Brain Peelings

Your Smile For Today

2007-09-19T20:35:00.000-05:00

Wow. I just read this and it really felt like I was reading the titles in "12 Monkeys" : in the future, looking back at the first real snippet of confirmation that utter doom is on its way:

Reporting for The Independent, Cahal Milmo writes, "A rise of two degrees centigrade in global temperatures - the point considered to be the threshold for catastrophic climate change which will expose millions to drought, hunger and flooding - is now "very unlikely" to be avoided, the world's leading climate scientists said yesterday."

Then, not wanting to kill myself just yet, I rewrote it in such a way that made it much more palatable:

Reporting for The Independent, Cahal Milmo writes, "A rise of two degrees centigrade in local temperatures - the point considered to be the threshold for catastrophic mood swings in women and gay men - is now "very unlikely" to be avoided, the world's leading fashion experts said yesterday."

And suddenly, I felt better!

I think I should create some kind of web site that can translate any other web page into "happy talk". It would make the news easier to bear, even if it had no effect on reality.

- g-spot -

"Information Age", My Ass

2007-07-28T10:57:00.000-05:00

I got a spam email just now with the subject "bedraggle backpack antagonism". The body text is as follows:

"contralto bindery attica cardiff. descriptive britain boy blurt bellyache dayton. corbett definition disciplinarian clog cochran bull curvature clinging clapeyron. annunciate ascomycetes ak cause deterrent azure bearish."

Seriously, what are they trying to sell me? All-You-Can-Eat-Gibberish for $9.95? Either that, or some study has just shown that one out of every million spam recipients will spontaneously send their MasterCard number to anyone with a reply-to address.

Free Enterprise System, your days are numbered.

- g-spot -

Genius Is Manifest In Many Different Ways

2007-07-26T21:40:00.000-05:00

"Never gonna stop, eat it up
Such a tasty snack I always eat too much, then throw up
But I'll soon be back for my, my, my, yi, yi, woo
M-m-m-my bologna
M-m-m-my bologna"

- g-spot -

Creep-Me-Out Factor 10, Mr. Sulu!

2007-07-25T23:47:00.001-05:00

I just thought : how would you express the perfect number, 777, as time, in minutes and seconds? 7 minutes and 77 seconds, or really, 8 minutes and 17 seconds.

Guess how long it takes for the sun's light to reach the Earth?

I'm trying very hard to make this not mean something.

- g-spot -

What It's Going To Feel Like At The End

2007-07-25T22:51:00.000-05:00

That's it.

No more worrying about the consequences of your next action, because there won't be one. No more consequences having to do with you.

People aren't scared of dying, they're scared of the prospect that the Universe can get along without them okay.

- g-spot -

Predictive Generative Music

2007-07-02T18:02:00.000-05:00

I've come up with a new way of writing ambient music, which I'm calling "Predictive Generative". You define a “space”, which could be as small as your apartment, or as big as a city. Each logical area within the location is a “sub-space”. In my apartment, the bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, living room, front hall and main hall are the sub-spaces.

Next, you create “paths” which are steps taken to go from one sub-space to the next. Each path is a separate instrument in the peice and the note lengths are actual footsteps travelling from one spot in the "space" to another. A normal step forward is a whole note; a 45 degree turn in any direction is a half note; a 90 degree turn is a quarter note. A path can only contain 3 notes; it’s up to the composer to decide which three. The first tone played is considered the “base” tone; the others are “alternate 1” and “alternate 2”.

When you move into a new sub-space, two things happen. One, you change from the base tone to alternate 1; if playing alternate 1, you go to alternate 2; if playing alternate 2, you go back to the base tone. And two : all movement into a new sub-space is preceded by a pause the length of the step just before entering the new sub-space.

All instrument parts loop immediately when their initial notes are finished playing. Because most paths will be of different lengths, the entire peice will become “generative”, or evolving, as different sequences play over each other in ways they didn’t start out playing.

The composer defines the spaces and sub-spaces, has complete discretion regarding the overall tempo and dynamics (tempo and volume changes are allowed, including total silence for an instrument, provided the sequence is still being followed), decides which instrument a path will be played with and which 3 notes are used in each path. The sequence of notes, their lengths, pauses and tone changes, however, are determined entirely by the physical paths.

I even worked out a notation system...

Step Notation:
| Full step
/ 45 degree step
– 90 degree step

Tone Notation:
0 Change to Base tone
+ Change to Alternate 1 tone
x Change to Alternate 2 tone

(Note : tone changes are written in brackets and are always preceded by a pause whose step value is that on the next step in the sequence)

This is the path from my kitchen to my office:

||| (+) | (x) --||||||- (0) |//||

So, what did YOU invent today?

- g-spot -

The Schizophrenia of Paris

2007-06-12T22:48:00.000-05:00

This just in :

"PARIS Hilton is supposedly at the breaking point in jail - but she'll be breaking out the champagne and partying like mad the second she's released, if her parents get their way.

Page Six has learned that the celebutard's doting daddy, Rick Hilton, was recently shopping a "Get Out of Jail" bash for his little girl to the top Las Vegas clubs, including Pure, the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino and the Palms."

My guess is God is going to get shunted off to the family vault the minute Paris hears about the bash. Which is maybe where he should be. Save him for a rainy day.

You know, I feel like this is what it must have been like during the 20's; mind-numbing celebrity drivel, evermore outrageous... and you know what happened after the 20's?

- g-spot -

What I love about this guy is that...

2007-06-10T23:37:00.000-05:00

... he plays the most vicious T.V. executive imaginable on "Studio 60", and yet he is as clearly fucked up as any of us! Whoa!... I mean Woe! to his wife and kids; I think he's got about 4 good years left.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-weber/paris-when-it-dribbles_b_51478.html

- g-spot -

The American Presidential Race

2007-06-05T21:35:00.000-05:00

What the fuck?!?

Unless Gawd Almighty intervenes and smotes Dubya's ass in some Heavenly Display of Blazing Justice (Ed. we feel it necessary to also point out how notoriously unreliable Gawd is), I can't help but note that the next American presidential election is about 18 months away. So, why is the fucking news filled with lurid depictions of every burp, hiccup and fart eminatting from 20+ dickheads no one will remember 18 months and 1 week from now?

Because America is getting really tired of watching losers get elevated to angelic status on "American Idol". After awhile, it's kind of depressing, if you know what I mean.

So now everyone wants to watch the mediocre, second-rate actors who are willing to flush hundreds of millions of dollars down the toilet to get everyone to flip a switch for them. They're sad but in a different way than the "American Idol" guys are sad. It's some kind of dramatic curve... first we root for the underdog, then we cry for the blood of the vanquished.

I've been trying to come up with some sort of formula to describe the downfall of America, something that would predict what the rest of our lives, at least, might be like, but I come up empty. America may be the river you stepped into, but she's not the river you're standing in.

- g-spot -

Vegetarians Are Food Too

2007-06-04T22:08:00.001-05:00

I admire vegetarians, being so certain of the dividing line between "which living thing I can eat" and "which living thing should I not eat". It's good there's SOMEBODY out there keeping score, making sure that even a small portion of the populace "does the right thing". Hmmm, never made much sense to me, though, why roast chicken is far more appealing than brussel sprouts (although I happen to like brussel sprouts very much). Ah well, all I know is it's bad and I should hate myself for it.

Ever wonder why so many lesbians are vegetarians? Two words : "Self" and "Loathing".

Well, anyway, just want to wrap this up by saying that I fully intend to chow my way through those 67,000+ carcasses I'm destined to eat before I go (see "Not-Ready-For-Blog-Rant Vol 2") , and if there is a God, some descendent of some bug that nibbled on Beethoven in his grave, will take a liking to me as well. It's all about the little things!

- g-spot -

P.S. Okay, that was a little too "Eating Roul" meets "Blue Velvet", I think...

P.P.S. Oh, and vegetarians : half of India doesn't eat meat. Have you considered commuting?

The Dark Side Of Oz? Pppphhhlll!

2007-05-25T20:32:00.000-05:00

Fuck that stupid "Wizard of Oz / Dark Side of the Moon" thing; it's lame, it's reaching, it's a little bit gay, and frankly, it doesn't line up unless you're on massive amounts of Quaaludes and E (which is also a little bit gay). However, I just watched the last 25 minutes of "2001 : A Space Odyssey" synced to Pink Floyd's "Echoes", and I'm a Gawdamned believer, baby!

Stanley Kubrick was clearly the anti-Chirst, we were just too busy to notice. Now what?

- g-spot -

The-Not-Ready-For-Blog-Rant-Players, Volume 5

2007-05-22T21:16:00.000-05:00

What I Don't Understand Is

The human body exhibits such startling symmetry.
So why is your heart on the left side, and not in the center, of your chest?

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Conquer Your Fears For Only $19.95!

Next time you're feeling apprehensive about an upcoming event, like a wedding or funeral or barmitzvah or presentation at the U.N., remember this:

It makes no sense to impart a greater sense of dread to one event over another; you have as much potential for getting brutally murdered the second you step outside your front door as you do of awkwardly running into an ex at a wedding (okay, maybe not the same odds, but up there!). So if all things carry an equal measure of dread, then shouldn't dread be as ignorable as, say, breathing?

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What I Didn't Need To See Before Dinner

I just heated up some bizzaro chicken-balls-in-a-bag chinese food thing. Easy enough to prepare; just add microwaves and voila! However, the packaging definitely requires a rework; extricating the poor lil' fellas from their protective wrapping brought to mind an alien abortion, or at the very least, a David Lynch moment. Food should not do this!

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Well, Something Not Nice Is Going On

About a dozen of Metro Toronto's finest fire, ambulance and police just went firing down south on the D.V.P., sirens and lights blazing. I'm just glad they kept going.

- Update -

The D.V.P. south is a parking-lot and there are sirens everywhere. This cannot be good.

- g-spot -

The Truth About The Flu (ReWrite)

2007-05-10T21:24:00.000-05:00

Tell me : what is the most astonishing point in the following dissertation?

"In the U.S., there is currently an estimated 25–50 million cases of the flu reported each year — leading to 150,000 hospitalizations and 30,000–40,000 deaths yearly. If these figures were to be estimated incorporating the rest of the world, there would be an average of approximately 1 billion cases of flu, around 3–5 million cases of severe illness, and 300,000–500,000 deaths annually.

Flu-related deaths can result from pneumonia and from exacerbations of cardiopulmonary conditions and other chronic diseases. Deaths of older adults account for more than 90% of deaths attributed to pneumonia and influenza."

I would think "Deaths of older adults account for more than 90% of deaths" tops the list. Admittedly, the flu may be a minor-to-medium annoyance to you and me, but it's one of Nature's great "Plan B"s for those who refuse to go quietly; it's like the young ganging up on the old, taking them out by spreading germs. Hmm, and guilt-free... it almost seems premeditated, in a sub-conscious sort of way.

- g-spot -

P.S. If someone had asked me who I wanted to be when I grew up when I was a child, and I knew then what I know now, I would have said "Nature. I want to be just like Nature when I grow up. She makes so much fucking sense!"

Paris Hilton Speaks Out

2007-05-06T21:23:00.000-05:00

"I Don't Deserve Jail Time", she said. Regarding her invalid driver's license, which she says she was never notified about : "I Have People Who Do That For Me... I Just Sign What They Tell Me To Sign."

First off, anyone who speaks in all caps must be... oops, my bad.

Second off, she's basically saying that she's not responsible for her own actions; if there's been a slip-up, one her minions is to blame. Gee, I hope my boss never commits murder or that's life in the pokey for me.

I find it sort of amusing that she was actually given a jail sentence; I guess the judge figures he can make more on the book rights (i.e. "Why I Threw Paris In The Slammer") than from a bribe from her dad (sorry, one of her dad's minions).

Whatever. She's like the "American Idol" of the famous-because-I'm-famous crowd... who gives a rat's ass if she goes to prison or not, or is blown up in a terrorist attack, or lands on the moon? What difference would it make to my life if she suddenly vaporized into a puff of smoke?

None, of course, except I'd have to think of something else to blog about.

- g-spot -

Conspiracy Theory Du Jour

2007-05-05T23:38:00.000-05:00

Okay, so none of this is verifiable, it could all be due to some other crappy program I've installed, it could be the weather for all I know, or it could just be my ingrained paranoia (probably the latter), however...

eDonkey (okay, aMule; whatever) and bittorrent, my pirate programs of choice, have been crashing frequently this past week. I've left these programs to run days and nights on end before, 24/7, and aMule crashes rarely and Azureus, not at all. And yet I come home and both are frozen solid every day; only a hard boot will bring things back to life.

Coincidentally, Apple launched Apple TV recently, basically a hardware box that sends video to your T.V. wirelessly, although the only content it will display (tah-dah!) is stuff you buy through the iTunes store. Also, coincidentally, they released an OS "fix" around the same time, then suddenly, the pier-to-pier software starts crashing. So imagine you're sitting around a board meeting and someone suggests that Apple TV will be far more successful if aMule and Azureus die a painful death. But you just can't start crippling freeware software in your operating system because it cuts into your bottom line. That wouldn't be cricket, not to mention the press would be brutal, if not irreversibly damaging... who wants to develop on a platform who's owners target you specifically just because they don't happen to fancy your software? Wouldn't that be sort of like a Toyota Corolla® deciding on its own that it would rather turn left instead of right?

So you mention, jokingly, to your cohorts at the board meeting, that you'd give any of the OS programmers a $50K bonus if they could just figure out how to stop these fuckers, and let Nature take its course. It's called "plausible deniability" and it preys on the most pathetic, yet strongest, of man's instincts, greed.

What these guys never seem to realize, though, is that we will always find a way around every road block and obstacle they drop in our path, because we actually care about this shit and they don't, they just care about money. Think about it : who is likely to be more successful, the person trying to invent the ultimate cipher, or the person trying to break it?

Duh.

- g-spot -

Definition Of A Meeting

2007-05-02T23:28:00.001-05:00

People getting together to discuss possibly doing something productive so that they can feel like they've done something productive. I ask you : wouldn't just doing something productive be simpler?

- g-spot -

Hula Jesus

2007-04-30T21:44:00.001-05:00

I've got this weird widget; it's a square with 4 selectable backdrops and 4 selectable characters... whatever character you choose will appear against whatever backdrop you choose, and when you wave the mouse over it, he / she will start doing the hula, and will stop after about 20 seconds. My favourite hula character is Jesus. Hula Jesus. When I'm feeling down, I wave the mouse over Hula Jesus and he does his little 20 second dance and I usually feel at least a little bit better for it. But I can't help wonder why the Almighty needs the attention of me, a lowly nothing, every 20 seconds or so, or he just can't hula no mo' ?

- g-spot -

On Death and Mayhem

2007-04-17T22:37:00.000-05:00

Like everyone, I'm inexplicably fucked up by the idea of 30+ people getting shot to death at point blank range in Virginia. Perhaps it's the proximity.

However, every day, CNN runs a little tag line, for about an hour, about 50 - 200 people getting turned into smudges by the latest suicide bomber in Iraq.

So maybe it's really about white people getting blown away. Weird.

- g-spot -

R.I.P. Kurt Vonnegut

2007-04-12T07:35:00.000-05:00

Okay, people, all we have left now is pain, misery and madness, so we'd better make the most of it.

- g-spot -

Imagine That!

2007-04-02T21:57:00.000-05:00

Aldous Huxley and JFK
Died on the same day.

I'm juss sayin', is all.

UPDATE : no, I mean the VERY same day, November 22, 1963.

- g-spot -

Watching This Al Franken Documentary

2007-04-02T21:23:00.001-05:00

And he had Sean Hannity on and they were screeching back and forth and then I stopped it, on a freeze frame profile of Hannity. I stared at this picture for 5 minutes or so, and thought : "there's something wrong with your brain, Sean Hannity, something defective. If there isn't, then there's something wrong with mine."

- g-spot -

I Once Thought About Encasing My Master Password

2007-03-30T21:17:00.000-05:00

In a password-protected case, but I couldn't think of a secure enough password for it. And then I thought : "obviously I should just use my master password. If I can get in, then I know what it is, so why would I try to get in?"

I think the underlying logic of this needs to be expanded upon.

- g-spot -

A Mixture Of Dead Things

2007-03-27T20:35:00.000-05:00

Dinner.

Sorry, did you think I meant something else?

- g-spot -

The Secret Motivation of the Anti-Smoking Activist

2007-03-22T22:17:00.000-05:00

They don't care if you smoke or not. They don't care if you drop dead from cancer or not. They certainly don't give a rat's ass if second-hand smoke kills, maims, disables, or even improves the quality of life of, anyone or anything. Or not.

They have another purpose.

Anti-smoking activists are really just secret government lackeys on a mission to identify, in the general population, "who is it that can be convinced to do something they don't want to do", and "who says 'Fuck you!' to the Establishment and abuses themselves to death as an act of resistance?"

The answers to these two questions could be worth alot, to alot of people.

- g-spot -

P.S. My advice to my smoker friends : sign up for, and drop out of half-way through, every "Quit Smoking" course you can find. Frequently, but on a random basis. Stir the statistics pot, citizen, you have the power!

