IT’S THE DOC40 HISTORY CLASS (for Dysfunctional History Month)

DEPT. OF MONKEY AND MONOLITH

Fifty years ago today -- on Feb. 20th, 1954 -- President Dwight Eisenhower interrupted his vacation in Palm Springs, Calif., to make a secret nocturnal trip to nearby Edwards Air Force base to meet two extraterrestrial aliens. And that, according to some theories, is when it all went really wrong. For just the facts (ma’am)...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4306380/

DEPT. OF ROCK AND HARD PLACE

I wrote this cautionary tale from the elder days of rock & roll, on how psychedelic music was corrupted into progressive rock, for Mojo. It ran in December ‘03 issue, but I figured, now the mag’s well off the stands, I’d post it for those among you who like this kind of esoteric musicological trainspotting...

PSYCH TO PROG

The Who were at the Marquee. The place was packed with rabid mods blocked on fine SKF Dexedrine. I think the tune was Smokestack Lightning, their early auto-destruct finale. Townshend had pulled round his two stacks of sixteen 4x12s so they faced each other leaving a nine inch gap. Holding his shell-shocked Rickenbaker by the neck, like a garroted vulture, he thrust the guitar into the space to create an electric alien banshee. Moon killed his kit in primitive anger management, Entwhistle made a noise like a nuclear submarine stripping it’s gears. We’d obviously come a long way from Be-Bop-A-Lula or Apache. It this wasn’t the future it was quantum progress.

More progress a couple of years later at the UFO Club, Pink Floyd played Interstellar Overdrive; similar psychosis, but far less rage. The piece commenced with a repeating four chord theme, little more than Green Onions in reverse and descending. The crowd was now stoned on Moroccan or Manfred’s acid. The paisley tide swayed and waved, submarine and languid. The theme cleared the gravity well, and meandered with whirling Binson echo boxes, out past John Cage and Albert Ayler to somewhere near moons of Saturn, straight from a Dan Dare hallucination, courtesy of Syd Barrett. Here again was rock & roll shaping its future, and making clear it was boldly going where none but Sun Ra had ever gone. Sadly, Barrett would soon be mistaking the dawn for a supernova, and being advised to take a rest from piping at the gates, but no matter, Sgt, Pepper was upon us and all manner of weird floodgates were bursting.

In the beginning, psychedelic meant novelty records; My Friend Jack Eats Sugar Lumps by the Smoke, Granny Takes A Trip by the Purple Gang, but, very quickly, the Rolling Stones went Marakesh/Owsley/Satan, while Steve Marriot and Pete Townshend were hard at work on a psychedelic pop idiom for Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake, and Pete’s underappreciated pop masterpiece, I Can See For Miles. Strawberry Fields were taking us down. Nights grew so neuron-hammered that we listened to Sister Ray by the Velvet Underground over and over, and very loud, and breakfast with Boss Goodman meant Paki black, bacon sandwiches, and all four sides of Live Dead. The MC5 were actually playing Sun Ra songs along with the more predicable rama-lama, while Jimi Hendrix blazed a trail all of his own to places where few humans could completely follow. The air was day-glo electric for those who Jim Morrison called the “stoned immaculate.” The only fly in the ointment was an insistent voice from the other side of the dressing room demanding we hold on a minute.

“Hold on a minute? Why?”
To engage in what seemed to be a very pointless argument turned out to be the answer. Was psychedelic music nothing but a drug groove? The slogan was bandied about; “what can be achieved by drugs can be achieved by other means.” To we Star Fleet dopefiends, the concept was plainly nonsense, but a number of bands, led by a Syd-less Pink Floyd, were backing off from public association with the drug culture. On one level this was an understandably pragmatic. In 1967/8/9, the official heat was on, from the high profile busts of Jagger, Richards and Brian Jones, down to the constant stop-and-search street harassment of the velvet and hairy. To blatantly promote oneself as “psychedelic”, or as a “drug band” was a red flag to the drug squad. In our neck of the woods, the Deviants, Sam Gopal, later Hawkwind, and all the stoner combos to follow, acted nonchalant, bollocks to pragmatism, and went our merry way flattering ourselves that we lived outside the law, and at least tried to be honest. Others, though, with their eyes on the prize, the contract, and dreams of shipping platinum, became circumspect. At the same time that CBS was developing their fatuous marketing campaign “The Man Can’t Bust Our Music”, house hippies working for major labels brainstormed for a generic term not so overtly druggie as “psyche”. The term Progressive Music floated from some hellspawned corporate meeting. A decade later, punk would be sanitized to suits and narrow ties by the sobriquet New Wave, and so it went when Psyche became Prog.

The house hippies had correctly noticed the all-night idiot dancers in what Zappa dubbed psychedelic dungeons went even more bananas than they were already were over America by the Nice, and this was absorbed as a template for Progressive. The greatest template of all, of course, was Whiter Shade of Pale – one of the most beautiful and deliberately witless pieces of pop music of all time. The major-label house hippies failed to grok, however, how, by embracing this approach, they were opening a Pandora’s box of pretensions and ugly trousers. Bad lyricist wrote screeds of illiterate Pre-Raphaelite poetry, but worse than that, keyboard players were encouraged. Led, as far as I could tell, by John Lord, Rick Wakeman, and Keith Emerson, these were a breed who had gone to Guildhall or some lesser college, and needed to get fancy with G-sharp diminished ninths, while making portentous judgements about Good Music. Unfortunately, rather than pillaging Bartok or even Richard Straus, and totally leaving Carl Orf for metal to discover years later, they leaned to the pop classics, Ravel, even Elgar. Sometimes it worked, as in Roy Wood’s early shoe-horning of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 into the bad-trip, proto-punk classic, Night Of Fear, or, on a more grandiose scale, Townshend’s orthodox operatic design for Tommy. Too often, though, grandiose became the dumb bombast of (say) Robert Plant’s Band of Joy. Progressive Music had to be de-capitalized, and some u/g press wag, maybe Charlie Murray, shortened it to “prog”, making it sound like a Saxon mining implement.

My real problem with prog was that I sensed totally different and more valid progress being made well away from its beaten tracks. Capt Beefheart represented progress in spades. With Trout Mask Replica, he had established rock’s own Mars Colony. The Stooges braved the metaphor of napalm in the morning and prepared for Search and Destroy. David Bowie sang Lou Reed like Anthony Newley dressed as Veronica Lake, while Bob Dylan was taking us down home for another look at country music. In such circumstances, it became very hard take the pomp and circumstance of King Crimson (even with the wit of Bob Fripp) as significant musical progress. Strange fusions were coming, but, for me, the strangest would be tragically denied us. Two great Kubrick monoliths, Jimi, post-Experience, and Miles, in Bitches’ Brew mood, appeared to be drifting into each other’s orbit. But then Jimi was a sunbeam, and that was the end of that. But damn, if nothing else, that would that have been progressive.

Of course, the psyche/prod conflict is now only in the minds of collectors. Those of us from back in the day have pissed over a lot of bridges in the intervening years. For the most part, we have kissed, made up, and even worked together, learning the lesson that method and madness are by no means antithetical, but are in fact two symbiotic halves of the same creative process. But remember, all of the above is highly subjective and shamelessly biased.

CRYPTIQUE – Smoke if you got some.

UTOPIA – SCHMUTOPIA

Yeah, well, it was nice to consider thinking outside the box for a moment, but sinboy was right. If you’re sick and ain’t got medical care, metaphysics can get a trifle luxurious, and thinking outside the box becomes academic in the face of the truly absurd shit the other side keep throwing at us as they strive for dictatorship. The following comes from Arianna Huffington, in her email newsletter. I have my reservations about Arianna. Never been too trusting of the pitstops, honky tonks, and the Highway Patrol parked behind the Exxon sign out on the Damascus Road, but in this case, she’s close to the money...

Remember that divisive pre-9/11 campaign staple? Well, it’s flared up again — with a vengeance and a rash of new administration actions clearly aimed at shoring up the president’s Christian conservative base. In the last month, the president has traded in his too-tight flight suit for a revival tent, backing a new anti-obscenity crusade, anti-condom sex-ed programs, a renewed commitment to fighting the drug war, and his attorney general’s efforts to poke around the private medical records of women who’ve had abortions. He even hinted in his State of the Union that he’d be willing to endorse a constitutional ban on gay marriage. But that’s not even the worst of it. The Justice Department has recently assigned a team of FBI agents to focus exclusively on adult obscenity cases. That’s right, with the war on terror in full swing, our war president is going to have a group of G-men doing nothing but working the porn beat when they could be tracking down — oh, I don’t know — terrorist sleeper cells. Talk about your misguided allocation of manpower. I don’t know about you, but I certainly feel safer knowing the feds are going to be keeping close tabs on Jenna Jameson.

Except Arianna doesn’t take it far enough. The old Duke of Wellington taught me that it’s half the battle to chose the battlefield and be the first to arrive. (Of course, it didn’t work for Robert E. Lee, but that’s another story.) The bloody fundamentalists are making the running, comrades. We are under heavy bombardment by the cultural trivia of oppression and it is wasting a great deal of our time. And it will get more intense and viciously witless as this election year progresses. Witness the following nonsense relayed by Jay Babcock

Can American cultural life get any more absurd? I'm laughing to keep from crying...

