuberculosis that infects cows, and Welsh authorities saw no reason to harbor this particular four legged incubator for the bug, sacred though he might be.
*
Britain used to bury about 2,500 people a year from tuberculosis, who caught it after drinking raw milk from the udders of cows infected by M. bovis. It’s a nasty and patient bacterium, taking perhaps as much as 15 years to kill the ruminant, but it doubles its population about every 12 hours, becoming infectious to humans and other cattle long before the original animal shows any signs of trouble.
*
So the sacred cow, which was actually a sacred bull, is dead, and for good reason. But what about of the religious implications of Shambo’s termination? Well, as the Hindu philosopher Carvaka wrote, in his creation of “atheistic materialism “, “While life is yours, live joyously. None can escape Death’s searching eye. For once this frame of ours they burn, how shall it ever again return.” Which leads me to the only Hindu joke I know; the believers in dvaita may wish to taste the sugar, but the followers of Advaita wish to become the sugar.
*
And, again, I’m still not sure what the hell we are talking about.
- 30 -

Gonzo, the Zombie Attorney General.

2007-07-26T08:27:00.000-04:00

I begin today reading about Oscar, the 2 year old feline who seems to have the uncanny ability to detect which of the residents of the “Steere House Nursing Rehabilitation Center” in Providence, Rhode Island are about to die. According to an article in New England Journal of Medicine, Oscar sniffs the patients who suffer from various forms of dementia, and about four hours before they float into that big confusion-in-the-sky, he curls up next to them and goes to sleep. He’s gotten it right 25 out of 25 times, even when the doctors and nurses didn’t. Why he does this is anybodies guess. Perhaps he is answering some long unused genetic guide for scavengers, or some suppressed urge to comfort ailing members of his pride, or maybe it’s just the heated blankets they put on dieing patients. But somebody needs to let Oscar know that Alberto “Gonzo” Gonzales has been up Capital Hill again and under oath again and folks, even I with an allergy stuffing up my nose I can tell this guy is d-e-a-d, dead.
*
But he’s still walking around, so call him the “Gonzo, the zombie Attorney General”, I guess. Like, ten minutes after Gonzo slinked out of the Senate Judiciary Committee room the staff pulled out documents showing that he lied; not that he fudged or shaded the truth. The little pisher lied. And there are a number of Republican Senators from the “Gang of Eight” who have already told members of the press that the 2004 briefings Gonzo insisted were not about the secret NSA wire tapping program, were, in fact, precisely about the secret NSA wire tapping program. I don’t know what I’m most offended by, that Gonzo is such an inveterate liar or that he is such a bad one.
*
My God, George, how low will you go before you dump this little pisher? He’s Fredo from The Godfather, for God’s sake. Give him a job but nothing important, for Christ’s sake. What has he got on you that you can’t fire him? What, does he know where the twins keep their birth control pills or something? Or maybe you’ve got something on Gonzo that keeps him from quitting, because no normal human would subject themselves to this level of humiliation day after day. He’s such a weasel. He is such a brown nosing little incompetent. He’s such a liar. Every time he opens his mouth Bush’s approval ratings drop a point or two. Having him take the oath before testifying is a waste of time, they should just beginning by saying, “We are assuming that everything you say today will be a lie”. And Gonzo can smile that insipid little smile of his and say, “I don’t have a problem with you assuming that”, and we could just move on to the lying and the blustering and posturing and be done with it.
*
Meanwhile, The Politico has a column detailing how the Republican lobbyists are jumping ship and, more, are actually giving money to the Democrats. Christopher Cox, who works for The DC Navigators, a GOP only firm, recently held a fun raiser for Allen Boyd, freshman D-Florida. I believe the phrase is, “rats leaving the ship”. Not that I am implying that Republicans are rats. Rather I think of them more as a wayward flock that have lost their way. But what is becoming increasingly clear is that the Bush Team were the biggest bunch of incompetent jack assess in American history, and only the equal jackasses in the past Republican congress prevented the American people from seeing that.
*
The Emperor has no clothes. And in the naked Bush, I guess Gonzo would be the butt. And I think we know what body part Dick Cheney is.
- 30 -

A Black Day For Baseball

2007-07-25T12:09:00.001-04:00

I read with sadness of the death of Mike Coolbaugh, first base coach for the Texas League North Little Rock Tulsa Drillers. Last Monday night a line drive foul struck Coolbaugh in the head. He never regained consciousness and died as the ambulance arrived at the hospital. He leaves behind his wife Mandy, who is expecting their third child in October. And it is that not yet born child who reminds me of that other baseball death so long ago, on a humid afternoon on August 16, 1920. The Yankees and Cleveland were the two best teams in the league. The pitcher was the best New York had, the crafty right hander Carl Mays. The batter was the veteran Indian speedster Ray Chapman. And as so often happens in baseball, one pitch changed the whole world.
*
Mays once said of another pitcher, “That fellow has no friends and doesn’t want any. That’s why he’s a great pitcher.” Carl Mays was a great pitcher and part of the Boston Red Sox dynasty that dominated the first two decades of the 20th century. But in 1919 he demanded to be traded. The Yankees paid $40,000 and gave up two players to be named later to obtain Mays. They wanted his “submarine” (underhanded) pitch, his blazing sidearm delivery, and his spitball, and his reputation for brushing back hitters who crowded the plate. He was on his way to a 26-11 record with six shutouts in 1920. He was pitching out of rotation this day because the game was so important and he was going for his 100th major league win.
*
Ray Chapman was fondly known around the league as “Chappie”. After 9 seasons in the Major Leagues he was at the very top of his game, batting .303, with 93 runs scored and 671 runs batted in. Chappie also had 233 stolen bases and he wielded one of the finest defensive gloves in the league. But he made his money laying down the bunt. He would crouch over, hugging the plate at the edge of the batters box, and thus leaving the pitcher with almost no strike zone. It was that stance and his blazing speed to first (he once rounded the bases in 14 seconds) that had given Chappie an impressive on-base average of .358. He often led the league in sacrifices. But in fact Chappie planned on getting out while he was on top. He had married the year before, and had made plans to go into business with his new father-in-law. And some World Series earnings would certainly smooth his way to retirement.
*
It was a different world. The “House that Ruth Built” had yet to be built, and the Yankees were sharing the Polo Grounds with the Giants for the season. It was 82 humid degrees with some 24,000 fans in their seats when, in the first inning, Chapman laid down his 34th bunt of the season. Thanks in part to that Sacrifice, Cleveland was now leading the game, 3 – 0. In the third inning Chapman had popped up. And now, as the fifth inning began, Chapman stepped into the batters’ box and dug in.
*

