(In case you haven't figured it out already, posting will be sparse and/or silly until I feel motivated to attend to the site. Right now I'm more in the mood to play the trumpet.)
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January 02, 2004
(In case you haven't figured it out already, posting will be sparse and/or silly until I feel motivated to attend to the site. Right now I'm more in the mood to play the trumpet.) January 05, 2004
January 06, 2004
And now: something I find peculiarly annoying.
Recently I've had to travel to Queens every other week, using the familiar R line, and I have experienced anew the ever-changing parade of advertisement posters that line the station walls. And I have become fascinated and irritated by the monkey-like idiocy of Luis Jimenez and Moonshadow. Here: let's look closer, shall we? I'm not a part of LA MEGA!!!!'s demographic (and you must shout LA MEGA!!!! in a Spanish accent every time you read it), so maybe I'm missing something here. Clearly, LA MEGA!!!! 97.9 FM is one of those stations that gives you piles of cash if you can work your primate fingers fast enough to dial in to the station at just the right time. But what they hell is up with these people? Jimenez looks like he's having an orgasm as he is subsumed beneath piles of LA MEGA!!!! cash. Moonshadow also looks like he's having one in the background there, although he seems to be a bit farther along in the process. And...Moonshadow? What the hell kind of radio moniker is that? Moonshadow. Does he look like a "Moonshadow" to you? Moonshadow is a name for Cat Stevens songs, New Age Boutiques, and Wiccan wanna-be witches, not graying morning-show sidekicks trying to be hip in the burgeoning Spanish-language radio market with their curved baseball cap-brims and their scruffy goatees that make them look fat. Every time I see this poster--and it's everywhere--I just want to boot each of them in the face. I am very pleased that they have been repeatedly humiliated via appropriately placed graffiti-penises. For some reason, these two are even more annoying the the endless parade of genetically engineered blowjob dwarfs that Butch Belair has designed to sell Steve Madden's shoes. Goddamn freaky mutant shoe-selling demon elves...everywhere! Everywhere! EVERYWH-- My goodness. Terribly sorry. Uh...anyway, those radio guys, they're sure dumb-looking. I have to go and find my medication. January 07, 2004
From this, we may gather four facts:
January 08, 2004
I gots da water on my brain And I got no forwardin' address I'ma strange man --Blind Frankie Meringue
January 09, 2004
Quite an adventure! Reminds me of the time me and Jack were stuck up in that cabin in Canada, just below the Arctic Circle...Jack went outside to take a leak and I had to rescue him when he froze himself to a tree. Those were the days... At any rate, I'm once again typing on a full-size keyboard on a fully-powered PC, and the handy little battery-powered blogging device reclines happily in its cradle, lounging and soaking up juice for its battery. But still...I will keep the candles handy...and the beef jerky...and the shotgun...no telling when this village will become a frontier of survival...the tooth-against-tooth struggle for fuel and firewood...former neigbors coming to steal the wood of my deck to heat their frozen bodies...breaking into my shed looking for gasoline...back off, man! Keep back! I'll use this gun, swear to god! Stay away from my jerky! Buncha savages...it's all a thin veneer, oh yes, we knows that...when it comes down to them or me, man, they better watch out...I'm gonna eat those cats, nobody else...just you wait...
Well. It's 9PM. About 15 degrees outside. Very dark, very cold. And so, naturally, the power's gone out. This of course gives me a great opportunity to use my cell phone/PDA/camera/hot air balloon. I've got a nifty little application that turns the entire touchscreen into a small landscape-oriented keyboard, which I'm now typing on in the aforementioned cold and dark, two-fingered. That's right...near as we can figure, he was still blogging when the wolves came through the window, poor bastard. It's a bit laborious. The keys are very small, my fingers are big, and because it's a graphical keyboard there's no tactile feedback whatsoever. Or maybe that's because I can't feel my fingertips anymore. Ah, well. At least the cats won't starve. And now, I'm off to play trumpet by candlelight. Which sounds cooler than it is...the votives on the edge of my desk just spewed a torrent of molten wax onto my pant-leg. January 12, 2004
In 2003, the Federal Reserve's budget for printing and distributing new currency rose 18.5%, to $510.3 million. Most of that increase is due to the higher billing rate for the newly-redesigned $20 bill. The old $20 note cost about 68 cents to produce. The new design of the $20 bill costs 99 cents, a 45% increase. Some of that cost was for "public education," so that the Reserve could tell us taxpayers all about the shiny new currency with its peach and pale blue tones, its color-shifting ink, its special hidden portraits of Andrew Jackson and its unrelenting hostility to counterfeiters. The Federal Reserve also spent $2.9 million on its counterfeit deterrence program in 2003. And what, pray tell, did we taxpayers get for all this? Nothing, apparently, that couldn't be defeated by anyone with a scanner and Adobe Photoshop. At the request of the Federal Reserve and various important banker-type persons, Adobe secretly inserted 3rd-party code into its Photoshop software that will not allow you to open any file that contains an image of US currency: The U.S. Federal Reserve and other organizations that worked on the technology said they could not disclose how it works and would not name which other software companies include it in their products. They cited concerns that counterfeiters would try to defeat it. Sort of like they've defeated every other anti-counterfeit measure, despite the millions spent by the Reserve. Hey, why should a government be responsible for securing its own money supply? Let's give the private sector the tools to do it! At the expense of the consumer! In a really sneaky way! Great! We should have thought of this before. I'm with Doctorow on this one (mark this date: that's a very rare occurrence). In other news: Crane, manufacturers of high-quality paper products and suppliers of currency stock to the Federal Reserve, announced today that attempts to photocopy currency onto any of its high rag-content papers would result in the explosion of that paper. January 13, 2004
