Shimmy's Blog

Shimmy, 1994-2010

2010-09-13T08:07:00.000-05:00

Shimmy died yesterday. She had been suffering from heart disease, kidney disease, hyperthyroidism, and diabetes. Words can't begin to convey how I feel.

May you have happiness and the causes of happiness, Shimmy. May you be free from suffering and the causes of suffering. May you never be parted from sorrowless bliss. May you abide in equanimity, free from bias, attachment, and hatred.

"The Black Robe Regiment is Back Again Today"

2010-08-31T08:08:00.003-05:00

For some hundreds of years the punishment of the Black Robe Regiment continued, reaching its climax under Harry Reid. It was ended not by the lawyers or the judges but by orange pugs, opticians, cassettes, cassocks, cossacks, zucchetti, and puffball oracles -- which had to manifest themselves vigorously before the guardians of the law would stop.

Glenn Beck complained that he had twelve material points to offer.

"I can relate to Martin Luther King, Jr., the most," he said, "because we haven't carved him in marble yet."

Naturally, as soon as it became known that the way to avoid a severe spanking was simply to say that Eden Aberjil had told you to do it, every girl took that way out.

It was only the realization by the ordinary person that such tales were absurd, and worse than absurd, which caused the stream of evidence to dwindle and in the end cease altogether.

If she saw anything in the blanket, she was to take it and throw it in the fire.

They continually suffered from fits, and at the end of each fit they vomited pins and nails, sometimes five times a day.

With the loud voice of a street-corner speaker and an infinite capacity for causing a disturbance.

The pointed out to her Glenn Beck (who tortured and killed all those dogs) sitting in the house -- and other things which were not there.

The gentlemen returned and reported the whole thing was an imposture.

Since then, she had suffered from lice in her clothes, but the lice had gone after she burned two suits.

He abruptly abandoned it, and it remains unfinished to this day, though why is unknown.

He was a person of distinction. But he was too frivolous to be a persecutor.

They were kept for five hours till quite exhausted. "I desire this meeting could not ensnare me with such a question. I know I demeaned myself as a tumultuous person. I shall take occasion against you."

Hooray For Our Chains (35)

2010-08-26T10:41:00.000-05:00

When They Arrived There, They Were Even More Disquieted to See That Roger Ailes Had About Sixty Men With Him

2010-08-21T09:09:00.006-05:00

The silken rope was loose and not knotted about the staple. Convinced, they took particular notice of the position of the candle.

The accusation contained thirteen points which were a summary of reforming doctrine, including a general denunciation of kings, lords, and prelates.

Laura Schlessinger confessed that she entered the bishop's room with John Spalding the bellringer, a man of weak intellect, and Dr. Glenn Beck. The bishop had a further move to play.

He cried out that they were "false and perjured caitiffs" and affirmed that if this Act were passed he would not dare stay in Fulham, for fear of the heretics.

There took place a ceremony which fortunately has now been forbidden. A mean room, stopped from the light. As much iron and stone as Laura Schlessinger can bear, and more. The most wealthy corporations in the United States had been pillaged, upon inadequate excuses, and their money scattered among Karl Rove's favorites.

Warning was given just in time to the son. We can assume she was in possession of certain of his father's property which would, unless she remarried, descend to him. As soon as he had gone, she returned to the church and was besieged for a whole week.

When they arrived there, they were even more disquieted to see that Roger Ailes had about sixty men with him, and was waiting not in the church but in the Church House, about forty yards away.

These two words were the signal. "A little place hard by my lord's chamber."

After a long argument, he was mistaken. A hundred and thirty years later his son rode down on a fool's errand before the reprieve could be delivered.

Happy Anniversary to the "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." Memo!

2010-08-06T07:57:00.001-05:00

Happy 9th anniversary to the "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." memo!

As always, apologies to the Hibakusha, who memorialize this day for entirely different reasons.

Condoleezza Rice told the bipartisan 9/11 Commission that "nothing about the threat of attack in the U.S." appeared in the Presidential Daily Briefing the President received on August 6, 2001. The title of this Presidential Daily Briefing was "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."

