DOC'S PAPERBACK CLASSIC'S #7

This is one of the few pulp covers where the lesbians get to keep their clothes on.

The secret word is Rectitude

SOMEONE'S ALWAYS GOT TO BE DISCOVERING SOMETHING

WASHINGTON - For the first time astronomers have discovered a planet outside our solar system that is potentially habitable, with Earth-like temperatures, a find researchers described Tuesday as a big step in the search for "life in the universe." Hey cool. Halliburton just filed papers to own it. (Read the whole story.) Supplied by some girl.

“What the fuck?”

And then some girl goes on to point out that some fool thinks he’s found Kryptonite. It doesn't glow green, but an unidentified mineral discovered in a Serbian mine matches the molecular composition of Kryptonite described in the movie Superman Returns. (What does this mean Kal-el?) When minerologists tried to find other substances that matched the white, grainy rock they found in a mine near the Serbian region of Jadar, they came up with nothing -- until they searched the Web and …well...you try and make sense of it.

GROWTH INDUSTRY

MEXICO CITY - Mexico City lawmakers voted 46-19 to legalize abortion Tuesday, a decision likely to influence policies and health practices across Mexico and other parts of heavily Roman Catholic Latin America. The proposal will take effect when the leftist mayor signs it. (Full story)

Presumably the city will be preparing for the massive influx of US citizens who will have no other choice once Bush’s supreme court finds an excuse to overturn Roe v Wade.

Doris Richards -- RIP
And I really don't see why TV news morons find this a reason to do some humor bit about Keith now snorting his mum. I mean, the guy lost his mother. Give him a fucking break.

TOOT TOOT DIDERUMP (THE DREAM IS NEVER OVER)

The last time I published a cartoon by Robert Crumb, I almost did two years in one of Her Majesty’s very unpleasant slammers.




The secret word is Tuesday

REASONS FOR REVOLUTION PART 1

Someone sent me this during all of last week's freaking out, but I’m damned if I can remember who it was and I forgot to make a note, but please email or leave a comment and I will credit accordingly…

"People will lose their homes and most of their “investment income” as business’s collapse, both because they can’t find enough customers, and the fact it costs way too much for the sheeple to travel from their McMansions in their SUV’s to their “discretionary spending” based jobs. Once the house of cards called the American economy starts to collapse, the federal debt is gonna prevent Uncle Sam from stepping in like Roosevelt did in the first economic meltdown we had. Banks and finance companies will first try to collect on the debt they loaned out, but they will collapse as they receive properties they can’t sell to cover their costs and as the financial system stalls, even formery ’safe” jobs will start to feel the pinch, government workers will face lay off as local and state governments go into debt with rapidly shrinking tax bases. As the local then state governments become insolvement, the social programs and public safety programs will grind to a halt, which will force the federal government to declare martial law. Hence the Patriot act, Halliburton build prisons for Homeland security, changes in “Habeas Corpus”, and the “posse comitas” act to empower whoever sits in Bush’s chair, has the power to control a rapidly disintragating situation. Welcome to the future as we will see it."

The secret word is Disintegration

Is still...

byron4d@msn.com

David Halberstam – RIP
Bois Yeltsin – RIP

HOME OF THE FUTURE

“The 4,000-square-foot house is a model of environmental rectitude. Geothermal heat pumps located in a central closet circulate water through pipes buried 300 feet deep in the ground where the temperature is a constant 67 degrees; the water heats the house in the winter and cools it in the summer. Systems such as the one in this "eco-friendly" dwelling use about 25% of the electricity that traditional heating and cooling systems utilize. A 25,000-gallon underground cistern collects rainwater gathered from roof runs; wastewater from sinks, toilets and showers goes into underground purifying tanks and is also funneled into the cistern. The water from the cistern is used to irrigate the landscaping surrounding the four-bedroom home. Plants and flowers native to the high prairie area blend the structure into the surrounding ecosystem. No, this is not the home of some eccentrically wealthy eco-freak trying to shame his fellow citizens into following the pristineness of his self-righteous example. And no, it is not the wilderness retreat of the Sierra Club or the Natural Resources Defense Council, a haven where tree-huggers plot political strategy. This is President George W. Bush's "Texas White House" outside the small town of Crawford. Yes, the same George W. who believes arsenic and drinking water might not be such a bad combo, the same man who reneged on his campaign promise to lower carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, the same man who is doing everything in his power to fling open the Alaskan Natural Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.”

Why, you might ask, does our President live in this high eco-tech miracle home, except to maybe piss off Al Gore? One answer is the super-powerful and super-rich are well aware of the hideous energy crunch and the environmental hell that's coming and protecting themselves well in front. New Orleans can go to hell, but George will be cozy in Crawford with his inexplicable wife and drunken daughters. (Clip by Rob Sullivan, supplied by logicgrl)

The secret words are Soylent Green

CRYPTIQUE – I brag of my misery, I like to live dangerously

DOC'S PAPERBACK CLASSIC'S #6

Does this require comment?