On his first pitch Carl Mays delivered a rising side armed fast ball bullet. There was a loud thud. The ball rolled back toward the mound and thinking Chapman had hit it with the handle of his bat, Mays adroitly retrieved the ball and threw it down the line to first base. Only then did he realize that Chapman was down.
*
The umpire, Tommy Connolly, saw blood coming out of Chapman’s right ear and nose. He called into the crowd for a doctor. Chapman opened his eyes and staggered to his feet. A few people in the crowd began to applaud. But after taking only a few steps, Chapman collapsed again. They carried him into the club house where he mumbled a request for his wedding ring, which he’d given to a trainer for safe keeping. The ring returned to his hand seemed to calm him.
*
Meanwhile, on the field and with a new ball, the game resumed. Mays retired the next nine batters in a row and the Yankees fought back to tie the game. It was a Yankee relief pitcher who gave up the winning Cleveland run; 4 – 3. Called in Cleveland, Ray’s wife, Katie, immediately boarded a train for New York.
*
X-rays showed Chapman had a depressed fracture of his skull, which required surgery to remove a 3 ½” section of bone to lessen the intracranial pressure. The surgeon reported that not only was the right side of the brain lacerated from the impact with the ball, but so was the left side, where the brain had rebounded off the skull. At 4:40 that morning Ray Chapman was declared dead, the only person to ever die while playing a Major League Baseball game. A family friend met Katie’s train at 10 that morning but didn’t tell her of her husband’s death until they got to the hotel. She fainted.
*
Wearing black arm bands in Chappies’ honor, Cleveland beat out New York for the pennant that year, and went on to win the World Series. The team voted Katie a full share of the winners’ award, about $4,000 (worth $45,000 today). Six months later she gave birth to Chapman’s daughter and named her Rae. A few years later Katie remarried, to businessman J.F. McMahon and they moved to California. But she still moarned Chappie. In 1926 Katie committed suicide by drinking cleaning fluid. Three years later Rae contracted German measles and died as well. Both were brought back to Cleveland to be buried in Calvary Cemetery under the name “Chapman”. Ray is buried alone about five miles away in Lake View Cemetery, where fans still leave baseballs, bats and memorabilia against his tombstone. If you have a chance, you should do the same.
*
Carl Mays played for the Yankees for only one more season. In 1921 he won 27 and lost 9, and batted .343. Despite that achievement, part way through the 1922 season he was traded to the National League Cincinnati Reds, where he went 20 and 9, making him the first pitcher to win 20 games in both leagues. In all Mays spent 15 years in the majors, earning 208 wins and 31 saves against a mere 126 losses, with an amazing 862 strikeouts in 490 games. His lifetime batting average of .268 makes him one of the best hitting pitchers of all time. And yet, despite what are clearly Hall Of Fame statistics he received only 8 votes for the honor. Some may claim it was because of absurd stories that he fixed a World Series game in 1922. But the facts belie that. What haunted Carl Mays until his death in 1971 was one pitch thrown in the August heat of the 1920 pennant race.
- 30 –