Billy FidgetEvery night after the lights are out, I say "Lord, help me do this! I got nothin'. I'm an empty bottle o' vino." And every morning when I wake up, I say 'Lord, help me do this! I got nothin'. I'm a cashed bowl.' And the Lord, he say to me, "Billy, I just set you up and watch you go. You like a tin soldier to me. Just do what you got to do and you'll be all right." And I say "Lord, that ain't very helpful." And he say, "It's real simple: gravity works. Fuck up and you fall down. Keep your balance and you move ahead." And so I say, "Man, I coulda dug that in the Inspirational section at Barnes and Noble. What's the point of bein' a prophet if you don't get no special insight?" And he say, "Yeah, but everybody else has to buy a book. You get to hear it from Me." --Billy Fidget
Ah, the amusing predictability of the Bushsessed. I'm just fascinated by this sort of behavior, which is good, because I can look at it and be interested without being incensed. A case in point: somewhat disgruntled ex-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil has produced one o' them there Insider Books about the Bush administration, which caused the ever-alert ears of certain segments of the polity to perk right up, and their salivary glands to start a-pumping. Froth followed, forthwith. Typical of such froth is Paul Krugman, who never met a Bush critic he didn't like. Or rather, he did, but didn't know that O'Neill was a Bush critic at the time, and now that he does know, he must commend O'Neill for "showing the courage I missed back then." Listing the Things That Are Bad About Bush And Therefore Must Be True, Krugman asks, "How can charges by Wesley Clark and others that the administration was looking for an excuse to invade Iraq be dismissed as paranoid in the light of Mr. O'Neill's revelations?" Here's what Mr. O'Neill said yesterday about those revelations: People are trying to say that I said the president was planning war in Iraq early in the administration. Actually there was a continuation of work that had been going on in the Clinton administration with the notion that there needed to be a regime change in Iraq. Which is, basically, what Bush said when asked about Mr. O'Neill's revelations yesterday in Mexico: Like the previous administration, we were for regime change. And in the initial stages of the administration, as you might remember, we were dealing with Desert Badger, or fly-overs and fly-betweens and looks, and so we were fashioning policy along those lines. The Foolish Dance that is the American Standard Media goes on. Typical of the headlines that were fashioned from yesterday's comments to the press was the one I saw over someone's shoulder on the train this morning: Bush admits planning Iraq invasion before 9/11. And let's tack on the subtext, there, just to be clear: Watch out! He's oppressing you! Also from the Bad If Bush Says It, Fine If Someone Else Says It department is the following from Wesley Clark, former Republican, current candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination: "Certainly there's a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda," [Clark] said in 2002. "It doesn't surprise me at all that they would be talking to Al Qaeda, that there would be some Al Qaeda there or that Saddam Hussein might even be, you know, discussing gee, I wonder since I don't have any scuds and since the Americans are coming at me, I wonder if I could take advantage of Al Qaeda? How would I do it? Is it worth the risk? What could they do for me?" Credit to the NYT for publishing that, not that it will make any difference to the True Believers. What are we to make of people such as Krugman, Princeton economist and New York Times columnist? From his high loud platform he bullhorns his views on Iraq, and in less than 24 hours is shot down so thoroughly by the very people he claims as his support that any ordinary person would be downright embarrassed. But not our Paul. He's a trooper, that one. As are so many others...picking and choosing, choosing and picking...heavens, there's just so much to be outraged about! Fortunately, we're above that sort of thing here at Astonished Head. January 14, 2004
Bwahh-hah-ha! I recently wrote about the taxpayer dollars wasted on apparently non-counterfeit-resistant counterfeit-resistant currency. Now, it looks like the anti-counterfeit software that the Guvmint spent who knows how much money to develop and surreptitiously insert into Photoshop is also useless: Almost as soon as word of Photoshop's new anti-counterfeiting provisions started to circulate, users began finding ways around the system...The ease with which people seemed to be eluding the anti-counterfeiting software left some wondering why Adobe had included it in the first place. The technical and savvy will always triumph over the bureaucratic and weenie-like. --- AND SO ON: While writing in the Commentarium for this post, I came across one of the many things that the Guvmint code in Photoshop would prevent if it actually worked: Johnny Burrito's Ugly Money. In fact, the description of the site makes an interesting tangential point: Since 1998, while running the cash register at Johnny Burrito, I have encountered unsung artists, poets, philosophers & pundits using our national currency as their medium. A cost effective delivery to be seen by many. Few folks would throw away money - offensive or not. I often wonder...what is someone thinking when they do what they do. After several years of collecting, this page was created Feb, 2002. In this case, currency itself is the mode of expression, but it's not much of a leap to consider images of currency as another mode. January 15, 2004
Hi folks. I'm disabling the Commentarium for a few days, as an experiment. It seems that about 20% of the visits I'm getting are using the mt-comments.cgi script as the entry page. Now, nobody links to comments, really. And comments aren't indexed, so they're not turning up on search engines. Which means, I think, that about 20% of my traffic is made up of comment-bots looking to comment-spam me. So, I'm shutting off the .cgi script for a few days, to see what happens.