BEE UPDATE

I’ll never understand the mindset of the rightwing asshole. Everything is always just hunky dory. We’re winning the war in Iraq, Al Gore invented global warming, and the bees aren’t vanishing. There’s even a whole deal being made as to whether Albert Einstein actually said the words that have been attributed to him and repeated all over in the last couple of weeks. "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man." I didn’t use the Einstein quote in all that I’ve recently written about bees recently, (see last Thursday) because I wasn’t sure how much the great mathematician knew about bee-keeping. And this now seems to be the big debate and totally clouding the seriousness of the bee disaster. What is wrong with these fools? (I also resisted the Einstein quote because it tied in too neatly with the theory of the end of humanity 12.21.12)

Meanwhile, Doug the Bass has sent some interesting economic statistics… Over 80 per cent of Americans are broke at 65 years of age.
CEO's in this country make more than 360 times that of the regular worker in their company?52 per cent of homeless people are Veterans?

Sho o suteyo machi e deyou (Throw away your books, rally in the streets) – Shuji Terayama; 1971

The secret word is Ire

"TAKE THIS ROCKET TO NEPTUNE!"

So I’m woken on 4/20 by a cat who wants his breakfast. I crawl out of bed, habitually turn on the TV to MSNBC only to discover that a lone gunman is holding up NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Huh? After blinking for a while, and knowing that I will be accused of cynicism and a lack of the correct piety in the face of TV death, a flight of fancy winged its unbidden way across my consciousness that maybe the guy was planning to hi-jack a spaceship, but had gone to the wrong place.

(And my cynicism might not be so deep-seated if the outpourings of the news media weren’t so pompously inaccurate. No one, from Fox News to The Huffington Post seems to know the difference between a serial killer and a mass murderer, and that the psychoses involved are vastly different.)

The secret word is Enterprise

FOUR TWENTY

The 1889 birthday of Adolf Hitler, a murdering bastard of epic proportions who probably burns in Hell if there is one.

Also the anniversary of the 1999 shooting rampage by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine High School in the Denver suburb of Littleton which has obviously just been subject once again to the media spotlight.

The significant stoner numerology.

(Although 4.20 is nothing in comparison to what will come to pass on 12.21.12)

The secret word is Abacus

GOOD FOR YOU, GOOD FOR ME

Valerie has sent this link to The New Scientist that provides further evidence marijuana is in fact a cancer retardant. The drug enforcement industry – like the oil industry with global warming – mutters crap about not enough research and the jury still being out and therefore the dope should remain illegal, blah, blah, blah, but their position becomes less and less tenable except, of course, they have heavily armed police, a vast penal system, and a massive Federal Gestapo to reinforce their opinion.

The secret word is Inhale

TODAY IN PRINT

Today’s LA CityBeat has an environmental theme, which gave me a chance to put together all the information I’ve been gathering on disappearing bees over the last month or so. I also bid a less than fond farewell to the old fool Dom Imus.

ROUND UP THE DEPRESSED, THEY'RE DANGEROUS

I’ve already been accused of an unfeeling cynicism because I am not weeping over the deaths of one set of strangers rather than another. I weep for friends and lovers. But now I feel I have to court even more disapprobation by pointing out the very fine line between tragedy and The Death Circus, and I fear we are already walking into the big top. (There’s a pun in there that only Londoners will understand.) The media is now left with nothing to show but candlelight vigils and probing the minutia of the madman. The clowns are being sent in, the nuts and racists are entering the arena, and Newsweek makes sure we know it.

“The bodies had barely been removed when the racial epithets started pouring in. Cho Seung-Hui, the 23-year-old identified as the killer of 32 on the Virginia Tech campus, may have lived in the state since his elementary school days, but to the bigots in the blogosphere it was his origins in Korea that mattered most. "Koreans are the most hotheaded and macho of East Asians," wrote one unnamed commentator on the Sepia Mutiny blog. "They are also sick and tired of losing their Korean girlfriends to white men with an Asian fetish."

Talk radio fascists beat their chests and demand to know why the victims couldn't take down one lone gunman -- and an Asian to boot -- while NBC reacts with sanctimonious delight as it finds itself with Cho’s press kit of Travis Bickel pictures and his multimedia mental meltdown.

“Network officials turned the material over to the FBI and said they would not immediately disclose its contents pending the agency’s review beyond characterizing the material as “disturbing.” It included a written communication, photographs and video."

