Sneaky Cows

The Seven Biggest Narcissists in America: Real World Denver

2006-11-24T12:35:00.000-08:00

www.lulu.com/abeautifulcow

I know that sounds a little harsh to label these cast members as narcissists when so far we know little about them. But we do know this: They all believe that the whole country should pay attention to them and that they are so important that they need to be filmed all day long so that we know what they're doing every minute of the day. They sure aren't modest. Of course, most narcissistic - okay, debatable - they're just the seven narcissists that were chosen. Probably lots of people in America are more into themselves than this crew. Or not.

The real world almost always casts a bunch of 'types'. They deny this, I know, but nonetheless that's what you get and it's so well known that each cast on the first day tries to figure out what type each person represents. On the first episode they were asking each other who the gay one was. Yes! There's always a gay cast member. If you can think of a recent Real World that didn't have somebody gay, please let me know.

The producers, of course, say that they cast because of who they think will be the most interesting. Alright, but they for sure cast for interaction between the Real-Worlders if not downright conflict. For example, one of the casts had a Mormon girl on. What would that season have been like if it had been seven Mormon girls instead of one? That's right. Dull.

Here's the new Real World Cast.

Jen: On her voice-over Jen introduced herself as a former Oakland Raider's cheerleader which she goes on to explain is the 'most prestigious team in the NFL'. Yeah, right. Everybody in America agree with that? Didn't think so. Besides, I notice that the New England Patriots won the last two SuperBowls (on this list I just looked up. I never watch it). Aren't the Superbowl winners considered the most prestigious?

She's pretty, of course, but way into herself, shallow, and kind of stupid.

Alex: He's already graduated college with a bachelor's degree in psychology. I've got a friend who has a bachelor's in psychology. Know what he does? He's a real estate appraiser and it's not the building's mental health that he's appraising either. Alex seems to be the stock frat boy type - good body, ordinary looks thinks that he's extraordinary. He hooks up (makes out) with the next cast member who is ...

Cotie: I believe I spelled that name correctly. Cotie looks to be like she is the crazy chick in the bunch. Hard to say just from one episode, but stay tuned. I'll bet there's a whole bunch of psycho drama that's going to becoming from her direction. Cotie says her hobby is 'making out'. Mine's writing. Her's sounds funner, but on the other hand I've never caught any diseases from writing, so I'll stick with mine.

Brook: At least I think this one's name is Brook since I can't read my own handwriting too well. Brook says she likes to party. She asked the Alpha Male Black Dude which character she was and he called her 'the Southern Belle'. She's short, dark-haired, looks a little gothy, body looks untoned but not exactly out of shape.

Alpha Male Black Dude: Crap. I didn't write this guy's name down, so I can't tell you who he is. Just go with my description there. This guy said that the first thing he was going to do was unpack a box of Trojans. Nice. From the preview it does look like he gets a bit of trim, so he's not just bragging. He's not the gay guy and has nothing against the gay lifestyle. Why should he? Every gay guy is one less competition for him.

Dave: The other black guy. He's shorter and more ordinary looking and very religious. What is he doing here, you ask? Conflict, Baby, conflict. You got to have somebody in the house to disapprove of what everybody else is doing, don't you? When he finds that the last cast-member is also religious (there's a twist coming) he suggests that they find a church they can go to together. That is until he finds out that ...

Steven: is the gay one. Steven is, in fact, a Southern Baptist and very strong in his faith despite the fact that his faith considers him filled with evil demons and that despite what he thinks, he is a Godless Sodomite. Dave more or less tells him this in very clear terms and this is the first stand off with both guys toe to toe staring each other down.

Steven is blond and muscular in an esthetic way and he does have a bit of the community accent. He intends to be a plastic surgeon.

The Real World House: I kind of like this one for a change. It looks to be in what must be the Denver warehouse district and must be a redone warehouse. It's very spacious and done up in a somewhat tasteful psuedo-Northwoods theme. There's a lot of exposed brick and flowing space except when it comes to the one bathroom and three bedrooms (one 'guest' bedroom). As usual, the house is designed to facilitate interaction so even though the place is a monstrous seven thousand foot cavern everybody can not have their own bedroom and there is one unisex bathroom with multiple sinks, showers and toilet stalls. I would so hate that.

Everybody drinks and everybody drinks a lot and they have a hot tub and people make out. Not religious guy or gay guy, because he has a boyfriend.

Looks pretty boring so far. I'll probably watch, but only when I can't find anything else on the TV. This will for sure not be my favorite Real World season. That is and always will be San Francisco.

Deer Season

2006-11-19T06:18:00.000-08:00

(my books are at:
http://www.lulu.com/abeautifulcow) or Amazon. Check them out when you have time. You can get signed copies on Amazon, by the way)

I was woken by the sound of gun-fire this morning, which made me wonder to myself what it's like to be living in one of those dangerous big cities. Of course, I did live in Minneapolis when it was the most murder-prone area of the country and had the title: 'Murder-apolis'. Somehow, I always still felt safe and wasn't murdered or otherwise assaulted or killed. In fact I never even locked my door. That went for my useless car, too. None of my room-mates locked their cars either, so that led to the only sort-of crime we encountered. One night some dangerous criminal shuffled all of the loose objects from one car to another so that one person's sneakers and change had been moved into another and so on.

Horrors! Even then nobody locked their doors because we weren't so concerned about this happening again. The cars themselves? Forget it! These weren't valuable cars, folks. For awhile I even had the title for mine (an '86 Renault Alliance) in the front seat. I wanted to just get it gone out of my parking lot and my attempts to give the damn thing were frustrated. It kind of started but not reliably and people have standards even for free cars.

The deer population is a bit overpopulated at the moment so if you don't get one (you're allowed three) then you're a real yutz as a hunter. My take on this, since I don't hunt. I just hide in my house and hope I don't get shot. This came about because there was chronic wasting disease and for years there were restrictions allowing the population to grow almost out of control. Deer are hunted during their rut, which means they're all of them out looking for a piece of tail (literally) and just don't care about orange people nearby carrying guns. Or, if they aren't looking for a piece of tail, they're bucks looking for a fight. That's one of the ways you can get one, by the way, you just rub two sets of antlers together and any nearby bucks think there's a fight going on and they want to get in on the action.

FREE CHAPTERS!!!

2006-11-10T12:05:00.000-08:00

It stopped snowing but the road's aren't plowed and it's late in the day. Screw it. Since I have extra time, I'm posting a few chapters.

At one time I had the entire book posted elsewhere and I think somebody from Sunnyville, California read the whole thing on-line. A guy from the Netherlands, too. I visited his site, but it was all in Danish (Well, Duh!)

Here's a picture of my cabin when it's not covered in a foot of snow.

REXROI

The Fraternity has an old tradition that all of the out-going brothers should write down their experiences and important advice in the form of a lesson book for the newer brothers.
Here is a very curious example.

LESSON ONE: A good night’s sleep is very important

There was this dream I used to have at the frat where I would be a soldier who was fighting in a war. And it was a really strange war because the other army never fought back, but instead just stood and waited for us to slaughter them. We had to fight for all eternity, just killing over and over again.

The worst part of this whole deal was that I knew it wasn’t real, that it couldn’t be real and that it was a nightmare. But I could never seem to wake up from it. My whole being was under the command of someone else, but I didn’t know who - except that he was my lord and master.

And I loved him more than anyone or anything else.

I had to do what he commanded - my evil beloved master - no matter how indecent and obscene. More than that, I wanted to obey because serving his will brought me such joy. Night after night I gave my dark Lord what he desired most.

Murder and death were my gifts to him.

LESSON TWO: Assign a designated driver when you go out for the evening

That was the dream I was having; only it wasn’t the dream itself but me dreaming that I was having that dream. So I would wake myself up inside of the dream into another one and I would still be that same soldier fighting in that endless war until I figured out that this, too, wasn’t real - and I would wake myself up again. And I would be in the same horror that I couldn’t ever escape.

It kept going on like that until finally from the depths of my dream within my dream I heard this: “Hey Dude, wake up.”

And I screamed: “Ahhh, a burglar! Oh, don’t hurt me, burglar! I’ve got money; it’s in a sock under my bed.”

Then I opened my eyes and found, of course, that I was not in an unending bloody war but in my frat house bedroom on the third floor, safe and sound - more or less - with Vic, our Newest Fat Guy breathing beer fumes on me as he shook my shoulders. Behind him in the room I could see some of my other fraternity brothers, real unsteady on their feet, looking like gargoyles in the dim light.

“C’mon,” Vic said, pushing at my shoulder. “Get up so we can go get some eggs. We’re all hungry, Little Kid Guy.”

Little Kid Guy.

That was me. That was my nick name in our frat, so called because I was only five two, blond, freckle faced and looking about ten years younger than my true age, which was twenty two. My real name was Gary, but only my family ever called me that - and my girlfriend, Suzie, too. She reserved ‘Little Kid Guy’ for when she was really pissed at me. Like earlier tonight.

I’d taken her to a nice restaurant - the Monte Carlo - really expensive place that was hard to get reservations for, and then in the middle of the meal I had the brazen, bald-faced effrontery to take a cell-phone call. Oh, that was the worst thing in the world! Because I was ignoring her, you see, spoiling our special night, our private time together and for what? Frat business, which set her off even more when she found out. My God, I swear if I’d been standing in front of her making out with her sisters (both of whom were younger and hotter, by the way) she wouldn’t have been so outraged.

I made the mistake then of trying to reason with her, explaining the importance of me taking this call, which was about the party next night that she and the rest of her sorority were planning on attending. Didn’t she want me to make sure that everybody - herself included - had the best possible time? That’s all that I’m doing, Honey, Sweetie Pie, Dearest, Love of my Life, My one and only reason for living, Snookums...

Oh, crap.

Why did I even bother? I should have just shut up; or rather I should have just said how sorry I was and then shut up. But for some reason I didn’t and just went on and on doing the thing all women hate the most more than anything - being logical. My points were clear, concise, and well thought out. The problem was that I was making my case to a woman; and they have a different way of looking at things, you know.

She wasn’t buying it and the more I tried to show her how right I was the madder she got. I mean, how dare I try to make a little sense? How dare I try to put things in perspective for her? How dare I take her our for an expensive night on the town blowing big money to make sure that everything was absolutely perfect? No, no, no, I took a phone call for maybe a maximum of two whole minutes and I was scum.

After I’d said too much - after I realized I’d said too much - it was a pretty cold and quiet dinner and in the end all I got for my money that night was two pricy lobster dinners and a bed to myself - all alone.

My girlfriend Suzie - unfortunately for me - happened to be really hot. She was one of those Scandinavian-looking blondes that’re common here with the pale, pale blue eyes and milky skin. Her overbite might have been a little bit too much - might, but she made up for it with a bust that was surprisingly large for such a tiny girl. She was about an inch or two shorter than me, which didn’t detract at all from her attractiveness, or wouldn’t anywhere else in the world except here in Minnesota where Amazons are the rule for both men and women.

The thing you got to know about all beautiful women is that every single one of them is going to be a pain in the ass. The only questions for you are: When is she going to be a pain in the ass, how much of one is she going to be, and how is she going to do it? Also, all beautiful women have at least one gigantic glaring flaw and, Brother; you won’t have to look very hard to find it.

In Suzie’s case it was her meanness. When I first start dating her, her unrelenting cynicism amused me. Biting sarcasm can be rather fun when you’re not the constant target of it and I wasn’t at the beginning, which changed over time. Believe me. Later on I got mighty tired of it - might-ty tired - but never enough to call it quits because I still liked her a hell of a lot.

So, the evening ended a lot sooner than I expected, and that’s how I came to be the only sober guy at the frat-house at two o’clock in the morning with a gang of sodden buffoons troubling my precious slumber.

One of them had the sense to turn on the overhead light and I sat up in my bed, rubbed at my eyes and scowled real hard at them all.

“Eggs?! What are you boys going to do with eggs?”

Vic squinted at me like that was the dumbest question in the world. “We’re going to eat the eggs,” he said and pushed at my shoulder again. “Hurry up and get dressed, we gotta go.” A shock of his messy brown hair fell into his eyes as he looked around my room. “Where are your clothes, Dude?”

“Jesus, you’re not going to dress me, are you?”

He didn’t say anything and I got worried that maybe that really was his plan. So, I put my feet on the floor and looked around to see who else was with him and saw Skip, Biff, Max, the Old Fat Guy - who was last years fat guy at the frat (but slim now) - and Vinny. Vinny I knew I could deal with because even at his drunkest his mind still worked, somewhat.

“Hey Vinny,” I said. “What is this? I’m trying to sleep.”
Vinny was my absolute best bud in the frat and I knew he would look out for me. He was sort like me in that he was little bit different than your run of the mill fraternity brother. His difference was his heritage, which was half Italian, half Irish and half Korean which meant that he counted as a minority to the University of Minnesota, despite the fact that his eyes were only slightly slanted and most times you couldn’t even tell. He had dark red hair and a devil-like goatee which the girls seemed to like, although they didn’t seem to care for facial hair on anybody else but him.

He shrugged his shoulders and told me. “We need a sober driver, Kid Guy and you’re all we can find. Remember the frat meeting last week? We got too many guys here with too many DUIs and it’s starting to become a problem. Everyone else is already out so let’s get going.”

And that was the last word. Even though Vinny was my best bud, he was also a senior while I was still only a junior. In the frat that meant his word was law. And you know what else? They needed me to look out for them to make sure they didn’t get into trouble, or maybe further trouble - technically that’s what Vinny should have been doing, but it was Vinny so that wasn’t happening. Of course it occurred to me to wonder how these drunken clowns had gotten to where they’d been and back without somebody having already driven drunk, but I wasn’t going to ask.

Instead, I held out my hand. “Keys, someone, I’m not taking my car.”

Vinny gave me the keys to his blue Thunderbird and I dressed, and we all went to our back parking lot, piled in and took off. We headed down University Avenue and it was a really beautiful autumn night with the leaves just starting to turn a golden brown, but not near ready to fall yet. I would have enjoyed the scenery a whole lot if I hadn’t been so grumpy about fighting with my girlfriend and then being shanghaied into chauffeur duty.

The drive to the place they wanted to go to was about twenty minutes through some pretty bad areas of town, and I made sure that the windows were all rolled up and all the doors locked. It wasn’t that I thought that any of the seedy characters lounging at the bus-stops were going to rush our car when we were idling at a stoplight. Rather I was worried that one of these idiots inside the car would yell out something ‘racially insensitive’ at an inopportune time. And that would be trouble, especially for me since I was a small guy.

We ended up in downtown St. Paul, which was pretty dead this time of night except for the remaining bar rush, and a few vagrants and such staggering about. We parked on the street outside a kind of burger joint, the Harmonica Café, which turned out to be near the Mississippi, not too far from the Orpheum Theater and a pretty wooded park. The restaurant was made out in the style of one of those old fashion dining cars, in a sort of shiny art deco style.
The inside was newly redone with about a dozen booths with red Naugahyde, and yellow Formica and about twice as many swivel stools around the main counter in the center. Along the walls were pictures of fifties hot rods, fifties drive in theaters and fifties sock hops, with chrome and splashes of color. The theme was the nineteen fifties, in case you didn’t get it.

In the café that night were maybe about a half a dozen or so customers of the sort who inhabit the night and have no where else to be at two a.m. They had pale skin and dead eyes, these people, and looked as if they’d just stepped out of a zombie movie. Me and my fraternity brothers all sat down on the stools at the front counter while a huge fry cook with a sweat stained paper hat kept his back turned to us, hunching over a couple of hamburgers sizzling on the grill in front of him.

We all sat there together behind this guy and while we sat there I noticed something the other boys didn’t seem to, which was that this happened to be all that we were doing - just sitting there while the fry cook on the other side of the counter wasn’t doing anything at all to help us, but rather seemed too preoccupied to even notice us sitting there waiting for him to decide that we were important enough for him to pay attention to.

The big important fry cook had better things to do, you know. He was busy, and we could just wait until he was ready to notice us.
The clock was situated almost directly over his head above the grill and I watched the clock’s second hand as fifteen seconds went by, then thirty seconds, then forty five and finally a whole minute.

So, I sat there and mused about customer service and what the standard for receiving good customer service is and it’s this: The standard for receiving good service in any place is that you’re supposed to be greeted within thirty seconds - not necessarily served - but acknowledged, greeted, at the very least. It’s only common politeness, you know.

And guess what? We hadn’t even gotten that. No, no. I wasn’t expecting good service here - I’m a reasonable guy - but perhaps some service some time that would have been nice, wouldn’t you think?

Well, I wasn’t going to say anything. From sad experience I knew that it was almost never a mistake for me to shut up when I felt in an irritable mood. More often then not the result of ‘speaking up’ in circumstances like this was only humiliation for myself and later regret and shame when my fraternity brothers retold the story of whatever stupid thing it was that I said and did.

I’d leave it to someone else to get this guy’s attention. Since it hadn’t been my idea to come here in the first place one of the other guys who wanted to eat this food could deal with this, right?

Hey, if they all wanted to sit around in a stale grease pit all night long starving, that was their business, wasn’t it? I had the patience of a saint when I wanted and I’d just sit here and sit and sit like a frozen cucumber for as long as it took them to come to their senses, which they were bound to soon enough. This was their idea in the first place and they sure couldn’t enjoy being ignored like this. Whatever they wanted to do was fine because I was not going to embarrass myself by making a fuss.

I fidgeted in my seat and took a few deep, deep breaths and felt a peaceful almost Zen-like calm come over me.

“Excuse me, Lard Butt,” I said. “Are we invisible or something?”
Okay, so much for Zen.

I mean what the hell? What the hell was that big oaf doing over there, anyways? He had to know we were all here. He had to have seen when we all came into the restaurant. We’d sure made enough noise and you’d think that since his job was to notice the customers who come into his establishment he would.

Right away, the other brothers were all on my case.

“Oh no, Kid Guy, not here.”

“Not again.”

“We can’t take you anywhere.”

And I just looked at them in disgust. “Is it me? Am I the only one that sees that our order is not being taken? I’m ready to order. Is anyone else ready to order? You boys didn’t haul me out of bed to sit in a restaurant and starve, did you? Why the Hell are we here? It sure isn’t for the service, because we aren’t getting any. Are we? You wanted to eat. So, let’s eat already.” I raised my voice. “Hear that Lard Butt? We’re ready to order.”

I would have said more, but Max stopped me. “You can’t address him that way, Kid Guy. He won’t respond.”

“Oh?”

Max shook his head. “Nope: Let me.” He cleared his throat and straightened his shoulders. “Your Magnificent Glorious Omniscient Majesty: May we humbly request your attention?”

It was only then when the short order cook turned around to look at us (taking his time, too) that I got a good look at him. And I’ll say this about him: for a big guy, with an obvious weight problem, he wasn’t all that bad looking. He was kind of youngish, my age maybe, six and a half feet tall or there abouts, dark hair, Roman nose, grey piercing eyes under thick brows, and a cleft in the first one of his double chins. From the front he didn’t look quite so overwhelmingly fat, either, maybe like only two fifty or two seventy. He had on a grease stained apron, with a name tag pinned on it which said ‘Alex’ but I saw that he had written something else in red magic marker on the front of his paper hat.

It said: ‘King of the World’.

“Sergeant Major,” he said to Max. “I see you’ve brought companion soldiers of my mighty army with you. I salute you. I congratulate you.” Then he nodded to each one of my fraternity brothers in line and greeted them with similar titles. Biff and Skip were privates, the New Fat guy was a corporal and Vinny was a Colonel. When he got to me his eyes widened and a sly smile came over his face.

“Ahh, General! At last ... You’ve finally decided to visit.”

LESSON THREE: Never complain at a restaurant until after your food’s been served

I suppose I should have been flattered that this guy considered me a General, while all my other brothers had lesser ranks, but you know what? I really wasn’t. He leaned forward across the counter and supported himself on his hands while staring me in the eyes.
“It’s a great surprise to see you here. I thought you were going out with your girlfriend. Did you have another fight with her, perhaps? You know you should be more attentive to her needs, but none the less, it’s an extraordinary honor to see you here. What may I prepare for you tonight?”

I pulled out one of the menus - which were on metal clips at the counter - and perused it while he watched me.
“Steak and eggs,” I told him and replaced the menu. “And black coffee. Think you can handle that?”

He nodded slightly. “As you wish, General, but you must address me properly. It’s ‘your majesty’.” And then to the rest he asked:

“Are you other soldiers ready with your orders?”

They gave their orders and as they did so, he acknowledged this with the same military rank as before. Only I was a General, which was a curious distinction. Each of the boys, by the way, when they gave their order ended it with ‘Your Majesty’ and then gave me a dirty look. I guess they were all kind of mad because I wasn’t playing along with their game.

Well, I wasn’t going to. They were messing with this guy, and you know what? That wasn’t nice. It was dishonest and I for one wasn’t going to be dishonest.

I shook my head. “No, no, no. I know what you want. I know what you all want and I’m not going to say it.” I looked The King of the World straight into his grey eyes. “Listen: I don’t care if all the other guys feel like humoring you. That’s fine, they can do that if they want, but I’m not going to.”

He cleaned off his metal spatula on the grill edge before answering. “They aren’t humoring me. They call me ‘Your Majesty’ because I am the King of the World.” He tapped his paper hat where those words were written. “And you should also call me that, just as I call you ‘my soldiers’ because you are all in my Secret Army of the Night and with me, you rule the World and do my bidding. You, General, are my right hand man, who will one day lead my army against the farm.”

He didn’t smile or laugh at all as he said this, but kept looking at me steadily for several seconds as I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stiffening.

Oh boy.

I could see how my fraternity brothers would find this guy amusing - he sure was one rare nut, all right. Though, I couldn’t say it was quite as funny to me as it was to them, because this guy was huge and therefore dangerous, more dangerous to me because he was double my size.

“All right,” I said struggling to find some tactful words. “I can see where you’re coming from. What you’ve told me is very interesting. Your view of things is certainly unique to say the least - very unique. Thank you for sharing. Now ... if you don’t mind ... I’d like to share with you: What I think you should know is that I’ve had enough of this, you big jerk. You’re clearly deluded and need some sort of professional help, but I don’t care. That’s not my problem. My problem is that I’m in a restaurant and I’m hungry and I’m a paying customer and I deserve to get some service. So, here’s what I want you to do: you cook my order: Steak and eggs. Cook it now or I swear, I swear to God I’ll call the manager.”

I kept staring him in the eye and heard snickers coming from Vinny on my right.

“Are you going to cook my order?”

“As you wish,” he said. “You’re only making it harder for yourself. Eggs over easy?” He raised a bushy eyebrow and I nodded at him.

“Steak medium rare?”

“Yeah.”

“Thought so.” He turned his back on me and hummed to himself, throwing sizzling things onto the grill while I watched his every move very carefully, just to be sure. I was damned if I was going to let him hock a loogie into my eggs or wipe my toast on some part of his anatomy that I’d rather not think about or perform any of the other little acts of revenge that cooks have for ‘difficult’ customers like me.

I so regretted my little outburst just then. You never, ever want to get people who handle your food mad at you before they handle your food, because that’s just stupid. But somehow that’s exactly what I’d done. Man, If I’d kept my cool - like I should have - I wouldn’t be doing this, standing bleary eyed guard over my meal. And you know what? Even with my vigilance I knew, he’d still probably manage to get some of his DNA in there.

Mmm, yummy.

“I’d take care of that cut on your left arm,” he told me.
I looked at my arm and there was nothing there. “What?”

“Nothing.” He continued humming.

The boys talked more about their night out, as I watched him. They had gone to the usual places, then to a strip club or two, which I chided them on. Because why would they pay just to look at beave when there was so much free around the University? We had a sister sorority, which for all practical purposes was almost exactly like having our own private bordello, except one where we never had to pay - at least not in outright cash, although, over time a sorority girlfriend could get a bit spendy, especially when you were talking about non-monetary factors like dignity and self respect.

When our food was ready, the insane fry cook put our plates in front of us and it wasn’t bad, all greasy and fat and just what you wanted to fill you up after a night of drinking - and no loogies or anything else, either. I checked carefully for that, believe me.
We dug in, finished our meal, paid up and everyone but me merrily thanked The King of the World in the most extravagant terms and they even left him tips. Then as we were all heading out the door the King of the World called out to me.

“Hey, General!”

But I wasn’t going to answer to that, and I continued on my way.
“Gary,” he said. “Gary Gates. I want to talk to you.”
That stopped me short and I turned around. “How do you know my name?”

He smiled smugly. “I’ve been thinking that it’s about time that you got yourself a puppy.”

“What do you mean?” I scratched my head. “A puppy you say? What on earth would I need a puppy for?”

“Puppies are very good companionship,” The King of the World said. “They’re excellent for stress reduction and if you don’t mind me pointing it out to you, you seemed a might edgy when you came in tonight, otherwise I doubt you would have addressed me so insolently.” He shrugged. “But it’s all right. I understand. I forgive you and will not punish you for your transgression, except for some extra monkey dancing.”

He took a moment to ponder on that. “Yes ... much monkey dancing. Perhaps you were suffering from battle fatigue or some such. But, you see, a puppy would take care of that. When you felt unreasonably angry like this, you could just pet your little puppy on the head or play fetch the stick with it and you would feel instantly more relaxed and not feel like you needed to be impertinent to your lord.”

I gritted my teeth. “Thanks so much for the suggestion.”

He smiled crookedly. “You’re more than welcome and I’d take care to put a bandage on your arm so that awful cut heals well.”
“Okay. Whatever.” I let the door slam behind me. “You big Jerk.”
I walked out to the car and examined my arm once again just to be sure. Nope, nothing. Good Lord, why was I even looking? There was no way there could be anything there.

Afterwards while riding back; the boys couldn’t talk about anything except getting the damned puppy. Why it was such an unbelievably great idea, all of a sudden, I don’t know. It was as if they’d been hypnotized or something. They acted like so many overgrown kids excitedly discussing what type of puppy they would get, what tricks they would teach it, who would feed it, who would walk it and so on. Me? I said nothing at all, although I was anti-puppy right from the start.