By the way--I do want to thank all the folks who have bought mugs and T-shirts over the past couple of months. I suspect that some of these sales are to people who've only really seen the Proloxil cartoon, but I know that some of my regular readers have been buying them as well. Just wanted to let you all know that I appreciate it! (And yes, there is another cartoon in the making. But it's not funny yet. So I'm still working on it.) January 16, 2004
MMWWWAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRGGHHHH! ERGHGHH!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!! aaaaaaaaaarrRRRRGH!!! MMWWAUUUUGH!!! *PBFTHPBFTH!!!* There, that's better. January 17, 2004
Shutting down the comments .cgi is like stuffing my ears with cotton and starting a monologue. I know people are still out there, but now it's all one-way, no chance for interruption or interjection. Makes me feel bigger, somehow, like I'm taking up all the space on the monitor. Smaller, too, because now it's just me. I am bigsmall! Be moderately concerned about my ceaseless wrath. Hot Lips Houlihan is screaming downstairs; I do wish she'd shut up. I wish she'd shut up right now. Either that, or I wish I could instantly build the door to my office-cave that I've been meaning to build since sometime last year, so that I could dampen her harpy screeching. Television. The gift that keeps on puking. Profoundly isolated; winter does that to me, but recently it seems that most of the time is wintertime, with the air in my head assuming the cold clarity of this season's atmosphere...it's supposed to be 30 below with windchill tonight--goddamnit she's screeching again, that stupid blonde slut--and it feels like the house will shatter if I slam the door. So very cold. I threw Bob the cat out into the powdery snow on the deck, because she's always wanting to go out and have adventures and she must learn: outside it is unpleasant on the footpads and especially nasty for a fat cat such as herself who's recently had her belly shaved for medical reasons. She got the point and ran back inside into the warmth where the food is. I'm reading about all these people who, you know, go out and do things. With other people. It's fascinating; I'd like to do that someday, maybe. I don't know. It seems like it might be uncomfortable, or maybe embarrassing. That wouldn't be any fun at all. Anyway...it's late. There's a lumpy futon that serves as a makeshift sleeping platform calling to me...come downstairs...sleep...let me have my way with your spine... The offer is only appealing because I'm tired. Trumpet is not going well. I hit some kind of wall Wednesday, and haven't recovered. It's tough to stick brass on your face when it won't sing; but the trumpet is played from the mouthpiece backwards, so I guess I know where the problem and the solution lie. Sad. Glum. Usually I attribute such random pits to brain chemistry, but I'm getting bored with that. Late, and cold, and dark. Aimless. Ooo, this is fun, what else...fat. Can't forget that, although having clothes that fit mitigates that somewhat. Itchy. My eyes are drying out. And my new guitar has a bow in its neck. Anything else? No, so good night and so on. January 19, 2004
(The Commentarium, by the way, is working again)
Once, in a time between times, I had the good fortune to meet up with the unincarnated spirit of the Nazarene, who was working on perfecting his pincochle strategy. I asked him his opinion on the current state of the world. "Oy," he said, tossing his cards down. "Don't get me started. I liked Herod's Temple, you know. It was big and impressive and it had style. Some pigeon-seller tries to rip me off in the courtyard flea market and I get pissed off, knock a couple tables over...so what? Next thing you know, it's two thousand years of mortified flesh and a dead guy hanging on a cross being mistaken for a god. They didn't even manage to write down any of my good material." "What about the Qumran scrolls?" I asked him. "What about Mother Wisdom?" "That?" He frowned for a moment, thinking. "That wasn't me, that was whatshisname..." he pointed. "That guy--the fat bald fellow with the flowers, over there at the cribbage table." And so it goes. Again and again, as the past is consumed by the future, the same ideas roll around. Once they're grabbed ahold of by a critical mass of souls, they're throttled and wrung dry of any life whatsoever and then cast aside into the dust as spent husks. Generations die off, millennia scroll past, and the same idea gets the same treatment all over again. As individuals, we haven't come up with new ways of perceiving the world in the past 100,000 years or so...we've just gotten better at checking out what all the other brains are doing. "Nail a guy onto a tree and make a fetish of human sacrifice? Hmm...I mean, it's been done, hasn't it?" But drive a tank through somebody's Texas compound so that it goes up in spectacular flames on national television, or run a bulldozer over some poor sap's house in the West Bank, and you can use that same idea for a different purpose. Next thing you know some other dingbat's blowing up an office building in Oklahoma or a dance club in Bali. Someone's misery becomes someone else's motivation to make other people miserable. No matter what the ideas are, the one human constant has always been the animosity of the True Believer towards the Unbeliever. It's a psychological need grounded in ontological perception: "I believe this. This is what makes 2+2=4. This is what makes gravity work, what makes the sun come up in the morning. It's what makes my bowels work properly, and it's what makes you wrong." It doesn't really matter whether the idea is about God's gift of land to the Israelites, Mohammed's authorship of the Koran, or the neccessity of wearing tinfoil hats to keep out the Government's mind-controlling television signals. At some point, everybody stops asking questions and starts believing. And I, for one, am sick of the whole damn mess. If people spent half as much energy solving humanity's problems as they do just describing them and demonstrating their heartfelt concern by proving how corrupt everyone else is, we'd all be living in Paradise.
January 20, 2004
It wasn't what Dean said, which was normal, but the animated way that he said it that inspired the questions. That's what the American people want, for sure. A President who is quoted in the Washington Post as saying, "Yaaaaaaaaaah!" Just imagine: Chief Justice Rehnquist: I will now administer the oath of office. Please place your left hand on the Bible, here...raise your right hand, and repeat after me: I, Howard Brush Dean, do solemnly swear... The "explosive" outbursts would continue throughout the Dean Presidency... President Takes Reporters' Questions at African-American Clergy Christmas Prayer Breakfast State Dining Room When a would-be Democratic nominee for the Presidency is going "Yaaaaaaaaaah!" there's not much more to be said. What we really need now, though, is a Dean-Bush debate. I'd pay to see that. Moderator: How would you describe your future anti-terrorism efforts? Mmm...I love the smell of the Big Political Funny on my monitor in the morning...