SomeTimes a Pool Cue is just a Pool Cue

2007-07-24T07:56:00.000-04:00

I begin the work week by asking the question of the age; Who the hell is “Posh” and what the hell is a “beckham”? Tom Cruise has taken a break from pissing off the Germans to fly back to Hollywood to ‘host’ a red carpet thingy for Mr. and Mrs. Richer-Than-Snot, a pair of British super stars who seem to be famous because he plays soccer and she’s had more plastic surgery then Phyllis Diller. And also I hear she is in a singing group or something. The guest list read like a “whose-owed” of Hollywood; Steven Spielberg, George Clooney, Demi Moore and Ahton Kutcher, Opra, Bruce Willis, Ron Howard, Brooke Shields…ah Hollywood’s golden era. Meanwhile, back in Germany, the chief spokesman for the German Protestant Church for Scientology, Thomas Gandow, denounced Tom as a pint sized Joesph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, also known as “The Evil Dwarf”. That’s quite an insult, especially coming from a German. Goebbels had a club foot and was the inventor of the theory of the Big Lie and the phrase “Iron Curtain”, later borrowed by that famous plagiarist Winston Churchill.
*
Tom is in Berlin to shoot a new movie about Claus Von Stauffenberg, who is a hero to the Germans because he was the only member of the German officer Corps who actually tried to kill Hitler. He failed, and his punishment was to be shot, which was better than the fate of many of the other conspirators who were hanged with piano wire. We know this because Hitler ordered the whole thing filmed so he could watch it when he was feeling low. And to those who claim there is no written order signed by Hitler ordering the holocaust I would suggest you try to explain that film and reconcile it with a man who would not order the deaths of millions and George Bushed the third Reich to the point that the death camps might have escaped his attention.
*
Ah, but back to Tom. See, it’s difficult to separate the movie star from the role, and that is precisely the German concern with their national hero being played by a Scientologist, which the Germans consider a cult. And this creates a problem for me, because I also consider it a cult, but I also believe in Freedom of Religion, meaning freedom to be a member of a cult. See, Scientologists believe we were invaded by aliens and spaceships and other wacky things, as opposed to the traditional rational belief systems like those of Joseph Smith and Martin Luther and Saul/Paul, in virgins giving birth and divine intervention in wars and walking on water and the sun standing still and etc., etc., etc.
*
Anyway, Herr Gandow called Tom “the Goebbels of Scientology” and called his faith a “totalitarian organization” (not like the Catholic or the Lutheran Church, for God’s sake) and he dismissed the film, which has yet to be made, as “propaganda for Scientology”. I would guess that Herr Gandow gets his info directly from God, sort of like Mohammad did.
*
As for myself, I am not as prone to these mythological belief systems as most people are. I’m worse. I have believed, in my time, in the Loch Ness Monster, Big Foot, UFO’s, poltergeists, various Kennedy Assassination Conspiracies and Jesus Christ. And as I have gotten older I have not gotten wiser, just more suspicious and clear on one point only; trust in people. They will likely screw you over but there really isn’t anybody else available. As Henry says in “The Lion In Winter”, “There’s no use criticizing the air when there is nothing else to breathe”.
*
But leave it to the Aussies to illustrate the point. The Tasmanian Supreme Court, an awesome conception to American ears, has just sentenced Mathew Noel Triffett to six months in jail and 140 hours of community service with two years suspended for ramming a pool cue…But allow me to render the details in the vernacular.
*
This is the dead set, mate. Matt Triffett is a beaut of a batter and a real Taswegian. So he and a couple of his cobbers decide to hit the turps in Hobart. They didn’t mean no harm. They were just lifting a pint of coldie to celebrate his mate’s birthday, right, just sinking some piss, and they got pretty stonkered and not in their full quid. They’d been making the rounds when they arrived at this boozer, the Village Green in the back and beyond east of Hobart, and Matt decides to lose his daks and do the walk about in his grundies. And his mate, he’s a real larrikin, he decides to prance around in the full nuddy, you see. And that’s when, holy dooley, Matty has himself a beaut of a blue. His mate is off his face and ass over tits when Matt grabs a pool cue and rams it up his mates freckle without so much as a “G’day mate”.
*
Well, holy dooley, even blind Freddy could see things were a gob. The cue breaks in two with about 10 cenies bogged up his mate’s date. And his mate starts screaming, which is understandable. But it took Matty a flash to realize he was balls up and in the cactus. Not to mention his mate’s condition! They take his mate home hoping he’ll sleep it off, only his arse still hurts. So by his oneses he removes the stub of the cue from his clacker, (I don’t know how). But come the sparrows fart he still hurts like the duck’s guts and he’s afraid he’s going to cark it. So he goes to hospital. That must have been a beaut of a story he told, but he told the strewth, mate. Which is why the bailey gave him such a light sentence.
*
Ah, what a piece of work is man. How infinite in reason.

Irony Can Be So Ironic

2007-07-22T10:10:00.000-04:00

I recall an L.A. cop who told me that nothing surprised him anymore. He then related how a gunfight broke out in front of his car in the parking lot at the “Tommy Burger” at Temple and Rampart. When the shooting was over fifteen seconds later there was one young man dead and two others wounded, and he and his partner witnessed it all without dropping their double chiliburgers. He showed me photo’s of the carnage, with pools of bright red blood. “I don’t think they even noticed us sitting there in our black and white.” Then he said, “And that surprised me.” Good cops are often impervious to irony, that way.
*
I wonder if the cops in Nagoya, Japan were surprised a couple of weeks ago when they got a call at about 7 AM of a headless man involved in a traffic accident in the parking lot of the zoo and Botanical Gardens. A station wagon was idling against a tree, and sure enough, behind the wheel was a man in his fifties, missing his head. They found the wayward appendage about twenty feet behind the car, along with a rope, lying on the ground. The other end of the rope was looped around a tree. The cops figured the man had tied one end of the rope around the tree and the other end around his neck, and had then gotten into his car and stomped on the accelerator, thus decapitating himself. Ever since I first read this story in Japan Today, I’ve been wondering if the poor guy still owed anything on the car. If not, I think that would be ironic.
*
The residents of apartments at 84 Gertrudstrasse, in Zurich, Switzerland, are angry because their neighbors keep dieing. Since 1998 some 700 people have “passed away” in the building and 55 year old resident Gloria Sonny feels she is living in a “house of death” and she wants it stopped. She and Laurenz Styger, head of the tenants association, have collected a petition insisting their landlord have the tenant “Dignitas”, which rents apartments on the first and fourth floors, evicted.
*
Dignitas, with a clinic in nearby Foch, is one of four Swiss groups taking advantage of an interpretation of Swiss Law that since 1940 has permitted assisted suicide as long as the assistance is not motivated by personal gain. The group’s motto is “Live with dignity, die with dignity” and frankly the residents at number 84 feel the constant stream of police cars and ambulances isn’t leaving them with much. Dignitas’ web site reminds potential clients that each suicide is “…always reported to the police, and there are fees involved…” but the practical implications for the neighbors tend to be glossed over, except to note that, “Travel and hotels are of course the responsibility of the person asking for help.”
*
Sonny says she supports the idea of Dignitas but she is defiantly a NIMBY, as in “Not in My Back Yard”, or, in her case, a NIMBLE, as in “Not In My Building, you Late Emigré”. The government is concerned Switzerland is becoming the final destination of choice for something called Suicide Tourism, but Dignitas responds that while they have almost 5,000 members, less than 20% chose to end their lives in any given year, and barely half of those come from the rest of Europe. But despite this logic the group has still been evicted. They have until September to find a new place to hang their IV bottles, unless their landlady should suddenly and inexplicably drop dead.
*
A dinner guest from the Belgium village of Verviers recently posed a question of ironic etiquette. After the meal, she and several other friends were helping to clean up because the day before the wife had stormed out, leaving the husband to prepare the meal and host the dinner alone. But when she opened the freezer intending to helpfully store leftovers she discovered the wife had not stormed out of the house after all. The courteous guest quietly informed the others and then calmly called the cops. They discovered the thoroughly frozen bodies of the wife and her 12 year old son packed between the hamburger and ice cream. Now, certainly the guest does not owe the homicidal hubby a thank you as she left, but should she have asked if he had any objection before taking the leftovers home with her?
*
And as the final irony, comes the court case from Montana, where 20 year old defendant Andrew McCormack was asked what he thought his sentence should be for stealing beer. He wrote on the form, “As the Beetles say, Let It Be.” To which Judge Gregory R. Todd replied;
*
"Hey Jude, Do You Want To Know A Secret? The greatest band in history spelled its name B-e-a-t-l-e-s. Advertisement
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Your response suggests there should be no consequences for your actions and I should Let It Be so you can live in Strawberry Fields Forever. Such reasoning is Here, There And Everywhere. It does not require a Magical Mystery Tour of interpretation to know The Word means leave it alone. I trust we can all Come Together on that meaning. If I were to overlook your actions I would ignore that Day In The Life on April 21, 2006. That night you said to yourself I Feel Fine while drinking beer. Later, whether you wanted Money or were just trying to Act Naturally you became the Fool On The Hill. As Mr Moonlight at 1:30am you did not Think For Yourself but just focused on I, Me, Mine. Because you didn't ask for Help, Wait for Something else, or listen to your conscience saying Honey Don't, the victim was later Fixing A Hole in the glass door you broke. After you stole the beer you decided it was time to Run For Your Life and Carry That Weight. But the witness said Baby It's You, the police said I'll Get You and you had to admit You Really Got A Hold On Me. You were not able to Get Backhome because of the Chains they put on you. Although you hoped the police would say I Don't Want To Spoil The Party and We Can Work It Out you were in Misery when they said you were a Bad Boy. When they took you to jail you experienced Something New as they said Hello Goodbye and you became a Nowhere Man. Later you may have said I'll Cry Instead. Now you are saying Let It Be instead of I'm A Loser. As a result of your Hard Day's Night you are looking at a Ticket To Ride that Long And Winding Road to prison. Hopefully you can say both now and When I'm 64 that I Should Have Known Better."
*
Translated back into English, Mr. McCormack was given probation and an undisclosed fine.
- 30 -