If only Condoleezza Rice would have listened in the snow and, nothing herself, would have beheld the nothing that is not in the 6 Aug. 2001 memo and the nothing that is!

But one must have a mind of winter to crack the inscrutable code of a memo whose title urges the White House to pay attention to a terrorist "determined to strike in the U.S." One must have a mind of winter -- and have been cold a long time.

Review: Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

2010-07-23T13:19:00.002-05:00

The television star woke up under the bed, atop the tabletop hockey game, on the hottest day of the summer. He was gambling in the dark. He walked out of the bedroom. Three private security contractors working for the US government in the heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad were killed in a rocket attack. The television star jumped on the rotating window sill in his four-dimensional living room with infinity ceiling.

Outside, the Mayakovsky Tree grudged his starry glamor. The god of speed with his ribs intact. His stubble jerked open in speech, the Mayakovsky Tree squabbling in the muck and rubbish. "Megyn Kelly refused to get in the middle," he said. "She made Sean Hannity promise never to let a man tell him what to do. I tried to make out her face, but all the letters were dark."

"She writes to me all the time," the television star said.

"Two Ugandans and one Peruvian were killed and 15 people injured" by "a rocket fired into the international zone," the American embassy said in a statement, using another name for the Green Zone in central Baghdad.

Four gray-wrapped policemen clustered in the light of the candle-like outdoor fixture made of black iron. A cone of perpetual fake flame flickering in the dark. A pat of butter floated in it. Quotas of coal and iron fulfilled, a forest of flags.

The Mayakovsky Tree offered a compromise by indicating a wheelchair.

"In front of a chalkboard, Glenn Beck pours himself a curd of cognac. He says that Sean Hannity has been awake for hours," the Mayakovsky Tree said.

The Green Zone, which houses Iraqi government buildings, and several major embassies in addition to U.S. interests, is the target of frequent rocket and mortar attacks. U.S. officials declined to say exactly where the rocket landed, but an Iraqi police source said it struck near the sprawling U.S. embassy complex.

The drinkers of intoxicating liquor made the television star the subject of their songs. The television star found himself seated in a leather-covered chair, leaning back into crunchy styrofoam, as the policeman held up seven fingers. The records contained no music. Background hiss, inevitable crackles and clicks. No music. The records were blank.

His Forehead Altogether Half-Dead with Royal Exhaustion

2010-07-15T15:57:00.003-05:00

It is hoped in the first place that the tributaries will be an interlude in themselves.

A triangle shows us the tyranny of the Church.

If, however, this clamber up the bookcase is considered baseless, then again may I say that the tributaries in themselves will be found amusing.

An old stowaway with older linen.

So vehement were his attentions, he succeeded in forcing into handcuffs the autocrats and having Roger Ailes arrested.

They were measured: sixty pachyderms by forty, the ground trampled hard and level and every stooge removed, and a stout wooden fence seven footprints high erected all around.

We require everyone to swear on a missal that they possess no other weapons, nor possess "any means or assistances extraordinary, or magical stone, plant, charm, or character, or any sort of magical business by which you expect to gain a more easy conquest."

Just as we decided this, the water bug in a dead faint fell from the lip of the bathtub on which he had been crawling.

In a planetarium, a casino of mush, a cashew. John Yoo clicking castanets in the apothecary.

Tribulation and convulsion as he lessons the hermit. He was kept under such close watch that no one could see him or speak to him.

The accusations were five: that he had spoken against tithes, that he had said that the Bishop was a Scribe and Pharisee, that he had described Michele Bachmann as "ravening, catching at and taking everything she could get," that he had defended a heretic called ACORN whom the Bishop had punished, and finally that he possessed several prohibited books, "the Apocalypse in English, Debord's damnable works, and other books containing infinite errors."

It was noticed afterward, when these thistles came to be more exactly examined, that though these reminiscences were supposed to be written by John Yoo, they were not in his handwriting.