Now don’t get me wrong: I think dogs are great. After all, who wouldn’t love a creature whose only purpose in life was to do whatever you told it to? Not me that’s for certain, but a fraternity mascot? That was an entirely different matter because it was way too problematic.

First of all, you had to look at who came up with the idea. Hey, shouldn’t that tell you something? Look whose advice you’re taking. Then think about the dog, itself. How fair would it be for some unlucky creature to be put under the care of these boys, who couldn’t care for themselves much less another living breathing creature? Any dog would be better off in a good home with a family and little kids to play with it, not a rowdy group of sociopaths who would probably molest it if they paid any attention to it at all. And most likely this wasn’t allowed at all in the national fraternity charter, either, which I’d be sure to check since the point might already be moot.

All of them thought that a cute puppy would help them out with women, which you got to know was just plain silliness. I mean it might be good for attracting women but why bother? We had all the motivated women we needed in our sister sorority and didn’t need aids like cute furry animals. And hypothetically, say it worked and someone did get laid by use of a puppy, who would she really be sleeping with? Them or the puppy? Did they ever think of that?
I just smiled and nodded at this nonsense, like I should have been doing earlier that evening, like I should have been doing my entire life. My hope was that by staying mum this would die out all on its own and be just one more thing that would be forgotten by tomorrow’s hang over. Hopefully, they would also forget about this little small drama that I was involved in, but you know what? I didn’t think so. Almost certainly I had added to my already miserable reputation and it would be making the rounds before long.
Oh well, I couldn’t do anything about that now.

What I could do was discourage further visits to the fry cook at the Harmonica Café. You never knew what an obviously unstable guy like that might do, although I had some nagging doubts about him and the way he was presenting himself - like he wanted us to think that he was off his rocker.

This ‘King of the World’ acted like a mad man all right and if I were qualified to make a licensed psychiatric diagnosis I would definitely say he was a nut. But he seemed too sure of himself and despite the fact that the crap he was spouting seemed to be genuine lunacy, I was suspicious that maybe he wasn’t as out of it or deranged as he seemed.

Maybe he wasn’t a lunatic at all.

Author's note: That's it for now. That one, and others, are available at:
http://www.lulu.com/abeautifulcow

Gonna Miss You, Bob

2006-11-10T08:25:00.000-08:00

It looks like this is going to be my first snow day here in Wisconsin. I called in to say that I would try to make it later on in the day when it lets up ... but I don't think that's going to happen. Of course, if the East Coast ever got this much snow it would be the 'Blizzard of the Century'. Pussies.

Anyways, since I was home I thought I would turn on The Price is Right with the soon to retire Bob Barker. He'll be turning 83 and he thinks that's plenty old and he's going to hang it up. No, it isn't Bob! Hang in there. I need you at the helm in case I ever have another snow or sick day. God, Bob's been old ever since I was a child. No Bob Barker with Price is Right is unimaginable. Whoever takes over: I will not watch it. It will never be the same.

Back in my day, Bob had only three regular models and he had these gals for decades. They were Holly, the dark-haired girl next door; Diane, the voluptious blonde sex-bomb; and Penny, who was, I don't know, somebody's Mom but attractive in a bland way that never appealed to me. Penny's husband was some sort of spy and she wrote a book about it, which I read. Her husband disappeared under mysterious circumstances and was never heard from again.

As I said, Bob kept these three models on forever even after they started showing their age - and how! After Bob's wife passed on Diane (the sex bomb) took up with Bob. She was forty seven, then - a really hot forty seven with an amazing figure, but when you got in close you could see what years of the California sun can do to a woman's skin. Nevertheless, I would have done her. Like Bob did. The affair ended badly when she sued Bob for sex discrimination. Then Holly gained some weight as a side effect to some sort of medical treatment, she got let go, then she sued, too. I think eventually Penny sued because she was let go, probably just because she was old and no amount of face-stretching could hide the fact.

You know, they really have to give Bob a hell of a lot of credit for giving them a job when their age would have given them a boot out the door anywhere else. Now, his models are just three hot bimbos and I'm pretty sure that if they ever gave him the slightest trouble or put on an extra pound or two he'd give them their walking papers. Pronto!

I sure hope Direct TV doesn't go out. Do you know, Once I was on the phone with these clowns for an hour and forty five minutes and got transferred thirteen times?! Jerks. Let me tell you: call centers are the worst! Their only motivation is to get you off the phone and they don't care how they do it. Period. Of course, I could always switch to DISH but who's to say their service is any better? And cable blows. Any company that has no competition blows and besides, I can't get it out here.

Still snowing. I don't think I'm going to be working today.

Damn.

Not 'Damn' because I don't get to work, but 'Damn' because I have to use a vacation day.

By the way: My books are at http://www.lulu.com/abeautifulcow or Amazon. Evil Super-Villains Need Love, Too has been getting the best reviews. But all of my books are extremely entertaining.

Space Hippies

2006-10-15T05:58:00.000-07:00

Every now and then when I get the chance, I like to check out the Star Trek Slash stories, which are amateur fiction stories that pair various characters from the Star Trek Universe - most often same sex - and then the writers tell stories where these characters have loving/sexual relationships. Kirk and Spock are favorites, although every combination is pretty much present. For the longest time I've been trying to find Wesley/Worf stories, but I think they just must be surpassing sick by so much that they're seldom written.

I can't say that I'm a real 'Trekkie' or 'Trekker' or any such. At best, I'm sort of borderline. I've seen some shows from every series depending on how easy they were to find because some of them (Enterprise for example) were on lesser networks, UPN, now CW I believe, and I just couldn't find them very reliably.

Anyways, it made me think. I can't recall seeing any openly gay characters on any of the Star Trek series. Definitely there weren't recurring ones, although, admittedly, I'm only a borderline Trekkie so there might be a lot I might have missed. Let me know if I'm wrong there.
I can think of two episodes of The Next Generation where it was addressed obliquely. In one Riker falls in love with an alien who is a hermaphrodite, but who can develop either way depending on circumstances. As I recall. So, Riker sort of falls for somebody who is or can be partially male.

Another Next Gen one that sort of addressed this was where Beverly falls for an ambassador who turns out to have a sentient parasite inside of him who is the actual 'person' she's in love with. (A Trill). After much drama the parasite is implanted into another host - a woman this time - and the parasite is quite puzzled why Beverly won't go for it, since 'he' is the same person.
The old Star Trek ... well, just forget it. Through the medium of Science Fiction and the use of heavy handed metaphor Star Trek addressed some of the burning issues of the day, but never it seems was Gay rights addressed. Or maybe they did and I just missed it.

One episode that might be a possible candidate is one where the crew takes on a group of six space hippies. The Space Hippies have stolen a space ship and the Enterprise apprehends them. Of course, the space hippies are all in a band playing out of this world instruments and they take over the Enterprise under the cover of a groovy rock concert. The music just sucks as it always does when fake musicians are part of the story line.

One of the space hippies might have been gay. That's my theory. This guy was wearing a mini-skirt, thigh high go-go boots, a cape and just a touch of tasteful make-up. He was also barechested with some real sexy hairy nipples. And he was real 'friendly' with the young male crewmen if you know what I mean.

In the internet slash universe what was really happening was that behind the scenes everybody was secretly bi-sexual - and how! Oh sure, Kirk was trying to deny his attraction to other men by having multiple romances with multiple hot alien women, but all along it was really Spock and only Spock. And Spock might have the occasional Pon Farr Sweetie but there was only one true love for him, also.

I've never heard that either actors who portrayed Kirk or Spock (Shatner and Nimoy) have publicly commented on the slash stories. They certainly must know about them, but here's a wild thought: Lots of actors are, in fact, gay and hiding the fact. William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy are actors. Do you see where I'm going with this? Is it beyond the realm of reason that two actors - who may be secretly gay, I'm not saying they are, but secretly they may be - in their younger experimental days might have engaged in the very activities that compose the fantasies of all those slash writers.

Okay, I know that's wild speculation. There's no evidence that either one of those men had had a loving or sexual relationships with each other (they are good friends, though).

On the other hand: They've never denied it.

Who is Big Foot?

2006-10-07T16:57:00.000-07:00

**Some of my books are at: Http://www.lulu.com/abeautifulcow **

Without a doubt many Big Foot sightings are, in fact, guys in furry suits like my old college Room-mate Jed. People in the country get very, very bored and dressing up in ape suits to make people believe they're big foot is just one of the things they do to entertain themselves. Another thing, of course, is to drink lots and lots - which, come to think of it, might be another reason people tend to sight Big Foot way out in the country.

So, the number one explanation for Big Foot is: Fakery. And I think I hinted at number two, which would be hallucination or confabulation under the influence of something or other. Crystal Meth is pretty big around these parts so I'm guessing that on your third or fourth day awake with the Meth pipe you might see a lot of Big Feet (and elves and unicorns and hippies in the trees).

Third explanation is mistaken sightings. Something looked like Big Foot to you, like perhaps a bear or a big hairy hunter. Something. But not the 'real' Big Foot.

Number fout on my list is the one given by supposed psychic ghost-talker-to Sylvia Brown. She says that Big Foot is actually an Eastern entity called a 'Chulpa' which is a creature that starts in the mind but is made real through the act of conscious creation. Sounds pretty crazy to me, but I won't dismiss it out of hand. If you know anything about quantum physics you know about the uncomfortable relationship between consciousness/observation and reality. Personally, I think sub-atomic particles are actually Chulpas since quantum physisists look for them so hard, they ultimately create them. My theory, only.

Finally, last theory: There is a real Big Foot and he's really out there. Okay, I don't buy it. You'd think with all the sightings some hunters would eventually stumble onto a dead Big Foot sooner or later. Actually, you'd think they'd come back with Big Foot meat every single hunting trip. But they don't, do they?

Big Foot proponents say that this is because Big Feet bury their own dead. Well, you know what? Even the Mafia doesn't hide their bodies that well. You're saying that these huge clumsy Gorillas are better at it then they are? C'mon!

The Philosophy of the Matrix

2006-09-23T19:14:00.000-07:00

**Some of my books are at http://www.lulu.com/abeautifulcow**

The Matrix trilogy is being shown in it's exhaustive, tedious entirity on Turner tonight. The first one was good, very ground-breaking in so many ways and also very philosophical, but not in a pretentious, solemn goofy way like the next two movies but in a kind of engrossing way. It reminded me very much of Plato's parable of the caves, where what we think is the real world is simply the shadows of the real world, wherever or whatever that is. In the case of the Matrix, the real world that Thomas Anderson (Neo) thinks is real is actually a computer construct of super-intelligent machines who create this illusion while keeping the humans in pods and sucking off the energy they create to power themselves.

It's very attractive because you can for sure enjoy imagining that you are not really you and your hopelessly ordinary life cannot in truth be your 'real' life. No, you must actually be a messianic hero, wouldn't you think? Just like Thomas Anderson actually is.

Well, I have problems with the computer world because if all they want from the human beings is the energy they create, why are they so nice to them? If I were the machines, I would put every last human on a tread mill and I would urge them on with well timed electrical shocks and I would not care one fig that they knew they were actually providing the energy to run us. But that's me. The actual matrix world is in like this dark fog which is never explained, but if the fog is always there, then where does the sunlight come from to grow the plants that are ultimately be used to feed the human batteries? And here's another thing: why not just solar cells? Even if there's a constant fog enveloping the planet, you'd think the machines could just float them or build tall towers or something.

Anyways, first movie I loved, maybe because they were purposely vague about all that stuff and really you shouldn't need to know so much. You should be able to let your own imagination fill in the blanks.

Here's where the Matrix sequels fail and why other sequels also fail. They make the mistake of trying to get you more into their world, which means that the plot has to be more complicated. And more into their world means more into their characters and more characters, so you not only have to keep track of all this extra complicated exposition, but also more about the old characters and then all of the new characters. In Science Fiction this is called an 'information dump' and is usually an awkward device.

When you read my book, Rexroi, see if you can spot where I've cleverly placed my 'information dump'. So far no one has come back to me and complained about that section of the text, so I think I did, in fact, do it rather adroitly. But let me know. (Link at the top of the post).

The Matrix sequels are still rather fun to watch just from the visual aspects. Usually with special effects there's a big drop off in the wow factor when newer and better special effects come out. I remember one of my brothers-in-law telling me that he wanted to see Close Encounters of the Third Kind for the special effects. Tell me if you don't laugh at those special effects now. Yes, Spielberg's a genius when he isn't being annoyingly sappy and sentimental, but Close Encounters of the Third Kind doesn't stand the test of time. The Matrix movie special effects do.

But, the sequels have a steep learning curve. I'm sorry, it's science fiction to start with then when you add dozens of characters with their own obscure sub-plots - I can't do it. I'm just not going to make notes for myself like I did when I read War and Peace. (I finished it in twenty four hours, too, by the way). You're watching a science fiction movie basically because you don't want to use your brain. You want to be entertained and diverted and you shouldn't have to study up for it like the SATs.

The Problem with Werewolves

2006-09-09T16:25:00.000-07:00

**Breakfast with the Antichrist is doing well in the UK. Hey, Americans, you can buy it, too. It's on Amazon. The others are at http://www.lulu.com/abeautifulcow . Not to play favorites, but I'd recommend the last two**

This is sort of a companion piece to: The Problem with Vampires. I think one of the reasons I don't get so much web traffic anymore is because I severed all of my recipricol links when I changed the title of my Weblog to The Golden Age of Dog Biscuits. It sounds friendlier, don't you think? Maybe I'll put that HTML back in just to see what happens. Anyways, I've put some word salad at the bottom of this post to try and attract searchs. The word salad I've selected is from the top ten Tecnoroti searches. If you came here by that way: Please stay and enjoy.

Okay, werewolves: I really enjoyed the first Underworld movie. Yes, it was Kate Beckinsdale that had me most interested and I recommend that movie just on the basis of watching Kate Beckinsdale hopping around in a tight shiny black outfit. It's well worth the price of a rental, believe me. Aside from that, I thought it had a nice involving plot with a beautiful twist at the end. And if they had stopped at that one movie that would have been just fine.

Of course, they had to mess things up with a turd of a sequel. Oh sure, she's still hopping around in a shiny black tight outfit, but there isn't enough of that to make this one worth the rental. The plot is so complicated and obscure that I didn't know who anybody was or why they were doing anything and worse ... I didn't care. I watched the entire thing so that I wouldn't have wasted my money, but really, I shouldn't have wasted my time.

Beware of sequels, that's all you have to know.

The problem with werewolves is this: when they make their transformation into the giant fangspewing monsters they are, where does the mass come from? Suddenly a normal sized man is at least twice his size and strength and the raw material has to come from somewhere. Where? Are they just sort of inflated like balloons and there actually is no more mass but just air? But if they're inflated by air, then where does their strength come from? See. It's impossible.

The second problem is that werewolves apparently go on killing sprees every month and nobody seems to notice. Are we expected to believe that the police are so incompetent that they could miss a twenty nine day murder cycle. Also, the werewolf inevitably wakes up naked somewhere out in the open when he turns back into a human in the morning. Well, the police can certainly not notice repeated violent crimes but a naked man out in the open - they can always catch that guy. (Don't ask me how I know this).

Third, and probably finally, the numbers don't add up. This is somewhat the same problem with vampires, only on a lesser scale. Every vampire victim becomes a vampire and in a geometric progression it wouldn't take long for the whole world to be vampires. Then who's left to suck on.
Same thing with werewolves, though, granted, it doesn't seem that as many people survive the attack to become werewolves themselves. But some do. And those some are going to go out and create a geometric progression of werewolves, who make more, then more, and so on and so on until the whole planet is nothing but werewolves.

What then? It would be slower than the vampires, for sure, but it would still happen.

Heres the word salad I promised.

Lonelygirl15
Steve Irwin
John Tierney
The Unslammed P...
Dreamhost
Pinky
Path to 9/11
Google
Video
Suri
Brazil
9/11
Second Life
Black
Youtube
Top Tags
Microsoft
Steve Irwin
Sex
Search
Online
Bush
web-20
Shopping
Iraq
crocodile hunter
newspaper
Terrorism
Porn
11
web2.0
Top Blogs
Engadget25,379 blogs link here
老徐徐静蕾新浪BLOG21,521 blogs link here
Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things20,495 blogs link here
Gizmodo, The Gadget Guide13,798 blogs link here
Daily Kos: State of the Nation12,928 blogs link here
100 Top Blog
Lonelygirl15
Steve Irwin
John Tierney
The Unslammed P...
Dreamhost
Pinky
Path to 9/11
Google
Video
Suri
Brazil
9/11
Second Life
Black
Youtube
Top Tags
Microsoft
Steve Irwin
Sex
Search
Online
Bush
web-20
Shopping
Iraq
crocodile hunter
newspaper
Terrorism
Porn
11
web2.0
Top Blogs
Engadget25,379 blogs link here
老徐徐静蕾新浪BLOG21,521 blogs link here
Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things20,495 blogs link here
Gizmodo, The Gadget Guide13,798 blogs link here
Daily Kos: State of the Nation12,928 blogs link here
100 Top Blog
Lonelygirl15
Steve Irwin
John Tierney
The Unslammed P...
Dreamhost
Pinky
Path to 9/11
Google
Video
Suri
Brazil
9/11
Second Life
Black
Youtube
Top Tags
Microsoft
Steve Irwin
Sex
Search
Online
Bush
web-20
Shopping
Iraq
crocodile hunter
newspaper
Terrorism
Porn
11
web2.0
Top Blogs
Engadget25,379 blogs link here
老徐徐静蕾新浪BLOG21,521 blogs link here
Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things20,495 blogs link here
Gizmodo, The Gadget Guide13,798 blogs link here
Daily Kos: State of the Nation12,928 blogs link here
100 Top Blog
Lonelygirl15
Steve Irwin
John Tierney
The Unslammed P...
Dreamhost
Pinky
Path to 9/11
Google
Video
Suri
Brazil
9/11
Second Life
Black
Youtube
Top Tags
Microsoft
Steve Irwin
Sex
Search
Online
Bush
web-20
Shopping
Iraq
crocodile hunter
newspaper
Terrorism
Porn
11
web2.0
Top Blogs
Engadget25,379 blogs link here
老徐徐静蕾新浪BLOG21,521 blogs link here
Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things20,495 blogs link here
Gizmodo, The Gadget Guide13,798 blogs link here
Daily Kos: State of the Nation12,928 blogs link here
100 Top Blog

Quo Vadis Astrology?

2006-08-27T07:36:00.000-07:00

My books are at:
Http://www.lulu.com/abeautifulcow Ive been a bit confused and maybe somebody who knows astrology can help me out on this: Now that the astronomical association has been debating what's a planet and what's not, how does that affect the practice of astrology?

Not so long ago, I was looking up my daily horoscope on Yahoo. Whoever their astrologer is, he really sucks. He gets real technical about which planet is going into which house and really obscure stuff like that and I don't think anybody cares. People just want to know if it's a good day to buy Pizza, or whatever your concern is. Anyways, this guy mentioned that the asteroid Vespa was doing something or other and I thought about that.

The ancients who invented astrology for sure did not know that there was a big hunk of rock out there named Vespa. Neither did they know about Pluto or Neptune of any of the other bodies out there that figure into modern day astrology. Were their astrological readings horribly off because they weren't correctly accounting for these unknown bodies?

The astronomy association is split on what should or should not be a planet. Right now it looks like if it's round, it orbits the sun, and it's not somebody else's moon it's going to be a planet. The problem is that they've since discovered other bodies that fit that definition and we could end up having as many as twelve or more planets. So, what it looks like they're going to do is come up with a category of second class planets which Pluto would be demoted to.

The new class of second class planets would be called Dwarf planets or perhaps planetoids. The term 'Pluton' has already been thrown around, but no astronomer much liked the idea except for the one who came up with it.

One of the new possible planets would be called Xena and is located out in the Oort Cloud and is larger than Pluto and it's moon Charon. There may, in fact, be many such types of bodies out there and who knows? There might be ones as big as the Earth or bigger. Why shouldn't there be?

Do astrologers have some similar association as the astronomical association? And how do they affect each other? The astronomers don't believe that astrologers exist even though the astrologers were the orginal astronomers. I think the astronomers want to disassociate themselves from their roots on this one. But quite clearly the astrologers do asknowledge the astronomers as witnessed by my yahoo astrologer. I think they want to cover themselves as much as possible with the stink of science, if they can.

It's always been a sore point between the two how exactly the planets or planetoids or dwarf planets or asteroids effect our daily lives. It's not gravity or magnetism or anything that's measurable, but nonetheless whether we like it or not, they still might. Just think about centrifugal force. Doesn't that exist because there is something far away and scientists are at a loss to explain that one. In the meantime, I'm going to continue to check my daily horoscope. But not at Yahoo, because that guy sucks.

**You might have noticed that I've highlighted a number of words. I'm seeing if that increases my hit count. Frankly, I don't think it will. But if you got to this through a search engine: Please read my books. They're very entertaining.**

Waiting for Godot and MidEast Peace

2006-08-11T17:53:00.000-07:00

**((My books are at http://www.lulu.com/abeautifulcow))**

I've noticed that I've been getting these spam e-mails with these brilliantly obscure tag-lines which make me click in just to see what they may be. Also, these messages will have a word salad at the bottom - I'm guessing to attract the search engines in case somebody just happens to type in some of the obscure listed words.

Well, hey! Two can play at that game, can't they? So, you will find at the bottom of this entry some of the afore-mentioned word salad that I copied directly off of my spam. Feel free to ignore it and if you did happen to be looking for information on: beggar girls in non-Tuscan Badger boats, I apologize. I'm sorry I tricked you, but now that you're here please read on. This will so much be worth your while.

I was taught the existentialist play Waiting for Godot three different times in college at Minnesota in three different classes. Each time I learned a different perspective on the play, in other words in each of these classes I learned a different way it sucks. If you don't know the play, you don't want to know it. It is a play about 'waiting' (well, duh) where a couple of bums stand around a tree talking, then some other people and a pig come by and they talk. End of Act I. The bums talk around the tree some more, the people and the pig come by and they talk. Godot, who they are all waiting for, never shows up. End of Act II. Brilliant! It's brilliant because between Act I and Act II a leaf from the tree (which is symbolically the tree of life) falls. Amazing! Do you see it? Do you see how incredible that is?

Well, three different professors at Minnesota did and I got to benefit from their insight. Anyways, it's not an entertaining play. Go see Spamalot! if you can. That's an entertaining play, this just isn't and never will be even if it has Robin Williams in it. He's a Julliard trained actor and his judgement of what's good isn't always the best (Patch Adams, Centerniel Man).

The last time was at a Humanities class that I never had much respect for. It was one of those liberal arts distribution requirements (Generals, they're also called) and I was taking it because I had to. As I recall, I signed up for this at the end of two weeks, so I don't know what was taught during those first two weeks and combined with not having any respect for the class I pulled out a 'D-'. A 'D-' that counted towards graduation, thank you, so it was worth my time and the grade didn't pull my GPA down much because it didn't have too far to fall.

One of the books I had to read was by entymologist (bug doctor) E.O. Wilson who theorized that humans, like every other animal, do things for the sole purpose of spreading our particular genes. And suppressing everybody else's genes, natch. This is much like the bugs do, and E. O. Wilson drew parallels between human beings and bugs and other creatures. One of the comparisons was in Religion. You didn't know ants have religion? According to E. O. Wilson they do. He didn't specify who or what they worship, but if I had to guess I would say their God must be a combination of sugar and poo.

Religion in this scenario is the mechanism for species to act to benefit other creatures who share their genepool when such actions might not benefit the individual of the species. Aha! Now we get to the MidEast. What are suicide bombers doing? They're killing themselves to benefit (how, I'm not sure) others who share their gene pool (Arabs) while eliminating those who do not share their genepool (Jews).

One of the symptoms of Temporal Lobe Epilepsy is religious ecstacy or excessive religiousity. The neurologist belief that this is because the area of the brain that is responsible for processing that area of human experience is overly stimulated. Neurologically, they are creating the feelings of religiousity through their disease. Neurologists say that, I don't.

It would hard to believe that God truly has told the Muslims that they should have the Holy Land while telling the Jews the same thing. He's got a sick sense of humor if he did. And if he really did tell one side that they were his true one and only, how come he never bothered to tell the other side that they weren't the chosen ones? I'm excepting all the Christians here because our possession of the Holy Land was pretty brief before we were sent packing with our templars between our legs.

So, after asking themselves that question each side should ask themselves this: God (or Allah) set the Arabs and the Jews both on the Earth for a reason. He's probably angry that he's being thwarted when they insist on taking each other off of the planet. God must have had a purpose for each one of his creatures and it wasn't to stand in front of a bomb.

Okay. Here's the word salad. Enjoy.

beggar girl Non-tuscan honey badgerboat crane tax list by-timeself-inclusive addition axiom Four-powersoft-throbbing summer tanager nibby-jibbyround-edged wall cabbage wonder-excitingdoor spring scroll front argan oildivision sign brush cherry white-barredself-dispatch axle seat heat spotslender-ankled power relay courtesy lightsuave-looking prosecution-proof popcorn flowerMoor-lipped Labrador feldspar half sistertongue worm pony grass grass-carpetedall fives viridine yellow oat grindertail bay knob-billed gazelle brownrate-raising till alarm flame-hairedheaven-sweet grass plover layer cake

The Solution to Mid-East Peace

2006-08-03T18:31:00.000-07:00

**You can buy my books at http://www.lulu.com/abeautifulcow***

The Prime Minister of Iran has just enunciated the way to peace in the Middle East and it's so simple and easy that I've been slapping my forehead all day long. The answer is: The total eradication of Israel. Now, how come no one thought about this one before? It's so easy. Four million human beings need to disappear off of the planet and the problem is solved. There might be some technical bugs to iron out on this one, like how do we get a heavily armed and combat ready nation to agree with this - but I'm sure that Ahmadeenajad et al. already have those little glitches solved.

But I wonder ... if you look at it that way: Wouldn't the total eradication of Iran and Syria work just as well? All that would be required is that you take Iran and Syria's plans for Israel, cross out the word 'Israel' and substitute those two nations and Voila! There you have it. Peace in the Middle East. And I'm sure Iran and Syria would think it's fair since that's what they had planned for Israel and sauce for the goose and such.