The-Not-Ready-For-Blog-Rant-Players, Volume 4

2007-03-20T20:39:00.000-05:00

The Definition Of Law In The Modern World

Rules about rules about rules.

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Album Title : Izwutitiz

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My Thoughts On The 40+ Crowd

We're getting creepier.
And more hopeless. Definitely more hopeless.

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The only time jerking off doesn't feel better, over-all, than actual sex, Is during actual sex. I think that's pretty much the key to the kingdom right there.

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I don't have enough sense of outrage to be a good musician
And I don't have enough sense of commitment to be a good person.

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I Just Spent 15 Hours Copying 40 Gigabytes

And then I discovered I had the hard drive plugged into the "slow" USB port instead of the "fast" one. On a $4,000 computer, why is there a slow fucking ANYTHING!?!?

- g-spot -

Communication Methods Of The Schizophrenic

2007-03-19T23:54:00.000-05:00

Think about it. Human beings seem driven to invent new methods of communicating
LESS efficiently with each new generation, but with an interesting side trip each time.

Observe :

- first there was talking. Pretty immediate, extremely efficient.
- then distance forced on us the telegram. Less efficient, but really the only way.
- then the telephone brought us back to talking. Hooray for the telephone!
- then we started writing things down and sending them BY telephone (i.e. faxing).
- then email... wonder of wonders! Almost like instant faxing!
- then cell phones... back to talking! And from anywhere, anytime!
- then text messaging... back to writing and sending it, this time by the most inefficient method ever conceived!

What is this drive we have to bring ourselves closer together and then immediately separate us as much as possible?

Sounds like sex to me.

- g-spot -

I've Got This Fortune Cookie Widget in the Mac Dashboard

2007-03-17T22:22:00.000-05:00

Normally, it's pretty innocuous stuff, what you'd expect from a fortune cookie.

This time, it said (paraphrased) : "Giving to the poor only ensures their poverty".

I translate this as : "Survival of the fittest, asshole! If you've got enough balls to sit outside in the freezing cold and beg for change, go get some low-rent sales job... same difference, only 10 times the dough. What?!? I'm supposed to give you money because you choose to freeze your ass off? Christ, if only my job were that easy!"

And on and on.

Okay, so here's what you do : pick one guy on the street who you want to be guardian angel to; give him $2 the first day, but nothing to anyone else. Then after a week, make it a loonie and a toonie. After that, just escalate it a dollar a day and you know what? In no time, you've got your very own slave for just $30 / month!

[ Sorry, I seem to have taken a Turning-of-the-Worms-esque sidestep there for a second... I'm okay now. ]

- g-spot -

There Are Alot Of Bad People Who Do Bad Things

2007-03-15T23:23:00.002-05:00

But they're never charged, never prosecuted. Because they're not stupid.
The only guys you ever hear about, the ones behind bars, are not there because they're bad, but because they're stupid.

If all of sudden ALL of the clever people realized this, we'd be in some serious shit!

- g-spot -

Paradise By The Beer Tap Light

2007-03-14T21:24:00.000-05:00

So my bestest buddy Spooge and I were doing what we normally do after getting our asses kicked at video trivia, which is kicking each other's ass at pool, at the Paradise Billiard Hall (a misnomer if there ever was one).

This place is your typical divey dive, known less for its quality of table, decor or bill of fare, than for the size of its barmaids' breasts. Sort of "Hooters" on the cheap.

As I pondered the wonder of our server's heaving bosom, I had to stop and think: WHY do I care about her heaving bosom anyway?

I think it's for the same reason Bugs Bunny loves carrots.

- g-spot -

The Only People You'll Hear The Phrase "You Can't Take Criticism" From...

2007-03-02T23:47:00.001-05:00

Are critics.

My advice?

"Do something instead of talking about doing something. You'll be worth listening to after that."

- g-spot -

The Database System Dichotomy

2007-03-02T23:28:00.000-05:00

It's about trust.

There is so much terrible, unreliably crap out there that
People assume from the start won't work, or will fail unexpectedly,
They get used to not trusting anything,
Especially something they're using for the first time.

And then they use one of my systems.

Suddenly, their mistrust deepens. They become visibly agitated.
Something is terribly, terribly wrong...

"It's been 45 minutes and this fucking thing hasn't broken down yet,
Or made me want to reach down my own throat and pull out my heart...
There must be something SERIOUSLY fucked up coming down the pipe!"

The burden of competence is a heavy one.

- g-spot -

The Five Dollar Word Smiths

2007-02-23T22:55:00.000-05:00

For whatever reason, I landed on this web page:

http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/FREEDOM.html

And I was impressed by their use of so many five dollar words. Somehow, they managed
To prove, beyond all doubt, that reality is everything and nothing, all at the same time!

And then they gave themselves away with this :

"There is genuine freedom in the world."

You can't describe reality as being anything and everything and then describe an absolute!
("Tell me when will you be mine? Quandary! Quandary! Quandary!")

The above is simply a desire, a self-serving concept brought on by the natural insecurity
Of the author, motivated by chemicals and cellular requirements. Or maybe not. Maybe both!

More likely, it's an expression of the secret understanding that he or she knows
Mostly nothing at all. Except the spellings of complicated descriptions of what he or she doesn't know.

- g-spot -

Hijab à Trois

2007-02-20T00:47:00.000-05:00

I've got it! I know the problem with The War of Terror (T.W.A.T.)!

It's like a Menage à Trois!

Amerikkka is fucking both Afghanistan and Iraq.

First, Amerikka said, I'm gonna fuck me Afghanistan. An' I won't tell Eye-rack.

Then, said Amerikkka, I'm gonna fuck me Eye-rack.

And if Iraq and Afghanistan ever get together with their sister in Iran, they're gonna fuck Amerikkka.

A friend of mine, in a moment of jealous, fucking stupidity, once ratted me out to one of two women who I was fucking at the same time. I told him I'd forgive him "this once because you're a brother, but if you ever, ever, ever fuck with my scene again when I'm havin' anything to do with the ladies, I'll rip your fucking face off your skull and feed it to you raw."

All's fair in love and war. I wonder what this all means.

The Turning of the Worms

The-Not-Ready-For-Blog-Rant-Players, Volume 3

2007-02-17T23:56:00.000-05:00

How Deep Is Skin Anyway?

Beautiful women are beautiful to everyone.
Beautiful men are beautiful to women and gay men.
If I knew what this meant, I'd rule the world.

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One Day You'll Get A Spam Email Message...

... the title of which will be the first line from a poem you wrote some time in the past but never shared with anyone. That's when you'll know that you've left the last millennium behind for good.

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Language As A Second English

Hand someone who doesn't read your language a dictionary, with no explanation as to what it is, and you might as well hand them a steaming shit pile. In fact, it would be infinitely more confusing THAN a steaming shit pile!

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Dawn Wells, Batman Smells

Just picked up this nugget about Dawn Wells (aka Mary-Ann, of "Gilligan's Island" fame) off the Internets :

"(December 2006) Will appear as Mrs. Howell in a South Florida production (and world premiere of) Gilligan's Island: The Musical that can be seen in January 19 & 20, 2007, at the Tennessee Williams Theatre, in Key West and February 2-11, 2007 at the Coral Springs Center for the Arts, Coral Springs, FL. In this production she will appear with fellow classic television star, Barry Williams, who portrays Mr. Howell."

I always wondered when I'd feel old, when I'd know I was actually old. I just found out.

Although I think it actually happened quite awhile ago. Oy vey!

- g-spot -

V.A.L.E.N.T.I.N.E.S. Fucking Day

2007-02-14T02:38:00.000-05:00

Vile
Atrocious
Lame
Etiolating
Nihilistic
Tedious
Idiotic
Nauseating
Emetic
Sickening

I hope all your little tinselly lovers' cards rot in Hell. Happy Fucking Valentine's Day. Go celebrate the Saint's Day of a beheading victim with a bunch of cute, pink, severed hearts, you dizzy romantic fuckers. You should be ashamed of yourselves.

The Turning of the Worms.

Chopchop

2007-02-11T03:03:00.000-05:00

I don't know why they call it a "beheading" instead of a "deheading". In Latin, the prefix, [de-] means "down" or "away from", so it would make sense that if a pissed off guy...I mean "freedom fighter"...ooops...."INSURGENT"...passes an axe or machete-type object through someone's neck, it should be called a "deheading".

Or maybe an "unheading":

"Today, Islamocommunistterrorpeadophiles unheaded fifteen security contractors. The deheaded contractors denied being mercenaries."

By the way, a dude I know who's a soldier-type dude has been thinking of going to Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan to make shitloads of money as a private..ah..."security contractor". Except all his army-type buddies who've already done this are telling him the enormous amounts of money they're making aren't worth it, and not to come. THEY'RE fucking off! The freaky part is that an ex-Special Ops dude (like my buddy) can make so much fukkkin munnee that I'm tempted to join the Forces just so I can get kicked out for smoking..."something" (like my buddy).....and get a job as a "private security mercen....I mean, 'contractor' ". It's more than I make now, and it's worth quitting smoking the other shit (the carcinogenic crap the government sells through subsidised farmers) and taking up target practice from the sound of it. Except even the special ops boys think it's too fucked up "over there". What does that tell you about the state of the world, and how accurate the state of Fox™ and CNN™ are? It's all about cut-off, burned heads, I guess....

Anyhow, my buddy is having second thoughts. He's spent more than ten years pointing guns at people and The War on Terror (T.W.A.T.) has corners too weird for even him. He LIKES counter-terrorism work. So fuck Bush's war. Even the war dogs are turning tail. How's that grab ya?

I don't say the "M-word" around him ("Mercen....ARRRRGHHH!!!!!"). He sometimes gets this weird look in his eyes and his whole face changes. Just for a second. Boy, I'm glad P______ is a nice guy with very good ethics and excellent self-discipline. Anyhow...

In the English tongue, [Be-] is usually a prefix which puts stuff TOGETHER with other concepts. Like:

Betrothed
Bewitch
Begone
Belabour
Betwixt

...where [Be-} shows a read "with" or "to" prepositional quality, grammatically and lexicologically-speaking. So I don't get any of this so-called "beheading" shit that Islamophreakoloonies are supposedly doing. I think it's all bullshit. The grammar's all wrong.

Funny. Whenever I see P______ , we never talk about theoretical linguistics, even tho' he's a really clever dude. And he knows how to shoot dogs from the back of a snowmobile with a shotgun (it was under orders in a foreign country). We only ever talk about military shit. I'll have to ask him why that is. Oh well...

PS. In case you were wondering, when it takes more than two shots to kill a savage dog, the snowmobile driver gets to switch places with the rider. That way, everyone gets to have some fun working for Her Majesty. Those old Armed Forces ads really say it like it is: "There's no life like it!"

The Turning of The Worms

Numb-erz Game

2007-02-06T13:05:00.000-05:00

They (Congress, or really, the American public, who DO, after all, have a constitutional right of revolution) say BushBaby can have his 21,500 extra troops to create a "surge" in Iraq.

Every hydrologist will tell you that a surge is immediately followed by a trough. But let's look at something less obvious.

There's no draft, and I'd be surprised to hear that enlistment in the American military has suddenly skyrocketed. So those "extra" 21,500 troops are actually 21,500 pissed off people who are going BACK to Iraq, perhaps for a third or fourth tour. Others are probably fat supply corporals and clipboard jockeys who are more used to moving around cases of green underwear and toothpaste than humping an 80 lb. backpack and a rifle through hot, deadly streets...

But that's not the real numbers game.

Military science teaches us a rule of three: if you want one, you need three. For example, on the tactical level, if you have one soldier wandering around with a gun, you need another one cooking dinner for when s/he gets back to camp, while a third one will be sleeping. Then, they switch positions every eight hours. To get one soldier working out there in the field, you need three in total. Notice that there are no rest breaks on this schedule; it's a burnout in the end.

Likewise, operationally, if you have a platoon of 18-22 infantry establishing a forward fire base, you need another platoon backing them up, and another platoon providing logistics and evacuation. Add administration, and you're up to a company of 80+ soldiers. It takes a company to field a platoon.

On a strategic/theatre level, if you field a company that is exclusively front-line combat infantry, you need a support and logistics company to transport, feed, medicate and administer them. And you need a full company back home "in the pipeline" to replace casualties, and for eventual turnover (the psychiatric casualty rate for soldiers in sustained, intense combat is more than 90% after 28 days). You need a battalion to field a company.

So when we hear that BushMonster and Co. have just gotten 21,500 "new" soldiers for their Springtime SurgeFest 2007™, does that mean there's going to be roughly 7,000 "new" soldiers out there, of whom 4,666 will be cooking, sleeping, shitting, and trying to shake yesterday's work out of their nerves? Leaving about 2,000 actually in country with guns, practicing the Profession of Arms? Or does it mean that 64,500 front-liners have been redeployed to create a temporary spearhead that can, by the rule of three, field about 7,100 soldiers on a 24/7 basis while the remainder (a) stand by as a backup/reinforcement pool, and (b) sleep.

So that's the military science class for the day: numbers don't lie; politicians and the media lie. Here's the homework question: what good is a 24/7 fielding of 2,334 to 7,100 front-line soldiers on a temporary basis going to do in a country of over 30,000,000 pissed-off people that's starting to seriously fall apart?

Get back to me.

The Turning of the Worms

I Had This Meat Pie

2007-01-29T22:46:00.000-05:00

It was this awful, President's Choice thing; too big, no flavour, undoubtedly chock-a-block with vile preservatives and sundry chemicals, and most certainly some kind of MSG additive to make me crave it so. And I thought : Gawd, these assholes KNOW they're offering people "Death-In-A-Box" and they don't care!

But if I were the manufacturer, this is what I'd say : It's a free market, which means you're also free to not eat crap if you don't want to. How stupid do you need to be to not heed the signs? And the poverty dodge won't wash; much better food is available for the same, or cheaper, price... it's all about how much effort you want to put into making it. Don't make your deficiencies my problem.

Besides, if someone jumps off a bridge, you don't put the bridge on trial.

- g-spot -

The Boneyard of Semantics. I'm Almost Drunk. Yay.

2007-01-29T03:05:00.000-05:00

US and Iraqi troops have killed at least 300 militants in battles around the holy city of Najaf, officials say.

Ummm. Yeah.

I cutted and pasted dat for ye.

At least, that's what THEY want you to call the dudes with guns in Najaf who aren't in military uniform. "Militants". Funny, isn't it? If you have a uniform and an officer/soldier hierarchy, you have a license to kill people in their countries according to the rules of international "law". But if a bunch of cunts who wanted to believe their military-industrial complex's lies..ooops..I mean, their government's lies...if a bunch o' these college-fund-grubbing cunts in beige camo come plopping into your desert, dangling from parachutes and roaring across the dunes in Humvees™, you might want to pick up a bargain basement AK-46, oops...47...for yourself. But if you do, you're an insurgent....an "unlawful combattant", not protected by the laws of man, nor those of beast. You're a...a...

Militant.

Which, one would imagine, means someone who has something to do with military shit. But no. English is weird that way. So are most languages, when left to the devices of despots and national broadcasting corporations. Having known more than a few people who've had stuff to do with military-type shit, and having heard none of them refer to themselves as "militants", I must assume that the term means something else. I posit the twain:

"MIlitant" means either:

a) Civilians who have somehow fashoned AK-47s out of old Motorola cases and Cambell's tin cans;

b) Soldiers who split Saddam's army the second the plopping and roaring of the U.S.M.C. thundered across the Babylonian plains.

Guess which one?

It seems a little unfair that if some cunt comes into your country with a machine gun, you're supposed to wear the uniform that'll get your head shot off. Or if you don't it means you're a terr'ist criminal. It doesn't matter which side of The War Against Terror (T.W.A.T.) you're on, the rules of combat just don't seem right. Weren't the French underground our heroes in WW2?

What would be wrong with writing the following, instead?

"US and neo-Iraqi troops have killed at least 300 pro-Saddam, Baathist troops in battles around the holy city of Najaf, officials say."

You know, actually. It would be very wrong. THEY wouldn't like it as much as:

"US and Iraqi troops have killed at least 300 militants in battles around the holy city of Najaf, officials say."

Which is what THEY got THEIR minions to write on an internationally-known website. Recently.

And even if you're a right-wing cunt, you've got to admit it. And avoid the question of WMD's, al Qaeda and 9-11.

If The Forces of God really do decide to bomb Iran, I wonder what those warriors will be called. "Insurgent" and "Militant" will seem a little time-worn by then.

Perhaps we should go back to the lexicon of the Hungarian uprising of '56 and just call 'em "Freedom Fighters". That's how they see themselves, and there's more of them than there are U.S. and U.K. dudes in uniform...

