THE HARDEST WORKING MAN IN POLITICS
Last night, Howard Stern second banana, Artie Lange, supplied us with the following fascinating statistic. In the last year (I guess figuring the war had been won) President George Bush had 98 days of vacation time, plus long weekends at camp David.
THE HARDEST WORKING MAN IN CHAOS
Earlier I was lying on the couch half-watching the movie Basquiat for about the nineteenth time, and I started idly wishing that I could get up one morning and string together a whole bunch of words that made absolutely no sense at all and get paid obscene amounts of money for so-doing. But, alas, it is not 1981, and may never be again. I do ask myself, however, what is the use of having the bloody Republicans in power if it can’t generate a totally spurious, bullshit art boom? I recall how Uncle Bill Burroughs and many others did very well for themselves in the Reagan era by doing very little. Today we simply wait for the roosting chickens, as in...
THE HARDEST LURKING ANXIETY FOR 2050
What did Jim Morrison tell us? “The old get older and the young get stronger”? When he said it, the young was my generation, but now Jim’s dead, and I don’t feel so great, and the young are doing the will of Allah. The point is made by Niall Ferguson in the London Sunday Times that the Muslim world has double the Western birthrate, which then causes him to make the following grim but all too plausible, not-so-longterm projection. “A youthful Muslim society to the south and east of the Mediterranean is poised to colonize a senescent Europe to the north and west.”
THE HAPPIEST LARGE ANIMAL
Meanwhile, Brother John is concentrating on the important stuff, and tells us more about the perc-a-pop (see yesterday)...
"Carfentanil (Wildnil®) is an analogue of fentanyl with an analgesic potency 10,000 times that of morphine and is used in veterinary practice to immobilize certain large animals" I hadda look up Fentanyl (and its analogs). In general I've always been rather against animal tranks -- not a gentlemanly indulgence -- but that's rooted in a natural bias against PCP. Not a prejudice that extends to opiates. I don't see how anybody could refuse something 10k the potency of morphine. I feel convinced that I could qualify as "a large animal"...
CRYPTIQUE – Time to wake the Mamalukes.
Friday, April 30, 2004
Thursday, April 29, 2004
PERC-A-POP
Yesterday a wall o’climate fell on Southern California like the Wrath of the Molten Brain-Eater, as the temperature hit 102F in downtown. The eyes in the cars are bloodshot, and I feel as though I’ve been run over by a busload of the living dead on the way to a company picnic. For those of you with an interest in meteorology, the spring in LA is always something of a tussle between the cold of the ocean and the heat of the desert, but never conducted according to such brutally extreme parameters. Until the end of June, the sea usually wins, at least before lunch. It’s cooler today, but we are warned by the TV weathermen that the heat will return as another head of high pressure builds over the land. Meanwhile the battle for Fallujah rages with the US attempting to fight counter insurgency with gunships, like it’s 1969, but no one seems to be paying attention, more concerned that American Idol may be fixed in favor of a geeky, tone-deaf, ginger-haired, white kid*. Maybe drugs are the only answer to despair and the impulse to mass homicide with an accurate rifle from a tall building. Give the anarchist a perc-a-pop. (As in...)
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) -- A narcotic painkiller that looks like a lollipop - designed to speed relief to cancer patients - is starting to show up in illegal sales with the nickname "perc-a-pop." The drug's ease of use and sweet taste have law enforcement officials worried about the potential for abuse. Actiq, a berry-flavored lozenge on a stick, contains the synthetic opioid fentanyl. "We're starting to see it emerge as a drug that is, as we call it, 'diverted,' which is a legally prescribed drug being used illegally," said Kevin Harley, spokesman for state Attorney General Jerry Pappert. "It's a drug that is easily administered or taken by somebody who might be afraid to either take a pill, snort or inject a needle in their arm."
AND...
* More on the state of current media dementia in this weeks LA CityBeat.
http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=876&IssueNum=47
CRYPTIQUE – Phew, Hellboy, wot a scorcher!
