HOW FAR DO YOU TRUST YOUR CAT ?

Here at the Doc40 funhouse we have talked much over the years about the coming Catapocalypse when cats will become the ruling species on the planet. Recent evidence, however, (submitted by our pal SAS) would seem to indicate that the Central Intelligence Agency may have been in on the act for half a century. The real question is was the CIA exploiting the cats, or were the cats playing the spooks.

“In the 1960s, the Central Intelligence Agency recruited an unusual field agent: a cat. In an hour-long procedure, a veterinary surgeon transformed the furry feline into an elite spy, implanting a microphone in her ear canal and a small radio transmitter at the base of her skull, and weaving a thin wire antenna into her long gray-and-white fur. This was Operation Acoustic Kitty, a top-secret plan to turn a cat into a living, walking surveillance machine. The leaders of the project hoped that by training the feline to go sit near foreign officials, they could eavesdrop on private conversations.

The problem was that cats are not especially trainable—they don’t have the same deep-seated desire to please a human master that dogs do—and the agency’s robo-cat didn’t seem terribly interested in national security. For its first official test, CIA staffers drove

Acoustic Kitty to the park and tasked it with capturing the conversation of two men sitting on a bench. Instead, the cat wandered into the street, where it was promptly squashed by a taxi. The program was abandoned; as a heavily redacted CIA memo from the time delicately phrased it, “Our final examination of trained cats . . . convinced us that the program would not lend itself in a practical sense to our highly specialized needs.” (Those specialized needs, one assumes, include a decidedly unflattened feline.)

Operation Acoustic Kitty, misadventure though it was, was a visionary idea just fifty years before its time. Today, once again, the U.S. government is looking to animal- machine hybrids to safeguard the country and its citizens. In 2006, for example, DARPA zeroed in on insects, asking the nation’s scientists to submit “innovative proposals to develop technology to create insect-cyborgs.” (Click here for the whole story)

The secret word is Purr

BUT WHO KNOWS THE FELINES’ TRUE AGENDA?

I very much doubt that even the CIA can subvert – or for that mater avert – the Catapocalypse. One somewhat unnerving new symptom is that my adorable companion Finn – aside from being obsessed with an X-Files green laser pointer – has taken to walking on computer keyboard and creating strange alien documents.

Click here for Elmer Bernstein and Saul Bass 

CYCLIST WITH MIND CONTROL CAT

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

Orlando, the Frozdick’s family cat, collects data for the conspiracy.

“SMOKE IF YOU GOT ‘EM. WE AIN’T GOING NOWHERE

GRATUITOUS POLYVINYL CHLORIDE

"Isn't that Maureen Dowd?"

“HUMANS ARE SO EASILY DISTRACTED”

ELVIS AND THE TRANSISTOR – A DANGEROUS DUO

I have always been fascinated by the impact of technology on culture from Gutenberg to Twitter – and don’t forget the Gatling gun – innovation can have far-reaching and unexpected results. Until reading the following in David Halberstam’s book The Fifties, I hadn’t considered how the transistor radio had freed teenagers from parental control of the music to which they listened.

“The rock and roll revolution rode in on the rails of technology. Disapproving parents in the 1950s might have been in control of the family record player, but they couldn't control a brand new marvel of technology, the portable transistor radio, which enterprising manufacturers would sell to the newly prosperous postwar teens for $1 down and $1 a month. Portable record players were not far behind. In fact, the average teen had almost as much disposable income as entire families had had only fifteen years earlier: 

"[Elvis] Presley's [career] timing was nearly perfect. The [rock and roll] crossover, led by Bill Haley, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard, was in full force. Parents might disapprove of the beat and of their children listening to what they knew was black music. But their disapproval only added to Presley's popularity and made him more of a hero among the young. Local ministers might get up in their churches (almost always well covered by local newspapers) and attack demon rock as jungle music and threaten to lead a crusade to have this Presley boy arrested if he dared set foot in their community (generally, there was no problem, their towns were too small for him to play). It did not matter: Elvis Presley and rock music were happening. In this new subculture of rock and roll the important figures of authority were no longer mayors and selectmen or parents; they were disc jockeys, who reaffirmed the right to youthful independence and guided teenagers to their new rock heroes. The young formed their own community. For the first time in American life they were becoming a separate, defined part of the culture: As they had money, they were a market, and as they were a market they were listened to and catered to. Elvis was the first beneficiary. In effect, he was entering millions of American homes on the sly ..."  