Voices bleat how can we stop such a terrible event ever happening again? The answer is that we can’t, and secretly don’t want to, or we wouldn’t sell machine guns to the mentally disturbed with such merry abandon. The occasional mass murder is just the price tag on the right to bear arms. And, of course, a symptom the quiet fact that American popular culture just dotes on death.

(And as I write this highly unconfirmed rumors flicker across my computer of two people shot at University of Missouri and a triple homicide and a suicide in NY????)

BTW -- Today's bodycount in Baghdad was 183.

The secret word is Broken

THE WEIRDNESS DEEPENS

I believe this is what you become after graduating from being a space cadet.

Meanwhile HCB writes…
"This business about Ismail is far more interesting than the fox etc for-hire pundits who are blaming violent movies and video games. Scary though to see a new wave of campus violence related to important literary sources--some bible, some Melville, some Leonard Cohen. In my day our motivational source was more likely to be Bartleby the Scrivener--a classic of passive resistance. I'd be interested to see a panel of lit professors and bible intellectuals tackling this on Charlie Rose. Might like to see Hannity and O'Reilly scratching their heads on this one as well. I think your poem, "Murder Impulse" is worthy of any coffeehouse slam. I predict Ismail Ax will be the name of a band within three months--sorry to be so obvious. I haven't read the guy's plays, but they can be found here"

ISMAIL AX

The weirdness commences. Seemingly Cho Seung-Hui died with the words "Ismail Ax" in red ink on the inside of one of his arms. The scrabble to find a meaning is now spreading like an internet contagion. The following speculation comes from Prison Planet.

"In Islam, Ibrahim is known as the father of the prophets and, upset that people in his hometown still worshiped idols and not Allah, he smashed all but one statue in a local temple with an ax. Ibrahim's son is Ismail, who also became a prophet. Ibrahim is Arabic for Abraham, who plays a significant role in Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Two theories come from literature, where Ismail is spelled Ishmael. In one, tied to James Fenimore Cooper's novel "The Prairie," Ishmael Bush is known as an outcast and outlawed warrior, according to an essay written in 1969 by William H. Goetzmann, a University of Texas History professor. In Cooper's book, "Bush carries the prime symbol of evil -- the spoiler's axe," the professor wrote. Also, the narrator from Moby Dick, Ishmael, is considered an enigma who is well educated yet considers his time on a whaling ship worthy of time at Yale or Harvard, according to education site Sparknotes.com."

The secret word is Disturbing

THE MURDER IMPULSE

MASS MURDER
MASS MURDER
MASS MURDER
MASS MURDER
MASS MURDER
MASS MURDER
MASS MURDER
MASS MURDER
CHANGE CHANNEL
MASS MURDER
MASS MURDER
MASS MURDER
MASS MURDER
CHANGE CHANNEL
MASS MURDER
MASS MURDER
MASS MURDER
MASS MURDER
MASS MURDER
CHANGE CHANNEL
MASS MURDER
MASS MURDER
CHANGE CHANNEL
MASS MURDER
CHANGE CHANNEL
CHANGE CHANNEL
CHANGE CHANNEL
MASS MURDER
CHANGE CHANNEL
CHANGE CHANNEL
MASS MURDER
CHANGE CHANNEL
CHANGE CHANNEL
CHANGE CHANNEL
(MASS MURDER?????)
or...

THE RETURN OF THE LONE GUNMAN

For the last hour or so I have stared at the TV, essentially watching nothing except meaningless images of cops in bullet proof vests, armed with automatic weapons, standing around looking grim as TV cameras troll like sharks in search of images, and voices babble non-information. All I learned is that some kid with a couple of pistols and a shitload of ammunition went on the rampage and killed and wounded a whole lot of people. I have been told countless times that this is a record for civilian mass slaughter in the USA, like massacre was some variety of bloody sporting event. It has been suggested that the shooter was oriental and thus a foreigner. One talking head wanted to involve rap music.(?) There would also appear to be some two-hour anomaly in the timeline, which is a dash of mystery in a situation in which I am really leaning nothing. I’m also being told that the President – a man who likes to do his mass killing from a long and comfortable distance – will be on TV in less than an hour. I don’t quite understand why. All I know was that I had to sit down and write this, away from CNN, because all my television is doing was providing me with an inert, unhealthy, and vicarious connection to sudden death on the other side of the country and, as I watched, I begin to feel wholly disgusted with myself and decidedly less than clean.

FIRST THE BURN THE BOOKS....

I believe this is some kind of celebration of Ray Bradburym but in this day and age, who the hell knows anything for sure.

CRYPTIQUE -- "And love is just a funeral pyre."