The Turning of the Worms

If You Drilled A Hole Straight Down

2007-01-07T20:23:00.000-05:00

If you drilled a hole straight down so that it came out of the other side of the world (assuming you live anywhere in North America; i.e. Canada, United States and Mexico), there is only one point you could drill down where the resulting hole on the other side wouldn't open up under the ocean, and that is in a little town in Alberta, about 37 clicks north of Medicine Hat, called Manyberries. The resulting hole on the other side of the world would emerge smack dab in the middle of the French Southern & Antarctic Lands, a very, very small (like, 50 miles across) island in the middle of fuck-all anywhere anyhow (more to the point, directly between Antarctica and the Indian Ocean... a tiny piece of rock in the midst of a vast carpet of water (the size of North America, actually!)) Pretty cool!

What would have been even cooler, though, is if a 50 mile wide lake stood where Manyberries does now. Hmmm, perhaps I have just discovered my mission in life...

- g-spot -

Great Band names for 2007

2007-01-01T22:59:00.000-05:00

Hot Pink Mormons

Saddam Affective Disorder (S.A.D.)

Depleted Uranium Monkey Bucket (D.U.M.B.)

Postal Mind Set (P.M.S.)

Whitestain!

Who's Got the Bacon?

Epileptic Blowfish Organ

Bogus

Muff In the Jam

Happy New Year!

The Turning of the Worms

Search Engine Crisis!

2006-12-28T04:22:00.000-05:00

It occurs to me that when video blogs get invented for real and the world becomes even more chaotic, "post-modern" and freaked out, how are we going to do Google™ searches?

I mean, if you type in,

"...a couple of know-it-all brainiacs with hyperactive egos, few social skills and a penchant for whining. Just like you!"

You'll probably get to our page, because it's dun writtun ther.

But when we get around to doing 4-D expressionist montages of eels and world trade centres flipping inside out in space-time, complete with screeching guitar and keyboard tracks, how are you gonna find us on the web?

Just a thought. Any comments?

The Turning of the Worms?

The Spy

2006-12-28T04:19:00.000-05:00

Volumnious files

sit like beige paper clams

with diaphanous veils of paper

that are

soft tissues gaping from within

upwards

into their filing cabinet prison

waiting to be released into the sea of florescent air

where some little bastard

in government tweed and tiny round glasses

and tight little lips under his prim moustache

can sift through your life and mind

(although now all of this is in silicone and electrons, you understand...)

and mine

and look at our pages and run his gaze across them

the way someone from an older clan

probably looked across a valley at us and decided

if we were harmful or not

but now

you and I

our pages sifted together

instead of introductions around a bonfire

we glow on a monitor

we've been databased

our zeros and ones encoded in ASCII slashes

like tribal marks across our faces

your hair is too pink and my ear ring too bold

and maybe the little man's eyebrow jots up a notch

almost like an emotion

as a shard of light glints off his glass lens

and a bead of sweat drops off his upper lip

like a wizard standing with a piece of broken glass above children's genitals

making them grow up

and act like men and women, instead of little boys and girls

And so the little man might smirk

because he's doing it for our own good

cutting us down to size in his underground cavern of faxes and glowing boxes

so he can feed our sheets into new, beige clams

and feed us into greygreen steel boxes that slide shut with a snap

and hold us in the embrace of this Fine New World we find ourselves enveloped in the

next time we try to get onto an aeroplane

and get a surprise at the gate

The Turning of the Worms

The Truth Hurts

2006-12-13T01:08:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine showed me his toenail collection yesterday.

The disturbing parts were that he's not eight years old (he's in his sixties) and that they weren't from different toes.

And you thought that a toenail collection in itself was the disturbing part....

That's right. They were all from one toe.

His.

He pulls out his big toenail with a pair of pliers every once in a while, he tells me as he pours the little pile of brownish chunks from their special, alabaster vase into the palm of his hand.

"Does it hurt?", I ask.

"Of course", he responds helpfully. He's looking me straight in the eyes and he's silent. He's really big and he's between me and the door.

"Do it grow back the same?", I say, to keep the conversation at a banter level. "Oh, more or less", he says, smiling. I'm afraid he's going to ask me if I want to try. I smile back.

The little pile of brownish chunks go from the palm of his hand and back into their special, alabaster vase, which then goes back on a very special place on a special shelf. I feel I've been shown something that's very important to this man.

We go back to the kitchen and he turns around looking me dead in the eyes for a couple of silent seconds. He says:

"Everyone's got their own "little thing", you know?"

I nod. There really isn't too much else to say at that point.

The Turning of the Worms

The Human Heart

2006-12-08T15:58:00.000-05:00

Gordian Knot, Gordian Knot,
Fixin' my troubles: I'm gonna get hot!
Problems with you? Problems with you!!!
Generals drop bombs till some folks look like stew.

The human heart? It plays its part
When people see others as goods in their cart:
Problems with you? Problems with you!!!
You need a big mirror to see what you do.

You got your money; you got your toys:
Load up your guns! We're rolling out, boys!
Genus of "Sapiens", Species "Homo":
Where others will hurt, that's where we all go.

Gordian Knot, Gordian Knot!
Stealing your stuff; it's stuffed in my pot.
Why should I work? I'm a real jerk!
I flash pretty smiles, but I lurk in the murk!!!

From CNN doom to tense living room
We each try to play out our part:
When under some stress, we fail at the test
And karma then lowers the boom.

Why ain't you nice? Why ain't he nice?!
Outside we're warm; inside we're ice.
The evil we does to them what we knows
Crawls into bombers and to Iraq goes...

...we look upon others as victims and twits:
("I've got what I want! And he's blown to bits!")
What have we got, to look at Truth's bits?
The absolute fact: we're self-interested shits!

Gift giveth Anger; Bright giveth Hate:
The way we all act, ain't it all great?
You let out a groan? You don't like this tome? : (
Don't bitch at me: it all starts at home.

I, you, he, she, we, you, they, all their day:
Don't you just want it to go right away?
If truly a new world it is you'd like to start
Then bullshitting, quit! Start playing your part!

Gordian Knot, Gordian Knot!
When one harms another, one acts as a twat!
To solve our own shit using others is hate
If change doesn't happen, great loss is our fate.

Have a nice day.

The Turning of the Worms

A seasonal wish about drugs and war

2006-12-06T01:41:00.002-05:00

So, for a change, how about a syrupy blog for the holiday season. Just this once.

"Syrupy" for this blog, that is.

A lot of ink has been spilled about the parallels between the so-called Wars on Drugs and Terrorism, but little has been discussed about how warfare itself, apart from being the biggest form of terrorism, IS a drug. The biggest problem that an addict has, aside from the addiction itself, is the withdrawal. Every smoker knows that the bleating of clean air nazis does nothing to stop the habit. Protests don't work. Knowledge doesn't help too much once the dopamine levels start crashing like a helicopter in Tora Bora. Willpower alone won't do it.

It's that last point, willpower, that non-addicts can never understand. It has to go hand in hand with timing or it just doesn't suffice. Take the case of the humble North American tobacco addict, who does about nine thousand hits per year, if you consider one cigarette to be a dose. Each dose's effects last about half an hour (which is why smokes come in packages of twenty five - so you'll have enough for twelve hours or so), and once in your body, take a few days to get out through a long chain of metabolic, enzymatic and filtering processes. Except real hardcore addicts have a feature which lighter addicts don't: there're less nicotine metabolites in their pee.

That's right. There're less. Just like real warmongers have less guilt.

A real addict's body uptakes nicotine and USES IT FOR SOMETHING. We don't know what. The first world sells arms and they wind up in Uganda. Same thing. In a tobacco addict's body, a substance that is toxic to nearly every form of life somehow becomes adapted to; the body molds its processes around a dysfunction and a poison, so to speak. So, when you quit tobacco, it has the same effect as a severe nutritional or metabolic imbalance or deficiency. When you quit war, your economy crashes and your rationale, if you're a nation state fueled by imperialism and competition, is dismembered. Ask any former coke addict, too. It's not nice and you need a supportive environment. And you need timing: you have to do it when it feels right, and that usually only comes from a strong and positive attitude that perseveres LONG BEFORE the quitting day.

Wanting to quit is not enough; you have to be PRIMED to quit. War isn't going to get switched off in one fell swoop. We, the little cells of the body of the great corporate nation states, have to start moving the whole organism towards a healthier orientation.

America has spent the last twenty five years in a mouth-foamingly rabid war against plants and molecules; the rest of us in the English-speaking world have more or less followed suit. Can it not be, gentle reader, that one war might be used to put out another, in the manner of fire vs. fire? Imagine a world in which cops break down the doors of arms dealers and pepper spray them repeatedly, and where midnight raids on Spar Aerospace become the topic of crime-themed, nightly shows, like "Cops".

Not likely, eh? And why not? The answer is not in the willpower. The answer is not in protest. The answer is not in recognising the harm that is done.

Addicts know that whole scene. It's bullshit, man. Change has to be spiritual, and spirit encompasses both mind and body. Get it?

The answer is in going sober, admitting where we've gone wrong, and readapting ourselves around an addiction in order to push it out of our lives, and this usually comes from little signals, like a plummeting bank account, or the cough that won't go away. Or raining depleted uranium munitions. We all have to learn to respond to our own negative behaviors with appropriate adaptations, so here's a Yuletide challenge: let's all kick the big habit in one little way. How 'bout this week we all identify one signal of our addiction to war and push it out of our lives? Thinking of buying that new cellphone for Xmas for the beloved? If you know that the minerals inside it are mined in West African countries where millions, literally, have died off the media's radarscope in the last few years, no new cellphone. Spend the money in a fair-trade clothing store instead. How about avoiding any computer games where brains can splat out? It's kind of hard to build a better world if we all turn into fantasy snipers or fighter pilots ten hours a week. Rather, spend an hour each evening on the alternative news circuit of the web, or educate yourself. Or go for a walk with someone you love.

All of us are contributors to the great addiction of warfare, like someone who says, "Yeah, I know lots of people die each year from smoking, but...", as yet another white, little tube of death gets tapped out of the pack. How many dead Afghani babies does your car get to the mile when you could walk instead? Make a better world in one, tiny specific area that you can nurture, this Consuming Season.

It's not a very big wish for Yule/Christmas/Chanukah, but it's a nice one. And it all contributes to the tipping point sometime, way in the distant future, when we all kick the filthy habit once and for all. Find one way to take your energy back from the military-industrial-entertainment complex.And make yourself shine a little bit, in contrast to much that you come away with from these normally dark pages, and give the world a little present of yourself this month, in the darkest season of the year.

This blog will now return to its normally acerbic demeanor.

The Turning of the Worms

A Passing, Poetic Thought

2006-11-20T23:44:00.000-05:00

Steve Jobs makes about 1/4 of Bill Gate's income and yet has only 5% of the market share. This proves my main assumption that while superior talent will never win out against superior bullshit, and superior bullshit will long be remembered while superior talent will die in obscurity (their contributions stolen and exploited by superior bullshit), superior bullshit will nonetheless always wonder, on its death bed as it draws its terminal breath, "Did I waste my life?", while superior talent need not ask.

[Candidate for the "Palme d'or" at the 2006 Run-On Sentance Festival]

- g-spot -

Great Spam Names

2006-11-17T23:41:00.000-05:00

Spangle K. Request
Kumar Garfinkel
Cupboards D. Mutilation
Comradeship L. Sixteenth
Synthesized H. Herring
Pygmy J. Eloquence
Prentice H. Liqueured
Reappraised M. Solvable

- g-spot -

My Thoughts On Remembrance Day

2006-11-11T23:08:00.000-05:00

In a war economy,
The rich get richer
And the young don't get older.

I wonder if it's just that old father and son thing at work.

- g-spot -

A Day That Will Live In Infancy!

2006-11-08T23:46:00.000-05:00

Today, the Democrats took control of the House and Senate in the U.S.

I don't know if this means things will get better, or just morph into something as bad, just left-leaning. I'm hoping for impeachment but I'll settle for public execution.

Doesn't matter. Six years of surrealism is long enough and I, for one, need a change of venue.

My one caution to you, though, valued readers : when the tide swings back, and it will (it always does), make sure you've got some money in the bank to ride out the storm with, that's all I can say!

- g-spot -

I wouldn't touch that with a 10ft. one

2006-11-06T22:22:00.000-05:00

There was an online poll on CNN.com just now. It's purpose was to determine where the reader stood in the political spectrum, what with the elections tomorrow and all. And it was the most outrageous load of crap imaginable; obvious, polarized, black & white... if you answered a certain way on the first question, you would have to answer the same way on all the questions. Not unexpected for CNN. And I filled out the poll like you'd expect; I'm your typcial outraged liberal. Turns out, though, I couldn't submit my answers because there was one question I couldn't answer. They gave me 2 choices but I didn't like either. The question was:

Do you think it is more effective to try to prevent terrorist attacks on the U.S. by military action or by economic and diplomatic actions?

[ ] Diplomatic actions
[ ] Military actions

I couldn't answer this because the very question itself ignored a very important point, that terrorism, by its nature, is only ever carried out by the victims of an aggressor. An aggressor has no need to terrorize because they have all the guns. Terror is the weapon of choice for people who have nothing left to fight with.

So how many arm-chair liberals answered "A" to the above question without thinking that maybe not constantly taking over other people's land and resources and lives might be a much better way to combat terrorism.

And I find it increaingly hilarious that the average American, that big, bad, muthafucking bastard, who owns the block he walks... that guy is most scared of a plane falling on his head.

- g-spot -

Little Known Cindy Williams Facts

2006-10-28T21:20:00.000-05:00

Was step-mother to Kate Hudson (Golden Hawn's daughter) for awhile.
Was Andy Kaufman's girlfriend.
Went to school with Sally Field.
Auditioned for the part of Princess Leia.

My entire world view has changed.

- g-spot -

Turning the Page

2006-10-05T19:13:00.000-05:00

I've been wading around in the open cess pool that is the "Senate page scandal", since there's clearly very little else to talk about down in the good ol' U.S. of Eh? The rest is just jibber-jabber... like that they just gave George Bush the right to snag and torture any person he feels like snagging and torturing (I can't wait to see the first well-known "moderate" Republican senator or house member get hauled off and water-boarded). And there are those couple of wars they're fighting. Oh, and that city they let drown.

Anyhoo, I came to a startling revelation : this is what finally might bring these fuckers down, some greasy slimeball text messaging porn to a bunch of teenagers. Kids who, let's face it, probably figured out early that this is the way the game is played in D.C. if you want to end up a greasy slimeball with any real power.

Because as we know, tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of people being mercilessly killed for no reason, or the tanking of the North American economy, or the stripping of their precious civil liberties right off their backs, are just background noise on the net.

Nope, what America cares most about is jerking off.

I've said it before, and if I haven't, then I'm saying it now : Americans deserve every excruciating reaming they get, times infinity, and then some.

I also thought : the timing is colossally suspicious. Obviously this was designed to coincide perfectly with the ramp up to their crucial upcoming mid-term elections. But did whoever think of this actually understand that the only way you can outrage stupid Americans is with outrageous stupidity?!?

If so, it means there's hope! (in spite of the fact that one third of the entire planet will be a desert within one average North American's life span).

Have a nice day!

- g-spot -

P.S. You know what pisses me off the most? That they didn't teach a course called "If a Democrat has been in the White House for 8 years, your next decade is going to be very difficult" when I was in Grade 3. What happened to "No Child Left Behind"?!?

Quotable Quotes (I Just Made up)

2006-09-25T00:03:00.000-05:00

The President of the United States wants to eat your babies! I fail to see how anything can be more important than that!

I have to wonder : if alcohol didn't exist, how many people alive today would have bumped themselves off long ago? Long Live Alcohol! The Saviour of Our Nation!

It's a good thing my mother instilled in me a solid sense of "good will to all men", otherwise I'd make a dynamite serial killer.

Miracles are real and they happen every day. They just happen on the sub-atomic level, that's all. It's called "Life", stupid!

While I can't listen to 1/100th of his catalogue without going stark-raving mad, I have to say : what a shittier planet this would be if Frank Zappa had never trod it.

If I ever figure out what my brain is for, I wouldn't need it anymore.

Women! You give them a fucking millimeter and they just take everything!!

I have over 1,800 movies and 4,000+ T.V. shows and documentaries. I have no fucking idea what to watch.

- g-spot -

Something In The Air

2006-09-01T22:54:00.000-05:00

Is it just me or has there emerged a quickly growing, almost maniacal, hatred of George Bush and everyone around him, over the last few weeks? Even big name Republicans are trashing him six ways from Sunday. I say quickly, even though people with more than 1 brain cell to rub together hated his guts 5 years ago and saw through the lies like cellophane. But assuming that the majority of citizens are brain dead, the recent wave of unrest is unprecedented.

Therefore, because I see no other way out for the fucking carpetbaggers who've hijacked North America to exit gracefully from the horrific disaster(s) that they've emersed us in, I'm putting this in writing : before the mid-term elections, there will another 9/11. This is going to be far more obvious, and most likely far uglier, because they won't have the kind of time to get it organzied like they did the first time. It'll be fascinating (and also nauseating, I'm sure) to see how John Q. Public reacts to this one.

By the way, what's the "Q" in "John Q. Public" stand for, anyway? Not "question", surely.