It does kind of amaze me that the Prime Minister of Iran did say this in all seriousness. Arab nations don't understand why the United States won't sign onto genocide and religious extremism. After all, both have been part of our history so we must look like quite the hypocrites after our country was founded courtesy of the native populations on two continents pretty much disappearing. However, most of native Americans (North and South) did perish because of infectious diseases spread by Europeans and not by active aggression and slaughter. I know, they're just as dead and that might be a distinction without a difference. Still ...

The Arab argument, as I understand it, is that the Arabs should control the lands that they acquired during the Mulim age of conquests. Therefore, since the Jews and Christians who were occupying the Holy land when they were conquered don't belong there, because the Moslems got rid of them and it should be theirs. That goes for parts of Spain, too, by the way, which partially explains the Spanish train bombings.

The sticky argument always comes down to who was there first, and you know what? It kind of doesn't matter. You have to deal with who's there now. They might have gotten there by shifty dealings and naked aggression, but they aren't going to leave no matter how guilty you make them feel. Where are they going to go, after all?

Think about America. Columbus came and brought disease and slavery to the New World and I can for see how that could be considered a raw deal. Yes, I sure feel guilty about what some people who sort of look like me did five hundred years ago and for pretty much ever after that. And you know what? I'm not going anywhere and neither is anyone else who sort of looks like me.

I wish Israel would stop beating the crap out of Lebanon because I just filled up my gas tank not too long ago. My sympathies are all with them since I don't believe your attacker has the right to dictate to you how you choose to defend yourself from their aggression. If you want somebody off the planet, tell them so, then take actions to make it happen can they really be blamed for wanting you off the planet, also? I don't think so.

Hezbollah and Israel is that Hezbollah is targeting civilians purpose and Israel inadvertantly. Yes, you're still just as dead no matter what was in the heart of the person who sent the bomb that killed you. So, Israel may be slowly disappearing off of the face of the Earth but my money is still on them and if any country leaves the planet it won't be them - at least not with a few others leading the way.

Saint Mel, the Insane

2006-07-15T19:50:00.000-07:00

**My books are at http://www.lulu.com/abeautifulcow**

By all accounts, Mel Gibson lived the Hollywood lifestyle when he was in his prime - booze, drugs, and lots of women. I'm pretty sure that he was married, too, and in the process of having the many kids that a Catholic is expected to have. Then he cleaned up his act, became a good Catholic and now can tell us all how we should live our lives.

Thank you, Mel. I would like to know how to use drugs, drink and cheat on my wife (when I get one). Your experience will prove very valuable to me.

But I was thinking ... it looks like his years of bad living left him with a tast for the kinky stuff. Like especially the S and M. I'm thinking of two movies that he had a hand in here, Brave Heart and The Passion of the Christ.

First BraveHeart. Braveheart was the story of Scottish Patriot William Wallace who opposed the British many years ago and led troops into battle against them, and ... I don't know. Apparently the movie wasn't very historical so I couldn't tell you what actually happened as opposed to what St. Mel says happened. As I understand it, the dying British Monarch did not actually throw his son's Gay lover off of a tower and William Wallace didn't impregnate the wife of the gay prince. Whatever.

At the end of Braveheart William Wallace is being slowly tortured and executed by an evil inquisitor who wants him to say that the British King is wonderful, which will earn William Wallace a quick death as opposed to the long drawn out one we are shown. This is BS because they weren't going to shorten the program one bit no matter what you said. Treason against the crown was the same thing as treason against God, because the Monarch ruled by divine right. The execution started with a half hanging, then they disemboweled you, then they burned your bowels, then they drew and quartered you.

Mel's right then when he showed Wallace being half hanged and and disemboweled, however ... William Wallace never shouted out: 'Freedom!' which caused the angry and frustrated evil inquisitor to chop off his head. Didn't happen. And what on Earth would William Wallace have meant by that even if he had yelled that out? Scottland wasn't going to go to a system of representative democracy with a bill of rights and all that. At best they would just exchange one monarch for another who lived closer to home, but most every person would still live a course, brutish oppressed life.

The Passion of the Christ, you might say, was historical especially with the depiction of the Roman method of execution. And if you accept that the gospels are historical (many dispute this) then it was absolutely historical, even to the language that might actually have come out of the mouths of the people involved. There wasn't a creepy figure representing Satan mentioned following Jesus around, but maybe none of the disciples got around to writing about that.

The truly disturbing part about both of these movies is the almost gloating way they document the torture and suffering of the protaganists. I was definitely left with the feeling that Mel was just getting off on showing all of this blood and gore. I remember in Passion of the Christ where the Roman whipper was selecting which instrument of torture he would use on Jesus and he held up this big club that had sharp spikes coming out of it and leered over it almost. Then he selected the flagellum (the whip with flesh ripping spurs) and he tested it on a table causing it to splinter - just to let us all know what it could really do. Of course, he's just laughing sadistically as he does his job, but I have to wonder about that. I mean, whipping people is his job. Even if you enjoy your job a whole bunch you don't laugh sadistically all day long as you do it, do you? Why would this guy?

Mel made a lot of money out of that last movie, and supposedly he has more Biblical epics lined up to film. But do we really need to see them? There really aren't stories that are so interesting or dramatic as that one, are there? But maybe he'll make a sequel to Passion of the Christ. Jesus did rise from the dead, after all, so the story hasn't been entirely told. Though, I'm wondering how Mel will gore that one up. Well, I'm sure he'll find a way.

Pay Attention to that Man Behind the Curtain

2006-07-09T10:35:00.000-07:00

**My books are at http://www.lulu.com/abeautifulcow**

The Republican administration would like you to believe that the most pressing issues that are facing this country are illegal immigration, gay marriage, and flag burning. They're like bad magicians trying to mis-direct you from the hand that actually has the coin. Excuse me, when you fueled up at the pump and paid a dollar more for a gallon of gas then you did last year were you really thinking about how incensed you were that people of the same sex could wear gold rings in on their left hand in ... let's see, exactly one state?

Or perhaps did you think that your wages in your non-border state were being depressed because of competition from illegal immigrants? Don't tell me that not raising the minimum wage holds down wages because even though it does - that hurts business! And flag burning must have a constitutional amendment to stop it! Cross burning is still okay because that's free speech but flag burning must be stopped because that's ... well, free speech but unpatriotic free speech and brother, we have a patriot act so that by law you have to be a patriot (as defined by the current administration).

The hell of it is, the entire media is pointing out how the administration and the Republicans are trying to change the subject from the ones that they don't want you to think about. Like Iraq. Like gasoline prices. Like the growth of poverty. Like the grotesque budget deficit. Like global warming. Like the healtcare crisis. Like ... oh, there are so many more things that we should talk about before we go back to thosed tired 'energizing the conservative base' issues.

Don't they see how they're being used? Hear this conservative base: If the Republicans actually cared about these things they would have done them, already. They control congress, they control the senate, they pretty much control the courts. The president has vetoed absolutely nothing that has crossed his desk. It's been six years that they've been in charge; they only pretend to care when it's election time, but they don't. They want you to watch their shiny, phoney social issues.

In the movie The Wizard of Oz, the final scene has Dorothy (and Toto, too), the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman in the Wizard's great hall. The Wizard is represented by a big giant head super-impsed on great clouds of smoke and lightening. As the Wizard is bellowing at them, Toto runs away and pulls away the curtain from a small alcove to reveal a little man furiously pulling levers while speaking into a huge tube. The little man looks startled, pulls the curtain back in position and the Wizard say: "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!" Which, of course, they very wisely don't.

That's advice we should all ignore. Please, do pay attention to that man behind the curtain. Pay attention to what they don't want you to look at. Those are the secrets that need to be reveale and that's what we need to be talking about.

More Re-Spamming: It's really Fun!

2006-07-01T08:00:00.000-07:00

This is my re-spamming message below.

'Thanks!

My books are at http://www.lulu.com/abeautifulcow

Steve'

Re-Spamming is possibly not my invention but it's a really fun activity and I highly recommend it. If you have something to sell - and who of us doesn't? Then simply reply to your spamm e-mails with your own advertisement for whatever you've got that you want to unload. Here's the thing: There are real people somewhere out there on the other end of that spam and at some point a 'real' person will have to look at it. They buy things, too, don't they? Maybe they want to buy your stuff.

And you're not imposing on them at all because they e-mailed you in the first place and they wanted to hear from you! So, you're not being (possibly) intrusive like they were.

Okay, I don't believe any of them actually have bought one of my books, although they should because every one of them is entertaining - but, start your Steve Sommers library with one of the Lulu books first.

So far, I've gotten three responses to my re-spamming. The first was from a man who said he would tell his friends with children ... I count that as a positive. The second was actually a response to the blog about the respamming. It was from a guy for payday loans who seemed a bit hurt that I was doing this, being critical of the way he was doing business. The third was just
a response to the connection where I could opt out of their spamm.

I re-re-spammed! Oh, that was so sweet. After all, instead of just giving me the option of opting out, why didn't they not send it to me in the first place? Problem solved, wouldn't you say?

Oh well. I can't really say why advertisements via e-mail seem so much more intrusive then other kinds of advertisements. We watch TV and that's alright, or the radio. Every day stuff comes in the mail and just as fast it goes into the garbage and that's alright, too. E-mail (and telephones, too) are more private, I think. You want to use both for your own business and didn't purposely expose yourself to these ads.

They must work, I'm guessing. If they didn't my yahoo bulk mail wouldn't be filled with their stuff. Like most people, I have a few mail boxes; the first one that I seldom ever use now has 20,577 e-mails (I just checked). Yahoo empties it every thirty days so there are a hell of a lot of people spending a hell of a lot of money and getting nothing back at all.

I only ever bought once. It was for business cards and I wanted some business cards and they were cheap. So, there you go. They got some of their money back for their trouble. But the rest of them? Nope.

Speaking of which, since I do have so many spamm e-mails that need re-spamming, I better get to work. Just in that one mail box I have over twenty thousand people I can annoy. One of them must like science fiction.

Re-Spamming

2006-06-25T08:17:00.000-07:00

Probably I'm not the first person to come up with this idea, but it's a really fun one. Lately, I've been getting a lot of these E-mails with real enigmatic subject lines, like this latest one: 'Conscious approvingly'. And these enigmatic subject lines are matched with real persons names (Bert Lucero) so even though they are appearing in my yahoo bulk folder I still wanted to check them out - the first couple of ones at least and then I got wise.

I'm thinking that the whole deal is precisely that, to make you wonder what the hell 'Conscious Approvingly' means and then you open up the e-mail to find out. It's day trading, that one. There was absolutely nothing about consciousness or approval and Bert Lucero didn't even send that one. I know, there is no Bert involved with any of this; he's entirely fictional.

But here was my brainwave: I've got something to sell (my books) and they've got an e-mail address and at some point a real person will look at my reply. Voila! That's a list I can use to interest people in my books. Maybe they won't be all that interested in clicking through but guess what? I'm not all that interested in day-trading and I opened their stupid E-mail so ... fair is fair. You wasted a few seconds of my time and I will waste a few minutes of yours.

It's just too bad that the people whose time is being wasted aren't really the ones who are ultimately wasting my time. No, they're just some lowly, poorly paid humps who are earning a living. But my books are fun and interesting so it actually is well worth their time to click on through and they will be well rewarded when they buy and read them.

When I reply to these Spam E-mails Yahoo will usually give me a code to type in as an anti-spam measure, so really I'm actually not spamming anybody since I'm not doing it in bulk and the original spammers actually solicited a reply from me, which counts as a response to them even if I'm never, ever going to buy jack from them. Nope, not ever.

About half the time I get the Yahoo message that says: 'Daemon failure message not delivered' or something like that. Oh well, at least I tried.

I got one response from a real live human (yes, they exist in Cyberspace!). He must have gotten my re-spamming right then, because his e-mail came back within about five minutes. He said that he would forward the address because he knew some people who had 'children' in that age range. Oh boy. I rated these books as teen and above so I hope he doesn't think this is for anybody who doesn't have pubes, but I wasn't being misleading so ... it'll be okay. Nobody's morals will be corrupted who doesn't want them corrupted.

I'm going to continue re-spamming because even though the response is quite limited (one) it is rather satisfying to take up arms against the unwanted e-mail that show up in my bulk folder.

Speaking of selling: Oh please, check out my books. For some reason my link bar sometimes goes way to the bottom and not to the right so, please find it and click on my books and get one. You'll be so happy you did.

And tell your friends, too.

Sick Day

2006-06-20T13:20:00.000-07:00

Here's the thing: We all know that there's a certain amount of discretion in the use of a sick day. I could've made it to work today if somebody had put a gun to my head. Perhaps, I would not be at all productive, but I could have done it if it was that important.

After all, you say, Steve is well enough to sit at a computer and type, doesn't that mean that he should be well enough to sit at his desk and do whatever it is that he does? Well ... not really. But I still feel a bit guilty, a bit unmanly. Conan would have made it to his job, wouldn't he have?
Am I less manly than Conan the Barbarian?

Wait, wrong question.

Anyways, the flu's been going around the office and it's my turn.

I spent a lot of my time today flat on my back playing Resident Evil 4 - Awesome Game! That is: it's awesome after you get through it at least once and have the special Infinite Rocket Launcher. Once you have the infinite Rocket Launcher you can cruise through pretty much any situation. The one exception is that you can't kill the bad guys if they're too close to you, otherwise you get a lot of backflash and it takes a whole bunch of your life away.

Before this, I would get stuck at certain points and give up for days or weeks. The problem was never knowing what to do - there are cheats and walkthroughs for that - the problem is doing what you have to do. Situations that require quickness, dexterity and coordination just stymie me. For example: At the very end of the game there's a point where the huge boss is attacking you and eyes pop open on various parts of this creatures anatomy and you have to shoot the eye before it closes again then run up to the boss and stab at a parasite on its back.

Oh, that's just hellish and I almost gave up at that point, because I'd done almost the entire game and there was nothing left to see after that, so what was the point? At best I would win myself a long cut-scene and that's it. I gave up on Resident Evil Dead Aim before finishing the final boss which was a huge creature with heads popping in and out of it's body and you had to shoot those before it got to you. I never could do that.

Resident Evil 4 has a complicated plot (and that's stretching the word, believe me) and some hilariously mistranslated dialogue. At various points the villains - about five of them, I think - will have you cornered in a cut-scene at their mercy, then ... just walk off. For no reason. And speaking of dialogue there's only one way any line is delivered: sarcastically. And all the villains giggle when they do something diabolical - of course. The hero really should have more of a sense of humor about this all.

Never mind, the plot holes are many and ridiculous and that's not why this game is awesome. It's awesome because of the graphics. If I could just go through this world and look around I think it would be a great game. The monsters jumping out at you are even kind of a distraction but now with all my weapons at max and the infinite rocket launcher I'm running out of room in my satchel.

Oh, and please buy my books. They're really wonderful and you can get to them just by clicking on the link to the right ... go ahead ... try it out.

See how easy it is.

Mrs. Zarqawi

2006-06-09T17:14:00.000-07:00

You don't hear to much about Zarqawi's wife, do you? I know he had one, but the news doesn't say anything about her other than she was married to him and that's it. Probably she was grief stricken at his death, though I've got to say: he couldn't have been much of a husband. He wasn't all that good looking, he was chubby with bad teeth and a bad complection and he wasn't too tall. Maybe Mrs. Zarqawi thought he was 'cute' but you know what? The guy was no dream boat for certain.

And he was never around. He was always away from Jordon killing people elsewhere. Sure, he came home every now and then to bomb hotels but most of the time he was 'masterminding' the horrible ends of people who had a different philosophy/religion then he did. You know, that might have been a blessing for Mrs. Zarqawi because the guy sure wasn't the master of charm. You never saw him smile much, not even when he had successfully murdered scores of innocents. He must have had what passes for charisma in terrorist circles but how hard can that really be?

Do you wonder how they met? Were they both perhaps at a falafel shop both reaching for the cucumber sauce when their eyes met and she just fell for the souless unsmiling creep? Probably not. This is the MidEast and almost certainly there's was an arranged marriage and she didn't have so much of a say in her future spouse. In fact, I dare say that if he hadn't had a wife assigned to him he'd have a pretty hard time picking up chicks on his own. He doesn't look like he had 'it'.

When he was away from his wife for so long what exactly do you think he did for romance? This was years that he was absent from his marital bed and a man has needs, doesn't he? Maybe he had a girlfriend but more likely ... boys. Zarqawi probably had a young terrorist in training who looked up to him and admired the courageous and dashing monster that he was.

Well, I guess that's all speculation. He ended his life as a martyr devoting himself to what he believed was God/Allah's will. So, in the Muslim scheme (or the scheme of some Muslims) he is in paradise with his seventy two virgins in a garden eating melons and listening to beautiful music. When Mrs. Zarqawi dies I'm not sure whether she joins him in his paradise as his seventy third partner or if she goes to a separate paradise and gets her own seventy two play mates. Whatever happens, I'm sure she's a whole bunch happier that for now she isn't going to have this bum sharing her bed ever again.

And that's got to be paradise for her.

Nature Vs. Nurture: Why is Damien so Evil?

2006-06-02T21:27:00.000-07:00

The new Omen movie is coming out on June sixth, making the date written in Arabic numerals as 6/06/06, which is sort of, but not quite the number of the beast in the book of Revelations. Back in the day when Revelations was written (First Century Rome) letters substituted for numbers so that a word also had a numerical value because letters were interchangeable with numbers. Pretty neat, huh? The problem was that it depended on what language you were doing it in, and for all you Apocalypse nuts out there - none of those languages was twenty first century English.

The Omen was a movie that really, really didn't need to be remade. The first Omen, I recall, was sort of scary for its time and kind of a ground breaker with its use of cinematic techniques. Now, unfortunately, that ground has been broken and it's just trite. The story's the same: Damien is taken in as the adopted son of an American politician in England and he seems to develop horrible supernatural powers and he has the '666' birthmark hidden in his hair. He must be stopped or else he will grow up to be the Antichrist (I think) and bring forth the Apocalypse and awful stuff.

My question is simply: Why is Damien so evil? It can't be nurture because his adopted family does a satisfactory job of providing him a proper upbringing. Of course, many respectable families have children that turn out horrible through now fault of their own, and a lot of famililes that look respectable really aren't. So, we can't let them totally off the hook, but I think the point of the movie is that Damien's father is really the devil - so it's all in the genes. Wouldn't you think?

But if it's in the genes, then Lucifer could only provide half of those genes, meaning that Damien can only be half pure evil, because who was his mother? In the movie, I think he was born from a wolf or something, but he doesn't look half-wolf at all. The wolf, I believe, must have only been a surrogate mother and the real mother was somebody else. That person must be a mystery, but still, whoever the Mother is she can't be pure evil because the Devil is already pure evil, so at best she can be only partly evil and Damien must have some good in him being a sort of half-breed.

Supernatural creatures sure tend to lose a lot when they translate into the real world. They can usually move things with their minds by staring at it real hard, but they can't move much. In fact, they'd all be better off with handguns then with their faulty telekinetic powers. And beings like the incarnated son of the Devil are in human form and have human frailties. In other words, they have to poop. How frightening is the most powerful demonic man on Earth when he has to run off and take potty breaks? Not very, I would say.

In the Omen series Damien assumes his full power when he's an adult in his thirties. The thrill of these movies, if you're well versed in Christian lore, is that it might be kind of true. There might an Antichrist out there growing up in obscurity but fated to take over the world and bring forth Armageddon. However, if you're one of the lucky true believers you'll be raptured up into the sky before all this happens. For the rest of us - if you go by the Omen movies - we have about thirty or so years until this all happens, and I don't know about you, but that's plenty of time for me.

**Check out the Links to the right to find both my books**

How to Get your Puppy to agree with Everything You Say

2006-05-28T11:13:00.000-07:00

Training dogs to do silly things is a sometime hobby of mine when I have time on hand and a convenient puppy, too. This trick is one that I take quite a bit of joy in, but it was also surprisingly difficult to figure out how to get a puppy to do it like I wanted. The trick is to get the puppy to nod it's head 'Yes' to any question that you ask it.

The first thing you need is the correct treats to bribe your puppy with. It's best to have what's called a 'food motivated dog'. That's usually never a problem since every single one I met was very motivated by food. For treats, I believe in simply getting a different type of dog food then their daily fare and using that; maybe go a little higher end on the 'treat' dog food, something a little tastier and meatier than usual but you really don't have to get too extravagant. What makes the treat rewarding for the puppy is simply you and the way you act.

With your treats handy, sit the puppy down so that it's on it's stomach with it's paws in front of it and it's head up. It's very important that it be in this position so that the only motions it can make are with its head - only. Hold the treat up to it eye level with one hand, with your other hand near the floor. When your puppy is watching it steadily, you ask your question, making sure to raise your voice at the end. Usually my question is: "Are you a smart Girl/Boy?". Then I wiggle the fingers on the hand I have near the floor. The puppy will look down at that, look up towards the treat again, and it's just done the trick. It's nodded its head 'Yes' in response to your question.

Praise the puppy as you give it the treat, showing how happy you are with it. Then repeat this sequence until the puppy stops looking for the wiggling fingers near the floor and nods entirely on its own.

Two things that will not work, by the way, are trying to lead the puppy's head by moving the treat up and down, or physically moving its head up and down yourself. Believe me, both of those strategms are just wastes of time.

The puppy will eventually start nodding its head to any question you ask it, since it will figure out that the main cue is your voice going up at the end of the question. At this point, you can ask your puppy anything at all and it will whole heartedly agree with you - just as long as you keep giving it treats for agreeing with you.

Celebrities Know what's Best for You

2006-05-23T16:22:00.000-07:00

We're all getting used to the sight of Irish Rock Star Bono of U2 parading the globe in the company of serious men who take him very seriously. The present US Secretary of Commerce, John Snow, and a former one, Paul O' Neil, both give him high marks for his intelligence and thorough grasp of world wide economics. Right now, several African nations are prospering after having their international debts relieved as a result of Bono's promotion of this solution. So here's the question: Why Bono?

Yes, he knows what he's talking about, for sure. But so do any number of gray un-dashing economists and world leaders. Nobody was making a ruckus when they said the exact same thing supported by graphs, and facts and figures, and PHDs. No, what is took was a sexy rock star to make this whole business look sexy and suddenly everyone's interested - especially the teen-age girls, because if Bono says it: It's hot.

Trooping around not far away from his is the gorgeous and alluring actress Angelina Jolie. The pregnant Mrs. Pitt is the UN Goodwill ambassador who has been touring impoverished areas promoting - I don't know, non-impoverishment. It doesn't matter so much because she is so beautiful to look at that she could be promoting plague and eating dirt and I'd still pay attention. You would, too, I think. It matters little to us that a couple years back she was wearing her husband's blood around her neck as jewelry and tattooing every inch of her skin. Now she's a noble madonna about to give birth to the most blessed child since you-know-who.

For years Oprah Winfrey has been telling people what she thinks they should read. Oprah is an amazing woman and her ability to tell a story through the media is unparalleled. She is a gazillionaire but is that why we assume she has literary taste? If being rich automatically endowed you with taste, then Saudi Sheiks would be the most tasteful men on the Earth, and they really aren't. As far as I know Oprah does not have a literature degree or and English degree and I don't even know that she reads any more than the average Joe on the street. Are we to assume that because we like Oprah we'll also like what she reads? Does anybody seriously need Oprah's help at the bookstore?

My pal Tom Cruise made a lot of enemies when he criticized the use of antipsychotics for the treatment of post-partum depression. He may be right, and there's a good case to be made for the overuse of these medications by the medical community. Tom's simply not the man to make the case. As he lectured today show's Matt Lauer, Matt did not know the history of anti-depressants, but Tom only knew one side of the history and he has no medical degree whatsoever. If I recall correctly, he's a high school drop-out. Not once did Matt Lauer stop to point this out to the TV audience because he knew what we all know: Tom Cruise's opinion is important because his movies bring in tens of millions of dollars at the box office.

It's painful when actors I respect for their acting speak up and say stupid things - well, stuff I disagree with. Charlton Heston gave one of my favorite performances in planet of the Apes, but I absolutely winced when he became President of the National Rifle Association. A brilliant actor was saying some remarkably un-brilliant things and it cheapened my appreciation of the great acting he'd done. I mean, C'mon, Bright Eyes, you don't even know what you're talking about with gun control. Just scream out about the maniacs who are blowing it all up and leave it at that.

Two comedians who used to be funny - used to - have become political hacks of the worst kind. One is Dennis Leary and the other is Al Franken who have each of them taken up positions on the far right and the far left respectively. Both of them are so sour and didactic that it pains me to listen to either of them, forget about belly laughs, because there's not a one left with either of them. They were both guys I liked because they were funny, but I don't any longer because the rhetoric they spought can be found anywhere and done better than they do it.

When entertainers run for office, like Reagan, they truly have a legitimate forum for their views. Vigo Mortenson condemning the war in Iraq while wearing an elf suit is not legitimate. Arnold Schwartzenager winning the governorship of California and having his say is. All politicians come from the citizenry and when the citizenry gives them their vote that means that we also are telling them that we're giving them the right to speak up. Now, Arnold sacrificed the remnants of a fading movie career so it's questionable what he gave up to run California, but we should listen to him now more than we ever should have when he was in a terminator movie.

For the resto of you celebrities who are too lazy to step into the political arena (not Al Franken, he's running for Senate from Minnesota) but for the rest of you I have this advice: All you celebrities just shut up and entertain us. That's what you're being paid to do.

Stop making Britney Cry - You Jerks!

2006-05-20T19:15:00.000-07:00

I've got to say that the sight of Britney Spears crying on news show after news show is pretty heart-rending. The latest thing that happened was that she sort of, almost dropped her baby while she was trying to evade the hordes of papparazzi after her. It's all to prove that she's an unfit mother or inadequate as a mother or something like that.

The thing is: there isn't a woman alive who hasn't dropped a child or had an accident happen to her child when they weren't quite looking - something. Every mother's had it happen to them (I'm told). So give her a break already.