The folllowing was recieved earlier...
"I think that nice young man in the "Marijuana will mess you up" poster just needs to put some color on his walls,.....a few lamps and pillows - much happier....maybe butter yellow would be nice. Best wishes, W Phillips (Mrs) Purley, Surrey"

DOC'S PAPERBACK CLASSIC'S #5

I think Dick Cheney read this as a young man (and maybe accepted it as a guide to crisis management.) I also note that 2040 is around the generally estimated date of the Singularity.



(And what is going on in the background?)

SUNDAY: SMOKE DOPE, MESS UP HEAD/LIFE

And after I’ve finished doing that, I’ll reread this linked poem and reflect on the fact that there are people out their who accept this sub-sentimental banality as an equivalent of art/reality, that they not only hold opinions molded by this kind of bathos, but they also get to vote.

The secret word is Challenged

CRYPTIQUE – “You know all the rules by now and the fire from the ice.”

Don Ho -- RIP

IT'S SATURDAY AND THE CHEMBOTS ARE COMING!

As if life wasn’t complicated enough, the wonderful Valerie sent the following that decidedly slowed down my breakfast…

“The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is seeking innovative proposals to develop Chemical Robots (ChemBots): soft, flexible, mobile objects that can identify and maneuver through openings smaller than their static structural dimensions; reconstitute size, shape, and functionality after traversal; carry meaningful payloads; and perform tasks. ChemBots represent the convergence of soft materials chemistry and robotics to create a fundamentally new class of soft meso-scale robots.”
But you really need to read the whole thing.

The secret word is Slither

WHAT? NO BLOODY SINGULARITY?

And just as Doc40 embarks on the possible endeavour of seeing how much anarchic fun can have with the nebulous but all-encompassing doom scenario of 12.21.12, HCB, with his famous timing, sends over this fascinating debate on the other possible big whammy in humanity’s future.

WHAT IF THE SINGULARITY DOESN’T HAPPEN
By Vernor Vinge

It's 2045 and nerds in old-folks homes are wandering around, scratching their heads, and asking plaintively, "But ... but, where's the Singularity?" Science fiction writer Vernor Vinge--who originated the concept of the technological Singularity--doesn't think that will happen, but he explores three alternate scenarios, along with our "best hope for long-term survival"--self-sufficient, off-Earth settlements.

This is really worth reading. (Although it might just be science fiction writers taking themselves too seriously.)

Meanwhile Valerie sends over the following piece numerology. (She also provided the graphic above.)

12 + 20 (zero doesn't count) + 12 = 26 = ZThe rest is the same.Though have probably just ruined all credibility for attempts to analyse thefuture with numbers theory.PS. There are 24 letters in the Greek alphabet. Z, irritatingly, is number 6.

The secret word is Prospect

TIME TO START WORKING ON THE MASS PANIC

We have just five and half years to go to what everyone from the ancient Maya to the late Terrence McKenna would seem to agree is going to be the absolute, unqualified, total, all-encompassing, full-on, no-one-here-gets-out-alive, Elvis-has-left-the-building, End Of Everthing. The theory is that, on December 12th, 2012, the full finality will fall upon us. The fat lady will sing and reality will simply cease. Even the numbers for December 12th, 2012 look really good and ominous. I mean…
12.21.12
…now doesn’t that have a ring to it? What William Blake called a fearful symmetry? As regular readers will have gathered by now, there’s nothing I like better than a good, old-fashioned looming catastrophe. Global calamity is good, but something promising to wink-out the complete known universe -- plus an infinite number of other dimensions as well -- into pure black nothingness really has to be the business. Even when the shit doesn’t happen, it can be a whole lotta fun. Who can forget the mass fear generated by the Nostradamus quatrain that suggested a serious nasty was going to come to pass in 1999 and seven months? Who doesn’t remember the paranoia conjured by Y2K, hey? And let’s not forget the merchandising!!!

So time to get moving brothers and sisters. If the squares find it beyond their capacity to muster so much as a simple lick of sense – fuck ‘em and the Administration they rode in on. If they refuse to act rationally, they wholly deserved to be zapped by a taser-shock of blind, uncontrollable mad-lemming panic.

Shall we get down to creating that mass panic? We have a whole five years to work on it.

(For those who need to bone up a bit on the background, this summation provides a suitably bizarre and impenetrable rundown on the whole 12.21.12 deal.)

The secret word is Trepidation

Kurt Vonnegut – RIP

DOC'S PAPERBACK CLASSIC'S #4

Clearly mental health is not what it used to be, but whoever said it was? At least, pro tem, the patient gets to keep her clothes on.

TO REJOICE IN SMALL VICTORIES

Alan Burridge writes (see last Saturday)…
Interesting to note, yet not due to my diatribe below, the lack of Hot X Buns at our local Hospital made the front page of today's Bournemouth Daily Echo newspaper. The decision was obviously reconsidered over the Easter Weekend by the hierarchy after the furore caused by hospital staff, and the buns, (usually given out on Good Friday), were reinstated and given to patients on Easter Sunday. The storm in a teacup now over, a normal cup of tea with a Hot X Bun was then enjoyed.

