Look at that. Chip off the old block, eh, Mitch? You should be proud, very proud. You are? Good, good. (Arrogant sonofabitch…)

Whoops. Didn’t know I was typing my thoughts as well as my spoken words – very careless of me. Do me a kindness and overlook that last remark… I’m just not in a very good state of mind right now vis-a-vis Mitch Macaphee, our resident mad scientist. Truth be known, he’s not arrogant. The son of a bitch part is fairly accurate, but I wouldn’t call him arrogant. Stubborn, perhaps. Okay, okay – obstinate. But not arrogant. And I am trying to hold my tongue around him, as it took a good long time to convince him to return to the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Wouldn’t want to be responsible for sending him packing once again. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) would never let me hear the end of it. (A devoted son, it seems.)

Why am I annoyed at Mitch? Well…. I’m told I’m being unfair. After all, it was he who ultimately shifted the man-sized tuber’s thousands of relatives out of the mill and back into the fields where they belong. That’s right, friends – the potato head family is gone, gone, gone. And it was Mitch who came up with the solution. Foolishly simple, really. He just phoned up our mutual friend Trevor James Constable and asked him to focus the full strength of his patented orgone generating machine towards the Hammer Mill. Let me tell you, that got a rise out of those little suckers. They started rolling out the door the minute Trevor James flipped the switch. Of course, there were some side effects. My fillings, for instance, began emitting easy listening music. Also, the fireplace implements took on an unearthly glow. But it was well worth the trouble.

What about the man-sized tuber? I’ll tell you, after all these weeks, he’s had his fill of relatives. Couldn’t wait for them to leave, quite frankly. (Quite a switch from the mopey Melvin routine that got us into this mess in the first place.) The only real downside here is that Mitch is insufferably pleased with himself for having solved this thing so quickly, so elegantly, so…. so enough, already! Even I’m singing his praises. The fact is, he doesn’t react very well to success. Now he thinks he can do anything. He’s inserted himself into my mixing and mastering sessions (which at least gives me someone else to blame for the positively geological pace of this project). He’s taken up cooking (using the same tools he uses to work with micro-organisms… uuuhhhlllll….). And, even worse, Mitch now thinks he can sculpt figures out of living rock. He chipped a crude Frankenstein’s monster out of the side of a cliff – looks ridiculous. Today I saw him looking discerningly at one of the mill’s courtyard wall – the one that makes up the north side of my room!

Okay, so that’s why I’m irked. I know, it’s petty. I’ll drop it soon enough. Though… between keystrokes, I can hear this vague chipping sound… like someone hammering a chisel into … bricks…

There was a lot of noise this week about Iran once again, this in the wake of an IAEA report that raises questions about some aspects of their nuclear program. The occasion prompted appearances on evening news shows of all manner of expert, so long as they share the view that Iran should never, ever be allowed to possess nuclear technology. One “expert” opined that such an eventuality would set off an arms race in the Middle East, prompting Saudi Arabia to get the bomb and so on. Not sure how closely he’s been paying attention to his area of expertise, but that train left the station decades ago. Israel has a substantial arsenal of nuclear weapons which, though undeclared, has inspired nuclear development programs in Iraq, perhaps Syria, and yes, Iran, if not elsewhere. That is the elephant in the room – the massive destructive power in the hands of a state that has recently and repeatedly attacked its neighbors, and that regularly threatens Iran with air strikes.

This cannot be spoken of, for some reason, at least not in the United States. Somehow when it comes to Israeli foreign policy, we are more Catholic than the Pope, unable to engage in anything close to the kind of lively debate you’re likely to hear in Israel itself. Here, all we can talk about is how Amadinejad purportedly wants to destroy Israel. (That’s a McCain stump speech staple, for sure.) Thing is, they don’t have the ability to carry that out, even if they wished to do so (which I doubt). Whereas Israel, on the other hand, can most certainly obliterate Iran’s major population centers, and perhaps the entire country, in a very short period of time. Their threats carry a certain verisimilitude, as do ours. (Recall that our military is well ensconced in the region, with theater nuclear weapons undoubtedly well within reach.) Is anyone really wondering why Iran might want the bomb?

