NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.

(June '02)

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6/2/02

Big smoke fingers wave, "come here, come here..."

Apologies to Captain Beefheart. I'm certain he would have no trouble coming up with a different greeting every week. Bring me my scissors!

Well, things are heating up a bit here at the Cheney Hammer Mill. I don't just mean that the mid-winter sun is beating down upon us earlier than usual. I'm also referring to Gung-Ho's subcontracting deal with some military conveyance manufacturers back in the states. As he has begun to fill orders for fully tricked-out Bradley Fighting Vehicles, we have discovered that our open courtyard is slowly being commandeered as a makeshift motor pool -- or perhaps simply a parking area for our neighbor's excess production. 

One would think that Gung-Ho would have relented after we posted that photo last week of my personal robot assistant Marvin as he attempted to stand down one of Gung-Ho's tanks. Sure, he was unsuccessful...but that heroic photo inspired sympathy and solidarity around the world. How can our neighbor ignore such a phenomenal outpouring of opprobrium toward his callous pursuit of cash, already?

As such, Marvin has been given the unenviable job of monitoring the activities in our courtyard. I know what you're thinking; that our friend the scholarly Mitch Macaphee, third runner-up for the Nobel Prize for interplanetary environmental engineering (on his authority, of course), did not construct an instrument so delicately calibrated as Marvin merely to serve as a glorified parking lot attendant. Yes, that is true. He was supposed to do windows and light housekeeping, but that remains beyond his capabilities. So we stuck him out in the lot in place of an actual human (i.e. paid) attendant because we're what? Cheapskates. 

Having said that, I should only add that Marvin is high on our list of potential roadies for our next interplanetary tour, which is now in the planning stages and should take place sometime this summer, concurrent with the extraterrestrial release of our LIVE From Neptune! EP. Our ever implacable label, Hegemonic Records & Worm Farm, Inc., has of course insisted that sFshzenKlyrn be part of our performance roster, even though he does not appear on any of the live takes. That's fine with us, though we're telling the Hegemonic boys it's not...just so we can have something benign to argue about and eventually give in to. (It's kind of like a placebo for them -- they need to give us a pain in the ass about something.)

Of course, a lot of the initial funding for the tour has to come from us (later reimbursed by Hegemonic...if they make enough profit). Matt had an idea on how we could raise some cash, and I think it's a good one. (Better than my vegetable stand idea, anyway.) It's actually a page out of the Karl Rove playbook. You've heard about how the Republicans are raising money by hawking that picture of Dubya on Air Force One making a panicked call to uncle Cheney on September 11th of last year. Well, Matt thought we could sell the rights to that picture of Marvin and the tank to the Borg Party, which happens to be running a few candidates in the local bi-elections this year. 

Who knows? With a signature, those prints could rake in the pazoozas for those friendly cyborgs who just want to rule the world. And who are we to try to talk them out of it? Bots rule! Bots rule! The check's in the mail! The check's...

Dubya Trouble. Well, did everyone make it through the Memorial Day weekend all right? No homefront casualties in the glorious War on Everyone? Phew! That's a relief. With all those urgent warnings, I thought for sure there would be trouble. 

Actually, it was Dubya who was in trouble last week. He was being threatened with diabolical scrutiny by known "terrorists" in Congress and elsewhere, whose heinous demands include that of an open accounting of what the Administration did in response to the specific warnings brought to their attention before 9-11 (to say nothing of what happened that day, like the famous Bin Laden express plane owned by a Saudi Prince -- the only non-military plane allowed in the air immediately after the attacks, used to ferry Osama's family back home before the FBI could interview them). Some have even called for an independent investigation of this 9-11 thing. Those fiends! Will they stop at nothing?

Of course, one should take the Administration's dire warnings at face value, in light of what we now know to be true -- that they're too thick to take reasonable precautions to prevent attacks even when they have fairly specific and repeated advisories. Also, we cannot ignore the fact that terror attacks bring tremendous political benefits to this -- indeed, any -- Administration; benefits they're more than willing to exploit to a shameful degree to press for expanded police surveillance powers, bloated military procurement wholly unrelated to "fighting terror" in any meaningful sense, increased restrictions over the release of declassified information and disclosure of Administration actions, and a range of other policies they've advocated since long before the World Trade Center's fortunate (for them) fall. When there's a strong institutional incentive for something to happen (i.e. war, terror attacks), it very often finds a way of happening. 