Fortunately, my device instantly unfolded into a radiation blast shield equivalent to eighteen feet of lead and twelve feet of hardened concrete, and I survived. Actually, the point of the picture is the ice...all the white gnarly-looking stuff between the camera and the ferry looked interesting to me, but the Fisher-Price two-pixel CCD in the camera decided that it would be more interesting to turn the ferry's docking lights into the sun. Last year, the entire stretch of water between the New York and Hoboken Ferry terminals was choked with the stuff as it flowed from up north, where we had three to four feet of snow on the ground. The North Cove boat basin was frozen solid. Tugboats were pressed into duty: they jammed their noses into the concrete seawalls near the docks and revved their engines, churning the water to keep it from freezing and the ferries moving. Once aboard, I would sit on the top deck in the bitter wind and watch as we picked our way carefully through floes a foot high and ten feet across, listening to them scrape and bump along the sides and bottom of the ferry. Each one had been bashing against its cousins as it travelled downriver, piling up fantastic frozen shapes made of cracked and crushed ice along its edges. Some of the mini-bergs were so thick that they had that wonderfully blue cast that you see on PBS. It was hypnotic...if I used my hand to block out the urban waterfront, I could pretend I was somewhere off the coast of Alaska, trying to find a place to put ashore so I could hike up a glacier. The ferry-ride took 20 minutes instead of its usual ten, but I relished every minute of it. It was a real Look At The Nature! moment. This year, there's a center channel that's free of ice, but we've still got the rest of January and all of February to get through. I may yet get stranded on a floe, and have to catch and eat winter seagulls until I'm rescued by a passing barge. January 21, 2004
Man...just shows to go ya. Dean whoops garbled noises, then Bush storms the podium with a big plate piled high with waffles: The same moral tradition that defines marriage also teaches that each individual has dignity and value in God's sight. Unless, of course, two blokes want to tie the knot, in which case God's sight becomes obscured by a mysteriously vague "constitutional process." All of us -- parents and schools and government -- must work together to counter the negative influence of the culture, and to send the right messages to our children. No, no, no! This guy is a Republican?! Claiming that "schools and government" have a place in how parents raise their children? Welcome to the New Nanny State, ladies and gentlemen: now, the educational establishment and the Federal bureaucracy will work together to assist you in instilling the proper values in your children, so that they won't grow up to be bare-bellied lip-ringed whores or the aforementioned homosexuals or--god forbid--be affected in any way by the culture in which they live! And, in addition to providing taxpayer dollars to teach young people that abstinance is the only certain way to avoid sexually transmitted diseases, we will also be teaching them that wrapping themselves up in foam rubber from head to toe and never leaving the house is the only way to avoid Death. Death is the number one killer of our young Americans, you know! As Sullivan wrote: This is not Reaganism. It isn't Gingrichism. It's Big Government Moral Conservatism: fiscally liberal and socially conservative. It will please the hard right and the base. And it will alienate libertarians and moderates. I'm alienated. So I must be one of them there libertarians or maybe a moderate. Of course, I suspect that if a Democrat were elected, I'd also be alienated. Maybe we need to elect...an alien? Feh, I digress and fall over backwards. Then there's this howler about the tax cuts, addressed to a chamber full of Congresscritters who've been spending right along with the President: These numbers confirm that the American people are using their money far better than government would have -- and you were right to return it. What the hell's the point in giving me a bit of my own money back if you've already spent that money five times over and will just ask for it back in a few years? "Far better," he says. My goodness, that's astute. I know that, if left to my own devices, I wouldn't have spent $1.3 billion dollars to convince people that Marriage Is Good...and yet, the money will get spent regardless! Amazing. It's almost as though I have absolutely no control over what the Government does with my tax dollars! Go to the moon? Sure. And Mars? You betcha! But there's so much pork getting stuffed into the barrel that the hoops have burst, scattering staves that stink of bacon throughout the Capitol dome...not that Bush's opponents would spend any less, mind you. They'd just spend it differently...you know, on things that they think are moral. I will always commend Bush for actually doing the things that needed doing after 9/11, tasks summed up by the concluding sentences of the two good paragraphs in the speech: America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our people. and The terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States--and war is what they got. Sadly, it seems as though there is less and less "there" there...one-trick pony...Karl Rove...standing on his desk, his willie flapping in the breeze...shouting his victory...Ashcroft recoiling in disgust, covering him up with a handy Department of Justice towel...meanwhile, Dubya capers through the bushes out back wearing his Mouseketeers hat and tra-la-las all the way to 2008...ahh...I think...I...passing out... *hic*