The secret word is Prevail

THIS BLOG IS STILL PROTECTED BY...

RUFUS HARRIS – RIP

HAPPY EASTER!

Here's the first bunny! (From Valerie)

The secret words are Fertiity Goddess

THEOLOGICAL BUN CRISIS IN THE UK

This just in...

Our pal Alan Burridge (who also runs the Motorheadbangers Club) writes…
"Hot X Buns Indeed! Just read Mick Farren mentioning back in the UK they will be having Hot X Buns" and it's obviously one aspect of living in LA he's missing.But my wife, Jane, arrived home from her shift at our local Hospital yesterday to say that, (after 17 years of working there, and it happening every Good Friday, until now), the patient's are no longer getting their Hot X Buns.It was tradition!It was what happened!When one of her colleagues asked "Where are the Hot X Buns?" she was informed: "The Hospital Trust decided not to provide them as it might upset or offend patients of other ethnic groups/religions."Excuse me?I'm pretty open-minded about everything, but this is OUR country!What ever happened to When in Rome, you do as the Roman's do?They need not eat the darned Hot X Buns, so why should their choice of living and using the hospitals in the UK stop others, also in hospital, from doing so?Even though religions vary, God must be pretty much the same geezer, mustn't he?When we visit or live in other countries, we are expected to join in and enjoy their traditions and ways of life, so why do we have to change ours to accomodate them?"

We are also talking the importance of bake goods here. I mean, I’m not a Christian but a good hot cross bun -- as pictured above -- is transcendental, an old-country tradition, ancient and powerful enough to parallel that moment in The Godfather when Clemenza tells Rocco, after they whack Paulie. “Leave the gun, take the cannolis.”

DOC'S PAPERBACK CLASSIC'S #3

Drug addicts probably fare as badly as lesbians in pulp fiction and also lose their clothes just as regularly.

BEARS, TO BUNS, TO BURROUGH, TO BUNNIES (AND STONED SPIDERS)

It’s Good Friday for all you Christians, right? All hammers, nails, crucifixions, and, back where I come from, things called hot cross buns that are delicious but defy description. So enjoy yourselves, right, and, come Sunday, you’ll be dealing with the theological significance of bunnies and chocolate. I wish you all joy.

For some unfathomable reason I find myself precipitated into a bout of double-plus nostalgia. Since about around the time I ingested my first chemical stimulants, I have been seeing photographs of what happens to the web-weaving abilities of spiders on various drugs, but now we have actual film.

And for no other reason that a blast from the past, here’s a showing of Uncle Bill Burroughs' classic Towers Open Fire.

The secret word is Golgotha

There's nothing like beating a cause into the ground! ACT! Fill in the email and send it off!

IF YOU MET US WE'D PROBABLY EAT YOU, BUT PLEASE SAVE US.

This is a Doc40 public service announcement. The Fish and Wildlife Service has recently announced a proposal to list the polar bear as 'threatened' under the Endangered Species Act. This opens a 90-day public comment period. Afterwards, the FWS will then undergo a 12-month review of all the comments, then issue a final ruling. Full story.

(We also trust that pictures of adorable polar bears evoke sentimental guilt to the max, if that’s what it takes to motivate us to salvage this sorry fucking planet.)

AS MUCH FUN AS WATCHING CHEESE MATURE

The panda cam is long gone. Butterstick is a surly teenager smoking cigarettes behind the bushes and the cheese cam is really no substitute. In fact the cheese cam – real name Cheddarvision TV – may be finest example of aesthetic boredom since Andy Warhol’s Sleep. What we are invited to watch is 44 pounds of English Cheddar cheese mature over a period of a year, give or take a few weeks either way. Thanks to Rich, Doc40 has both a news report and the actual cheese cam.

The secret word is Cracker

ALSO in this week’s LA CityBeat, I have some truly stunning observations on what’s being called viral politics.

MAYBE FALLING OUT OF A TREE DOES MAKE YOU TALK TOO MUCH

So Keef now claims he was joking when he regaled the NME with the tale of how he snorted his father's ashes along with a line of blow. He is, however, continuing to assert that he was trepanned by a brain surgeon, who watched his thoughts flying around in his head.

The secret word is Hush

DOC'S PAPERBACK CLASSIC'S #2

Lesbians always have a terrible time in paperback

DOES FALLING OUT OF A TREE MAKE YOU TALK TOO MUCH?