- g-spot -

I'm Singin' In The Rain

2006-07-17T21:40:00.000-05:00

I just faced down near-hurricane strength winds while standing in my bathroom.

This is pretty serious shit. You'd think they would have mentioned the possibility of a hurricane, even as much as an hour ago, on any of the weather sites.

All I can say is, I feel like I just had an Al Gore moment.

- g-spot -

The Definition of Mojo

2006-07-06T22:13:00.000-05:00

Lately I've been wondering how to tell my lead singer that his performance on our latest tune is somewhat, well, "overextended", that if he dialed it back a bit, it would come over real, not melodramatic. And then being the dutiful Capricorn, I set about seeing if there were an established rule about this, involving geometry and percentage tables and fairly impressive 3-D pie charting.

However, having found none, I will say that in my opinion "the sweet spot", the boundary between honestly intense and pandering theatrics, lies at precisely 78% of the most extreme Broadway-style presentation.

Oddly enough, this is also the amount of surface area of the Earth that's covered by water, at the Equator.

And also oddly enough, the percentage human beings are of water as compared to everything else, at birth.

True art lies at 78%.

Now go... and sin no more.

- g-spot -

Totally Tubular

2006-07-01T20:34:00.000-05:00

I was thinking... original audio recordings were made on tubes covered in wax. At some point, someone decided a flat disk would work better. And with the exception of tape, all audio which has since followed has been delivered disk shaped (even the stuff in your iTunes or iPod).

I wonder what would have happened had the tube idea worked out... would we instead be playing CT's , "compact tubes", little white cylinders about the size of a king-size Player's Light® ? There'd be a round hole in the front of your computer to insert...

Ahh, that's it. Tubes are dirty. :-)

- g-spot -

On Passing Cars

2006-06-13T21:09:00.000-05:00

Funny... I live by a major highway and can see the extreme south end, and also the extreme north end, from one window. Just now, a couple of cop cars went screaming north and then I watched the traffic... the cars at the south end were going about 20 kph faster than those at the north but there was no bunch up anywhere. Somehow, everyone in the middle just instinctively slowed down the same amount so there was a perfectly even flow from one speed to another.

How could even the most stalwart cynic look upon that and still think there is no hope for Mankind?!?

- g-spot -

The End All and Be All

2006-05-05T20:05:00.000-05:00

Every day, one thought is cemented deeper and deeper into my psyche : opposable thumbs have brought us to the brink of self-destruction and huge, empty, chronically under-developed brains have been their unwitting accomplices.

- g-spot -

Gee, the hard-ons are kinda losing steam...

2006-04-29T19:52:00.000-05:00

http://www.hist.umn.edu/~ruggles/Approval.htm

It's sort of like a guy trying to impress a new girl (or guy, whatever) with his stickmanship but doesn't know when to say goodnight and roll over.

- g-spot -

The-Not-Ready-For-Blog-Rant-Players, Volume 2

2006-04-14T22:06:00.000-05:00

A Passing Fancy

Hey, I just thought of something... if we could go forward to when we're dead, and could see the utter horror that awaits us after we shrug off this mortal coil, be it hellfire or infinite nothingness, we'd certainly come back with a renewed sense that every day must be lived to the fullest! However, we'd probably be so fucked up knowing what an abysmal let-down the afterlife is, we wouldn't be able to enjoy a minute of it.

------------------------

Here's a great movie title :

Hairy Goblet and the Fire(ing) of the Potter(y)

------------------------

Your moment of Heinlien

"I'm sorry, Doctor, but I keep having these terrible dreams. I wander around, lonely and terrified and betrayed, and all the trouble seems so unnecessary. And then I wake up... oh, sorry, 'get stoned'... the people in the dreams keep insisting that getting stoned is an awful thing... and then I get stoned..."

------------------------

Deathwatch® says I've got 13,406 days left. Christ. If I assume the meat I eat every day comes from, say, 5 different sources, the bodies of at least 67,030 different animals will have contributed to keeping me alive between now and the day I die. I hope I can somehow repay the debt when it comes my turn to contribute.

------------------------

Eulogy to Daily Kos

Daily Kos is like a leper colony:
When all is lost, at least there's a sense of community.

------------------------

A Great Jesus Line Never Uttered

"The poor you will always have. But low interest rates? Here today, gone tammara' "

- g-spot -

Happy Birthday, Spooge!

2006-04-10T16:56:00.000-05:00

This one goes out to our one and only loyal reader, Spooge. Zippy Barmiztvah, ya' old fart!

- g-spot -

Bend over and kiss your Internet good-bye

2006-03-31T22:42:00.000-05:00

You're 4 times as lucky to find a Spanish version of "King Lear" on the pirate boards, as English. And next in line under English, only one or two pirates away, is Russian.

Makes you think.

- g-spot -

Ahh, I understand the whole pizza thing now...

2006-03-31T22:31:00.000-05:00

In order to meet (or better) the preposterous "20 minutes, or it's free" boast, pizza places have had to fall in line... "people don't care if it's cooked, they just want it NOW!!" became the mantra and a whole new way of cooking a pizza was divined, known as the "make it hot" method. The goal of this method is to deliver what the client thinks is prepared food, in a ludicrously short period of time. This was brilliantly achieved by first mirco-waving the pizza for approximately 2 minutes, and then searing it under broiling elements for another 2 minutes; the first action implanted the notion that the food had been cooked ("it was hot") and the second action provided physical evidence ("it was burnt").

Which left them 16 minutes to deliver the pizza, along with all the other cooked-for-4-minutes pizzas.

And that, boys and girls, is how it's possible to make money with a pizza franchise.

- g-spot -

P.S. Yes, I made all this up, but it actually makes sense, doesn't it?

You know what would be a really weird short story?

2006-03-27T22:05:00.000-05:00

"The Annual World Trade Centre Attack Photographers Barbecue & Reunion"

- g-spot -

Widget Midget

2006-03-18T09:43:00.000-05:00

Cool! There's this new gizmo/widget for Mac OS Tiger® that let's me add a new post directly to Brainpeelings like typing something into a PostIt® Note.

Now if only I could think of something even remotely interesting to say!

- g-spot -

(What? Nothing since Jan. 14th? Crikey!)

2006-01-31T00:39:00.000-05:00

Keith, dude....this one goes out to you, just because you reminded us that we actually DO have an audience, and that somebody cares...

Citizens! This is your brain on langwidge:

I bet you dni'dt konw taht if you wirte smeohting wtih all the lerttes fckued up epcext for the vrey frsit and lsat oens of ecah wrod, i'ts slitl pssiolbe for a ntavie raeedr to cmorphend wh'tas been wirtetn. It truns out taht wehn we raed smehotnig in an aplhbaectial lnagauge, we olny need to look at its "fmraweork", and not i'ts "cenrte".

I d'not eaxtcly konw waht the riamfciatonis of tihs are for lnagauge-lreaners and thier tacehers.... I maen, it knid of fcuks up the wohle piont of sepllnig lsesons, d'eonst it? Tihs is bad: i'ts waht I do for a lviing. Nor do I konw how tihs cmoopnent of lnaugage cognitoin afefcts poelpe who lvie in a dffirenet cnoopcetaul pradagim, epsceailly dsylxeics and tohse lreaners of Egnilsh as a Sceocnd Lnaguage wohse ntavie lngaugage epmolys iedogarphs, scuh as in Cnheise.

Do you tihnk tihs olny hpapens wtih Egnilsh and its (vrey) fkuced up seplling ssytem, or is tihs a mroe uinvreasl pehonemonn? Id' be itnresested in waht ya'll tihnk.

The Turning of the Worms

Forget Creationism... I have proof that Evolution is true!

2006-01-14T22:43:00.000-05:00

Check it out :

http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/01/14/trauma.pill.ap/index.html

See, we haven't evolved to become the most advanced species on the planet because we've learned that aggression and greed and terror are bad and should be avoided at all cost... quite the contrary.

Our greatest claim to fame is that we've invented, all by ourselves, a drug that lets us forget about all the senseless pain, misery and death we cause each other.

Now that's progress, baby!

- g-spot -

The Star-Strangled Hammer

2006-01-10T18:38:00.000-05:00

What most Americans don't know is that their favourite violent nationalist tune, um, anthem, was orginally a drinking song about fucking and drinking

( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Anacreon_in_Heaven )

and that the war which Francis Scott Key was celebrating (the War of 1812) was, if you read Canadian history, a victory which was partially won by the British LETTING a loosely-disciplined American militia invade Fort York five minutes before they blew up their own magazine to send the Yankee invaders back over Lake Ontario in a shower of orange sparks. Oh sorry...it was a DRAW, like Vietnam...if you read American history books.

The point is that three countries have defeated the U.S. in history: Canada, Cuba and Vietnam. In each case, the weaker country let the Yankees in and allowed them to kill themselves with badly-designed military operational planning. Iraq is probably going to be the same. History repeats, as Satayana pointed out....

Anyhow, in commemoration of American military ingenuity, we here at Brainpeelings have decided to offer up a more modernised version of the militiamen's drinking song, with words that Rosanne Barr will actually be able to remember before the first pitch at SkyDome in Toronto in the springtime:

O say can you see, while the I-raqis fight,
How so badly you failed at the prison-house reaming?
Whose young men and old farts, thro' the perilous night,
O'er their orange jail suits, were so fearfully peeing?
And the agents all there, vi-olent and unfair,
Gave proof thro' the night that your flag was still there.
O say, does that rug-headed asset still crave
An end to Wal-Mart from the depths of his cave?

Sometime, look up some old oil paintings of the "White" House before 1813; you'll notice that it used to be the Pink House. That's because American Militiamen decided to burn Niagara On The Lake in their retreat south; the British/Canadian forces repaid the favour by going to Washington and having a torch party the next year; the only thing that saved the city was an unexpected downpour. However, history has left its mark on D.C. to remind us: the only colour of paint in sufficient quantities to repaint the presidential palace was (you guessed it), white; hence, "The White House".

Yesterday, largely unreported, two suicide bombers in cops' uniforms made it into the heart of the "Green Zone" and blew themselves up in the Interior Ministry, killing twenty-eight in the process.

It's not in the news today. Surprise, surprise....

In what colour(s) do you think history is going to repaint the Green Zone? Crimson? The world's most powerful military can't hold a four-square-mile patch of land in a country they've been kicking the shit out of for fifteen years. Maybe call it The Black Zone. History probably will.

The Turning of the Worms.

Happy Pearl Harbor Day

2005-12-07T06:47:00.000-05:00

I recently watched a documentary about how FDR and the U.S. gov't knew about Pearl Harbor and purposely let it happen. An interesting thing : there's an actual communication from FDR to some army guy saying specifically to let the Japanese attack if they want, that the U.S. wanted the first overt attack to be theirs. And if you think about it, that's reasonable... somebody wants to kill you, let him make the first move. You can still have your war but at least you didn't start it. But then I thought : well, fuck, why not at least give the poor bastards sleeping in on Sunday, Dec. 7 an hour or two advanced warning, so they could get into their damn planes?

Of course, this was the real point behind not telling anyone at all. Think about the galvanizing aspect of the timing... the Japanese suddenly became cringing, cowardly devil-nippers who couldn't stand up to their enemy like real men and instead, jumped out from the shadows when G.I. Joe was at his most vulnerable (and on God's Day, no less). Jesus, if you're looking to motivate your population, you can't buy press like that! If you want to get into a world war, whether to jump start an economy ravaged by the Depression, or because you honestly believe Hitler is a very real global threat, or maybe both, you have to do everything in your power to convince the Great Unwashed that Armageddon® is unfolding and they damn well better get themselves on the side of Truth, Justice and the American Way, and right quick!! (And keep in mind that at the time, 70%-80% of the American public was absolutely opposed to any involvement in the war).

So, vroom ahead to Sept. 2001. The U.S. has no easily recognizable enemy anymore. There's no country in the world louder, ruder or more aggressive, not to mention richer, than the U.S.; they're everyone else's enemy and are more like a big dog who just wags his tail when the little dogs are yapping at them than anything else. But they still have bills to pay and they have to get a real war going. The money river has turned into a damn piss-stream and it's getting harder and harder to sell anything with a 15,000% markup to anybody. Plus alot of the Big-R Republican senators are up for their 337th term in office; they won't last forever which means elections which means the possibility of a shift in the balance of power. What would really help is another Pearl Harbor but if there's no enemy, they just can't wait until someone decides to attack... and if they did, what if the attackers fucked it up? What if they drove a plane into the Hudson River by mistake? Anyway, connect the dots.

No, 9/11 wasn't another Pearl Harbor. What happened at Pearl Harbor was large-scale mercy killing compared to what the fucking animals in charge today have done, and will undoubtedly do in the future.

So raise a glass and toast a bygone era when an American presidential administration allowed thousands of its citizens to be killed for political purposes, but at least had the decency to feel bad about it.

- g-spot -

Endgame

2005-12-04T04:52:00.000-05:00

Wow...we're getting close to the end of it all. Doesn't it give you the shivers? Just think, all those dead bodies and stink about to finally....

Oh. Yes. That's right. Y'all don't know what I'm talkin' about, do y'all? 'kay...what I'm going on about is the wonderful day of Peace and Harmony, about to be bestowed upon us on December 15th, in the Year of Your Lord 2005. Here's where all this shit ends. Or as I just pulled off the Web:

"Bush and his Republican Party are under pressure at home over the rising American death toll -- which the Pentagon put at 2,125 on Friday -- and the president has embarked on a new series of speeches aimed at shoring up support for a project which he says will bring peace and democracy to Iraq through an election on Dec. 15."

Thing that ain't bein' mentioned is the fact that after December 15th, there IS NO MORE POLITICAL PROCESS. That's it. For two-and-a-half hard years of shakin' and bakin' the U.S. Wehrmacht and its allies have been pushing from one political goal to the next, through a curtain of human flesh albeit, but pushing FORWARD, towards a goal of Stupendous Light. Jesus over the savage "Saddamists", as the Amoeba-in-Chief called them yesterday. Good vs Evil. Paul Bremer, "Director of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance for post-war Iraq " vs. Osama bin Hussein, or whoever. Yeah, yeah...

It's seemed to make it all make sense, right? Set up a roadmap to "Peace" and use an armoured column to punch your way through to the next salient...to the next mobilisation point...to the next assault upon the Forces of Badness that would thwart "democracy". Right over the bodies of 100,000 innocents, and a shattered country. Except after December 15th., that's it. Nada. Niente. Nothing else. That's when democracy will have happened, according to The Grand Scheme hatched under the spidery loins of Rumsfeld et al in the caverns below the Pentagon. No more roadmap. Just blank, historical space....

And 150,000 troops about to piss a script with no name into the shifting, radioactive sands of time. Ninety years ago we heard that they'd be back for Christmas. Nope. They're stuck, with Tet New Year 2006 just around the corner, and about a month or so between Dec. 15th and then to remind us that The Prez.'s "strategy", heard of so oft of late, is a big nothingness. Not even the PNAC and Pentagon boyz have any clue what happens next, citizens. No game plan. Just tell the idiot to keep guttering the phrase "strategy for victory" all over the media so all the sheep will go back to sleep and get ready to cel'brate Jesus' birthday. And so the maw of history opens for American hubris....and for all of us.

This is gonna make Vietnam in January of 1968 look like nothing. This is the cradle of civilisation, baby; all bets are off now.

The Turning of the Worms

Why I've Decided To Become A Creationist

2005-11-30T08:29:00.000-05:00

Think for a second about Jesus and when he lived, 2,000 or so years ago. Think of everything that's happened since then... a lot of stuff, lots of big changes. The fall of the Roman Empire. The Renaissance. Playstation 2.

Okay, imagine you run into Jesus way back when and you go up to him and ask him to imagine what 2,000 years before that was like? He probably wouldn't be able to give you many details. What was going on in 2,000 B.C.? I dunno. Hell, Athens wouldn't be built for another 800 years, so it's awhile ago.

Okay, so go back another 2,000 years before that. What was going on 6,000 years ago? According to Creationists, that was when God created the world.

However, geologists say the planet is actually 750,000 x 6,000 years old.

Whoa! I think I'll have to side with the Creationists. The idea that this is as far as human beings have gotten in 750,000 x 6,000 years is just too fucking depressing.

Oh, and I just found out : I'm actually about a year older than the science of plate tectonics. Krazy!

- g-spot -

My 0.023438 Cents (USD -> CDN)

2005-11-26T15:25:00.000-05:00

[ The following is a comment I recently posted on Daily Kos, in response to a diary which sucked the very meat off the bone of the self-righteous Left. The author, I gather, had dared to offend the Progressive Left's Patron Saint of Revisionist History, Cindy Sheehan, and was torn a multitude of new assholes for her trouble. I felt she (the author) needed to know that she wasn't the only one out here in BlogLand who felt maybe the Fucking Left is as bad as, if not worse than, the Fucking Right. Enjoy! ]

[ UPDATE : Well, well, well... the author of the diary I mention complained that her original diary, the one that started the whole mess, had been mysteriously deleted... one of Daily Kos' supposed great strengths is that you can say whatever you want and regardless of how insulting or stupid it is, it won't be deleted or censored. So guess what? Her followup diary is also gone now, along with my comments below. So much for freedom of expression and the Great Liberal Blogosphere! ]

-------------------------------------------------------------------

I haven't read the aforementioned "diary-that-shall-not-be-named"... I saw the title in the Recommended List, saw Cindy Sheehan's response also listed, and the number of comments in both, and decided they'd probably put me off my dinner (not the diaries, the comments). I'm guessing they had something to do with Native Americans, George Bush, dead soldiers and war and I gather it wasn't exactly flattering to Ms. Sheehan. Oh well, somehow I think she'll survive the assault.