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That's the fear, anyway. I saw some airborne ice last year from my 42-floor office, and it was fairly impressive. The way it exploded into thousands of very small pieces when it hit the street far below delighted my inner ten year-old hyperactive boy. Nevertheless, I had to laugh when confronted with this lone sign in the middle of the plaza outside my building. It's dark out. The building is over sixty stories high. How, exactly, am I supposed to exercise caution when confronted with the possibility of falling ice? Walk with my head tilted back, alert for plunging shards of frozen doom? According to a certain German folk tale, if I walk around looking skyward I'll fall into a pit and die, so that doesn't seem like a very wise choice. Am I supposed to scuttle along the edges of the building? Should I move away from it in a straight line at a steady pace, or run away from it in a haphazard pattern, hoping to beat the cranium-crushing odds? Statistically speaking, where does ice tend to plummet when it peels off a skyscraper? Is there a Zone Of Icy Airborne Death on the lee side that I should avoid? Still...thanks for the warning, I guess... January 22, 2004
After the towering remains of the broken buildings were carted away from Ground Zero by truck and barge, the progress of the Wintergarden's restoration became my barometer of normalcy. When it was finally completed, almost a year to the day after the attacks, I made a point of walking through it on my way to work each day. It helped me to realize that the passage of time would actually do what folks who weren't there that day so easily assumed it would. The Wintergarden has also become the stage upon which which memorials are unveiled and architectural visions are proposed. Since it reopened, all of the significant public announcements of the plans for the WTC site have been made there, under the bright green fronds of the new palm trees and the thousands of glass panes that form the structure's barrel-vaulted roof. Usually, I walk through the atrium before any of the guests and presenters arrive, as the stage is being set and the forest of cameras and boom microphones is beginning to sprout near the grand stairway that used to lead to the Trade Center complex. This morning, they were preparing to present the design for the new PATH station. I had to make way as a model of the Freedom Tower and the other new buildings trundled past, pushed by someone I thought was a member of the Wintergarden event staff. But then I realized that he was probably a member of the architectural firm, judging by his suit. He pushed the block with its miniature depiction of the future into a corner, behind the escalators, and cordoned it off. There was a time when this open daylit space was filled with fragments of a skyscraper's corpse, its marble floors covered with thick, sooty dust and littered with its own shattered glass. Today, a little over two years later, a meticulously crafted model of the grand towers that will replace what was torn down that day is wheeled into place, a scale depiction of our determination and our skill. In another eight years or so, the tallest building in the world will be visible through the Wintergarden's glass ceiling, soaring over the palm trees. Take that, you lunatics. We win. You lose. January 23, 2004
Today is National Fuck A Pancake Day!
January 25, 2004
Boff A Waffle Week?
January 27, 2004
Now they've given us...tea. That's right: the same mechanical marvel that will extrude high-pressure jets of dirtwater coffee via the amazing Non-Recyclo-Filterpak-O-Death will now invade your kidneys with the flourescent contents of genuine Tea-Style Beverage Non-Recyclo-Filterpaks-O-Death. I've been a fan of green tea for some time...well, not a fan really...I mean, I'm not one of those freaks you see hanging out in front of the Sushi House in twenty-degree weather wearing nothing but green paint, a giant foam tea-cup hat and a tea-leaf g-string...let's say I'm more of a friend of green tea. Yes, that's it: I appreciate that, when my coffee-blasted colon and my stimulant-addled adrenals finally collapse, there is another caffeine source available that also happens to be chock-full of free radical fighting antioxidants. I once saw a packet of green tea beat up Abbie Hoffman, you know. [One more like that and you're back in the foot locker with the ball gag. --Ed.] Moving right along. "Japanese Green Tea is rich in flavonoid antioxidants," reads the back of the filterpak, "Which may help to maintain good health. It has been an integral part of Japanese life for centuries and we have sourced the highest quality leaf, from the world renowned Shizuoka and Mount Fuji regions. We have brewed this tea using traditional methods, then used a high-pressure evaporator to reduce the tea to a thick, crumbly paste. Then, a high-speed grinder turned this paste into a fine powder. Anti-caking agents and solubility enhancers were added. Finally, we packaged the resultant tea-style beverage powder into our patented mylar-film filterpaks.
That's some tea, right there. Un thé vert japonais de qualité! And when they say "green," they're not messing around. Usually, green tea is a pleasant sort of straw color, reminiscent of the green growing leaves from which it was brewed. Flavia's offering can be used to mark the positions of sunken submarines for the recovery teams. The teas are in the top rack in the photo above. You can see them gleaming there with an unholy luminescence, unlike the coffees below, which lie in wait like dark muddy unholy multi-tentacular creatures from the pit of Hell that you can drink with your doughnut! Or danish! My god, their throbbing maws remind me of what once was my youth, what once was my innocence, before I was drawn into the suppurating embrace of-- [Foot locker. Ball gag. --Ed.] Well then. I've...got to go get lunch, I think. Get outside a bit, get some air. Away from...from those things.
How depressing. I just looked back through some year-old posts...and I was alot more interesting back then. I wonder what happened? Phooey.
Meanwhile, in my small yet frightfully important corner of the world, the snow is doing an excellent job of acoustic dampening. The air is cold enough to make the snow waxy and fluffy, and it's falling thickly, lending the night air that wonderfully muffled winter silence. I had to plod out into the yard with my trusty PDA/cellphone/camera/home knee surgery kit to get a picture of the falling snow backlit by the incredibly annoying sodium-arclights from the very pit of Satan's Ass that adorn the carwash out back, but the dinky camera wasn't quite up to it. Instead, I captured an atmospheric image of the shed, which I am calling The Shed By Night With Snow Falling That You Can't Really See.