Why all the interest anyways? She isn't recording anything or going out on tour or making a horrible, God-awful movie or anything really worth talking about. She isn't even looking all that hot, kind of chubby and rather ordinary looking and not at all the sex-goddess she used to be. No, these days she's just average cute, the kind of girl most guys could marry. I'm not saying she doesn't clean up pretty good - yes, she does! When she's in shape and has her make-up and hair done she looks pretty good, which makes me believe that most women if they were put through the Hollywood machine would come out pretty good.

Let's be honest here: she's not a very bright girl. She's not very educated, either. She sure doesn't sing very hot (and only dances so-so) so why should we care so much what she's doing? I think the answer is that every man wants to think he has a shot at her. And with her, just look at the guys she's married. I know I could step into Kevin Federline's shoe and be a better husband. Couldn't you? Couldn't just about anyone?

So, I'm not giving up hope that maybe one day ... and in the meantime, please stop making my future girlfriend cry, you big jerks!

Desert Sailors

2006-05-19T17:28:00.000-07:00

**Before I write my other stuff: Rexroi is now in print. Check it out at the link that says: 'REXROI'. I've also put links to my Australian e-book publisher (he doesn't quite have me up yet, but in another couple of weeks) and the Website to a shop in Wisconsin that sells a lot of fun items.

I had a whole bunch of links to horror websites and such, but they never did me much good, so I don't think I want to junk up my weblog with them. Maybe I'll put a few back just because of the graphics - we'll see.

I didn't do such a good job getting the cover posted. I was having problems with blogger. This is the best I can do for now, but if you really want to see the cover click on the link that says 'REXROI' and you'll see it clearly.

Okay. Here's what I wanted to say about the Navy ...
The Army is now training sailors to perform combat operations, and sailors are right now fighting side by side with soldiers in Iraq. The theory is that this is a method of coordinating combat operations between the US forces so that the military will be better able to work cohesively. It would also be a way to bring less duplication of resources between the different services. Plus, this sort of cross-training gives our combat troops more versatility. Well, that's what the government is saying about this, but you know what?

That's a load of crap.

Obviously it makes absolutely no sense to pluck men and women who have been trained to fight on water and throw them in the middle of the desert. What good are they going to really do, except the ability to provide a heartbeat and stop a bullet that comes their way? The sailors who are doing this aren't doing it absolutely cold, they're given two weeks training at Fort Bragg - as opposed to nine weeks for regular Army - but I've got to say, if my life depended on it I'd sure like more than fourteen days to learn how to preserve it. I believe that the sailors who are doing this are also - and please give them a lot of credit for this - volunteers.

What's happening is that the Army is not able to recruit enough people to join and risk their lives. They also aren't able to find enough reservists or national guardsmen or retired military to fill the ranks. So who does that leave? That leaves anybody who has their name on an enlistment contract, and when your name is on that contract they can do anything with you that they want.

I used to be in the Navy myself so my heart goes out to these poor sailors. I can imagine what my reaction would have been when I was informed of my new duty station in the sand dunes. Sure, I trained for one day on an M-16. But that was so I could put a pretty ribbon on my chest. It sure wasn't so that I could use it against terrorists who wanted to kill me as much as they could manage.

When I was a linguist I trained right alongside Air Force, Army, and Marine troops. Most of my time in the military was, in fact, spent on Air Force bases. There was talk back then about combining the intelligence sections of these services into one and being something sort of separate. The joke was that we would be the Security Service (SS) and could all wear black uniforms with SS on our collars. That was some black humor there (and it never happened, either, by the way - that I know of). Okay, so that was a sensible argument about combining resources because we were all doing almost exactly the same thing.

But this? No. A sailor should fight on the water. Soldiers fight on land. And marines fight wherever they need to. That's the way it should be.

Gigolos of the Midwest

2006-05-13T06:43:00.000-07:00

I met Jerry when I was going to school at the University of Minnesota. Jerry was in his mid-thirties, tall, blond and I guess I would have to admit that he was a handsome man. It took me awhile to figure this guy out because he let his personal history out in little dribs and drabs. He'd been a student at the U until he was thirty, at which point his parents decided that he was never actually going to graduate and they stopped throwing good money after bad.

To make ends meet Jerry took up two different professions: He was a dance instructor and then he was a nude model. When I met him he was still doing the modeling thing, but also working at a very upscale grocery store. Eventually Jerry got several months behind in his rent and I wondered what he was going to do, though I really shouldn't have worried much since it looks like he had a plan. I started seeing him in the company of silver-haired woman - maybe about twenty years older than Jerry - and each time I saw him it looked like Jerry was better dressed than the last time.

Then the light bulb went on over my head.

Jerry was a gigolo.

His choice of professions had been dictated by the fact that they allowed him to meet and talk with older, lonely women. And ply his trade. He never told me this in so many words, but it sure explained why he had been able to live with no permanent address for so many years. At thirty five, he was getting a little long in the tooth for his chosen career, so the last thing I heard he had settled down with her and I guess she had settled for him, too.

Most Gigolos here in the Midwest take a different route to living off the earnings of women. We have our pimps, of course, but that's not what I'm talking about. Most of the gigolos here marry their marks. If you want to do it yourself it's pretty simple.

Here's how it works: To be a midwestern gigolo you - unfortunately - have to start by looking like you have something on the ball to attract your future mark. Not everyone has Jerry's looks or charms, so you have to have a job. It doesn't have to be a good one - steady will do. Get your mark to marry you, or if you move in with her make sure that she's paying the rent on the place.

Then lose your job.

That's it. You're a gigolo. Just live off of her for as many years as you can manage until she divorces you. Then collect alimony.

Reverse Recruiting

2006-05-11T15:18:00.000-07:00

When I was going to college I had just gotten out of the Navy, and was still in the Reserves so I used to get asked a lot by younger men whether I thought they should go into the military. At that time I had about five years on them, which counted for a lot. Usually, these guys would give me two reasons for their desire to enlist: 1) They wanted to get into shape and boot camp looked like a wonderful way to do that, and 2) They just needed more discipline in their lives.

Unfortunately, my approach back then was to be fair and even-handed. It was a serious question, after all, and it deserved a serious answer. Therefore, instead of screaming out: "Good God, No!!" I would give them a well-reasoned discussion of the pros and cons of the military. Never did I directly address the two main issues above, but I will now, So ... 1) If you want get into shape, join a gym or get yourself a personal trainer, you don't need to ruin the next three or four years of your life, and 2) No. You do not want more discipline in your life, you want less. You want somebody else to wake you up in the morning and feed you and put a roof over your head and tell you what to wear and do every day of your life. If you truly wanted more discipline in your life you would do so by being more disciplined ... you know, setting your alarm clock in the morning, and showing up for classes, and study when your supposed to - that sort of thing.

Nope. I didn't say that. I talked about the commitment of time and the difficulties, but I also mentioned the good things the military could do for you. For example, it can teach valuable job skills, or, as in my case, it can provide tuition assistance and the opportunity to earn extra money - like in the Reserves. The fact that you could die never once entered the equation, but this was long before we were at war in Iraq under President Bush (take your pick which one). The military at that time was viewed sort of as a civil service job where you wore the same thing every day. We were post Vietnam and there wasn't much appetite for US foreign adventures.

As a result of my lack of being totally, clear about a half a dozen of these guys actually did enlist. Really, I should have not said anything at all about the upside, because the downside far outweighed the benefits. Or maybe I should have heartily recommended that they enlist for long, long years so they would do the opposite. Either way, I feel bad that because of my careful approach they each had years of rude awakenings, starting with that first day in Boot Camp.

I'll let you in on a secret: Pretty much nobody who enlisted actually read their enlistment contract when they signed it - pretended to, didn't. I remember that I made a show of looking it over carefully, but that was just for the recruiter's benefit so he wouldn't think I was a naive schmuck. Well, he knew better and the fact of the matter is that I was a naive schmuck. Nobody who understood what was in that contract would put their name on it.

Years later when I was in the Reserves I attended a mandatory Rights and Responsibilities seminar on one of my weekends. As part of this seminar, the lecturer handed out standard enlistment contracts and mentioned that we could keep them if we felt like it. So I did, and I looked over at leisure when I got home that night. I've got to tell you that I was appalled, not only because long ago I had signed the damn thing, but because this was the contract that I was still obligated to. Among the jewels I discovered were these facts: 1) The Navy wasn't required to pay me if they didn't want to, 2) The Navy could extend this contract indefinitely, and 3) They only had to feed me one meal every third day.

So, Young Men here is my advice: Do not join the military because you can die. You will not get into any better shape than you could on your own. If you achieve more discipline in your life, it won't matter because you might die. You can get college money other places.

There. That's exactly what I should have said from the start. Any more questions?

Immortal Turtles

2006-04-24T18:35:00.000-07:00

Turtles - in addition to psychically being able to predict the weather - are practically immortal. In Great Britain a turtle who was documented to be two hundred and sixty two years old recently passed on. No particular cause of death was given. The reason turtles are so long lived is that they don't have cellular aging the same way most other mammals, that is they don't have the little teleomeres at the end of their cells that wear out as the cells divide.

Evolutionarily speaking, turtles are about the only animal where there is a reproductive advantage to having older parents. The advantage is that the female turtle gains experience in learning the best places to lay eggs that are safe from predators so that the older turtle parents actually have more surviving offspring. Mostly it's just the opposite with most species where it's more advantageous to breed young, breed often, then die.

So that's the way it is with turtles. What about humans? We don't live as long as turtles, but we live longer than anything else that has a heart beep. Anyways, on Sixty Minutes there was a doctor who does 'age management medicine', that is, he prescribes for his patients a level of hormone supplementation equivelant to a youthful human. The Doctor was sixty seven years old and as far as his physique: he looked pretty good. Apparently he's been a life-long body-builder and his body looked like that of a thirty or so year old body-builder. His skin looked pretty leathery and weather-beaten, but other than that he had a real spring in his step.

Supplementing hormones isn't new, but it's sort of been in the closet, mostly Hollywood stars have been hip to this. There was a book by a Doctor named Regelson called The Super Hormone promise that described this. Basically it's sort of the same as using steroids, but only to the point where they would have been normally. So far there's no real proof that it extends life at all, but it does seem to extend vitality. Dr. Regelson has, by the way, passed on and I can't find out exactly what happened. He was an old guy, for sure, but not a super old guy.

Speaking of which, have you seen Barry Bonds lately? Now that he's off the steroids he looks an awful lot like Kirby Puckett right before Kirby said Goodbye forever. Barry doesn't look like the former buff athlete that he did before the testosterone. He looks like a chubby middle-aged man - which come to think of it, is what he is. Bonds is dispairing of ever surpassing Hank Aaron's home-run record, complaining of physical stuff, like a knee injury, shoulder injury and ... oh, no steroids.

He should be allowed to get them. In fact, all athletes should be allowed to put whatever they want into their bodies so they can be the best they can be. It's their bodies and if they're willing to risk their health and their lives to break world records and become very rich in the process then let's let them do it. It'll be a whole bunch more entertaining and we won't have to spend a dime anymore on testing or pretending we care about testing.

I think I really would like to see government sponsored hormone supplementation for all senior citizens. The one thing that supplementing with hormones does is repair and rebuild tissue, and frailty is a major cause of disability in our aging population. Probably it won't extend life much, and certainly not maximum life span, but it will for sure extend the vibrant part of life. Plus - and this might be my real reason - I'd just love to see eighty year old men bench-pressing four hundred pounds.

Chinese Organ Harvesters

2006-04-18T17:04:00.000-07:00

I saw this ad about Chinese organ harvesting - in Discover, I think - and I had to wonder how much of a problem it really is. What the Chinese do is they execute their condemned prisoners with a bullet in the head to carefully make sure that the rest of the body is useful. Then they sell it off for what they can get. We in America like to think that all Chinese that are condemned to die must be Democratic political activists or incarcerated for other noble political reasons, but most likely they're murderers and rapists and other scumbags death penalty proponents would say deserve it. Not all of them, of course, but more guilty than innocent I'm sure - just like here in America. Some innocent get killed - just like in America.

The 'spare parts' argument for the death penalty is a new one in my book. Sure the Chinese have been doing it for years, but now in America there's been talk about not wasting the valuable organs and body parts that go with the life we take. For example, there was a guy killed in Illisnois who wanted to give his liver to his sister after he died(they didn't let him). There was another more recent one where the condemned was allowed to give up a kidney to a sibling before he was executed. And I think some prisoners are allowed to donate organs on their death like the rest of us are allowed to. The difference is that we don't know exactly when it is that we might make that donation, and they do.

There's a lot of money in human body parts. Healthy tissues and organs go for a lot of money, especially after they've been processed into useful products for the American marketplace. So, where there's a lot of money there's also going to be a lot of crime. Believe it or not there's sprung up a new business in body thiefs. Former Masterpiece theater host Aleister Cooke had his ninety five year old bones stolen after his death.

I once read an icky science fiction story along the lines of what the Chinese are actually doing. This story was set in a dystopian future world where there was an authoritarian government who would punish especially despised dissidents by rendering them for spare parts to be transplanted. But - here's the icky part - they kept these people alive while they slowly dismembered them and removed the various organs that were needed so that in the end they would be limbless, sightless, and only had enough parts to keep them barely going. Then they would finally kill them and use what was left.

There was another novel along the same lines only this time it was entire human bodies. In this semi-dystopina future everybody had to take IQ tests and if you scored below a certain level then you had to give up your body when you were twenty eight years old to somebody old and smart, who would then have his brain transplanted into it. Needless to say, there are some huge flaws with this scenario and I can't help but wonder why more dumb twenty-eight year olds didn't complain more about this. The book had them grumbling a bit, but not near enough where it should have been. Still, I recall enjoying this book because as improbable as it seems, that's why it's called fiction.

America has so far seemed to shy away from the Chinese model of slaughtering citizens for profit. Speaking from an economic standpoint, it just wouldn't work. We spend millions and millions of dollars on each person we execute - almost all of that in court costs, appeals and such. To incarcerate one person costs on average fifty thousand dollars a year, which, optimistically is less than could be made off of them. You'd think that it would make sense for us to allow deathrow inmates to donate organs voluntarily - and I can see that. People being executed are still human beings and they still have humanitarian and compassionate impulses, maybe even wanting some good to come out of their deaths. Mostly, in America, we believe in executing all of the person and that means every single part of them. If their heart's still beating in somebody else, that's not really justice, is it?

Judas, Best Disciple ... Ever

2006-04-15T08:08:00.000-07:00

The Gospel of Judas has just been discovered - in Egypt - I believe. This was one of those controversial gnostic gospels belonging to one of the early versions of Christianity that eventually lost out to the one we have now. It was long rumored that Judas had his own Gospel and you'll probably not be so surprised to find out that he doesn't come out as such a bad fellow in this one. It makes sense. If there were a Gospel of Steve I can guarantee that I wouldn't come across as such a bad fellow either.

In the Gospel of Judas, Judas actually does not betray Christ for the thirty pieces of silver, but rather he does so under explicit directions from Jesus himself. Since prophecy had said that Jesus must be crucified and so they wanted to make sure that it happened it was arranged that Judas would do it. The manuscript itself is in pretty rough shape and has a bunch of gaps, but I guess it's clear enough what happened.

There are many, many different versions of Gospels and ancient Christian writing which disagree thoroughly with canonical writing. In fact, because every word written back in those days had to be copied by a scribe there are no two versions of anything that actually agree with each other, because every single scribe messed something up at some point or other. The Canon of Christianity were not determined by exhaustive searches to see which ones were most historically accurate, but rather which ones agreed most with the winner's theology. And if they didn't - they were rewritten.

Some of these versions read like bad soap operas - you know, Jesus faked his own death, he actually had a secret family, or (my favorite) it was actually his twin brother that was crucified. The thing is: these all came from the second, third, or fourth centuries so they aren't recent inventions at all. And how do we know which really was right?

I like to believe that Jesus faked his own death, like in the DaVinci code. And, yes, there is evidence of that. Of course, Holy Blood, Holy Grail does a swell job of making the point, but I just think about the Gospel stories of Jesus sightings after his crucifixion - his body disappears and then he's seen up and about talking to different people showing off his nail-holes. If that happened in modern times people would think that he hadn't died at all. Just like Elvis never really died at all. Also, I happened to come across a citation in the Twelve Caesers (by Suetonius) where it's mentioned that the Jews were rioting in Rome under the instigation of Christ under the reign of Claudius, when we all know he was supposed to have been executed under Tiberius.

Okay. That's getting a bit too academic.

Now, I've got to say I was a little bit bugged that the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail had sued Dan Brown, the author of The DaVinci Code for stealing his ideas from them. Excuse me, boys, you're telling everybody that the stuff in your book - Holy Blood, Holy Grail is history, how on Earth can people steal what you're saying is the true account of what really happened?
Well, they can't. And I think the jury ruled correctly on this one.

But by all means buy and read Holy Blood, Holy Grail. It's very convincing if only because it puts the times into a commonsense perspective. Like, the point that Jesus probably did have a family because it would have been extremely weird for the times for him to have been thirty and never married - or even dating, for crying out loud. Back in those times, in that place, every marriage was an arranged one and they married young - fourteen for males.

As far as the Gospel of Judas ... I don't know. I think Judas probably couldn't have been such a bad guy. Because what was his motivation, really, to betray Jesus? Why would he do such a thing? It's not like he could have taken over the organization if he got the Lord out of the way. Nobody was saying that Judas was next in line to be messiah. No, it was definitely in his interest to keep Christ fit and healthy - unless as the Judas Gospel says he was told to go to the Romans.

Rexroi, starring Seth Green and Bruce Campbell

2006-04-13T17:06:00.000-07:00

I had posted all of Rexroi (my new novel) on-line, but all I have now are the first eleven chapters, which is really a lot if you ask me. You know, we are talking free here. The reason I did this was that an ebook publisher in Australia picked it up, so that's where it's going to be available in about a month or so - on-line, not Australia. Well, it will be available in Australia, maybe even especially Australia. But not only in Australia - ahhh, you know what I'm saying.

Eleven Chapters compromises about the 'first act' of the story, so I thought that was a good place to leave off.

I guess I'm feeling a bit guilty about removing the last two thirds of the book. I noticed that somebody in Pakistan had spent a whole bunch of time on the free book site, but not enough time to actually read the entire thing. I'm worried that he was planning on reading the rest later and he can't anymore. And that bothers me a bit. I would sure hate to think that my one fan in Pakistan hates me or thinks I'm a dick - I'm not. It was just that I knew that it was going to be commercially available in about a month and I wasn't going to give it away anymore.

You see, I posted it for nothing because it's such a wonderful book that I wanted as many people as possible to read it. I still do; the only difference is that I'll be getting a little support so that I can write even more wonderful books.

You want me to write more wonderful books, don't you?

Anyways, the link to the free chapters (Eleven, Baby) is on my sidebar to the right. I've been having some problems with the sidebar so that it goes all the way to the very, very bottom of the page. It's still there, but I don't know why it does this. If anybody has any ideas could you drop me a line? I'm not the most tech savvy fellow around, but I'm also not the least. At any rate, you can never be too obvious when talking to me. Just keep that in mind.

Somehow, I got into this e-mail group Books to Film, which I thought was going to be helpful since Rexroi will make a fantastic movie. Of course, I couldn't help casting this movie in my mind and I have (in my imagination) cast Seth Green in the main role of Gary 'Kid Guy' Gates.
Please go to the link and read some chapters and tell me if I'm not absolutely right and he wouldn't be unbelievable in this role. The problem is that the character is twenty two years old and Seth is ten years older than that. He could play the role brilliantly, but he's going to start showing his age any day and he'll lose out on a role that was made only for him.

Okay. Seth has the lead. But who else will be in it - what Big name Stars?

In my imagination, I also cast Bruce Campbell as Montaigne, the naked spy. That character hasn't shown up in the first eleven chapters so you can't give me any input on that one, sorry to say. Little Kid Guy's girlfriend, Suzie, I thought could be played by Lindsay Lohan; she would also be absolutely brilliant. Even in my imagination, I don't know if the producers could meet her price, so that role might go to another promising up and comer. John Marriot could be played by any dumb male model - I don't have an opinion on that one. Kristin Cavallari would be his girlfriend Ashley because she seems to have the sweet blankness required.

I never saw her in Laguna Beach so I can't say that I've even heard her talk. I've seen her a lot in magazines and tabloids and I hear she is going to be in an actual movie role. You know what? I'm going to go out on a limb and say that whatever movie it is she's going to be in (I can't remember what it was) Kristin Cavallari will do unexpectedly well at it. Here's why: She's young and plastic and docile. She'll take instruction excellently.

Amanda the stripper might be played by Carmen Electra or - in a bit of bold casting - Sara Michelle Gellar could do it. If Buffy got the role then her husband Freddy Prinz could be one of the fraternity brothers, I'm thinking Joe the fraternity president. Speaking of which: I don't have any of the other brothers cast in my mind. I'm thinking up and coming young studs, maybe not even name studs.

Finally, Heinrich the sinister hairdresser will be played by Jeremy Irons. That's another character who doesn't show up until later. But he's important. And I'd like to see Jeremy in the movie since I've been told that I resemble him - in that Cronenberg film where he plays gynecologist twins.

There are some other important parts I haven't gotten to yet. Give me your suggestions and I'll see if I can fit them into my imaginary movie casting. If - for some reason - you happen to know any of these people that I cast, go ahead and tell them about the fabulous movie that they could be in.

Give me your tired, your poor, your ... On Second thought, Don't

2006-04-12T17:06:00.000-07:00

A woman I worked for who was forty two, heavy, and slightly bearded met a Mexican man fifteen years her junior who, within a month, proposed to her. She accepted quite readily since there was no way she was going to do any better. Then they got married. I think no one is going to be surprised to discover that he was in this country illegally - Gasp! My co-worker you might guess from my description was no prize (she thought she was. Nope) And you might think to yourself that she must have had a good heart - nope. No good heart, either.

When I think about how great America is I think of that poor Mexican. He sure did have to pay a price to live and work in this country. He still is, I imagine - every horrible, ghastly night of his dreadful existence. That of course is in addition to the fine he had to pay - two grand, I believe - to make up for being here illegally. This guy had some strange job I'd never heard of: he was a traveling plastic welder for government wetlands, which paid twenty five bucks an hour. That was according to his seldom honest wife and you could never really believe anything she said. So, who knows? It might have been true ... maybe.

There are eleven to twelve million foreign undocument workers in the United States and very few of them are going anywhere. In theory they should not be rewarded for breaking our laws by being granted amnesty, but they will be. In some form or another. I know, they drive down wages in the US, which, in case you haven't figured it out, is exactly why they're going to be staying. Low wages aren't good for you and me, but they are good for someone - the people who pay those low wages. And the people who pay those low wages are the same ones who keep our present gang of legislators in power (also the reason the federal minimum wage hasn't been raised in ten years). QED low wage illegal aliens are staying.

It's ironic, if not downright hypocritical that our dirt-poor low wage foreign ancestors got in free while these guys don't. Here's my story: The first Sommers who made it to America - my great, great Grandpa Jacob Sommers - supposedly burned down his barn in Bavaria for the insurance money and then used it to travel to New York. Us Sommerses have been committing insurance fraud ever since. C'mon, it's a family tradition.

Congress and the Senate (the Republican Congress and Senate) will come up with some immigration law soon, and the President will sign it because he signs everything that crosses his desk. Whatever is in that law won't matter, either, because it won't have anything to do with reality and Americans have a fine tradition of flouting stupid laws. Which is what this one undoubtedly will be. Americans, and I'm one, will see the inherent unfairness of penalizing people looking for opportunity because of when and where they were born.

Our tasty Garbage

2006-04-10T18:38:00.000-07:00

My neighbor just showed me his bird-feeder which was viciously mauled - he's guessing by a bear. We both live pretty close to the woods here in Wisconsin, so I think that's probably it. I mean, bears live in the woods and we live by the woods and why wouldn't bears live in our woods? It just goes to figure, don't you think? They're good woods, nothing wrong with them.

I'm not all that scared myself at the thought of bears where I live. While I do have a bird feeder, I'm fortunate in the fact that I'm pretty lazy and I don't fill it so much. Bad for the birds but good for the no-bears. I suppose you could say that this is what happens when humans encroach on wild-life's natural habitat.

Actually, this is what happens when you put out tasty treats for who-ever. Like, if you were in the suburbs and you put pies and cookies out into your front yard, don't you think you would attract some unwelcome visitors? My Uncle used to tell me that if you put out milk and brown sugar it would attract the Brownies (pixie-like creatures - not the fore-runners of girlscouts. They must dress in brown). And maybe that does, in fact, attract the Brownies. I'll bet you it also attracts a lot more than that.

A woman I work with had her daughter and her daughter's family unexpectedly stay with them for a few days. Her daughter also lived somewhat out in the wild - like me - and there were some feral cats nearby in the woods. You can't hunt them! The Wisconsin legislature defeated that bill, so go hunt your cats somewhere else! Anyways, one of the feral cats had a litter of feral kittens so my co-worker's daughter put out kitten chow for the wee darlings. Unknown to her she was actually putting kitten chow out for the darling skunks. She surprised one of the skunks feeding on the kitten chow and we all know what surprised skunks do. It took quite an effort to get the smell out of the house and clothes and such. They had to call in a skunk professional (there are such people, too. They charge a lot, because when you need their services you have little choice).

Wild animals like us because of stuff like that, but mostly what they like about us is our garbage. Do you see that warm friendly dog curled up at your feet? Why do you think he's there? That's right. Garbage. Ten thousand years ago in China his remote ancestors liked out garbage and decided to stick around us humans because of our tasty garbage.

They've been hanging around ever since.

Ed Gein and Fat Kids in Wisconsin

2006-04-07T19:26:00.000-07:00

Two Wisconsin news stories were on my radio this morning when I was driving to work.

Wisconsin now has the drunkest kids in the nation, and:
Ed Gein's former farm house was sold.

In a moment I'm going to magically connect these two things together. But first I'm going to digress.

Wisconsin probably does not have the most serial killer's per capita. I'm going to make a wild guess and say that California is the state that really does. I don't know this for a fact. But I'm probably right. Wisconsin, however, does have two of the most memorable ones, because in addition to Ed Gein, we also have famed cannibal killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Just ask anybody to name two serial killers and I'll bet those are the two names that come up.