I'm dropping my wee comment in here, though, because I was truly struck by startkravinglunaticradical's tone more than anything (okay, her (?) sheer competence as an author is pretty damned impressive too) and wanted to cheer her (?) on by saying "Whatever the fuck you're talking about, you go, girl! Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke!"

Daily Kos is settling very nicely into what I long suspected it would, which is a clearing house for MOR thinking and nambypambyness on a grand scale. All new movements, whether they be in art or music or theatre or the written word, are formed when extreme elements collide; no one knows how it will all end up (which is what's so cool about creativity to begin with) but sure as shit, if the sparks given off are sufficiently bright enough, they'll attract the attention of those who normally can't bear to look directly into the light for too long. Those people will flock to the new source imagining that they're lifting themselves out of the mainstream and (at last!) joining the cutting-edge. But then the painful, sad process of homogenization begins... the majority, needing to keep things calm because that's just how they are, starts sucking the very life out of that which caught their eye in the first place. Eventually things settle down, the radical fringe element storms off in disgust and the mainstream majority circle-jerks itself to sleep.

I had high hopes for DKos, I thought maybe this place would prove the above theorem to be false, but now I think nothing can stop simple human nature from turning everything into pablum. Just seems to be the way things work.

An aside : by the way, I'm part native (...umm, aborigin... aw fuck it, "injun"!) and even though I'm as white bread as the next white guy and my family's past is just a vague story I recall being told as a child, I recently found out that I actually qualify for official "status" up here in Canada. How fucked up is that?! I think I'll just ignore this opportunity to rip-off my ancestors further and leave the resources for those who actually need them.

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- g-spot -

When surrealism hits the ground running...

2005-11-23T22:32:00.000-05:00

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/B112305Y.shtml

Too weird for words, man. The Fidel-lovin' communist leader of a South American country just fucked the completely fascist American federal government straight up the ass!! This is so absurdly strange, on so many levels, I'm getting vertigo!

And Joseph P. Kennedy II is helping to administer the discounted oil ????

I honestly think that if a monkey flew out of my butt right now, I'd probably consider it pedestrian by comparison.

- g-spot -

I'm getting buried under the milestones!

2005-11-21T22:24:00.000-05:00

A week from this Friday will mark the 30th anniversary of the release of Queen's "A Night At the Opera".

Okay, handy tip : when I stop saying "Christ I'm getting old!", that's how you know I'm dead.

- g-spot -

If they're "progressive", I want to start the "Digressive Party"

2005-11-20T22:28:00.000-05:00

I just read (and participated in) a grotesque display of all that is wrong with the Progressive Left movement, in small, and the United States, at large, over at Daily Kos. A posting by some Ohio politician announced that he was spending the next 4 nights living on the street, with only the clothes on his back, to get a feel for the plight of the homeless. Okay, first thing to pop into your head? "A stunt, for sure". Mine too. But the second thing to pop into my head was : "Christ, anyone willing to spend even one night on the street without a dime in their pocket (in Ohio!), deserves enough respect from me that I'll at least keep my fat mouth shut about it".

The "progressive" community? America's sympathetic voice?

I'd say about 70% of these fuckwads tore the guy a new asshole from tip-top to tip-toe. In their rarefied opinion, he's just an opportunist, a media-whore, or an outright liar. Or every other comment began with something like "if you REALLY wanted to help the homeless..."

The truth being, of course, that most of these jerk-offs have likely never known hunger or desperation. Probably the most traumatic thing to happen to any of them in recent memory was gas hitting $3 / gal. And that's our poor, misguided, schizophrenic America for you : even their most generous and selfless segment can be counted on to eat its own young.

You know, it wasn't until this moment that I fully understood how much the Right and Left are like Men and Women. Think about it : the Right are a bunch of loud-mouthed, conniving, self-serving bastards, which is what Men are, which is what Men are *supposed* to be, if you take Darwin at his word. And the Left? A bunch of pussies, man, there's no better way to explain it. Utopian and catty, naive and bitchy, consumed with the welfare of others but not wholly willing to get their hands dirty accomplishing it.

The Left will NEVER outright win, will NEVER retain power for very long, because the Right has something they don't : solidarity, or at least the appearance of it. On the Right, if you don't agree with your party leaders, you maneuver yourself into a position to usurp them, you have a "Night of Long Knives", so you can be twice as fucked up as them, or maybe just try to undo the damage they may have caused because they're twice as fucked up as you could ever be.

On the Left, you rent a stage and a bullhorn and you yell at the world about how fucked up your party leaders are. News flash : guilty by association, assholes. The rest of the world has little respect for anyone who tears down their leaders in public. It smacks of disloyalty and regardless of your point of view, being disloyal isn't something many people would find appealing. Most find it repellant. I'm not agreeing or disagreeing, I'm just saying...

I dunno, I'm rambling. But a terrible feeling is starting to creep up on me : I'll never be able to agree philosophically with anything the Right has to offer, but the insipid naiveté of the Left makes me want to burn crosses on people's lawns. I'm just a man without a moral compass, I guess.

So if this is the Apocalypse®, we have about a thousand years of this shit to yet endure, eh? Oy.

The Not-Ready-For-Blog-Rant-Players, Vol. 1

2005-11-18T22:18:00.000-05:00

"Love is like the world's worst chili dog, wrapped in beauty"

The Ultimate Mysogynist Put-down:
"There are two kinds of women: those who won't talk to me and those who won't leave me alone. You, strangely enough, occupy the number one position in both categories."

Book Title:
"I'm just hairy about Wilde!" (thanks to bb for that one)

"Dance like you've never been hurt. Work like nobody's watching. Love like you don't need the money."

On Being Eaten:
"Nary a day goes by wherein I am not cognizant that my very survival depends on my consuming some kind of once-living, now-dead thing's flesh and / or bark and / or what have you... It's hard to believe, sometimes, that my gullet is so many creatures' destiny. However, those thoughts are not enough to stray me from the path of self-righteous carnivorousness; I am all-consumed with the notion of ingesting dead things. Strangely diametric, though, is a secret dream / wish of mine, that someday, some thing, some creature, some entity higher in the great chain of life than a bacterium, will live just one more day because of me, because of the bounty my cellular structure has to offer. Seriously, what else could possibly be more self-sacrifcing?"

"You know, I can live with being a disappointment. I don't know if I can live with being thought of as a disappointment, though."

You may have too high a regard for yourself if you find yourself saying something like :
"Yah, you're 'Lara', but I'm fucking 'Dr. Zhivago', man!"

Life is an off-Broadway play with bad reviews... common sense says you should just pack it in but Jesus, we could maybe be the next "Rent II - The Beginning"!!

- g-spot -

An Open Letter to my Dope Dealer

2005-11-18T21:36:00.000-05:00

-- Please forward to your complaints dept. --

Dear Sir / Madam,

I am writing in regards to a recent purchase that I made of a product supplied by your firm. During the sale of said product, I happened to remark to the friendly service representative that unlike other customers of yours, I actually appreciate smaller buds over larger ones; they suit my post-sale processing much better and result in a finer end-product, in my opinion. However, I have noticed a peculiar aspect to the exclusive use of your more diminutive wares ... namely, there seems to be a fairly dramatic increase in the presence of stems. Not overly large ones, of course, but by volume, a definite increase in percentage of "inert" material to ... um... "ert" material. Please do not infer this is in any way meant as a disparagement of your fine product. My intent is to inform, not to criticize, in hopes that my observation might only contribute to an improvement of an already excellent consumable.

Thank you.

Yours truly,

A Satisfied Customer

Oh, really?

2005-11-16T21:39:00.001-05:00

Just found this on a "regular" news site:

"The US military on Wednesday acknowledged it might have killed civilians in the Iraqi city of Falluja with white phosphorus munitions during the battle against insurgents a year ago."

This is big news, and people are shocked. Wow. I bet it's even on the T.V. (I finally gave up the filthy habit a few years ago; never felt better!).

Funny...it's been on the web ever since last year, when it happened, along with thousands of photos and videos that never quite seem to make it to the "instant medium" of the glass toilet that passes for entertainment, social life, information, education and news in our twenty=first century Neon Rome, glow(er)ing in the corner of the room. I can't wwait to see what happens when the "depleted" uranium story comes out on CNN and FOX. Or the BBC, more likely...

Web historian/archivists of the distant future! As you read us, do you laugh or do you weep?

The Turning of the Worms

Smile when you say that...

2005-11-15T21:13:00.000-05:00

"Would you like a drink with the sandwich, sir?"

"No, just the BURGER I ordered, thanks."

"If you order the combo you get a medium fries with the sandwich of your choice and a drink for only 34¢ more than the sandwich and fries by themself...", she parrots.

"It's not a sandwich...it's a burger. Just what I ordered, please, to go..."

"Will that be to go or to stay?", squeaks the automaton.

You've been here, no doubt. Remeber those lists where you find out that the average person spends 3.7 days sneezing, 8.21 weeks shitting, and 0.012 days of their life looking at their wristwatches for a second time, because the first time wasn't good enough?

We each get 666 days in the fast food line having human communications and the English grammar system mangled by teenaged and immigrant slaves of The Corporation, slaves who have been trained to call all hamburgers, Fish MuckFillets, Big Mucks, bagels and horrid chicken things, "sandwiches". This is how "counter help" became "customer service associates" and "napkin" became "serviette", a daintier, more frenchified kind of thing (and which in France means, "menstrual pad").

A "sandwich" is edible stuff between two fucking pieces of bread, or on one if you're Swedish, or having a dainty British garden party. It's not a fucking burger, foccacia, fucking pita or anyfuckingthing else. Just fuck off.

This time the corporation has gone to far, but we're gonna get them back. The next time one of those poor slobs who had to BUY their fucking stupid robot uniform for the privilege of feeding people like us sugar-laced, addictive carcinogens and mangling human relations and language (all in one go!) says to you, "sandwich", say in return, "I beg your pardon?"

The robot will beep, "Would you like a drink with the sandwich, sir?"

Just stare it in the eyes and say, "I didn't order a sandwich. Or a drink. I ordered a Big Muck BURGER. To go.".

It will probably say, "They tell us to call it a 'sandwich' ", or, "We're told to call it a sandwich".

Reply, "Who is 'they', son?", or, "By whom?", respectively.

The answer will be the name of the particular business, or "the management/manager".

Say, "Well that's stupid!" really loudly.

The robots are programmed to execute their script to the letter, and are given no training for interventions such as these. Fear, confusion and pain are often the results; these reach management:

"Sir, five different people told me to fuck off and stop calling everything "sandwiches", and everyone gets mad when I ask if they want a drink."

The other arm of the pincer attack:

If one out of every hundred of us eMails or phones The Great Beastly Food Empires and bitches LOUDLY about the low-level, mind-controlling money grab of the last thirty years ("...a drink, ma'am?") and the savaging of the English language by their Corporatese double-babblers, at the very least, these fucking bastards are going to call a boardroom meeting or two to find out why their customer base is rebelling in person and by correspondence about the human cattle drive which has worked so well since Happy Daze. They will perceive it as a great market shift and make unwise strategems. They will not sell so much sugar-laced beef and not so many tallow-laced fries that year. Morale will suffer. These issues will eat up more than 1-2% of the Boardroom's annual productivity.

And this is but one pin in the hairy side of the Foul Beast. Dream on, Brothers and Sisters...dream on...the Revolution begins with a MuckCheerful plastic meal tray quik-dri-epoxied to a formica tabletop. Or two thousand. Dream on!

The Turning of the Worms

A One-Sided Coin

2005-10-25T22:36:00.000-05:00

I ran across this line just now. It's describing the U.S. Democratic Party's seeming unwillingness to take advantage of all of the Republican scandals going on:

"Wouldn't want to upset the Bringer of Pork who makes the Great Herd of Jobs return after the cold winter."

Wow. I never realized it before but it makes total sense:

The Republicans love to talk "fiscal restraint" but anyone with a brain in their head knows they are the Pork Party... they buy their re-elections by pouring money into their local economies. And the Democrats know this. They also know that the Republicans, being a big bunch of greasy, pork-sucking bastards, are criminals and criminals just never know when to say when... it's in their conniving, criminal nature to keep causing more and more shit, until people catch on and toss their evil asses out. Then they vote Democrat. And guess what? The Democrats come in and fix everything... they raise taxes generally to fund all the programs the Republicans gutted, and they *dont'* repeal any of the pork, they make everyone think it was their idea. Win, win.

So why don't they get re-elected all of the time? Because they're into raising taxes, dummy, and Christ knows The Great Unwashed want all of the "oomph!" without any of the "doh!". But more importantly, it's because Demorcats are boring, sniveling wimps and at the end of the day, America is about John Wayne fucking Mao Tse-Tung in the ass, baby!

Plus, while they spend as much, or more, as the Republicans, they don't have the balls to pull all the shit the GOP does to get those payola schemes going and kick-backs rolling in... eventually, all the money dries up and they're not so good at being the bad guys, so you have to get those fucking Republicans back in to start the whole cycle over.

Sigh. Between the U.S., global warming, tsunamis, hurricanes and avian flu pandemics, I can't believe this bloody rock is still spinning!

- g-spot -

Of Thee I Sing!

2005-10-19T21:23:00.000-05:00

A quick calculation on some eDonkey statistics has revealed that anywhere from 600K to one million users are, on average, each sharing 146.275 unique computer files at any given moment.

Of those shared files, I guarantee you, 85% is hardcore pornography.

And STILL, I can obtain a copy of "The Broadway Melody" or "THX1138" with relatively little delay.

God Bless America!

- g-spot -

Constitutional Ratification or Bust!

2005-10-17T21:55:00.000-05:00

In a truthout article about the Iraq constitution thing, wherein it's spun like some magical process bestowed upon the Iraqis as a gift, instead of the slow-motion-train-wreck-about-to-happen that it is, my favourite line :

The announcement that voters in some provinces voted in inordinately high numbers in favor of the constitution follows concerns, publicly expressed by Shiite leaders before the balloting, that the constitution could fail.

"American" Translation:

"We need an excuse to stay there. Clearly, the Iraqis are barely above gorillas in the natural pecking order, so the next of many constitutional referendums will pave the way for many more referendums to come, where, hopefully, eventually, they'll finally see that our way is the better way. I think we should maybe sit tight for another 3, 10, maybe 25 years or so..."

"The Rest of the World" Translation:

"Of course, it wouldn't make sense that the fucking Shiites and the fucking Kurds would turn out in record numbers to ratify a constitution that would essentially give them total control over their (minority) slave masters from yesteryear, the fucking Sunnis! That's just crazy talk!!"

Pave it over or stop talking shit about it! Either way, I'm bone tired of the fucking Middle East! I can't wait for the fucking oil to run out so they can go back to being over-heated Tibetans!

- g-spot -

Evil Is The Root Of All Money

2005-10-11T20:55:00.000-05:00

In an earlier rant, I discussed the media, its failings and its... well, failings. Today I just spotted an advert for an upcoming episode of MSNBC "Countdown". The subject is a discussion of the last 13 terror alerts down U.S.A.-way and how they strangely seemed to always coincide with some political bad-tidings for Our Lord and Saviour, George Dubya.

This is fascinating because it signals yet another "corner being turned" (the Phrase Du Jour). The mainstream, corporate media is uncovering what all of us here in The Outer Limits® have known pretty much since 9/12, that the "terror alerts" were, and are, bullshit. Crowd control. Mass manipulation. Terrorism inflicted by a government onto its own people. That the media is reporting it is a signal that perhaps the long, dark nightmare is almost over.

Nope.

Not it at all.

MSNBC, like all other commercially-owned media agencies, REPORTED the last "terror alert"! What the fuck is up with that? If we know it's bullshit, surely they must know 10 minutes sooner! And then they're putting on an exposé to denounce the dissemination of false information for the bending and shaping of public opinion?! Jeeeezus! It's like rape, except the guy offers to clean up after...

Here's what's happening : the media has clued in to the fact that more than 50% of the U.S. public thinks BushCo is a doublepluscapital-"F"uckup and that many centrist and left-leaning consumers are turning to the Internet and Comedy Central® shows to get "the real story". So they had these focus groups and marketing studies and came to the conclusion that they could go after the kossack crowd by telling them what they want to hear. Doesn't matter if it's true or not, if it changes anything or not, as long as people start cross-posting "so r u gonna watch alert thing?" txtmsgs, viewership will skyrocket.

