Usual Rubbish

No kill I.

There once was a planet named Borax, a land of all head and no thorax…. That’s all I’ve got so far. What do you think, stuffed chef? Is it lacking a certain, well, goodness? How about you, plastic ficus tree?

Man oh Manischewitz, I have never seen a place as uptight as this hideous little orb! A big cowboy howdee of thanks to honest Abe Lincoln for booking us into this hell hole. Not for nothing, as they say in the vernacular, but from the moment we crash-landed into their luxurious nightclub, the people who hired us have been… well… more than a little hostile, if you want to know the truth. As I mentioned in my previous entry, we were held at scrootch-gun point as we descended from the wreckage of our space vehicle. A fine how do you do! We were then marched off to a reception area that look suspiciously like the local drunk tank. Ever spent a night in an 11 by 14 foot cell with several disgruntled band members and a drunken Boraxian? Well… just don’t.

The next morning, we were brought before the local magistrate and ordered to explain ourselves. Unfortunately for us, the Boraxians look uncannily like our companion, the man-sized tuber, (except that they have two antenae on their heads with a little purple spark that shoots between them). This meant, of course, that they insisted on addressing all of their comments to tubey, who (as you know) is not fully checked out on the lingua franca of the galaxy. Even sFshzenKlyrn couldn’t get a decent hearing in that courtroom (and he’s such a cosmopolitan fellow of infinite jest and undeniable charm… cretins!). So there we were, standing like statues as the Boraxians babbled incoherently at our mute vegetable companion. This was not going well.

As luck would have it, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) as able to act as the man-sized tuber’s “translator,” so we could feed Marvin lines and attempt to steer the proceedings to our favor. How did it turn out? Man, I’ll tell you – magistrates get very touchy during war time. We were stuck not only with damages on the luxury night club, but also a stint of community service… which in this war-torn world meant mostly digging trenches and removing unexploded ordinance dropped the night before. Hey, what can I tell you? They treated us like immigrant labor, giving us the jobs they least wanted to do. None of those tuber-like Boraxians were lining up to yank 500 pounders out of the ground, believe you me. (When I told Mitch Macaphee about the verdict, he turned green as a Martian.) Worse luck, our performance was cancelled, so we were forced to work off the damages with pick and shovel.

So what the fuck. Do any of you know what the code number 76-OX9-NL stands for on a laser guided missile? I know it means turn the cylinder either one click to the left or three click to the right, but I don’t remember which. Mitch! Come on and take a look at this thing, will you? I’ll just finish this trench. Pharaoh… Let my people gooooooo!!!

Political Rants

Near hit.

Yes, friends, we do still have a color coded terror alert system (not heard from since just after the 2004 Democratic National Convention) and it’s cranked up to red after this week’s thwarted terror plot in Britain. Another hijacking plan involving long-distance flights, this time apparently focusing on ten aircraft, though I believe the 9/11 strategy originally called for more than 4 or 5 planes. Bush’s comments following the announcement seemed particularly rambling and incoherent, covering the usual talking points about those who “hate our freedoms,” then stumbling off even further into numbskull territory. His painfully qualified-sounding observation that we are “safer than we were on 9/11” sounded a bit like when he was lowballing the number of Iraqi dead to “around thirty thousand”, give or take. This man should never work without a script. In any case, the national security establishment was full of self-praise at having averted a major catastrophe of the type we can expect to see attempted with greater frequency in the months and years ahead, thanks to their ham-fisted policies over the last five years. So, well done… I think.

Still, this near miss (or as George Carlin might term it, “near hit“) fills me with dread. Maybe it’s just paranoia born of anticipating the inevitable fallout from the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon, but I can’t help but wonder – why such an obvious scenario? Why attempt an attack using the very system that is most closely watched by the authorities? Might this be an elaborate diversion, a rouse to distract us from some far more novel operation now in progress? I hope not, but I know this has occurred to others besides myself. It would be reckless to assume that this would never have occurred to groups like al Qaeda, as well. The malign brilliance of the 9/11 plot was that it completely blind-sided our national security establishment and used the failings of our profit-obsessed commercial aviation system and the atrophied regulatory bodies that oversee it as weapons against us, to terrifying effect. Someone – I doubt bin Laden – was bright enough to look closely at our society, discern where the structural weaknesses are, and proceed accordingly. If they’re smart enough to pull that off, it seems to me they’re probably too smart to rely solely on a plot that uses those same resources, which while still vulnerable are much more highly scrutinized by intelligence and law enforcement than they were prior to September 2001.