Still, this business of playing "red light/yellow light/green light" with Tom Ridge and the boys feels like the cynical manipulation that it most probably is. In New York, of course, we've got the added complication of a governor who's trying to stretch his 9-11 virtuous afterglow into the November election, insisting that people not be afraid to come to the city and risk their lives (if Ridge is to be believed) to watch the tall ships (and spend, spend, spend). So it's back to "Take cover! But...don't be afraid!! But...avoid any major monuments or gatherings! But...keep spending money!!"

Hey...you've got to believe they've got our best interests at heart, right?

Peacemaker. With India and Pakistan on the brink of a conflict that could kill 12 million in the first salvo, Dubya lurches into action: send Rumsfeld to straighten it out. Hell, why not ship what's left of Edward Teller out there, too? And maybe get Union Carbide to send some gas masks. Anything to help humanity, eh?

luv u,

jp

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6/9/02

And a big houndog howdee to thee...

It's raining pusscats and pooches here in Sri Lanka. Looks like the monsoons are starting a little early this year. The courtyard (a. k. a. Gung-Ho's military motor pool) has turned into our own private lake...quite literally a motor "pool," in fact. Old Gung-Ho had better start producing some amphibious vehicles if he ever wants to get them out of the driveway. Or maybe PT boats. It's going to be a wet one!

I stopped by the building site of our new split-level lean-to and found the foundation hole filled with water. The cheese-food extraction equipment of Hegemonic Total Resource Removal, Inc., lay still in the ensuing downpour. The monsoons are apparently the only thing that will dampen their enthusiasm for spading easy money out of the ground. (Why didn't I think of that before?)

The fact is, somebody did. Matt tells me that Trevor James Constable has been camping over in the field behind the headquarters for BigGreenHits.com, firing bazooka-like rainmaking rounds from some cloud-seeding device he invented while campaigning for Curtis LeMay. When Matt asked what substance he was using to provoke such torrential and persistent rainfall, Trevor James spoke of a long process of scientific trial and error conducted many years before at a remote outpost in the mountains around San Bernardino, California. Our Reichian friend loaded every known substance into his rainmaking gatling gun -- stone, heavy metals, clay, peanuts, old socks, margarine, playing cards, tarot cards...anything he could think of. Nothing seemed to work.

Then one morning he was having breakfast beside his prototype rainmaker when he accidentally poured the entire contents of his bowl of Puffa Puffa Rice into the barrel of the machine. "Why not?" thought Trevor James -- such was the stuff of many a technological discovery. He cranked up the cloud-seeding cannon whilst singing the mock Hawaiian melody used at that time to market the cereal, serenading its discharge with his full-throated baritone:

Yummy yummy, a-dig-a-dig-a bowlful!

(OOF!) New kind of break-a-fast cereal!

(OOF!) Him puff and toast-ed nice!

Him call Kellogg's Puffa Puffa Rice!

Yummy yummy, a-dig-a-dig-a bowlful!

You catchem a big big flavor!

Oceans of energy!

(For a look at the jerky, semi-insulting-to-Polynesians TV ad,  click here)

Whether it was the cereal or the exuberance of his rendition of the jingle Trevor James did not know, but within moments the rain began to fall in San Bernardino, dousing the redwoods with precious water. So hard did it rain that Trevor James was compelled to retreat to a higher elevation, landing himself in an alpine village called "The Valley of Enchantment," where residents carried staves and wore lederhosen. But that's another story. 

Needless to say, Trevor James' Puffa Puffa Rice rainmaking breakthrough put his services in fairly high demand the world over. For the next 20 years, he cannoned bowl after bowl of the stuff into impotent cumulus clouds from Kiwi to Kalamazoo, traveling with his own Hawaiian musicians to crank out his rendition of the famous jingle, complete with pedal steel embellishments and interpretive dancing. Quite early on in his rainmaking career, however, Kellogg's had discontinued production of the precious Puffa Puffa, forcing Trevor James to stockpile thousands of cases in a temperature/humidity controlled warehouse outside of Sacramento. 

That was in the mid-1970s; since that time, his supply dwindled gradually to the point where he could no longer perform his outstanding alchemy on demand. Rumor has it that he used two of his last dozen boxes of Puffa Puffa Rice on the clouds above our Sri Lankan building site -- thus did he sacrifice to drive the mineral extraction pirates from our adopted ancestral home. Well done, Trevor James!