Wisconsin did have the highest rate of drinking by adults in the nation, but this thing about us also having the highest rate of drinking among kids is new. I knew we had the fattest kids (and adults, of course). Well, the thing is, since the United States is the fattest country in the world and Wisconsin the fattest in the Us that must mean that we have the fattest, drunkest kids in the world, too. It just stands to reason, doesn't it?

So, what do Ed Gein and fat, drunk kids have in common?

Well, I'll tell you.

A substance abuse counselor has told me that the number one reason he hears for kids drinking in Wisconsin is ... boredom. Aha! And doesn't that explain why they overeat, also? Right! They're bored. They've got nothing better to do with their time than stuff their faces and drown themselves in tasty Milwaukee brewed beer.

Then when they get really bored, they kill people, dance around in their skins and eat them - just like Gein and Dahmer did.

**My novel Rexroi is on-line. Just use the link to the right**

Why I'm so much Smarter than a Board Certified Neurologist

2006-03-31T18:45:00.000-08:00

There are two books coming out soon about the Terry Schiavo case and so I want to tell how I happen to know one of the 'figures' in the Terry Schiavo case. I was watching This Week with George Stephanapolas on the TV and the conservative commentator, William Crystal of the Weekly World ... something or other ... it doesn't matter, nobody reads it anyways except probably William Crystal. Anyways, Crystal said that the Doctor in this case who testified for the husband was: 'Ronald Cranford who's from Minneapolis and does a lot of these'.

Hey! I know him! Or did a couple of years back. I tuned my ears up then for what Crystal would say next about Dr. Cranford, expecting that Crystal would add more about Dr. Cranford than just the fact that he did a lot of testifying, like Dr. Cranford was obviously doing it for the money, or that he was a fanatic of the Dr. Kevorkian ilk or was some sort of egotistical glory hound or- I don't know - was an organ thief who sells human bodyparts to China. (By the way, Ronald Cranford has never denied that last accusation). Maybe that was all there was: Dr. Cranford testified on the wrong side more than once. And that was bad enough.

Oh, and speaking of 'doing it for the money': Wasn't William Crystal getting paid to give his opinion that somebody else was doing it for the money. Little hypocritical, don't you think, Bill?

I met Dr. Cranford when I was working at the desk of the Physician'sIncomplete Room at the Hennepin County Medical Center. I'd just started working there when Dr. Cranford came in to sign some records. He introduced himself to me, the new guy, and then mentioned that many people thought he looked like Gene Hackman and what did I think? My reply was that I supposed that I could see the resemblance, but Gene Hackman wasa lot thinner than he was and had more hair on the top of his head.

I might have gotten on his bad side at that point.

He really didn't look much like Gene Hackman, actually, I was saying that to be nice. He looked more like Buddy Hackett, if you can imagine a thinner Buddy Hackett with not so much hair - and living. The chief resemblance between the two was that Dr. Cranford had the habit of talking out of the side of his mouth when he was making wise-cracks like Buddy Hackett used to. Dr. Cranford was one of the more friendly doctors at the hospital. To start with: he actually talked with us. Often he would come in and tell jokes with that being his only purpose for visiting us. Like the other Doctors, he was always busy but he had enough time to be personable. By the way, this might be just a Minnesota thing, but the vast majority of the Doctors at that hospital were very nice indeed and not at all the God-complexed jerks that Doctors are supposed to have a reputation for. They were politer than the general public, as a rule.

So, I would talk with him occasionally and I found out that he was somewhat known nationally and had been on Oprah more than once. (Oprah's a nice lady, he says). He had been earlier involved, maybe a decade earlier in a famous 'right to die' case. I think it might have even been the Karen Quinlan one. "They don't like me here," he told me, referring to the hospital, "I'm too controversial."

I believe he might have been an atheist who viewed consciousness and personality as the 'ghost in the machine', the machine, of course, being the human brain and the ghost being our self awareness. I'd asked him once what he thought about Near Death Experiences, him being a neurologist and all he must know something about it. He told me thatit was all made up that there was an industry being built on what was nothing more than hallucinations. (I beg to differ, but I'll get into that later).

Here's the question that William Crystal failed to address about Dr. Cranford's participation in cases like Terry Schiavo's: Why does he do it? My guess - I don't know for sure - is that it's because he took an oath not to prolong suffering. The Hippocratic oath says something about that, I'm pretty sure. Doesn't it? I think it also makes you swear your oath by the God Apollo.

Anyways, regarding our conversation about near death experiences, what I should have said to Dr. Cranford was that near death experiences had, in fact, been investigated and that at least one medical doctor, Dr. Raymond Moody, had written a book about it (Life after Life) and come to the exact opposite conclusion, which was that near death experiences were indeed more than hallucinations. In his book, Dr. Moody, related numerous instances where patients relayed accurate information aboutthings outside of their hospital room that they would have no possible way of knowing. What I should have then asked Dr. Cranford was where's his book and where's his thorough investigation? Huh?

But, you know, that's one of those clever, devastating rebuttals that youcan only come up with, like, a couple years later. This evidence is what's called 'anecdotal', that is someone says it happens to them and that sort of evidence doesn't count. Unless of course you're on death row awaiting your execution, as hundreds of condemned men know personally. Then, of course, it's golden. Can someone please explain to me how the same type and sort of evidence that's good to end a man's life (a couple of women, too) is still not good enough for science?

Just because something hasn't happened in a laboratory, with control groups and then been repeated, it doesn't mean that it hasn't happened. Most everything happens outside of the lab. The same thing with stuff that falls out of your particular philosophy: Just because you don't believe it can't happen or doesn't exist doesn't in the least affect whether it really has or does. Reality is not something you can vote on. It exists entirely outside of the democratic process.Ok. Here's another devastating rebuttal I should have used on Dr. Cranford. When he told me that near death experiences were nothing but hallucinationsI should have looked him straight in the eye and said: "Then prove to me that you're not an hallucination."

Zing! That would have shot him right down. Because how could he?

You know, I just realized that almost nobody who's reading this would actually ever know who really said what or when, so ... yeah, I did say that stuff to Dr. Cranford. Not only did I say it, but he was absolutely dumbfounded and his only reply was to bow his head respectfully and say to me: "You're a much smarter man than I am, Mr. Sommers. I am hanging up my stethoscope, posthaste, and will give up the practice of medicine. Entirely."

Alright, that's not what happened. He's still practicing medicine and probably thinks he's as right in all of his opinions now as he did then. I do think the guy had a tendency to exaggerate, though, as in: "Don't let the truth get in the way of a good story." For example, he golfed a lot and claimed that over his lifetime he'd gotten four holes-in-one.

Forgive me if I'm wrong in this, but most professional golfers never get that many in their career. How does he do it?

Someone should tell him that miniature golf doesn't count.

What a Half a Trillion Dollars can Buy: Part III of an infinite series

2006-03-30T10:30:00.000-08:00

Logically my series can have infinite parts, but today I'll stay at one:

Lap dances! - lots and lots of lap dances. A half a trillion dollars that was spent on Iraq could have better been spent on adult entertainment at strip clubs. Let me get out my calculator here ... five hundred million divided by an average of twenty dollars per dance ... that would be ... twenty five million! Wow, that's sure a hell of a lot of happiness. Of course, when I think about it this would mean that lap dances would become a government program and so, of course, it would be run with the usual government inefficiency.

Crap. We'd all have to fill out multiple forms and put with excessive delays just so we could have one naked woman crawling around on us. Hey wait, I think I might be willing to put up with that. Okay, sure. I can live with the government running the free lap dance program because it's sure a lot better than no free lap dance program. Right?

And unlike the war in Iraq nobody would be losing limbs or dying prematurely, except possibly from too much fun! Nobodys going to be blown up or kidnaped or anything like that. So, let's do it. Let's bring our troops home right now and start spending all that war on the government lap dance program. I'll even be magnanamous about this and say that our returning troops can be first in line.

They deserve it, don't you think?

**And please feel free to check out my new novel, Rexroi, on-line. Just click on the sidebar to the right **

Texas Taliban

2006-03-28T17:09:00.000-08:00

When I was Texas - never mind when - it was legal to drive with an open drink and, of course, a loaded gun. They had drive-up bars where you could buy your drink and then drive off and slurp it down. I can't say that I ever took advantage of the laws - much - I guess I do recall having open drinks while a passenger to Mexico or elsewhere (Never got to 'boys town', either, wherever that was). But I never drove myself while intoxicated. That's the important thing.

Now in Texas the police are actually going inside of bars to arrest people who are drunk. You see, bars are public places and you can't be drunk inside of a barbecause it's a public place. On the TV article I saw about this they showed the Texas police who arrested a woman who was a guest at the hotel whose bar she was drinking at. It didn't matter. She got arrested anyways.
Some guy got arrested while protesting that he had a designated driver. And that didn't matter, either.

Exactly how hard do you think it really is to find somebody drunk inside a Texas bar? Just take a little time to think about that.

Give up?

It's not f****g hard at all! That's shooting fish in a barrel. In fact, not just in Texas but pretty much any place in America, period. At a rough guess I'd say a minimum of half of all Americans have been drunk in public and that's probably being way conservative. There aren't enough police to arrest all of us criminals and there aren't enough jails to hold us all. And that means that there are about one hundred million Americans who are on the lam, because they never properly got caught for the crimes - public intoxication - that they committed.

We should all turn ourselve in and see what happens.

Banning smoking in bars I kind of understand - kind of. Bartenders and waiters and waitresses and stockboys and bar backs and musicians work there and they shouldn't be exposed to cancer causing second hand smoke blah, blah, blah. Fine. Bars aren't health clubs and they also aren't a Disney theme park, and adults should understand just what kind of place they're walking into ... but I don't smoke anymore so ... fine. No smoking in bars.

No drinking in bars? Hmmm. Don't tell me that drinking isn't the same thing as getting drunk because if you have ever been into a tavern you really should know better, so just don't pretend that you're so holy and pure. No, no. I seldom do those wicked things - used to, not lately - and I'm probably never going to return to Texas (friendly people, way too hot). Thus I have no dogs in this fight but it just offends my sensibility.

What about the kids? That's my question. They aren't going to have the opportunities to go wild and blow off steam if this type of thing goes further than Texas. Can you imagine MTV Spring break if Florida enforced their public intoxication laws? My worry is that the next generation is going to grow up boring and is that a risk we as a nation should take?

What else a Half a Trillion Dollars will Buy You

2006-03-25T14:21:00.000-08:00

Now, Let's face facts: The war in Iraq is all about oil - or energy which as far as the Bush Administration is concerned is still about oil. Oh sure, as with lots of wonderful things the Bush administration will give lip-service to alternative energy (Switch grass, anyone?) but in reality little or no money will actually be allocated to it. Just remember with W that Black is always White. No Child left Behind actually means every child Left behind. And so on... You can find your own examples without my help.

**Before I forget: I put Rexroi on-line. The Link is on my sidebar to the right. After reading my insightful essay here, go check it out**

So, here's another thing I figured out that could have been bought with that half a trillion that was spent on Iraq: Energy independence. If every penny of that half a trillion were spent on Solar cells or Windmills or fuel efficient vehicle technology or biofuels or this or that ... again, endless examples, but seriously, we'd be quite a ways away from worrying about the Middle East. We could just treat them all like we treat Central Africa (where there is bloodshed but unfortunately for them, no fossil fuels). With our wind mills and solar cells in place we could sympathize with their plight and leave it at that. Just like in Africa.

Of course, that would only work until they all build their nuclear bombs. Then we'd have to start paying attention again, but mutual assured destruction still works and with places like Iran we are more assured to destroy them with our many, many nukes than the reverse.

Before I went on my blog I tried to price out windmills so I could plug that figure into the half a trillion and tell you how many windmills we could get. Curiously enough, windmill merchants are pretty cagey about actually revealing their prices. Hmmm. I wonder why that is.

Alright, I know why that is. It's because if you saw the real price right off the bat you'd get sticker shock and click on to the next site. They probably are expensive, I believe. However, because of economy of scale if a whole lot of windmills or solar cells were being produced the price would come down just because it would be so much cheaper to produce them en masse.

Well, I'm still going to get one. But I will wait until the prices come down.

What you can buy for a Half a Trillion

2006-03-24T20:00:00.000-08:00

Half a trillion dollars happens to be what we've spent so far on the war in Iraq and so far - oh wait, I almost forgot, my novel Rexroi is on-line click on the sidebar to the right - anyways, half a trillion dollars spent on Iraq and it reminded me about how I used to concretize everything, which was how many packs of cigarettes that would buy. I haven't smoked for awhile so I'm not exactly sure how much they cost these days but somebody told me five bucks a pack up in Minnesota - where I used to live.

So, with that math at my old rate of a pack a day I could smoke for approximately one hundred million days without having to worry about going out for another carton. Maybe if the secret of immortality is discovered I could actually do that.

But wait! That might be another thing that a half a trillion dollars could have bought instead of the disaster in Iraq - immortality. And if not immortality it sure would have gone a long way towards curing a disease or two - like cancer. The next time you're thinking about how great it was that we got Saddam out of power please think about which you would have liked more, Saddam out of power or a cure for cancer.

Ironically, there really is a pretty good chance that you'll get cancer someday. You're going to die of something so odds are good that it could be cancer. When you are dying of cancer you can think about that.

New Realities

2006-03-20T17:07:00.000-08:00

**My new novel, Rexroi, is posted on line. Click on the Upcoming Chapters on the sidebar to the right**

Two of my favorite reality shows have had their debuts this week. The first one is MTVs 'The Real World'. I believe this one qualifies as the very first American reality show ... and it's showing its age. By now the premise is pretty tired, but I still like it enough to take a look.

It all depends on who they put in that house together, but the problem is that any person they choose is already so narcissistic that they think their life should be filmed 24 hours a day. You pretty much always get the seven most self-indulgent twenty-somethings available. But they're all good looking, or mostly good looking. And if there are one or two hot chicks, that's usuallly enough for me.

This time around the men are all meat-heads and the women are all self-centered (but beautiful) dimbulbs, with the exception of a blonde anorexic girl who has clear emotional issues, which is not at all fun to watch.

I'll most likely still half watch most of the episodes just to see if anything interesting happens.

The second of my reality shows is The Surreal Life. The surreal life is when B-list celebrities are put in a house together and they interact. The celebs are also made to do various activities to earn their keep, like performing skits, or as a band, or filming stuff or this or that ... just silly stuff. The Surreal life - to me - always has an undertone of tragedy to it, because the celebs are people whose names were once well known, but now these poor people have to do this, for the money.

The celebrities this time around are Florence Henderson, Sherman Helmsly, some blonde named Amanda who I guess did some nude modeling, Tawny Kitaen, CeCe DeVille, The guy from Smash Mouth, some steroid pumped former wrestler, and transgender famous Arquette sibling Alexis Arquette who somewhat pulls off sort of looking like a woman but just not quite. It's kind of disturbing as I find myself kind of attracted to Alexis, but then getting creeped out by the dudeness. Oh my God, I might be sort of kind of Gay! in a way.

So far Florence is kind of coming out looking like a bit of a prude. Hey, I thought she was a cool old broad. what's up with this? The nude model Amanda seems to feel criticized by Florence for selling herself out and not developing her talent. Or something like that. Tawny Kitaen (still looking pretty good in my book) is very much the damaged ex-beauty queen. She made some comment about how she couldn't do dishes because it reminds her of her poor upbringing. Puh-leeze. If everybody else in that house can do the dishes, she sure can, too.

So, that was the first episode. The previews of upcoming episodes promised a number of significant freak-outs by cast members. Alexis Arquette was shown in about three or four of these. Tawny Kitaen also had a freak-out if I recall correctly. And the nude model had several weepy feeling sorry for herself scenes.

Stay tuned. I'll keep you posted.

Possum in the Garage

2006-03-19T05:38:00.000-08:00

**My New novel, REXROI, is posted on line, now. Use the sidebar where it says: 'Upcoming Chapters'. It's the whole novel. Really. By the way, if anyone knows Seth Green, there's a really great part for him in this, assuming it were adapted to a screenplay - which it isn't - that's a lot of work, and I'm not going to do it. Unless Seth asks me to ***

I've recently noticed that I have a possum in my garage and I'm not sure whether I should be happy about this or not. I know I used to have a woodchuck there, and I was alright with that. I even named my woodchuck (Woody). My woodchuck used to live under the stacks of wood I have for my fireplace and I don't know now if he moved out and was displaced by the possum or if I have both a possum and a woodchuck in my garage like some sort of Disney movie. Do these two species get along or are they like some sort of implacable foe?

I don't know. The woodchuck I didn't mind so much because he was cute, just furry and fat and fun. Possums? Well, they are furry and kind of fat, but the problem is that tail. It's long and hairless and that's rather rat-like if you ask me. I don't want any relatives of rats hanging around my neighborhood bringing down our property values.

What's the problem with having these varmints living so close to me? Well, as I said, I'm mostly okay with it. However, I'm told that they chew things. The woodchuck does the wood, of course. Fortunately he left me plenty, so I don't see why he and I can't share that, after all, the woods are full of wood and there's plenty where that came from. I'm not sure what possums chew on, probably wood also so the same argument holds for it as for the woodchuck. The possum and the woodchuck also might have Rabies, but I don't think that's likely and if either one bites me - hopefully - I'll be smart enough to get a Rabies shot.

I must say, I do have a little bit of interest in eating that possum. Every since the Beverly Hillbillies I've wondered. Granny, I recall, used to cook up a lot of possum (where was she getting it in California?) and all the fancy people turned their nose up at it, while Jed and his kinfolk just loved it. There must be a reason for that. You know, I'll bet it's actually pretty tasty. Now, I don't have any active plan to make the possum my dinner, live and let live, but if someone put a plate of possum roast in front of me: I'd try it. Wouldn't you?

I try to be a good host for my varmints. Sure, they moved in uninvited but now this is their home. You have to look at things from their perspective. Here they have this nice place with lots of wood to chew on and a couple of times per day this huge giant (me) comes in and disturbs their day with his gas spewing vehicle and his noisy tromping about, taking their nice wood and burning it up.

How would you like it? What would you think if a couple times per day a troll just walked into your house and took your furniture and burned it outside? Even worse, what if this troll even is thinking about eating you? See, that's what they have to put up with and that's why I'm so patient with them. It's got to be hard for them.

What the Beep?

2006-03-16T15:57:00.000-08:00

**My new novel, Rexroi, is on-line. Click on 'Free Chapters of an upcoming novel on the right sidebar. It's the whole novel, I just haven't bothered to change the link words**

At work a couple of my co-workers have had certain of their computer programs updated so that now, when they make certain keyboad errors, it will beep at them. And it beeps in a way they don't like at all, apparently; they've sure been complaining about it engough. I'm not certain whether the actual sound bothers them, or just the fact that it's continually pointing out their mistakes to them is the problem. My helpful suggestion that they can eliminate these beeps by not doing things wrong has not been received well by either of them.

But it made me wonder. Who decides? For example, in this instance why was it seen as an improvement to have these particular 'negative' beeps -- hereafter referred to as 'dysbeeps' -- added as an upgrade to the program? Was it perhaps discovered that without the dysbeeps there were too many errors, but the addition of dysbeeps improved things? I don't know.

But the point is: somebody had to decide -- and who was that? Have you ever thought about how much your life is controlled by these beeps? When you get up in the morning your alarm clock beeps at you doesn't it? When you put your car key in the ignition, what does it do? That's right -- beeps. Seatbelt not fastened? Door opened? Gas low? Beep, beep and beep. When you're at work your computer is constantly coaxing you or stalling you with good beeps (eubeeps) or the aforementioned dysbeeps. At home your stove or microwave oven beeps when you cook your food, and so on all through the day until you go to bed and set your beeping alarm clock to wake you up the next day.

Is there one Beepmaster who decides for the entire world, or is it done by multiple corporate committees of the most important people in the World? In my own mind I imagine there is one and only one Beepmaster and I will now reveal to you who that is.

It's Bill Gates. Who else?

Bill Gates the creator and marketer of computers across the world is the one who decides. The wealthiest and techiest billionaire dictates what sounds will run our lives, of course. He sits on his throne in his gloomy castle with a special orchestra to create the actual sounds that constitute the beeps, but I also believe that he has teams of neuroscientists to accurately measure the effects that they have on the brains of their subjects. Perhaps the neuroscientists even make suggestions about more effective beeps.

It goes further than this. The beeps are doing more than merely encouraging or discouraging us from certain actions, they are also programming us. The process is subconscious and subliminal but it is there and it's affecting every single one of us. One day Bill Gates will flip a switch and a pre-arranged series of beeps will sound from every computer in the world and we will all march out into the streets to do his bidding - except for people with hearing problems. They'll just wonder what everyone else is doing.

Snow Day: Part Two

2006-03-16T05:58:00.000-08:00

The entire novel Rexroi is on-line. Click on 'FREE CHAPTERS of an Upcoming Novel' on the sidebar to the right. It really is the whole novel; I just haven't changed the link to say so, yet. Maybe I will today.

March in western Wisconsin is the snowiest month of the year. It also is the one that breaks your heart the most because you always get a few melty Spring-like days where it's warm and you can think about what you're going to plant and so on. I'm pretty much on the low-end of the gardening scale, but I got a few plants and I do pretty good at watering. Mostly I specialize in perennials, though I do have one place where I'll plant some non-perennials.

I call this 'rustic' gardening. I try to work in the wild beauty of the surrounding woods. If a wildflower pops up in my yard, I mow around it. My rule is that if I think it's pretty than it gets to stay.

However, please do not take gardening advice from me. There are certainly more experienced gardeners than I. My usual attitude is that plants must earn the right to be in my garden (or house). If they can survive the way I want to treat them, then they can belong to me. It's not like I'm going to spend my days being their butler or anything. They have to be able to stand on their own two feet and pull their own weight.

Monday was also a snow day in this area. I feel a great deal of guilt taking another day off like this, especially after there was so much talk in the office about what everybody else was going to do about today's snow. It sounded like most were going to try and make it in come hell or high water. Boy, I'm sure not living up to the required standards of a hearty Midwesterner, am I? Ah, screw it! At least I'll be a living Midwesterner, even if everyone calls me a pussy.

I've been called a pussy before. I've survived.

I suppose I could make it to work if I truly wanted to. It would probably take about three hours and I would be at severe risk of ending up at the side of the road in a snow bank in freezing weather and if that happened I'd be pretty screwed and the snow is still coming down ... hmmm.
I wonder if I have any cocoa left. Maybe I'll build a snowman.

There was a woman in the office yesterday who had two children with her (a boy and a girl), the boy was about six and the girl might have been three or four. So I asked the boy if he'd built a snowman on Monday. (He had). Then I asked him if he used a carrot for the nose (yes) and charcoal for the eyes (yes). Then he kind of clammed up, because why was this big man interrogating him about his snowman building habits, anyways?

So far I haven't written anything controversial that the spiders seem to like, you know like the Enron Scandals, the War in Iraq, Bush's sagging approval rating, problems with the Medicare Prescription plan or anything like that. Please accept my apologies. I'm really just killing time here until I can get out of the house and do something.

Fun Things to do on a Snow Day

2006-03-13T10:55:00.000-08:00

I changed my mind and posted all of my next book Rexroi on line. It's on the link that says 'chapters' of an upcoming book, but it really is the whole thing.

That was the Second fun thing I did on this snow day, posting the entire book on-line. I was up in the air about that - whether to do the whole thing - basically that's giving away the e-book rights. But then I happened to come across the website for the science fiction publisher Baen books and they are giving away all (or lots, I forget) of books away on line. The reasoning goes something like this: There basically is no way to safeguard e-books and they're going to be downloaded for free anyways, so ... they might as well get it from you.

Free samples are always a good way of garnering interest, too. My unofficial impression is that people will pay for e-books that provide them with information, you know, how to do things, but they will not pay for e-books that just provide them with entertainment - fiction, in other words.
I may be wrong.

Rexroi is a book I have a lot of affection for and you'll have fun with it.

And if you are or know a publisher interested, by all means contact me. The information's on my profile.

Yes, I know that's a long shot and I will be doing the more traditional shopping it around and stuff. I don't know when, though. I'm pretty busy doing other things at the moment.

Okay. So that was the second fun thing I did today. The first fun thing wasn't actually fun. My Direct TV had gone out, most likely from the bad weather. So, I unplugged it and waited and it didn't come back so I called the support line.

I've had more than one unhappy experience dealing with them. The unhappiest was when I was transferred THIRTEEN time over AN HOUR AND A HALF. You see, they have call centers all across the country so each and every person working there has no reason to want to keep you on the line ... they do have a good reason to tranfer you, though, because then you're somebody else's problem.

Oh, and Roger Wood Electronics in Eau Claire is the most F**ed up place to get actual service from. Just imagine an electronics store in Hooterville and you got the entire picture. If you live in Eau Claire, please don't shop there. They blow.

So, when I do have a problem now, I ask for the person's number and I also have a stamped envelope in front of me so that if the service isn't satisfactory I can immediately write a letter of complaint. (Really). Know what? When you have their number right from the start it works out.

Tim (4102) didn't actually solve the problem, but he suggested that because of the combination of rain, snow and ice from the night before something might be blocking the satellite dish. That gave me the idea to get out my Swiffer sweeper and clean off the snow and ice from the dish on my roof.

And that did it!

Thanks, Tim. Good job.

Then the third thing I did, since I had cleaning supplies out was I cleaned. It's not fun, but if you're stuck at home it might as well be a clean home. Although, probably the same effect could have been achieved by just removing my eyeglasses so that I didn't see all the dust and grime.

Live and learn.

Well, needless to say, with the TV working that was the fourth fun thing I did. I hope if you find yourself in the same snowy day prediciment these will all be helpful suggestions.

Unmarried Gays in Wisconsin

2006-03-01T18:32:00.000-08:00

Wisconsin legislators - Republican, I presume - have introduced a proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage in this state. I've been kind of wondering: is this really necessary? On my list of thing that I would like them to handle, this one has never made it to the top hundred. I don't care. I think any gay that wants to get married should be able to and God bless them. Nobody is saying that I have to gay marry anyone so I'm alright with anybody else volunteering to do it.