So while our homeland security secretary and various anti-terrorism officials pat themselves on the back for a job well done, there may be some more subtle conspiracy under way on the part of the “evil doers”. Lord knows we’re open to attack across a broad spectrum of the national infrastructure, from ground transportation to chemical plants to power generation facilities and so on. Our homeland security funding is a shambles, with money being sent in all kinds of strange directions per the usual congressional pork-barrel allocation process. Just a few miles from where I live, there’s a training facility where people in hazmat suits practice for the terror attacks of yesteryear, effectively closing the door on that empty barn. Sure, it generates a few jobs and it makes it look like our politicians are doing something to make us safer, but when you’ve got a top-level leadership that doesn’t think New York City has any important landmarks worth protecting; one that has demonstrated its inability and unwillingness to respond to predictable disasters like Katrina; a national political culture that has done more to breed terrorism in the last five years than Osama might have dreamed possible in 2000, there’s no question but that we have a major problem here.

By the way, we now have a cease fire agreement for Lebanon that allows the IDF to keep dropping bombs “defensively.” More payback on the way, I expect… so keep your heads down, my friends.

Usual Rubbish

Y’ello.

This is it – truly it. No, I don’t mean just any “it” – I mean the real thing. You don’t know what “it” is? What the hell! Where are you going? I’m talking to you, bwah!

Whoops. Did it again, didn’t I? Sorry… I didn’t mean for anyone outside the confines of our little space RV. How bloody humiliating. I was just reading posi-Lincoln the riot act for his various failings. Oh sure, he may have saved the Union back in the 1860s, freed the slaves, etc., but what has he done for us lately? I’ll tell you what – he’s made a flaming wreck of this tour, my friend, and I mean that quite literally. Never get an ex-president to do a booking agent’s job, that’s what I always say. (Should have stuck to my principles on that one. I wouldn’t be wasting my time right now trying to explain the meaning of “it” whilest stranded on a hostile planet.)

So yeah – we’re stranded on a hostile planet. Reason for this pickle? Simple. Our genius “great emancipator” booked us into the middle of an interstellar conflict, a la Ameniar and Vendicar from the original Star Trek series. Only difference is, these fuckers use real bombs, missiles, lasers, and other assorted anti-personnel devices. Anyway, that FAX Lincoln was waiting for was being sent by one of the antagonists in an interplanetary dust-up that’s been going on for the better part of a decade. The planet BORAX 19 and its near neighbor CALGON were exchanging missiles as we arrived, in fact. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was the first to notice when one skimmed by our break lounge window. The second one, well…. that landed in the galley. Not good.

Now, as you folks out in TV land know, any breach in a spaceship’s hull may present a problem, particularly to those sentient life forms (sFhszenKlyrn excluded) who may be lurking within. You know the drill – air excaping, alarms going off, the ship pitching back and forth (or, at least, the camera does and the people fall left and right in an accordingly dramatic fashion). Well, we got into a bit of that. Luckily at that particular juncture, those of us on the lower deck were trying on our newly acquired astronaut get-ups, which make for jolly good stage gear out yonder. What happened next? Well, as I was cursing Lincoln to high heaven, we followed the trajectory of a popular song from way back when:

Down and down and down we go
Round and round and round we go

From there, we experienced one of those “crash-bang” landings we’ve become famous for over the past few years. The good news is that we were able to find the venue that Lincoln booked us into. The bad news is that… that’s the building we crashed into. Once the fire was out, all we had to deal with was a very angry club owner with an oversized scrootch gun. Vendicarians speak through sign language (just like we do when we’re angry). Kind of hard to tell them you’re sorry when your hands are up.

Weird ass music since 1986