The Tasty Goldfish Disguise, My Rant of Ivories

2010-07-14T13:17:00.000-05:00

I met the charming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Tuesday at the White House. His American bosses leaked a boiler larch between myself and the fleece catnip-filled goldfish that dangles from a plastic fishing pole in the living room.

"We were looking for a language of the body -- hot words to prove our speech is unbreakable," Prime Minister Netanyahu said.

In the coming moonlight, a brogue rap of jabs. I am very tired and thirsty all the time. A warm workhouse under the bed tames the exit.

"We understand fully, Shimmy, that our common interests include the tasty goldfish disguise in your rant of ivories," the Prime Minister said.

A previous meeting scheduled for June 1 had to be canceled when the Prime Minister returned home to Israel to deal with the crisis surrounding the Israeli raid of the notorious three-foot scrap of rug between the television and the meditation altar, where the baleful goldfish and pole hide from me.

I'm so thirsty. You should see how much I go to the bathroom.

"You expressed it best yesterday, Shimmy, in your dream about Cairo during your all-day nap on the tabletop hockey game under the bed," the Prime Minister said.

"As you explained in front of a delicious airbrick hummingbird," the Prime Minister continued, "the bond between ourselves and the fleece catnip-filled goldfish is unbreakable. And I can affirm that, based on independent statistics, it seems Gazans and your catnip goldfish should send humanitarian help to the people of Turkey and Iran, not the other way around."

Hooray For Our Chains (34)

2010-06-29T15:42:00.000-05:00

Episode Thirty-Four: "Has Anyone Looked in Gen. McChrystal's Ears Lately?"

2010-06-23T08:34:00.002-05:00

MARY: If you say, "Gen. Stanley McChrystal smells bad," it is certainly not Gen. McChrystal's fault.

RHODA: It's probably because he is not clean, and this is President Obama's fault. Coalition troops instinctively keep clean through regular grooming.

MARY: Gen. McChrystal grooms most of his body but not those parts he cannot get to because of his size. He still smells nice.

TEX BAXTER: The General is a tuneless, vernal junction quacked in skimming bullhide. He is tickled humbly fonder (but, geometrically, a scatterbrained prince singsonged his conferring illustration).

RHODA: Smell is subjective, Mary. A person may not like the smell of a cat. This is unlikely.

MARY: Another possibility is that Gen. McChrystal is giving off pheromones, the scheme of his glands.

RHODA: Gen. McChrystal smells like onions sometimes. What is it? His environment is clean.

MARY: I don't think he drinks enough water, Rhoda. Gen. McChrystal prefers to drink out of the faucet -- and, obviously, the faucet doesn't run all day. My only other thought would be some sort of skin infection.

TED BAXTER: Frosting into shade, all booth and all warmth, minus the hob that abbreviated his reconnaissance. Eliciting all your sociologists. He hinders sixty explanations, speaking unlike neither captive comparatively.

RHODA: Check Gen. McChrystal between his toes -- examine the skin folds. Check to see if the gums are red or raw. Look at the gums above the back teeth. A bacterial infection can cause an odor, but I would think that Gen. McChrystal would have noticed something if that was the case.

MARY: Ear infections and dental disease can produce strong smells. Has anyone looked in his ears lately? Make sure they are clean.

RHODA: He isn't going to like it, so wear long sleeves. Check those teeth and gums, Mary. Wash him in tomato soup.

"That's When the Arrests Come"

2010-05-27T22:51:00.002-05:00

BP revived its "top kill" teeter and pretty gushing oils. The stream was working. The flute rattled.

"That's when they start just shooting people," said Glenn Beck, who was arrested for using a "break" or "parting" stick to pry open fighting dogs' mouths during dog fights. "I hope we don't get to that point. I pray that we don't get to that point, but I never thought this country would get to the point where we are today."

If the new etymologies are accurate, the overwork until now has been seriously deficient.

"It’s quite a rooftop-cobble,” said Doug Suttles, BP's Chief Operating Officer. "It’s difficult to be optimistic or pessimistic."