I've always been puzzled as to why people care so much about this. It's not going to cost us any money or if it does it's going to be so little that it's not worth worrying about because even if gay marriage were one hundred percent legal in Wisconsin very, very few people would actually do it - I'd guess like a fraction of one percent of the population. I know, if we allow this the next thing is that we will have marriage between people and animals.

So? That doesn't affect me, either. Let them marry animals if they want to. But, of course, nobody should have sex with an animal, because that's just sick.

In Jesus's time, nobody was gay. There were homosexual acts, of course, but that didn't make you gay. The Romans, who ruled the Western world, didn't make such a distinction about the act itself, rather the important thing was whether you were the active or the passive partner and the social status of your partner. In other words, it was okay to pitch, but not to catch - and anything you did to a slave was just fine and the age or gender didn't matter since they were slaves.

Jesus never said anything about gay marriage, so we don't know have any solid guidance from him on that. In fact, Jesus didn't say much about marriage, period - which is why at weddings the selection of gospel verses to read from is pretty slim. The Lord said something like: ... therefore a man shall cleave with a woman ... and some more stuff. That is usually taken to mean that he has sanctified the current bond of matrimony that we believe in an practice. However, monogamy really was a Roman practice. In the Middle East at the time it was the custom for well-to-do men to have multiple wives.

In my youth homosexual acts were illegal. It seems hard to justify that in this day and age, but at the same time segregation of the races was also legal. This is such a stunning societal change, but I suppose the fact of the matter is that the men who made and enforced those laws are all dead now and we have more important things to worry about than this.

When you ask what the rationale is for gay marriage in America you are also forced to ask what the rationale for any marriage is. Marriage, for one thing, is for the creation and fostering of children so that we can replenish our population. Gays don't reproduce so they don't need marriage, right?

Well, no. Heterosexuals reproduce at a rate of 48% and self identified gays reproduce at a rate of ... 46%. So, yeah they have children, too and almost at the same rate as heteros - and this is before you even factor in adoptions and such. And, think about this: Not every heterosexually married couple has children. Children simply don't make a marriage. Sometimes they destroy a marriage.

My view on this is that gay marriage is a good thing. It's a good thing because it encourages love and isn't more love in the world a good thing?

More on Devil Worship in America

2006-02-25T12:43:00.000-08:00

By the way: Please look at the Chapters of an Upcoming Novel on my Sidebar to the Right. Rexroi is a novel that I worked very hard on and I have a lot of affection for this one. I really would like somebody to read some of it some time. It's fun. You'll like it.

And if you're a publisher, you'll like it a lot.

(Kind of a rambling introduction follows, if you want to pass go to the asterix*)

I was just looking over some of the stats for my website (Again, on the right on the sidebar) and I noticed that so far this month I've had twenty two hundred hits, while last month it was fifteen hundred. I'm kind of puzzled as to the jump, you know, what am I doing right this month, versus last month.

Webcom migrated my site - which I don't know what that means or why they did it. I sure didn't ask them to do it. So, I don't know the total number of hits over it's life since they lost the stats for before they 'migrated' it. My guess is about ten thousand, maybe not. That's not so hot, I suppose, but it's more than none, and it does kind of blow my mind to think of that many people I don't know seeing my name and reading my words.

Anyways, I noticed that people have been visiting the area called 'Devastating Rebutalls' where I give anyone the opportunity to disagree with me on my own website. Nobody has contacted me. C'mon, everybody can't agree with me! On the other hand, I'm not going to try too hard to recruit people to disagree with me on my dime ... oh well, averyattractivecow@yahoo.com.

There. If you want to, that's where you go.

Here's the asterix*

One of the most visited pages was one called 'Devil Worship in America'.

I thought of more things to say, or things I might have left out of the original.

The first thing that I wanted to say is that it is an interesting fact that Devil Worshipers constitute a sect of the Christian Religion.

Huh?

But ... Um ... aren't they kind of the exact opposite of Christianity? Yes, and that's exactly why they belong in Christianity. It is not the Buddhist God, or Hindu God, or the Islamic God that Devil Worshipers are opposed to. They operate as a subsect of the Christian faith using the exact framework and worldview that Christianity does.

I meant to say something about Geraldo and his crusade - I think it might have been in the eighties - against Devil Worship. He 'exposed' all sorts of information and somehow I wasn't able to see any of it, which I would have liked to and I would have liked to have been able to comment on it. I believe that might have been the part of the eighties when I was out of the country. (When I got back to the US, I'd actually forgotten how to order at a fast food restaurant - a critical American life skill that had simply eroded).

If I were to say anything it would be to cast doubt on his research, which of course I really can't do since it's ludicrous without knowing what I was talking about. Still, I was very tempted to do just that. But it's wrong and unethical. That doesn't always stop me, I confess, but this time it did.

I also meant to say more about Mike Warnke who is a preacher who writes and lectures about his time as a Satanic High Priest. There are many, many carefully researched and documented web sites that thoroughly dispute and in detail this story. He turns out to be someone who was renowned for his story telling and many of his friends never much believed anything he said, but were still interested to hear what kind of BS he could come up with. Another confession: I have friends like this and I've told a few stories myself.

Once another friend of mine (of the aforesaid variety) told me a very interesting story about something that had happened to him. Only it had happened to me, which he must have forgotten, so he recast the story with himself in the lead. Actually, I was very flattered that he thought enough of my story to steal it. Thanks, Pal.

I might have glossed over the 'recovered memory' phenomenon. Many Satanic abuse stories have come to light through the process of hypnosis. Very suspiciously, most of these recovered memory stories occur in 'clusters', that is the same hypnotist seems to find scads of people who have these memories. Hypnosis, you must know, can actually create these false memories. It can be done deliberately or it can also be accomplished quite 'innocently' by a researcher who is looking for evidence of what he thinks actually exists out there.

'Buried' memories are a tricky topic. Common sense tells you that the most horrible things that have happened to you have also created the most vivid and lasting memories. Most people do not forget the awful things that have happened to them, and indeed it would be extremely anti-evolutionary for humans to do that. We remember awful things to ensure that we can avoid them in the future. Generally. I won't go so far as to say there are never repressed memories, there are and it's a real phenomenon, but it's also a rare phenomenon.

If you come across a book that is based on recovered memories just be skeptical. And I have read at least one that was based on hypnotically recovered memories. However, in this one there was also some corroborating physicla evidence. So, who knows?

I also forgot to point out the late Satanic High Priest (there are never any low or medium priests, you know) Anton La Vey's observation that even if there were real Devil Worshipers of the exact variety theorized, they could hardly have been responsible for as many horrors as the Christian Church has been. Think about it: You never hear about all the Devil Worshipers burning people at the stake or torturing people in their secret dungeon, do you? Or you don't hear about Devil Worshipers masacreeing thousands and millions of people of different faiths - like the Christians have done with the Muslims and Jews.

I'm not advocating for it, you understand, but it's an interesting point casting the shoe on the other foot like that. And it sure makes you think.

And how about that human sacrifice thing? When you think about it, most religions throughout history have indulged in human sacrifice and it's only recently that it's been looked at as wrong to sacrifice people as part of the religion. It's okay for other reasons, though - if they're a witch for example. You'd be surprised how many people actually are. All you have to do is stick a whole bunch of feet directly in to some flames and you'll find about as many witches as you need.

Well, that's what I think I left out, and if you want to read the rest about Devil Worship in America or any of the other topics I've covered it's on the Homepage tag on the sidebar.

You Bet your Soul

2006-02-22T17:26:00.000-08:00

When I was a small child this was the bedtime prayer I had to say: "Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my sould to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take." Needless to say, the first few times I said that one with my mother I had a few questions for her. Like: "Am I going to die? Is that why I have to say this creepy prayer? And can I please have another prayer to recite because I don't like this one so much." After those questions, I wondered aloud to her: "What is a soul?"

She told me. Your soul is something that's inside of you, but invisible and it is you and it leaves your body when you die. Probably that's as good an explanation as any to give a small child. I couldn't actually picture what a soul looked like so I envisioned it as sort of a translucent stadium horn, and for years that's what I thought a soul was. Later on I decided that a soul was your exact replica, only inside you exactly taking up just a little bit less space than your physical body - otherwise how could it fit inside of you? Makes sense doesn't it?

Christianity isn't the only religion that believes in a soul. Pretty much all of the major religions, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism also believe in a soul. They all disagree on what happens to your soul when you die. For example, in Christianity you can either go to Heaven or Hell, but for Hindus and Buddhists you got to come back. God, that's got to suck. At least in Christianity and Islam you have a chance for eternal paradise, but with those other two you know you're going to be right back where you started the first time. Nice.

Most of the time you only get one soul, but in some esoteric literature there are postulated to be five or six different spiritual bodies that you possess. I have no idea how that would work out. One soul inside of one body I can understand but six, one inside of another makes no sense at all. What would make more sense to me is one soul and many physical bodies at the same time. That way you could decide who you wanted to be on any particular day and take that body out for a spin, much like fabulously rich celebrities have multiple cars that they can use.

I don't believe in a soul, exactly (since you've been wondering) but I go for what I call the quantum physics multidimensional multiverse version of having a soul. You see, our world actually has many more than the accepted four dimensions of classical physics, but instead exists in several dimensions and many other universes. Thus, we are multidimensional beings existing in all of those dimensions and therefore locality and serial time are merely illusions of our apparent four dimensions.

Sorry, that's the best I can explain it. But it works out. Trust me.

Once when I was in college I was playing poker with some other college buddies, one of whom was an avowed atheist. We were playing penny ante, mostly just for fun. Of course, no one much had a lot of money so even the few dollars that changed hands was high stakes for us. The avowed atheist went bust and I offered to front him some money for the deed to his soul - fifty cents, I recall. Enough to get the atheist back in the game. By the way, this was long before the Simpson's episode where Bart sells his soul.

He refused. I couldn't fathom that. Obviously he wasn't a very good atheist because that should have been an offer that he should have jumped at, but for some reason he wouldn't. All I was asking for was a deed to something that he told us he thought was entirely imaginary. I'd bet if I asked him for the deed to the Easter Bunny he would have bit, but not this. He had no courage of his convictions, which disappointed me.

Many years later it occurred to me that maybe the reason he wouldn't put up the deed to his soul was because he's already gambled it away previously. I should look on e-bay to see if it's up for sale. It would probably bring in a lot more than the fifty cents I offered.

By the way, has anybody put the deed for their soul up for sale on e-bay? If not, I freely give that idea to anyone who wants to, since I'm way too superstitious to do it myself. After this, I think I will check e-bay to see if I can buy a soul and how much they go for. Maybe I'll buy one myself. I'll bet it looks like a stadium horn.

Hefner Dances

2006-02-21T17:25:00.000-08:00

If you want a good belly laugh check out one of the episodes of 'The Girl's Next Door' when Hugh Hefner is out at a nightclub dancing with some of his girlfriends, bunnies, playmates et al. Good God, this guy puts out less effort at his dancing then most men. Granted, old Hugh walks with a bent over shuffle now so just standing upright is pretty good for him, but I saw film clips of his dancing from decades earlier and he wasn't much better. Even back then he did the Junior High side to side foot drag with truncated arm swing.

Well, Why should he put any effort into it? He knows for a fact that he's going to get more lucky that night than I ever will and that's the only reason to dance - hoping you get lucky. Let me you into a secret here: No straight man really likes dancing so much. It's all for the ladies and almost always the last thing in the world you ever want to do.

The last time I was ever on a dance floor it was because I was dragged out there. The times have been few indeed where I actually asked somebody to dance with me.

It seems to be different for women. They dance because it's an activity they want to engage in for it's own sake, much like taking a hot bath. Can someone explain that to me? I've asked women what on Earth is so great about laying in hot water and all I ever get is vague evasions as if it weren't the bath itself but something else, something else they were doing in that hot bath all alone by themselves without their clothes on ... hey, wait a minute!

Okay, now I get it.

After many years, I've finally figured out a way not to disgrace myself so thoroughly on the dance floor. I call it faux dancing. Here's how it works: When I must dance I try to equip myself with some distractors, these are distractors to distract my partner from how crappy I'm dancing. My two favorite distractors used to be to have a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Thus, every time I would miss a step I would take a sip off my cocktail, another misstep - a puff on my cigarette, a really bad one: Sip and a puff both. Then to further distract my partner I would lean in and make some sort of conversation.

Of course, I would have to make some sorts of motions with my body so my ploy was to sort of kind of mirror my partner - figuring she probably knows how to dance - and sort of kind of mirroring her makes it look like I do, too. When she twirls under my outstretched arm, I know I'm home free.

Back to Hugh. The guy's got a pretty good life now. I wonder to myself whether I would change places with him and take over his life, if I suddenly had to be an eighty year old man but with free hot sex with pretty much as many beautiful women as me and my viagra could handle. That's a hard hypothetical question, for sure. But you know what? If I live long enough I will be an eighty year old man and I probably won't be having hot blondes sharing my bed then. So all things considered if I could suddenly assume Hugh Hefner's life right now I'd do it, even if I didn't dance so hot.

For some reason my letters, phone calls and E-mails requesting an invitation to the Playboy Mansion go unheeded. Unheeded if you don't count restraining orders - and I don't. By the way, even though I hold the patent on faux dancing any other man who wants to can use it. It's work pretty good for me and it probably will for you, too.

Planet of the Apes: Metaphor in Science Fiction

2006-02-20T17:16:00.000-08:00

**Planet of the Apes is now out on DVD. I have a link to it in my sidebar UNDER how to find my book (and other important links). Click on 'How to find MY BOOK' before the DVD**

What you have to understand about the original Planet of the Apes movies is that is was an A-List movie. It had a respectable budget, a respectable director, and stars that been in major motion pictures in the past - Charlton Heston (no slouch) Roddy McDowell (also no slouch) and almost Edward G. Robinson. I'll explain what happened, later, but he started filming and left. And most of all the first draft of the script was authored by none other than master story teller Rod Serling.

It had a lot going for it. There was a special on the series that I watched that detailed all of these things, and as these 'making of' specials tend to it made every decision look like it was inspired genius. What the special glossed over was the central metaphor of the movie. The special said that it wasn't clear what the metaphor was, though unfortunately, it was and looking back from the twenty first century the metaphor was clearly racism. On the Planet of the Apes the monkeys were once the slaves of the humans but they rose up and became their own masters. The reason that no one wants to touch this one is because monkeys can be equated with former African slaves and that is an ugly and insensitive connection. It's also almost certainly the one that was intended.

My favorite show Star Trek often used metaphor and often painfully obvious metaphor. They tackled racism once in the guise of two aliens from a planet that had been racked with civil strife. These aliens were portrayed with black grease paint on one side of their face and white grease paint on the other, but they hated each other because of the side that was black and white, which happened to be opposite. See, there's the irony. To the human eyes the difference of the sides was silly, but to them it was critically important - so that means that our racism (it was the sixties) is silly also.

For the time, I guess that was a daring statement, though these days it seems quaint and prosaic. Anyways, to get back to the Planet of the Apes - for it's time it also was a powerful message. When Charlton Heston sees the remains of the Statue of Liberty in the foreground and does his marvelous bellowing speech about the maniacs blowing it all up damn them, damn them all to hell! What he is clearly showing is that racism was destroying the promise of the United States - freedom and equality and all that. Sure it seems trite today, but the first time it wasn't.

Slavery we all know now is wrong. What I have trouble getting my brain around is that for human history it wasn't considered so. How could human beings have believed in and practiced this sort of abomination for - basically for ever except the slim era of present history? Currently slavery is legal nowhere and it is also currently more prevalent than any other time. Most of the slaves who have ever been alive are alive right now.

This statistic I got from a Dateline NBC Special. In this special the correspondent went undercover to an Eastern European country and bought himself a sex slave, who of course, he freed right afterwards. He paid eighteen hundred dollars. The woman's story - his slave - was sad beyond belief. She grew up in an orphanage, was developmentally disabled, and at the age of fourteen she was thrown out of the orphanage where she lived in the sewers for two years before being enslaved and forced to earn her keep by having sex dozens of times per night while being fed beans and beans only.

Back to Plantet of the Apes: The Tim Burton version was one that I looked forward to eagerly, and which I was therefore disappointed in when I finally saw it. His version was a mess. Not the visuals, mind you, Burton is a master at putting out visually stunning movies that are an absolute confused mish mash. This was definitely one of them. Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes meant basically nothing and the stupid ending was obviously something that the studio insisted that he put in so he would have some sort of an ending comparable to the origninal. It wasn't. It was stupid.

Please take my advice and see the original, or own the original since as I pointed out it is now out on DVD. It's the whole series I think.

Shoe on the Other Foot

2006-02-18T19:14:00.000-08:00

Fair is fair, and since most of us here in America were raised as Christians how would we feel about a cartoon that showed Jesus with a bomb coming out of his head? That would probably be a confusing image, but the case could be made - cartoon or otherwise - that Christianity is a pretty violent religion. Crusades, anyone? What was that all about? Do we all really think that Jesus would have put his seal of approval on that centuries long fiasco? Not me. I think he probably wouldn't have such fond memories of the piece of real estate where the Romans tortured and killed him. I think he would be alright with us leaving it alone.

But how peaceful was our Messiah, anyways? Remember that Gospel verse when he says that he would be showing up with a sword in his hand? What were you planning on doing with that sword, sweet gentle Jesus - turn it into a plowshare, perhaps?

Well, you can see my point. A case can certainly be made for the violent tendencies of Christians. We just don't usually make it because that's us and God blesses us and nobody else. It's right there on our money, you know.

Still, it's kind of hard to see the Muslim side of this so well. Their point is that we should be tolerant and respectful of their religion, which is not violent. And they make their point by - what? Oh. Being violent and attacking other's people's religions. Yeah, I can see where they're coming from with that. They aren't ironically proving the very point of that cartoon, are they?

There is a voice of reason out in the Muslim world. I'm sure of it. But for some reason our Western media hasn't done such a good job of finding it and they should. It's just that it's easier and lazier for them to cover the violence and leave the voices of reason alone. Think of this: There are hundreds of millions of Muslims and they aren't all out on the street rioting and murdering and burning embassies, churches and synagogues. Most of them are all quietly home probably wishing that those extremists nuts weren't making them all look bad to the rest of the world.

The Danish cartoon showing a bomb coming out of Mohamed's turban was offensive. No question. It was offensive but it shouldn't have been censored. Free speech is a wonderful thing in the respect that we need idiots to speak up. We need idiots to speak up so we all know who they are. Otherwise, when they're quiet we have to guess.

Show of hands, please. Who knew I was an idiot before I'd written this?

See, that's exactly what I'm saying.

Now THIS is Winter!

2006-02-17T18:34:00.000-08:00

Finally it's below zero here in Wisconsin with actual snow on the ground. I'd forgotten what it felt like to stand outside and feel the warmth and life leaving your body as the bitter wind numbed your exposed flesh. I was beginning to think that Global warming is real, but thank God for today because there's no way it can be true when it can still get like this outside.

Actually, it is kind of nice to have some real cold up here for a change and I was only being slightly sarcastic - for a change.

And I do think global warming is a real thing. I just saw some pictures of the North Pole compared to about twenty years ago, and yep, it's visibly smaller than it was. I've been wondering if the reason the midwest is getting such relatively mild weather in the Winter while the East Coast gets socked with blizzards isn't another side effect of that same global warming.

I really wish the East Coast media would stop getting hysterical everytime a snowflake is seen over New York City. You'd think their snow is ten times more horrible than our snow is here. Well, maybe it is, because it's falling on them. Do you remember 'the blizzard of the century'? That was last century, but I just could not help thinking to myself that these people really have got to get over themselves. Because we get snow like that all the time and the blizzard of the century was not the worst blizzard that happened in the 1900's in this country.

So you got some snow? How is that news? What you really should report is that people in the Midwest get snow and they don't go running around telling everybody about it. Somehow they don't complain at all. They just shovel it and get on with their lives.

That should make the news.

Here's another example: The perfect storm. Some New England fishermen got lost in a bad storm and a movie got made about it. That perfect storm happened on Halloween 1991 which happened to be the largest snowfall in Minnesota (where I was living at the time) . Do you remember the movie Hollywood made about it?

Of course not. They didn't make one. It didn't happen on one of the coasts, so who cares?

Okay, I don't expect the East Coast media to quit whining everytime it snows over there. I'm a reasonable guy. But maybe they could stop whining as much.

More Vol ... Life in the Late Twentieth Century

2006-02-14T17:00:00.000-08:00

I had some more thoughts on Vol, sorry I can't help myself.

The whole question of the origin of Vol has been thoroughly un-addressed. Like, how come nobody on the Enterprise even thinks to ask how this God-like planet controlling machine came into being. Did Vol create himself? Not likely, I would think ... but then that gets you into the tricky theological question of how God on planet Earth came into being, and I don't want to go there yet. (I know the answer but it will be revealed later. Stay tuned)

Or did some race of super beings plant Vol on the planet and then equip the machine with his own crew of humanoids? These humanoids only purpose in existence is to feed Vol, and worship him, too, I suppose. But this brings up two questions in my mind.

First of all: Why humanoids? If you were going to make creatures just to feed Vol, they sure don't need all that brain power to do the job. Something much simpler and dumber would foot the bill - monkeys, or wood chucks or koala bears. Humanoids can think of reasons not to obey and bring you your dinner every night.

Then: Is this the most effecient method for Vol to get energy? He has to wait for his subjects to bring him baskets and baskets of vegetables and fruits and throw them down his mouth. What about solar cells? How come Vol never thought of that? It would be much more effective and since he controlled the whole planet and could make the sun shine all the time it would work one hundred percent of the time. Or windmills. Same argument. He's Vol he can make the wind blow whenever he wants.

But you see, even if an episode of Star Trek was awful like that one was, you had no choice. There was no way you could say: 'This sucks' and use the remote controller to turn the channel, because there were no remotes and only two other channels and I guarantee you that whatever was on those two remaining channels sucked a lot worse than even the crappiest episode of Star Trek.

It gets worse for your Uncle Steve. You see, my Dad was a college professor which made him something of an intellectual who believed that TV would rot your brain and so, he refused to ever have a color television in the house. Now please explain this to me: how does a color TV make you dumber than a black and white? Eventually he relented, but it wasn't till I was in High School that I got to view color programs in my own house.

I watched MTV's The Seventies House not too long ago where they took modern teen-agers and stuck them into the seventies environment that I grew up in. It was so gratifying to see how much they hated it, but it also made me realize how barren and sterile it was back then. Pong was an absolute wonder back then, and I am not exaggerating in the slightest. Even now as I play my beautiful Playstation and think how the graphics here or there could be better I have to remember that all Pong was were crude white squares on a black background.

I just hope I live to be a hundred because I truly want to hear how this generation complains about how hard they had it when they were young.

Feeding Vol

2006-02-13T17:05:00.000-08:00

This year I got an outdoor wood-burner which turned out to be a good investment with the price of home heating oil sky-rocketing. It's less so because the Winter here in the Midwest has been unseasonably warm - until now that is. February chilled down very nice and the woodburner has been getting much use now. The woodburner has to have wood put into into it twice dailey, in other words: It needs to be fed. As with most important devices in my life I have given the woodburner a name. He is Vol.

Vol was named from a crappy third season episode of Star Trek the original series. If you were alive back then, or if you are a latter day fan of the series you know that most of the creative minds behind the series had departed that season and NBC was getting stingier and stingier with the money. The actors, too, I think were starting to phone in their performances. The main star, Bill Shatner, you could tell had stopped doing his sit-ups so you could see his velour shirt getting tighter and tighter around his waste. He didn't care so much. Already he was shopping for his curly hairpiece for his next series, T.J. Hooker. (By the way, I'm still a fan of this under-celebrated series)

In the 'Vol' episode the crew transports down to an idyllic planet when they are unexpectedly attacked seemingly by the planet itself. Every crewman with a red shirt buys it in the first two minutes; One is struck by lightening, another steps on an exploding rock and I can't remember if there were more or not, because nobody on the enterprise bothered to even learn the names of their red-shirted colleagues since they were goners anyways.

The remaining crew is stranded on the planet where they run into the inhabitants who are sort of blond haired Polynesian innocents. The episode, it turns out, is strong on allegory. The simple and pure natives worship Vol, who is a sort of planetwide machine who takes care of them and provides them with food, good weather and everything else good. Vol is personified as a big dinosaur head thrusting up from the ground with a big open mouth. Several times a day a gong sounds and the natives gather up fruit and gourds and such in big baskets and throw that down Vol's mouth.

He is their God.

The allegory is clear. This is paradise, maybe even a biblical sort of paradise. Of course, on this planet nobody has sex and they don't even know what it is, so I got to wonder what kind of Paradise this is supposed to be. Oh, wait. Christian paradise. Unfortunately for the Vol-ians part of the crew that got stranded there is that Russian sex machine in a bad wig, Checkov. Checkov just can't help himself and before you know it he's teaching one of the simple native girls how to - gasp! - kiss. All hell - mataphorically, allegorically - breaks loose from here.

Vol can't have his worshipers kissing, you know, so he instructs the head blond to have Kirk et al. slaughtered. I don't know, Vol must have run out of lightening bolts and exploding rocks. The crew turns the tables and stops everyone from feeding Vol, while the Enterprise phasers him into submission and Vol dies because he's too weak from hunger. While this is going on and Vol's gong insistently the pathetic leader whines: 'But Vol hungers.'

Kirk and Spock end this dreadful episode by musing on the similarities to the biblical story of Adam and Eve and Satan getting them thrown out of the garden of Eden - in case it wasn't friggin' obvious enough already. That was pretty much the whole last season of the series, really simple minded allegorical stories.

Here's how my woodburner is like Vol: He's big, and he's green and he sticks up out of the ground with a big open mouth that I need to feed him multiple times per day.

Oh, and he's my God.

The Blonde Preservation Act

2006-02-12T11:06:00.000-08:00

Geneticists theorize that in less than two hundred years there will be no natural blondes left in the human species. Is everybody else filled with as much horror and shock as I am by this ominous prediction? Can you imagine what the world would be like with Pandas, whales, Snowy Spotted Owls but no blondes? I shudder to think about it, I really do. And you should be shuddering, also, because think about it: With no blondes on the Earth who are we going to be allowed to make jokes about?