Do You Smell Something?

2007-07-21T07:47:00.001-04:00

I guess you could compare it to waking up to soft unexpected affections, and through barely opened eyelids seeing your aficionado as only a moving mass of blond hair. And as your pleasure builds toward release you become more awake and you look down into the marble blue eyes of…Ann Coulter. Ewwwwww. All together now, Ewwwwww. Okay, so after you soak your offending member in pure alcohol until the flesh falls off - because you know you could never trust it again – how do you feel? How about “sickened, ashamed, appalled and afraid someone might find out? Well now you know how most Repub candidates feel about Resident Shrub right now. “Sorry, George, who?” I hear them say. “Sorry, don’t recognize the name. Are you sure he was President? And you say he was a Republican. No, I’m drawing a complete blank.”
*
Sorry about the first part. It’s just that the Couter-giest…Is she the living embodiment of the term “harridan” or what? It comes from the French, “haridelle” meaning an old gaunt horse, and is defined as “a worn-out strumpet; a vixenish woman, a hag,” or “a scolding, vicious woman, a hag, or a shrew.” “Grose’s “1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, defines a “hag” as “a hagged old woman; miserable, scraggy, worn-out harlot,…”.So, …gaunt, vicious, hate filled, vengeful, worn-out, scolding, miserable, scraggy …yup, that’s our Ann. How dare Ann Cold-tits even suggest the term fits somebody else. Now, what was I saying? Oh, yeah.
*
In 2002 Shrub raised $180 million for Repub candidates. This time around he couldn’t raise a temperature with a light bulb up his behind. Last Monday night Shrub held a little get together for the GOP Senatorial Committee, the kind of soiree where you pay a bundle to get your picture taken with the big guy and you put it on your wall to impress all the sycophants that you covet. But on Monday most of the attendees agreed to come only with the promise there would be no press and no pictures, please. It was a “behind the green doors” fundraiser, a secret fundraiser, like the ones Dick held with the oil companies and like the ones the Mafia holds for neighborhood merchants.
*
The lobbyist are terrified they’re going to get caught in a camera flash as they came out of the Repub shake down and then the Demos could write their attack ad in about eight seconds. “These are the Washington fat-cats and who still support George Bush. And Senator What’s His Name.” Ewwww. Nobody wants to be in a photo with Shrub. He might as well be Griffen, the albino who studies refractive index and becomes H.G. Wells’ “Invisible Man”, except of course, Shrub couldn’t describe refraction if his life depended on it, let alone use it. Refractive, reflective; Shrub isn’t interested in any of those “Re” words, except of course, repose.
*
The last time Shrub was on the campaign trail was in 2006, when he tried to help Senator George Allen. Remember him? Yeah, that’s my point. Allen’s approval numbers actually went down after Shrub showed his face. And this next time around the Repubs are not likely to use Shrub anywhere the voters get cable TV. This election cycle Shrub will be visiting swing states like Kentucky, Alabama and Kansas. Yea, swing states. So, is it party time for Democratic Party? Lisa Miller, a fundraiser for the R.N.C., was quoted as saying, “Sitting here, in the place where the money is raised, I can tell you he is still a gigantic draw”: meaning Shrub, and meaning drawing money, as opposed to drawing flies, .and meaning that Ms. Miller is full of manure.
*
And speaking of manure, Steve Chapman at Reason On Line has a great opening to hos column for July 16th (http://www.reason.com/news/show/121398.html)
*
“Ronald Reagan used to tell the story of a boy so optimistic that when he woke up on Christmas morning and was confronted with a huge mound of manure, he gleefully began shoveling. "There's a pony in here someplace!" he exclaimed.”
*
Chapman goes on to say that for Shrub, when it comes to Iraq, every day is Christmas day, “…though even Republicans are starting to suspect that the malodorous pile is that and nothing more.”
*
Do you smell something? Yeah, me too. And I think it is Ann.
- 30 -