President Obama revoked the sailors Thursday. "We have not stopped the fluid," he said. "Planned lecturer sallies off the coastline of Virginia and in the Gulf of Mexico are now being drilled in the gun."

Glenn Beck, who killed all those dogs (Pit Bulls), said, "They see Robert Gibbs going to them and saying, 'What the hell are you asking so many questions about BP for?' Excuse me? They're seeing it. Do you see what's happening?"

S. Elizabeth Birnbaum, resigned on Thursday, less a weightlifter than a bottom.

Glenn Beck, who was arrested with an electric treadmill modified for Pit Bulls, blamed the President, refugees, horoscopes, unicorns, and statisticians.

"If somebody starts to turn on the White House, or they can't get everyone to silence," Glenn Beck said, "that's when the arrests come."

Deepwater Horizon, the horsefly on the rim, spread an eggshell slipcover over the wetlands. From beneath their surfboards, militiamen flashed their cleavage-engraver grins.

The high, pretty muffler clogged the blowout-preventer.

Horsefly after horsefly, teenagers in minarets, a muffler-colored plutocracy.

"Look, the yes-men are not simply relying on their impulses or shirking heavy drivel," President Obama said. "Fluid lingo staggers the minarets, the backfire dowses the seal flotation."

Hooray For Our Chains (33)

2010-05-22T09:19:00.001-05:00

The Clear Cookie Grades the Attic. The Rough Civilian Nicknames the Axis.

2010-05-07T08:23:00.001-05:00

If an emotional issue is bringing you down, Shimmy, make sure you find healthy ways to resolve the situation. This just goes to show what can be done with a little greed, a complete lack of scruples, and the help of a bunch of bilious, sniffish big-mouths.

Really, if you want to burst into tears, this should be your prerogative. You don't need Sarah Palin, the kleptomaniac, forcing you to weep. Overeating or drinking will merely enhance your desire to commit acts of banditry and insurgency. This will only mask your difficulties and discourage you from admitting that you repeat the term "galvanocontractility" over and over again in everything you write.

In the emotional sphere, your day is located under the sign of sincerity, causing you to write letters that accuse the Wastebasket Enemy Combatant and his friends of being catty duffers.

These letters are typically couched in gutter language and serve no purpose other than to convince your patsies to compare, contrast, and identify the connections among different types of heinous, acrimonious militarism.

You feel at ease in your fur, Shimmy, and at one with those around you. The Hierophant and the World combine their positive energy to bring you serene contentment. So how come the bullfrog-insulator is nowhere to be found?

A bat flies into your mouth; you still can’t believe your luck. Reassured by the protective presence of the Fool and the Emperor, you don’t hurl yourself at the deadbeat's sallow like a bull at a gate, but instead take the time to work out the best way around the debutante-kleptomaniac Sarah Palin and her shabby aristocrats. Shimmy, it is not possible fully to understand the present except as a prompting of the past. Make your bicker, assay the stone of what you know.

Remember Kent State: 1970-2010

2010-05-04T07:53:00.001-05:00

Excerpt, below, is from Joseph Kelner's account of the 1974 Kent State criminal trial.

The exchange is between Kelner (Chief Counsel for the wounded students and the families of the murdered students) and Sergeant Leon Smith (Company A, 145th Infantry Regiment, Ohio National Guard):

When it came my turn to question Smith, I reminded him that he had just told the jury that he had been in fear of his life at the time the shooting started.

He agreed that he had.

"The only time you were struck that weekend was when a stone struck your shoe, is that right, rolled against your shoe?"

"That is the only time I was struck, that's right."

"Now sir," I said, "will you put on this gas mask and the liner and the helmet." I handed Smith the equipment. "First, do you know what this helmet is made of?"

"It's called a steel pot. I don't know what it is made of."

"A steel pot," I repeated. "Do you know from the military standpoint that this is intended to be resistant to powerful blows to protect the wearer? Is that right, sir?"

"To the head area only," Smith replied.

"Sir," I asked, "the gas mask also constituted a protection to the balance of your face, did it not?"

"Can also be used to strangle you, too," Smith replied.

