Latewire

Well, if anything is to be said about Barack Obama, let it be that he really knows how to squander an opportunity.

This guy, this &^%##* guy, just went one-on-one with the frayed, decrepit, ibogaine-addled 'Penguin' stand-in known as John McCain, and managed to get his individual ass handed to him by sheer virtue of his lack of focus.

Obama is widely mocked in the press for being 'professorial' in tone and prone to digression, but this wasn't professorial. This was more like second-year-grad-student TA. He forgot th' questions before he even started to answer them, and instead repeated vague anti-"last eight years" saws that were tangential at best.

The classic moment was when some goateed ex-Navy guy asked plainly whether, if Iran attacked Israel, we'd wait for UN approval or just blow them I-ranains up real good tout de suite. McCain emerged from his 3rd plateau drug haze long enough to say "we won't wait" before spiralling into a whirlpool of his own jabber. Obama, on th' other hand, completely ignored the question and started to talk about whether or not Iran should have nukes. Wha-wha-whaaat? It's a truism that Democrats are weak on foreign policy questions, but this guy wasn't even trying. He droned on until the heads on the audience very literally started to droop.

Now, McCain was barely able to stop waddling around the stage and forgetting whether his hero is Ronald Reagan or Teddy Roosevelt for long enough to utter any statement of substance, and when he did, it was likely to be the stuff of fantasy such as his assertion that we can tackle health care, entitlements, and some other huge issue simultaneously (the question was 'prioritize these please"). But for McCain, showing that he can communicate in English rather than lecherous quacks can be counted as a victory, whereas Obama came into the ring with a clear public opinion advantage (on paper at least) and tossed it out th' window by digging his own rhetorical grave in exactly the same manner that his detractors say he tends to do. Obama can put together an English sentence, McCain can't. But when Obama puts them together, his credibility falls apart.

Obama : didn't even try in '08

{ gotta love how McCain dated himself with that repeated 'hand on the tiller' metaphor though! This guy is ready to go full sail ahead; I like th' cut of his jib.... WHAT TH' &^%$ }

The Swine List : The complete list of House representatives who changed their vote from 'no' to 'yes' and passed the bailout proposal against their constituents' will, by state :

Here's the list of 'public servants' who caved in to fear or greed and betrayed the public interest by voting 'yes' on the bailout proposal of 10-03, after they had voted 'no' on 09-29. Every 'yes' voter should be ejected from office come November, but these House members are most responsible for the failure of congress to uphold our rights and values on 10-03. Send a message : write down these names and vote them out of office on Election Day, and write and call them to let them know that you'll do so!

Arizona :

G. Giffords (D); H. Mitchell (D); E. Pastor (D); J. Shadegg (R)

California :

J. Baca (D); D. Watson (D); H. Solis (D); A. Schiff (D); B. Lee (D); C. Woolsey (D); CM Thompson (D); D. Rohrabacher (D)

Florida :

V. Buchanan (R); C. Mack (R)

Georgia :

D. Scott (D); J. Lewis (D)

Hawaii :

M. Hirono (D); N. Abercrombie (D)

Illinois :

J. Jackson, Jr (D); B. Rush (D); J. Biggert (R)

Indiana :

A. Carson (D)

Iowa :

D. Loebsack (D)

Maryland :

D. Edwards (D); E. Cummings (D)

Massachussetts:

J. Tierney (D)

Michigan :

C. Kilpatrick (D); P. Hoekstra (R); J. knollenberg (R)

Minnesota :

J. Ramstad (R)

Nebraska :

L. Terry R)

Nevada :

S. Berkley (D)

New Jersey :

W. Pascrell (D); R. Frelinghuysen (R)

New York :

J. Kuhl (R)

North Carolina :

H. Coble (R); S. Myrick (R)

Ohio :

B. Sutton (D); J. Schmidt (R); P. Tiberi (R)

Oklahoma :

M. Fallin (R); J. Sullivan (R)

Oregon :

D. Wu (D)

Pensylvania :

J. Gerlach (R); B. Shuster (R); C. Dent (R)

South Carolina :

J. Barrett (R)

Tenessee:

Z. Wamp (R)

Texas :

E. Cuellar (D); S. Ortiz (D); S J Lee (D); A. Green (D); K. Conoway (R); W. Thornberry (R)

Woman: *Sigh* I sure am bored, ronery and also hot. My fingernails need biting.

You: Hey...

Girl: Oh, hey. Whatsup?

You: Hey, uh... are you by any chance a member of a Masonic Temple?

Girl: What the hell??

You: COS YOU BE LOOKIN' ILLUMI-NAUGHTY!!!! YEAAAAH!!!

Score. Commence tits.

American car makers and some grandfathered Japanese auto plants are being bailed out by a $25BILLION "loan" backed up by John Q. Taxpayer.

Under the provision, which was buried in the latest money dump into Iraq and Afghanistan, US automakers as well as some 20-year old Honda and Nissan plants will be subsidized.

Keep in mind, this isn't the first bailout for the auto industry. In 1980, a 675million dollar sum was given to Chrysler, who will of course be bailed out once again, just 28 years after the first time they sauntered into the red.

AP article

Dear PETA:

I have a business idea, and since it concerns animals, well I know how you guys like to make a fuss over every little thing so I'm just going to run this by you. Shark prostitution. I'm going to whore out sharks for people to have sex with.

You see, sometimes people just want a real rough, hard fuck, with the most vicious creature imaginable. We'll keep them sedated and in small tanks, which our clients can get in, and screw them right in their shark vaginas. They'll have fresh water constantly running over them so they can breathe, and special waterproof speakers that'll play smooth jazz to help get them in the mood. Does Kenny G turn sharks on? More research is surely needed.

So PETA, will there be any problems with this? I know what you're thinking.. Maybe this isn't ethical, right? But isn't it? Who knows? Maybe these whoresharks will give rise to mutant sharkmen, and that's a great evolutionary step. That's more than ethical, that's downright kind! Not to mention that they could be a valuable asset to your organization. Perhaps you could start an offshoot organization SPETA (sharkpeople for the ethical treatment of animals). Sure they won't be able to firebomb buildings like you guys like since they'll need to be in the water, but they'll still be able to get in on the fun! Think how much easier it'll be to follow whaling ships, with a whole organization that can follow along right in the water. Sure, they'll probably kill the whale and eat it if the whalers don't, but you guys aren't ever much for details, why start now?

In summation, I hope you consider my attempts to help people have sex with sharks as a friendly gesture for both man and sharkkind. By not replying to this open letter I will take it to mean that you have no problem with it. Also-
By reading this post you agree to my EULA.
This consists of not using info in my post as the basis for any lawsuit, and not suing me for libel no matter what I say.
Failure to adhere to this agreement constitutes breach of contract and will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7636577.stm

Madcap antics on a British freeway - this is 'better living through chemistry.'

Biden: "When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened,'" Barack Obama's running mate recently told the "CBS Evening News."

Yeah, that's what he did alright. Then Abe Lincoln got on his cell phone and reminded Biden that FDR didn't take office until 4 years after the crash. Oh, PS: the first television station didn't exist until 1941. I guess FDR was thinking the people of the distant future needed reassurance that the crash of '29 was being taken care of.