Condos & Condors, and Trout On A Pike

2007-07-20T06:15:00.000-04:00

I have a horrible feeling that somehow we’ve gotten this whole endangered species thing backward Yes, we continue to carelessly destroy habitats, introduce alien species, and randomly dump industrial waste, and that’s all bad and we should stop it. But I’ve been eating dolphin safe tuna for thirty years now and the darn dolphins are still not safe. I thought these guys were supposed to be so smart! Meanwhile, nobody is trying to protect the Northern Pike of Lake Davis, California: Quite the opposite.
*
Some idiot released a couple of Esox Lucius Linaeus – Northern Pike - into the small and now very un-placid Lake Davis back in 1991 because they thought Pike would be fun to catch. Unfortunately the lake already had a native population of game fish, Onocorhynchus clarki – Rainbow Trout - which are not only a popular game fish amongst tourists but are also an easy meal for the voracious Northern Pike. To the California Fish and Game Department the worry was that once these piscatorial carnivores had finished off the Trout they would swim downstream and devour the Delta Salmon populations, which Fish and Game had just spent tens of millions of dollars re-introducing. So, since 1997 the California Fish and Game Department has spent something in excess of $24 million trying to kill off these finned invaders, and that effort hasn’t proven to be fun for anybody, except possibly the Pike.
*
The Northern Pike of Lake Davis have been poisoned. They have been electrocuted. They have been shot, netted, hooked, cornered, dynamited, starved and suffocated. The state even drained the lake. For over a year the local human population couldn’t drink the water, it was so full of piperonyl butoxide. The pike barely noticed the stuff. These fish aren’t on any endangered species list, they’re on the ten most wanted list. They’ve got more people gunning for them than Osama bin Laden.
*
When nothing else worked Fish and Game tried stocking Lake Davis with oversized Trout fry, thinking they would be too big for the young Pike fry to eat and the Pike would then starve to death. In response the Pike began growing nine to fourteen times faster than normal. They became super-pike, Franken-fry, Fry-enators, big nasty Pike which had no trouble swallowing the abnormally large Trout.
*
Six hundred Pike were caught in Fish and Game sample nets the year after the lake was poisoned. In 2004 the catch was 17,635. In fact, about 60,500 Pike have been caught in Lake Davis since humans began trying to eradicating them.
*
In May of 2005 the Pike Fry were caught trying to find away around the Pike screens on the spillway. And in 2006, after a winter of heavy snow pack and spring rains, Lake Davis came within inches of overflowing the spillway entirely, releasing the Pike into the Sacramento River system. Still, not willing to admit he has been beaten by a mere fish, Steve Martarano of California Fish and Game gamely insisted, “We’ve gotten better at knowing where the Pike are.”
*
Yeah, Steve: they’re in the water.
*
Well, this past January, 2007, Fish and Game announced plans to try it one more time. In a $12 million program about 48,000 acre feet of “rotenone”, a commonly used and “safe” pesticide, will be dumped into the lake, and this, fish and game assures everyone, will finally kill off the Pike without killing the people or the local economy. Again.
*
And if this doesn’t work I suggest we try some fresh approaches, perhaps getting Vice President Cheney to designate Lake Davis a “National Fish Oil Reserve”. If there were oil involved the Bush Administration would have those Pike clear-cut in a week. But perhaps the Pike of Lake Davis are trying to tell us something very simple. Perhaps we’ve been misunderstanding Mother Nature. Maybe the reason the spotted owls are endangered is that we’ve been coddling them.
*
Consider the lowly pigeon; there isn’t a city anywhere in the world that isn’t forced to budget money for pigeon population control. What’s the feathered tree rats’ secret of success? At Cardiff University in Wales experiments show that pigeons recognize and remember individual human faces, and they learn which individual humans to avoid.
*
Meanwhile biologists raising endangered California condor chicks use hand puppets to feed the baby vultures, so they will have no positive human interaction before they are released. But despite these efforts about a half dozen of the first juvenile Condors freed chose to hang out at the Pine Mountain Club, a condo resort village down the road from Fraser Park, in the Tehachapi mountain range between Central and Southern California, where it seems the birds figured out on their own that their razor sharp beaks and talons designed to rip open animal carcasses worked even better on plastic trash bags and kitchen window screens.
*
One “naturalist” studying the Condor-condo interaction returned home after a hard day of remote Condor observing via powerful binoculars to discover three of the 30 pound birds with 10’ wingspans, gallivanting about his bedroom, using it as a sort of free flow toilet.
*
I’m not making this up. They had entered via a slit they made in his window screen. One was in his underwear drawer shredding his shorts while the other two were slowly dissecting his mattress with all the abandon of adolescences free from parental oversight.
*
It almost looked as if the birds had picked out this guy personally, and maybe they had. The average human would have defended their turf and gone into that room with a broom and driven the squatters out the way they had come in. But this guy was a “naturalist”. To avoid interacting with the feathered truants he retreated until the birds got bored and left on their own.
*
The “naturalists” then convinced local politicians to require all trash to be held inside until the morning of collection, and then placed only in locking containers. And at the landfill the garbage bags would be immediately covered with dirt. The thinking was that without an easy food supply the condors would leave.
*
Instead the Condor gangs’ response was to loom about on the roof of a local restaurant, depressing the hell out of potential customers. The condors were actually waiting for the trash trucks to arrive. They would then use their extraordinary skills at gliding to follow behind the trucks as if they were injured wooly mammoths, all the way to the dump, where they quickly descended on any leftover macaroni and cheese containers.
*
The front loaders couldn’t cover the trash bags without the risk of burying a condor at the same time, so the meals could now be eaten at leisure in a sort of Condor olfactory playground. Game, set, and match to the Condors.
*
The biologists and naturalists were horrified because it didn’t fit their image of noble Condors sailing in an empty sky above an untouched wilderness - which is where the Condors almost became extinct in the first place. Need I point out that not a single condor died at the Pine Mountain Club? They ate too many French fries but none of them died!
*
The happy ending to this story of rebellious Condors is that once they matured and mated the adult condors didn’t want their offspring growing up in an urban environment anymore than Republicans do. Today, the Pine Mountain Club is condor free except for a few weeks every summer when, like Amish teenagers on rumspringa, the newly adolescent vultures fly in for a sort of avian spring break. They eat spicy food, taunt the humans and stage panty raids on the naturalists.
*
Now, I’m not suggesting we try protecting endangered species with dynamite or by raising their cholesterol levels, but it does seem that the animals we’re protecting are all in trouble while the ones we’re trying to exterminate are experiencing population booms. What can we learn from this?
*
Well, there are six billion humans on this planet at present. Modern Condors, searching for dinner while soaring above the wilderness are going to see a lot more humans than dead deer. So why not “humanize” them, teach them what every mentally retarded pigeon knows; the fries are better at Burger King, don’t drink the yellow water, never trust a politician in an election year and don’t go swimming in Lake Davis unless you want your talons bitten off.
- 30 –

