NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.
(March '01)
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3/4/2001
What's up?
That is, of course, the question that remains on all of our minds here at the President's Select Commission on Extra-Terrestrial Phenomena. And the minute we have an answer, we'll get back to you. Right now, it's moving day.
That's
right, friends. Our sojourn at the official Vice Presidential residence has come
to a screeching halt -- the Cheneys have evicted your Big
Green friends from their flop in the Blair House butler's pantry, having
grown weary of their meddlesome ways. I suppose they're justified. I mean, some
of our actions might be considered intrusive, like sFshzenKlyrn's
midnight refrigerator raids and Matt's sideline as a sousaphone instructor. When
John and I confiscated the Cheneys' monogrammed socks for study, that may have
been the last straw.
Of course, suggesting the Cheneys might be ZORCHONS (and, therefore, dedicated to total control over the American way of life) may also have contributed to the sad events of this last week. (Touchy, aren't they?)
Whatever the provocation, our eviction has
left us with no alternative but to grab the first available accommodations.
(It's either that or join the legions of homeless the Cheneys have helped to
make a permanent part of our national landscape.) Luckily, we did have solid
leads on some fairly 
desirable
properties in the greater DC area. In fact, one place came very highly
recommended by that nice Mr. Rumsfeld over at DOD. Rumsfeld (Donny, as we call
him) told us it needed some work, but that with a little TLC, we might never
want to leave the place. It's one of those basement apartments that were quite
stylish back in Donny's day. You know the ones. Cozy. Well-stocked. Corrugated
steel overhead.
(Dibs on the cot above the canned water!)
So all that remains for us to do now is to
finish gathering up our few meager possessions and cart them from Blair House to
our new digs in 
Chevy
Chase, MD. Actually, Dick and Lynne haven't been completely remiss in their
duties as our hosts. In fact, Dick has generously pitched in with the move,
acting as project foreman. (This is where his Halliburton experience comes into
play big time!) He even knows how to work one of those big cranes -- you know,
the kind you see at Manhattan building sites? (Hmmm...I guess we've accumulated
a few more things than I'd thought.)
The big trick is going to be disassembling everything and crating it up for easy storage in our new basement apartment. John says he has an idea or two on this one; so does sFshzenKlyrn. (I might just slip back to Sri Lanka until it's all over.)
Happy Anniversary! No, not ours, you silly terrans! I meant the Gulf War triumph of a decade ago. The airwaves have been thick with celebratory forums, rebroadcasts of wartime press conferences, rehashes of warmongering rhetoric, and the like. Bombs dropping in the Middle East...those were the days, right?
A quite noticeable
protuberance on the media landscape since the (s)election of Dubya, General
Stormin' (Bore-man) Norman Schwartzkopf (the towering soldier who saved us all
from the terror-state of Grenada back in 1983) has featured heavily in the Gulf
War love-fests. I saw him last night on C-Span, on stage with Pappy Bush, Bush
CIA crony Robert Gates, and other disjecta membra of the early 90s NSA
killing machine. As a laugh line at the end of the forum, Norm lamented not
having bombed downtown Baghdad one last time, just to get that statue of Saddam
Hussein. It had been taken off the target list because the US was doing all 
it
could to avoid civilian casualties, according to the big guy. (News to us, and
to those in that downtown bomb shelter.) But heck, he "should of gotten
that statue." That got a big laugh.
Where was Cheney? He had work to do. Always busy these days, you know. It's not easy filling in all the words for a Chief Executive who is, in effect, a bizarro hybrid between his own father and Dan Quayle. You have to give up a lot of the perks of elder statesmanship that Norm and the boys can enjoy. Beats Nuremburg all to hell, though.
See you. Don't sail over the Greeneville.
luv,
jp
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3/11/2001
Hey-yuh.
Well, moving day was a shambles, as you might have expected. With Dick Cheney in the hospital for yet another angioplasty, we were pretty much left to our own devices, doing our level best to manage the immense freight-moving machinery on loan from Halliburton. (I hope all that packing and lifting didn't contribute to Dick's relapse. It would be poor payment indeed for all of his kindness....)