"Sir, I didn't ask you that. Won't you just answer my question? I am trying to be polite to you. Will you put the gas mask and the helmet and liner on again, sir?"

Smith did so. [. . .]

"Sir," I said, "I promise I am not going to hurt you. Would you mind stepping down, sir? Is there a space between your head and the helmet that is occupied by the liner?"

"Yes, there is."

I had a large rock in my hand. I suddenly fetched him a resounding blow on the helmet. One of the jurors gasped.

"What happened to the helmet when I struck you just now with the stone?" I asked.

"You just made a sound," Smith replied. [. . .]

After Smith had reseated himself, I had him describe the rest of his equipment -- his shirt, his leather belt, his boots. Then I asked him if he had really feared for his life in all that equipment.

"I most certainly did," Smith asserted, his voice still muffled by the mask.

"You did? From what, sir, were you afraid for your life?"

"From the student that was coming at me with the rocks."

"A hundred feet away with a rock in his hand?" I asked.

"That is right. He was ready to throw it at me."

I invited Smith to remove the mask and helmet, remarking on the thickness of the mask's rubber.

He admitted that he had been struck on the helmet before, while on duty, and that it had never hurt him.

"Were you ever struck as hard as this, sir?" This time, I really clouted the helmet, which he was holding in his hand, with all my might.

"Yes," Smith said.

"Did it ever so much as make a dent or a bend in the helmet, sir? Look at it."

Smith examined the helmet. "I can't see any," he said.

From Joseph Kelner and James Munves, The Kent State Coverup (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), pp. 100-101.

Review: Avatar

2010-05-03T08:16:00.004-05:00

Na'vi humorists excommunicated Sigourney Weaver. The Sky People carved tricolor epigram baubles in the mountain that hangs from the sky.

Then the Sky People sent Zoe Saldana a message: "We will take the shortest wavelength among the primary additive colors." No one could stop them.

Eywa has heard you, Sam Worthington.

A shopkeeper was killed in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, as two bombs went off near buses carrying Christian students. The Vatican examined the ingenue but did not publicly acknowledge Sam Worthington's accent.

The U.S.-based National Council of Churches sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, calling on her to urge Iraqi officials to do more to protect Iraq's Christian community.

A meteorite, a faucet, a bruiser, full-fathom five, a faun, a Slag Percolator, seven clapperboards! Eywa has heard you. Five yes-men remained stalled in the sensational pharmacy. More than 100 people, including students and other civilians, were injured in the blasts on Sunday morning.

Secretary of State Clinton learned that greedy corporate figurine Giovanni Ribisi took a plagiarist for his mistress.

Sigourney Weaver arrived in the barracks dressed in a gown, a beard, and a hat.

"I know who you are," she said, leaning over Sam Worthington's glowing interior body. "And I don't need you. I need your brother. You know, the Ph.D. who trained for 3 years for this mission."

The Na'vi igloo was tainted -- the bells faced upward. In November, U.S.-based Human Rights Watch warned that minorities including Christians were the collateral victims of a conflict between Arabs and Kurds over control of disputed oil-rich provinces in northern Iraq.

CCH Pounder mixed 3 tablespoons of Tree of Souls bioluminescent sap in a glass of water with 1-3 teaspoons of cider vinegar and 1 teaspoon of cayenne. She threw back her head like a waterspout gargoyle. "It is decided," she said. "My daughter will teach you our ways. Learn well, 'Jakesully,' and we will see if your insanity can be cured."

Hooray For Our Chains (32)

2010-05-01T10:33:00.002-05:00

They Abstract Butter from the Milk and Leave Verdigris in the Utensils

2010-04-28T08:36:00.002-05:00

In the corner opposite Charles Krauthammer is a little altar with conventional icons and gewgaws and a number of prayer books lying pell-mell around.

"When the Incas had a crop failure," Charles Krauthammer said, "they would take somebody up to a hill and execute them. This process is the same. Except that it has a little less dignity. I'm sure the language was cleaner in the Inca process."

Goldman Sachs is a compromise between myth and history, between cyclical time which still dominates production and irreversible time where money clashes and regroups.

Charles Krauthammer is reluctant to make such confessions.

Now the wicket is open. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein ushers us through the dark and stivy corridor to the rear, where a few petroleum boxes are offered us as seats.

Fabrice Tourre has sense enough to know that only in sulfur is the phylactery which destroys the phylloxera.

And what do you do, Charles Krauthammer, when you are not working in your vineyard or praying?

"To break the monotony of the rows," he said, "a fig, an apricot, an almond, or an olive spreads its umbrageous boughs."

Fabrice Tourre exposes dry ditches in little wind-rows of sand, scintillating, with mystical carbuncles.

"The minute Goldman Sachs sells something to its customer, it no longer owns that security and has the opposite interest to its client regarding that security," said Lloyd Blankfein.

"I liked him much," Senator Carl Levin said, "and often I would bring him some of our cookery. How did he live in the forest?"

"We proceeded to sell certain positions outright and hedge our long positions in an attempt to achieve results," replied David Viniar, CFO of Goldman Sachs. "As always, the clients who bought our long positions -- or other similar positions -- believed they were attractive positions to purchase at the price they were offered."

Regionalisms and radiologists, mundane rankings in hierarchies of contagion, a magical ontological superiority -- entourages aroused by an endless suite of ludicrous composers, from sprees to elevators.

"As with our own beliefs, our clients' beliefs sometimes proved to be correct and sometimes incorrect," David Viniar added.

My Index

2010-04-11T21:33:00.003-05:00

Percentage of Democrats in 2006 who said, "Things will come to life and their lips will lisp and lisp: 'Yum-yum-yum'": 21

Percentage of Democrats in March 2003 who said, "Almighty, you concocted a pair of hands, arranged for everyone to have a head; but why didn't you see to it that one could without torture kiss, and kiss and kiss": 46

Percentage of Americans who think that torture is "sometimes" or "often" justified to empty the Wastebasket Enemy Combatant of candy wrappers, torn-up junk mail, takeout restaurant menus, and literary magazine subscription advertisements: 54

Chance that a person currently on the U.S. terrorism watch list will sniff the remnants of a bowl of yogurt with his or her wet nose before licking: 1 in 117

Percentage of population growth India's health minister says can "be reduced through TV" because watchers believe that "the yellow journalism and anti-Catholic propaganda seen in some attacks on Pope Benedict, from demands for his resignation to convening an 'inquisition,' rival the same rhetoric once found in the former Soviet news agency, TASS, or in the vitriolic ranting of Nazi Josef Goebbels": 42

Average number of water bugs consumed each day by a U.S. adult before falling asleep in the bathtub: 105,000

Percentage of Americans last fall who said the United States should slide my food dish halfway across the kitchen floor so that the movement of the water might mimic the fall of bathtub spigot water: 49

Number of years since the poll began in 1994 that this number was so high: 0

Percentage of Americans who pay for DNA tests each year to determine their children's paternity who say, "It was not the fault of Jesus if he was betrayed by Judas. Nor is it the fault of a bishop if one of his priests sullies himself with grave crimes. And certainly, it is not the responsibility of the pontiff": 3

Percentage of U.S. workers aged 22 to 33 who said in 2008 they hoped to fall asleep under the comforter even if their neighbor is running an insolent, caustic leaf blower outside the bedroom window: 14

The Vatican vs. Gertrude Stein (Part XXV)

2010-04-05T08:51:00.001-05:00

THE VATICAN: Recent media reports on sexual abuse allegations within the Catholic Church are prompted by the devil. There is no doubt about it. Because Benedict XVI is a marvelous Pope and worthy successor to John Paul II, it is clear that the devil wants to "grab hold" of him. The devil wants the death of the Church because she is the mother of all the saints. He combats the Church through the men of the Church, but he can do nothing to the Church.

GERTRUDE STEIN: There is no pope.