I knew it was going to be a bad railway day tomorrow when my homeward train passed through the main switching interchange outside of Hoboken station this evening: fire! Fire everywhere! That's how they keep the switches from freezing, you see...natural-gas powered burners to heat up the rails. It looked like the aftermath of a plane crash, only without the wreckage...and there were train tracks...so...well, it was a bunch of train tracks on fire, actually, and it didn't really look like anything other than what it was. But I won't have to struggle with railway similes tomorrow, because I'll be safe and warm here in Peapod Manor while the hapless commuters are stuck somewhere in the wilds of North Jersey, contemplating snacking on their seatmates as the temperature in the train car...slowly...drops... January 28, 2004
bush·sess (boosh-'ses), v. [Latin bushsessus, pp. of bushsidere, to besiege politically, from bush- Dubya + sedere to sit -- more at OB-, SIT] transitive: to be haunted or excessively preoccuppied by the idea that George W. Bush is responsible for everything bad that has ever happened, is happening, or will happen, esp. to an abnormal degree, ("Maureen was bushsessed with the idea that Dubya was a lying demon from the pit of Hell, which is also run by Republicans, and that they'd throw everyone who disagreed with him into camps any day now") intransitive: to engage in bushsessive thinking, become bushsessed with an idea ("Krugman bushsessed over the fact that troops hadn't found any WMD in Iraq, and concluded that it was due to Bush's intrinsically evil nature, and his tax cuts") Let's see what David Kay, who recently resigned from his duties as head of the WMD search teams in Iraq, said to Tom Brokaw on Monday: "There were a lot of small activities. Now, in the missile field it’s quite different. There were actually large, purposeful programs going on in that area. But in chemical, biological and nuke, it was rudimentary." Now, let's take a look at what he said to the House Permanent Select Commitee on Intelligence, the House Permanent Select Commitee on Appropriations, Subcommittee on Defense, and the Senate Select Commitee on Intelligence on October 2 of last year which, if you need to know, was a Thursday: "We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002. The discovery of these deliberate concealment efforts have come about both through the admissions of Iraqi scientists and officials concerning information they deliberately withheld and through physical evidence of equipment and activities that ISG has discovered that should have been declared to the UN. Let me just give you a few examples of these concealment efforts, some of which I will elaborate on later: My my, Mr. Kay. What changed? Here's what changed: the quality of the intelligence. Before the fall of the regime, we had satellites in space, and high-tech taps on communications, and absolutely no human eyeballs anywhere inside of Iraq. After the fall of the regime, we had thousands of troops scouring the country, getting their grubby little mitts all over the file cabinets that Saddam ordered incinerated, the equipment he ordered destroyed or hidden, the secret warehouses he maintained, and the scientists he paid. And guess what? We were wrong. Bill Clinton is on record as believing the Iraq had WMD stockpiles and ongoing development programs, and so is his wife, not to mention his Secretary of State. They were mistaken...but Bush is a liar. Joe Lieberman is on record as well, saying the same thing, and so is his former running mate. They were wrong, but Bush is a liar. Dianne Feinstein, Barbara A. Milulski, Tom Daschle, John Kerry, Tom Daschle, Dick Gephardt, Bob Graham and Ted Kennedy [partisan link here] also made the same claim. They were all misled! But Bush is liar. The United Nations Special Commission believed in Saddam's WMD, too. That august body was clearly acting on flawed intelligence. But Bush is liar. Even Jaques Chirac said Iraq had WMD. Maybe he was drunk! You know how those French persons can be. Bush, though, is a liar. You know who else lied? The Iraqi weapons scientists. Here's what David Kay had to say about them to Tom Brokaw: "They describe an Iraq that was really spinning into a vortex of corruption from the very top in which people were lying to Saddam, lying to each other for money; the graft and how much you could get out of the system rather than how much you could produce was a dominant issue." But there's something far more important than the fact that a former President, the Democratic leadership, the President of France, UNSCOM, and many others all said the same thing about Saddam Hussein's WMD programs and stockpiles. Bush is a liar. That is what you must remember. Now then. I think that there are two choices, here. You can continue to receive Noam Chomsky's radio broadcasts on your dentalwork at night, and believe in a single, monolithic Government that serves its own interests, its own power elite, and the power elites around the globe, always and forever, no exceptions, amen. This belief requires the utter stupidity of nearly everyone in the country, and the complicity of every media outlet in a vast, sophisticated web of sheer propagandistic genius (all that anti-Bush stuff you read on the Internet or in newspapers, hear on the radio, and see on television across the entire country? Karl Rove is behind every word). It means that yes, Bush lied, and so did all the other organizations and people, because they're all in on it. It also means you should really be working on your giant puppets for the next WTO protests instead of reading this site, because you won't learn anything here. This is a place for sensible people, or for people who at least think that being sensible has a certain charm. Shoo! Or...you can accept the fact that Saddam Hussein himself may have believed that he had weapons of mass destruction...and didn't. The next step, post fact-acceptance, is to think about what that might imply about the ability of Western intelligence agencies to gather accurate information about what was going on inside of Iraq. You may also consider accepting the fact that Saddam's WMD programs were just one reason among many explicitly enumerated reasons for toppling his regime, all of which boil down to enlightened self-interest. It was in our interest to get rid of Hussein and his successors, because his regime was a nexus of money, shelter, and possible weapons provision for the type of folks who would really like to see the White House get the business end of of a 767. It was also in the interest of the Iraqi people, who at this moment are busy helping us dig up mass graves, yelling about what a crappy job we're doing, and not getting shot through the skull for it (unless they're shooting at us while they're yelling). It was in our interest to make the bold attempt to turn Iraq into something resembling a functioning democracy, because a successful, free and prosperous Iraq will eventually help stabilize the entire region, making it less attractive for the aforementioned nasty folks. Not next year. Or next decade. This is a long-term project, very much at odds with our instant culture and our darting attention spans. If it works, in 50 years we'll think about US troops in Iraq about as often as we think about US troops in Germany. It was also in our interest to clearly demonstrate that our diplomacy--unlike the diplomacy of certain European nations and like-minded organizations--carries with it the undeniably credible threat of force. Qadaffi got the message. That sort of capitulation is also in the interest of the greater global community, and hopefully we'll see more of it. As we work to shut down the intricate financial networks, the gun-running networks, the fake ID labs and the training camps that were used by our enemies in their declared war gainst us, we're also working against all the other people who used the same networks and facilties, from Africa to Asia. That's generally a good thing, as well. But none of that is important...if you're bushsessed. Friends, bushsessional neurosis is a terrible burden to bear. It is characterized by compulsive ideas and irresistable urges, often forcing those who suffer from it to engage in the repetitive, ritualistic use of certain phrases. If you or someone you know suffers from this condition, please contact us today. 