The following story has been wandering around the internet for most of the day. Why Keith should indulge in all these revelations is anyone’s basic guess…

Keith Richards admits ingesting all manner of substances in his time. But none quite as bizarre as he reveals in his latest confession: he snorted his father's ashes. In a wide-ranging interview published today, the 63-year-old veteran of tequila breakfasts and drug marathons described how he once sampled his father's ashes mixed with cocaine. "The strangest thing I've tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father," he told NME magazine. "He was cremated and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn't have cared, he didn't give a shit. It went down pretty well, and I'm still alive." Bert Richards died five years ago at the age of 84. He had been a factory labourer and wounded in the second world war.
But if this episode of his Rolling Stone son's life was relatively innocuous, it was a different story when the guitarist found himself in what he said was his most life-threatening drug experience. "Someone put strychnine in my dope. It was in Switzerland. I was totally comatose, but I was totally awake. I could listen to everyone, and they were like, 'He's dead, he's dead!', waving their fingers and pushing me about. I was thinking, 'I'm not dead!'," he recalled. He said his longevity in the face of multiple drug abuse over decades was just luck, and advised others not to follow his lead. "I've no pretensions about immortality ... I was number one on the Who's 'Likely To Die' list for 10 years. I mean, I was really disappointed when I fell off the list."
Richards himself had yet another brush with death last year when he had a fall on holiday in Fiji. It had been overplayed, he said; he was not climbing a coconut tree but sitting on a "shrub". But he did not play down the subsequent treatment. "I've been trepanned. That's quite an interesting experience, especially for my brain surgeon, who saw my thoughts flying around in my brain. I've got pictures of it, mate. They cut my head, brain, skull open, went in and pulled out the crap, and put some of it back again. I mean, shit, Keith Richards has got to do everything once."
And yes, I suppose he does. We have to give the old boy that much.

The secret words Crossroads

HOW THEY BUILT THE GREAT PYRAMID -- MAYBE!

This very disturbing report comes from the wonderful some girl but I don’t like it.
PARIS - A French architect claimed Friday to have uncovered the mystery about how Egypt's Great Pyramid of Khufu was built — with use of a spiral ramp to hoist huge stone blocks into place. Ending eight years of study on the subject, architect Jean-Pierre Houdin released his findings and a computerized 3-D mockup showing how workers would have erected the pyramid at Giza outside Cairo.

And here are pages of it, plus a slide show and 3D animation except the 3D animation involves downloading yet another goddamn player program, this one made by Dassault Systemes, which I kinda suspect are the same Dassault that made lousy jet fighters back when the French were losing their war against the Viet Minh.

I would be interested know however if M. Houdin has taken into account the odd system of narrow shafts and remote controlled doors discover by Rudolph Gantenbrink and his robot Upuaut. And then there are the man-hour calculations. I can’t give you a reference, but back in the 1970s, I recall a work-study on moving that volume of rock into a pyramid structure, and how it would have taken the then-population of Egypt, plus any available enslaveable neighbors about 350 years to complete the project without the use of levitation or alien tractor beams. That would mean they started building Cheops tomb some two and a half centuries before he was born. Me? I’m still an alien interventionist and cling to the image below. The origins of Victor Renquist will not be undermined.

The secret word is Secret

DOC'S PAPERBACK CLASSIC'S #1

I come across so many great paperback covers in my travels I figure I should start an irregular series, just to share them with all of you friends and neighbors. And how better to start than with that laugh-a-minute cut-up George Orwell?

BEE STORY TURNS UGLIER

The more I read, the more the death of the bees is confirmed as a what-the-fuck crisis, and the suspicion level rises to the idea that this is something massive and wholly horrible, a portent from a science fiction scenario that ends apocalyptically badly. Except it's for real. In the following from Triple J sent via Munz, the finger is now pointed at Monstanto or maybe Bayer.

In Germany where they still teach science they published an article about the toxic nature of Monsanto’s Triple Hybrid GM corn and it's effect on bees in '05. Why won't the media here mention that GM corn is the likely cause of the bees disapearing? Could it be that Monsanto is a massive multinational corp with a market capitalization of 30 billion dollars?? Of course insects are seen as pests by most people. Most people who passed Earth Science class in highschool understand that every part of the food chain is important and some, but not most, understand that bees perform a task that vital to our survival. For more…

AND MEANWHILE the dry catfood would appear to be contaminated.

AND IN YET ANOTHER WORLD -- It was a nice Saturday afternoon -- until a bum dropped dead outside the drugstore right in front of my taxi. I found it disturbing that, after it was determined he was dead and cops were called, all the driver and I could do was decide to take Hollywood to Gardener instead of La Brea. I asked myself, "Is that all a man's life is worth, a change of cab route?" And then a voice, somewhere between Sam Elliot (two L's), and Johnny Cash replied "That's right. Mick. Sometimes the bear eats you." (I have already included this story in a personal note to a friend, but it was on my mind, and I felt I had to post it as a change from pics of Iggy and other trivia. My apologies to the recipient.)