Our bandmate sFshzenKlyrn -- who has signed on to our upcoming interplanetary promotional tour, incidentally -- developed a cloud-seeding technique of his own some years back. From an altitude of approximately 105 nautical miles, our Zenite cohort would drop kilos of filberts -- salted in the shell -- into the outer atmosphere while singing a doggerel that went:

With a hey-nonny-nonny

and a nuts to you!

Then, within the next 24 hours, it would begin to rain somewhere on Earth. Uncanny. Let me tell you, friends. We've got a brain trust here in Big Green land like no proto-alternative band ever dreamt of having. Top of the mast, all the way.

Big As Texas. The news from California is that the father of Prop 209 (the anti-affirmative action measure) has put forward another ballot initiative designed (its supporters say) to outlaw racial profiling. But as Nation columnist Patricia Williams has helpfully pointed out, the measure actually outlaws the gathering of the data by which discrimination is commonly documented (with the sole exception of law enforcement, which can cheerfully continue its profiling unimpeded by this new egalitarianism). It's the ideal conservative concept -- eliminate the evidence of a problem, and that problem disappears. Hey presto -- no more racism! Didn't cost a dime -- in fact, we're saving money on all that troublesome research!

This should appeal to Dubya and the boys, since they have such a mania about controlling information. And after all, what percentage is there in compiling bothersome statistics about people you've just, say, dumped off of welfare? Isn't that just asking for trouble? If we do nothing, on the other hand, we can pretend they're living and working like normal suburbanites instead of starving in the road...and we can feel proud that we've got a heart as big as Texas. 

Talk about "homeland security" - what greater security can a government ask for? And while Dubya and his fellow clueless conservatives strive to protect us from the tree of knowledge and its bitter fruit, they're tossing around some pretty lame denials about what went wrong in the weeks and months leading up to 9-11 -- stuff that would have put Bill Clinton on the end of a pike (and rightfully so). Dubya himself has served up some equally lame proposals, including one for a Department of Homeland Security (didn't he do something like that already?), offering the kind of bureaucratic solution that big-C conservatives tend to jump all over (Not another federal agency!). But then, he is Dubya, and that makes it okay...even amongst a group of people who used to whine piteously about deficits and big government, but who clearly only care about running everything by any means necessary. 

Of course, conservatives can't win unless they run away from their core beliefs. That's why welfare reform is all about helping people off of a pernicious dependency on food and shelter, California's "Racial Privacy Initiatives" is about ending profiling, and Bush's efforts to use 9-11 as an excuse to step up domestic espionage and gorge an already bloated military are about making us safer. Regaled by these bland assurances, we are all supposed to sit back and shut up while the country goes straight to hell, driven by morons like "school-choice" hero Tom Ridge and that witless Texas fratboy in the White House. 

Another Triumph. Well, even with 160 U.S. Special Forces and thousands of Philippine troops surrounding them, the Abu-Sayyaf guerillas escaped from their redoubt on Basilan island to Mindanao, where a last-ditch rescue raid left two of their hostages -- one an American missionary -- dead. Just another triumph in the "War on Terror," added to our glorious record in Afghanistan, where even Osama bin Laden managed to escape the iron ring of our military, wheeling his kidney dialysis machine in front of him through the mountainous Afghan frontier. And then there's those anthrax terrorists....remember them? Well...forget 'em again. 

luv u,

jp

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6/16/02

O-yea, o-yea!

Greetings from down under. No, your friends and colleagues in Big Green have not relocated to the continent/nation of Australia. I meant down under my desk at the Cheney Hammer Mill where I've been all morning, prompted by the plaintive cry of the compound's air raid siren. We're under siege once again!

Yes, in spite of our best efforts to convince the world that we are pacifists who profess non-violence towards the world around us (particularly where those military types are concerned), we've been place on the target list of at least seven different air forces, including the U.S., the U.K., and Madagascar. Every couple of hours the bombers pass overhead, depositing their destructive payloads on the compound, the brick yard, my breadfruit orchard -- everything we hold dear. 