Their ad is more technically proficient than mine. And the Zoloft campaign just begs to be mocked. But the Proloxil ad has been in circulation since June, and I can't help but wonder... January 29, 2004
This has shown up in a bunch of different places, but still...ahhh, perspective! Paul Berman is the author of the book, "Terror and Liberalism," and sits on the editorial board of the left-leaning Dissent magazine. He thinks Bush is an idiot. He also thinks that the idiot is right about Iraq. In the Winter 2004 issue of Dissent, he recounts a conversation in a bar that encapsulates his realistic appraisal of the current world situation and neatly describes how that appraisal is in conflict with the knee-jerk Bush-hating ideologues that populate the leftward portions of the political spectrum. From "A Friendly Drink in a Time of War": My friend said, "I'm for the UN and international law, and I think you've become a traitor to the left. A neocon!" Do read the whole thing, as they say. It emphatically makes the point that I've been making, but with far more intelligence and impact: Bush is not the most important issue facing our nation. "The left doesn't see because George W. Bush is an unusually repulsive politician, except to his own followers, and people are blinded by the revulsion they feel. And, in their blindness, they cannot identify the main contours of reality right now. They peer at Iraq and see the smirking face of George W. Bush. They even feel a kind of schadenfreude or satisfaction at his errors and failures. This is a modern, television-age example of what used to be called 'false consciousness.'" Right on, brother. Stick it to the Man. January 30, 2004
The human beings, in this case, are Iraqis. Unfortunately for them, the helicopter pilot spotted one of them dumping a "tube-shaped object that appears to be about 4 or 5 feet long" into a field. Now, they're dead, and someone apparently thought that we should see that. As far as I know, footage from American military gun cameras doesn't usually get released into general circulation. I won't belabor the obvious. What we've got here is violent, mechanized death on film. It's brutal and nasty and nauseating. I won't comment on the "tube-shaped object," either. I wasn't there. But I will assume that a combat-trained Apache helicopter pilot might know the difference between a bundle of farming implements and an RPG launcher better than I do. Remember, also, that this grainy footage wasn't what the pilot saw--he was either using his own eyes or his own camera system. Furthermore, any video equipment used in combat is very high-resolution, and most of that resolution was lost in the multiple transfers this footage underwent between the gun camera and your computer screen. There is also the possibility that the pilot was mistaken, that the Iraqis tossed a piece of irrigation piping or some other innocuous object into the field. In that case, he needs to be relieved of duty, at the very least. The situation in Iraq is tense and confused, and nerves are frayed. But we can't have that sort of thing happening with any frequency, or we'll never accomplish our goals there, and we'll never be able to leave. A number of commenters on Ito's site made a suggestion that intrigued me. Basically, their idea is that if this sort of footage were shown to us more often--say, on the evening news--we, as a nation, would more fully appreciate the horrors of war and wouldn't be so eager to engage in it. The assumption is that some of those who support the war aren't bloodthirsty violent neocons, but are actually good people. Good, but ignorant. If these people knew what war was really like, in gut-spattering detail, they would be against the war in Iraq. I'm against war. I think it's a terrible, stupid, primate thing to engage in. I think that in general killing another human being is never a good thing to do, although it is sometimes the right thing to do (see this post from December of 2002 for more on that distinction). So let's do a little thought experiment. Let's say that it's the year 2000, and that we've acquired an ample supply of footage from Uday and Qusay Hussein's personal video collection. We've got footage of people being fed into industrial plastic shredders, head-first for those who were shown mercy, and feet-first for those who weren't. We've got footage of childrens' bodies being dumped into mass graves beside their stuffed animals and their parents. We've got footage of the wives of Iraqi dissidents being raped in front of them, with bonus footage of the dissidents' ears being cut off and their tongues being cut out. Now, let's show that footage on the television news. That would be terrible, wouldn't it? All those people being tortured, raped, burned, mutilated, crushed, and killed, night after night. There would be outrage. Surely, that would incite all of those "good but ignorant" people to cry out: this is intolerable! This must be stopped! But now they've got a problem. They want to stop this inhumanity...but they can't kill anyone. Because they're good people, and they know that killing others is wrong. If we want to give the commenters the benefit of the doubt, we must assume a genuine moral conviction on their part, rather than the petty prejudice that killing is wrong only when committed by the American military. This means that the good people, now relieved of their ignorance, would want to stop all of the killing and torture they see nightly on their televisions. What are their options? They'd be faced by a tyrant with a military bearing weapons of unknown destructive capability, who is surrounded by a savage political establishment. Do we offer him diplomatic incentives, so that he will mend his ways? Say we lift the sanctions. He then increases his income from oil exports, builds up a massive military, arms it with chemical and perhaps even nuclear weapons, and invades Iran, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, killing millions on all sides. So that's no good--all that killing is wrong, and we would have made it possible. Perhaps we can encourage the native Iraqi resistance? Give them funds and logistical support. Then they, in turn, rise up, and kill a bunch of Iraqis--civilian and military alike. In the aftermath, the oppressed target their former oppressors, and blood runs thick on the streets in the upscale neigborhoods of Baghdad. Once again, we've enabled murder. Say we lift the sanctions and encourage the resistance? Somehow, I don't think that would end up as a gloriously bloodless coup either. What effective action can they take to stop the slaughter? What do all these good people do, now that the scales have fallen from their eyes? Nothing. There's nothing they can do, except remain true to their principles. Meanwhile, Hussein's death machine would rumble onward, chewing up hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and spitting their bloodied bones out into the sand. What about other situations of savage inhumanity? What about Rwanda? 