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla., Sunday, Feb. 15, 2004 – Bobby Labonte overcame early problems in the Daytona 500 and fought back to finish 11th in the 46th Daytona 500 Feb... The hood of Labonte's car is both a shameless movie plug -- The Passion of the Christ, coming soon to a theater near you -- and some new-style proselytizing for the Gospel. Yes, witnessing has moved from the revival tent to the fast lane. "It's a chance to get the word out," Labonte, who grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas, said about the ad on his car. "Someone who is curious about Jesus and has never been saved sees the race and says, 'Hmmm, I'd like to see what that's about.' ... Maybe we can change their minds." NASCAR racing and the Christian faith have often worked hand-in-hand, from infield services for drivers, crewmen and officials to the pre-race invocation to the annual break in the schedule for the Easter holiday. Now comes a car promoting The Passion of the Christ, a soon-to-be-released movie that already has drawn lavish praise from conservative clergy -- including the Rev. Billy Graham -- but angry denouncements from Jewish groups fearing it will stir up anti-Semitism. For Labonte, it was a no-brainer to plug Mel Gibson's film on the No. 18 car, especially since the movie focuses on the seminal event in the Christian faith -- the crucifixion of Jesus."I know how much it has impacted my life and my family's life," said Labonte, a former NASCAR Nextel Cup champion.

http://www.bobbylabonte.com/news/04_news/040215_race.shtml

AND IN RESPONSE TO SINBOY OF YESTERDAY

some girl writes...

sinboy is cute, but...????
Quoting him: "I figure the seeds were there in other places for shit like the Manson cult to come about, but they just grew the way they did because of a serious disrespect for human life, and a leader who decided to use that for his own glorification. That's not uncommon, it's just that they looked really fucked up and unique when the media found them." Oh, that media. always trolling for freaks. or maybe they were kind of hard to miss, what with the slaughtering of the pigs and all. i mean, i see what he sorta means, but...i dunno. i would a more cynical point about it being natural for leaders to abuse their power, human nature, blah blah ... but then i'd feel bad for raining on his hard-work utopian parade. hee. anyway, i love reading about his little commune or whatever, but does he really think it's never been done before? adorable. hmmm....a true libertine? and a boy, no less. kewl.

AND FINALLY MORE FARREN

For a more reasoned and erudite analysis of the current Democratic primaries try the cover story I seem to have written for this week's LA Citybeat.

http://lacitybeat.com

CRYPTIQUE – Rome wasn’t burned in a day.

UTOPIA REDUX – First Response To Yesterday’s Post

Sinboy writes...

Polymorphous yes. Utopianism? Are you effing kidding? This shit takes work. One of my tribe (*) just broke her leg on the way to thecourthouse to help with the same sex marriages in San Francisco. She's a massage therapist, has no health insurance, and is going to need near
24 hr care for a while. The really shitty thing is that she's a marathon runner, and was just recovering from some pain from her last try at training for an AIDS marathon. That Heinlein guy never mentioned this in Stranger In A Strange Land. But somehow I don't feel cheated. If you're still worried about the whole "Manson cult" thing, you should see the scar one of my other family members just got. A lamp fell on him. He's this intense biker tech guy with a superman fixation. I figure the seeds were there in other places for shit like the Manson cult to come about, but they just grew the way they did because of a serious disrespect for human life, and a leader who decided to use that for his own glorification. That's not uncommon, it's just that they looked really fucked up and unique when the media found them.
(*)there's no word for what we do as a family. It's not common enough to get a definition. Some call it polyamory, others call it open marriages, and some would call it communalism. The words aren't what's important.

While some girl corrects a couple of Star Trek details I screwed up.

Star Trek: TNG is set in the 24th century. That would make it THREE hundred years in the future. Not two hundred. And you didn't key in a code to get what you wanted from the replicator on the Enterprise-D. You just told it what you wanted. You know, like, "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot." And there you had it.

GAY WEDDINGS

Again I stand corrected. There were 2500 gay weddings in the Bay Area over the long weekend, to which I can only paraphrase Col. Kilgore in one of my favorite movies. -- "I love the news of gay weddings in the morning. It's news of...chaos."

WHAT US WORRY?

But this clip from the New York Times may indicate that all this discussion of a better world may be totally academic...

Recent astronomical measurements, scientists say, cannot rule out the possibility that in a few billion years a mysterious force permeating space-time will be strong enough to blow everything apart, shred rocks, animals, molecules and finally even atoms in a last seemingly mad instant of cosmic self-abnegation. “In some ways it sounds more like science fiction than fact," said Dr. Robert Caldwell, a Dartmouth physicist who described this apocalyptic possibility in a paper with Dr. Marc Kamionkowski and Dr. Nevin Weinberg, from the California Institute of Technology, last year. The Big Rip is only one of a constellation of doomsday possibilities resulting from the discovery by two teams of astronomers six years ago that a mysterious force called dark energy seems to be wrenching the universe apart. Instead of slowing down from cosmic gravity, as cosmologists had presumed for a century, the galaxies started speeding up about five billion years ago, like a driver hitting the gas pedal after passing a tollbooth. Dark energy sounded crazy at the time, but in the intervening years a cascade of observations have strengthened the case that something truly weird is going on in the sky. It has a name, but that belies the fact that nobody really knows what dark energy is. In six years it has become one of the central and apparently unavoidable features of the cosmos, the surprise question mark at the top of everybody's list, undermining what physicists presumed they understood about space, time, gravity and the future of the universe.

CRYPTIQUE – Surf or fight!

ANYONE FOR UTOPIA?

How many of you remember Star Trek: The Next Generation? That was the second version of the show that boldly went where no TV show had gone before, the one with the Patrick Stewart and his shaved head as captain of the slick, new-model Starship Enterprise, with the bar and the “holodeck” where all fantasies were made virtual reality. The Mk 2 Enterprise also came with a neat device that looked like a microwave and could supply anything from a dry martini to clean underwear just by keying in the appropriate code. In a small backstory aside, viewers were informed that, when this marvelous stuff simulator was invented, money was abolished on Earth, and a whole new social order introduced.

This was supposedly two hundred years in the future, but it would seem that from MP3s to weblogs, the situation is already with us in the contemporary arts, and the obsolescence of money becomes technically possible. Okay so the record companies sue downloaders, and techies work on encryption devices so we still have to pay to watch movies, but these are only holding patterns. Writers wonder where it will all end. Some turn tricks, others pose as Nazis. Agents cop attitudes, and don’t return calls. Drummers move to Montana where bars still pay the band to play blues for drunks. Web and print scuffle for the same advertising dollars. Chaos is virtually upon us. And yet we can hardly have a culture that is entirely driven by elves, amateurs, and the unemployable.

You may have noticed that I’ve taken a day off from Bush bashing. This doesn’t mean that I have given up on evicting the weasel from the White House, but today I started reflecting on the shape of things just a few miles further down this road. The battle is not merely to get John Kerry into the White House for nothing more than a Dem course correction. Fear of the future is rapidly becoming the 21st century malady, and when the ignorant get scared they run to daddy. Daddy, of course, in political terms, is, as cognitive scientist George Lakoff, (I don’t have a link to hand, look him up!) points out, the totalitarianism of dictatorship. That is why I am so bent on bashing Bush. I recognize, with, I hope, some accuracy that the Bush/Cheney/Ashcroft/Rumsfeld quartet and the voice of PNAC are the thin end of an Imperial American dictatorship.

Maybe with Bush currently polling five points behind Kerry, he is not so invincible as he looked at the end of last year, but what’s ahead? Can the kind of democracy formulated by 18th century gentleman farmers cope with a techno-driven social upheaval that promises to be as radical and disruptive as the Industrial Revolution and the Italian Renaissance combined? Right now half my cable channels are down, but Comcast, while trying to buy Disney, have instituted a policy of charging me $1.99 to complain to a human being. They have a monopoly on my TV service, unless I re-tech to satellite, or go back to eight channels and rabbit ears with bits of tinfoil on them. I’m not only screwed but left prostrate for further uninvited penetration. That is how corporate capitalism copes with change.

So, brothers and sisters, what are your thoughts on all this? I am not preaching doom and gloom, and ain't that a change? A golden road could be paved for our tried feet, but it will require a massive creativity. But the very survival of creativity is being choked off. I’d really like to hear from all who read this. Short comments on the absurd comments board, but longer reflections to byron4D@aol.com. They will be posted.

NOTE

How many gay weddings were there today in San Francisco? A hundred?

RESPONSE TO YESTERDAYS BECK/FARREN

from mfc
Henri LeBeque...how dare you mention mendacity and not Burl...and I think there's room for The Rifleman in there somewhere

CRYPTIQUE – Somebody say amen.

DID YOU MISS ME?

Yeah well, it was a weekend not so much lost as spent running behind the metaphoric bus, and not managing quite to get on it, mainly because of Mixmaster Eric and his using me and the CityBeat crew as guinea pigs for his glow in the dark cocktails, although the golden-orange ones were very nice – Carmen Miranda’s Tropical Pussy or something. I really have to compose the names of Eric’s drinks for him. I did create a moment of drama, though, when the TV in the bar was running by default, tuned to some History Channel-type show about famous executions, it being the anniversary of the hanging of alleged Lindburg baby kidnapper Bruno Hauptmann, and everyone was suddenly watching with such rapt and grisly attention that I felt I had to remonstrate with full Shakespearian projection that this was not appropriate bar-viewing on a Friday night – even the 13th – and then storm out for a smoke. When I came back, Jimi Hendrix was on the jukebox and the lights had been dimmed and all was much more as I felt it should be. So I guess I prevailed, but maybe I am turning into an irascible old geezer. Who knows?

DIALOGUE

The following exchange occurred on Sunday afternoon with Henry Cabot Beck, although you do need an extensive knowledge of old movies and Tennessee Williams to follow it.

Re “Richard Cohen describes far more vividly than GWB what it was like avoiding Vietnam combat in the US National Guard.”