While Matt attended to the crane, I took
command of the forklift battalion and started loading what possessions we had on
pallets into the transport vessel that would carry us upstream to our new abode.
By mid afternoon, the freighter was loaded with all of our furniture, statuary,
anvils, hot air balloons, and luncheon meats. Then we drove our collection of
1970s-vintage Datsuns on board, so that they would be the first to come 
off
the ship. Everything went pretty much according to plan until we started driving
the cars off the ship at dockside. The minute sFshzenKlyrn's
B-210 was clear of the ramp, the freighter raised anchor and steamed away
with our chesterfield, our terra-cotta gnomes, our mortadella....everything! As
we stood on the dockside, we watched in horror as the deckhands lowered the
Liberian flag and hoisted the infamous Jolly Roger. Pirates!
Having been summarily unburdened of virtually every necessity of modern life, your erstwhile Big Green friends limped their aging fleet of low-end imported subcompacts to the subterranean address that awaited us in Chevy Chase, MD. With nothing to unpack, we spent the remainder of the afternoon looking through the storage bins for something to eat besides canned water. That's when Matt and John stumbled upon a sinister prize left by the previous occupants--one that would spell near-disaster for all of us. Just beneath sFshzenKlyrn's bunk in a concrete footlocker, they found a large cache of fine...white...powder.
Yes,
friends. It was white flour -- seven kilos of real high-grade stuff (King
Arthur, I believe), ideal for making flapjacks. Before I could stop him,
Matt was mixing up quarts of batter, pouring it onto a device flapjack addicts
refer to ominously as a "frying pan," flipping the deadly cakes once
or twice, then passing out stacks of them to his strung-out and haggard
bandmates. I scarfed mine down without so much as a pad of butter, and went back
for more. That's when I knew the dreaded flapjack monkey was on our backs once
again, with a hunger made all the more potent by our recent misfortunes.
After a punishing twelve hour binge, our new home was a wreck. Plates and empty single-serving syrup packets were strewn everywhere. Matt -- always the most flapjack-crazed of the group -- was cutting the remaining batter with milk and drinking it raw. It was an ugly scene to awaken to, I can tell you. Yet in the wake of so grim a housewarming, my mind turned over these seemingly unrelated events and found solace in suspicion. Pirates?...a house laden with flapjack ingredients?....can this truly be a coincidence? Or is someone trying to get us out of the way? We shall see. But first...breakfast!
The
Great Communicator. The corporate media is still in full frenzy over
stealth-Republican Bill Clinton's sleazy exit strategy from the White
House...but as the newsletter Counterpunch
points out, there is nothing new about trading presidential pardons for
cash, cooperation, etc. Pappy Bush did it for Soviet spy Armand Hammer after
Hammer made a hefty contribution to the Republican Party. Bush also pardoned
Eliot Abrams, Robert MacFarland, and other Iran Contra figures, including Cap
Weinberger, whose pending prosecution may well have implicated the president.
Talk about "tension city..."
One
wonders to whose benefit Dubya will exercise this extraordinary executive power.
It remains to be seen which of the Reagan/Bush retreads in his administration
will need his timely intervention. Maybe there are a few frat buddies he can
help out. Or maybe he can issue an auto-pardon to clear away those three
convictions on his own record. However it plays out, you can rest assured the
beneficiaries won't be among the thousands victimized by an increasingly
punitive "justice" system, popularized by Reagan, greatly expanded by
big Bill Clintstone, and no doubt carried to new heights of barbarity by the
current bloody-handed, bloody-minded resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Sail cautiously. Another long lunch on the Greeneville.
luv,
jp
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Huhn?...Did somebody say something?
Oh...that was me. What a bender! It's been nearly a week since I lost consciousness after downing an unprecedented 12-story stack of high-octane flapjacks. Our new apartment is demolished--strewn with hors de combat from our eight-day binge. Matt is nowhere to be seen...probably staggering through the streets of Chevy Chase looking for a Ho-Jo's, an IHOP...anyplace he can score a quick fix. John and I are both covered in flour, sprawled on our cots like rag dolls.
Our
friend and colleague sFshzenKlyrn has
suffered the worst fate by far -- one that commonly befalls Zenites who
"mess with the cakes," as they say. After just a few stacks, sFshzenKlyrn's
gaseous form solidified to a state as dense as bronze. The condition is
temporary, but it does, in essence, render him helpless. Sometime during the
week, while the rest of us were incapacitated, a scavenging ghoul from HGTV
stole him away. He was last seen placed as a bit of sculpture to add interest to
a drab entranceway on "Room For Change." Poor fucker!
As I started to say last week, this sort of thing doesn't happen by accident. It can only be a deliberate effort on the part of person or persons extraterrestrial to blunt the edge of our lawful presidential commission. And who but the sinister ZORCHONS could orchestrate so intricate a plot to put us out of commission? The Raelians, perhaps? Or maybe it's the guys from Mortadella, still miffed about that Venus gig last October. That flapjack flour had to come from somewhere!
Of course, for now, we've got to start
piecing our lives back together. My first task will be washing this flour off
with what's left of our canned water. Matt will busy himself with finding his
way home -- a rather ambitious task, under 
the
circumstances. As for John, he's already gotten a pretty good start on
rebuilding our little bomb-proof apartment. In fact, while he was in
reconstruction mode, he took this opportunity to add a few rooms up top-side. We
were a little constricted down here, having to share our 12' x 20' space
with Jim and Margaret Anderson, their daughter "Princess," and their
dog Alvin, all of whom have been confined to the apartment since 1952. (Though
they kind of made themselves scarce after sFshzenKlyrn's
tragic flapjack-fueled transformation...)
Anyway, when John's finished, we'll at least have some room to breathe. Maybe even a proper breakfast nook, so you can drop by sometime for a cup of coffee and a few flap....I mean, a crumpet or two.
Enviro-Mentals. Here's a big surprise. Dubya reversing himself on his one seemingly environmentally-friendly campaign pledge, dropping his support for our ludicrously inadequate standards for carbon-dioxide emissions. (I'm sure he picked up a lot of informed voters on that one.) This on top of a whole raft of other surprises, like pulling the rug out from under any federally-supported toxic cleanup efforts that use union labor (like the Onondaga Lake clean-up, finally getting underway after years of delay), working to rescind some of Bill Clinton's straw-man eleventh-hour environmental half-measures, appointing Whitman as EPA chief, Norton as Interior Secretary, etc., etc....
I
wonder what his position will be with respect to the EPA's proposed dredging of
the Hudson River? (Pregnant pause.) Of course, General Electric -- producer and
distributor of the more than 1.3 million pounds of toxic PCBs that now reside in
the Hudson -- is mounting a massive PR/Advertising campaign (under the usual
guise of a pseudo-citizen's organization) to drum up public opposition to the
clean up (which would, of course, cost them more money than the current ad
blitz.)
Luckily, there are organizations like NYPIRG (www.nypirg.org), dispatching their young leaflet-armed troops like so many Davids against this corporate Goliath, trying to get the word out. What's the word? Just this -- write the EPA before the end of the public comment period on April 17 and tell them you support the Hudson River PCB clean-up. Here are the addresses:
"Snail mail":
Hudson River PCB's Public Comment
U.S. Enviromental Protection Agency
290 Broadway, 19th Floor, New York, NY 10007-1866
or email your comments to:
Do it soon. Your river needs you. Want more info? Go to www.cleanhudson.org
luv u,
jp
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3/25/2001
Bon matin, mes amis.
As Spring slowly encroaches upon the nation's capital, your friends and colleagues in Big Green have been gradually piecing their lives back together after the mother-of-all-flapjack binges. I'll tell you, it's times like these that make me long for the spartan comforts of our 47-room lean-to in Sri Lanka. (Don't get me started...)