Why the daily sorties, the persistent night raids? There's a simple answer -- Gung Ho and his cottage industry, tricking out Bradley Fighting Vehicles, souping up second-hand tanks, and -- crucially for those attacking us -- parking the lot of them in our Hammer Mill courtyard. With such an unnatural concentration of military vehicles in so small a space, our humble squat was spotted by one of the many spy satellites that buzz around this unhappy Earth of ours. (I think it may have been the Madagascarian satellite -- the one that orbits 20 feet above the surface of the Earth. John and Mitch Macaphee play a game where they throw a hoop up when it passes over and try to time it so it flies right through. But I digress.)

Anyway, with numerous images of our tank and half-track choked motor pool added to its storage banks, some automated military targeting system chalked us up as a potential threat. And since Dubya and the boys are all about offensive, pre-emptive strategy now, we were immediately placed on the interservice hit list. We may even qualify as one of the 60 nations that support or sponsor terrorism (my first reaction to that policy statement was...there are 60 nations?). They tag-team the bombing raids, so France gets us one night (our "night off," as it were), then the U.S., then Madagascar, then Russia, and so on.

How are they doing? Pretty poorly, in general. Spain took out the water tower last night, but aside from that they've really just managed to make our parking lot a little more crunchy. Yeah, they've hit a few of Gung Ho's toys, but not enough to put a serious dent in his inventory... which, of course, is ultimately destined for the parking lots of the people sending out the sorties against us. Ironic? It would be, except that in the context of the current perma-war against everything that moves, it seems inevitable that the ever-expanding Rumsfeld-led military would have to start bombing itself eventually. 

You can actually get quite a lot done from under your desk, I've found (no off-color joke intended)...especially when you've got a mechanical personal assistant like Marvin. When the power went off during one of the air raids, we were using Marvin as a memo delivery service, sending him back and forth with hastily scribbled messages of no particular consequence. We had an informal contest going to see who could write the most dramatically illegible and content-free note before the "all-clear" whistle blew. (John won with a memo scrawled diagonally and seared around the edges.)

It's not all fun and games, mind you. Between us we've worked out a plan to both fund our next interplanetary tour (slated for August-September, incidentally) and revitalize Trevor James Constable's long-stagnant career as a rainmaker. It's simple -- we get Kellogg's to start selling Puffa Puffa Rice again...only with our picture on the back of the box instead of Davey Jones's. That way Trevor James will have all the cannon fodder he needs for his rain machine, and we'll have the celebrity endorsement we've been lusting after ever since Matt saw Hanson's picture on a frozen waffle box. Not bad for a bunch of guys passing notes from desk to desk via robot. Kind of like school, really. (Except for the robot.)

Daddy Peacebucks. That thing they call Rumsfeld has been deployed to South Asia, presumably to demonstrate by example how not to avoid perpetual war and how not to bury the nuclear hatchet. (A perfect reverse barometer for lovers of sanity everywhere.) Can it be that his mission is to stand between opposing sides of a conflict his government's (and his own) actions have helped bring to a ferocious boil? Or is he merely encouraging the morally bankrupt leadership of both India and Pakistan to see the distinct political advantages of joining forces in the lucrative "War on Terrorism" -- namely U.S. financial, military, and diplomatic support for any number of abuses wholly unrelated to "terrorism" in any meaningful sense? 

Probably both. So brazenly cynical a mission of "peace" can only be expected of a man whose boots are glazed with the saliva of a thousand journalists' tongues and whose ample ass bears the unsavory evidence of their appreciative lips. Why do the corporate media mavens give this...this...creature such an easy ride? Perhaps they love him 'cause he treats them so bad. The Pentagon-approved press corps always seems to respond best to those spokespersons (uniformed and plainclothed) who show them the most contempt, painting them as "tough" or "sharp-witted," even "funny." One of their number even referred to Rumsfeld (I swear) as "America's stud." Say what?

There are, of course, strong institutional reasons for this symbiotic relationship. Still, it does come off as a little perverse. I mean, the press never asks Rumsfeld anything of substance at his briefings, and if they quibble over anything, it's always some technical point that could only interest readers of Jane's Defense. Of course, if anyone ever did ask anything that bears on the obvious stupidity of administration policy, that correspondent would not be invited back anytime soon. So every Pentagon briefing is just one softball after another, for which the press corps is subjected to the kind of abuse they so richly deserve. 