Beck – We're going to find that like Orson Welles' Mr Arkadin AKA Confidential Report, guys who could actually come forward and talk about bending elbows, snorting blow, chasing West Texas hookers, tipping cattle, and evading the war with GWB will have disappeared, one at a time, in the vast indifference of the Texas outback. Other movie references: Cliff Robertson in Picnic, Kyle Hadley (Robert Stack) in Written On The Wind, Anthony Franciosa as Jody Varner sucking up to Will Varner (Orson Welles again) in The Long Hot Summer. All stories about bad sons with too much money, mean and miserable, trying to make daddy happy or stand in his shoes. If this were the film Giant, GWB would be seen as a child playing in the dirt with an toy oil derrick, a tin soldier and an empty whisky bottle. Chill Wills would play Dick Cheney.

Farren – But where is Jett Rink?

Beck – He's Phil Spector.

Farren – Oh, I though he might be Ted Turner. More important though, in the Giant analogue, where is Liz?

Beck – To my mind, the tragedy of GWB is that he never had a great, big-titted fag hag Liz Taylor dominatrix drama queen to pick him up by the scruff of the neck like Roy Horn and drag him away from Big Daddy like Maggie The Cat did for Brick. Of course GB had Barbara, but Laura Bush is neither Big Mama nor Maggie nor even Hillary. Come to think of it, Bill would have made a good Brick. And worst of all, Big Daddy Bush (Bradford Dillman?) never gave GW the much needed speech about mendacity. Of course the crux of the play is that nearly everybody in it is a lying liar. The world may be ready for Cat On A Hot Tin White House.

OBITUARY

Munz sends the following clip...

Feb. 13, 2004 – The Wisc.Post-Crescent

His daughter remembers him as a man with a pad of paper and pen, always writing articles or jotting down memos. For the man who first used the term "psychedelic," the end came in Appleton. Psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, 86, died at home Feb. 6. Osmond and his wife, Jane, had been living with their daughter in her Appleton home for the past four years. He moved to Appleton from Alabama. Euphemia Blackburn, 45, said her father had been an invalid for about 13 years. "He went quietly at home," Blackburn said Thursday. Osmond, born in England in 1917, is said to have coined "psychedelic" in a letter to British author Aldous Huxley to describe manifestations of the mind. Osmond, researcher of such mind-altering substances as LSD and mescaline, gave Huxley mescaline in the 1950s. Huxley related his experience in "The
Doors of Perception." Osmond was interested in researching the way LSD altered perceptions of
time and space and whether it could help could help alcoholics kick their addiction.

CRYPTQUE – I might as well live.

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A SHORT INTERUPTION OF SERVICE
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Due to a bout of Friday 13th drunkeness -- and the resulting hangover -- brought on by Mixmaster Eric and his glow in the dark cocktails, Doc40 for St. Valentine's Day was massacred. And the Sunday post is kind of pathetic. A full account of the incident, or at least some lame excuses, will follow on Monday. The following poem sets the mood...

A LONG WALK WITH THE DEMON

All his life he'd walked with the demon
From the Radium Room to the Palace of Mirrors
From the Canadian border to the Place of Skulls
All his life he'd walked with the demon
At regular intervals, his friends had come to him
And pleaded that he cast it from him

The demon drove him to the madness
The craving for the adoration of the mob
The reason that all but one of his women had left him
The demon might mature and modify
Making him more comfortable with the passage of the nightmare
But he would never be free

The demon would never let him be free
Never allow itself to be cast out or put aside
Symbiosis, home boy, it told him
A twin singularity

Written in 1993. Recorded in the same year with Tijuana Bible for the CD Gringo Madness, released by Big Beat, London 1993.

CRYPTIQUE -- Give me a fucking break!

INSPIRATIONAL PARABLES

I’ve always hated that story about the guy with no shoes who meets a guy with no legs and doesn’t feel so bad. You know why? Because the guy with no shoes was a wino with prostate cancer, and the guy with no legs was a billionaire Columbian drug lord with one of these ultra-tech wheelchairs like Stephen Hawking. (And while we’re on the subject, how did Stephen Hawking cheat on his wife?)

THE RED OCTOBER TRACTOR FACTORY

Whenever I hit one of the sloughs of depression and despondency that make artists such a pain in the ass to be around, I remind myself of the two Russian soldiers who, during the World War II siege of Stalingrad, manned a machine gun nest in the Red October Tractor Factory for 52 straight days, frequently starving and always freezing. I mean, how can that determination and suffering be compared to, say, the fear of creative failure or the pangs of unrequited love? And yet maybe one or both of them, in another time and another place, ached for a lost love to the point of suicidal contemplation. Which, of course, begs the question can pain, or joy for that matter, ever be quantified?

THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY BUSHWHACKERS (LEB)

(WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE WAR MR. PRESIDENT? #1)

Richard Cohen describes far more vividly than GWB what it was like avoiding Vietnam combat in the US National Guard. Clip courtesy of Billy via natalien...

During the Vietnam War, I was what filmmaker Michael Moore would call a "deserter." Along with President Bush and countless other young men, I joined the National Guard, did my six months of active duty (basic training, etc.) and then returned to my home unit, where I eventually dropped from sight. In the end, just like President Bush, I got an honorable discharge. But unlike President Bush, I have just told the truth about my service. He hasn't. At least I don't think so. Nothing about Bush during that period -- not his drinking, not his partying -- suggests that he was a consistently conscientious member of the Texas or Alabama Air National Guard. As it happens, there are no records to show that Bush reported for duty during the summer and fall of 1972. Nonetheless, Bush insists he was where he was supposed to be -- "Otherwise I wouldn't have been honorably discharged," Bush told Tim Russert. Please, sir, don't make me laugh. It is sort of amazing that every four or eight years, Vietnam -- that long-ago war -- rears up from seemingly nowhere and comes to figure in the national political debate. In 1988 Dan Quayle had to answer for his National Guard service. In 1992 Bill Clinton had to grapple with the question of how he avoided the Vietnam-era draft. Now George Bush, who faced this question the last time out, has to face it again. The reason is that this time he is likely to compete against a genuine war hero. John Kerry did not duck the war. But George Bush did. He did so by joining the National Guard. Bush now wants to drape the Vietnam-era Guard with the bloodied flag of today's Iraq-serving Guard -- "I wouldn't denigrate service to the Guard," Bush warned during his interview with Russert -- but the fact remained that back then the Guard was where you went if you did not want to fight. That was the case with me. I opposed the war in Vietnam and had no desire to fight it. Bush, on the other hand, says he supported the war -- as long, it seems, as someone else fought it.
It hardly matters what Bush did or did not do back in 1972. He is not the man now he was then -- that by his own admission. In the same way, it did not matter that Clinton ducked the draft, because, really, just about everyone I knew at the time was doing something similar. All that really matters is how one accounts for what one did. Do you tell the truth (which Clinton did not)? Or do you do what I think Bush has been doing, which is making his National Guard service into something it was not? In his case, it was a rich kid's way around the draft. In my case, it was something similar -- although (darn!) I was not rich. I was, though, lucky enough to get into a National Guard unit in the nick of time, about a day before I was drafted. I did my basic and advanced training (combat engineer) and returned to my unit. I was supposed to attend weekly drills and summer camp, but I found them inconvenient. I "moved" to California and then "moved" back to New York, establishing a confusing paper trail that led, really, nowhere. For two years or so, I played a perfectly legal form of hooky.
To show you what a mess the Guard was at the time, I even got paid for all the meetings I missed. In the end, I wound up in the Army Reserve. I was assigned to units for which I had no training -- tank repairman, for instance. In some units we sat around with nothing to do, and in one we took turns delivering antiwar
lectures. The National Guard and the Reserves were something of a joke. Everyone knew it. Books have been written about it. Maybe things changed dramatically by 1972, two years after I got my discharge, but I kind of doubt it. I have no shame about my service, but I know it for what it was -- hardly the Charge of the Light Brigade.
When Bush attempts to drape the flag of today's Guard over the one he was in so long ago, when he warns his critics to remember that "there are a lot of really fine people who have served in the National Guard and who are serving in the National Guard today in Iraq," then he is doing now what he was doing then: hiding behind the ones who were really doing the fighting. It's about time he grew up.

(See tomorrow for #2)

A MUSICIAN JOKE I NEVER HEARD BEFORE

A young child says to his mother, "Mom, when I grow up I think I'd like to be a musician." She replies, "Well honey, you know you can't do both."

CRYPTIQUE – Friday 12A

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ANNOUNCEMENT

For those of you in and around Los Angeles, Mick Farren will be signing the paperback of his novel UNDERLAND tomorrow, Saturday, Feb 14th, 2.00PM – 4.00PM at ...
Dark Delicacies
4213 W. Burbank Blvd.
Burbank, 818-556-6660 / 888-darkdel

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TIME IS NOT ON MY SIDE THIS WEEK

Still putting the “dead” in deadline, and in the grip of other, more proximate horrors, I again cop out, although, today, I offer up (below) a fabulous golden oldie for you nostalgic consideration. This was written back in the days when the aliens were still around, Bill Clinton ruled over a pleasant and golden land, and all the religious right had to worry about were blowjobs and Satanic conspiracy...

