All posts by Joseph

Usual Rubbish

Downer, man.

I spy with my little eye… a planet. See it? Just outside the viewport there? Right — very good. Yes, that’s right… the one that’s getting bigger and bigger with each passing moment. That’s the one. You’re good at this game.

Ah, the distractions we devise to keep our minds off of unpleasant things. Things like uncontrolled descents, fiery crashes, and all that. Yes, friends — that bit of engine trouble I told you about last week was a bit more serious than we’d thought. Now it appears we’ve been issued a one-way ticket to Kerplackistan, if you catch my meaning. And let me tell you something, blog-o-file… it’s downhill all the way. It’s that irresistible force of gravity that’s the problem — no matter where you go in the universe, you’re never quite free of it. Too technical? To simplify matters, I will convey the problem in song, while Marvin (my personal robot assistant) renders its emotional import in a brief interpretive dance:

What goes up
must come down.
Spinning wheels
got to go round
Talk about your troubles
it’s a cryin’ sin
Ride a painted pony
let the spinning wheel spin

Then there’s the bit about having no money and no home, but you already know that part.

How did we arrive at such a revolting predicament? Well, after drifting aimlessly through the asteroid belt, past the object briefly known as the “planet” Ceres, one of our number stumbled upon a novel idea for interplanetary propulsion. No, it wasn’t a member of our scientific contingent — both Mitch Macaphee and Trevor James Constable had long since retired to their cabins with a case of Beefeater’s (each) and a sizeable poke of Zenite snuff (courtesy of sFshzenKlyrn). It was, in fact, the man-sized tuber who first “suggested” (i.e. made his idea known through the art of bad cooking) placing our main PA speakers inside the aft airlock and turning them up to eleven, with sFshzenKlyrn obligingly supplying a mega power chord from his trademark trashed-out telecaster. We just cracked the hatch open, let that bad noise out, and forward we lurched.

When I say “lurch”, I mean just that — an aimless forward motion. (Not a large, Frankenstinian butler working for the Addams family). We were propelled by the sustained power chord out of the asteroid belt and into the gravitational pull of our home planet, known to you terrestrial types as “de oit”. (That’s like “Detroit” without the “tr”.) Well, as many of you already know, the “oit” has a much stronger gravitational field than the asteroid formerly known as “planet” Ceres. And resisting said gravitational pull will take more than a mere power chord or two.

So, let me close with the refrain from another highly apropos little number:

Down and down and down I go!
Round and round and round I go
like a something, something, something….

P. S. — YAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!

Political Rants

Meet Mr. Guilty.

It was a real Rove moment. George W. Bush at the rostrum in front of a room full of 9-11 victim families, announcing his new policy on the disposition of detainees held in the never-ending “war on terror.” (God forbid our official enemies should declare a similar “war on air power” or “war on artillery”). Dubya pulled most of his trademark non-sequitur facial expressions ( the “by crackee” squint-smirk, the long “get it? get it?” glare) and was generally in form for this photo-op as he promised to bring the 9-11 plotters to justice for the nearly 3,000 lives lost on that awful day. And yet, as well received as his words were among that group, I wonder if anyone there pondered how Bush has brought about, by his own count, at least ten times as many deaths in Iraq — and really more like 50 times as many by the most realistic reckoning — as a result of the war of choice he initiated in the name of their fallen loved ones. I know that a good many 9-11 families are none too happy about being used in such a manner… and they can expect the memory of their loss to be invoked regularly in the weeks leading up to the mid-term elections.

So what is this thing called guilt? What meaning does it have if it is only applied to those who lack the power and resources to avoid apprehension and prosecution? Recent experience suggests it has very little meaning at all except as a marketing tool — recall the Saddam trial and all of his unindicted Reagan-era co-conspirators. Actually, I had occasion to hear one of the great legal minds behind the administration’s war on terror this week. NPR’s “Day to Day” was interviewing John Yoo, author of Bush’s legal justification for torture and detention without due process. Yoo drew a distinction between “war time” and normal circumstances, arguing that it is not practical to apply the niceties of constitutional rights to combatants captured on the field of battle. Of course, what he didn’t discuss was how many of these “combatants” were pulled from their homes in, say, Lahore or Karachi, and thrown into a black hole where they were beaten, humiliated, and held without legal recourse for up to three years before being released on the admission that they were innocent all along. In Yoo’s legal world, it’s okay to hold someone like that until the end of the “conflict” (i.e. forever) — just arrest everyone you can get your hands on (or pay a bounty for) and sort them out later.