To put it bluntly : the mainstream media is about to invade the Internet, and I don't mean "ABCnews.com". Let's just say that if I were the slimeball president of a major news organization, I'd have 3 of my top writers posting blog rants on Daily Kos containing very subtle advertising to steer the blogospherinoids my way. Who gives a shit if it's "for" or "against"?... it's all about selling papers, man.

Better yet, just show a promo for a "Dump on Bush" program during a news segment that you know for certain two dozen geeks are digitizing, and it'll race through the 'sphere like lightening ("Hooray! The media is finally on our side!!").

Free advertising.

You gotta hand it to these guys.

- g-spot -

The Forbidden

2005-10-11T14:44:00.000-05:00

No-one's saying it, so I just felt I had to.

No. I didn't "have to". I "wanna". So there.

No-one's mentioning how pissed Allah/The Holy Ghost/The Force is at Uncle Sam and His buddies. And the Rest of Us. Really. Look!

Hurricane Katrina, followed immediately by H.R.H. Rita. Whammo! Into the oil-refining heart of (a) the world's biggest polluter; and, (b) the biggest killer of people over in the "Holy" Land. All at once. Pow! Which Holy Land? Christian, Jewish or Muslim? Or Texas? Doan' matter none; it's all the same bloodbath in the sands of time.

But your avenging, monotheistic deity has been watching all you nasty, sinning little monotheists! She/He/It has been watching you very closely indeed!

Now, India and Pakistan...both of whom have been waggling their nuclear appendanges at each other for the last few years: Gotcha! Whoosh! U2!

O.K. So there's a flaw in my hypothesis; India is largely POLYTHEISTIC.....but they've been ACTING like the rest of the world, vis a vis the contrast between everyone's proclaimed cultural and religious background (rooted in peace, love and all that shite, all around the planet) and our behavior "on the ground", as a species. So there. Shiva's pissed as well. And Reverend Moon, too, probably.

Pakistan let the U.S./N.A.T.O. through its borders to womp Afghanistan, an ongoing battle theatre that has anaesthesically dropped out of the collective T.V. brain of the nations.....

So they got it too: rumble, rumble. Someone else is gonna get it next. Soon.

Yup.

We're probably all gonna get it.

Betcha all of the above is how every freakinsh fundamentalist fuckwad without a life has been thinking 'bout the last year....since The Tsunami, and well before. Remember? Last year? The tsunami that fell off the radar screens of The Great White Media Machine a month or two after it happened. Yeah, well...

Hurricanes, tsunamis (Papua New Guinea 1998...remember? No?), earthquakes (Iran 2003...remember? Hmm...), tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes....

The whole world's media has, in its politically correct wisdom, chosen to ignore the fact that (whether or not you do) a significant number of the human herd/horde who populate this planet DO indeed believe that their chosen Entity of Respect is pissed off at everyone, and the media is afraid to admit it. Or has been ordered not to know. I betcha "They" know what's up, but I betcha "They" don't know what the fuck to do about it either. Maybe that's why the world has chosen to erase our memories after two days. Who knows?

Not the buried Guatamalan Mayans. They fell of the radar after a day and a half. Remember?

Last year we could think back in time a year or two; now it's a day or two. Does this have something to do with the exponential increase in hard drive space and processor speed over the last few years?

Anyhow, I betcha at least 20% of the hairless apes on this planet who have access to a radio, T.V. or newspaper of any kind are walking around with the program running in their heads, "...maybethejudgementmaybethejudgementmaybe....". Wonder what that's gonna do when the next Big Event happens, whether it's natural or human in origin, or a blurring of the two. Sorry: we're not very natural at the moment. Or what all the loony Jesus/Allah/Adonai/Vishnu freaks are gonna think and do when THE Big Event happens, as all our wonderful religions and cultures have self-fulfillingly chosen to prophesy. Gonna be trippy, I bet...

Wonder what the commies in Kim Jong Il's Korea think about the weather and destiny; they've got T.V.'s and opinions just like us. I wonder if they believe in Apocalypse Wow! the way the rest of us do, and what that'll do around the negotiation table, vibe-wise...when THE Typhoon hits, followed by THE Great Drought. Just when everyone else is thinkin' about the same thang. Just curious.

The Turning of the Worms

Curiouser and Curiouser

2005-10-10T11:56:00.000-05:00

I'm as mystified as you are as to the status of the New Orleans refugees... the last I heard they were getting up Barbara Bush's nose in Houston... what with their poorness and blackness 'n all. They can't still be at the Astrodome since the Astros are in the semi-finals of the World Series.

My response is not exactly about the refugees, but is kinda related. A short, but curious conversation took place at a Thanksgiving dinner party Friday night... a fellow there - we'll call him Bob - was telling us that an associate of his (Bob is one of those worldly types who knows Important People in several countries) offered him a chance to go to New Orleans for five years to work on the reconstruction and could make enough money to retire... Bob would be 43. The conversation went on to talk about the fact it wouldn't be Bob who'd make enough to retire, but the sub-contractors and contractors who would be making the huge money... not to mention the fact that one would have to live in New Orleans (gasp!) for five years.

Bob was kind of sheepish when telling us about this opportunity, and there was something that was Not Quite Right about the conversation itself that picked at my sub conscience during and after the dinner... it wasn't until the next day after watching a just Bittorrented episode of Real Time with Bill Maher that it hit me was WAS wrong: A bunch of foreign nationals - in this case Canadians - can go to New Orleans for five years, make big gobs of delicious American dollars, bring 'em all home to pay off bills, build their dream homes and pad their small business' bank accounts while the citizens of New Orleans continue to wander around with nothing - no home, no job, no money... and no opportunity to declare bankruptcy... just that haunting 'What the fuck' expression on their faces.

spooge

Curious?

2005-10-10T01:18:00.000-05:00

I wuz jus' wundrin....

Where are all the "Katrina Refugees"? I know that SOME people have been allowed to go home, but this was a disaster zone that cleaned out an area the size of Great Britain.

So, like, where are the hundreds of thousands of refugees who were in the media two weeks ago? Have they disappeared?

I know that history has disappeared. It's dead. Just watch anything on T.V. or in a newspaper for a week; it'll become a rapidly red-shifting vanishing point within days. Pakistan/India is next.

Kate Moss did coke.

So, again, where are the hundreds of thousands of refugees who were in the media two weeks ago? No-one's saying anything. They've gone.

The Turning of the Worms

Your Friday Sunset - 10/7/05

2005-10-07T17:48:00.000-05:00

Your Friday Sunset - 9/30/05

2005-09-30T18:51:00.000-05:00

Thought I'd start posting one of my infamous sunsets every Friday... this blog needs some colour, mang! (aside from The Turning of the Worm's colourful language, of course)

- g-spot -

Job Peelings

2005-09-30T07:13:00.000-05:00

Ask me about the Trids sometime.

I'll tell you all about the Trids....

I've been in a not-frenzied but intense week of training (through observing, mostly) in/for my new job. Intense but neato: it's sort of like I've gone from the gut-filled trenches of Iran (oops! Iraq!) to the marbled, polished holy halls of the Pentagon, in a nice shiny uniform, with a nice, new shiny microchip...

In computing terms, I've gone from Filemaker to Assembly Code, quite literally. How would you answer this?

Fill in the blank:

__________the poor quality of the hash, the hippies choked and gagged.

a) Because

b) Because they

c) Although

d) Because of

You chose "d", right?

That's NOT because you remembered that when "because" is used as the subordinator at the head of an inverted compound sentence it has to be part of a prepositional phrase, namely, [because of], because in such a construction, the phrase head determines the semantic meaning of a following noun/gerund structure, and not a clause, which would be introduced by the (single) head word provided in option (a), [because], as in,

[Because fuckers sell oil to car drivers, the world suffers]

Prepositions and prepositional phrases are followed by noun or gerund structures, in English.

Likewise, option (c) doesn't work because, [Although] alone, is like [because] in that, as a subordinating word in the English grammar system it links to a whole clause, and not just a noun or gerund structure, or simple phrase:

O.K. [Although the hippies coughed, they got off!!!!]
Not Cool [Although the raw and hacking nature of their coughs, the hippies got off!!!]

In short, if there's no preposition, there has to be a predicate. I think.

Similarly, option (b) does not work because it is [because + they + (predicate) ] at the head of one of those noun structures that are already linked to a predicate to make a sentence:

[Because they hacked and gagged for twenty minutes, the hippies finally got off on the shitty, crumbly hash!!!]

That's why you chose "d". But you didn't remember it; you did it unconsciously.

My noo yob is teaching all the unconscious wiring given above, consciously.

Without lecturing. By guiding them through the exploration above with questions and hints, based on what they do know about the English grammar system. The vocabulary counts for nothing in the exam I prep them for. So for us, it'd be the same as:

Fill in the blank:

____________the schnell ficklity of the snosh, the melgrabs blonked and snezzed.

a) Because

b) Because they

c) Although

d) Because of

Which is exactly the same syntax as the previous example, as you doubtlessly will have already noticed. Your brain had to work a bit differently, didn't it? Now do this example, immediately above, in basic French.

{Tu es Canadien; tu connait "francais elementare!"}

That's what I teach now: the microchip/information structure interfaces of a rather deep and abstract level of the English language system. For a highly artificial, unnatural test.

I teach language hacking to students who wanna hack into English-speaky universities.

I've been doing it for a year-and-a-half in an object-oriented language for which I designed the architecture, operating system parameters and defaults, and user (me!) interface.

Now I work in the secret sub-basement, just one floor or two above the geeks in the white coats who are playing with "0" and "1" on a weird computer with eight keys.

That's what I do now, in the elitest and only school of its type in the 'hood.

That's what I do now.

I need a Guinness.

The Turning of the Worms

A One Followed By A Million Zeros

2005-09-14T22:46:00.000-05:00

Wow.

My brain just got blown, twice, and not in a good way.

I just finished reading the latest dissertation from my partner in crime here at Brainpeelings Central ("The Big Chimp, The Big Easy and The Big Story" below; you should read it) and found myself, not surprisingly, wondering where I'd put my Jack Daniels and razor blades... damn! And you know, one is just no good without the other (poignant blogage, by the way, dood!! I laughed and then I cried and then I laughed at myself for crying).

I was going to post my own wee kudos-open-letter sort of thing, similar to what he wrote in response to my take on the over-the-edge lunacy of the Black Sheep of the Family to the south, and thought it'd be funny to use Google®'s language translator thingy to retrieve some clever-sounding French or German phrases with which to pepper it.

Imagine my shock at discovering the site that hosts this very blog is owned and operated by Google®.

It's not that they're hiding this fact; it says so at the bottom of every page (although it's quite telling that they haven't named the site something like "Bloggle" or "Bloogle"). But I just never noticed. Although I had wondered a couple of times how something so professionally laid out could be given away to the public for no charge or fee and ads. Okay, yes, I had noticed that they recently announced their "hey, include Google® ads right in your blog! Make some dough while you rail against The Man!" campaign. So there's your revenue stream. Everybody's gotta eat.

But then I got a shiver that pretty much tore me a new asshole from my lower extremities all the way up to my cerebral cortex (and beyond!)... Google® knows everything. They're documenting everything (including these very words). And if they're the uber-geeks I think they must be, they've likely got daily backups stored in dozens of underground bunkers throughout the world.

So, be of good cheer! Yes, we're most likely entering what, at best, could be described as The Dark Ages v2.0. But the monks are already hard at work, ensuring that thought and expression don't perish down the well of time. Good for them!

But these guys do realize that one day, there won't be any electricity to run the computers all this shit is stored on, right? I mean, they've allowed for this, haven't they?

Hmm, maybe not. Maybe someone will run off a hardcopy or two by chance and that will be all that's left. Eventually, we'll find the descendants of Google® shareholders copying the original by hand, spending untold hours illuminating the manuscript after the words have ceased to mean anything. And then, when drawing elaborate curly-cues out of boredom has lost its allure, they'll start imposing their own meanings on the words and pictures. Whatever is going on at the time will be what the words and pictures are actually about and it won't be just an elaborate make-work program anymore, but maybe a way out of the dark and into the light. Everything will make sense, finally.

And then the long, arduous struggle to get back to exactly where we are today, will begin again.

- g-spot -

The Big Chimp, The Big Easy, and their Big Story

2005-09-14T19:14:00.000-05:00

So The Great Chimpanzee has taken responsibility, has he? That's like someone borrowing your car and saying, "Dude, don't sweat it; I take FULL responsibility!". Then it comes back to you with a huge scape on the driver's side and the word "responsibility" turns out to mean, "Oh, dude...I'm really, really, REALLY, SOOOO sorry, dude! Just tell your insurance agent it happened in a parking lot." And so YOU end up doing time for fraud the very second you decide to become an apologist for the asshole's lies. But that's not The Big Story.

Isn't this the same smirking goon who's just appointed himself Grand Inquisitor of the Katrina disaster? That's convenient, and rather nice of Ape King: by assigning himself the role of chief detective and IN LESS THAN A WEEK pronouncing himself to be the guilty party ("responsible"), he's saved American taxpayers millions of dollars on a full inquiry. Perhaps he can declare himself an enemy combatant of the American people and get himself shot in front of a firing squad. That's the penalty for Mass Destruction, isn't it? At least "responsible" samurai had the dignity to literally spill their guts over bad decisions; let's see what the American Leader Dude can come up with in terms of Duty and Honour. A lot of the losing generals in Japan got hanged for getting their nation caught up in a multi-theatre war of aggression. Sound familiar? The porcupines are bristling on all sides...

Cuba got whomped with a Category Five hurricane just last September. Although 20,000 houses were destroyed, Papa Fidel got 1,500,000 people to higher ground AHEAD OF THE STORM. No one died. That's what a bunch of cigar chompin', pinko sugar farmers pulled off with only a little communication and a common purpose. Oh, and leftover 1947 Studebakers with next to no petrol in their tanks. If that's all it takes, then why were these crucial elements missing in America, 2005? Go ask FEMA, which has been TURNING AWAY disaster relief en masse: go see www.informationclearinghouse.info on that topic. But that's not The Big Story; I don't want to get bogged down in it here.

Communications and the common purpose have been turned off. While Katrina certainly deserves top billing for drama, her aftermath has obscured a BIGGER story, that of Jose Padilla.

Huh?

Remember him? He's the gang-banger who has been under lock and key in solitary confinement since May, 2002...who has been asking to have charges read against him....you know...he terrorist dude who's off the radar. That dude. He's The Big Story.

"Why am I in jail?"

That seems to be a basic question after three years of incarceration, and yet the state refuses to tell him or his lawyers, citing the fact that Padilla is so dangerous to the public good that to even list his offenses in a courtroom might upset the delicate and terrible balance between the forces of Good and Evil. "Why am I in jail?" is one of the most basic questions in law, in civilised countries like America, the U.K., Canada, Australia....

The Virginia-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit has ruled that the President can indict people without charges and hold them indefinitely, and this power is subject to no oversight or review, let alone open to countermand. In Roman history, this is the point when Caesar was crowned Emperor. Same in Star Wars II. Same in World War Two, with Hitler. Same Big Story, always.

Goodbye Habeus Corpus. Poof. Hundreds of years of guarantees and protections handed down to the English-speaking world since the Magna Carta have just vanished in the U.S. through a court edict against an innocent man whose case has been left unnoticed in the media by Bad Intent, Katrina, and The Death of History four years ago this week (remember when only 3,000 bodies was such a big deal?). And the U.K., Canada, Australia...what do they say? Nothing. they have their own Jose Padillas; the Americans just happen to be the loudest and most overt of the Anglo horde.

America is the loudest, but look! Listen! Nothing in the media about The Big Story....

Wait a minute, there...what was that? Padilla "an innocent man"?!? Yup...that's how the law is required to view him. You and I can think whatever we want about a gangsta who, it seems, signed up for terrorist training courses in Pakistan, but the state is required to not have an opinion until one is proven beyond the shadow of a doubt in a court of law. Or WAS required, that is. Poof. Gone. No requirement of due process of law for citizens, just like the non-citizens in holiday camps like Guantanamo Bay, and "elewhere": the State is The Emperor, and his Fiat.

And Padilla's an AMERICAN CITIZEN.Think about that, all you fucking fucks who've ever supported Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II and any of their fascist, manifest-destiny policies. That's right: you've killed democracy in your own country by electing these evil fucks, you stupid fucks. Even worse are you unmentionable fucks who neither vote, assemble, nor think. You did it; you've gone and destroyed your own Republic, just like the Romans. Congratulations! - now you get to have Caligulas and Neros who strum guitar while New Orleans drowns, and who buy $7,000 shoes while old ladies rot. Cheers! You're in the river of history now. You've chosen unwisely.

And Padilla's an AMERICAN CITIZEN. Non-Americans should be respectful to The Masters, and you goddamn' Frenchies better be quivering in your lacy undies 'bout now: behave yourselves. Don't ever get the fuck caught in Dodge after dark if you're from outta town an' you been kickin' up a ruckus...les'un say there's a pole an' a rope we keep aroun' here fer folks like that....