BIG TROUBLE ON THE MONKEY PLANET

The last time that I was abducted by aliens, I returned with the distinct impression that they were close to the end of their extra-terrestrial rope with the Third Stone from the Sun and, in particular, its overdeveloped, tool using, simian inhabitants. Namely us -- the human race. When one of those lipless little grey suckers with the bald heads and huge guppy eyes came up to me, right there in the main abductee reception area, a charmless place not unlike Ontario airport with an added dimension, and wanted to know "when the hell are you Earth monkeys going to stop breeding yourselves into extinction", I had to accept the fact that we may not be the most admired lifeform in this neck of the quadrant.
I rarely admit my abduction experiences. Not so much because I'm embarrassed by them. It's more that I've never really felt that my encounters had been significantly productive. I tended to talk about them rather more when I lived in New York. I discovered that, on 14th Street, if you told the guy on the next bar stool that you were an UFO abductee, he would more than likely dismiss you as crazy, but mercifully harmless. Try the same thing at a party in Venice and they'll not only totally believe you but proceed to recount their own adventures in space, usually centering on intrusive alien surgical procedures, often of a gynecological nature. Some will even give you the number of a therapeutic support group.
It was during the initial medical examination that the ETs started to discover that I was hardly the experimental subject of their collective dreams. I was first abducted at a time when I was drinking even more heavily than usual. It solved the missing time problem, but my blood alcohol level spiked out and created chaos butterflies in their nano-stats. Even worse, my chromosomes had been so customized by the quantities of LSD 25 that I'd consumed during an earlier bout of destructive self exploration, that I was pretty much useless as a source of genetic material, unless, of course, someone or something wanted to breed a race of nappy haired tadpoles with nasty imaginations. Rumors also circulated that, when particularly fucked up, I would show a less than appropriate affection for the rectal probe.
In terms of the normal conventions of Earth/alien interaction, I pretty much proved myself a social incompetent, and I would never have been abducted again had the implant not already been in the small of my back, just to the left of my spine. This means I'm solidly on the tracking computer, and can be hauled up for a bogus 20 thousand light year service at any time, and there isn't a damn thing that I or any other bio-entity can do about it. I don't want to see them, they don't want to see me, but, like junk mail and unwanted relatives, they just keep coming around.
This was surely the reason that, after the third routine beam up, I was shuffled aside to hold gentlemanly if sometimes oblique conversations with Qua/D/Thrrof, the discursive focus of a being, essentially a form of highly intelligent yeast, about nine thousand miles long and one molecule thick, that makes its home in a loose orbit around Jupiter. Qua/D/Thrrof was the first alien to make crystal clear what I'd already suspected. As far as the rest of the inhabitants of the viable cluster are concerned, here on the Monkey Planet, (as Earth is commonly known) we are in big trouble. That's why, even after twenty thousand years, we still haven't emerged from the quarantine phase as laid down in the Prime Directive. (He also confirmed how Tom Tomorrow's theory about the Republican Party and Rush Limbaugh being a secret alien test of human stupidity is uncannily on the money.)
Like most foreigners, Qua/D/Thrrof blames a considerable proportion of Monkey Planet woes to the affluent of the United States. (Or, as they call them, The Resource Gobblers.) In our most recent conversation, he expressed trepidation over how 2000 AD is a Presidential election year, and the escalating horror of the phenomenon might, this time round, actually push us over into a collective, species-wide, greed-barking psychosis.
"I don't know why you don't just get rid of democracy." Qua/D/Thrrof has a certain problem gasping concepts like the rights of the individual, coming as he does from a collective consciousness of over two billion component facets. He's good, however, at accepting nuances like how election finance reform is fundamentally impossible because the television stations end up with the lion's share of the bucks, and around election time, politics yields more ad revenue than headache remedies, phone sex and psychic hotlines combined.
"Just get rid of television." Even other passing aliens realized that Qua/D/Thrrof was elaborately out of touch with this remark. A small green person with tentacles and huge ears sadly shook what approximated for a head. "It's only television that keeps them from killing each other more than they already do. If television hadn't been introduced in the fifties, they'd be into mechanized erotic cannibalism by now. You know what the monkeys are like when you leave them to their own devices."
Another received snippet of intergalactic gossip is that our Earth, despite its quarantine, is getting the reputation as a clandestine hangout of vermin and lowlife. High on the list are the crew of retard hot rodders and nova scum from Zeta Reticuli who've been putting on the lightshows out at Area 51, just north of Las Vegas, and sending the conspiracy paranoids into uproar. It would seem that these alien Hells Angels have managed to have convinced the US military that they are the Supreme Authority in the Universe, rather than the malicious honky tonk sweepings of a hundred parasecs, and now have total run of the Pentagon.
What really worries Qua/D/Thrrof, however, is our galloping overpopulation. "Surest way to foul up a perfectly good planet. You either got to stop breeding or start dying." Qua/D/Thrrof is especially pissed at the Catholic Church and their attitudes to population control. As he puts it "Jesus was one of ours in the first place. It's kinda embarrassing."
Another serious consideration would seem to be that many aliens feel that our Earthling stupidity is playing directly into the hands of some galactic political hard liners. Apparently the stampede to the bellicose right is not confined to only this solar system. An entire multi-species mindset would be just as happy to fire up the Great Planet Fryer and turn this whole messy sphere that we call home into one vast, fused, green glass Christmas Tree ornament. Seemingly they view Earth as something akin to a planetary welfare case.
Like they say on the X-Files. "The truth is out there." Or at least some approximation of it.

Written in 1996. First published in 1996 in The Los Angeles Reader as a column in the "Panic In The Year Zero" series.

BUT...

Maybe the aliens have not gone away, and/or the Satanic conspiracy is still lurking. This comes from MSNBC...

A small town in Sicily may be due for an exorcism. The villagers of Canneto di Caronia are struggling to explain why dozens of household items are suddenly bursting into flame. When electrical goods began combusting, they assumed a strange power surge, so the local utility cut power temporarily. But even unplugged appliances combusted, and pieces of furniture began lighting up without notice. Some fires have spread so rapidly that residents have been evacuated from their homes. "Demons occupy a house and appear in electrical goods... Let's not forget that Satan and his followers have immense powers."

CRYPTIQUE – Keep your hair-dryer close, but your toaster closer.

THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY BUSHWHACKERS (LEB)

And what fun for us pinko saddle-tramps to watch the fascist pundits turn on their former golden boy. As in this snippet from AOL news on the formerly rabid Robert Novak...

Mr. Novak pointed out the most Republicans are not likely to vote for the Democratic nominee. But, he said: "The problem is not whether they vote for Kerry. The problem is whether they stay at home."

Then, hey, let’s have some real nice TV on election day, tailored for Republicans. Like a Touched By An Angel marathon hosted by Rush Limbaugh. Or an nice new happy-happy miniseries on the Reagans.

************************************************
ANNOUNCEMENT

For those of you in and around Los Angeles, Mick Farren will be signing the new paperback edition of his novel UNDERLAND next Saturday, Feb 14th, 2.00PM – 4.00PM at ...
Dark Delicacies
4213 W. Burbank Blvd.
Burbank, 818-556-6660 / 888-darkdel

************************************************

STOP PRESS

According to the site tracker, Doc40 just got a hit from Iran! Fuck! Now what lists am I on? Another surprise was one from Croatia.

THE CURSE OF THE DRINKING CLASSES

Work. That’s right friends and neighbors, today I have to work – as in write to earn a living -- so things are going to be kinda short. But mother said there’d be days like this, and I’ll see you all tomorrow.

Also, in my incarnation as TV critic of LA CityBeat, HBO sent me the first four episodes of the next Sopranos series, and I have to watch them. I don’t think I’m giving anything away when I tell you there’s a cool New Jersey black bear in the season premiere, and Anthony Jr gets a drum kit. (NB. David Chase was once a rock drummer.)

In the meantime, nobody gets totally left without anything to do at Doc40's fun house. Our homegirl hipspinster has updated her blog with observations on Jimi Hendrix, the Grammies and the Super Bowl, plus, if you scroll her back a couple of posts you will find yourself filled in on Eric the bartender at Canters who mixes glow-in-the-dark, demon-raising cocktails. (See comments board). She’s at...

http://hipspinster.blogspot.com/

And if that wasn’t enough...

TRUE LAWYER JOKES 3 & 4

More courtroom absurdities from the book Disorder in the American Courts, courtesy of Jessica. (See Fri Feb 6 & Sat Feb 7)

Q: Now doctor, isn't it true that when a person dies in his sleep, he doesn't know about it until the next morning?
A: Did you actually pass the bar exam?

Q: What was the first thing your husband said to you when he woke up that morning?
A: He said, "Where am I, Cathy?"
Q: And why did that upset you?
A: My name is Dorothy.

And, of course, LEB marches on...

THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY BUSHWHACKERS (LEB)

Having seen George screw up on TV, with the details of his so-called military service now spilling all over the media, and rightwing pundits like Bill O’Reilly start to shy away from him, our pal Patrick stays one jump ahead by directing our attention to the growing scandal over Republican dirty tricks, in this instance, the hacking of Democrat computer files, and then turning then over to Robert Novak, who, having aided in the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame, seems willing to make public anything the GOP or the White House feeds to him no matter whether it’s in the national interest or not. The following snippet is from the Boston Globe...

Democrats now claim their private memos formed the basis for a February 2003 column by conservative pundit Robert Novak that revealed plans pushed by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, to filibuster certain judicial nominees. Novak is also at the center of an investigation into who leaked the identity of a CIA agent whose husband contradicted a Bush administration claim about Iraqi nuclear programs. Citing "internal Senate sources," Novak's column described closed-door Democratic meetings about how to handle nominees. Its details and direct quotes from Democrats -- characterizing former nominee Miguel Estrada as a "stealth right-wing zealot" and describing the GOP agenda as an "assembly line" for right-wing nominees -- are contained in talking points and meeting accounts from the Democratic files now known to have been compromised.

And Marjorie forwards a call to direct action...

Dear friend,
In an attempt to escape responsibility for the misleading statements that led the nation to war, President Bush has announced plans to form an independent inquiry to look into what went wrong. An inquiry would serve the Bush administration well: it would envelop the issue in a fog of uncertainty, deflect blame onto the intelligence services, and push any political damage into 2005, after the upcoming election. But the facts need no clarification. Despite repeated warnings from the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, President Bush and his administration hyped and distorted the threat that Iraq posed. And now that reality is setting in, the President seeks to pin the blame on someone else. We can't let him. Congress has the power to censure the President -- to formally reprimand him for his betrayal of the nation's trust. If ever there was a time to use this function, it is now. Join the call for Congress to censure President Bush now at:

http://www.moveon.org/censure/?id=-539027-24Vd7Yn86Y9kb1kp3dto2A

CRYPTIQUE – The butterfly can’t be blamed.

THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY BUSHWHACKERS (LEB)

Whether it’s the constant onslaught of Doc40 at the tainted edifice of G.W. Bush, or that Toad-Boy deigned to show up on TV yesterday, but my laptop memory is groaning under a ton of 100% anti-George email. In a way it’s kind irksome that we have gird up and take the fight to the simian fool, when we could be laughing, joking, and debating the important topics of the day like how Diana Ross is going to survive 48 hours in the joint, why Marla Maples is selling some weird package of religious devotional software called The 72(?) Names of God on late-night television, or listening to me whine about all the help I’ll need to win the H. P. Lovecraft Necronomicon Competition. (I mean, how do you pastiche a 17th century Satanist translating 9th century Arabic?) But, as Chairman Mao once remarked, “the revolution is not a dinner party”, so it’s back into the breach, dear friends, once more.

MORAL DILEMMA – Open with a joke
A beau jest from Billy via natalien...
This test only has one question, but it's a very important one. Please don't answer it without giving it some serious thought. By giving an honest answer you will be able to ascertain where you stand morally and politically. The test features an unlikely, completely fictional situation, where you will have to make one decision. Remember that your answer should to be honest, yet spontaneous. You're in Florida. In Miami, to be exact. There is great chaos going on around you, caused by a hurricane and severe floods. There are huge masses of water all around you. You are an Associated Press photographer and you are in the middle of this great disaster. The situation is nearly hopeless. You're trying to shoot very impressive photos. There are houses afloat around, people floating, disappearing into the water. Nature is showing all its awesome power. Suddenly you see a man in the water - he is fighting for his life, trying not to be taken away by the masses of water and mud. You move closer. Somehow the man looks familiar. Suddenly you know who it is - it's George W. Bush! At the same time you notice that the raging waters are about to take him away, forever. you have two options. You can try to save him or you can take the best photo of your life. You can't do both. You can either heroically save the life of George W. Bush, or you can shoot a Pulitzer Prize winning photo, a unique photo chronicling one of the world's most powerful men in a battle against the power of nature itself.
Here's the question (please give an honest answer): Would you select color film, or instead go for the simplicity of Classic black and white?

322?
From fidicen
Ahoy Doc – Point of Information
"#322" was uttered by Russert, not the smirking chimp. I 've looked into that girl's book on Skull and B but cannot recall the significance of that number, though surely that is Bush's membership number. Bush only said "it's so secret I can't even talk about it." Curious how Russert quoted Kerry's knowing of Bush then and Bush utterly denied knowing Kerry, which would be impossible if they were there together, as they were. Another nice factoid is that that they give you a new name when you join. They couldn't think of one for Chimpy so they named him "Temporary." Lo and behold, he never got another name so his name in the group is "Temporary!" One of the very first events at the WH following the coup was an S&B bash. Fine opportunity this summer to discredit anti-conspiracists as two boners have a cock fight. Should be a rash of good outings, esp. for that good woman's tome. Two links – Brother Corn with a fine deconstruction: http://thenation.com/capitalgames/index.mhtml?bid=3&pid=1245
and here: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0209-02.htm

HISTORY AND LIES

A handy lies-in-timeline from Marjorie,
Oct. 7, 2002: "The Iraqi regime... possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons."
March 17, 2003: "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."
January 20, 2004: "Had we failed to act, the dictator's weapons of mass destruction programs would continue to this day."
January 27, 2004: "First of all I think it's very important for us to let the Iraq Survey Group do its work so we can find out the facts, compare the facts to what was thought."
February 8, 2004: "Saddam Hussein was a danger to America... because he had the capacity to have a weapon, make a weapon. We thought he had weapons. The international community thought he had weapons."
February 8, 2004: "There is no such thing necessarily in a dictatorial regime of ironclad absolutely solid evidence. The evidence I had was the best possible evidence that he had a weapon."
Sources: Reuters, The Associated Press

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SADDAM

Just the facts (ma’am) from kaymo
1958 Iraqi military men inspired by Nasser's nationalist revolt in 52 against the British backed Egyptian monarchy, seized power in Baghdad. Their leader General Abdel-Karim Kassem turned to the USSR for aid. He legalized the Communist party. He decreed wide ranging land reform and granted autonomy to the Kurds in the north. Iraq also announced its claim to Kuwait, which had once been joined to what is now southern Iraq in a province of the Ottoman turkish empire. This alarmed both the US and the UK. The British reinforced their presence in the Persian Gulf to head off any moves by Kassem. CIA Director Allen Dulles deemed Iraq "the most dangerous place in the world." The CIA began fishing in Iraqi waters. (At the time the Shah was firmly in control of neighboring Iran after the CIA backed coup there.)
1963 the anti-Communist Ba'ath Party-- Sunni controlled-- seized power in a coup. Kassem and a long list of leftists provided by the CIA were shot. Among the young Ba'athists was one Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti. The Ba'athists were as yet unable to completely dominate the country and had to govern as part of a coalition. This did not sit well with the CIA which wanted a tighter, right wing government in place.
1968 The CIA helped the Ba'athists pull off a coup d'etat in which they eliminated their lefist and centrist coalition partners and set up full Ba'athist regime (think Francoist, Phalange Spain for a comparison.)"It was a regime that was unquestionably midwived by the United States and the CIA's involvement there was really primary." Roger Morris, staffer of the NSC during the late sixties under both Johnson and Nixon.
1979 Saddam Hussein came to the fore in another coup and replaced his mentor Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr. A massive purge of the Ba'athist elite took place at once. Saddam Hussein was a known CIA intelligence asset. The same year saw the fall of the Shah of Iran and the rise of Khomeini and the Islamist state in Teheran. This event had enormous repercussions for American policy in the region.
1980 Saddam invaded Iran with the idea of striking while his bigger neighbor was in chaos and seizing the Iranian oil fields along the Persian Gulf. This would have crippled the Shiite government in Teheran and also help to cow the Shiite majority in Iraq. Saddam and his generals bungled the war and by 1982 they were thrust back on the defensive. It began to look as if Iran might actually defeat Iraq. This was unacceptable to the US and the Reagan Administration launched a covert operation to arm and assist Ba'athist Iraq. (Note: the NSDD No.114 of Nov 26 1983 is still classified top secret. The US promised to do whatever was necessary to stop Iraq losing the war.) The Reagan Admin began to secretly funnel arms and supplies to Baghdad. As much as $5.5 billion in loans were arranged to help Iraq buy arms, under the cover of promoting American farm exports. Weapons were sent via CIA fronts in Saudi Arabia and Chile. Between 1986 and 89 seventy three transactions took place including weapons grade Anthrax cultures, computers and aircraft repair equipment.
In December 2002 when Iraq was forced to deliver to the UN Security Council an 11,800 page dossier on the history of its weapons programs, officials of the Bush Admin seized it and took out 8,000 pages before any other member of the Security Council was allowed to see it.
In Dec 1983 Donald Rumsfeld acting as Reagan's personal envoy, met Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. He returned in March 84. At the time Iraq was employing chemical weapons against Iranian troops. Rumsfeld declared that "the defeat of Iraq in the three year old war with Iran would be contrary to US interests."
November 1984 Reagan restored full diplomatic relations with Baghdad – which had been severed since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Thereafter Reagan stepped up sales to Saddam of items such as the helicopters that would be used in the gas attacks on the Kurds in 1988.Indeed, the US maintained friendly relations with Baghdad until the moment when Saddam revived Iraq's claims to Kuwait and then invaded Kuwait in August 1990.
Question: What's in those 8,000 pages?(Prepared from "The Sorrows of Empire" by Chalmers Johnson Henry Holt Pub.2004)

(The Doc40 email is byron4d@aol.com)

CRYPTIQUE – The railroad runs through the middle of the house.

DOG EATS PRESIDENT’S HOMEWORK

Maybe, one day, these weblog templates will come with so many toys and add-ons that I will be able to reproduce a set of bombastic 172 point, New York Post style headlines, but, in the meantime, I can only imagine them. And why do I need to imagine then? Because, Saturday night/Sunday morning, I sat up until 9.00AM to watch Tim Russert interview GWB on Meet The Press. Why? Because I’ve been slagging the man off for god knows how long, and even instituted The League of Extraordinary Bushwhackers (LEB), and it seemed only fair to take a direct look at the bastard, just in case I had judged him wrong, or (I live in hope), he fucked up so badly, his presidency would be terminated right then and there, and I’d be watching TV history on a par with the Nixon/Kennedy debate.

Since the latter didn’t happen, I probably would have been better off sleeping. Prior to the Bush interview, there was little to do but watch TV, and having sat through Sunset Boulevard and identified too strongly with William Holden’s character, who can’t sell his movie script, hooks up in desperation with Gloria Swanson, and winds up floating face down in the pool, I was getting pretty depressed. Then I watched Daredevil, which was, beyond doubt, the worse superhero movie ever, plus weird Catholic undertones. (Although I did start to see why some of my friends are enamored of Jennifer Garner, only she died in the third act). All in all, I was feeling pretty grim by the time that Georgie boy came on in his neat single-breasted suit, stars and stripes pin, and blue tie.