The secret word is Wept

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

"Robbie, I think we have to deprogram the shoe fetish. Plus I'm getting tired of sitting on this ladder."

The secret word is Mule

REMEMBER ROCK & ROLL?

I have to stop stealing images from If Charlie Parker Was A Gunslinger There'd Be A Whole Lot of Dead Copycats (linked on the right) but I needed something to expunge all thoughts of Sanjaya Malakar.

The secret word is Dog

THE BEES ARE VANISHING

The mystery of the vanishing bees is no joke. I really think it’s hitting some kind of what-the-fuck crisis level.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Beekeepers throughout the United States have been losing between 50 and 90 percent of their honeybees over the past six months, perplexing scientists, driving honey prices higher and threatening fruit and vegetable production. Beginning in October 2006, beekeepers from 24 states reported that hundreds of thousands of their bees were dying and their colonies were being devastated. For more…

In LA CityBeat I have a short squib on The Tudors

And this really needs watching. Times ain’t getting any easier.

WASSUP WIT' SATURN?

"This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides," said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, asadena, Calif. "We've never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn's thick atmosphere, where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate, is perhaps the last place you'd expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is." The hexagon is nearly 15,000 miles across. Nearly four Earths could fit inside it. The thermal imagery shows the hexagon extends about 60 miles down into the clouds."

For more and a video clip (thanks to Wendy)

The secret word is Perplexed

AND TALKING OF GALACTIC MENACES...

As if it wasn't bad enough that there's a sheep that's geneticaly 15% human, someone called Shigella has crocheted a Dalek. Which, in theory could give rise to an entire army of brand new wooly versions of the damned things zapping whole planetary systems and yelling "Exterminate! Exterminate!" in their annoying metallic voices. (Or would the knitted ones sound more like sheep?)This information come from Peromyscus whose very cool blog is perma-linked on the right.

The secret word is Tardis

Also If Charlie Parker Was A Gunslinger There'd Be A Whole Lot of Dead Copycats has some unbelievable pictures of the 1911 Triangle Shirt Factory fire in New York. (And, if you don’t know what that was, fucking look it up. It was the truly hideous face of capitalism.)

MEANWHILE, FLEEING THE CYLON MENACE...

When did Bob Dylan become one of the divine Lords of Kobol?

CRYPTIQUE -- There must be some way outa here.

MAYBE I WAS WRONG ABOUT TILLMAN

Seems like I may have been wrong about Tillman being a dangerous psycho. Some girl’s email that follows in its entirety shows that it she is much better informed, and I was just reacting to the foul propaganda Jessica Lynch stench that taints anything to do with Bush and his evil goddamned war machine.

looks like you've got yourself a particularly intelligent troll (haha). and of course the troll is an asshole, but i've read a bit on tillman, though not this article. all accounts show he wasn't a gung-ho anything (at least no more than other soldiers). he was a dupe and a pawn, same as all the military and much of the american people. his case resonates more b/c he was a successful pro football player who walked away from all that to go fight the taliban. and, of course, b/c his high-profile death was first used as an endless "martyr moment" and then suddenly disappeared from the talking points after it came out that he died in afghanistan under friendly fire. he was a perfect PR/recruitment poster for the bushies, a textbook case of "sacrifice" for "freedom" (and DAMN how they talked him up and talked him up during football season after he enlisted...and even after he died, until the circumstances came out. then the NFL stopped talking about him, too). then came the REAL tragedy -- the lies and coverup of how it happened. tough to portray him dying a "heroic" death when it was actually a horrible cock-up (of the type that certainly would remind the public of vietnam, a comparison bush et al were desperate to avoid at all costs back then...still are i suppose).as far as i know there's no evidence he was "fragged." fer fucksake, he was a corporal. fraggings in the nam happened usually to young, green, gung-ho first LTs who would actually get their underlings killed by ordering stupid assaults, patrols, etc etc. generally speaking LTs were fragged in self-defense. there's no conceivable reason a soldier like tillman would be that type of an uncontrollable risk. hence, fragging wouldn't be on the agenda. the accounts i have read of what happened that day indicate confusion, fear, fuckups, and deviations from an impromptu plan led to the friendly-fire death.what the government did in terms of lying to tillman's family (not to mention the rest of us) actually turned them against the cause. they would've better handled the truth and come to terms with it. instead they feel betrayed, because they were. the bush administration shook the faith in this country that one typically patriotic family held. to me the tillman case is another example of how much damage bush and his cronies have done, and a terrible reminder that they do not give one flying fuck about ANYBODY but themselves. if you're on their side, you may go into the meat grinder. if you're not on their side, you may go into the meat grinder. whatever works for them. they don't even take care of the people who support them; they only take care of their own. hang the faithful along with the faithless...they scarcely care to make that distinction, in the end.anyway, i thought the comment about tillman was very unfair and surprisingly callous. geez, he was actually opposed to the invasion of iraq, he was not religious, and he even opposed bush's reelection. i am not a fan of him; i think his choice was stupid, and the way he was held up in the media was infuriating and tiresome. at the same time i feel that we were all lied to, and some of us were more susceptible to those lies than others. the human toll that "talking points" and other rhetoric have wrought should not be forgotten -- especially b/c that's the way bush and co. act, like the words and the decisions and the actions don't have any consequences at all. but they do, and they have. not just here, of course, but in iraq and all around the world. the hypocrisy of the government and the military actively trying to conceal the truth from tillman's family strikes me as particularly despicable, maybe b/c it is such a perfect microcosm of all the things i've just mentioned.

