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!
One of the study’s authors, Les Roberts (recent candidate for the democratic nomination for congress in my hometown district), seems to me not at all the hysterical exaggerator type. A physician and epidemiologist, he has been working on public health issues for many years, including time in war zones like Bosnia. This study is a follow-up on the one his team released a couple of years ago that put the number of “excess deaths” (i.e. those resulting from the U.S. invasion) at that time conservatively at 100,000. (The administration hated that number too, as I recall. )
Whatever the pols would have you believe, if this new Iraq casualties study is anything close to true, this is truly one of the major bloodlettings of our time — Rwanda league, for sure. But even if it were closer to the lower figures I hear the administration bandying about — a mere 50,000 or 100,000 — isn’t that bad enough? Isn’t the real crime that those deaths are so unimportant, regardless of their magnitude? For chrissake, does anybody still think that this war was unavoidable? If we’re close to unanimity on that, isn’t it time we consider the degree to which we are responsible for the suffering in Iraq? Is it somehow less disturbing to imagine a 2:1 ratio of Saddam’s killings to our own than something closer to 1:1, when we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of bodies in either case? Shouldn’t totals like this bother us at least as much as some lame-ass Congressman pulling a boner on teen pages?
Ship ahoy, ship ahoy… who wants to marry a sailor boy? Washed ashore, washed ashore… How’s the rest of that cheesy Hollywood shanty go? Mitch? Trevor James? Marvin (my personal robot assistant)?
Reader’s note — “attempted” is the operative word in that last line. Sure, we made the sail unfurl and we climbed aboard, expectant of a rapid deliverance from the tropical tedium we had endured over the past weeks. And, well, nothing happened. Nothing. No wind. No freaking wind, here in typhoon alley. We beckoned to our resident quasi-meteorologist (Mitch Macaphee) and asked him what was what. He consulted his pocket weather satellite device and shook his head mournfully. We were in the midst of a kind of tropical doldrums — not even a lazy breeze to push us out to sea. This was the limit. As if it wasn’t bad enough that we should have to resort to wind propulsion to get us out of here… now wind turns out to be at a premium. (Perhaps Mitch was right about that coconut fuel idea. Or perhaps not.)
After a bit of head scratching, it was Trevor James who came up with an idea worth considering. How about training his patented orgone generating device directly on the main mast and turning up the volume to eleven? How’d that be? But was it practical? “Sure,” said Trevor James. “We just lash the O.G.D. to the hull and crank her up.” Mitch had some quibbles about leverage and the principles of thrust, but who the hell cares what he thinks, eh? The idea had more merit than chucking coconuts in a reactor chamber and tossing matches at them in hopes they would cause a mighty fire — one mighty enough to destroy Tabunga. (Tabunga? I’ve been on this island way too long…) So, okay, Mitch. Next time we want to stop the Tabunga, we’ll give you a call.