Forget for a moment the quagmire in Iraq, the catalogue of mendacity that put us there, or the economy being to far in the septic tank that it will take Rotor-Rooter to save it. Forget the dropping approval rating that brought Bush to my screen to save himself, or the primary exit polls that show that 70% of both Dems and independents are angry and disappointed with him. I wanted to just look at the man. And within the first five minutes, I knew I wasn’t seeing a man – just a spoiled little rich boy who learned very early in life that if he goes on repeating the same lame excuse over and over, the parents, teachers, or the Highway Patrol who pulled him over drunk and coked, will eventually give up and cut him a break because his daddy’s connected. Here’s a toad-baby who has been totally raised on the shit sandwich vision of the world, where the more bread you have, the less shit you have to eat, and that, sooner or later, he will be let go if just keeps repeating, over and over, “But the dog ate my homework.”

Through the interview, Bush’s relationship with truth appears not just less than tenuous, he looks like a man who has memorized a set of flash-cards, and is desperately casting around for the one that fits the question. The rehearsed and ingratiating smile is belied by narrowed eyes that the suddenly dart right as he struggles, and the loud declamation, “I’m a Methodist”, that comes out of nowhere as he tries to explain how he’s creating religious pluralism in Iraq is little short of weird. He seems happy when, after a half hour on WMDs, and all the other lies that paved the path to war, the topic is switched to the economy, where he knows he’s on safer ground if he doesn’t quote any numbers and just keeps telling Russert that “tax cuts stimulate the economy.”

Bush stumbles over elementary words and can’t form simple sentences. And it matters, goddamn it. I don’t want to live in the same world as an obvious and over-privileged fool who has the infinite power to unleash a nuclear holocaust that could consume that world, but who can’t even pronounce nuclear correctly. I don’t want to see that cunning little grin as he tells Russert, on the matter of the his champagne draft-dodging, that, although there’s no evidence of his reporting for duty during a period that he was technically AWOL, there’s no evidence that he didn’t report. Huh? “There may be no evidence but I did report; otherwise, I wouldn't have been honorably discharged.” Huh? Then he moves on to talking about his going to Harvard Business School as though it was part of the Vietnam war effort. Huh?

I did, however, relish a tiny moment of conspiracist delight as, when Russert joked about both Bush and Kerry being Skull & Bones, and Bush laughed, “Number 322", as though someone, somewhere, understood what that meant.

After Bush I slept, but woke to more Bush on 60 Minutes, in the context of Jesus and that poisonous evangelical science fiction of The Left Behind Novels (www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/01/001gross.htm), and the Christian toad people who believe the Rapture will come Wednesday, and rejoice that I – and the likes of me – will be left to suffer the torture of the damned.

But – oh my friends and oh my foes – this is perhaps not my most lucid writing, because today the candle feels as though it’s not only burning at both ends, but also in the middle, so I may not be totally making sense, (and some girl and logicgrl, there may be typos) but it’s from the heart and at least I figure I have one. The heartless toad people close in, and I need a drink as they look knowingly from the TV, and tell me “The Rapture will be cool.” Although another does inform me that, when they ascend into the realm celestial, they will lose the fillings from their teeth. Ha!

But, fuck, I will not be afraid. Angry maybe, maybe grim, but I will not bow to their Industry of Fear. And if they are the saved, let we, the damned, go on and party.

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Kinda short on fun today, after a long, dark and introspective night and fitful day behind closed draps. But Doc40 will post daily while the energy, audacity, and feedback holds up. So make the link a regular stop and tell all your friends. I think we have a fine forum going on here, and old Doc would like to see it spread as wide as possible. (And, oh yeah, today Doc40 got its first hit from Russia. Could it be the Russians are coming? I have a second of my books being published there.)

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CRYPTIQUE – #322?

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

ONE MIND BOGGLING 2

“So when’s the cavalry going to come to the rescue?”
“You are the cavalry.”
“Oh fuck.”

AN ANSWER TO YESTERDAY’S QUESTION

Elizabeth, after informing us that we could have looked it up on google, sends the following on those Nigerian bank scams...

A Five Billion US$ (as of 1996, much more now) worldwide Scam which has run since the early 1980's under Successive Governments of Nigeria. It is also referred to as "Advance Fee Fraud", "419 Fraud" (Four-One-Nine) after the relevant section of the Criminal Code of Nigeria, and "The
Nigerian Connection" (mostly in Europe). However, it is usually called plain old "419" even by the Nigerians themselves. The Scam operates as follows: the target receives an unsolicited fax, email, or letter often concerning Nigeria or another African nation containing either a money laundering or other illegal proposal OR you may receive a Legal and Legitimate business proposal by normal means. Common variations on the Scam include "overinvoiced" or "double invoiced" oil or other supply and service contracts where your Bad Guys want to get the overage out of Nigeria; crude oil and other commodity deals; a "bequest" left you in a will; "money cleaning" where your Bad Guy has a lot of currency that needs to be "chemically cleaned" before it can be used and he needs the cost of the chemicals; "spoof banks" where there is supposedly money in your name already on deposit; "paying" for a purchase with a check larger than the amount required and asking for change to be advanced; fake lottery 419; and ordering items and commodities off "trading" sites on the web and then cheating the seller. The variations of Advance Fee Fraud (419) are very creative and virtually endless. At some point, the victim is asked to pay up front an Advance Fee of some sort, be it an "Advance Fee", "Transfer Tax", "Performance Bond", or to extend credit, grant COD privileges, send back "change" on an overage cashier's check or money order, whatever. If the victim pays the Fee, there are often many "Complications" which require still more advance payments until the victim either quits, runs out of money, or both. If the victim extends credit on a given transaction etc. he may also pay such fees ("nerfund" etc.), and also stiffed for the Goods or Service with NO Effective Recourse. The Nigerian Scam is, according to published reports, the Third to Fifth largest industry in Nigeria. It is the 419 Coalition view that, in effect, the elites from which successive Governments of Nigeria have been drawn ARE the Scammers - therefore, victims have little recourse in this matter.

And HC Beck sends a link for those who want to know more

http://www.quatloos.com/cm-niger/nigerian_scam_letter_museum.htm

COMMENTS

I’m beginning to wonder if the comments board is going to go into overload and implode, thus proving Some Girl, and all the others who said we should do it the conventional way with a comment button after each post, absolutely right as usual. It’s starting to feel like one of those submarine movies in which the crippled sub sinks deeper and deeper while the crew sweats and the officers watch the depth gauge go into the red, and everyone wonders when it’s going to be flattened like a tin can. Like the submarine crew, we can only wait to see what happens.

THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY BUSHWHACKERS (LEB)

From today’s NY Times...

Now let's turn to the administration's other big embarrassment, the budget deficit.
The fiscal 2005 budget report admits that this year's expected $521 billion deficit belies the rosy forecasts of 2001. But the report offers an explanation: stuff happens. "Today's budget deficits are the unavoidable result of the revenue erosion from the stock market collapse that began in early 2000, an economy recovering from recession and a nation confronting serious security threats." Sure, the administration was wrong — but so was everyone.
The trouble is that accepting that excuse requires forgetting a lot of recent history. By February 2002, when the administration released its fiscal 2003 budget, all of the bad news — the bursting of the bubble, the recession, and, yes, 9/11 — had already happened. Yet that budget projected only a $14 billion deficit this year, and a return to surpluses next year. Why did that forecast turn out so wrong? Because administration officials fudged the facts, as usual.

FROM THE EMAIL

A strange one from Blanche...

Rosie Reid, a first year student at the University of Bristol, placed an advert on eBay offering her virginity to the highest bidder and received offers of up to £10,000 before eBay Inc. removed the auction from its website. Reid said that she came up with the idea after hearing that lots of students sell things on eBay to help keep debts under control: “I needed to raise cash and I was thinking about what I could sell. It seemed that my virginity was something really valuable, yet at the same time something I could do without. The way things are going, I’ll leave university £15,000 pounds in debt. That’s why I’m taking drastic action. With £10,000 in the bank I could work less. I could live comfortably till the end of my course and concentrate on my studies. Unless I do this I’m going to be in financial trouble.” She also reasoned that “people have sex all the time and they do it free of charge. And I don’t know many people who actually stay with the person they ever sleep with.” Her advert, which was placed earlier this month read: “Eighteen-year-old university student looking to sell virginity. Never lost it due to lesbianism. Will bung in free massage if you are any good. Picture on request.”

And HCB, who we suspect has never met a rack he didn’t like, is still fascinated with Janet Jackson making a clean breast it. I wrote “I will not go any further with JJ’s right tit.” Henry responds...

Supposing of course that she would let you. Why, I wonder, is the word pastie no longer in the world lexicon? I've only seen one photo of the malevolent mammary, but is she not wearing a star-shaped pastie? Correct me here, but isn't the lovely tittie made more respectable by the application of a nipple hubcap? I hate to keep quoting Lenny Bruce but when he was responding to the idea that tits are dirty, he said, "Not to me, Jim. I like to hug 'em and kiss 'em."

And on Buddy Holly...

ok--the first r&roll death by tragic accident, if you don't count James Dean - I'll buy that. Followed in short order by Eddie Cochrane and Patsy Cline. But the first real crash and burn R&R self-inflicted demise was to my mind, arguably, Hank. After Hank, most of them did it that-a-way.

TRUE LAWYER JOKES 2

More true courtroom absurdities from Disorder in the American Courts, courtesy of Jessica. (See yesterday’s post)

Q: Are you sexually active?
A: No, I just lie there.

CRYPTIQUE – Viddy well, my droogs.

COMRADES, I HAVE A QUESTION

You’re all probably very familiar with this kind of email...

I am Mrs Mariam Sani Abacha (Widow), the wife of Late General Sani Abacha Former Military Head of State of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, who died while in office in 1998. After my husband's death and, upon the enthronement of, the present democratic elected government of OLUSEGUN OBASANJO in 1999 thus, started the probe of my husband's tenure as Military head of state over the years, during the tenure of my husband, he acquired and accumulated a lot of money while in office, stashed this funds in various banks in America, Canada, Europe and Africa but unfortunately, my husband died. However, the present Government succeeded in discovering and frozening* most of these accounts and have so far recalled some of these money back to the country, with exception of the above stated(USD$45.5 MILLION UNITED STATES DOLLARS) deposited with a Bank in Switzerland, blah, blah, blah, etc.