The Big Story. Think about it: Katrina's tale is nestled inside this Padilla epic; Katrina is the un-Bhagavad Gita within the anti-Mahabharata that has been unfolding since "that fateful, bright, blue September morning" those five years ago. The Prez can have people locked up at will without charges or appeal, as of this week; the Presidential orders which created FEMA give him the tools to do that collectively in times of national disaster; there is no appeal in the courts; and, there are tens of thousands of people who will probably have no place to go for at least a year or two. What do you think happens to them next?

"Nothin': y'all jus' sit right there an' shut the fuck up!"

The Padilla case gives Chimp Boy the right to do anything to people at whim, and he has a lot of poor black folk to deal with right now; they're getting in the way of his war; so, might as well use 'em up fer somethin' good - recruitment or rehearsals for The Really Big Story coming to a planet near you, soon. FEMA chooses who gets to go to the job fair. Non-Americans: What's FEMA called in your "country"? You've got one. We all do.

How do you like the dress rehearsals for Peak Oil, citizen?

Padilla was probably just getting a few courses in how to beat down his competition in the 'hood, terrorist style, and set up a few nifty junk deals with an AK or two thrown in on the side. But he got unlucky: the Feds don't want anyone stepping on their toes in the area of Fourth Generation Warfare and economic control (drugs) within American inner cities, and didn't want him giving anyone else any ideas, hence the lockdown. He was too smart for his own good. But that's as far as I'll go into conspiracy theory tonight.

One guy setting up a "dirty bomb attack"? THAT's a fucking conspiracy trip, man. That sort of shit doesn't go down in real life within a vacuum unless the guy happens to have figured out how to parallel-wire a series of model railroad transformers to a "gizmo" in his bathtub and make Cesium-137 out of aluminum foil; if the Federales know as much as they claim about his plans of doom, O.K. then...where are his buddies? Where's the fucking bomb parts? Padilla was unarmed, and had neither Weapons of Doom nor plans for them. Nelson Mandela WAS busted with terrorist shit, and now he's Ghandi. Think about Mandela, and then think about Jose Padilla. And then think about how a black South African "terrorist" got more due process from the Apartheid state apparatus and police services than a full citizen of The Greatest Show on Earth is getting more than a full decade after Daddy Beast proclaimed "a kinder, gentler America". If you can try the Nazi High Command in full public view at Nuremburg, then surely you can have an open court, and charges, for a dirty little loser from Chicago - those same civilised, sacred formalities that "we" granted those WW II Japanese generals who wound up dangling at the ends of ropes for war crimes; at least they got the ceremony of Justice before their necks were snapped. Padilla gets life inside a silent box. And maybe a white, tiled room and a needle, at the end...

"Justice" and "war crimes" in the same sentence? Not in the last century or so of history books.

Let's not talk about the Tokyo fire bombings of spring, 1945....

....the bombings that claimed more than three times Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.......

...the bombings that not one English-speaking high school student out of a thousand has ever heard about.

And we say that the Japanese write distorted history! We're the victors and, remember, history is written by the.....

That's scary, man.

We've been bullshitted worse than the Soviets ever were; they KNEW it was all shite. We have a free press, and Britney Spears. We lap it up.

The Big Stories. Forests or trees? You choose.

Unless you own a T.V. Then you've probably forgotten how to choose.

So. History is murdered, and there's this Commander in Chief of America who sets up his own commission to investigate government failings and finds out, in under a week, that they're all his fault: he's responsible. The President is guilty as charged, and the uncharged citizen Jose Padilla is...is...

Go about your business, citizen...nothing is happening.

And nothing WILL happen, either in BushMonkey's life, or in Padilla's. Or in the lives of the Gulf Coast refugees, until the Army recruiters and corporate slavemasters show up to offer a way "out".

Go peel some brains with this story at the water cooler tomorrow and see what happens. Probably nothing.

Maybe that's the biggest story of them all in these interesting times.

The Turning of the Worms

Bloggo-spear!!!! Open letter to g-spot

2005-09-11T14:54:00.000-05:00

(To Our Esteemed Readers: Whooo! Whooo! This is an open letter to my colleage, g-spot, who just received a response to his happy September 11th blog, "America Has Lost Its Mind". People don't usually repond to us. Given the vitriolic nature of his invective, and the fact that somebody actually has written back IN SUPPORT of our point of view, I've just had to jump into the fray. Jump down and read g-spot's brainpeelings and his correspondent's comment for context, first)

Dear g-spot,

Right thru th' fuckin' chest, mate!!! Ouch!!! That's what I thought about the puir, wee Americans when I read your bloggage. Sad things...they're not very complicated and might not realise that the Canadian mind sometimes has an obscure Asian bent wherein we say one thing but mean quite another. I'd bet most Yanks wouldn't realise from your brainpeelings that we actually love them, like the big, clumsy family branch that's always knocking things over at the Anglo clan reunion. I don't hate Americans; I just wish they'd stop breaking things. They make us Canucks and Aussies look bad by association.

Wow. What really freaks me out, though, is that you got an almost instant response to that hand grenade full o' rant that you've just lobbed, o great g-spot, and a positive one at that! The reason this scares me is that your correspondent is either:

a) an NSA/CIA liason officer setting up our termination, because we speak The Truth; or,

b) is sincere.

I think in all sincerity that the "sincerity option" is the most likely. And dangerous. Assassinations would only affect you and me, and a small team of killers. As I blogged earlier, we live in global tymz, brutherzz an' sisterzzz!!! Your interlocutor, o g-spot, innocently reveals America's crisis; he/she demonstrates its tragic flaw, its bipolarity. This affects us all.

By the way. were this to be a Canadian respondent replying to a blog-bomb such as yours about good ol' Ad Mare Usque Mari, the Great White (but Multicultural!) North, the comment you've received could also be interpreted as,

c) An ironically-conceived, passive-aggressive dart specifically designed to make us feel uncertain and insecure.

Americans don't get a third choice.

Americans are Bipolar, by design; Canadians have Multiple Personality Disorder, by accident. We're safer; we can shift around more. We've got more options and maneuvering space. Our Karma is more evenly distributed. Parts of it are just as bad, if not worse than in the States: go ask a Cree family living in northern Manitoba if they love the Queen. But we're more middle-of-the-road. That's a multiparty system for you. And we don't worship politicians and have cute little military marching anthems composed for their official functions. We intrinsically distrust ALL of the bastards, and then just try to get on with the ol' 9-5.

If you're gonna play in the road, dancing on the white line like a Canadian may seem chickenshit, but it's safer - it's our Anglo-French paradox at work. Like in New Orleans. We're not THAT different, as everyone knows, but we're also VERY, VERY different in so many ways. For one thing, we have a tiny, wee, deadly military that won't be able to do shit if we ever REALLY piss anyone off, so we try to step on fewer toes. If we were bigger, we'd probably get ourselves into some serious fucking trouble. Small is beautiful. Americans have Big Energy and hop from lane to lane with gay abandon, and then get surprised when they and/or their playmates get squashed by Mack trucks. Vietnam...Iran...New Orleans....

One can't fund a multi-theatre war machine and build a quarter-million emergency housing units all at the same time. Nor invent a few hundred thousand jobs out of thin air: gubbamint doesn't do that in the Anglo world - yer on yer own, baby! In China, everyone would just be given orange, paper overalls and a fake, plastic construction hat, and a job working on the Three Gorges project (speaking of catastrophic floods in the making....)

Something's gonna give.

As a Canadian, a positive American response to your brainpeelings is already making me feel uncertain and insecure. But then, as most Canadians are closet fatalists, I realise that the worst option is probably the one in operation, so I can relax, and what your commentator is actually revealing is (b) the fatal flaw in the core of the American diamond, itself, (i.e. "sincerity and intellect" living two blocks away from "crazy shit") and not a sudden American capacity for handling ironic, passive-aggressive Canadian wittiness and intelligence. We may be humble, but we're still better at subtlety - mostly by historical accident. We confuse ourselves more than the Yanks do, and this keeps us safer. The fatal, tragic flaw in the U.S. of which I speak though, is, to wit:

"There are doods like this, and doods like BushMonster, sharing the same "Worlds Bestest Country"

The more different chemical elements are from each other, the more explosive their reaction is when they are combined. America, by allowing almost anything within its founding philosophy, allows self-destructive chaos. Children who grow up without manners and rules turn into little maniacs. Children who've learned the rules grow up into adults who learn how to experiment with them safely. You writer IS sincere, I believe, and s/he unknowingly reveals the imminent demise of her/his Shining City on a Hill through his/her insouciance and good-naturedness: at the other end of the rainbow, Condolezza Rice was buying shoes and taking in a musical while the Gulf Coast drowned. This sorto thang is gonna split everything right down the fucking middle; Canadians operate somewhere in the sodium-yellow band of the electromagnetic spectrum of politics and social behavior, and blur out from there a bit into the orange and green frequencies, but the Yankee Doodles, as you so aptly term them, reach all the way from infrared to ultraviolet, doodling all over the world with cruise missiles and IMF "relief" packages, and thinking in terms of sound energy and gamma rays...cowboys with space-based weapons platforms, and Gideon Bibles. The American Spectrum. Weird metaphor, but it's true, and their energy is getting stretched mighty thin. They, not us, are the most internally multicultural country, that Land O' Plenty where veterans starve on the streets, and where Mormons and S/M leather clubs compete for space. Sure, the Amerikkkan elite control 98% of everything, but the poor think that they have a right to try to have the same, and to bear arms, so maybe the Ol' American Way will win out in the end. We can only hope. But only after the contrasting colours of Star-Spangly New Rome go to war with each other. It will be ugly. People like your correspondent and Barbara Bush can't share the same borders forever, just like a mongoose and cobra, or an owl and a crow, won't share the same cage. There can only be one, Highlander!!!!...

...unless, that is, the shitwave that's going to come out of Karina over the next couple of years can be harnessed, hydroelectrical-like, by the large percentage of real Americans who, like your commentator, have the capacity to recognise how their freedom loving country has been hijacked by Big Power. America is the most creative nation the world has ever seen, in a broad sense. Perhaps the creativity of Average Americans can usurp the conservative backlash to the civil rights movement that has swung the pendulum so far to the right over the last forty years. If Americans can take control of the helm, perhaps Katrina can be the engine of change. Sad to say, but within disaster lurks opportunity.

Mao Tse Tung claimed and proved that you only need 10% of a population on your side to have a completely successful revolution, and he did it with illiterate peasants. Amurikkka's going to do it to herself with television. And anger and denial. And dissenting viewpoints on Fox and CNN. And revolution is a constitutionally-guaranteed right, South o' the Border, so the rest of the planet is just going to have to draw back, cowering, waiting to see what Big Brother is going to cook up next. I just wonder how the tiny Canadian Armed Forces are going to keep all the refugees out when it happens. Maybe it'll happen in the middle of winter during a fuel crisis and we won't have to worry too much. Like Russia, we're a very bad place to attempt to invade, in any way, for purely ecological reasons.

The second American revolution WILL be televised, but it will not have leaders, unlike in the 60's. It will just happen. Let's call it Fifth Generation Warfare.

The Turning of the Worms

America Has Lost Its Mind

2005-09-11T07:03:00.000-05:00

I'm Canadian and I'm not proud of it, or at least not proud in the way that Americans are proud. Pride is a deadly sin, don't forget, and humility is the virtue with which to counter it. We Canadians have got humility up the wazoo, man!, we wrote the bloody book on humility! (and no, we're not proud of that either). So it is with all humility that I simply have to say : Yo! Yankee Doodles! You have lost your fucking minds and I think you should just decline like a good little empire, take your ball and go home.

Seriously, you're doing no one any good at all. You're greedy, self-absorbed and utterly dangerous. You're 100% delusional about your role in the world and your power to affect positive change (in fact, I'd go so far as to say that you see no value in affecting positive change in the first place). You honestly think the world envies you and wants to be like you and that your opinions matter but really, you're like a high school cheer leader who is heady with self-importance while oblivious to the fact that guys just want to get their hands on your tits.

You choose "leaders" who rape and pillage you, who treat those of you in the bottom 98% income bracket with utter contempt, who lie to your face in ways that would infuriate a 5 year old, and you have parades in their honour to celebrate them! What the fuck is wrong with you?!? Are you suffering from Stockholm Syndrome or something? (http://www.geocities.com/kidhistory/trauma/stockhol.htm)

To be fair, this is nothing new; it's the essence of empires. I imagine the poorest wretches of the Roman Empire saw themselves as far superior to the poor wretches unlucky enough to reside outside the Emperor's loving embrace, and in the case of the Western World, this is mostly true; a "poor" person here can't imagine the horror real poor people throughout the globe live with day in and day out. But nothing lasts forever and you are no exception. The world has been grabbing and sucking on your tits for quite awhile now but the net result is that you've developed quite a skanky reputation and pretty soon, no one will want to fuck you.

So on this day, 9/11, as you commemorate the Greatest Tragedy to Befall Mankind Ever, keep in mind that the rest of the world is cringing in embarrassment... you're the drunk uncle at the wedding whom everyone regrets inviting; we're just waiting for you to pass out so we can get on with things.

- g-spot -

The Rebirth of History? Happy 9/11, Katrina.

2005-09-10T22:09:00.000-05:00

Everyone in the media is scrambling over themselves to say that Hurricane Katrina will be/is the turning point for a re-examination of "America's Soul", whatever that is. The thing is, the "soul" or "essence" of a nation doesn't reside in one thing or place like a gallbladder or spleen, so the examination is going to be rather hard, as it involves a whole complex of fuck-ups ranging from the shitheads in government who, over decades, ignored a catastrophe in the making, to all the selfish losers who had spare vehicle space and who drove past the abandoned masses, to the lunatics who are shooting at rescue helicopters because they're pissed off. And especially the media, who have bestowed upon themselves the laurels of democratic truth, and who devote all their wavelengths to vegetables like Terri Schiavo and Paris Hilton over the years while a nation rots on the inside and outside. When the earthquake in Kobe overwhelmed the likewise unprepared Japanese government a few years ago, the Yakuza (mafia) stepped in with all their heavy construction equipment in what was perhaps the best public-relations ploy ever executed by a criminal organisation...but the point is, for whatever reason, they felt they had to do it. Practically nobody does shit for anybody else in the States.

Freud toured the U.S. once and left declaring that the whole country was neurotic and "shouldn't have happened."

Something I've noticed over the past couple of weeks is that everyone from The Prez all the way down to the lowest "refugee" feels that someone else "should have done something about it", "it" meaning Mother Nature getting pissed off and throwing an enormous heat-transfer mechanism named Katie at the nation most responsible for global warming. This blame game comes from people floating past their floodplain and shoreline underwater houses and underwater SUVs and underwater lawn tractors in their Wal-Mart canoes, over marshy, subdivided land that pre-Columbian Indians never occupied permanently on account of the annual hurricane season. Blame it on the French for building a city there. But ah, there's the media rub; by focussing on New Orleans, the Great Eye makes us look away from the big elsewhere, the disaster zone covering four states, and not just one city. This is a disaster area the size of Great Britain. Make sure to blame the fucking media, too, who've ALL sucked the dick of Big Power over the last four years leading up to this anniversary day of History's Death, September Eleventh, and for long before as well. O public, make sure to fuck the fucking media, for being the slave and mouthpiece of the war machine that grew out of the ashes of The Greatest Media Event The World Has Ever Seen. Happy September 11th, 2005. Kill your T.V.s or you feed the beast. Learn to read again. And to speak and listen. They've boxed our minds for 50 years. Millions of dollars got diverted from Louisiana flood control to help pay for Fallujah/etc. 150,000 troops and Guardsmen could've come in handy right about now, too...

The media did that. All of that, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Vietnam, etc. etc. They did NOT just "let it all happen" or just "report" it. They actually DID it for their fucking overlords. They've puked in our brains all our lives.Think of that the next time you give the cunts money for cable T.V. and watch their brainpuke while the first world eats the third world. Peel your brain instead...get wired and turn on. Blame yourself if you've never thought of what you'd do in a crisis, and how you'd respond to those around you.

Or blame it on the morons who take no political interest in their own juggernaut, ooops, I mean "country", and who in fact have no right to point their fingers at the gubbamint, having decided as conscious adults to be compltely uninvolved in its operation or critique. But you can't blame it on the Monkey Prez; he doan' know no better, from nature nor nurture. Look where he learned it from - Barbara Bush has just toured the Astrodome and had the following comment reported this morning:"...and so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underpriveleged anyway, so this - this (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them...". The Great Chimpanzee sucked on that, whilst a babe.

And let's also blame weak-kneed losers who bleat from the sidelines that the government JUST HAS TO find 400,000 jobs and housing for a dispossessed coastline. How does the state's record on job production look over the last few years in Amurikkka? Let's get real. Wasting any breath on pipe dreams in the face of a tragedy of this magnitude is nearly criminal. The nasty truths have to looked at and dealt with, in no half measures. Situations like Katrina can eventually trigger phenomena as large as The New Deal and the Monroe Doctrine; politics follows nature. Amerikkka is going to have to do something radical to deal with the mess, and this administration has proven itself to be pretty radical in just about any area requiring foresight and historical sensitivity. They're not all goin' home by Christmas.