"Mr Paulson will tell the Senate Banking Committee that the personal savings of US citizens are at risk, according to his prepared remarks."

Savings? Americans don't save a damn thing.

Check this out, th' notorious "Section 8" (and I don't mean th' Phoenix punk band :

"Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/22/dirty-secret-of-the-bailo_n_128294.html

This is a ^%%*(( power grab if ever there was one. Next thing, Comrade Paulsons will start buying all Libertarians one-way Amtrak tickets.

END BAILOUTS

p.s. if anybody has a good handle on how to get IE6 to read CSS layouts correctly, drop me a line - I couldn't get the EndBailouts layout to display correctly in IE6, so I had to break it temporarily.

From Slashdot :

http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/research/mendelson_div_conq.html

PELOSI:'WE'RE NOT SENDING A BLANK CHECK TO WALL STREET'...

Yeah, a check would have to have money to back it. Ironically, a blank check sent directly to citigroup and whoever the hell else wants some would be a shitload cheaper than what we're doing. At least when you cash a bad check, it bounces... in the case of our bailouts, we just print the money, screw over the lower and middle classes, and say it's in the name of stability.

Awesome.

Announcing the establishment of EndBailouts.org ( http://EndBailouts.org ), an online resource and petition to end the bailouts :

In the four days since "Paulson is a Whore" was posted, the swine and his lackey Bernake managed to concoct an outrage so monumental that it makes the AIG bailout look like shoplifting.

No public liability for private debt!

One trillion dollars -- equivalent to the cost so far of the Iraq War -- of your money is now on the line to purchase the bad debt of big corporations. Including foreign banks! And unlike the AIG bailout, when the failed private businesses take your money under this plan, they don't surrender control of their company to you. Instead, you get the bad debt, and the reckless companies keep the good! So they stay solvent while your public debt is nearly ten trillion (!) dollars and the deficit in the budget is nearly half a trillion.

We don't have the cash on hand to bail out private companies who made bad bets. We're deep in debt to foreign interests including the Chinese and the Saudi Arabians, the Cayman Islands and numerous other entities whose aims may not exactly jive with ours.

Paulson and his slaves have tossed a grenade through our window. We must throw it back!

We must stand up right now and resist the establishment of a precedent of public liability for private corporate debts. There is no time to delay -- the swine are working all day and all night with coke-encrusted snouts to cheat your children and future generations out of their freedom.

Effective immediately, we're suspending all other creative activity in favor of resisting this crime. Stand with us!

Join EndBailouts dot Org at http://EndBailouts.org and sign the petition, then write your Congresspeople directly and tell everybody you know to take action now! Don't wait -- these crimes depend on hesitation. Sign, write, call at this moment to preserve our values and our money for future generations!

I never thought that this day would ever come. Well, it's way, way worse than we had even supposed.

For mumbled, muttered reasons that really boil down to the fact that our national government exists to protect not any thing but the interests of large corporations and their officers, the Federal Reserve Bank elected to 'bail out' the tanking pseudo-insurance dodecapus American International Group.

What this means is that eighty-five billion public dollars -- that is, your tax money -- is being used to prop up the "Weekend at Bernie's" style corpse of AIG in 'exchange' for 80% of AIG's shares of stock. So what you get, pal, is a gigantic liability in addition to an immense amount of worthless stock.

Sounds like a pretty good deal, huh? Well, I've got a better one. Overthrow the government.

See, what we have here is a crime. I'll spare you most of the Econ 101 lecture, but here's the basic problem : this government spends a lot of time trumpeting the wonders of the free market (at least the domestic market -- recall 'trickle-down' theory from the 80s?) and adopting policies both social and economic that are putatively designed to allow that market to operate in a way that is minimally hindered. This includes making sure that feisty entrepreneurs have incentive to take the risks that drive business activity by allowing them to keep a pretty good cut of the rewards if their risks pay off. Market activity for profit is gambling, speculative activity doubly so. The incentive to make the smartest, shrewdest choices in the market is provided by what generally happens when risks don't pay off -- one loses one's investment. If you don't think it through when evaluating risk, you find yourself more 'highly exposed' to the risk -- in essence, you can lose a whole lot on a stupid bet. That's what happened here. The mops at AIG gambled on financial products that few understand and nobody ended up profiting from -- mortgage-backed security bundles and so-called 'derivatives,' which are sort of like a bet on the outcome of other bets -- and lost their stupid, slave-made shirts. And that's how it ought to be, because in a market, there are always winners and losers, and sometimes when folks don't use their heads, there are really really big losers.

Now, the government has justified its meddling in the natural workings of the market that it so loudly promotes by saying that AIG was just tooooo big to fail. Too bookoo! Too big! Too big and too enmeshed in the so-called 'financial system' and if they get wiped out, there will be widespread suffering not limited to our own economy, but others in the global market as well. What the deuce, say you? AIG held a lot of insurance policies on bank deposits and other financial accounts, and was involved in apparently innumerable portfolio capers that are so wide-reaching that if they weren't around to guarantee those investments and manipulate those portfolios, your head might catch on fire! Or your dog might turn into a knife and stab you in the spine. Whatever would happen, it'd be real, real, bad. That's why the national government needs to give away your money to these swine.

The really cool thing about this bull feathers justification is that, since the 'Fed' says that firms of a certain size are 'too big to fail,' everybody now has tremendous incentive to :

1) Grow as large as possible to increase the chance that they, too, will be 'too big to fail'

2) Involve themselves in complex investment transactions of high risk with little regard for the risk levels -- in fact the bigger the risk, the better.

See, if you win on a big risk, you usually win a lot. And if you lose on a big risk and you're 'too big to fail,' well, no big deal! Jim and Edna Taxpayer will slip you a little of their bountiful extra cash to chill them individuals out so you can wait for the cavalry.

Don't buy a word of the barf oil that Paulson is spewing about why he done what he done. If we're going to operate on market principles -- good! Free markets usually do, as the slavering yaks of government have been crowing for years, provide the most good for the most people -- 'utility'-- in the long run. Even if some people get hurt along the way. That, buddies, is why when your bondage shop or panaderia fails and you lose your invested life savings on top of innumerable labor hours and maybe even some of your other personal assets if you were dumb enough to commingle them with your business, the general line is "oh too bad, we feel sorry for you, but that's tough -- that's the market." Likewise when your adjustable-rate mortgage goes ape and you can't make the payments on what is now a double-digit interest rate and you default, ruining your life : tough! Shouldn't have taken on that risky ARM. But don't act like we're maintaining a free market if this applies to anybody -- except giant corporations, who have nothing to fear ever. This recent bare-faced turn makes clear two things : the government is not for you, and Henry Paulson is a whore.

Unless you like paying for the bad debts and dumbass moves of coke-snouted corporate goons, you need to write every on of your legislators and call the White House. Do everything you can think of to let the swine know that you don't much care for their plan. If the government is going to put you on the hook for the liabilities of any firm of size "X" or bigger, that's not a free market. The logical response to that situation is that, since it is obviously not acceptable for the taxpayer to have to foot the bill for failed idiot companies, firms must not be allowed to achieve a size that's too big to fail. We shouldn't allow these horses to have it both ways -- free market when it's profitable, Communism when things get dicey. That's rubbish and it's a crime.