The free ride extends to the entire administration, led by a president who avoids press conferences like the plague...even when he's guaranteed there'll be no embarrassing questions about his protection of the Bin Laden family from scrutiny, his coddling of the Saudis in general, his extensive and deep connection to Enron and other big energy players, etc.  I guess their experience of his prime time press briefing last fall must have taught his handlers one valuable lesson -- prepared statements only! No extended, off-the-cuff remarks! (I can still see Ari Fleischer sitting off-stage that night, a black cartoon cloud of grief forming over his head as Dubya fumbled over each answer with remarkable vacuity.) Even though they have little to fear from the White House press corps, what percentage is there for them in putting the man's stupidity on display? Keep him under wraps, Reagan-style, and everyone will revel in his popularity...everyone who counts, that is. Like the administration. And the energy companies. And the press corps. 

Don't Mess with the AB of C. Toby Keith's ersatz-cowboy ode to neo-fascist tribalism has been dropped from ABC's upcoming (and sure to be glorious) Fourth of July Special, reportedly for being too nasty. Anyone who thinks Toby is being silenced has not sat in my dental hygienist's chair and heard the song played on the radio until foam runs down your neck. It could just be that those network boys decided the song -- aside from being a Charlie Daniels-esque attempt to capitalize on post 9/11 hyperpatriotism -- is just bad music. Which, of course, it is.  

luv u,

jp

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6/22/02

Hello, then...(then what?)

Well, you'll be glad to know that sFshzenKlyrn won the pool. The Madagascaran air force was the first to score a direct hit on Marvin's little quick-lunch stand out in the parking lot. Good shootin'!

As I write, the siege has officially been lifted and we are no longer under sustained attack from the combined air forces of a dozen nations (though certain rogue elements of the Indonesian air force still occasionally drop a package or two on us). Gung Ho made a few calls over to his pals at Foggy Bottom; after that, we just had to endure another ten days of heavy bombardment and hey presto! the attacks tapered off. Nothing like having friends in high places. 

Our sporting little wager centered on the corndog/gyro stand my personal robotic assistant Marvin set up in the parking lot of the Cheney Hammer Mill in hopes that he might pick up a few extra dollars, lire, drachmas, whatever, by attracting lunch hour business from the pilots of the fighter bombers. Marvin actually put quite a bit of effort into this endeavor, and I was duly impressed by its inspired inanity. First he parked all of Gung Ho's humvees in formation to spell out the words "CHEAP LUNCH" in letters readable from 10,000 feet up. Then he rigged Trevor James Constable's orgone generating device to mimic the signal of anti-aircraft radar, so that when he pointed the device at the planes it would quickly draw their attention. That's when Matt, John, sFshzenKlyrn, and I started picking our winners, two bucks a pop. (sFshzenKlyrn picked Madagascar because he liked the "z" in their country's name. Yeah...I know.)

So anyway, the Madagascaran formation came in low, just above the treetops, dropping 500-pounders the length of our perimeter road, taking out the guardrail, a telephone poll or two, one of Gung Ho's humvees, then BANG! the quick-lunch stand was blown to splinters. Marvin came teetering in a few minutes later, singed and smoking like a cartoon coyote. From under his desk, Matt tossed the little bag we'd filled with coins over to where sFshzenKlyrn was doing his victory dance. Ever heard a Zenite war hoop? Chilling. 

With the end of the bombing campaign came a sobering period of reappraisal for all of us here in Big Green land. We had lost more than a week of planning time in advance of our new interplanetary tour. Our celebrity endorsement contract had not been finalized (We still don't know whether our likenesses will appear on bags of popcorn or boxes of frozen French toast, though we've put together a proposal for Raisin Bran that has some merit). Our new extended play CD for the extraterrestrial market remains hung up in production, buried somewhere deep within the labyrinthine corridors of our sinister corporate paymasters, Hegemonic Records & Worm Farm, Inc. sFshzenKlyrn's shoes haven't arrived from J.C. Penny yet, and Nayan's Deli still owes Mitch Macaphee a Chinese pizza. In short, next to nothing got done the whole time we were under attack (except Marvin's new matte black finish). 

One good thing did come of all this. The mineral extraction company (a subsidiary of our nefarious label) that had grabbed our lean-to building site has abandoned their claim, despite evidence of substantial cheese-food deposits. Official notification of their departure arrived via the usual channels (random hearsay), with the reason stated as "sustained air bombardment." I guess those laser guided missiles and 500-lb gravity bombs made extraction too costly. (Man, are they easily dissuaded!)