Yesterday a wall o’climate fell on Southern California like the Wrath of the Molten Brain-Eater, as the temperature hit 102F in downtown. The eyes in the cars are bloodshot, and I feel as though I’ve been run over by a busload of the living dead on the way to a company picnic. For those of you with an interest in meteorology, the spring in LA is always something of a tussle between the cold of the ocean and the heat of the desert, but never conducted according to such brutally extreme parameters. Until the end of June, the sea usually wins, at least before lunch. It’s cooler today, but we are warned by the TV weathermen that the heat will return as another head of high pressure builds over the land. Meanwhile the battle for Fallujah rages with the US attempting to fight counter insurgency with gunships, like it’s 1969, but no one seems to be paying attention, more concerned that American Idol may be fixed in favor of a geeky, tone-deaf, ginger-haired, white kid*. Maybe drugs are the only answer to despair and the impulse to mass homicide with an accurate rifle from a tall building. Give the anarchist a perc-a-pop. (As in...)
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) -- A narcotic painkiller that looks like a lollipop - designed to speed relief to cancer patients - is starting to show up in illegal sales with the nickname "perc-a-pop." The drug's ease of use and sweet taste have law enforcement officials worried about the potential for abuse. Actiq, a berry-flavored lozenge on a stick, contains the synthetic opioid fentanyl. "We're starting to see it emerge as a drug that is, as we call it, 'diverted,' which is a legally prescribed drug being used illegally," said Kevin Harley, spokesman for state Attorney General Jerry Pappert. "It's a drug that is easily administered or taken by somebody who might be afraid to either take a pill, snort or inject a needle in their arm."
AND...
* More on the state of current media dementia in this weeks LA CityBeat.
http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=876&IssueNum=47
CRYPTIQUE – Phew, Hellboy, wot a scorcher!
Tuesday, April 27, 2004
LOST IN TRANSMISSION
Ducking the war and all the rest of the dementia and turning to Pay for View for a chance to become prone in front of the TV but not totally mindless, I ceased to be one of the few inhabitants of the LA Basin who hadn’t seen Lost in Translation. My reactions?
1. Boy was I disappointed. Not that it was a bad movie, but it had been so over-sold to me that I was expecting considerably more than I got. And, folks, I love Bill Murray. I have seen Groundhog Day some 38 times, and this, Ms Coppola, was not Groundhog Day.
2. Boy would I like to back in Tokyo amid all that neon. I could have watched the teen-rituals in the video arcade for an hour. (And all the ennui of the characters seemed less than sympathetic in a city that so positively vibrates. If you’re fresh in Tokyo and bored, you got crisis energy problems, Bob and Charlotte. I recall being in my hotel room with jet lag, and watching inexplicable movies, but bouncing up and down with delight, even at the commercials.)
3. Boy was that some racist movie. The dumb-depicted Japanese were such stereo-parodies of the infinitely courteous and helpful people I encountered, I just found myself becoming irritated to the point that I didn’t give a rat’s ass what he whispered to her at the end.
4. Boy do I want one of those toy machine guns with the laser bullet-effects.
KILL THE WABBIT
Later, on Letterman, a resemblance between George W. Bush and Porky Pig was more than adequately demonstrated with film clips. Yes, kill the evil d-d-doers.
That’s all folks. It was 100F in LA today. The end is nigh, but distaff ire, if nothing else, seems to have brought the comments software back online. (Open now for "soft" jokes.)
CRYPTIQUE – B-b-b-banzai!
Ducking the war and all the rest of the dementia and turning to Pay for View for a chance to become prone in front of the TV but not totally mindless, I ceased to be one of the few inhabitants of the LA Basin who hadn’t seen Lost in Translation. My reactions?
1. Boy was I disappointed. Not that it was a bad movie, but it had been so over-sold to me that I was expecting considerably more than I got. And, folks, I love Bill Murray. I have seen Groundhog Day some 38 times, and this, Ms Coppola, was not Groundhog Day.
2. Boy would I like to back in Tokyo amid all that neon. I could have watched the teen-rituals in the video arcade for an hour. (And all the ennui of the characters seemed less than sympathetic in a city that so positively vibrates. If you’re fresh in Tokyo and bored, you got crisis energy problems, Bob and Charlotte. I recall being in my hotel room with jet lag, and watching inexplicable movies, but bouncing up and down with delight, even at the commercials.)
3. Boy was that some racist movie. The dumb-depicted Japanese were such stereo-parodies of the infinitely courteous and helpful people I encountered, I just found myself becoming irritated to the point that I didn’t give a rat’s ass what he whispered to her at the end.