The government's not doing what we pay it to do. Instead, it's giving away your money and doing away with your rights. The Federal Reserve and its cow of a Treasury Secretary are paid henchmen that sneak crimes by you behind closed doors and then lie like Oriental rugs about the reasons they steal. Enough of that. It's time to overthrow that criminal order. Overthrow it. You're going to need every right you have left.

Vote or DIE!

We had first beam on Wednesday at 10:28 AM, which I got to experience from the CMS control room. Sadly, I left before the celebratory champagne toast, which didn't happen until after we successfully circulated the anti-clockwise beam a few hours later) Contrary to what most people think, first beam at the LHC really isn't all that groundbreaking, since we're running at lower energies now than the Tevatron and we aren't colliding anything yet. Still, it's nice to know that it works. We're actually ahead of schedule to start lower-energy collisions in a month or so, when we collide the first bunches of protons. It'll still take two years to ramp up to the full 14TeV center-of-mass energy, so the discovery of the Higgs is still a few months away at least. And the Tevatron might still find it before we do.

The part of the experiment I'm working on, the Muon Endcap system, has been working quite well, with only a few chambers (out of a total of 468) causing problems. Right now (at CERN, 8:51 AM Saturday 13 September), the beam is off and will be for the weekend, so we're doing a global run and triggering on cosmic rays, and can see a few of them, so we know everything's working.

Big news (made slashdot): CMSMON, the CMS monitoring system, got hacked and defaced by a Greek hacking group. I'll include the e-mail here:

-------------------------------------------------------------
Dear all,

The attack was possible was due to my fault.
I wrote a file uploader java sevlet for my
personal usage. Before the server is shutdown,
the java servlet is removed permanently on
the cmsmon server. The attacker used
the dynamic host addresses which are
77.83.40.193 cpe-77-83-40-193-dsl.netone.gr
79.166.16.235 ppp079166016235.dsl.hol.gr
87.118.101.102 tor-anonymizer1.dotplex.de
and used a manual POST uploading.
What happened is understood. The only damage
is one of the files I owned.

Sorry for the scary experience to bring to us all.
I learned a big lesson and I'll be very careful.
The code responsible for this fault is removed.

Please, turn the server back on.
-------------------------------------------------------------

Now that the LHC's on and the camera crews are gone, it's been relatively quiet around here. I've been sitting shift every other day (basically monitoring the entire endcap muon system, and fixing stuff as it goes wrong) and working on the software to control the crate that sorts through data from the cathode strip chambers and sends worthwhile stuff to data-collection computers for copying to the grid.

The LHC experiment is suddenly getting a lot of press, which is good if a shade late. People don't seem to grasp, though, that this experiment will potentially produce the biggest breakthrough in experimental (aka 'real') physics in more than half a century.

The initial salvo seems to have fired off well; with luck, m0nster will provide detail about it after he cleans off the radioactive lepton residue or whatever from his mini-'fro.

Sit back and think it through, fatties : this may be the year you find out why you have so much dang mass.

I've earned a lazy image post. Have some

The creature that darted into my living room had the aerial abilities of Amelia Earhart when she wasn't chocked full of laudanum and crashing airplanes into the Pacific Ocean.

This thing was as big as my pathology textbook and twice as deadly. I finally lured it into my kitchen by opening the blinds and watching it smack head first into the window. Sort of surprising considering I've neglected its cleaning for so long that it's opacity makes the hellish Phoenix sun on one side look like mid morning in Boston on the other.

Having dazed it a little and bought myself some time to consider different methods of dispatch, I thought back to my organic chemistry class. What do you do to an animal that breathes through it's skin? ...

I got it right on the first try when I picked up the maximum strength Formula 409. With the fly swatter in one hand and the bottle in the other, I alternated between swiping and shooting at the fucker until finally it perched, likely fatigued, at the very apex of my 13 foot vaulted ceiling. 409, being designed specifically to kill living creatures at long distances, launched a final volley of liquid death that vanquished my foe and sent him circling towards the floor, where my cat immediately launched in to finish the job.

Forget nerve gas. Saddam should've just thrown water-balloons of 409 at the Shiites. It'd give a whole new take on "ethnic cleansing."

Critics in Congress, in academia and elsewhere worry that the Fed's unprecedented actions - including financial backing in March for JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s takeover of Bear Stearns Cos. - are putting taxpayers on the hook for billions of dollars of potential losses. They also say it encourages "moral hazard," that is, allowing financial companies to gamble more recklessly in the future.

In Greenspan's latest book, he takes a swipe at some of the bailouts of the US banks.

Greenspan, 82, who ran the Fed for 18 1/2 years and was the second-longest serving chief, says he is concerned that Capitol Hill will look to the Fed's actions "as a wondrous new font of seemingly costless federal funding - a magical piggy bank."
...
The ex-Fed chief says he is skeptical of a sweeping plan, put forward by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, that would turn the Fed into a uber cop of sorts - responsible for policing financial market stability. "Much as we might wish otherwise, policymakers cannot reliably anticipate financial or economic shocks or the consequences of economic imbalances," Greenspan says.

He, unfortunately, is somewhat in favor of bailouts in some "extreme" circumstances, however he disagrees with the Bear Stearns bailout and how it was done.

The United States has long "abandoned the notion that we should leave crises to be resolved solely by the marketplace," Greenspan says in making the case for new powers in this area.
...
"We need laws that specify and limit the conditions for bailouts - laws that authorize the Treasury to use taxpayer money to counter systemic financial breakdowns transparently and directly rather than circuitously through the central bank as was done during the blowup of Bear Stearns," Greenspan wrote in a new epilogue to the paperback edition of his memoir, "The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World." (The paperback will be released Sept. 9; the hardcover came out last year.)

However, the bailouts Greenspan has in mind are not without a catch, which is a far cry from the airline bailouts of 2001 et al.

Greenspan envisions the formation of a group akin to the Resolution Trust Corp. to step in, take a troubled company into conservatorship, wipe out the equity, impose some charge or "haircut" on its debts before guaranteeing them and then selling its assets.

So if Greenspan had his way, certain institutions would be allowed/forced to die, but under the parachute of the treasury so as to limit foreseen market panic. This is not quite the monetorist love song we've all come to love in Greenspan's musings. Obviously politically hard-wired institutions would still be selected for federal assistance before others, but it's still a heck of a lot more in the spirit of laissez faire than throwing a bucket of money at a failing corporation that needs to die.

Italic quotes from this article by AP.

So, after 5 months of operation, we've finally made it to number 1 on google's search for the term "Latewire".. there's also an abandoned myspace page for the hip-hop group "LateWire" that's actually been rocking us for a while, but we've slowly been pounding their apathetic asses and have nearly booted them off the front page.

I'd like to thank Google for finally putting us to number 1 for search results obviously solely pertaining to us.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
to shine in use!
shine in use!
shine
in
use
!