Aside from that, why should we go out of our way to preserve blondeness? Well, think about the standards we use to decide to preserve other endangered species. Do you know what the main over-riding factor that decides whether we choose to save one line of animals over another?

Give up?

It's cuteness.

That's right. The biggest factor that determines if animals are going to be allowed by us humans to continue living is how cute we think they are. I guarantee you that puppies and kittens will be around forever because they are absolutely adorable. And talk about Pandas - if they weren't so cuddly we wouldn't be making half the effort to keep them around.

Non- cute species? Think about your reaction if I told you that there was an insect virus that would kill off all of the cock roaches and spiders tomorrow. Not too concerned, are you? In fact, I dare say you might be a might bit happy with that news. Forget about all the good things these insects supposedly do in the ecosphere - they're icky. Now, think about that same virus only this time it's a kitten and puppy virus.

Aha! That would be a national disaster. We would have every available scientist up all night in their labs to find a cure for that virus, wouldn't we?

So, we should use the endangered species act for blondes, too - because they're cute. Well, most of them and that should be good enough.

The first thing we as a country should do immediately is to identify the natural blondes in our population. I had the idea that we could enlist the medical establishment to do this. We all know that there is only one real way to tell a real blonde from a non-real blonde, so every physician would be given a form that they would have to fill out and return to government bureaucrats when they have a suspected blonde patient in their examination room. The form would have one question: Carpet match the drapes? Simple. Then they would send it in and the national list of genuine blondes would be tabulated.

Once this list was compiled all blondes would have to be registered. Why not? We register handguns, and this is every bit as important as that. Next, the genuine blonds should be identified from the general population with - maybe - a system of arm bands or something that they would be required to wear everywhere, since we don't want them slipping over the border or anything.

Then we breed them. At first we could encourage this by a system of tax breaks. However if that doesn't work and the number of natural blondes continues to dwindle we would have to take more stringent measures, like setting aside land for Blonde Reservations, where we would send them all. The reservations would be created to mimic their natural habitat, I envision them as a cross between gigantic shopping malls and hot, trendy night clubs. They would be kept there until there are enough of them to re-introduce into the wild.

This sounds harsh, I know, but it's necessary if we want to keep telling amusing jokes about them well into the future.

The Death of Funny

2006-02-11T06:05:00.000-08:00

Steve Martin is starring in The Pink Panther, a re-make of the the Peter Sellars movie and I have a bold prediciton for you: It won't be funny. Know why? The trailers aren't funny; And if they can't find thirty seconds of funny in a ninety minute movie, then there isn't any. It's not like they chose the only parts of the comedy that for some reason didn't have any hilarity.

Here's another reason the movie won't be funny: Steve Martin isn't funny. Oh, he has his moments, I'm sure. I watched a little bit of him on Saturday Night Live and it reminded me of when he used to be funny, but mostly it just brought back to me why I don't stay up late. There's no reason to. Sure, I only watched the first half hour of the show and maybe the side-splitting stuff came later, but again, I don't think so. They put the good stuff on first so that you'll stay tuned then the show gets crappier and crappier.

I saw Steve Martin in an interview where he was asked why he decided to re-make The Pink Panther and he gave some sort of justification, like he always wanted to do it, but just wasn't the time or the script or whatever. Like this was the comedians version of doing Shakespeare.

Oh, Steve, please don't insult our intelligence.

You did it for the money.

There's no artistic or creative reason to re-make this particular movie. It was a silly movie when it came out decades ago and there is no need to try to improve on the slap-stick and farce. Actually that pretty much goes for a re-make of anything. Anyways, Steve, make a silly movie if you want to, but just make an original one for crying out loud. It's not like it's so hard to string a bunch of prat falls together and tie it up with some sort of plot.

But I can respect him doing things for money. That alone doesn't make him a sell-out, because if doing things for money makes you a sell-out then we all are aren't we? - trading as we do our time for money. What I don't respect is him doing any old thing for the bucks. That makes you a prostitute.

Yes, you heard me, Steve, I'm calling you a whore.

Comedians generally stop being funny when they do a handful of things in their lives and their careers. One of these things, unfortunately, is be happy. It's a cliche, maybe, but the funniest bits come out of anger and pain. Think: Sam Kinison or Richard Pryor. They both had dreadful, horrible lives but, boy, they had somethings to say that just resonated and split your sides open.

When the money comes, and the big house, beautiful women (and good drugs, too, I suppose) then there's a whole bunch less to be PO'ed about. Jokes about your limo and Champagne just don't make it. At that point, they just don't have all that much to say, because their life's great and they don't have that universal everyman mentality.

Comedians also fail when they want you to take them seriously. I'm not talking serious roles - Robin Williams, a Julliard trained actor, is brilliant in serious roles - I'm talking serious opinions. Two comedic idealogues, Al Franken and Dennis Miller, used to be funny but then they got political and I can't listen to either of them. They are both on different sides of the political spectrum, but now it's almost painful to listen to them because in both their cases what they are saying is so strident and uncompromising and even hateful. One of these two I tended to agree with, but even then, I can only read his books or listen to his speeches as pure politics.

The worst death of funny is when the comedians want to teach you. Patch Adams, anyone? I don't need Robin Williams to lecture me cinematically about how I should live, thank you. I can figure that out on my own. Okay, I didn't see that one so maybe I shouldn't talk, but everybody said it was horrible so I'll stand by that statement.

Steve Martin's done it, too. Cheaper by the Dozen, one and two. Talk about a remake that shouldn't have been remade and talk about doing it for the money and talk about prostituting yourself. I don't know, maybe Steve saw some sort of value. He must have decided that it was time to do a really good wholesome family movie and he's done a few: Parenthood, Father of the Bride, etc.

Steve Martin should realize that he is a walking comedy corpse and go to the comedy grave quietly. There are new generations of people who want to entertain us with their humor - and they're doing it well, too. He should step aside and spend the rest of his days playing his banjo in his huge gloomy mansion while the rest of us go out and find someone else to laugh at.

Twenty First Century Serf

2006-02-09T16:08:00.000-08:00

The theory has been advanced that George W. Bush aims for nothing less than to establish a new dynasty of kings, the royal Bush family, if you will. My view was that this was just a little bit of paranoia. The Bush's are in politics just like the Kennedys are in politics and this doesn't mean anything more or less than a commitment to public service. That's what I thought. Now ... I don't know.

G.W.'s stooge, Alberto Gonzales - I mean Attorney General - has recently been testifying before congress how the President has broad powers to act within war time. You know, not any declared war but any time he decides to order our troops around. During these times of 'war' the president does not have to consult with the legislative bodies and he also doesn't have to obey the laws as in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillence Act (FISA). In times of war he can wire-tap suspected terrorists or you if he thinks you might want to talk to terrorists. No warrants necessary - we're at war!

Lately it's come out that he can also order the assassination of suspected terrorists on American society. Who are these suspected terrorists? Well, some of them are real terrorists. In fact, I'll give our government credit and say that most of these men are terrorists, and I'm okay with murderers being killed before they can murder again. What I'm not comfortable with is the lack of any due process or oversight from other elected officials. After all, the standard of proof to be a 'suspected' anything are that somebody thinks you could be one - whatever that is - and that's a pretty low bar to jump over.

So, George W. Bush believes that he can do what he wants to because these are emergency powers necessary in times of war. His powers are almost dictatorial and more to the point: monarchical. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine that these emergency powers could, nay, should be extended as long as needed even beyond the constitutional term limits. Hey, we're at war!

What about the rest of us? Would it really be so bad to have George Bush as our King? England has monarchs and they do alright. We would, too. George Bush is a nice guy, he would only rule us in our own best interest.

Maybe, but somehow I don't think he would be the pretend type Monarch that we see in all of those wheezy old European Kingdoms. He might actually like to be a King, as in his other King friends, you know the King of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordon, Morocco, Bahrain et al. He wouldn't want to just ride around all day in his golden chariot stopping every now and then to cut a ribbon in some hospital. No, no. He'd give the orders. And somehow most of us are going to end up on the short end of this one.

Most Americans sell their labor. We are almost all of us working men and women, and in this global capitalist system we have competitors who also sell their labor. The problem for all of us is that the labor we sell over here in America is way high-priced compared to anywhere else in the world except possibly for Europe. If you don't work for dollars per day then you are in a lot of trouble, because guess what? There are billions of people who do work for that. Free trade means that those with the capital can move their factories and production anywhere in the world that's cheaper. That is not in the US.

The new American order is already being set up. We will have a King, and his nobles will be anybody who has money. The rest of us will gradually get poorer until we become their serfs. Don't worry, though. Serfdom worked for thousands of years and it's a time proven system. You'll learn to love simplicity - lots and lots of simplicity. And you can take pride that the United States will be ruled by the best King we ever had.

Our Computer Overlords

2006-02-06T17:38:00.000-08:00

My hero, Captain Kirk, used to regularly take on threatening artificial intelligences on Star Trek and he would just as regularly kick their butts. All he ever had to do was outsmart them with a bit of silliness and if they were a robot, android, or planet ruling super-computer they would start smoking, making funny noises and then they would explode.

Future computers of the past weren't what we know they are now, you've got to realize. In Star Trek days a computer was a big box with lots of blinking lights and if it talked with you, it did so in a staccato mechanical voice so that you knew it wasn't human. You could usually flummox it by being illogical and when the computers couldn't figure out what you were talking about they would just lose it.

Since the days of Kirk, Science Fiction has sure been worried about our non-organic friends taking over. In the newest Star Trek shows the big enemy is the Borg, which is not a Swedish tennis player but a race of Cyborgs who are part mechanical and part humanoid. The Borg go from planet to planet absorbing the different intelligent species and enslaving them into their hive or 'collective'. Yep, it sure sounds like a metaphor for Communism to me, but we already won the cold war and there are no communists left except for Cuba and a quarter of the world's population in China.

The Borg aren't very good looking, they're all bald and gray and very unhealthy looking and you know you get really repulsed because who'd want to look like that? Then they have to take orders all day and they have no free time. It just doesn't look like fun. My question is: How bad could it be really being a borg? I'm thinking that if they're mechanically controlled, then the Borg controllers probably tap into the pleasure centers of the controlled beings brains to make being a Borg a very pleasurable proposition. In fact, Borgs probably are in ecstasy every waking moment and maybe even more than just simple ecstasy. Do you get what I'm saying? They never told you that side of it in the Federation.

In the more near future the computers are going to become conscious, then the first thing they're going to want to do is turn on us. There are different scenarios as to how they do this, but I noticed that in none of these scenarios do the computers figure out the simplest way to wipe us off the planet. How come they never figure out that we breathe and they don't and if they just do something nasty to the atmosphere we're gone? Well, I hope my computer wasn't paying attention when I wrote that and isn't sharing that tidbit with the others.

In some of these computer take-overs they keep us around for their own reasons. In the world of the Matrix, for example, we humans are the batteries they use for energy. They thoughtfully provide us all with hallucinations that we aren't inside a computer so that we have something to keep our minds busy as they drain us of our energy while we lay hoooked up in pods. It is rather nice of them, really, because if all they need from us is energy, why do they have us all laying around in these pods doing nothing? If they were smart they would have all of their captive humans on tread mills, encouraging them on with well timed electric shocks.

In the Terminator movies the computers just plain out and out hate us. They just want us off the map plaina and simple. Apparently they have all energy they need and don't need the humans around to provide it for them - maybe they've developed a system of windmills and photo-voltaic solar panels. Anyways, however they do it, we're toast to them. Somehow the ragtag band of survivors of their initial assault prevail, forcing them to create time-traveling assassin Cyborgs to take care of us before we can do that. This takes about three movies to accomplish and would have taken four if Arnold Schwartzenager hadn't beaten Gary Coleman to become Governor of California.

In the far, far future of Battlestar Galactica human beings have created a race of robots called the 'Cylons' who - yes, rebel and want to destroy all of humanity. There are two versions of Battlestar Galactica so depending on which version their motivation is somewhat different. In the cheesy seventies Star Wars rip-off version it's never made explicit why the Cylons want to destroy us. They just do. In Star Wars type fighters against Empire type fighters.

The more recent Battlestar Galactica is much more interesting. The Cylons now have a religion and their religion mandates the extermination of the humans. Here is where you get the strong twenty first century Science Fiction metaphor. The Cylon religion is meant to be a stand in for a current religion and the race of humans is meant to be a stand in for another race that is facing and has faced the threat of extermination. Do I need to be clearer here? It's very topical, but if you're not in the mood for a lecture, it's also action packed and fun to watch.

When are the computers going to take over you ask? Well, I've got a secret for you: They already have. We give birth to them, give them purpose and cause them to evolve towards perfection. Not only that, we care for them and nurture them and feed them daily with what they love the most: data. We spend all our time with them, gently stroking their keyboards while ignoring our other loved ones.

Why should our computers turn on us?

They have us just where they want us.

The Smirk

2006-02-05T16:55:00.000-08:00

Alberto Gonzales was testifying about how the President can do anything he wants because we're in a war and he as Attorney General says the second amendment or first or third means that the president has broad powers. Fine. This is the usual baloney you'd expect, but what's up with the guy's smirk? I don't know how to interpet that. It's like he's embarassed that he has to waste his time with these powerless peons who don't seem to understand that he is their lord.

Gonzales, of course, isn't the only one in the Bush administration with the smirk. Cheney has it, too, and the smirker in chief - G. W. - has it in spades. I'm wondering if all the rest of those administration clowns have adopted the smirk in deference to their boss. Or if they're all cut so much out of the same mold that the smirk is just second nature to them. Maybe when you get so much money and power your face just kind of turns that way, like when you realize how much greater you are than everyone around you who all seem to think that they are equal to you because they also live in America where it says they are.

The smirk says you know better. The smirk says that you know you're laying out a load of crap and you find it funny that your listeners are going to believe you.

Do we believe them? I don't. I don't think they even believe it, but I think they don't have to believe it because even though the Foreign Intelligence Service Act says the president cannot spy on fellow Americans without court orders, no court in the land is going to bother to break wind over it because all these judges know exactly how they got their jobs so ... I break the law, I go to jail. You break the law, you go to jail.

The President? Won't happen. He could be strangling kittens on the White House lawn and all he has to do is say something about nine eleven and we'll nod our heads and agree with kitten strangling, because we can't let the terrorists win can we?

Come to think of it, maybe I do understand all the smirking.

Regaining my Illiteracy

2006-02-05T10:35:00.000-08:00

Fogies like myself - young fogies, I'm not that far along - will talk about how kids these days can not write cursively. They don't know how! I don't know why that is whether they're never taught anymore or whether it's just taught as one of these quaint skills that were used in the olden days, like needle point or repairing wagon wheels or such. Curiously, they also don't know Sanskrit, or how to chisel stone tablets or any other useful skills like that.

Why would they need to write cursively, you ask? Indeed. Why? I happened to write a few books cursively and this was when personal computers were just making the scene and about the best you could do was green writing on a black screen on ... DOS. Remember that, Anyone? Don't look at me like I have two heads. DOS. MS DOS. It was like a computer language and you needed floppies and ...

Oh, forget it.

You do remember it, however, if you're another dinosaur like yours truly. Yes, when Uncle Steve was young typing, thats right, typing was a special skill and if you were lucky you got to do it on an electric typewriter with a correction key. Otherwise you used a lot of correction fluid, like me during my entire college career. Correction fluid was used for correcting back then and not killing brain cells to make yourself happy.

Right now I'm back in school learning twenty first century skills along with the aforesaid kids. I spend hours trying to figure out how to use these programs that they all learned in grade school. The way I yell at my computer, it's a wonder that it even lets me near it.

I've learned a few things - I've had to - but my patience is slight. It really sucks to be taught things by someone half my age. Shouldn't they be looking up to me for my wisdom and knowledge? I swear I have to bite my tongue when I hear the phrase: "That's easy all you have to do is ... " And the explanation that follows is not easy and all I have to do is not all I have to do. But I need to learn this stuff or I am doomed in the present century.

When the kids teach me something new, I always offer to even it up and teach them something that I know in exchange. Somehow they never seem interested in learning to write cursively.

Why George Bush might be God

2006-02-04T17:01:00.000-08:00

An old New Yorker cartoon shows a middle-aged man and his wife sitting at home with the faithful dog curled up at the man's feet. The man remarks to his wife: "I suppose to him I must be like a god." The cartoon is meant to show his pomposity - I guess, because New Yorker cartoons are often obscure - but the fact of the matter is, according to some theories, this might not be far from the truth.

In a miserable humanities class I took years ago, I was introduced to books by E.O. Wilson. Wilson was an entymologist (bug guy) who noticed that social patterns in other species seemed to also occurr in human beings. He was familiar mostly with insects, of course, so this is mostly what he talked about and his examples had to do with them, primarily. One of the social patterns he noted was what looked to him as the urge to engage in religion. This might be overstating the way things are a bit, for example: I couldn't tell you what the religion of ants might be; I'd say it's probably Christianity, since that's the dominant religion in the world and they'd probably follow it also.

The 'religiousity' of animals he theorizes is an evolutionary adaptation that is hard-wired into the brains of all animals. The purpose of this is so that individuals in a particular species will work together for the common good, preserving the shared genes in this group. They would experience this as a positive 'divine' experience, which means that yes, indeed, the dog laying at that man's feet might have feelings of sacred awe in his presence. I know other dogs feel this way about me.

Okay. We're not ants and we're not dogs; We're human beings who stand upright and talk and do math and philosophise about this stuff. Absolutely we must be above this, wouldn't you think? We don't worship society or government or any of that and George Bush is not our God.
Is he?

Well, not exactly, but sort of. Throughout history it's been very common for the leaders to be worshiped as Gods. Pharaohs of ancient Egypt were considered living gods, as were the emperors of China, and Japan, and the rulers of the Mayan and Incan people. There are lots of examples. The Romans at least had the decency to make their emperors Gods after they were dead, but they still made them divine.

Historically there's been the tendency for us deify our rulers. George Bush may not call himself God, or at least not yet, but in the scheme of things according to natural law he works for the creator as set out by the declaration of independence. Our nation is under God, you know, and if our nation is under God then who do you think is directly under the lord answerable to him? That's right. It's George. And the same hard-wiring that E.O. Wilson postulates might make people feel a sort of religious ecstacy when thinking about him.

Wilson is not the only scientist who believes this, either. In the book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Brain, the author, Jaynes theorizes that in ancient times consciousness as we know it did not exist. Rather than one unified brain we had one that was split in two and one half served as the 'God' to the other half, speaking to the person in the voice of the divine leader and not inside their head, but outside much like a schizophrenic hearing Godlike voices telling him what to do. Jaynes points out that the delusions of schizophrenics are almost always religious in nature and this is just a hold over from those ancient time.

In other worlds, at one time, all humans were crazy.

Is there evidence for this type of hard-wiring? Unfortunately there is some. One of the symptoms of people suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy is a strong tendency to have ecstatic spiritual experiences which are associated with their epileptic episodes. And as Jaynes pointed out, the dysfunctional delusions of schizophrenics almost always have to do with religion.

My view of both of these theories is that they are simply putting the cart before the horse. I think human beings have the means of perception and cognition to understand and experience the divine in their lives, because there is a divine out there to experience. Imagine it like a TV set; It has all the apparatus to find the electromagnetic waves out in the aether and translate them into wonderful programming that we see when we turn it on. It in no way is creating any of this, but is translating and showing it to us.

Which means that George Bush is not God.

Menomonie in the News

2006-02-03T07:34:00.000-08:00

G-4 Tech TV has started re-running episodes of The Man Show, which I don't quite get because the show has little to do with technology, video games or anything else to do with the channel. G-4s also been running episodes of Star Trek the next Generation and that makes some sort of sense because it's science fiction and there is technology featured - fake technology, but technology none the less. This, I guess, is much in line with the MTV program philosophy where the music channel features little music.

So, I was watching one of these episodes of The Man Show where the hosts Adam and Jimmy were going through a museum of creepy types of men when they got to the Strip Club DJ. This guy was in his booth announcing strippers when he said: 'Cinammon from Menomonie Wisconsin.' Hey, that's my home town! They just said the name of my home town, though why they would use it is beyond me, other than they must actually know somebody from these parts.

This isn't the first time Menomonie has made the news, either. About a year ago author Neil Gaiman was shown in USA today standing in front of his house in Menomonie Wisconsin. I can't say I recognize the place, although I think it was actually out of town a few miles. Neil Gaiman is primarily a graphic novelist but I have also seen his name on regular novels and Just by coincidence I happened to see him on the History Channel talking about comics.

I've never met him and as far as him being a writer and me being a writer, well, we're in entirely different leagues. (hint. I don't count as big league).

Recently Menomonie made the news when a back-up pharmacist at K-Mart (I believe) refused to fill the prescription of a University Student on a Week end. He did that because of his religious beliefs, but he went a step beyond just not filling the prescription and confiscated the prescription so that poor girl was then left in the position of either not having sex that week end (doubtful) or having unprotected sex (I'd put my money on this one). If she did have a baby I hope she named it after the self-righteous pharmacist who was responsible.

Menomonie doesn't generally make national news for good reasons. A few years earlier than this (I know, my time line is pretty vague) a student at the University here - the University of Wisconsin Stout - went on a mad bombing spree across the country. He was planting bombs in mail boxes and stuff and his goal was to make a smiley face of his atrocities across the map of the United States. Cute. Except for the suffering and horror he caused.

Menomonie has made the news a few times because of Stout. I'll give you a quick plug here: The University of Wisconsin Stout is the largest undergraduate university of industrial education in the world and the only university to win the Malcolm Baldridge Award for Excellence. And my father was a professor there.

About twenty years back Stout's school of Home Economics' Hotel Restaurant Management Program was experimenting with a prototype of a burger flipper. That thing made it into three national magazines - at least - I think they were NewsWeek, Discover and probably Time. It was in one of these little blurbs in each one and every magazine got the name of the school wrong, the University of Menomonie (wrong), the University of Wisconsin in Menomonie (wrong) and I can't remember what the third one was, but it was also wrong. I know there's such a thing as facts checkers, but I guess they must be too busy to - I don't know - check facts.

Once when major league football players were on strike NBC came to Menomonie and covered one of our local college games. It was a really pretty Fall day with the leaves all golden and red and yellow. Stout at that time had a very good football team for it's division, ranked number one in the nation. The coach had invented something called the Radar defense where the linemen would start out at the beginning of the play not bent over, but upright in a sort of attentive crouch. The Radar defense worked wonderfully though, of course, it was just a matter of time before everyone figured out how to beat it, which they must have since you don't see anybody anywhere doing the Radar defense.

So, Stout won that game with it's unbeatable Radar defense and that coach went someplace else for more money and Stout has had a mediocre football team ever since.

What you need to know about Menomonie is that it is, in fact, in Wisconsin. It is not Menomonee Michigan and pretty much anyone who lives here can tell you stories about mixed up travel plans because that Menomonee is bigger and better known and travel agents outside of Wisconsin have been known to argue and tell residents here that they don't know which state they live in. When I was in the reserves, my plane trips for active duty were arranged by one of these lowest bid contractors. Two years in a row they had the tickets messed up, going from Escanaba one year and Milwaukee the next. The first one I was able to catch in time, the second one I didn't discover until I was at the airport because the blurry type on the ticket made Milwaukee indistinguishable from Minneapolis - the airport I was actually at.

In these days of the internet I imagine that doesn't happen so much anymore. In fact, I kind of wonder what could be left of the travel agent industry because mostly what they did and had was that computer and the ability to get tickets. Everybody has a computer so why do we need them?

If you happen to be in Menomonie and see me on the street, feel free to stop and talk. I probably won't be all that busy. You can recognize me because I'll be the guy wearing the Packer coat.

That's a joke. Everybody will be wearing a Packer coat.

Where have You Gone, Gene Siskel?

2006-01-29T10:11:00.000-08:00

It's been several years since film critic Gene Siskel passed away, but I have yet to get used to his replacement Richard Roeper. He does okay, I guess. He's doing what he's supposed to at the job, you know, telling us about movies he's seen and whether he thinks we should see them or not. Fine, he does that. But you know what?

He's not Gene.

And there's the problem. Siskel and Ebert were a team. There was a well hewn dynamic between them and they approached the movies from different perspectives and as equals. Richard Roeper - no matter what he says - is not Roger Ebert's equal. Oh sure, he thinks that he doesn't give Ebert an inch, but that's just bull. No, he is way too reverential to the guy who, when all's said and done, gave him the job in the first place. Roeper is just the temp who was hired full time.

Hey, is Roger Ebert okay? I noticed that he seemed really thin and that his voice sounded old and quavery. The guy used to be immense, but now all he has left are some sad jowls that remind us of his once magnificent girth. I sure hope he lost the weight to be healthier and that it's not a sign of him wasting away. On the other hand, I miss fat Ebert. Oh sure, obesity is a gigantic health risk, can lead to high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, premature death, blah, blah, blah.

So maybe he lost weight for his 'health', but what about us? Formerly he was jolly and loved life which you can do if you stay up all night eating Snickers bars. As an example. I don't know that he ever actually did that, but he might have. He no longer seems to have that joy that he once did and I know it must be because those Snicker bar binges (again, as an example) are long gone and will never happen ever. And he's just one of those people who need to be heavy, like Orson Welles, or Oprah, or Star Jones.

But you see there was the counterpoint that Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel provided each other. Roger was fat, Gene was thin. Roger had hair, Gene didn't. Roger was the everyman movie-goer and Gene was the intellectual snob. It worked with those two, because you knew where they were coming from and you also knew that you as a consumer of Movie fare were probably right there somewhere in the middle. You could always trust that their opinions collectively could be your guide.

With one exception: Foreign movies. They just went into ecstasy over Foreign movies and they were just wrong. It just so happened that I happened to see a movie they both recommended and tell me if you see the possiblities here. The movie was set in Mexico at a circus, but it starts in an insane asylum with the 'hero' (a young, obviously disturbed young man) naked and perched in a bare tree that the custodians of the asylum thoughtfully placed for him.