I'm With Turd-Blossom

2007-07-19T10:18:00.000-04:00

I have heard of whistling past the graveyard and spitting to avoid bad luck, but the anti-hex antics of the Senate GOP leadership has me perplexed. They got nothing left but pop guns and they are still shooting their mouths off, while shooting themselves in the foot and several other more vulnerable appendages at the same time. As usual Senator Lamar Alexander from Tennessee saw the situation clearly and STILL missed the point. It’s as if he suffers from the curse of the man driving the runaway stagecoach while facing his own butt. He knows he can’t steer and that he’s going too fast but he thinks he’s getting away with it. Alexander blustered, “If the American people suspect for one minute that any of us in the Senate are using those tactics as political issues…I think there will be a heavy price to pay.” Ah, LaMarr, you are such a putz.
*
He meant of course to imply that the Democrats were playing politics with the war, as did Arlen Specter, from Pennsylvania, when he sniffed that the all night session was an “indignity”. But I don’t think the public is going to buy that line, not with two more U.S. combat deaths in the last 24 hours, (dieing to save George Bush from self inflicted political embarrassment, now that is an indignity!), and not with all but four Repubs in the Senate voting, once again, to “Stay the Course.” It’s like watching the slaves on an ancient war galley, rowing like hell, exhausting themselves to reach a far superior enemy who is going to slaughter them. I keep expecting one of them of look around and ask, “Hey, guys? Why are we in such a hurry?”
*
The proof of perception was in the headlines. The New York Times said “Stymied by G.O.P., Democrats stop debate on Iraq”. And the Washington Post headline read; “Democrats Won’t Force War Vote, Effort Halted After GOP Blocks Proposal”. The first paragraph in the Post story was, “Senate Republicans torpedoed a Democratic bid yesterday to force the withdrawal of U.S. Combat troops from Iraq, as even Republican Senators who have questioned the war sided with President Bush’s adamant refusal to consider any change in war strategy before September.” And even the Detroit Free Press, taking their news from the Conservative USA Today, led with, “Troop Surge Gets More Time, Senate Republicans block pullout measure”.
*
So Republicans “stymie”, “block”ed, “torpedo” and “block”ed yet again. Gosh, it sounds like a young George Bush’s review of his date with a debutant. And like the girl, the only thing the Repubs are likely to get out of their continued relationship with Georgie is fustrated, fucked and feeling used.
*
Given that most people only scan the headlines, and that most who read on further still don’t go much beyond the first paragraph, it seems to me that the Republican attempts to portray the vote as a Democratic political ‘game’ have failed completely. When John McCain observed, “Nothing we have done for the last 24 hours will…change any fact on the ground in Iraq or (make) the outcome of the war any more or less important for the security of this country,” he was not only correct but he may have been sounding taps for dreams of any Republican, including himself, of living in The White House come February 2008. Asked who they blamed the most for the mess in Iraq 40% told the Times/CBS poll that they blamed the White House, 33% blamed Iraqi leaders and only 13% blamed the Democratic controlled congress. And nothing that the Repub managers said or did Wednesday into Thursday changed the facts on the ground in the Senate. And in the same poll, 63% of the public said we should decrease or totally withdraw our troops in Iraq. I guess we are just a nation of “Cut and Runners.”
*
And the Times/CBS poll was released before the Senate vote, which confirms, I think, that the Repubs have decided the world looks better through obtuse glasses. It seems as if the Repubs are determined to run for re-election while wearing tee shirts with George Bush’s face on them, over the words in big read letters, “I’m With Stupid.”
*
Yea, we're with you all the way, turd blossom. .

