Calling all cars. One Adam Twelve. C-Q, C-Q. What the… – this thing is faulty as hell, Mitch! You call this emergency communications? I call it trash.
Well, as you might imagine, we’re trying to prepare for the worst here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Hurricane season is just starting, after all, and this has been the worst year for tornadoes for as long as anyone can remember. So we’re getting all of our ducks in a row. (Kind of an ongoing project, as they keep waddling away and we have to keep having to chase them and carry them back.) We found some old tent stakes in the basement just in case anything… needs staking… down. Not sure when that’s likely to come up, but if it does, we’ll be ready. Then, of course, I’ve got some old tarps from my barnstorming days. Yeah, they’re moldy and motheaten, but we’re talking about emergency readiness here, not aesthetics. Get with the program!
Mitch Macaphee came up with some walkie talkies that we can carry around with us in case the lights go out. As you can tell from my earlier outburst, they don’t work so well. Not sure where he put his hands on the components. My suspicion is that he just bought them at a yard sale somewhere in town, probably from some 12-year-old entrepreneur willing to bilk an aging mad scientist. Hell, I used some of my best phony call signals, and nothing! Even Marvin (my personal robot assistant) couldn’t copy me… and he was standing five feet away. (Perhaps his hearing circuits were on the blink. Another Mitch triumph.)
Our thought was emergency communications, of course. We’ve got some other measures we can take, too. Like running down the cellar. Sure, that’s where our studio is, but that’s okay – we can combine hiding from the storm with rehearsal. Should be a huge time saver this year, as it thundered and rained every day in May, I think. In fact, flood water was pouring down the basement stairs at a couple of points. I had to ask Marvin to act as a dehumidifier for a few days. (We just stuff him full of cotton wool and reverse the polarity on a couple of his cooling fans, then plant a bucket under him to catch the condensation. How easy is that?)
I know… we should treat Marvin better. We’re not nice. Guess it’s time we went back on the road again, work off some of this nastiness. Road trip!
I don’t get choked up very often listening to NPR, but I heard a story on Memorial Day weekend that did it – about the father of a soldier killed in Iraq, talking about how he’d planted sunflowers near his son’s gravestone because the young man liked them so much, and how the father went to Iraq and saw his son, he claims, and the apparition asked him what the f**k he was doing there, told him he should go home, and said that it was all right, he was in a better place. We’re on year ten of stories like this. Jesus! Time to shut it down.
Well, summer is upon us, friends. No, not summer by the calendar, but rather summer by the sweat of the brow. Or so it goes in the northern climes of the northern hemisphere, on that land mass known as “North America”, just below the mighty lake Ontario, maker of much snow in the darker months – a kind of ice goddess, if you will. (Hell, even if you won’t.) It doesn’t take much to raise the temperature in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill – all that brick, you know, baking in the direct sunlight, no trees to protect us. It’s like spending a night in the box. Sure wish you stop trying to help me, Captain.
program, it’s still just a pig with way too much lipstick, and any fool can see it. I am a bit heartened that their attempt to buy off the elderly by saying their privatization scheme would only affect people under 55 (i.e. me) has thus far failed miserably. Perhaps they neglected to consider that eighty-year-olds might have fifty-year-old children. In the midst of all their yak about family values, they apparently forgot about families. Nice try, mothers!
I’m sorry you had to hear that (or read the transcript of it, rather). Yes, tempers are running a little thin around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill these days. Some see it as a variation on seasonal affective disorder – you know, it starts getting warm, we can’t afford air conditioning, and this clammy mill gets kind of toasty. But it goes deeper than that, I’m afraid. An erosion of trust, you might say. It’s the kind of thing that tends to happen with Big Green between interstellar tours. In fact, that’s what keeps driving us into space. I think that’s what, anyway.
This was the magic of the marketplace passage that’s been previewed over the past few days. Obama promised to get the IMF and World Bank working to “modernize and stabilize the economies of Tunisia and Egypt.” What he didn’t say was that the mass protests in Egypt he referenced earlier were fueled, in part, by neoliberal reforms of the type he’s describing. All I can say is that the revolutionaries in Egypt and Tunisia had better be on their guard, because plugging their economies into the Washington consensus only means striving to be another Honduras.
This is not good, folks. Marvin is doing the renegade robot from Mars bit again. It must be an errant line of code somewhere in his reams of programming. Every once in a while he gets ornery… I mean SUPER ornery. Starts breaking things, running things over, insulting people (including anti-Lincoln, who’s sensitive, you know) and otherwise causing mayhem. I suppose I should count myself lucky that we’re not on some interstellar tour with this happening. Living with a mechanical nutjob is one thing; sharing a cramped spacecraft with one is quite another. I don’t have to tell you that…. HEY! PUT THAT DOWN! THAT’S THE ONLY ONE OF THOSE WE’VE GOT LEFT, YOU DOLT!
over the years are wildly unpopular. The current crop of GOP congresspeople represent an odious distillation of his most extremist positions. What’s not to hate?
Yes, more strife here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, place of our birth, land of our fathers, and all the rest of it. What is Big Green up to this week? Gasping. Lots of gasping. As some of you may know (and many, I’m sure, don’t), May is the time of year when mad scientists tend to roll out all of their new world-destroying experiments. It’s in anticipation of the upcoming CrazyCom Mad Science Convention they hold in Madagascar every August. Everybody wants to show boat the new death ray, the improved zip gun, the killer robot, now with more sparks. Kind of a pissing match for high-tech cranks. Attend at your own risk. (The last one ended badly, I hear.)
The interpersonal connections between ISI and networks like Al Qaeda were built up over the course of decades. How else could such a notorious terror leader hide in plain sight, except by the same kind of tolerance shown to killers like Jose Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch?