All posts by Joseph

Usual Rubbish

Last minute waltz.


One-two-three, one-two-three, JUMP-two-three, one-two-three… Good, good – you’ve got it! Now try it again, from the top. And a-one-two-three…

Greetings from the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, a combination squat house, launch pad, recording studio, interstellar refugee center, and – now – dance studio! You heard me right. Sure, sure – no one in Big Green can dance his way out of a paper bag; this much is true. But needs dictate actions in this corner of the universe as well as in yours, and damn it, we need money to get this tour off the ground. So….. dance lessons. Administered by Marvin (my personal robot assistant), as it happens.

Oh, sure, laugh. You may laugh, but actually… he’s not as bad a dancer as you might imagine. In fact, he’s far worse than that. To observe that he is mechanical is less than surprising, I suppose. Actually, he’s kind of mechanical even for a robot. (He doesn’t do that robot dance any justice.) Fortunately, we live in an area where no one can dance, apparently (precious little reason to do so, as well), so Marvin can, simply by dint of his willingness to claim expertise, seem like an expert. Oh, the lengths money will drive a man (or an automaton) to. Sad.

Why are we so short on cash? Please! Aren’t we always? Think of the expenses we need to bear. Just keeping ourselves in Cheesits and crepe paper is enough to bankrupt any tycoon. And then there’s Anti-Lincoln’s odious absinthe habit. (Now I know why he spent so much time at the theater.) We’re just pouring money down the rat hole every day of our lives. And those rats are living pretty large, my friend, pretty large. Of course, now they have to share with our tour manager, Admiral Gonutz (ret.), who needs cash (and lots of it) to provision our ramshackle interstellar space craft.

So… I don’t care how poorly Marvin teaches the waltz. So long as his students pay their bills, we’re bleeping golden. ‘Nuff said.

Political Rants

War’s end.

President Obama delivered his second address to the nation this past Tuesday, this time on the subject of the “end of combat operations” in Iraq. Here – unsolicited by anyone – are my comments:

Turn the page. President Obama said it was time to “turn the page” on the War in Iraq. Um… not so fast, Mr. President. I know you are obsessed with looking ahead rather than behind, but if everyone took that attitude (say, local law enforcement), no one would be held accountable for anything. This war was caused by people in our own country – people in positions of authority. Your administration has neglected to even examine the record of those responsible for this disaster. This has emboldened them to the point where they regularly flaunt their guilt in public, secure in the knowledge that they will never pay a price for what they did.

Good intentions? At one point, the president said this:

This afternoon, I spoke to former President George W. Bush. It’s well known that he and I disagreed about the war from its outset. Yet no one can doubt President Bush’s support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security. As I’ve said, there were patriots who supported this war, and patriots who opposed it.

I won’t address the “patriot” issue, since that is such a loaded term. But I can most certainly doubt President Bush’s “support for our troops” without any resort to imagination. He sent them into Iraq to die by the thousand, for no legitimate reason, in pursuit of an illegal and immoral war – a war of choice, no less. He shipped National Guard troops overseas in the ramshackle vehicles they used back home, with no armor, no protection. He is no friend of our soldiers or military families. To suggest otherwise is simply obscene.

Dark creations. The president went on:

Along with nearly 1.5 million Americans who have served in Iraq, they fought in a faraway place for people they never knew.  They stared into the darkest of human creations — war — and helped the Iraqi people seek the light of peace.

This passage is worthy of his predecessor. Reading it, one would think we invade Iraq to help the Iraqis.  It also, like so much of Bush’s prose, seeks to cloud the notion of agency behind the initiation of the war itself, as if to suggest that our troops went to Iraq on their own initiative to do good works, as if they were Peace Corps volunteers. This is just a rhetorical cop-out, a between-the-lines attempt to deflect criticism away from those who plan the wars by keeping the focus on those sent to fight them.

His call to Bush reminds me of that closing scene in Animal Farm, when Napoleon the pig was having dinner with the farmer and the other barnyard characters, looking on, couldn’t tell one from the other. Such is our ruling class, I suppose.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Launch menu.


Garbage out, garbage in. That’s how that saying goes, right? Backwards? Are you sure? ‘Cause around here, it’s garbage out, garbage in.

Well, friends, in preparation for our upcoming interstellar tour – ENTER THE MIND 2010: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE – we have hauled most of our moth-eaten possessions out to the curb (on Admiral Gonutz’s orders). We have also begun to rack up commitments in the outer reaches of our galaxy (some “stellar” venues among them, I should add. Heh. heh. heh.). And, perhaps (but likely not) most importantly, we have identified a rent-a-spacecraft to replace our long since repossessed Jupiter 2 imitation craft. And hey, that ship, she’s a beauty…. NOT.

I should mention here that when I showed a picture of this moth-eaten craft to Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor (and the guy who makes every gizmo run), he turned a distinctly whiter shade of pale. Inside his enormous, distended brain, no doubt, flashed images of sleepless hours coaxing the skow’s antiquated engines into action as we drift closer and closer to a neutron star. (Chilling indeed!) I’m not sure into what dark alley Admiral Gonutz ventured to find this twisted piece of unspaceworthy tin, but he needn’t have bothered dragging it out. In point of fact, he had Marvin (my personal robot assistant) do the actual dragging… but if he thinks Mitch is going to work on this sucker for free, there’s something stronger than Borkum Riff stuffed into that pipe of his.

Will we actually get anywhere in this ramshackle conveyance, now that we are but days away from our departure to the great unknown? This member of Big Green is doubtful. But what the hell, we’ve done worse over the course of our spotted career. Look at some of our past tours, and you’ll see what I’m talking about. Tacked-together technology, hastily arranged performances, hostile alien interlopers. What keeps us going back, you ask? (You didn’t ask? Well then, I have a question for you: Why didn’t you ask?) We don’t think about it too much, as you can tell. We just do it… get it done.

So what’s on the menu for our tour lift-off? We shall see, my friends. We… shall… see….