Political Theatrics

2007-07-18T09:09:00.000-04:00

I don’t know how he said it with a straight face. Senator Jon Kyl, Republican from Arizona, and admittedly not the brightest bulb on the Republican side of the aisle, denounced the beginning of the Democratic all night session setting up yet another attempt to end the Iraq war, calling it “…nothing more than a publicity stunt”, leaving me with the tremendous urge to ask of the Senator, “Yea, and so what? It’s politics, for Christs’s sake. What did you think it was going to be about, substance or something?” How politicians manage to say the dumbest, most stupidest things with a straight face, without bursting into insane laughter or throwing up or sobbing inconsolably is beyond me. Compared to this skill, lying must be a piece of cake. But if you can walk and talk like an idiot without actually being an idiot, you too could be a United States Senator. But if you are in fact as stupid as you sound then you have to stay in the House of Representatives. I think it’s a law.
*
The Democrats had those poor guys from the General Services Administration haul twenty cots out of storage from someplace and lug them all the way across town to Capital Hill to set them up in what the Washington Post called “…a ceremonial room..” (How appropriately named). Then they dragged out the pillows and sheets and I just hope nobody over-dosed on the mothball stench. This stuff was supposed to be used in case of a nuclear attack. I’m sure we are all much happier that it has been reduced to props in a bit of political theatre.
*
Then the interns were sent out to buy mouth wash and toothpaste and snack foods. Can you picture Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”, his voice cracking, his tie undone, his hair all disheveled and his little senate desk piled high with empty Pringles tubes and crumpled bags of Bugles? Well, I can. I really can. And they bought deodorant, too. Thank God for that. You know how forgetful most Senators are about their personal hygiene.
*
It’s politics! If it wasn’t for the theatrics, politics would be political science, with charts and numbers and balance sheets and as a system of government that couldn’t possibly work. Twenty-five hundred years ago Alcibides, the greatest political weasel of all time, betrayed his native Athens to the Spartans, then betrayed the Spartans back to the Athenians, and then betrayed the Athenians and Spartans to the Persians. He lied to everybody and yet everybody believed him at one time or another. Of course he used theatrics. And so did his enemies. Theatrics is the whole point, the reason de arte of politics. That’s why they call them political parties and not dull and boring things.
*
And coming from members of the party that used theatrics to get us into this war (the old mushroom cloud routine) the charge of using theatrics to try to end the war is worse than laughable; it’s boring. Every state of the union speech is theatrics (and in Bush’s case, theatre of the absurd.) Every Senate roll call is theatrics. Those late night speeches in front of empty chambers? Theatrics. The Contract With America? Theatrics. The Terry Schiavo bill? Bad theatrics, really bad theatrics. You cannot possibly believe these college educated SIS’ers (stiffs in the Senate) believe the crap they spew out for the noise machine. But they spew what they have to spew to get reelected. He who spews the best gets the best elected.
*
Senator Barak Obama, flew in from a campaign thing in Cincinnati to meet a midnight quorum vote. Theatrical; and theatrics matter. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Republican from Kentucky, asserted, “If they want to debate all night, we’ll be here. Plenty of volunteers will be here to discuss this issue as long as you like.” Theatrica.
*
Said Joe “The Schmo” Lieberman, Independent from Hell and Rhode Island, “Redeployment is nothing but a mandate for defeat.” Pretty theatrical phrase, Joe; I would almost call it hyper-theatrical. Republican Lamar Alexander, Republican from Tennessee, lamented, “Instead of gamesmanship we should try to put together a unified position.” Translated from political theatrical speech that means looking for CYA, or Cover Your Ass.
*
Political Theatrics? You bet your sweet bippee, babe. And there is nothing wrong with that. It’s just politics.

Another Emperor of America

2007-07-17T11:48:00.000-04:00

I read that Colorado Governor Bill Ritter had a visit from an angry constituent yesterday. The man, dressed in a rented tuxedo, walked into the governor’s office just after 2pm and announced that as the “Emperor Of America” he was there to assume control of the government. A state trooper confronted the man and they exchanged some angry words before additional troopers arrived. They were escorting the man out of the office when he allegedly produced a hand gun. The officers shot him dead. I wasn’t there and I cannot comment on the need to shoot the poor deluded madman. But we were much more understanding toward his predecessor.
*
Of course Joshua Norton proclaimed himself to be Emperor not at gunpoint, but at the point of a pencil. On September 17, 1859, he left a proclamation to be published by the San Francisco Bulletin, and the editor, looking for an escape from the oppressive drumbeat of building war news back east, published it. It read;
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“At the peremptory request and desire of a large majority of the citizens of these United States, I, Joshua Norton, formerly of Algoa Bay, Cape of Good Hope, and now for the last 9 years and 10 months past of S. F., Cal., declare and proclaim myself Emperor of these U. S.; …NORTON I, Emperor of the United States”.
*
Norton had arrived in San Francisco ten years before with an inheritance from South Africa. He bought a general store and while Levi Straus was making a fortune selling pants and John Studabaker was creating his first fortune selling wheel barrels, Norton was turning his $40,000 into a quarter of a million. Then, in 1852, China was hit by a drought and the price of rice skyrocketed to 36 cents a pound. Joshua bought 100 tons for $25,000, or about 12 cents a pound. But the very next day, before he could cash in, two Japanese transports loaded with rice arrived and the price plummeted back to three cents a pound. His creditors sued. Norton counter sued. The case dragged on for four years, adding legal fees to Joshua’s debt, until the banks foreclosed on his property holdings. Finally, emotionally exhausted, he declared bankruptcy in 1858 and disappeared for over a year, reappearing under the delusion that he was the Emperor of America.
*
San Francisco did not shoot their emperor, but honored him. Restaurants, even the finest in the city, gave him tables of honor and never presented him with a bill. In fact they proudly posted brass plaques declaring, “By appointment to his imperial Majesty, Emperor Norton I of the United States.” They proved a boost for business. Every theatre and music hall reserved a seat for him on opening night, and audiences stood respectfully when he entered.
*
After he assumed the throne, in October of 1859, Norton I had ordered that Congress be dissolved. And in January of 1860 he ordered Major-General Winfield Scott to “clear the Halls of Congress.” It was a decree that made him instantly popular. He had his own currency printed, and it was honored. He ordered all Protestant and Catholic churches to ordain him. They didn’t, but he didn’t seem to notice. He ordered the democratic and republican parties dissolved. They didn’t do that either. But army officers stationed at the Presidio presented him with a jacket and gold epaulets, which he wore officiously while inspecting city work projects, sidewalks and streets, cable cars and city offices.
*
Still there were some without imagination or heart, and in 1867 a bone headed cop named Armand Barbier, arrested the Emperor as a vagrant. Other cops pointed out that he had $4.75 in his pocket and lived in a lodging house, which meant he was not legally a vagrant. So officer Barbier changed the charge to being of unsound mind and a danger to himself and others. Finally the Chief of Police Patrick Crowley ordered Emperor Norton released and publicly apologized. From that day all police officers saluted Emperor Norton, and he saluted back.
*
He was called “The Emp”. Perhaps his most noble act came during an anti-Chinese riot. A drunken white mob had cornered a handful of terrified Chinese and was preparing to lynch them when Emperor Norton stepped between them and began to softly mumble the Lord’s Prayer. After a few moments the mob, now thoroughly ashamed, dispersed to sober up.
*
Norton I ordered the creation of a League of Nations, but he was not listened to. In 1872 he decreed that;
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“Whoever after due and proper warning shall be heard to utter the abominable word "Frisco", which has no linguistic or other warrant, shall be deemed guilty of a High Misdemeanor, and shall pay into the Imperial Treasury as penalty the sum of twenty-five dollars.”
*
But again, no one listened. Finally he grew so wearing of issuing decrees for one particular project the he ordered;
*
“WHEREAS, we issued our decree ordering the citizens of San Francisco and Oakland to appropriate funds for the survey of a suspension bridge from Oakland Point via Goat Island; also for a tunnel; and to ascertain which is the best project; and whereas the said citizens have hitherto neglected to notice our said decree; and whereas we are determined our authority shall be fully respected; now, therefore, we do hereby command the arrest by the army of both the Boards of City Fathers if they persist in neglecting our decrees Given under our royal hand and seal at San Francisco, this 17th day of September, 1872”
*
As work on a replacement for the Oakland-Bay Bridge approaches it 2013 finish date the city of San Francisco has offered an official request that the Bridge be renamed the “Emperor Norton I – Bay Bridge”. But so far the mayor and city council of Oakland have shown themselves to be totally without imagination or heart.
*
The Emperor’s official residence was listed as 624 Commercial Street, San Francisco, and you can still see it today, a sidewalk bench located between 608 and 632 commercial street. And it wasn’t far from this spot that the Emperor died on the evening of January 8, 1880, probably from a massive stroke. Thirty thousand lined the streets for his funeral. His cortege was two miles long. All flags in the city flew at half staff. Most business were closed out of respect. He was buried in a new uniform and in a suitably elaborate coffin. His headstone reads,
*
"Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico”.
*
He died with $6 in his pocket. In his flophouse room were found a single sovereign, a collection of modest walking sticks, some correspondence with Queen Victoria and some shares in a worthless gold mine. But his legacy lives in the words written by his friends Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain. Both created characters based on Norton. And the day after his funeral, San Francisco saw a total eclipse of the sun.
*
So this is what we have come to. Our emperors no longer dare to approach the powerful. And the powerful fear the approach of their constituents. It’s just not clear anymore who is really gone mad, us or them.
- 30 -