So the upshot is that the land is ours, as well as all the processed riches that lay beneath its crispy, crunchy surface. I'm for getting that lean-to up as quickly as possible -- perhaps by our launch date for the upcoming tour. And we can celebrate our good fortune with a big pan of macaroni and cheese made with our own Velveeta deposits from the basement. Mmmm-boy!

The Big One. Is it any coincidence that the accidental White House flyover by a small private plane should happen on the same week as when the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile got pulled over near the Pentagon? And that both should coincide with the near-miss of a soccer field sized asteroid that skimmed by the earth without anyone knowing about it? (As George Carlin would say, "that's not a near miss...that's a near hit!") What does it say about our "defenses" that the only one of the three that was effectively neutralized was the big wiener? 

No, seriously...think about it. If that asteroid had collided with Earth, it would have caused an explosion similar to that of a large H-bomb. And we didn't even know it existed until after it had passed us by (at 24,000 mph). If it had hit, say, Manhattan, or Washington DC, it would have obliterated either city, and quite probably prompted the launch of a retaliatory strike at....well, at whomever "we" most want to see dead. Sure, the odds would be against a direct asteroid hit on a major population center...but it's hard to imagine a benign spot for a multi-megaton H-bomb-like blast anywhere on the globe, particularly with the current tinderbox of international relations. 

So while we're down here scrambling jets (unsuccessfully) against stray Cessnas, pulling over king-size wieners, and arranging extra-judicial military detention for a Chicago gang member (an American citizen, no less) for engaging in "loose talk" about dirty bombs, a danger equal to the sum of all fears careens by undetected, missing us by 75,000 miles -- a mere hair's breadth in celestial terms. Perhaps we should divert some portion of those 400 billion annual "defense" dollars toward some really existing dangers -- not just passing space rocks, but mundane stuff like health care, food, shelter...you know, necessary stuff that a lot of people don't have. What greater threat to security is there than that?

Aye (For An) Aye, Sir! After Sharon's spiritual partners in Hamas and elsewhere finished their grisly attacks this week, the fat man wasted little time in reprising those bombings  with his own high-tech terror machine, collapsing a building on one young person and lobbing shells into a Jenin marketplace where three Palestinian children were killed along with one adult. This on top of the usual daily casualties, humiliations, house demolitions, arrests, etc., etc., that characterize the ongoing crime of Israel's occupation, the full reality of which never quite makes it to the mainstream media in the U.S., where the guns, helicopters, missiles, and money come from. 

Always looking out for his own best interests, Arafat signaled acceptance of the Bantustan deal that Clinton and Barak had tried to ram down his throat two years ago -- one that would confine the Palestinians to several non-contiguous cantons, all cut off from Jerusalem and Gaza. If this is a formula for peace, I'm Martha Raye. (And I'm not Martha Raye.)

Edward Said is right. The time for Palestinian elections is now. Read his terrific column now at the Al-Ahram Weekly web site.

luv u,

jp

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6/29/02

Hold on, thar! 

Man, when things start falling into place, it's hard to make them stop! After the trials we've been through, I'm a little unused to good fortune...or even a minimally tolerable level of discomfort. But just look at us now -- no more bombing campaign, no more mining company stripping processed cheese out of our land, and an endorsement contract that doesn't involve wearing animal costumes. (At least, not all the time. We can take them off when we sleep.)

With the departure of Hegemonic Total Resource Removal, Inc., for lands more congenial to their looting, construction has begun in earnest on our long-delayed lean-to project, replacing the one that was vaporized by Gung-Ho's attack on the mongoose settlement last year. (It's a little complicated. Just read My Back Pages for the full story.) As luck would have it, the miners from Hegemonic left about 20 gross (that's 20x12x12) boxes of their vaunted cheesefood product behind, all of them about 3 months out of date. Just the thing for setting our foundation. The work crew got down in the hole and pointed up those Velveeta boxes real nice -- that's when we knew we were in business. 