4. Boy do I want one of those toy machine guns with the laser bullet-effects.
KILL THE WABBIT
Later, on Letterman, a resemblance between George W. Bush and Porky Pig was more than adequately demonstrated with film clips. Yes, kill the evil d-d-doers.
That’s all folks. It was 100F in LA today. The end is nigh, but distaff ire, if nothing else, seems to have brought the comments software back online. (Open now for "soft" jokes.)
CRYPTIQUE – B-b-b-banzai!
Sunday, April 25, 2004
WEEKEND FEVER DREAMS
As what seems like another too-early heatwave hits LA, the sense inhabiting a very nasty, but highly realistic science fiction movie closes in on me, and the sense that I may be writing for my life, and but with knowledge that it is probably already too late. Global weather systems lurch out of whack. The planet is now so crowded that my favorite cities have grown, just in the last few years, to the point of standing-room only. An enlightened species would be galvanized by a sense of apocalyptic urgency. Population and environmental disaster loom, but instead of uniting in a common awareness of the threat, those in power, both secular and spiritual, allow the contagion of war to run lose yet again. The USA has been stumbling down the slippery slope of counter-insurgency for a year, and has now fallen into a dead run. The last time this benighted and evil game was played, it ran for twelve years, cost lives of 50,000 young Americans, a million Vietnamese, and don’t even mention the Kennedy Brothers. It split the country, polarized the world, and took a bite out of my youth, although I will freely admit that we had a lot of fun fighting the good fight to stop that wat. Who the hell knows where the mess in Iraq is going to take us, or how long it will be in the taking? But right now it causes menacing images to spin out at random from my memory.
Like who recalls the neutron bomb? The neutron bomb was a piece of nastiness from the Carter era. Small, low yield nuke that was designed to vaporize the Soviet tanks as they rolled across the West German Border without doing to much permanent damage to the friendly real estate and infrastructure. The fear at the time was of the Red tank superiority over NATO, and the joke was that the neutron bomb killed people, but left the buildings intact. The thought can only lurk in the back of my mind that at least someone in the Bush is wondering where we left them and how hard it would be to dust them off. Kill the insurgents but don’t irradiate the crude?
And then there’s John Kerry. He is now the repository of the world’s hope to oust Bush and restore some semblance of civilization to this country. We all knew he’d run into a barrage of flack, but he hardly seems to be coping with it. While the Republican’s drag out to old fabricated snitch-files of J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO that absurdly claim the VVAW was seeking to overthrow the government, Kerry is still fumbling the smear about how he voted on the invasion of Iraq.
On this last topic, Andrew Christie, wrote the following and more for CommonDreams.org (sent by some girl)
There was Dick Cheney speaking to an NRA crowd last week, firming up the base, getting in the administration's favorite Kerry dig: Kerry could try to "explain or explain away all he wants" his vote to authorize the Iraq war, but such vacillation, was, to Mr. Cheney's way of thinking, unbecoming in a man who would be Commander in Chief. Incredibly, Kerry has allowed this issue to remain an issue, via his thread-the-needle, what-I-really-meant parsings ever since his former primary opponents started lobbing his war vote at him, now continuing to allow it after the GOP has taken it up, using it as the polishing cloth to burnish up their frame around Kerry's flip-flop image. Incredible because this was, and is, an issue easily dealt with. When Cheney demands to know how Kerry can justify his shameful, unmanly, indecisive, poll-driven equivocation on the war -- how it is that he now opposes what he once obviously supported -- he need only reply as
follows: "Because you lied to me, Dick. Remember? The White House sent its managers to Congress before the vote, and they briefed the House and Senate Intelligence committees on the dire threat of Saddam. The reconstituted nuclear program. The mushroom clouds that would be appearing over New York and Washington in a few years. The lie you were telling the American people in general terms, you told us with specific, impressive-sounding statistics and authoritative reports -- that legendary 'bad intelligence.' It was on that basis and that basis alone -- the basis of imminent threat to America from weapons of mass destruction -- that my colleagues and I voted to give your boss the authority to invade.