The Man Eating Badgers Of Basra

2007-07-15T10:13:00.000-04:00

I suspect a conspiracy and a cover up. No one is admitting it, of course, because it wouldn’t be a cover up if they were admitting it. And a categorical denial is always a dead giveaway. British Major Mike Shearer would have made Special Agent Dana Scully suspicious. “We can categorically state,” he says, “that we have not released man-eating badgers in the area.” And the fact that the second unit in any British Army formation is always called the “Badger Brigade” is just a coincidence, I suppose.
*
When Major David Gell asserted, “We have not released giant badgers, and nor have we been collecting eggs and releasing serpents into the Shatt al-Arab river”, it sounded as if he doth protest a bit too much, to me. And who asked him about giant serpents? When they start denying stuff you haven’t even asked them, you know they are hiding something. First the man eating Badgers of Basra and then the Loch Ness Monster and the Beast of Bodmin Moor. They’re all like some drunken fairy tale, told by a drunken fairy to other drunken fairies.
*
Suad Hassan doesn’t think it is a fairy tale. She told the London Times, “I was sleeping at night when this strange animal hit me on the head. I have not seen such an animal before. My husband hurried to shoot it but it was as swift as a deer. It was the size of a dog but his head is like a monkey. It runs so quickly.” And from where could such a monkey dog have come from except from Great Britain? And what diabolical reason could he have for hitting a sleeping woman on the head? And what kind of bizarre 2/3rd dog and 1/3 monkey tool could he have used?
*
This omnivorous eating machine is properly known as Mellivorinae Mellivora capensis abyssinica, and by the time you pronounce his Latin name he could chew your foot off. So humans call him by shorter names, unpleasant names such as “ratel”. In Basra, where misbehaving children are warned he is coming to eat them, he is known simply as al Girta, “the beast”. But in Iceland he is the terrifying Hunangsgreifingi. In equatorial Africa he is the Nyeger who comes by night. In Italy they whisper of il tasso miele. And in England those who dare to speak his name call him… the Honey Badger. And he is not called honey because he is sweet.
*
Picture a creature over 40 inches nose to tail, 20 pounds of perpetually angry, hungry beast that ravenously devours rodents, porcupines, skunks, foxes, jackals, antelope, chickens, vultures, hawks, frogs, fish, beetles, scorpions, turtles, small crocodiles, fruits and berries and they are especially fond of fresh melons when in season. al Girta has even been known to use his razor sharp teeth and claws to remove the testicles from any creature that gets between him and his meal, such as leopards, lions and even …humans!. (Music sting!)
*
Farmer Sattar Jabbar has faced down this Mesopotamian Chupacabra. “I saw it three days ago at night,” he says. “It even ate a cow. It tore the cow up piece by piece.” Jabbar said he tried to shoot the beast but, “…it ran into the orchards. I missed it.” Sounds like it might be time for a badger fatwa.
*
Mushtag Abdul-Mahdi, who runs the Basra Veterinary hospital, and who is clearly on the payroll, insists, “Talk that this animal was brought by the British forces is incorrect and unscientific.” But Ali Mohsen, a local farmer, isn’t falling for this line of British camel dung. “This animal appeared following a raid…by the British forces,” he says.
*
The badger has won “The Most Fearless Animal” from the Guinness Book of World Records, and at youtube.com/watch?v=Ua3M1O-WQrM, you can watch one of these rodents of unusual size steal a meal from a King Cobra and then eat the snake. Despite being bitten repeatedly al Garta wears the cobra down, bites off his head, passes out from the effects of the venom and then reawakens before nonchalantly resuming his meal. Dedicated, single minded, impervious to pain and neurotoxins: It sounds like these Indigenous Nocturnal Carnivores (or I.N.C’s ) would make the perfect royal marine.
*
Still Major Gell insists that Man Eating Badgers are not a threat to humans. Then why are they called man eaters, Major? You can almost hear the British brass hats smirking as they claim, “Badgers? We don’t need no stinking Badgers.”
- 30 –