Fact is, this denial of rights is criminal in the extreme, and the Bush team knows it. That’s why they are so dead set against any international legal architecture of justice — not because they fear U.S. soldiers will be dragged off to the Hague (as they claim) but because they see themselves in the dock one day, facing charges of unlawful abduction, torture, mass murder, and the supreme crime of waging aggressive war against a nation for no legitimate reason, at the cost of many tens of thousands of lives. So as you pause for your solemn moment of silence this Monday, think not only of those who perished in the 9-11 attacks, but also of those who have died since as a result of our political culture’s thirst for blood and our own indifference to the suffering of others. Let us duly mourn our failure to stop this before so many were forced to pay with their lives (including nearly as many Americans as died on that fateful day five years ago).

And so long as your head is bowed, think of that Pet Goat Bush was reading about as the WTC burned and ask yourself why the hell this man is still being allowed to run our nation into the ground.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Hail and farewell.

Mmmmm, burnt toast. The smell of over-heated coffee. That cool splash of orange juice in your lap, while strips of fakin’ bacon belch greasy black smoke from an unattended frying pan. Yes, breakfast is my favorite meal of the day. (Is that the fire alarm I hear? Seems like the wrong pitch….)

Greetings from the lower deck (galley area) of the reconstituted J-2 space RV, our home-away-from-home planet during this GET ME THE HELL OUTA HERE Big Green Tour 2006. We’re just in the middle of a particularly toxic breakfast, so bear with me. No budget for an on-board chef, unfortunately. We’ve press-ganged the man-sized tuber into doing the job. Probably not the best pick, but we figured that, since this is an all-vegetarian voyage (much to the chagrin on Mitch Macaphee), it might be appropriate to have a certified organic vegetable doing all the cooking for us. Besides, old tubey has to carry his own weight somehow. Can’t spend the whole trip sitting in his specially designed space terrarium, keeping himself humid and well-mulched. (Or can he?) So we got him a second-hand chef’s hat and made him watch the Food network in his little glass room for a few hours… and voila. Instant chef.

Still, it’s actually kind of relaxing to just sit here and let an overgrown yam burn our breakfast snausages, especially after the frantic week we’ve had, framming away uselessly on celestial objects no longer considered to be planets. (Mmmmmmm. Burned snausages….) Beats the hell out of me how these hellacious hunks of interplanetary rock and ice ever got themselves in the running to be considered planets in the first place. What the fuck were those rocket scientists thinking? Anyhow, that nightmare is over, and we are drifting lazily through the asteroid belt, meandering our way home, lonely as a cloud of dark matter. Why so nonchalant? Lots of reasons. We’re close to the end of our tour. We’re almost finished with our sophomore album (now in the mixing phase). And … ah yes… we’ve blown our ion-drive engine to kingdom come. Nearly forgot that one. (Details, details!)

How, you ask, could such a thing happen? Well, ahm gon’ tell yuh. As you know, our friend Quality Lincoln was dispatched from his position as official booking agent for this tour, owing to some rather unforgivable oversights on his part (I won’t go into all the ugly details… he knows what he’s done). He has been replaced by the inestimable Big Zamboola (a former planet himself, you know), who was serving as our navigator. That post was taken over by Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who had been putting in his duty as our helmsman these past couple of weeks. Since posi-Lincoln was semi-familiar with concepts related to aviation and had personally commanded several observation balloons in his day, we though he might sit in at the helm for the last dog leg of the tour. Big mistake. BIIIGGGG mistake! My guess is that he’s more of a steam locomotive guy than an ion-drive spacecraft guy. He apparently thought he had to get up a good head of steam to pull over the top of Saturn. Then there was a bang. Then a boom. Then another bang, but not the same as the first one. Finally… the sound of a dog barking. (I’m still working on that one.)

And so, here we are. Adrift. Total rupture in the reactor vessel. No forward thrust whatsoever. Auxiliary power only. Bottled oxygen. And a vegetable cooking our meals. Is this any way to end a tour? What sayest thou? I can’t hear you. (Oh, sure…. the transmitter’s out and all. )