COMMENTS
After all last weeks discussion of the comments board, the bloody thing seems to be falling apart and I don’t really know enough html to either fix it or replace. Of course, once you declare a piece of web of software to have failed, it frequently reasserts itself. If anyone finds that it’s working perfectly for them, please email me. If anyone has a link to an alternate server, let me know about that too. (Byron4d@aol.com)
CRYPTIQUE – I can’t do that, Dave.
As what seems like another too-early heatwave hits LA, the sense inhabiting a very nasty, but highly realistic science fiction movie closes in on me, and the sense that I may be writing for my life, and but with knowledge that it is probably already too late. Global weather systems lurch out of whack. The planet is now so crowded that my favorite cities have grown, just in the last few years, to the point of standing-room only. An enlightened species would be galvanized by a sense of apocalyptic urgency. Population and environmental disaster loom, but instead of uniting in a common awareness of the threat, those in power, both secular and spiritual, allow the contagion of war to run lose yet again. The USA has been stumbling down the slippery slope of counter-insurgency for a year, and has now fallen into a dead run. The last time this benighted and evil game was played, it ran for twelve years, cost lives of 50,000 young Americans, a million Vietnamese, and don’t even mention the Kennedy Brothers. It split the country, polarized the world, and took a bite out of my youth, although I will freely admit that we had a lot of fun fighting the good fight to stop that wat. Who the hell knows where the mess in Iraq is going to take us, or how long it will be in the taking? But right now it causes menacing images to spin out at random from my memory.
Like who recalls the neutron bomb? The neutron bomb was a piece of nastiness from the Carter era. Small, low yield nuke that was designed to vaporize the Soviet tanks as they rolled across the West German Border without doing to much permanent damage to the friendly real estate and infrastructure. The fear at the time was of the Red tank superiority over NATO, and the joke was that the neutron bomb killed people, but left the buildings intact. The thought can only lurk in the back of my mind that at least someone in the Bush is wondering where we left them and how hard it would be to dust them off. Kill the insurgents but don’t irradiate the crude?
And then there’s John Kerry. He is now the repository of the world’s hope to oust Bush and restore some semblance of civilization to this country. We all knew he’d run into a barrage of flack, but he hardly seems to be coping with it. While the Republican’s drag out to old fabricated snitch-files of J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO that absurdly claim the VVAW was seeking to overthrow the government, Kerry is still fumbling the smear about how he voted on the invasion of Iraq.
On this last topic, Andrew Christie, wrote the following and more for CommonDreams.org (sent by some girl)
There was Dick Cheney speaking to an NRA crowd last week, firming up the base, getting in the administration's favorite Kerry dig: Kerry could try to "explain or explain away all he wants" his vote to authorize the Iraq war, but such vacillation, was, to Mr. Cheney's way of thinking, unbecoming in a man who would be Commander in Chief. Incredibly, Kerry has allowed this issue to remain an issue, via his thread-the-needle, what-I-really-meant parsings ever since his former primary opponents started lobbing his war vote at him, now continuing to allow it after the GOP has taken it up, using it as the polishing cloth to burnish up their frame around Kerry's flip-flop image. Incredible because this was, and is, an issue easily dealt with. When Cheney demands to know how Kerry can justify his shameful, unmanly, indecisive, poll-driven equivocation on the war -- how it is that he now opposes what he once obviously supported -- he need only reply as
follows: "Because you lied to me, Dick. Remember? The White House sent its managers to Congress before the vote, and they briefed the House and Senate Intelligence committees on the dire threat of Saddam. The reconstituted nuclear program. The mushroom clouds that would be appearing over New York and Washington in a few years. The lie you were telling the American people in general terms, you told us with specific, impressive-sounding statistics and authoritative reports -- that legendary 'bad intelligence.' It was on that basis and that basis alone -- the basis of imminent threat to America from weapons of mass destruction -- that my colleagues and I voted to give your boss the authority to invade.
COMMENTS
After all last weeks discussion of the comments board, the bloody thing seems to be falling apart and I don’t really know enough html to either fix it or replace. Of course, once you declare a piece of web of software to have failed, it frequently reasserts itself. If anyone finds that it’s working perfectly for them, please email me. If anyone has a link to an alternate server, let me know about that too. (Byron4d@aol.com)
CRYPTIQUE – I can’t do that, Dave.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
.JPG)
