All posts by Joseph

Usual Rubbish

Land ho-no!

Hear that scraping sound? Dragging my ass this morning. Literally. Don’t lo0k at me like that — you know what I’m talking about, that blog look you always give me. I can see you in the back there… don’t try to hide behind the fat guy!

Sorry if I came across a bit touchy just then. This has been a long hard slog, but I have no right to take it out on you — you who have stood with me every league of the way. Damn it, I’m ungrateful! But isn’t that the way it goes with pop band denizens. Anyways…. our wayward breeze did come along eventually, and pushed us on our way-ward. (Or forward, as it were.) Once we were clear of the strange psycho-miasma surrounding the dreaded Sea of the Weekly World News, we were able to navigate using something other than Trevor James’ Orgone Generator (which, with the polarity reversed, acts as a crude bio-plasmic compass. It’s a little hard to explain, actually. Okay… just drop it, all right?)

Right, right — back to my tale of woe and intrigue. We were on the high seas for several days, making fairly good time (as pops used to say), when Marvin (my personal robot assistant) spotted the silhouette of a substantial coast line to our port side. Land! But what land was it? Iceland? Greenland? Long Island? It was hard to be sure. We thought it best to send a scouting party in the long boat to check it out before attempting to land. Trouble was… no long boat. (We didn’t even have a short boat.) Matt, John and I began to roll our eyes around the ship’s cabin, searching for a gullible… I mean, workable solution. Which one of our party had the greatest natural buoyancy? The answer came quite quickly…. BIG ZAMBOOLA — a true living, breathing floatation device.

Well, friends… Zamboola went ashore and did the recon, as they say (looking more than a bit like that “Rover” critter from the sixties TV show The Prisoner), quickly determining that we had, indeed, sighted land and that — yes — it was indeed the land of our homestead, the besieged, much maligned Cheney Hammer Mill, which we call home. (Did I say that it is our home? The mill? Okay, then.) Next step: get the ship on dry land. But how to accomplish this? Though it was capable (until recently) of interstellar travel, and has of late been modified to serve as a sea-faring vessel, the imitation J-2 space cruiser has zero capability as an over-land vehicle. We needed some means of locomotion — not wind power, not ion power… something that would give us traction for the long road ahead.

When it came to a vote over who would be elected to drag the ship back to Colombo, Marvin won by three votes. (My vote was on posi-Lincoln, but that was out of bitterness… sheer bitterness.) So forward we went, propelled by the power of Marvin’s ion reactor. Hammer Mill, here we come! Giddyap!

Political Rants

Keep dreaming.

October is turning out to be one of the bloodiest months for U.S. troops since the war in Iraq began — their lives being expended so carelessly that even the generals on the ground are publicly re-thinking their latest pacification strategy in Baghdad. (One can only guess ho many Iraqis are dying in these operations. One can only guess because, as I mentioned last week, no one in an official capacity in the U.S. seems interested in counting them.) At the same time, we’re hearing more and more about how our leaders are “losing patience” with the Iraqi government, and there’s been some suggestion of a possible coup, martial law, etc. (see Saigon 1963). One can see a screw job in the making, for sure — a well-worn imperial gambit. Those damnable natives; they just can’t get it together! (See Saigon, pretty much any time between 1946 and 1975.) This whole Iraq thing was going great until they got in the game.

Once again I’m reminded of a comment I heard from a Canadian official a couple of years ago — something to the effect of, “When’s the last time you can recall the Americans taking responsibility for anything?” Well, it still rings true, particularly with regard to the perpetual explosion that is Iraq. Blame will be assigned to the Iraqi government, the Shi’ite militias, the Sunni insurgents, the Iranians, the Syrians, “foreign (i.e. not American) fighters,” Hezbollah, Hamas, Bill Clinton, Barbara Streisand — anybody but “me”. (That’s MBA backwards: Anybody But Me. Bush has got one of those, hasn’t he?) But no matter who is to “blame”, the game will remain the same — stay the course, get the job done, etc. That’s all Bush has now, and since he can’t run again, he’d just as soon not be one of those presidents who had to reverse their Custer decision and pull troops out from where he’d sent them, mission decidedly un-accomplished.

Correct me if I’m wrong (honest — there’s a comments form!) but I believe the mission now is to keep George W. Bush from looking bad… well, worse, let’s say. As long as we stay in Iraq, his political allies can ride around on their unicycles and tell all who will listen that Dubya is like Lincoln and Truman, taking political heat for an unpopular but necessary war, later to be vindicated by history and celebrated as strong and visionary leaders (Lincoln for saving the union; Truman for building the U.S. empire). If we leave Iraq now, that fiction evaporates. So 20, 22, 28, 35-year-old Americans are dying in combat to preserve Bush’s bogus claim to future greatness. That, at least, is what it looks like, since they appear to have no real plan behind what they’re doing. Just keep it going. Like Rumsfeld suggested last week, the War on Terror may never end. Sounds like wishful thinking to me.

If wishes were horses…

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

A band adrift.

What’s this I spy with my little eye? ‘Tis a man in a wee lifeboat. Soggy, nautical-looking gent with a captain’s hat on. Smoke rising lazily from the bowl of his pipe. Looks to have been out here a while…

Oh, yes… hello out there in cyberspace. It’s your old pal Bozo… I mean, Joe-zo. (Been at sea a little too long, me thinkst.) As you may have surmised from my previous utterance, we did manage to shove off last week, as the saying goes. Our dear friend Trevor James Constable cooked up a little nor’easter with that orgone generating device of his, and we were carried off to open water by a most congenial ocean breeze (12 knots, I believe — knot that that means anything to me). Around 1300 hours GMT, we crossed the tropic of Capricorn and headed into uncharted waters. Take it from someone who’s spent the better part of the last month on a desert island — if you’re going to be in uncharted waters, you’re better off keeping in motion rather than standing still. Word to the wise.

Now I don’t know how many of you have actually been to the Sargasso Sea or any of those other forgotten corners of the world that only seem to show up in naval lore, but let me tell you, friend — they exist. Oh, yes. Our nor’easter blew us into a fog-bound stretch of ocean. Aye, grim and foreboding it was, with the smell of decaying hulks hanging heavy in the air around us. Our pilot Marvin (my personal robot assistant) spotted an albatross — t’was then we knew we were in for a rough passage. Shiver me timbers, I’ll be a peg-legged polevaulter if we didn’t spy a small craft off the starboard side, its master a lone ship’s captain, his haggard features bearing a tale of many months at sea… or perhaps years. Aye, an eternity in the doldrums, perhaps. His pipe still lit, he gave a jaunty little dance… and I knew. T’was the captain of the Titanic. We had entered the dreaded Sea of the Weekly World News.

What lay ahead for us? Bat boy? Bigfoot? The space alien who plays presidential kingmaker? We had to get out of here fast. But nay, there was a strange dampening field at work, a peculiar miasma that kept the orgone generating machine from functioning as our weather-maker. If we wanted to avoid being trapped in supermarket checkout lines for all eternity, we needed to find an alternative source of power — one strong enough to push us clear through to the subcontinent. There was only one option: Big Zamboola. But would he do it? We formed an ad hoc delegation and brought the proposal to our beachball-sized planetoid companion. (He’s been hovering in the power core for the last week or two, pining for the Pleiades).

Well, it was more complicated than you might have imagined. Zamboola wasn’t hot on the idea. And as they say, you can lead a planet to water, but you can’t make him blow. (That didn’t come out the way I meant it to, but let it pass… let it pass….) See you in the checkout!