Click here for colorized

The secret word is Ear 

AND TALKING ABOUT RADIO…

Click here for almost an hour of Bob on radio in 1962 

IT JUST GETS WORSE

I will soon reach the point where I will have to stop reading environment predictions or lose my mind as the profit motive and the energy barons eat the fucking planet.  

"Under all plausible greenhouse gas emission scenarios," the world is on track to surpass temperatures not seen since the dawn of civilization, according to new research.

Confirming "unprecedented" global warming, the new study published in Friday's issue of the journal Science shows that the earth's temperatures catapulted in just the last century at a rate that had previously taken 4,000 years.

"In 100 years, we've gone from the cold end of the spectrum to the warm end of the spectrum," said climatologist Shaun Marcott, lead author of the study. "We've never seen something this rapid. Even in the ice age the global temperature never changed this quickly." Marcott said that current "global temperatures are warmer than about 75 percent of anything we've seen over the last 11,000 years or so." By 2100, he said, global temperatures will be "well above anything we've ever seen in the last 11,000 years."

"The climate changes to come are going to be larger than anything that human civilization and agriculture has seen in its entire existence," NPR quotes Gavin Schmidt, a climate researcher at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, as saying. "And that is quite a sobering thought."

BUT ALL THINGS HAVE A SOLUTION

“FEELEST THOU PROPITIOUS, PUNK?”

NOW A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR…

GRATUITOUS BARDOT

I COULDN’T HAVE PUT IT BETTER MYSELF

The secret word is Slime

Hugo Chavez – RIP (See Facebook for the debate)

WE’RE DISGUSTINGLY RICH OLIGARCHS AND WE DON’T GIVE A TOSS ABOUT THE POOR

“Let them eat cat food, darling. Poverty is only God’s way of punishing the stupid.”

Click here for Rise Against (trust me)

BUT THEY’RE PUTTING ACID IN THE CAT FOOD

DON’T ASK ME MY HANDS ARE TIED

THEY’RE NEVER TOO YOUNG TO PLAY THERMONUCLEAR ARMAGEDDON

GRATUITOUS WROUGHT IRON CHAIR

SUNDAY BREAKFAST

I’m taking the day off, goddamn it!

Click here for Buddy Holly

Click here for The Quarrymen

The secret word is Chill

MARILYN SEZ…

“He’s taking the day off, goddamn it!”

DIAMONDS ARE A GIRL’S DILEMMA (Part 2)

DOC’S PAPERBACK CLASSICS # 109

GRATUITOUS ISOLATION

COLD CASE CARBON 14

Knowing I’m a sucker for both crime and weird science, our pal HCB (may his initials be blessed) sent me over the following from Fox of all places.…

“Former U.S. nuclear weapons titan Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is applying its bomb know-how to help solve police cold cases. Lawrence Livermore was established in the Cold War to advance American nuclear weapons. The lab was responsible for many pivotal advances, from thermonuclear missile warheads for submarines to developing the first high-yield warheads small enough to be carried in bulk on a ballistic missile. Now the national lab is applying its expertise in nuclear "bomb pulse" radiocarbon analysis to help solve cold cases…and have created a new way to figure out ages and birth dates on those cases  The new approach, combining Livermore’s bomb know-how with new anthropological analysis and forensic DNA techniques, has already yielded results.” Click here for all.

Click here for Nick Cave

 The secret word is Roentgen 

DIAMONDS ARE A GIRL;S DILEMMA

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

Delilah Frozdick had no trouble enlisting some guys to drag her bike out of the river.

SPACE OPERA

“Are the bars open?”

SUNDAY BREAKFAST

“Farren has a habit – when he can be bothered to make a Sunday post in the dismal wake of Saturday night – of running something under the generic title of “Sunday Breakfast” which can about pretty much anything – bacon, bourbon, or baroque behavior, rubber or rubbing alcohol. And this is immediately followed by something called “Marilyn Sez…” in which I contribute some smart-ass one liner of either the great cynicism or morbid philosophy of which only a dead movie goddess, deeply embedded in the conspiracy theories of the 20^th century, would be capable. Today, the two have finally melded and we wonder if this is a coincidence, a happy accident, or a deliberate penetration of a major reality membrane possibly engineered by agents of Ah Puch the Destroyer. And talking of membranes and Ah Puch the Destroyer older Doc40 readers will recall that this all started with an inter-reality psycho-fi quasi-fumetti called “The Adventures Of Marilyn” that concluded when I decided I didn’t want to be a Dionysian agent in the Apollonian War On Chaos and more. The “The Adventures Of Marilyn” may be long gone but the classic episodes are still entombed in their own blog and you are all invited to revisit it. Just click here (but remember it’s a blog and it runs backwards. What else in psycho-fi?)