In the absence of our original designer, Eric the Architect (off on some kind of cruise, I believe), we put Marvin, my personal robot assistant, in charge of the construction detail. Because the trained construction workers departed weeks ago, Marvin simply hired a regiment of lawn robots -- the same ones we have tending the gardens out at the Cheney Hammer Mill. They're not the sharpest pencils in the box, but they can follow Marvin's orders, for the most part. When he says "dig," for example, most of them start hefting a shovel, while one or two might don shades, an artist's cap, and a "beat" goatee, and start snapping their fingers. The errant ones just need a little extra direction, that's all, and Marvin is well capable of providing it now that we've gotten all the soot off of him from last week's air strike on the corn dog stand. (A little rubbing compound will go a long way towards making your robot assistant more presentable...and respectable.)

Even with the occasional delays, Marvin and the bots have made good progress. His success as a foreman has allowed us to turn our attention to more pressing matters, like how to get from planet to planet without using a spacecraft. (We've got Trevor James Constable working on that one.) When the budget figures got sent down on a flaming pike this week from Hegemonic Records & Worm Farm, Inc., we noticed there was no line item for transportation. Apparently the cheapskates at our label are expecting us to travel by commercial carrier, unless we care to provide our own space vessel. As many of you know from personal experience, interplanetary and interstellar commercial flights are notoriously unreliable. The delays are grueling and insufferable...sometimes years pass with you on standby. 

What about that honking little saucer we used last time around? Well, sFshzenKlyrn rode off in it one day and came back on "foot" (with his shoes missing, no less). He says he put it down for collateral on an overdue mortgage he's had hanging around his neck for eons, but I think he lost it in a card game. Or pawned it to buy a stack of illicit flapjacks. Either way, it's well out of our reach. Domage. 

Like I said earlier, Trevor James may yank us out of this impasse yet with some form of matter transfer device -- something like what those quiet aliens used on Lost In Space. That's if he can find a conscious volunteer for his experiments. Oh, Mar-vin....?

The Best Defense. The Israeli military has been hacking away at Hebron and other municipalities in the West Bank and Gaza, practicing a standard of "self-defense" that would have made Goebbels green with envy. These "retaliations" for suicide bombings just happen, by happy coincidence, to follow closely the Israeli government's well-established practice of making Palestinian life as short and unbearable as possible, in hopes that the lot of them will just pack up and leave like their countrymen did in 1948 (with some brutal encouragement), saving Israel and the US the cost and bother of ethnic cleansing. After all, as the decades-old racist argument goes, there are many other Arab countries where those Palestinians can settle. (An A-rab is an A-rab is an A-rab, right?) 

I've actually heard this trash advanced as a serious proposal as recently as this past week on Bill Moyer's PBS show NOW, by a rabbinical colleague of the lizard-like Christian right wunderkind Ralph Reed. One wonders what the reaction would have been had supporters of apartheid South Africa suggested that its rather inconvenient black population should simply move to any of those dozens of other black African states. Though Israel, too, is working (in tandem with its American godfather) on a Bantustan solution, albeit a substantially meaner one than the South African version, it may yet opt for ethnic cleansing, an idea that has seen growing support in Israel recently. (Hell, Sharon is Prime Minister. That should tell you something.)

As I write, the smoke is still rising, I'm sure, from the rubble of the Palestinian Authority's headquarters in Hebron, detonated by an Israeli explosive charge so powerful that it reportedly threw automobiles up into the air -- no word yet on the fate of the occupants, amongst whom Israel claims there were 15 "wanted men." And so Sharon's US-armed shock troops proceed to dismantle the native forces Israel created in the Oslo agreements to provide for its own security, wasting an untold (and unreported) number of civilians in the process. With at least 700,000 Palestinians under curfew, and all Palestinians in a state of extreme insecurity, Oslo is as dead as any deal can be. (In as much as it was negotiated to prolong the occupation, it's probably well gone.)

Where's the leader of the Free World? Having his ass checked. They're going to shine a pen light up there to see if they can spot any fragments of brain that might prove an impediment to the "war on terror." (My guess is that, if he opens his mouth, there'll be a circle of light on the exam room ceiling.) Don't worry, folks...Cheney's in charge. If anything goes wrong, you'll find him in the kitchen with the pastry chef. 

Cheap Advice.  Note to terrorists: forget the complicated disguises or costly plastic surgery. Just wear the flag, sing the national anthem, and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. That fools them every time. (Include the "under God" part of the latter, tacked on around the same time the confederate flag was hoisted high to defend southerners against the civil rights movement. Those were the days...)    

luv u,

jp

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