It’s the “D” word, friends – deterrent. Our leaders try to suggest that it is inoperative in the post 9/11 world, but I don’t think so. Between states, the principle still applies. Iran’s leaders have the rudimentary intelligence it takes to see which countries get attacked by the sole remaining superpower and which ones get negotiated with. They don’t even need to look beyond the very exclusive club Dubya Bush himself established – the Axis of Evil – for their answer. Nuclear armed Korea, with batteries of conventional artillery massed in preparation for a retaliatory strike on Seoul, was able to cut a deal – no invasion was seriously contemplated. Non-nuclear Iraq, on the other hand, which had abandoned its early-stage atomic weapons program in the early 90s, was attacked, invaded, destroyed, occupied, and buried in corpses. What Bush claimed would be a beacon of freedom in the Middle East is, in fact, a national catastrophe no one will ever wish to emulate. So what lesson should the Iranians – third of three in the Axis – take away from this? Get the bomb… and fast.

One thing seems certain, at least – if Iran is attacked in the coming months, it probably won’t be by Olmert… unless the launch codes are buried somewhere in a suitcase stuffed with cash.

luv u,

jp

Want to see me make a donut disappear. Ala-kazam! (*Gulp*) Ta-daaaa! Okay, now… watch me do a half-moon. Presto-change-o! (*Gulp*) Where’d it go? Where’d it go? Next…

Oh, hello. (urp.) Glad you could surf by. I suppose you might be asking yourself, What the fuck is he doing now? Well, friends…. “what the fuck” indeed. The things I have to do to keep people on board with this pointless venture of ours! (Yes, yes… we keep losing people to other unrelated pointless gestures – it’s very discouraging.) You may recall that sometime last week, in our despair over the water table having been depleted by the man-sized tuber’s thirsty relatives, we began digging makeshift wells in the cobblestone courtyard of the Cheney Hammer Mill. And, having run into some (predictable) difficulties with that endeavor, we resolved to employ some kind of hacked-together magic to make our well-holes – this seeming a more immediate course of action than waiting seven years for Mitch Macaphee to get off his lazy ass and invent a stone-piercing neutron laser.

With me so far? Okay, then. So I sent Marvin (my personal robot assistant) over to the local public library in search of some standard volumes on magical spells and incantations. He was gone several thirsty hours, only to return with some lame-ass tome they must have ordered through the mail in 1973 from a publisher’s over-stock house somewhere in New Jersey. (This I know from nothing.) I mean, it was full of pointy hats and al-a-kazams and hey-prestos… the kind of stuff that would embarrass a sit-com pre-teenager. Just plain sad. We were thinking the real dark arts stuff… you know. Beads and flammable powders, all that. Still, I was getting too thirsty to think clearly, so I actually started messing around with some of the spells in the book. I borrowed a few strands of spaghetti to use as a wand, a rolled-up newspaper for a sorcerer’s hat, and went to work. What happened next was shocking, just shocking….

Did I say “shocking”? Perhaps that was too strong a word. Let’s go with mildly surprising. The lame-ass magical spells did nothing to further our well-digging enterprise. (Nothing except earn me the derision of my peers… particularly anti-Lincoln, who’s a hard-nosed little bastard.) What did happen, though, was that I had drawn the collective attention of all of tubey’s relatives. Picture a thousand potatoes in a room, and all eyes on you. Kind of unnerving, actually… but they were being mildly entertained. And that meant less water being drawn off of our somewhat piffling little water table. Within an hour or so, the taps were working again and we could even switch on the humidifier in tubey’s terrarium. (His skin gets scaly during the summer months – that’s why I keep a peeler handy.) Talk about the law of unintended consequences! (Did that ever make it out of committee?) This situation was so twisted, it came out straight.

Trouble is, now they just want magic all the time, and my little bag of tricks is empty. Ergo, I’m resorting to cheap sideshow deceptions. (Which will likely be the theme of our next tour… not bad… not bad… )