(* gotta love the word frozening)

...but now the bloody things have started showing up daily, I’ve commenced to wonder what the con really is. I’m aware that it probably involves giving out your bank details to some gutterjumping cutpurse, but I would really like to know some of the details. Like, is it a straight cyberscam where a computer siphons off all your worldly, or is it one of those greed-driven progressive psychological elaborations like the old found briefcase game? I’m fascinated by the mechanics of fraud, and if someone out there can fill me in on the nuts and bolts, it would save my overtaxed brain trying to figure it out. I promise that all answers will be posted with credit and gratitude, and also be treated as a public service rendered – and if Doc40 ever finds itself in a position to be giving out free t-shirts, you’ll be the first to get one.

THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY BUSHWHACKERS (LEB)

The anti-Bush propaganda is coming in by the ton. The sheer volume is a great comfort, demonstrating as it does there are so many of you out there who loathe the bastard as much as I do, but it’s starting to prove a tad daunting. Thus Doc40 has decided to coral it in a special section using the above title, I hope, with sufficient style to, as I said yesterday, “put boots and a duster coat back into politics.” Again I wish that Doc40 had the resources to hand out t-shirts and secret decoder rings. Maybe one day. I also just realized that LEB could also stand for Let’s Evict Bush.

So let’s start the ball rolling with a one-two from the dangerous kaymo...

MUCK, BOOTS & BULLETS

Interesting to see that lots of prom Dems did military service, but not a single one of this bunch of GOP fuckwits with their raving mad itch to blow up the world ever put on army boots.

http://www.awolbush.com/whoserved.html

UNCLE BUCKY

W.H.T. Bush, Dubya's Uncle, joined the board of directors of Engineered Support Systems of St. Louis, Missouri, in March 2000. W.H.T. Bush-- "Bucky" Bush, was one
of the Bush Pioneers who raised more than $100,000 for Dubya's Pres bid. ESS is a highly profitable contractor for the Defense Dept, garnering between $300 and $500 million in contracts most years. Most comes from the Army. In March 2003 ESS announced an order for 52 Chemical Biological Protected Shelter systems worth $19 Million, to bring the Army inventory up to 204 of these units. CBPS units are self-contained contamination free work areas to serve as mobile medical aid stations, field command posts etc. May 1 2003 ESS acquired TAMSCO (Technical and Management Services) a Maryland based outfit that specialises in radar systems, computer
networks and things like TDMAs (Time Division Multiple Access satellite terminals). Needless to say plenty of all these things have been bought this past year by the Pentagon for the Iraqi ops. Bucky Bush sits on the ESS audit committee and owns a considerable number of shares in the company. Bucky is also a trustee for the investment firm Lord Abbott, one of the top ten shareholders in Halliburton Corp.

HOMELAND SECURITY

Now I’ve started this, I have become quite fascinated with the Doc40 site tracking system. Today I noted the Doc got two hits from the United Arab Emirates. Welcome pal, whoever you are. Join the crew. But I guess that will get me on yet another fucking list.

FROM THE OTHER EMAIL

TRUE LAWYER JOKES

Jessica has sent a bunch of courtroom absurdities from a book called Disorder in the American Courts. Here’s the first guaranteed, absolutely true-life recorded exchange. More to follow.

Q: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?
A: No.
Q: Did you check for breathing?
A: No.
Q: So then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy?
A: No.
Q: How can you be so sure, Doctor?
A: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
Q: But could the patient have still been alive, nevertheless?
A: Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practicing law somewhere.

AND HOW ABOUT SEX?

I have begun to worry that Doc40 is getting damned earnest and highly unsexy. I mean, two headed babies, exploding whales, and a ludicrous president are all very well, but are they enough? I will not go any further with JJ’s right tit, because this is now a media assault on our intelligence, and I suspect a weapon of neo-totalitarian dumbdown, but I have been wondering if I should post a couple of the more lurid sections of the still unsold ROCKNOVEL, and also be looking more closely at what calls itself the sexblog community. Without sex, the risk seems high of the Doc simply turning into an Ann Coulter of the left. What does everyone think? (Maybe that I should get a life?)

CRYPTIQUE – Hello, Danny.

THE CIA IS A COMPANY YOU MAYBE DON’T WANT TO FUCK WITH

In a transparent attempt to get his lying ass off the hook over the failure to turn up any Iraqi WMDs and starting a war under false pretences, GWB has instituted an inquiry into the failure of the intelligence community to tell him what he already knew. That the inquiry is a shameless attempt to shift the blame from the White House to the Central Intelligence Agency is being swiftly confirmed by conservative pundits who, in a truly bizarre role reversal, are now damning the agency as the heart of darkness where once it was the great bastion of freedom. One of the first into the ring with this rightist newthink was NY Times resident lamebrain and lockstep Bush propagandist David Brooks, who yesterday in a confusing and unattractively written column condemned the CIA for its betrayal of the president. Here’s a snippet...

For decades, the U.S. intelligence community has propagated the myth that it possesses analytical methods that must be insulated pristinely from the hurly-burly world of politics. The C.I.A. has portrayed itself as, and been treated as, a sort of National Weather Service of global affairs. It has relied on this aura of scientific objectivity for its prestige, and to justify its large budgets, despite a record studded with error

For those of us who are old enough to remember the murders of Che Guevara, Salvador Allende or Malcolm X, or Operation Chaos that sought to link the Anti-Vietnam war movement with the Red Menace, and who maybe still have files in the Langley vaults, these developments can only produce a bitter smile.

And by a weird piece of synchronicity, a book of mine from the late 1990s, CIA – Secrets of the Company has just been republished in the UK by Chrysalis Books, with new updated chapters. The book was intended as a young persons guide to basic paranoia, but now Barnes & Noble have taken quite a substantial order for the US, and I’m wondering if the eventual readership may turn out to be right-of-Attila, GOP hard-ons. An odd prospect, although the royalties may still keep me in Jack Daniels and reefer. Lord knows something has to.

One word of warning, though, George, old boy. The last president who threatened the CIA was Jack Kennedy after he decided Allen Dulles had railroaded him into the Bay of Pigs, and we all know what happened to Jack. Maybe it would be a good idea to stay out of Dallas, know what I mean?

For a quick resume of old-time CIA–JFK conspiracy (courtesy of fidcen) try... http://www.ciajfk.com/

THE TURTLE THEORY

I have yet to completely gather my thoughts about what the Kerry surge in the Dem primaries really means. A USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll that shows Bush trailing Kerry by 53 percent to 46 percent, but, after the savage destabilization of Dean, I do see the image of a turtle. (Not unlike Homer Simpson after he ate the Guatemalan Insanity pepper.) When the head pokes out – in the form of a clear Dem frontrunner – it will be immediately hammered to a bloody pulp by the Bush media and money machine. I hope to hell I’m wrong, but time will quickly tell. I also see a potential divide between those who want a particular Dem contender elected, and those who simply and desperately want to see Bush evicted from 1600 Pennsylvania. Again, my mental ducks are not quite in a row, but we have to find away to make this a positive, and not four more years of the disaster named George.

FROM THE EMAIL

Kaymo comes up with another horror story...

IMPERIAL AMERICA

Been reading "The Sorrows of Empire" by Chalmers Johnson (author of "Blowback"). He's a Japanese oriented wonk with lots of experience. Essentially his case is that the US Military has slipped the leash and is now steadily taking control of the State. It's budget is no longer controllable by any civilian authority and we may have already reached the point where the Military decides what it's going to do and then tells the Administration. There are more than 750 US military bases around the world now, and CINCs for every continent. Some interesting questions occur. The Pentagon is said to be thinking of taking control of orbital space and forbidding other countries to put anything in orbit without American permission. Clearly this puts the US and China on collision course. Russia is fast losing the power to even fire its missiles let alone keep them in good working order. The enfeeblement of the Russian economy shows no signs of ending anytime soon. But look further down the road. Consider: US Military is the global hyperpower, cop etc. etc. But the US itself is heading into massive, systemic debt. At some point down that road the needs of the Baby Boom generation for their Social Security Checks and the demands of the Military for ever more spending are going to come in conflict. The Boomers are too big and vocal a group to be denied, unless the US suffers a military coup and becomes a full fledged fascist state. The other possibility is that the US Military would begin to charge other countries for the costs of protecting them. It might begin with "contributions" in oil and Euros, and thus progress bit by bit to the good ol' annual tribute. Once that kind of thing is established can anything hold the US back from becoming a kind of hyper-Rome, a vast parasitical military, and state, foot firmly planted on the necks of the rest of the world, imposing taxes on everyone else to fund an ever expanding Military Industrial complex?

There was a whole mess of other fine email, but I’m too tired tonight to clean up the codes. But, as Scarlett O’Hara told us, tomorrow is another day. So come on back, and I might even reveal the secret plans of The League of Extraordinary Bushwhackers and the plan to put boots and a duster coat back into politics.

NOW FOR SOMETHING REALLY DISGUSTING

This was circulating in the topless tower of CityBeat World HQ. I’m not even going to tell you what it is, except it’s fucking gross – and Dominican.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/040204/481/xwa10102041432

AND THIS MAKES ME VERY HAPPY

My novel Jim Morrison’s Adventures in the Afterlife was, although brilliant, hardly a runaway best seller, but now some folks who do that kind of thing have turned it into an online role-playing game called Afterlife. If you so fancy, take a look at...

http://www.livejournal.com/community/the_afterlife/

CRYPTIQUE – I can’t do that, Dave.