Click here for Marilyn

Click here for Bob

The secret word is Combine

LOVE IS A MANY SPENDOURED THING # 1

LOVE IS A MANY SPENDOURED THING # 2

(Sorry Russell)

LOVE IS A MANY SPENDOURED THING # 3

GRATUITOUS HITLER’S KNEES

GOD IS GOD BUT ELVIS IS ELVIS

The good guys at Headpress have just published Gathering Of The Tribes: Music and Heavy Conscious Creation to which I contributed an essay on Elvis, Nick Cave, and Satan. Today our pals at Dangerous Mind posted an excerpt….

“Even the most cursory theological (or even Reichian) shakedown will reveal that rock’n’roll has quantum multiples of the potential mythic/mystic power ever commanded by conventional Satanism. Where so much of contemporary Satanism—with its upside down crosses, modified but still liturgical robes and rituals, its ammended litanies, the serving of a faux-Eucharist from the naked torso of an immobilized cooch dancer on bad acid (shout out, hey, Susan Atkins!)—reveals it as nothing nothing more than an inverted critique of Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. (Much in the way that Marxism was essentially a critique of Victorian capitalism rather than a stand alone philosophy.)“

Click here for a whole lot more excerpt and a video

The secret word is Shotgun

AND LET’S NOT FORGET THAT ROCK & ROLL WAS ALWAYS A BATTLEFIELD

OLD MONSANTO HAD A FARM

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

Buzz Frozdick would would grow up to command a ICBM silo.

DOC’S PAPERBACK CLASSICS # 108

And wouldn't this be a rare and fabulous idea, neighbors? Amazing meetings to challenge the imagination and a twelve-step spiral staircase to heaven?

DON’T ASK US OUR HANDS ARE TIED

THIS IS SVITLANA – SHE MAY BE THE NEXT SENATE SEX SCANDAL

They say power has its perks. Just don’t get caught. Unfortunately Sen. Bob Menendez seems to have forgotten this last part. Or that at least is what the Daily Caller claims…. 

“As The Daily Caller tells it. A senator’s life is really rough, allegedly. Meet Svitlana Buchyk, a Russian beauty who is suddenly at the center of a prostitution scandal that threatens to send Democratic New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez the way of former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer.  “Sveta,” as she’s called, is “a young Russian who lives in Miami, Florida and travels frequently to New York,” according to a dossier compiled by Peter Williams, a mysterious whistle-blower who started circulating information in 2012 about the prostitutes Democratic donor Dr. Salomon Melgen allegedly provided to Menendez. “This girl is one of the most regular participants in the activities the Doctor arranges for the Senator,” Williams wrote. “She has traveled with them in the jet, sailed with them in the yacht, and has repeatedly visited the Doctor’s house.” The Miami Herald managed to contact Buchyk on Jan. 31. She confirmed that she has worked for Melgen, but wouldn’t say what kind of duties she performed for him. Menendez is set to take over the chairmanship of the Senate foreign relations committee any day now. That’s not a joke. It’s really called the U.S. Senate Committee on “Foreign Relations.”

.

Click here for Buddy Holly

The secret word is Transaction 

Kevin Ayres -- RIP

YESTERDAY’S PAPERS

LET ME SHOW YOU HOW TO WALK THE DOG

Click here for the Stones

I’VE HAD A HELL OF A COUGH LATELY

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

DON’T ASK ME MY HANDS ARE TIED

SUNDAY BREAKFAST

So the Maya got it wrong, the meteorite did hit us in the Urals and cause a shitload of  grief but the big boy – the 150 ft city-killer – missed us by a whisker. All of which leaves with not much to laugh at this weekend except the absurd and totally hypocritical Euro horsemeat horror. Get real people. Eating Black Beauty is no more or no less ethical than eating Daisy or Babe. I schooled myself long ago that, while I remained a carnivore, I would never think too much about the brown mystery meat in a Big Mac.

Click here for The Rolling Stones

The secret word is Abattoir