PLAUSIBLE? ANY OF IT?

I have hardly been keeping up with all this Pat Tillman business, (here’s a report if your not up to speed either) but am I to understand from the word “fratricide” in the story means that, rather than being accidentally killed by “friendly fire”, he was actually fragged by his own men because he was a gun-ho barking-crazy psycho and fatally dangerous to anyone close to him? Or is that just my cynical assumption.

And meanwhile, as I posted the above, this appeared in my in-box. “TOKYO — A health ministry affiliate has received 23 reports of antiviral drug Tamiflu causing neuropsychiatric disorders in children aged under 10 such as hallucinations, depressed consciousness or delirium." Now wasn’t this junk being pumped up by the pharmaceutical companies as their first line of defense against H5N1 Avian Flu? I never did trust it. Like Pat Tillman’s unfortunate death, it just seemed so overhyped.

The secret word is Skepticism

THIS BLOG IS STILL PROTECTED BY...

NEWTON HAS AN UPDATE

The deaths supposedly caused by catfood that we were all worrying about last Monday have been attributed to rat poison, although how exactly is not clear. For what there is of the story...

BRITS TAKE SMALL STEP TO DRUG SANITY

Aeswiren sends us the following report from the BBC…
"The drug classification system in the UK is not "fit for purpose" and should be scrapped, scientists have said. They have drawn up an alternative system which they argue more accurately reflects the harm that drugs do. The new ranking system places alcohol and tobacco in the upper half of the league table, ahead of cannabis and several Class A drugs such as ecstasy. The study, published in The Lancet, has been welcomed by a team reviewing drug research for the government. The Academy of Medical Sciences group plans to put its recommendations to ministers in the autumn."

Rest of story…

The secret word is Benzodiazepine

BLATANT SELF PROMOTION (Nosferatu Division)

Earlier in the week (on Tuesday to be precise) we were discussing the arithmetic impossibility of vampires and I happened to mention Victor Renquist and posted a link to his Wikipedia entry (not written by me) but maybe I didn’t urge everyone sufficiently strongly, who hasn’t already gone out or online to buy The Renquist Quartet, to do so immediately starting with the first book – The Time of Feasting (left).

And when you’ve made the purchase, HCB poses some comments, all of which I think are brilliantly resolved in the Renquist novels. (Along with the problem of Nazi flying saucers and the whereabouts of the last Quaalude on the planet.)

“The vampire population is increasing in a geometric progression, and the population of humans is similarly decreasing -- and at that rate, the authors calculate, the entire human population would be transformed into vampires in only 30 months.”

HCB -- But you’d have to assume they were capable of traveling great distances because otherwise they'd entirely consume the local population in short order and starve (if they can in fact actually die) or tear each other to pieces. More likely they'd have the same effect as any lethal virus in a finite population, and like a contagious disease they'd have a much greater effect in bigger urban environments. There's also the native earth business to get around. I guess you could say they're land-locked.

“Am Legend that also became the Vincent Price movie The Last Man On Earth and was also the basis of The Omega Man with Charlton Heston”

HCB -- The new Will Smith version is set to release in Dec

HCB also provides a link to Hard Day’s Night Of The Living Dead

Larry "Bud' Melman -- RIP

A FAREWELL TO WASTE MANAGEMENT

In this week’s LA CityBeat I use up the space available for what I guess is my elegy on The Sopranos and how it is, in reality, a surviving product of the Bill Clinton 1990s.

The secret word is Bing! (or maybe Bah)

SPRING?

Our friend Yukiko has sent me a short poem known as "Waka" (a little longer form of Haiku) written the famous Japanese monk poet, Saigyo. Some of you will be aware why I post it here. Those who aren’t should just enjoy it.

Let me die in spring

under the cherry blossom,

let it be around

that full moon

of Kisaragi month

(Kisaragi is an ancient Japanese name for the month of March.)