FORTY FIVE YEARS GONE

The word went round Worthing High School for Boys that Buddy Holly was dead. Not to diminish them, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper had also been killed in the same crash. Sad, but they didn’t signify in the same way. Holly was the gangly geek-nerd straight out of Texas, with the first Stratocaster we’d ever seen in the hands of a white boy, and it would be a couple more years before the cheap Burns and Framus copies showed up in the windows of the oh-so square music shops and piano stores, and we could handle a knocked-off surrogate for ourselves. Holly was the one that gave us hope. If he could make it with his thick glasses and buck teeth then maybe so could we. We were too young and untutored in the ways of the rama-lama at the time to be fully aware that he was touched by near-genius, or that Peggy Sue and Rave On would be rock songs of the century, and Holly would provide the Rolling Stones with their first real hit. We simply saw him as, by proxy, one of us. He wasn’t as stunningly handsome or blessed with the vocal shaman-magic of Elvis, he couldn’t hit those notes like Roy Orbison, and he didn’t have the dark frustration-rage of Gene Vincent. He was the one who brought us the word that, in rock & roll, all things were infinitely possible.

But, back on that grey, English February day, he also brought the first death in our rock & roll experience and attached a shocking sense of mortality to the music. If Buddy Holly could make it, so could we. If Buddy Holly could die, so would we. The shock resonated deep, and, for the rest of the day, we English schoolboys went through the motions of education, surly and recalcitrant, with a potential prison-riot vibe hanging in the classroom air. A secondary rumor told of a kid in Manchester who had hung himself because he could take a world in which That’ll Be The Day was all Buddy wrote. I never did find out if the rumor was true. The teachers didn’t get it, but they knew enough not to push a potentially incendiary situation. One beery math-teaching oaf was overheard to mutter something about how he was unable to fathom why we should be making such a fuss over “some bloody crooner”, and suggested, by way of explanation, that form 2B had been infected some horrible and virulent form of communicable homosexuality. Little did the oaf know that, in just seven racing years, other “bloody crooners” would be pointing us to the barricades, and the culture would be in violent upheaval.


FROM THE EMAIL

From Larry Kirwan of the excellent band Black 47 (via HCB)
www.black47.com

Happy James Joyce's birthday. He would have been 122 yesterday. My, how the years have flown. And on a more poignant note, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper died 45 years ago today. I was just thinking of the three of them on Sunday night during the hilarious Superbowl Half-time Show Is it just me or was there something intrinsically, mind-blowingly funny about that spectacle? Was it meant to be funny? I was in a noisy pub and couldn't hear the sound that well, so couldn't tell if the whole thing was camp or serious? I'm hoping it was the former. Then again, I'm not sure, maybe it was a bit of both - one is lost for words when trying to categorize it - perhaps, post-orange alert irony? At any rate, it's an interesting thread - sociological, if not musical - between Buddy's Stratocaster and Janet's nipple. Maybe, it's because it's five in the morning and "Macbeth had murdered sleep," but I'm also reminded of a framed picture of Che Guevara that I see from time to time. Of course, one is jaded by his commercial T-shirt likeness flaunted by everyone from Dick Cheney to my Aunt Fanny's third cousin's granddaughter. But in the wonderful picture I speak of, the man is captured in all his stormy idealistic handsomeness. I sometimes stop to look at him and wonder how he would have dealt with polls, opinion groups, town hall meetings, etc.? Would these modern artifices have given him pause, or caused him to change course? And if so would he still be alive today, an elder statesman baring opinions and revelations to Barbara Walters? Or is he better off glaring out from that lonely picture in all his moody magnificence? Oh dear, the thoughts that torment at five in the morning.

And a horror tale from Kaymo...

From this month's Scientific American we have news of – Littoral Airborne Sensor Hyperspectral – US Navy is experimenting with this system on board blimps Next time you see a blimp hovering over your zone, check it out carefully. It may be keeping you and yours under surveillance. LASH is a computerized color detection and matching system. Blimp borne cams scan the ground below seeking anomalies which are fed into the Dbase and crunched. Anything that seems out of place can then be zeroed and examined in greater detail. In Oct 2002 the feds planned to use LASH to search for muzzle flashes in the hunt for the DC sniper, but the case was solved before LASH could get into the air. While it may first be deployed to check for terrorists landing on US shores in small boats, further uses aren't difficult to imagine as the USA slides towards a police state future.

LINK

Now I suppose you could stretch a point and make the jump from LASH to erotica. Well, okay, I could. And, for those with a taste for the explicitly well written, today’s Belle de Jour is a gem.

http://belledejour-uk.blogspot.com/

CRYPTIQUE – Those who would follow you into hell all too frequently bring their own hell with them. Just to make sure there’s enough hell to go around.

BLOG POLITICS

As you probably gathered from recent posts, I’ve been spending far too much time in the blogosphere attempting to grok the fullness of it, and today the report from the ether is categorically political. The following snippet is from the right, quoted by a solid Bush supporter who wants not only to outlaw a woman’s right to choose, and take us back (all except the rich) to the backstreet horror of pre-Roe v Wade, but also make abortion the conservative litmus test yet again. The interview with Wes Clarke is by Joseph McQuaid of the Manchester Union-Leader,

Clark: I don't think you should get the law involved in abortion.
McQuaid: At all?
Clark: Nope.
McQuaid: Late-term abortion? No limits?
Clark: Nope.
McQuaid: Anything up to delivery?
Clark: Nope, nope.
McQuaid: Anything up to the head coming out of the womb?
Clark: I say that it's up to the woman and her doctor, her conscience...You don't put the law in there.

And after that the commentary departs into a fantasy of waiting until the fetus is at it’s junior prom and killing it on the dancefloor. Meanwhile, a liberal/progressive blog offers a clip from the New York Times...

Consultants for Mr. Bush have tried in vain to get him to control his smirk. Still, the smirk slips out from time to time, as it did during the president's State of the Union address when Democrats clapped at Mr. Bush's warning that the Patriot Act, an antiterrorism law, would soon
expire. “Bush is vulnerable when that smirk rears its ugly head,” said a Republican strategist, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “It comes across as not only cocky, but arrogant, and nobody likes an arrogant politician.”

And since I so totally agree with this, let’s work the smirk, in hope the whole country sees him revealed by it as a sneering, lying, oaf-of-a-richboy with neither wit, brains, or conscience. In other words, let them see him the way I do.

LATE POST

Roger reminds us that this is the 45th aniversary of the death of Buddy Holly. (See comments board.) No wonder it was such a rotten and bloody day. Maybe more on the subject tomorrow.

FROM THE EMAIL (And there’s a ton of it – which is good because it saves me ranting at the end of a wet and wretched Monday.)

Doug Lunn, master bassplayer and once and future Deviant passes along the following shaggy president joke...

A lobbyist, on his way home from work in Washington, D.C., came to a dead halt in traffic and thought to himself, "Wow, this seems worse than usual."He noticed a police officer walking between the lines of stopped cars, so he rolled down his window and asked, "Officer, what's the hold-up?" The officer replied, "The President is depressed, so he stopped his motorcade and is threatening to douse himself in gasoline and set himself on fire. He says no one believes his stories about why we went to war in Iraq, or the connection between Saddam and 9-11, or that his tax cuts will help anyone except his wealthy friends; the press called him on the lie about Iraq trying to buy uranium from Niger, he and Powell are caught in their lie that the weapons inspectors were thrown out of Iraq under Clinton, and now Campbell Brown is threatening to sue him for a sexual innuendo he made at a recent press conference. So we're taking up a collection for him."
The lobbyist asks, "How much have you got so far?"
The officer replies, "About 14 gallons, but a lot of folks are still siphoning."

And our old pal Henry Cabot Beck comments, first on last weekend’s terror alert...

Well, the prognosis was that we'd get hit on Jan 7th (I got this from an inside-the-news source). and that came and went, and then we were worried about the Superbowl. and I was told last week of Jan, first week of Feb, and that doesn't seem to be happening. We're like kids waiting for dad to come home, either to punish us or bring us a present--I guess it's where anticipation meets anxiety. And cynical me keeps saying keep your gloomy forecasts to yourself--it may well fucking happen, just like death, but worrying is just tossing your energy down a suckhole, and I haven't got all that much to spare. What's more, it's the worst kind of self important self indulgence. But then you know that. Them fucking terrists. All buildup and no punchline. We've been living a shaggy dog joke for 2 1/2 years. I'm just glad I'm not Catholic--they're prefab doom clocks--original sin sundials, the whole lot.

And on the German cannibal conviction (see Saturday Jan 31st), to which HCB alerted us to in the first place...

Still doesn't explain the ten wiener/eight bun conundrum. Funny, though, that cannibalism isn't illegal in Germany. It's like that old Lenny Bruce routine about drafting legislation to deal with animal sexual abuse--there had to be a crime for the legislature to draft a law “The sheep aren't safe! What are they doing in Sacramento?”

Finally from Mike Stax, editor of Ugly Things, the great garage band ‘zine, or, as he bills it, “wild sounds from past dimensions.”

Re: the upcoming elections. Now that the media has marginalized Dean completely it seems Kerry is our only hope of salvation from Dubya. While I'm not exactly knocked out with Kerry, he does have at least three things going for him:
1) He played bass in a garage band in the 60s -- OK an East Coast prep school band, but it's oddly comforting to know that he has more than a passing acquaintance with R&R. (They were called the Electras; there's a pretty great photo of them on the Internet somewhere.)
2) He protested against the Vietnam War -- after fighting in it.
3) He could, just possibly, beat Bush.

LINK

Our homegirl hipspinster has a great blog on David Bowie live in LA at http://hipspinster.blogspot.com/

CRYPTIQUE – Don’t vex me, MacGregor!