McCain selected Palin?
Fuck. I need a drink or something, pronto.
Just what in the hell is wrong with that mans brain?
Too much Abba? Is that a viable excuse? Will that work for you? It doesn't satisfy me...
What would perhaps pass off as a somewhat viable vapid whore for hire in interracial-milf-wearing-glasses fetish porn is now not only a governor (albiet of a frigid, sparsely populated and completely remote shithole of a state no one gives a fuck about) but a potential candidate for Vice President of the United States?
Fuck.
FUCK.
I'm not the only one in need of a drink, I can hear the corpses of our previous leaders doing barrel rolls in their caskets. Even Dick Fucking Nixon has shat his mouldering drawers over this one.
Never been one much given to prayer, never even really considered aliens made it any farther than we have... but at this point in time I am praying for an extraterrestrial Shiva to shake down from the heavens and level life on earth back to the state of blissful foragers and inept predatory scavengers. Consciousness it seems has been completely and utterly wasted on the great hairless apes.

To make matters worse, it seems David Duchovny has entered rehab... for sex addiction. This means that all the x-Files monsters who frightened my adolescent pre-teen mind were most likely violently and mercilessly sodomized at the hands of old monotone-mumbler Duchovny when that redheaded slut on the show was on her period and too fussy to put out.

Palin is a contender and the wolfman is a nancy boy with an eight gauge butthole.
Only drink and sleep can save me now. Fuck you reality, fuck you.

As of this week, CMS is officially closed off--everything's in place and the giant pit that was used to lower everything has been sealed. This week also marks sitting data-taking shifts, after getting back from Belgium with two cases of Westvleteren beer. These shifts are sat as the CMS magnet is tested at 1T, 2T and 3T. Mostly, it involves sitting there and watching as chambers/peripheral crates/other electronics go into error state, figuring out why, and trying simple diagnostic methods. If that doesn't work, we call the experts. If everything goes smoothly, we sit there and surf the web for 8 hours (although this has never happened...)

We've also been having problems with communication between crates and data-taking computers. This is due in large part to misconfiguration of our switches (which are unfortunately Netgear products...); that is also ongoing.

Today, however, a large number of the low-voltage power supplies to the CSCs (cathode strip chambers, an integral part of the muon system) tripped and went into an error state after a few of the cables actually melted. Investigation yielded that the cables were improperly crimped, so we are postponing taking runs until Monday.

If we work hard though, we should have no setback and be all sorted by first beam on September 10th.

I still expound the notion that we as a global collective of hairless apes should do away with the silly leap year nonsense and instead re-work the calendar to include one extra day per week henceforth referred as the non-denominational and completely mandatory day of rest. We wouldn't even need to formally name it, the entire concept being beyond the convention of naming via sheer force of usefulness.

We can all see from the examples set by Elliot Smith, Hunter S. Thompson and Ernest Hemmingway, that a man can choose to end his own life.
And we can also see that certain animals can choose to end their own lives, for example a swan whose mate has been killed will stop eating and observers will announce, "Poor thing died of a broken heart." One is reminded of the story Old Man Burroughs (R.I.P.) told of an ex-Parisian whose cat starved itself to death atop his gravestone...
And well, now this one is a stretch... One can kind of imagine the earth being the sum of all its interconnected systems and patterns to be itself some kind of an organism. Distinct say from Pluto as Pluto is from Jupiter. Certainly some people hold this beleif and even give a name to the concept, but there is such a thing as taking an idea too far... Anyways we could possibly conceive of the Earth as a kind of organism in a sense.
Now would it be too much to put forth the notion that mankind is simply the agents chraged responsible for enacting the death wish of planet earth? Bacterium after bacterium after fish to ape and so on, all to create the ultimate being of dissolution. Certainly animals are capable of rape and violence much in the same way as man, but mankind excells at it like no other. It is common sense to say that war predates mankind, but who has done it better than us?
This idea of evolution with a sinister intent seems to solve the problem of absolutely zero contact throughout history with any other sentient beings via any means whatsoever such as radio waves, direct contact, light signaling, Dyson spheres etc. So then planets develop the evolutionary gusto, reach a crescendo of understanding with the energy available to themselves and grow tired of it all so wish to end it.
It seems mankind has fallen into the error of developing a soul, and with it things such as a conscience, the notion of love, guilt and sorrow and so forth but in the very end can this be some means of salvation or merely add further insult to injury by prolonging the inevitable while making us fully aware of what we are doing the whole entire time.
The last few centuries of history seem much like the muddled and confused musings of an old man with a loaded revolver in his hand. What exactly is the meaning and why so much rage?
In any matter, one comes to see mother nature as quite a cruel bitch, who can say she doesn't deserve a thorough defloration?

Guten tag! 'Tis the season for bad flashbacks of 20th century monstrosity. The Russkies are invading their neighbors, the Italians are systematically fingerprinting Gypsy children, and Nazi iconography is on display at the Olympics. Some folks say that the Olympic torch is a repugnant throwback to the 1936 Nazi-hosted Games, and maybe it is, but moreso is the crypto-SS leotard uniform sported by the German gymnast Fabian Hambuechen.

Sounds like Germanophobic jabber, huh? After all, Germans are pretty sensitive about the whole Nazi thing. They'd have to be nutty to field any uniform even vaguely reminiscent of the bad old days, right? Well, check this out :

Look at the zig-zag angles on homeboy's uniform and compare them to those in the Schutzstaffel logo (or the KISS emblem, for that matter). No matter which way you look at Hambuechen's outfit, you get half of the SS flag. The black-n-red color scheme and eagle don't do much to soften the Wehrmacht overtones, either.

Even more provocative is the fact that Ham's old leotard design didn't have the "S" on it at all :

What kind of maniacal madness drove this rubbery punk to change into the Ubermensch spandex? An even better question is : why in blazes did his handlers allow him to prance onto the world stage in that abominable outfit? Did they seriously think that nobody was going to notice? It's not subtle. It's not like there's a regular "S" on this guy's suit and people are saying 'oh Germans shouldn't wear "S"es, it looks Nazi.' Nope, this is a dead-obvious SS "S" on the guy's uniform.

Wake up, people. Funky days are back again. As long as by "funky," one means "absolutely G_d-damned terrifying." Sit back and think it through.

I just booked a room at a Marriott in Silicon valley for $70/night by bidding on Priceline.com... Marriott.com sold the same room for $160.

Priceline.com sits all other websites down and tells them what time it is like that Chris Hansen guy on To Catch a Predator.

Even the commercials are cool. I mean, it seems like shameless marketing to cater to the weird and sad by getting Shatner to promote it, but you do gain points for giving work to unemployable sci-fi washouts.

Blather on, Shatner.

When I was in 5th or 6th grade, I read one of those ‘young adult' sci-fi books about a colonial expedition from a dying Earth that landed on some alien planet after years of travel in suspended animation. There were vast fields of grain on the surface, but when the settlers tried to mill it, they found that it was so crystalline in structure that their flour was like ground glass. There was no other food to be found. As their supplies ran out and the folks began to starve, some of the children found and consumed the alien flour. When the parents discovered what had happened, they were prepared to administer their stash of suicide pills to these kids. This was just a science fiction story, but boy, it really stuck with me through all these years. While cancer was eating away at my guts, I thought about it a lot. Back when I was younger, thinking about that story had made me afraid of space travel and the future. But I'd grown to realize that for years already, I'd been chowing down on the fruits of the glass harvest.