500,000 people were murderd there, mostly with machetes. Machetes, mind you, not $20 million gunships. What about Somalia? The Congo? The Balkans? All these people, all over the world, killing each other using whatever means are available, with no end in sight. And these commenters, these armchair moralists, want to show me footage of people being blown apart by 30mm rounds, so that I won't want to fight anymore. So that I'll see that killing is bad. I know that killing is bad, thanks for preaching. My question to them all is: how would you stop it? This isn't heaven. This isn't the Kingdom of God. This isn't Utopia. This is planet Earth. It's muddy and wretched and well-populated by a species of fast-breeding primate with a limbic system that hasn't evolved much for the past 100 million years and opposable thumbs that can make finely-crafted lethal weapons. It's full of pain and suffering, death and ambiguity. It is a place where ideas have no real power. Only action matters, here. You can't out-theorize evil. You can only act against it. Were it not for the evil enacted against us two years ago, those Iraqis in the field might be alive today. We wouldn't be working to root out the fascism in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Africa that has claimed more lives than any American action. This work is now required of us. Not because we are morally superior, but because we're monkeys like everyone else, and we must protect ourselves. We must act. And because this is Earth, and because it and we are imperfect, that action will be imperfect. Deal with it.
This is why e-mail is a good thing: NASA to Review Plan to Phase Out Hubble. Excerpt: E-mails have poured in to the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which coordinates the use of Hubble's instruments. Now, imagine if all those e-mails had to be typed, folded up, put into envelopes, addressed, stamped, and mailed. People might still have cared about the Hubble, but given the pace of modern life, I doubt that even a quarter of those letters would ever have made it to the mailbox. 
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It's been awhile since I regularly partook of the delights of the New York Subway system. I moved from the city over a year ago, and these days I don't really leave the immediate vicinity of my downtown office building. 
This meager image doesn't do the whole 5x4 foot poster justice, but it will have to suffice.
"She wears Steve Madden brown leather platform cowboy boots while also walking her pet chick. As she makes her way through New York she travels hrough many environments: airport, an alley, a West Village sidewalk, subway and through heavy traffic while miraculously avoiding injury. She finally makes it to another West Village shopping area where the viewer watches a showdown between our main character and her blondhaired fashion antagonist, another Madden outfitted hipster full of style and attitude. Cut to a close-up of Steve Madden shoes: white leather s pump a la 80’s glam rock. As the two girls’ paths cross, each gives the other the rollover assessing the others hipness and fashion status. The blond notices the other’s shoes and recognizing the mark of her legitimacy, resigns herself to the fact that the new girl in town is cool and thus above reproach. Our protagonist walks away into a Chinatown scene where we leave her and her chick entering a Steve Madden store."
Just as the mouthpiece began to adhere to my stiff, blue lips, the lights came back on. Good thing, too...after I knew there would be heat in the house again, I took a stroll out on the deck, which crack!ed alarmingly as the moisture in the boards shattered under my feet. It is alarmingly chilly outside. Even the moon looks frozen.
Today's 
Using my stealthy cellphone/PDA/camera/apartment, I snapped this picture of an approaching ferry just as the smuggled nuclear device in the wheelhouse detonated.
When it gets Bitterly Cold and stays that way for awhile, ice tends to accumulate on the tops of tall buildings, and when it gets windy, great honkin' chunks of it sail off into the air and come crashing down onto the fragile heads of hapless pedestrians.
On cold mornings like this one, I usually pass through the newly-glazed atrium of the 
I have told all who will listen of the horror that is 
Flavia! From the slopes of Mount Fujii to your mouth in less than eighteen months."
This is the storm that is coming to kick my ass. Or, rather, a bit of it. A bit of the storm, that is, not my ass. I didn't spring for the longer-range base reflectivity system when I got the radar dome for Peapod's roof, so the range peters out somewhere around Scranton. But the primitive weathercreatures on the television tell me that this storm stretches all the way across New York state and over Lake Erie. Massachusetts is going to get hammered, which is good, because I don't live there.
No travelling for me tomorrow, no sir. I will transform into Telecommuting Man! My mutant ability is to bill hourly while never leaving the house (a power also used, incidentally, by Courtesan Woman!) Which is just as well: if I did manage to get across the savage frozen mountains, escape the icy slide off the side of the road into certain death and Honda-entombment, and then actually reached the train station, I'd just stand around outside waiting for the lovely mechanics of NJTransit to coax the trains into motion while my nose turned black. Any time it gets Bittterly Cold, or snows, or Tom Cruise farts, the entire railway system collapses into a smoking heap of fifty-year old underfunded infrastructure. 
From 