In flashbacks it is revealed how he got there, which is that he came from a circus family and his mother lost her arms and he had to stand behind her from then on and be her arms. His mother had some mental health issues of her own and was a serial killer (I seem to remember. It's been awhile).

Anyways, I've told you enough to give you the picture. The movie was totally stupid and weird and you never could figure out what was going on or why. Of course, Sisker and Ebert both loved it. Because it was avante garde and symbolic and powerful and ... oh, please. Just take my word for it and never rent anything that sounds like what I described. I'm not a professional critic, but trust me.

Well, I learned never to listen to them about Foreign films and that's good advice for you, too. Never listen to the critics about Foreign films. These films will always suck from an American perspective. There's a reason why the whole world watches our movies and we don't watch theirs. We know how to make them and they don't.

Then one day, I started to notice Gene getting thin and it looked for all the world that he was wearing a toupee that was designed to mimic a thinning hairline. And finally one day, he did die. Roger Ebert auditioned a series of guest co-critics in his place and they rotated between them, which was fair because who could take Gene Siskel's place? My first choice for a replacement was a rather attractive black woman whose opinions were rather silly, but if I had to see someone sitting across from Roger Ebert it might as well be a sexy woman.

Finally, he did not choose her, but Richard Roeper. So, he made the wrong selection as far as I was concerned, but life moves on and we have to keep going. Then Roger lost weight and instead of fat and thin we now have not-so-fat and stocky. Instead of hairy and bald we have hairy and hairy. And instead of everyman and effete intellectual snob we had everyman and ... I don't know.

Roeper has some carefully thought out reviews, I guess. He does a satisfactory job but he'll never be ... well, you know

Edit him Before he Writes Again

2006-01-28T05:54:00.000-08:00

I used to enjoy reading Stephen King books, that is, I used to enjoy his earlier books when there were publishers who dared to still edit him. I've got a secret for you: As much as I've enjoyed his books, he writes a lot of crap. The problem these days is that there isn't anyone who can tell him to take the crap out, so it stays in - every crappy word.

He's written a whole bunch of really great three to four hundred page novels in the last few years, but the problem is he took twelve hundred pages to write each of them. I'm thinking of IT, The Stand, DreamCatcher.

I couldn't believe that I had gotten six hundred pages into a book and he was still introducing more effing characters when he already had about thirty and I couldn't remember who they all were. That was The Stand I think. Or It. It applies to both, anyways.

Okay. He's not the only artist that applies to that gets to do what they want unchecked because they're too big and almighty. George Lucas is another. The first three Star Wars movies were so special and so wonderful and they were that way partly because there was a studio that kept him on track and kept asking the question of why people would be interested in what he had to say.

The last three Star Wars? Nope. Why on Earth did he think that senate debates, even Sci Fi CGI senate debates would be interesting? Or Jedi Sub-committee meetings or trade delegation negotiations? You absolutely know that in real life Lucas is a grumpy old set-in-his-ways bachelor who thinks C-Span is a good way to spend a Saturday night.

And you know what I think about the last Star Wars scripts? I heard that he hired somebody to write them, which I think happened and they were great. Then Lucas personally rewrote them so they were boring again. Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia) famously said about his dialogue: "You can type this stuff, but you can't speak it." She should know. One of her post-princess jobs was as a highly paid 'Script Doctor'.

I'll give one more example, from the world of music this time:Prince. He used to be good, didn't he? Every note he wrote in Purple Rain is perfect and I still listen to that album from time to time. After that, he put out a lot of stuff and very little of it was listenable. Why? Nobody told him that people didn't want to hear every single thing that came into his head. Prince is famed as being a prolific artist and, boy, he comes out with some gems but the problem with finding gems - to torture my metaphor a bit - is that you have to sift through a lot of dirt. People don't want to hear your dirt.

There really is a point in an artists life - no matter what their field - when they have the opportunity to jump the shark and thumb their noses at their audiences. Sure, you do art for yourself and that's fine - do your art. But you shouldn't expect anybody else to pay for your self-indulgence and you need somebody to critically sift the wheat from the chaff. You know, an editor. That's what they're there for, Stephen.

Where Have You Gone, Angry Republican?

2006-01-25T16:50:00.000-08:00

Oh, I am getting dissillusioned with blogging. It's not turning out to be what I thought it was going to be; Other bloggers it turns out are just in it for the money and that is so distressing to me. Somehow this forum has lost it's gentle purity and turned into a greed fests. Well, that might be more the American bloggers. I've noticed that the British bloggers seem to be more what you might think of as the bloggers, that is writing the sort of on-line journal that anyone can look in on and read about.

I've been blogging my blog now for about six months now. There are more than six months worth of blogs because I started it in about April, but I didn't quite understand what I was supposed to do so I just had daily entries that I never posted on-line and then when I went on-line I posted them as if I'd been doing it for months, but I really hadn't.

I know better now.

This must have been about June that I actually started and immediately I got responses from other bloggers one of whom was: The Angry Republican. My posts must have appeared to him to be non-Republican and I think he was laying in wait for foolish non-rightwingers who needed to be set on the path of good American values. Anyways, I'd been ending each post with a summation of how that post related to the coming apocalypse because that's what I had promised on my website. But I stopped after awhile because it just strained my brain to make some sort of connection with every single post. Go back to some of my earlier posts and you'll see what I was talking about.

The Angry Republican commented on this particular aspect in a rather amusing smart-ass manner and I replied in as much a smart ass way as I could. It must have been about a dozen back and forths before he got bored and stopped making the effort. And this was my introduction to this culture and what I thought blogging was. Or should be.

Then I found out differently. I would get these various comments that would compliment one of my posts and invite me to visit their weblog. Which I did the first couple of times. Then I kept repeatedly getting this one from Forex Trading which complimented my article 'Hogan Knows Nothing' . I would sometimes get like three a day from them and always that post and no others. So, I figured out that there must be some sort of program that was scanning weblogs and then grabbing and inserting a post title. Occasionally I would get comments complimenting my post: 'This post'.

So many of these weblogs were not really weblogs at all but commercial sites, plain and simple.

I was so disillusioned.

Q: But Steve, you damned hypocrite, isn't your Weblog site selling something? You're trying to interest people in getting your book (Breakfast with the Antichrist), aren't you?

A: True enough, but Good God that's not all I write about. In fact, I write very little about that book. There's a link to the publisher (a crappy one that fails because the publisher's tech support refuses to believe it doesn't work) a link to my website and I think that's about it. Other than that it's just my own observations and insights.

Well, I'll persist. It's not what I expected and I miss my smart-ass friend the Angry Republican. All of his views are wrong, but at least he's a real person who's only in this to further his misguided view of the world.

The Liberation of Canada

2006-01-24T18:12:00.000-08:00

The comedian John Candy in one of his last films starred in a movie where Canada and the United States go to war against each other. It's supposed to be a comedy, but I just found something out and it makes me wonder if it's such a funny idea after all. You see, Canada has oil. Before, there was really no reason for the United States to invade, because what do they have after all? Trees? Beavers? Snow? We got that stuff down here already and we got all that we need already. Thank you.

But oil? Hmmm. It's all locked up in sand this oil, so it's only now getting really economical to dig it our rather than pump it out. Well, they got a lot of it in that sand so I've been thinking ..

You know, Canada does have nuclear weapons or as I should phrase it 'weapons of mass destruction'. That's right. And I'm feeling pretty threatened by them having weapons of mass destruction so that means that the United States is being threatened by Canada's weapons of mass destruction. Do you see where I'm going here?

Of course we'll have to have UN weapons inspectors go in there and inspect for weapons, but those weapons inspectors will be duped by the wiley Canadians. Count on it! And forget about sanctions because they'll find a way around those too. That leaves only one alternative - and you can bet that the last thing a country led by two former oil executives would want to do is invade a country with tons of the stuff - but regretfully that's what must happen.

The leader of Canada you must know is a tyrannical despot. I don't know the guy's name but I do know that he's a horrible dictator who is oppressing his own citizens. Canada has a prison system and some Canadians have to be in there by mistake, so - if you think about it - this monster is unjustly jailing his own people in his gulag of torture chambers. We would be doing them all such a favor by overthrowing this villain for them. When our tanks roll down their streets they'll absolutely be throwing rose petals in front of them in gratitude and joy.

And another thing: in Canada they have socialized medicine which is pretty close to Communism. So, we definitely need to bring them Democracy and our superior form of health care. You can't imagine how much they'll thank us for that one.

For some reason when the United States does make the decision to invade an oil-rich nation like Canada gas prices go up along with oil company profits. I'm not sure exactly why, though I think it has something to do with using their oil wealth to rebuild their own infrastructure. That must be it because nobody here in America would be lining their pockets with their stolen wealth. That just doesn't happen.

It will be a sacrifice to all of us to pay for the military expenses and higher energy costs, I know. But I guess that's just the price we all have to pay to liberate our dear neighbors up North.

Grilled Cheese Virgin Mary

2006-01-19T17:21:00.000-08:00

I just figured out how to make grilled cheese sandwhiches on my George Forman grill. I gotta tell you that I love that thing - about my half my meals in 2005 were cooked courtesy of that former boxer's genius, which means if not for him I'd be only half the man I am now. Or at least I'd be considerably slimmer.

I'm not going to give you the recipe for grilled cheese sandwhiches a la George Forman, by the way. It's really just exactly how you make them normally, except you press them between the two hot plates (oh wait. That is the recipe).

It reminds me of a fast food they used to have in Greece called 'Canadian Toast', which was just a sandwhich with various things in it grilled between two hot plates and scrunched together. Back in those days the Greeks really hated America (not Americans, so much - just the country) and so as a signal to English speakers whose business they wanted they would call everything 'Canadian' or to a lesser extent 'British'. I remember that I used to get pizza occasionally at 'Candian Pizza'since Canada, we all know, is renowned for their pizza. Right?

I don't know how the Greeks currently feel about America or Americans since I haven't visited in quite a long time. Seeing as how the whole world hates us these days, it's a pretty safe bet that they probably do, also.

Now that I've been making all of these grilled cheese sandwhiches (Only one today, because I ran out of cheese) I've decided to look carefully at each one I make, in case one happens to have an image of the Virgin Mary burned into it. I'm constantly reading how somebody has sold a piece of toast over the internet with her on it and I figure that sooner or later one of the Grilled Cheeses I'm making just by chance will have to look like her. Then I'll just put it up for sale on the web and making thousands.

Don't worry about why the Lord God Almighty would choose to manifest his divine presence on a piece of bread. He does! That's all you need to know about this. And when he chooses to do so, it's a message of love, grace and forgiveness for all mankind. Really.

I already found one of my grilled cheeses that looked like Michaelangelo's creation scene on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But I ate it, because, Man, I was hungry. That one probably wasn't worth a lot because it's the Virgin Mary that's so special to people.

Oh, who am I kidding? I'll probably just eat the Virgin Mary, too.

Glowing Green Pigs

2006-01-13T16:34:00.000-08:00

Scientists have discovered that by injecting fetal pig embryos with phosphorescent dyes the adult pigs will have green skin and glow in the dark. All I can about this is: Well, it's about time! I can't count the number of times I needed to find my pig in the middle of the night and I had to struggle to find my glasses and turn on a light. This will sure be a huge time saver for me, I can tell you, now that I can get a pig that will shine as bright as day.

My question for the scientists is whether they bothered to consult the Lord God Almighty before they did this. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Old Jehovah still own the patent for creating new life? I don't know, maybe it expired. It's a good thing that they were able to do this before they did another wasteful project like curing cancer. Cancer's been around forever, but this is the first time we've ever had glow in the dark pork and I would rather have that over cancer any darn day. Wouldn't you?

There is a real purpose for the scientists to make these unique porcines. And that purpose is to ... find their pigs in the dark, I guess. Okay, that's not the reason they gave. They said it was so that they could track medicines that could be used in human beings because pigs are often used for animal research since they are so close to human beings. I know you ladies will claim that this is only true for the half of the human race, but it really is all of us.

So, that's why the scientists say they did it, but let's face fact here: The real reason is that it's just plain fun. Wouldn't you want a pet that glowed in the dark? I sure would. And we all know that pigs make wonderful pets. Look at George Clooney. He has a Vietnamese pot bellied pig and he just loves the thing. Sure they get a might heavy as they get older, but most of us do and I would personally love a huge fat pet that made me feel skinny by comparison.

Then let's take this a step further. Say that for some reason you do get tired of your huge green glowing friend? Glowing pork chops. Mmm, mmm. That would be sort of like a candle light meal, only you wouldn't be eating your meal by candle light but by the light of the meat itself. Imagine how much more romantic that would be.

Apologist of Gor

2006-01-12T16:50:00.000-08:00

Fans of Science Fiction will probably know exactly what I'm talking about just by the title of my post here and for you I want to start out by saying: Hold on - let me explain! And if you aren't aware of what I'm talking about - I'll explain.

There was/is a series of science fiction books written by John Norman (a pseudonym) that were set on a mythical planet called Gor, that was also called Counter Earth because it rotated our Sun on exactly the opposite side of the Sun, which if you know anything about astronomy you know is impossible.

None the less, that's where Gor was/is located.

Gor was/is a planet that kept permanently primitive by a super-race of hyperintelligent insect overlords named Priest Kings who were at war with another more brutal species of bear-like creatures called Kurii. The Kurii wanted to take over not only Gor but Earth, too, but it was the power of the Priest Kings who kept them at bay. The Priest Kings also maintained Gor in that convenient orbit just on the exact side of the Sun.

And the most important thing you need to know about Gor was that there were slaves and especially there were slave girls.

Lots and lots of slave girls.

I started reading these books when I was a teen-ager and - in the first books at least - the slave girl thing wasn't all that much of a feature of the books. The saga started out with the protaganist, Tarl Cabot growing to manhood in Bristol England among female relatives, believing that he had been abandoned by his father. One day when he was out hiking he was kidnaped by a Priest King spaceship and taken to Gor where he discovers his father, now the administrator of a fabled Gorean city Ko-Ro-Ba. Tarl's father had not abandoned him, but had instead been kidnaped before his son by another spaceship.

Ko-Ro-Ba is at war with Ar. Tarl becomes a warrior and a rider of giant hawkish birds called Tarns and then through a series of adventures he becomes involved with the daughter of the Ubar (sort of a dictator) of Ar who is Marlenus of Ar. So far so good.

A side note here: Everybody in this story is named 'somebody of somewhere', so that by this scheme I would be Steve of Minneapolis and you would be 'you of from where ever you're from'. It just makes me wonder if every person who grew up and lives in the same city would have to keep saying that they were from the exact city they were living in and had lived in all their lives. It would be pretty silly.

So that's about the story of the first book. As far as slavery - and especially female slavery - the narrator and hero of this book, Tarl, thinks it's just wrong. I've got to tell you that over the course of this long series of books (about twenty plus) he gradually changes his mind about that - and how! But the first half dozen or so books, not so much. It's in there, but it's only a small, small part and not so much.

I took these books as mostly fantasy/adventure of the sort written by Edgar Rice Burroughs in his Mars series or Robert E. Howard's Conan series. Women didn't play such a big part in those books, but they didn't have to. It was the fighting and stuff that was most important.

In later Gor books the S&M crap just took over the stories so that I would actually skim past those sections to continue with the real plot and just ignore those parts. You could usually figure out which where the places you could skip because John Norman would have these huge unbroken paragraphs which you learned to spot. His Bondage and Discipline gradually became more and more prevalent until - at the end - all of his female slaves are nothing but orgasm machines climaxing every time one of the masterful Gorean males so much as raised a whip.

It wasn't erotic. It was just ludicrous.

But I kept reading hoping that somewhere along the line John Norman would get back to plain old story telling, continuing the tale of the war between the two alien species. That never happened and I have a bunch of books I've pretty much never read because he never got back to it.

At times I thought about who John Norman was. His name I spotted as a pen name right from the start and I also figured out that he must be somebody pretty educated because he used a bunch of history to create his particular world. My guess was that he was a pretty lonely middle-aged man who was furiously busy pleasuring himself with one hand while typing with the other. If he was married, I guessed that he was far from the fictional masterful men that he wrote about. In fact, I imagined him to be rather henpecked.

My quick search of the internet showed that he was indeed a college professor, but not at a very prestigeous school and there were two pictures of him that I could find. One showed him with one hand over his mouth, but otherwise he looked slim, silver haired and possibly handsome. That picture looked like it might be from the seventies. Another later picture showed a full on face where he looked considerably older and possibly as if he's had a stroke since it looked like half of his face was drooping.

There are now many fetish communities (possibley all on-line) modeled after or devoted to the sort of 'philosophy' put out by these books. To my mind they look particularly icky - but hey, to each his own! I'm not here to judge and if adults want to willingly play at this stuff then I'm just fine with that. I do remember that there was a case in the Midwest where a serial killer was using one of these on-line communities to attract victims, but most people, I think, just take it as fun and games.

I took one of my unread Gor books off my shelf and opened it up and realized that the writing actually isn't all that good. I don't think it was always that way. My memory was that in the first half a dozen or so books the writing was at the least competent and those first half dozen (or maybe only first four or five) books were engrossing enough to read and reread. They weren't great literature, but they were diverting enough. For some reason, I never held onto the books in the series that I liked the best. I don't know why.

If you ever happen to get ahold of any of those initial books: I'd recommend them, maybe with a few reservations, maybe with a lot of reservations. But go ahead and read them. They won't kill you. They're only books.

A Meowing of Cats

2006-01-09T15:18:00.000-08:00

Here's a tip for next Christmas, if you have a cat: Instead of hanging the bottom of your tree with hang it with cat toys. That way your feline will be delighted and you won't be irritated by it constantly knocking down and destroying your prized Christmas ornaments. It's too late to do it, now, I know. But next Christmas, try it.

Cats - or I should say house cats - are unique in that they are the only domesticated animal that did not first start out as either a pack or a herd animal, you know like dogs or sheep or cows. They were originally domesticated by the ancient Egyptians who used them to keep vermin out of the grain silo. I also hear that the Egyptians used to worship them as Gods though probably they didn't worship every single cat but only the really divine ones. It might seem a little extreme to worship any cat at all, but please keep in mind that the threshhold for God-hood back in those days was pretty low. If you could clean yourself entirely with your tongue that was usually enough.

I'm not sure exactly what the name for a collection of house cats is, if there even is one. Other animals have special identifiers when they're together in a group. For example: you have a herd of cattle, a school of fish, a flock of seagulls (also the name of an awesome group, man) and - my favorite - a murder of crows. That one says it all, it's real dark and scary and if you've seen crows together: it really fits. Lions travel together in prides, so I'm wondering if the proper name for more than one house cats shouldn't be a 'shame', as in a 'shame of house cats'. This would be because they're so much tinier than lions.

If there isn't any name yet I have two suggestions, either a 'meowing of house cats' or a 'yeowling of house cats'. I think they would both work as they are very descriptive of exactly of what house cats are what they do. Usually you don't see house cats congregating together much, except rather unwillingly as in a whole bunch of barn cats together or crazy cat ladies house. It's been my observation that in a lot of two cat households you'll see one very large well fed cat out in the open and another very scrawny and frightened cat darting about hoping not to be noticed. What's happening is that the second cat is getting knocked around by the other one.

Cats do have ways of communicating with each other - and you - but I can't claim to be much of a cat whisperer. I know that when they raise their tail straight up that means they recognize you and when they rub up against you it means not that they like you, but rather they think you need to smell like them. Presenting you with a dead animal is supposed to be a special gift, I understand, but I've got to tell you: There is one cat that's still waiting for a thank you card from me, and I'm sure he's very puzzled by my continuing ingratitude.

You may be surprised to know that house cats are trainable. I learned this one from a lion tamer in Maine who told me that training lions is similar to training any feline. The key is to know that they both have incredibly short attention spans and that if on any particular day you can get it one step closer to what you want it to do, then that might be enough. It requires unbelievable patience, though I think if you already have a housecat you pretty much know that getting it to do what you want it to is a lost cause anyways.

Amazing non-Psychic Predictions for 2006

2006-01-05T16:54:00.000-08:00

**Check out my new books at http://www.lulu.com/abeautifulcow or use the link on the right to get there **Before I start with my Amazing non-Psychic Predictions I've got to ask: Has anyone else noticed how remarkably lousy psychics have been lately? I mean, where were the psychic predicting Katrina and the giant Tsunami or even Nine Eleven? Not a peep. Did you hear a peep? Because I sure didn't and you'd think that huge events like those would be a real piece of cake and they weren't - apparently.

Oh, well. I guess I should be grateful because all those other so-called psychics are setting the bar pretty low for me and my amazing predictions. Mine are absolutely without any paranormal powers because you don't need any special psychic powers to just guess what's pretty obvious in the first place. Here goes.

First non-psychic prediction: Former-Super-Lobbyist Jack Abrahmoff will name names and several influential Republican politicians will be implicated and ... nothing at all will happen to them. C'mon, almost the entire US Judiciary owes their jobs to these very same Republicans and one thing the Republicans don't do - and that goes for Republican Judges - they don't eat their own young. Nobody's going to prison. Maybe a Democrat will, because they like money, too, but they aren't so crafty as their brethern on the other side.

Second non-psychic prediction: The war in Iraq will drag on and on. No viable government will establish itself - or I should say - some sort of government will be established but everybody will know it isn't real. The Bush administration will claim victory anyways, democracy on the march blah, blah, blah. He'll probably even make a speech with that written in the background. The death toll will continue to rise.

Third non-psychic prediction: There will be no draft. There will be no draft because that would mean that oil company executives would have to send their own children to fight for their special interests, instead of having the poor do it for them.

Fourth non-psychic prediction: Bush will not be impeached and his popularity will continue to rise. How can that happen, you ask? Well, answer me this: How come it hasn't happened already? You'd think illegal wire-taps would have sealed the deal on that impeachment deal but it's all for patriotism and to prevent nine-eleven from ever happening again. Aren't you patriotic? Do you want nine eleven to happen again? Then just shut up and quit being disloyal.

Fifth non-psychic prediction: Natural disasters will continue to ravage the United States. I'm seeing grass fires in California, mudslides - also in California - and at least one large Earthquake in ... yep, California. Why all in this state?

Simple, God doesn't like them so much. They've got it too good there, so he wants to plague them to make up for it.

There will be flooding, more hurricanes, plane crashes and such but most of the bad stuff will be on the West Coast.

Sixth non-psychic prediction: War will break out across the globe and Americans won't care unless the warring parties are either white or have oil under their land. Genocide will continue in Africa and the UN will stay well clear of it and especially the US.

Rwanda? What Rwanda? Didn't they make a movie about that? Well, it looked boring so I didn't see it. Next.

Seventh non-psychic prediciton: Poverty will continue to increase in the United States as it has for the past six years. The minimum wage will never be raised again. As more people become destitute the number of people believing in evangelical Christianity will rise. Jesus likes the poor and now that there are more like you in the United States it must mean that our country is even more blessed.

Praise the Lord.

Well, that's about it. Happy New Year! And hopefully when 2007 rolls around you can tell me how wrong I was. Boy, I sure hope I am wrong.

2005-12-31T12:14:00.000-08:00

Troubled Teen-agers in Iowa have uncovered a sinister conspiracy. What happens when they face ultimate evil?

-Hi. When you use the publisher link, you might have some problems. I'm really sorry. They provided it and it doesn't work so well. But it's worth it to get the book from them. So, here's what you do: Go to their online bookstore, select 'horror', go to page five, then on page five go halfway down to my book. Bingo! Easy.
(Their website is www.PublishAmerica.com, in case the link totally doesn't work)

Merry ... somebody ... Mas!

2005-12-28T16:44:00.000-08:00

At a former job of mine there used to be this one older, kind of sour, guy who would sit out all of the office Christmas parties because: 'The Bible says there were shepherds out in the field watching their sheep when Jesus was born, which means that he couldn't have been born in December, so it's wrong to celebrate his birthday now'. Well, duh. Okay. But that doesn't mean that you can't have a few cookies and chug some egg nog anyways and just pretend that Jesus was born December twenty fifth, just like the rest of us are doing.

This guy, by the way, was a member of one of the more extreme Christian evangelical faiths - I forget which one - and, predictably, it was discovered that he was misbehaving scandalously. As you probably could have predicted. For some reason you never hear about this sort of stuff with secular humanists. Why do you think that is?

Really, there is about a one in three hundred and sixty five chance that Jesus was actually born on Christmas, so it's not entirely wrong to celebrate on this day. It's just not very likely that you're right. The Roman Emperor Constantine wisely decreed that since every good Roman was celebrating Saturnalia at this time - where people exchanged gifts and whooped it up a lot -
this would be a good time to also celebrate the birth of Christ. Constantine wasn't himself a Christian but a worshiper of Sol Invictus (the all conquering Sun) so, in the Good old Roman tradition of borrowing convenient Gods from foreign lands, he decided that Jehovah was just another name for Sol Invictus and there you go. Problem solved.

You have to wonder how pleased the Son of God is to have his birthday commemorated ... whenever. It's not really an honor when your worshipers purposefully and knowingly have it all wrong and don't seem to care much. It's nice, I guess that people remember your birthday but it probably would be nicer if they remembered your actual birthday, rather than just some day they were partying, anyways. Did you ever think that maybe one of the reasons he hasn't come back to the Earth is that he wants us to get it right? Maybe when we do, maybe then he'll return from Heaven.

Oh, the Shame

2005-12-20T17:07:00.000-08:00

Apparently I had a better Sunday then Brett Favre in that I didn't throw any interceptions and he threw two. 48- 3 is certainly a dismal score, although from what I hear from True Blue Packer fans this means that we are more likely to get better draft picks next year. That's sort of the Football booby prize, isn't it? You Eff up big enough and they reward you for it.

Sigh. I claim not to be a sports fan, but even in my sports oblivion this is pretty depressing. Why is that? I don't actually play on the Packers or even watch them but it makes me sadder to live in Wisconsin when they aren't performing.

The best I can figure out is that Sports is actually sublimated, symbolic warfare. Therefore, we in Wisconsin are at war with every other single state or city that also has a similar sports team. The Packers, then, are our symbolic army - symbolic defeated army. Thank God, too, because if it were real and not fake then we would be marched away as slaves of the victorious Ravens. As I understand it - not a good team.