When I was a teenager, my friends and I took to playing 'cee-lo' regularly, a dice game that was championed by a number of our favorite 'gangster rappers' including Warren G, the Geto Boys, and Ice Cube. The version that we learned and played almost daily was a simple one that was crisply devoid of strategy and whose outcome was dictated wholly by chance. This game has a Zen-like quality that can be addictive; once you get into it, it can claim substantial portions of a summer. I have unclouded memories of waiting until after sunset and meeting the guys over at Phil's house, crouching in the yellow light of the driveway to roll dice while the day's heat still radiated up from the blacktop.

These days, of course, if you ask someone in the suburbs if they want to play cee-lo, they assume that you're either a narc or an idiot; therefore, the dominant time-waster for guys in my neighborhood is poker, a game that, like cee-lo, is based on chance, but unlike that pastime of my youth, has a wide streak of technique and thought running through it. I dislike this game due to that and also to the thick atmosphere of pseudo-psychological jabber and weird posturing that accompanies its modern form. So, I don't really play.

The thing about it is that the wafer fab industry is so saturated with attempts to control and rein in the random -- you know, when you're dealing with processes that are measured in nanometers, it starts to drift into the realm where you're trying to regulate stuff happening on the quantum level. Every step is regimented, verified, checked, and inspected with such rigor that it can start feel a little robotic.

I really felt that robo-sting when I went back to to line on Monday. I had a note on my workstation that said our QA failures were up 3 per cent from last quarter and that everybody on the line must redouble their efforts to prevent bad product from sneaking out the door like a hungover sleepmate. I peeked on down the line and saw identical notes on everybody's desk. Line fatigue can kill a fab just as bad as a cowboy punk in the driver's seat. But it's more insidious, more like a disease than a sudden catastrophe. If you don't catch it before it starts eroding morale, you're toast. It felt weird to know that I was part of this problem. It was kind of like opening your sock drawer one day and finding a murder weapon.

I was still feeling pretty raw by the end of Tuesday night. It was '80s Night' at The Frane, which was code for "ten hours of hodgy English mope-dance," but I needed to get some ya-yas out and so I went down there. Now, the kind of ya-yas a guy my age gets out aren't the same ones that the Frane's other main demographic gets out. Primarily, these ya-yas consist of leaning against a table in the most louche manner possible, watching girls a decade or more my junior and waiting for some nostalgic hit of my youth to be played so that I can prance stiffly in the strobe.

Everybody at The Frane reminded me of vermin that night. As I watched their pathetic twitches and struts, their smeared makeup, I was overcome with a dang revulsion at the bestial uniformity into which I'd paid to enter. I was repulsed by myself, too. Also, the DJ was playing the Thompson Twins more than once per hour, which really bugged me. I finished my Beck's and got out of there, feeling even worse than I had when I went in.

When I got home, I decided to breathe a little uplift mofo randomness into the universe. I got out a phone book from under my coffee table where they accumulate and figured, well, there's a million names in this book that belong to folks who feel choked just like me. I'd randomly choose a name a day and send them each a randomly chosen verse from the Good Book. That'd kind of kill two birds with one stone.

I decided to throw dice to select the name and the text both. I guessed it'd be easiest to get four dice and roll them once to get the letter of the alphabet, like a total count of 18 dots would signify "R," then roll them again to get the name -- I'd just count down however many names from the start of the listing until I reached the one indicated by the totaled dice faces.

For the verse, I'd throw two to get the book (snake eyes would mean Exodus, etc -- this worked out nice because there are a perfect number of books in the Bible for this method though of course Genesis gets shortchanged), one for the chapter, and one or two (determined by a coin flip) for the verse. If I got a repeat or an inapplicable number, I'd throw again. Easy.

Hesitation leads to failure, I thought, so let's get this rolling straight away. A gent named Ben Garshik was lucky enough to get Leviticus 4:2. I figured that the occasional person might not like getting these things in the mail for one reason or another and I didn't want any trouble, so I put on some kitchen gloves, loaded up the old Lexmark with fresh paper, and got online to grab the text from my favorite version, the sturdy King James. I printed that sucker out, printed out a new envelope with Gershik's address and the return address of a sex shop on 12th Street, and posted that diamond of chance into a blue mailbox on the other side of town. As I took off the gloves and drove back home, I felt a sensation of lightness and escape fill me up.

The next day at work, I wasn't very bothered by the robotic grind, the pressure, or the futility of efforts to control the uncontrollable. I was just looking forward to sending out my next verse. That night, Adam Ibsen got himself a complimentary copy of Romans 3:8. After a week of this pattern I was feeling so good that I decided to do five every night and just post them once a week, on a day chosen by rolling a single die each week. It's not like I'd had anything more important to do, and I was on a roll. And it'd sure been a long time since I could say something like that.

Coming soon: 22 part series on health, fitness, and poison foods.

Four-Grain Pesticide-Free Bread :

Ingredients (all measurments are approximate):

2 cups very warm filtered water
2 rounded teaspoons dry active yeast
1 tablespoon organic unfiltered molasses
1 tablespoon organic raw agave nectar
2 cups unbleached organic white wheat flour
2 cups organic whole wheat flour
1 1/2 cups organic rye flour
1 cup organic hulled whole millet
1/2 cup organic whole soft wheat berries (not hard winter wheat)
1/2 cup organic flax meal
Dash of salt
Teaspoon of organic cornstarch

Procedure :

The evening before baking, separately wash and sort the whole millet and
wheat grains, rinsing them until clean and picking out any nasty bits.
Place the millet in a bowl and add ~3 cups of warm filtered water. Cover
bowl. Choose another bowl, put in wheat berries, and add one cup warm
water; cover bowl. Let these sit out until bedtime, then put them in the
fridge to soak overnight.

Proof the yeast by putting it in a large glass bowl, adding 1/2 cup of warm
water and the molasses, and waiting for it to bubble up to double volume.
After it's proofed to satisfaction, add one cup of warm water, one cup of
the white flour and one cup of the whole wheat flour and mix gently with
hands or a fork until a shaggy, soggy mass is formed. This will become the
'sponge.' Let the sponge sit out until bedtime; if you listen to it, you
should hear the yeast well at work and it should gain considerable volume in
an hour or two. Then cover the bowl loosely with plastic wrap and leave in
fridge overnight to ferment.

The next evening, take the grains and sponge out of the fridge. The sponge
will have fallen somewhat and should be about 50% bigger than it was at the
very beginning (if it's bigger, no problem). Begin slowly adding the
remainder of the flour and mixing it in with a fork, no more than 1/2 cup at
a time. Add in the remaining cup of warm water at the same time. When all or most of the flour has been added, but before the dough
gets too stiff to work with the fork, stop and let the mixture rest, covered
loosely or with plastic wrap a damp towel, for 20 or 30 minutes to encourage
the gluten. Before the dough gets too stiff to work with the fork, add the
flax meal, the millet, and the wheat berries, and finally the agave nectar
and salt. [Throughout this process, add small amounts of warm water or
flour as needed if the dough seems to be too watery or too stiff at a
particular stage.] All ingredients should be evenly incorporated when dough
is at kneading stiffness. When the dough becomes too stiff to mix with the
fork, transfer it to a floured surface for kneading.