Just about the only place any of these countless dispossessed is going to find a way out of the hurricane's concentration camps is by getting work in a nice, warm munitions plant or in the military. The former has been in recent years one of the very few true growth sectors in the U.S. financial-industrial complex, and the latter is desperate for recruits. Most Amurikkkan youths currently weigh the option of slogging through destroyed cities fighting for survival in a Mad Max shooting gallery to be a poor career choice after watching the last few years of slaughter in Afghanistan and Iraq on the tube - at least until Katrina. But if it's happened to you once, say in The Big Easy, why not get PAID to do it to someone else in their city? Better than meeting Barbara Bush in the Astrodome in the stink of shit and the wail of babies, at any rate. Watch for the recruiting angle....

Public housing for nearly half a million folks? No fuckin' way. Never.

Brothers and Sisters of the Planet, this may be it: The Big Fucking Tipping Point of Tipping Points. Katrina is the event when the most powerful country in the history of our planet will have had to make the decision to become, collectively and institutionally, either totally humane or fascist. This big one doesn't go away, unlike Uncle Osama. This one sits in its tens of thousands in concentration camps inside and around major cities until.....until...what? History has shattered and blurred in the blender of the last few years' spin, but the reality on the economic ground of this disaster makes this something beyond interpretation: the whole world is going to feel this. The War of Terror will let drop its curtain to show the stage of this REAL drama. Iraq and Afghanistan have coughed up less than 2,000 U.S. bodies, and look what that's done to the ratings of The Great Chimpanzee and his cohort. Americans have no stomach for disaster and war on their own turf. Who does? But who's also responsible for over 1,000,000 deaths by combat and attrition in Iraq and elsewhere over the last decade and a bit? If there was ever anything a radical, loony Islamist fringe needed to fuel their terrorist ravings and plans, this is it. This is the big call from Above. This WAS NOT "Amurikkka's Tsunami"; that event, last year, wiped out poor people, and was felt mostly locally. The nightmare of the Gulf coast is a truly global event. Poor countries are offering aid to the King of Nations. And not such poor ones, of course. Canadian disaster relief teams were on the ground five days before the U.S. military; the Canadian military was already assembling and offering a naval flotilla and packing emergency supplies before the Pentagon was able to relay its needs and plans up North. I bet that quite a few of the Louisiana French, who originally hail from French Canada, are gonna remember that one for years to come.

The sad thing to say is that in the end the citizens of the U.S. DO matter more than those in Indonesia or Sri Lanka, from an economic point of view: someone in the middle of Nebraska consumes about 25 times more resources than the average human being on the globe today, and as such, is responsible for powering 25 times more of the planetary economy. 400,000 destitute Americans is the same as 10,000,000 elsewhere, on average. This hits seafood restaurants in Canada, tire factories in Mexico, cell phone makers in South Korea...aid to North Korea, if ever....

Amerikkka couldn't get 100,000 people safely out of a fully-predicted disaster zone; the whole world is going to feel the effect of its total inability to deal effectively with an aftermath four times that size for years to come.

This is thunderfuck.

The Turning of the Worms

My God, The Impotent Omnipotent

2005-09-04T14:21:00.000-05:00

I've been rifling through news reports, blogs and the like, accumulating detail on the latest catastrophe to hit the United States, namely Hurricane Katrina. If I were an American, especially a poor Southerner, I'd certainly think that maybe the Apocalypse® decided to start itself in my backyard. Of course, Americans tend to think of themselves as the center of the Universe, so I wasn't too shocked to hear the disaster described as "our tsunami", although someone should maybe remind them that the number of people simply affected by this "tsunami" was roughly the number of people killed in the one they're comparing theirs to.
In any case, it's still a disaster the likes of which I personally haven't seen in this part of the world in my lifetime and it got me thinking about God, back to the age-old question: "If God really existed, why does He let things like this happen? Why create so much astounding beauty and then stand idly by while it's destroyed?" None of the answers to this question, including that we are somehow being punished for our sins, have ever made sense to me... it seems to me that only an Entity filled with malice would treat His creations with such ambivalence.

But then something occurred to me : what if there really is a God, and He does exist, but He doesn't actually have much power or control over His creation? Maybe His forte was invention, not maintenance. Anyone whose ever had their own business knows how easy it is to get it going but a couple of years down the road, the daily grind is enough to make you want to pack it in and take up a career in ditch-digging. What if He's not so good at the Big Stuff, like intervening on behalf of entire populations and smiting their enemies, but tries to keep busy anyway by helping out where He can? You know, like dropping a $10 bill in the gutter for you to find, or having a really cute girl appear in front of you at the grocery store check out just when you're feeling a little down? Seriously, if this were the case, I think I could definitely get into religion. I mean, an incompetent but well-meaning God is better than no God, right? And if everyone bought into this idea, then we'd all have to admit that we have to take care of ourselves and stop being so damn lazy, since we'd know no one is going to be cleaning up our shit for us. At the same time, we wouldn't feel so lost and despairing, thinking we're nothing more than phenomenally unlikely chemical reactions.

Oh, and in this new religion, there is still a Heaven and a Hell; Heaven is exactly the same as here but you can eat anything you want and you don't get fat, and Playstation 2's only cost $5. Hell? Unfortunately, it's just exactly the same as here (hey, whaddya' want for nuthin'?!?)

So remember, next time you roll doubles and land on Boardwalk, that was no chance toss of the dice; that was God, doing His bit to brighten your day!

- g-spot -

Pacific Rimjob Party

2005-08-23T23:37:00.000-05:00

Waaalll....y'all know...

That Yuan-thing is getting kind of interesting.

For the last five years I've been bitchin' about the Commie Menace, and I'm glad other people are noticing. I started to get worried when I started seeing the same ticket prices on manufactured articles that I'd seen in the early 70's ; given the amount of inflation since then, it's a weird boon. So you're a pinko government. So you:

1) Fuck your workers by turning them into slaves. Political prisoners are, of course, ideal fodder for "re-education through labour" camps;

2) You wait for the assholes in charge of North America to destroy their own manufacturing sector with deregulation and "free" "trade";

3) You wait for the assholes in charge of North America to destroy their Free Trade Agreement just as oil is peaking;

4) You then (i.e. "watch for it!") start or wait for a trade war with America, and when things get nasty, you put a $300% tariff on textiles and vinyl goods, destroying your own manufacturing sector (see below). A $4.50 shirt at WalMart is now a $15.50 shirt, like it was twenty years ago. People stop throwing stuff away, and remember what a needle and thread kit are for. Whoops! That needle and thread kit has a label which reads, "Made in China"! That'll be $5.50, please. You make sure prices are kept just low enough to ensure that your warehoused goods will slowly dribble into the American market, and so that the Amerikkkanskis won't be able to start up their factories again.

Actually, keep prices low enough to fuck the Koreans and Mexicans, too.

5) The Americans fire back. The resulting trade war destroys commerce in China. Except, only about 4% of China's economy is internal; most people live in the country and feed duck shit to their Bok Choi, so they'll have something to eat next month. THEY'RE fine. Remember? Mao had a PEASANT revolution, the thing Marxist-Leninism said was impossible; the "proletariat" is the INDUSTRIALISED labour class. You starve the proletariat and their capitalist-running-dog urban overlords, the new Chinese "middle class", right the fuck out of Beijing/Peking and Urumchi. Millions die of starvation and poverty-vectored disease in cities. The birds start dropping first.

China will take over the world when it figures out how to terminate 10% of its population overnight. Probably this:

a) The above;

b) A conventional war (India?) to take care of the huge surplus of sexually-frustrated, aggressive young men the state's "one family; one child" policy has wrought;

c) The hydrogen bombs stashed under the Three Gorges Dam(n);

d) Birdflu

The Renaissance happened because 1/3 to 2/3 of everyone around you back then died screaming, with black "buboes" erupting from their armpits and groins. Remember the corpse-gatherer in Holy Grail?

"Bring out yer dead!...."

But you got all the stuff that the dead guys used to own.

The New Rich of China will be lynched by their peasant brethren, who will eat their livers and prosper (it happened in the Cultural Revolution). The idle factories will be nationalised, their warehouses opened to the starving masses - mass re-industrialisation will occour in a way that is primarily geared to internal consumption...fuck the West! With a little re-collectivization here and retooling there, Chinese industry will be ready to provide 5'-wide woks for collective kitchens that no-one in the West will want to buy, nor which could be used in the average kitchen over here. Same for the tiny, little Mao costumes with the bum all in the wrong place for us. And the wee sandals. They'll have all the shit they need, and we'll have fuck all.

And when their millions die off, the survivors will be so horrified that they'll swallow the bait, hoot, line and sinker that "capitalism didn't work...look at all the disasters it brought!" in a kind of commie 9/11 that allows the state to hypnotise the masses into slavery. Watch for a second great Commie revolution to take place, coming soon to a Pacific theatre (of war) near you! The state will become the sole capitalist.

I keeps tellin y'all...Russian or Chinese, doan' matter...."THEY"'ve become a fucked up version of capitalism, and WE'RE going to become a fucked up version of communism. It's all in the plan.

The Turning of the Worms

The Media Is The Massage

2005-08-22T20:07:00.000-05:00

I hate to be the Prophet of Doom N' Gloom (who am I kidding? I love it! I roll around in it like a dog rolling around in a dead animal's carcass!) but I was just flipping through some blog posts and news articles detailing the meteoric fall of Dubya's approval ratings. Don't get me wrong; this is a good thing, a very good thing. But the first thing I thought when I saw one of those graphs that show him at 51% approval in January and 36% approval today is : "Hey, what's different? What's happened to make his numbers plummet? What awful thing has he done in the intervening months to cause this?!?" The answer is nothing. Nothing has happened since January that didn't happen in the 3 years prior to January. In fact, it's fair to say that it's pretty astounding that he could have pulled the shit he did in those 3 years and wind up with 51% approval, and that things only started to go bad when, well, when nothing happened.

Soldiers keep getting blown away for no discernible reason but they don't even make single-line links on news sites anymore. And no one remembers who the fuck Saddam or Osama are. And even the British bombings were covered like a hurricane forecast that turned out to be overcast with a few showers. Okay, something did happen : Karl Rove. And when he stopped being Flavour of the Picosecond, Cindy Sheehan. What do these two have in common? The media. In the last few months, the media has smelled blood in the water and has shifted gears. Why? Because they can see the tide turning better than anyone and when the balance tips, they're front and center with poison pens ready to strike. Not because they too have suddenly understood how horribly they've been duped... they've never been duped. They just go with what works to sell newspapers. Doesn't anyone remember the extreme political correctness wave from 10 years ago? Wasn't that just the liberal equivalent of the shrieking "Save the Family" right wing crazies we hear about now? There was no end to the coverage on that crap and it wasn't Republicans pushing it.

But what does it say when 15% of the U.S. public can just change their mind for no more reason than the media is telling them to change their mind? It says this: nothing will change, ever, since such a huge chunk of the public can be made to dance so easily at the end of a string. It doesn't matter if Dubya goes down in flames, or who replaces him, Republican, Democrat, Green Party, aliens from Alpha Centauri... the Media is the puppet-master and the Great Unwashed are the stupid dopes that will believe anything they're told.

Knowing this is not really depressing, but knowing this is how it's always been and is how it will always be, is.

Have a nice day!

- g-spot -

Fifteen Years After: A critical review of World War Four

2005-08-08T19:52:00.000-05:00

So, exactly sixty years ago, before I was writing this, there were tons of people in Nagasaki wondering, "Whatthefuck!!!" because Hiroshima had just been obliterated. By the time you are reading this, exactly sixty years earlier their faces had already been burnt into the bottoms of their breakfast rice bowls by a flash brighter than the sun. Happy August 8th. Maybe we should recognise this as the International Day of Suspense.

Maybe I'm thinking about this because I ran into two separate Japanese friends today. Sixty years ago, they were "THEY", the Yellow Horde.

Whenever one is dealing with "They", it should be borne in mind that "They" are the sneakiest fucks around, and "They" will resort to chicanery, deceit, murder and mayhem in pursuit of "Their" heinous ends. So we have to fight fire with fire. We gotta get heinous on "Their" asses before "They" do it to "Us".

Except, of course, that there is no "they" and "us" when it comes to radioactive fallout; we all have measurable decay products left in our bones from atmospheric testing, all those years ago.

This "kick they asses!" philosophy, however, was the spirit of the times six decades ago, when the newspapers proclaimed that the "Military Target" at Hiroshima had been destroyed. The same thing had happened to the "military targets" in Dresden, of course, and at the world's largest massacre, the Tokyo fire bombings in the spring of 1945, significant horrors which have become erased from the collective historical and moral consciousness under the shadow of a mushroom cloud. You don't need nukes to do very bad things. They just help a lot.

Still, it's incumbent upon the user of nukes to prove to his public that a device which can burn the skin off half a human from three miles away is actually a Force of Good. That's where the "military target" moniker comes in handy, if one is justifying the atomic slaughter of Japanese civilians. Which, as history is starting to demonstrate, was more of a means for Truman to kick-start the Cold War than a way of ending the Pacific War. Japan was fucked; they were distilling trees as fuel. After Midway, it was game over. But that's just a series of entries in Truman's war cabinet record, and not a grounds for debate (anymore), so let's move on. And "terrorism" is just the new peril, same as the old peril...so...

Kosovo. Iraq. Afghanistan. Iraq. Yes, that's Iraq twice. If you conduct a water cooler pool tomorrow, on "Nagasaki Day", you probably won't get the exact, correct response to the question:

"How, exactly, are these places like Japan in August, 1945?"

You'll probably hear, "They've all been fucked with bombs and guns and the other joys of war, courtesy of the U.S. and her allies", seeing as how Japan isn't and has never been high on the list of countries with Muslim populations. All these others are heavily Muslim, however. But that's not it.

Yes, that's right; they've all been "military targets" over the last little while. Yes, that's getting "hotter".

But noooo...that's not quite it yet. It's not just the "war" or "military target" things. Go check the levels of background radiation in these places for a little revisit to the balmy, glowing Pacific shores of yore, sixty years ago. Or, just google the phrase "depleted uranium" for over 600,000 pages of information...or...if you're into a more esoteric nightmare on the Web, google for, "Uranium Oxide" and "Battlefield", together, to get the real rap. Just in case you hadn't noticed.

What you'll find is some real grist for the chatter mill of that water cooler in the period between Nagasaki Day and September second, the day Japan actually formally surrendered. I suggest we call it "Nuclear Month", out of nostalgia. Here's the gist: the United States and her allies has found that "Depleted" Uranium is the primo tool for the omnicidal clearing of political, economic and military "hotspots". Like Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. And "hot" they are, to use an expression that's fallen out of use for the effects of radioactive decay.

Uranium, as we learned from CNN back in the good ol' First Gulf War, makes great, heavy-duty tank shielding, and as it turns out, it's a groovy death substance when used in missile warheads and other toys of mayhem. In Kosovo 34 tons of Uranium-238 munitions were used, as admitted by the U.S.; in 1991 in the Gulf War, between 325 to 900 tons (depending on whether you're listening to the Pentagon or not, respectively); and, in Gulf War Part II, an estimated 2200 tons of U-238. Afghanistan is another recent beneficiary of this improved Nuclear Age.The sources for this highly flaky, conspiritorially-minded data, should anyone ask you, comes from the 2003 reports by the U.N. Environmental Program on Yugoslavia and similar NGO publications over the last ten years or so. Kill your T.V. and mainline Google, instead. Anyway....

That's four nuclear wars that have gone completely unnoticed in the international media. In 1990 the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) estimated that if 50 tonnes of DU were to be used in the Gulf it would cause an extra 500,000 cancer deaths. Using this UKAEA estimate in conjunction with the supposed amounts of U-238 released into the biosphere by military actions, as per the figures above, it can be estimated that around 25,250,000 deaths should result. That's around the population of Iraq. The test group for this Peak Oil depopulation programme was the legion of 700,000 American soldiers (and their allies) in Gulf War One who fought for mere weeks, but amongst whom more than 240,000 are on permanent medical disability. Over 11,000 are dead. That's a matter of public record. And, that's the tip of the iceberg: the grisly catalogue of birth defects, cancers, et al can be found, yet again, with a little intelligent googling.

Have you noticed in the mainstream media this week that "everyone" is unhappy with "They", over in Iran and North Korea, because "They" want to develop nuclear power for ostensibly peaceful purposes? "They" are lying, we're told, and should probably be "pre-emptively" nuked with small yield tactical hardware. U-238 provides options. That's one of the charms of DU, isn't it? As neither a fission nor fusion atomic armament, it slips through the cracks of definition, and blurs the line between 'conventional' and 'nuclear' warfare. You don't need a towering mushroom cloud to apply WMD diplomacy anymore; you just need to spray a curtain of ceramic uranium oxide death from a few A-10s. Political power proceeds from the glowing of a barrel of nuclear waste...apologies to Mao Tse-Tung.

Maybe we should have International Nuclear Hypocrisy Month, instead.

The Turning of the Worms