We've
been working through our recoveries, each in his own special way. My
self-administered therapy has concentrated on the practical matter of weaning
myself from the dreaded batter using the most modern methods. Shoelace
replacement therapy has helped a bit (though my battered green all-stars look a
little strange with black laces); and, of course, I've been visiting a waffle
clinic on an outpatient basis for the last week or so. Since Matt rolled in last
Tuesday, he's been scribbling furiously in his notebooks, saying nothing,
responding to questions only with notes folded into paper airplanes. John has
buried himself in the task of rebuilding (and greatly improving) our home. As
you can see from this photo, his penthouse addition is nearly complete. Not bad,
huh?
Predictably enough, sFshzenKlyrn has had the greatest difficulty with his recovery. In fact, after a solid week of being...well....solid, he has only just begun returning to that shapeless miasma of plasma we all know and love. Yesterday sFshzenKlyrn -- now a molten blob of heavy metals radiating a temperature of 734 degrees Kelvin -- burned through the floor of the yuppie entranceway he has adorned for the past week and is now tumbling in free-fall through the earth's crust. On his home planet Zenon, this is considered a hopeful sign. First step, recognize you have a flapjack problem. Second step, burn your way through miles of living rock. It gets easier from there.
We're
not the only ones with sFshzenKlyrn on
our minds. It appears the boy from Zenon made quite an impression on the
Andersons, that unreconstructed 1952-era suburban family that shares our
basement dwelling. Perhaps it was the endearing sight of his leaden form
sprawled backwards over the crates of baloney-sandwich casserole that first
tugged upon their heart strings. Whatever the cause, they've taken quite a shine
to sFshzenKlyrn --
particularly Margaret Anderson, for whom the attachment seems to have taken on a
somewhat more romantic aspect. I sense trouble brewing, there. (Tune in next
week for another gripping episode of...I Left My Family For A Zenite Blob!)
Much as I feel somewhat responsible for this unfolding tragedy in the Anderson household, I've got other, more pressing concerns...concerns that concern the future of this entire concern, as far as I'm concerned. (Yikes! I've caught flub-Dubya-dislexitosis!) What I'm trying to say is, I've found further damning evidence of a conspiracy to undermine the effectiveness of the President's Commission on Extra-Terrestrial Phenomena, therefore compromising the security of the United States of America, already.
Oh,
you may laugh. You may say that this is just another manifestation of my
flapjack-induced stupor. But it's true. Someone -- the ZORCHONS,
the Raelians, Mortadella,
I don't know who -- has published and circulated a
pamphlet designed to make monkeys out of us. This cleverly-worded chop job
actually references our recent struggle with flapjack addiction and ticks
through every misdeed we've ever committed, as well as a few I'd never
heard about. Like that weekend in Moscow back in '87, and some goat named Helmut
that sold Matt bogus shares in an Esperanto correspondence school, and....Hey!
Now they've got me spreading their lies! Clever bastards! (I wonder if
they hired Patton Boggs...)
Anyway, I'm going to get to the bottom of this poisonous little book. In the meantime...don't believe everything you read. (Did John really sell snow to the Eskimos?)
You Don't Say, Mr. (P)resident. There they go again. Stalwart guardian of our sacred freedoms, the corporate press is doing its best to help our new (P)resident articulate his political agenda...quite literally.
Just
as they did with "uncle" Ronnie Reagan, former champion of the Chief Executive
gaffe contest, the print media from the New York Times on down are
cleaning up Dubya's trademark misstatements -- the very substance of his claim
to being the rightful heir to Dan Quayle's intellectual legacy. According to Ken
Silverstein (www.thenation.com),
our august "newspaper of record" straightened out some of the tortured
syntax in his recent address to Congress. Meanwhile, the Boston Globe
praised Dubya for "gaining command" of his articulation...even as the
boy explained to an elementary school audience in Tennessee that "you teach
a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test." 'Nuff
said.
For those of you who see some value in knowing just how profound an idiot now has formal control over our nation's most powerful institutions, take a look at Jacob Weisberg's compilation at Slate (http://slate.msn.com/Features/bushisms/bushisms.asp ). Or watch C-Span...listen carefully...and forget what the newpapers are telling you.
See you next week. Avoid those F-22 testing grounds.
luv u,
jp