Knead the dough vigorously until the it takes on an elastic character, can
stretch somewhat without breaking, and has a smooth appearance on the
surface (excepting any protruding grains). This will take a fair while due
to the amount of bran present in the dough. Keep the kneading surface
floured and dust the dough with flour as needed.

After the dough has been kneaded to satisfaction, clean the original bowl
and very lightly grease with organic olive oil. Pat dough into a smooth ball
and place in the bowl; turn the dough over so that both sides have a (very)
thin coating of oil. Let dough rise for approximately two hours; it should
be really big after rising. Punch dough down, divide in half, and shape
each half into a moderately thin French bread shape (or other shape of your
preference; adjust cooking time to suit bread shape). If you have a bread
paddle and baking stone, place the loaves on the lightly floured or
cornmealed paddle for rising and then transfer to the stone after they're
risen; otherwise, let loaves rise on a lightly oiled baking sheet.

The loaves should rise until they increase somewhat in volume and look a
little puffy, about 45 minutes. Do not over-rise at the risk of a collapsed
loaf.

In a small cup or bowl, mix some warm water and a very small amount of
molasses with the cornstarch. This will be used for basting.

Heat oven to 425 Farenheit degrees. Put a Pyrex bowl of filtered water in
oven during warm-up and leave in during baking. Place loaves in oven and
bake until done (inserted toothpick emerges clean / loaves sound hollow when
knocked upon), approximately 25-30 minutes. During baking, lightly baste
with cornstarch mixture every 5 minutes to enhance crust.

When done, remove from oven and cool the loaves well on wire racks. When
cooled sufficiently, slice and enjoy.

I found out later when I sat on the couch with my sandwich and turned on the evening minddrain what the cop that had bypassed me had been in such a hurry to get to. Some guy whose house was about five blocks down from mine had posted bail after getting nabbed on a big-time white collar rap, gone home, and shot his whole family to death before committing self-murder.

The local newshowler put on a front of shock but was unable to conceal their glee at breaking such a lurid local story. This is what brings in the moolah -- 'local news first!' Cannibal swine, I thought. What good does it do me to know about this awful thing? It's not like I can do anything about it or use this information to make decisions. It just happened and is monstrous.

I'm not trying to imply that I'm riding some slicked-up immaculate moral high stallion here. I'm saying that it's base behavior that put me off my much-needed supper. That's a hard thing to forgive.

I went to bed feeling crinkly and spent. Equine dreams disturbed me that night.

~

Snorlax is certainly my inner Pokemon.
Titanic fused with Moby Dick would be the greatest story ever told.
Robotic (i.e. shitless) pets which also serve as personal media players and babysitting devices should eclipse RFID implants as a means for paranoid rich people to keep track of their scrambling rugrats.
Standardised small scale multi-locale manufacturing is the wave of the future, along with recycling every goddamn thing possible.
Barack Obama will become president after John McCain wins and immediately succumbs to coronary implosion due to old age, badgeriness and general amazement at winning despite doing everything in his power to lose. Obama will legalize marijuana and become addicted to morphine. The US economy will soar like an eagle and the rest of the world will continue to bitch and moan and listen to (and enjoy(?!) our shitty pop music.
Pornography will soon usurp Hollywood in income, popularity, output, and class. This will contribute to the pheonic rise of the American economy.
In the miserable shit filled hovel of Anchorage Alaska where only sailors and their male prositute companions are stupid enough to reside, gas will never fall below $4.00 a gallon.
Georgia totally had it coming.
Beer: the first, best, and only true energy drink.
Once one horrible reclusive and shrewd man comes to own 99% of the worlds resources, space will finally draw the attention it deserves. Vast expanse filled with pretty lights will teach humanity once again how to love.
Once limb replacement surgery becomes more widely practiced, it is only a matter of weeks before the first Goro body-mod.
The first Goro body-modee will win every fucking armwrestling competition hosted. Sylvester Stallone will lose his truck, and his son... to fucking Goro.
Goro will become addicted to crack cocaine after the fame goes to his head and will star in a seemingly neverending series of fisting fetish videos.

Goodniiiiight neverland!

Eye food for the breakfast.

now my only Muziq-al Nirvana on this Earth involves writing about the aqueous stuff whilst riding through the Gloom atop my Distorted Pony.

First order of business, a lot of grief has been flung in the direction of those venerable venereal Rockers, The Stones. Now any band making music for such a large time frame is bound to have more misses than hits, owing to the essence of music and the carrot-on-a-stick nature of making a livelihood off of creativity but this shouldn't detract from what The Stones put out which was worthwhile. The tracks Sweet Black Angel and Shine a Light off the Exile on Mainstreet album are quite worthy indeed and the song Sympathy for the Devil off Beggars Banquet, while being a bit more widely recognized justifies at least 20 years of releases solely to pay off the heroin dealers. If Trent Reznor can slide by with remix album after remix album, at least give The Stones a little bit of credit.

Oddly and simultaneously interestingly enough is the notion that the more popularised songs of a well known band are usually the worst. Granted some bands like Psychic TV, whom put out hundreds of releases actually made only 1 listenable song, which was their only hit, Godstar the polar opposite is usally the case. T. Rex being a great example of this diamond in the rough phenomenon. Bang a Gong and Children of the Revolution, while being above average radio tunes, receive far more play than some of Bolans more with-it works such as Dandy in the Underworld, Chariot Choogle and Catblack (The Wizard's Hat)... this list expands but the song titles also grow increasingly sillier. The downside of all this hidden gemstuffs is that the listener must actually take the time to go through a discography rather than simply listen to the radio. This discography listening is the true path to musical enlightenment and is one of the most important reasons why downloading music should be seen as a form of low-quality librarianism rather than outright malicious theivery.

The third and final ramble shall mostly concern itself with the notion of fan manipulation or high profile hoodwinkery as it were. Most notable offenders include the various Rap and R&B producers who seemingly take advantage of the artists as well however delving too far into any genre seems to evoke the cash-in 'me-too' aspect of creativity which hinders production on all levels and ultimately insults the entire concept of music. Where a certain amount of humor is involved, in the case of such musically competant copycats as the Japanese trio Boris a certain amount of slack is to be expected, but acts like Sunn O))) dangerously tiptoe the line of treating the noble and earnestly yearning fan as nothing but a naive and organismal ATM machine. Perhaps in the case of Sunn O))), the absolutely gorgeous artwork of Stephen O'Malley could in combination with the curious ability to enduce David Bowmanesque states of wide-eyed wonderment create a sort of hesitant barrier. The notion of any artist pulling one over on their public is essentially a very shameful and self-defeating tactic. Once the hand that feeds you has been bitten of its fingers, only the tough and calloused (most likely somewhat hairy...) palm is left to devour.

The widely and snidely accepted notion that no good music is at all produced is by and far untrue. The peer-to-peer juggernauts of the internet will prove that a little effort put in will result in many untold legions of melodic discoveries, and if given enough time, the digital libraries will perhaps seal the death of radio and usher in a new and glorious age of keeping the neighbors awake with late night sessions of 120 plus decibel rocking out. Just remember gentle and noble readers, if your incessant bitching accomplishes nothing then your best bet is to invest in a decent subwoofer and engage in some sub-acoustic terrorism tactics.

Disgusting jokes about genitals and other natural yet largely ignored facets of human life to be included in future posts you princes of Maine… you kings of New England, do not in fact or fiction give up hope.

Do:
Use plenty of lubrication, natural or synthetic. After all, a chafed organ wails like Billy Corgan.
Be mindful of involuntary body noises if male, if female... just giggle.
Burst into song if the mood strikes you, after all the opening chords of Deep Purple's classic 'Smoke on the Water' sound much better vocalized. Politely refrain from the Madonna however, as Cher is much more becoming.
Lock all kitties out of the room before and immediately after the act occurs.
Give the neighbors 24 hour notice. 48 hours is reccomended by Japanese scientists, however it has been brought to Miss Manners attention that the Japanese do not in fact possess souls and as such should not be heeded by anyone.
Remain in contact with all involved parties after said act has commenced.
If at all possible, hire an interlocutrix. Hire two.

Don't:
Interrupt the session on account of the balls touching, such accidents are natural and only on the third occasion should a meaningful and direct exchange of willfull glances occur between the involved parties.
Use your illusion. Under any circumstance.
Call for your mother.
Alert the proper authorities.
React in any way to any legal threats or cries of pain.
Feed the bears.
Let the neighbor kid watch.
Let the hand cramps interfere with the task at hand.
Exclaim, "Word." upon disengaging from an intercourse.
Let practical (i.e. popular) opinion discourage your latent discharge, let loose with the fury of 10,000 pert hemp plants.
Feed involved parties after midnight, be wary of clock-cord biting hijinx. Hoarde the fried chicken just in case.
Do the whole flowers routine, what are you? A queer?
Believe the hype.

11 years gone...

"Love? What is it?
Most natural painkiller what there is.
LOVE"

When I got back from the Iowa thing, I was hungry as a woodpecker in a stone quarry. Naturally, I was greeted by a dead scorpion in my foyer and a fridge that was home only to half-empty sixer of Beck's and a bag of soggy jalapenos. I had a $7 bag of rice on the counter that I'd forgotten to put in the canister before I left, and when I picked it up, I could see the dang grain beetles that had hatched in there squirm deeper in to avoid detection. Classic. I lit a fire in the galvanized trash can out back and tossed the buggers in with the bag. Those little demons are persistent like the dickens once they get in your house.

The long and short of all this was that I needed to make a trip to the grocery store. I drank a couple of the Beck's, checked my email, and after putting another quart of 5W-30 in the engine, headed back out.

I was about ten blocks out when I realized that I hadn't put out the rice/beetle fire in the backyard, so I banged a hasty U-turn on Warner and started back. I wasn't far from home when I noticed a cop hanging about 30 yards back from me. I got worried -- I usually wait longer to hit the road after having a couple of beers, but I was hungry as all-get-out. It'd be a real big problem for me if I got tagged with a DUI at this point in time. A real real big problem. I was sweating it a little and looking pretty hard in the rearview when I realized that this light had been yellow for several seconds and was about to turn. It was too late to brake, and I sailed right through there, kind-of-sort-of running the red. Doggone it, I thought. I kept checking the rearview, and a few ticks after the light turned green again, I saw that cop put on his lights and start zooming.

Every muscle in my back and head went tense and I started to really panic. Sweat was slicking down my Ray-Bans and I struggled to keep it together. The closer that cop got, the more my back seized up and by the time I could see his face in the rearview, it felt like my shoulder blades were trying to rip themselves out and my scalp was being torn. My eyes hurt too, and I just pulled over and cursed aloud. I guess there must have been something even worse than me cruising the streets on a Sunday afternoon : The cop flew right past me on the left, his siren screaming.

I was relieved, but now I had an searing tension headache and my back felt raw. I wiped my hands off on the seat next to me and my shades on my shirt and tried to chill out a little bit. Lesson learned, I thought : a man who is controlled by his appetites ceases to be a man and becomes a beast, or whatever. My stomach was eating my innards by this time, so I drove at exactly the speed limit back to my house, ran in, doused the beetle-can fire with dirt, and left my house for the second time in an hour. Grocery shopping really rubs my rhubarb, but it's what Ice-T would call a 'necessary evil.'

~

I was sitting like a fool in the poison stink of the infirmary waiting room, just sweating it up. I was waiting for the mink-faced sawbones to call me in and let me know exactly what was going on with my innards. The beat nurse beckoned me in and I sat down on the papery exam table while an evil-smelling draft wafted in from the vent and made me cold. The doc came in with his pointy ashen mug sagging even more than usual, and I knew then that it was bad news. After a couple of state-paid test batteries and some invasive examination, it turned out that I had a beastly doggone case of cancer in the rear end.

See, toward the end of my stretch in the slammer, I'd developed a little problem in the old digestive tract vicinity. Go figure, four years of eating reject, BHT-sodden chicken face burgers from Tyson's factory seconds pile with a side of green beans soaked in industrial waste and Wonder Bread isn't good for your guts? Whatever with all that. Bottom line, so to speak, was that I was in big trouble. One of my favorite rappers, Too Poetic from Gravediggaz (AKA 'The Grimm Reaper,' cf "Two Cups of Blood") was dead as a rat in a vat after an excruciating battle with this disease at an age younger than mine, so I was a little shook.

They said I had a chance if 'we' acted fast, so I told them to do what needed to be done. I guess what needed to be done was the most awful, painful, and embarrassing series of surgeries I could imagine, because that's what all they did. They followed that up with a bunch of chemotherapy treatments that made me look and feel like a dog after a day at the antifreeze pool. After eight months of that, I was about ready to call it quits and just lie down and die.

I was pretty surprised then, when after my tests came back in the ninth month the minky doc and co. declared me to be "in remission." On top of that, the 'Twilight Zone' surgeon had managed to save a stretch of the afflicted organ and I was therefore spared the lifelong unpleasant hassle of that medical accessory that is often the souvenir for survivors of this nasty illness. Pretty incredible. And on the taxpayer dime -- thanks, guys! Also probably the best outcome of any event in my entire life. Not that there wasn't a downside.

~

I mentioned before that one of the foods I love best is bacon. After they declared my cancer in remission, Dr Mink told me that if I was interested in doing what I can to prevent the cancer from returning and sending the rest of my body to the abbatoir, I had better avoid saturated fats, processed foods, chemical additives and preservatives, pesticides, and just about every dang thing that is known to irritate a membrane. He told me that these substances deliver a "roundhouse kick" to the colon in particular and that if I continued to eat like a trucker that I would probably be doomed for good. Well, I'd said, it's not like the cafeteria offers grilled veggie kebabs. Minky said I should shut up and that he'd write out a prescription diet of raw vegetables and beans and things like that for the last couple months I was in, and told me again that I had to avoid all that other stuff once I got out or else.

My current doc tells me more or less the same thing, plus he said that hard liquor was right out and it'd be the occasional beer only, if anything, from here on in. I told him right off that if I didn't get some bacon soon, I'd be back on the Most Wanted List in no time. He told me look, if you absolutely cannot live without it, you can have so many grams of uncured -- he emphasized "uncured" -- bacon a week, but you'd better eat it with a grip of fiber and make sure that everything else you eat is so pure that you'd spoon-feed it to baby Jesus himself. "Christ," I said. Exactly, he smirked.

~

What all that meant for me on a hot afternoon when I'd narrowly avoided a disastrous apprehension and was hungry enough to eat the wing off a Cessna was that I was in precisely no mood to go about my usual Sisyphean shopping ritual of picking up something that looks good and reading the all doggone ingredients to be sure that there aren't any chemical additives or processed garbage in there that will tick off my surviving length of large intestine. Now, every time I start kvetching about this hassle, people always say "Oh why don't you go to the co-op whole sustainable organic fresh store?" Here's the deal : those places drive me one hundred percent nuts. I hate the whole hippie vibe and the slackjawed trustafarians who ring up the groceries. I hate the artificially inflated prices and meager selection. I hate the posters for various left-wing and New Age groups, which are not only dumb but make me mad because I realize that with the whole meditation thing, I actually have something in common with these jerk punks. Plus, half of the products they sell at those joints are still rife with chemicals and highly processed components like modified corn starch and canola oil, neither of which you want to know how it's made. So forget that. I have to read the labels anyway, so I might as well do it in an environment that doesn't make me grind my own teeth down to the dentin.

When you first start reading the labels on stuff with the intent of avoiding chemical additives or highly processed stuff, it's boggling. Take, for example, saltines. One of the simplest things imaginable, right? You think it's got to be just flour, water, and salt. Well, every box of saltines I've ever picked up has had some crazy garbage in there, acronymically-named preservatives, modified this or that, or both and more. And it sure doesn't end there; you've got to make sure that the oils are pressed instead of extracted with hexane, that the magical space-age substance that is high-fructose corn syrup isn't hiding in there, make sure the produce is free of pesticides, all kinds of stuff. The more packages you pick up and read, the more limited your choices become, and once you start reading labels you can't stop. It's a slippery slope to nothing. I've been in smaller grocery stores on the road where the only ready-to-consume thing I could buy in there was a rice cake. And I hate rice cakes.

So with my stomach tying itself into various Boy Scout knots and my back still clenched with tension, I huffed around the aisles until I came up with a loaf of organic 9-grain bread, a jar of no-additive peanut butter with a weird religious name for no reason, and a bag of organic apples that looked like electric tapir dreams and cost the same as your average dinner date. Well, my average dinner date, at least.

Of course, there were only two checkout lines open. Well, manned checkout lines -- I can't stand those so-called "self-checkout" systems. It's more like "self-confuse, self-overcharge, self-make-appear-to-shoplift, self-embarrassingly-get-helped-by-attendant." So I had to choose between two mobbed lines of apparently equivalent nightmarishness; I took the one without the guy buying 42 individual cans of "Fancy Feast" and a 40 of Schlitz. Everything was cool until the middle-aged short-hair woman ahead of me was rung up. Her groceries, including 2 boxes of Honey Nut Cheerios and a tub of Marshmallow Fluff big enough to cause a boating accident, totaled $167.23. She had $150 in cash (!). She pulled out a checkbook covered in purple leatherette with dog embroidery to write a check for the remaining seventeen and change.

Now, people who pay with checks in the grocery store are part of a band of useless dinos I call "checklers." They deserve their bad rep by wasting vast amounts of time just because they fear debit cards. So this woman writes out a check for seventeen simoleans and twenty-three cents, hands it to the cashier girl who has to run it through some stupid verification machine. The machine says 'NO.' The cashier girl runs it again. Another rejection. The woman acts very surprised. The cashier girl asks if she can put the rest on a card, the woman says no, her house was burgled yesterday and they took all her credit and bank cards, and she had to cancel or put holds on all her accounts. The cashier irl asks whether this might be the cause of the check problem.

The facts hit the woman like the Pentecost tongues of fire. She starts caluculating aloud which items she must omit from her grocery order to bring it down to $150 with tax. Anger spreads within me like a drop of food coloring in a glass of water. Mindful of today's brush with cops, I write an IOU on the back of my business card, drop it significantly on the conveyor belt, walk noisily through a display of Doritos 'Big Grabs' which crashes to the cheap tile, and head out the automatic door with the first food I'll have had in almost 14 hours. Nobody says anything to me. Nobody tries to stop me.

As it happened, I was driving through the Midwest to meet up with some folks in the industry who wanted to talk about the feasibility of setting up a leading-edge wafer fab in southern Iowa around or about the year 2013. It was generally felt that the rising costs of shipping and travel combined with tighter oversight by foreign governments as their currency strengthens relative to the dollar and the declining price of domestic labor meant that the smart money was on forgetting about the shift to global sourcing and sticking with primarily domestic wafer production.

An additional benefit to this plan was to be the relative ease of maintaining QA and other corporate standards in domestic plants. In the plants on foreign soil, you have to either pay for nearly 26 months of intensive training for managers and line overseers culled from the local industry (if it exists), or wait until some hot-headed young in-house cowboy with a big ego and a desire to push around some foreigners can learn the language with sufficient fluency to go over there and run the darn thing while training other guys from the foreign pool. Either way, it's a bogglingly expensive nightmare that rarely results in the kind of tight controls that maintain a respectable bottom line in the long term. I've seen guys groomed for thirty-six months, getting paid upper management salary while sitting in Tagalog classes for eight hours a day, only to finally get over there and be so overwhelmed by the workload and difficulty earning the foreigners' trust that they let a whole fab run at 8% under target capacity, sweep injuries and violations under the rug, and simultaneously ignore the QA process while telling everybody back home that things are absolutely jim-dandy. It's like a mini-Great Leap Forward. Eight months and four lost contracts later, the brass starts looking at sourcing reports and finds out that this champ has been quietly having a nervous breakdown, they can him, and eight times out of ten the guy ends up in a foreign prison after committing some craime during his post-firing drinking binge. The other two times out of ten, he runs off with some hot-bodied little foreign filly he met on the line and shacks up with her, frittering away his severance pay while she breathes microscopic fibers in a shirt factory after the fab is sold.

Anyway, this was the thinking behind the Iowa proposal, so I was going on up there to take a look at the figures and the labor pool to see if this goose might fly or if it, like 85% of proposals I look at, is a doomed pipe dream fuelled by greed and fear. These trips are always a nice break from the grind, but I admit that they also kind of tick me off, because I know that as soon as I'm done advising the execs, investors, and other flab-chinned vampires, I'm going to be back on the line just like Joe Schlabotnik from Duluth. Seems to me that if a man knows enough to tell the brass what time it is, he ought to be tiptoeing up that ole dollar ladder himself. They keep telling me t