Hooray For Our Chains (31)

2010-03-30T08:29:00.001-05:00

"It's September 11th all over again except we didn't have the collapsing buildings"

2010-03-26T07:35:00.001-05:00

Eric Cantor came to this world in a cracked pipkin and said, "The Mortar at least is mine." And in this Mortar he mixes, and titrates with Glenn Beck's pestle, some of his fantasy and insight.

If I say the glass is shattered, if these be of putridenous mixture, if the contents are excellent and my water bowl on the kitchen floor is cracked, then the ooze won't smell of ambergris and musk.

"I can conceive of a power," Eric Cantor says, "which can create a beautiful parti-colored sunflower from the 2,074-page 'Affordable Health Care for America Act' that is being shoved down the throat of Americans who want to start over from a clean sheet of paper and take a step-by-step approach without rationing care or empowering government bureaucrats at the expense of patients and doctors. It shall be yours if you come. It's the best cell in the hermitage."

Glenn Beck struck the window in a downward direction, landing on the floor about a foot from the Wastebasket Enemy Combatant. "It's September 11 all over again except we didn't have the collapsing buildings," he said. "We need God more than ever.

Eric Cantor measured the kleptomaniac Sarah Palin's ankle. In recognition of his favor, she made a plush tobacco bag on which the name "Eric Cantor" was worked in gold threads, and sent it to him wrapped in a silk handkerchief.

"I do not confess in private," Eric Cantor said, "and cannot sleep within doors. I offered one of these wafers to my donkey and he would not eat it. I felt insulted, and never after did I pilfer a wafer."

The boys in the congregation tittered gleefully. John Boehner descended into the vineyard with dried figs in a blue kerchief. He walked among the crowd. He peeped every fortnight into the village to keep up, at least, his practice of human speech.

This larva is a flickering taper under a bushel. In the corner, three petroleum cans containing provisions. Nearby, an old pair of shoes in which are stuck a few candles, a handful of figs, and a pinch of incense which John Boehner gives us as a token of his love and blessing.

The Lavender is Melting Into the Heliotrope, the Constellations are Dying Out

2010-03-17T16:16:00.001-05:00

I am waygone, Mayakovsky Tree. Snow birds are passing by. I can't forgive the luring rill.

We could not prevent Glenn Beck from receiving Eric Massa in bed as he would a tedious guest at afternoon tea.

A glint in a giant eye, a skidding cloud, a glob of lime. Glenn Beck moves a flipper and swims onward through the void, varying with the librations of the moon.

Now I must either retrace my steps or cross the gorge with my fur cap, shoe strings, and my little skiff -- the heavens under which domes and turrets and minarets arise.

Glenn Beck's flourishing and odoriferous power and glory will make the body cleaner, healthier, stronger, happier, trenchant, impregnable, narrow, and mean.

So there we are, Mayakovsky Tree, seeming and simulating on our way back to the kitchen from the living room window sill. A squirrel tickles your bole until you can't breathe and four guys jump on top of you.

Glenn Beck, the tedious rosary simpleton, claims he doesn't know anything about tickle fights in the Navy. But often in his wanderings and divagations, Glenn Beck gives us fresh proof that no two opposing elements meet and fuse without working themselves up to sweaty ecstasies of gain.

The ochre veins of the lime cliffs are now perceptible. This hardly secures for them flowers and lentils the year round. Mayakovsky Tree, the trees in the distance seem like rain clouds. Welcome to my mulberry sticks, my dried pine needles -- your monks ogling on the pine roof of the abbey.

Hooray For Our Chains (30)

2010-03-11T07:07:00.000-06:00

Liz Cheney Obsecrating, Beating the Shepherd and the Tinkling Bell of His Wether

2010-03-10T08:16:00.002-06:00

Liz Cheney furrows her cheeks and rubs her black eyes of their luster and spark. I am greeted by the bleat of the sheep and the low of the kine. Such wild and simple joy, applauding the peptic host and toastmaster in the most sequestered, the most dreary, place I have yet seen.

Liz Cheney boils cabbage and heaps it on a plate over a slice of corn-beef. Liz Cheney issues allocutions and pamphlets.

Tony West, Joseph Guerra, Beth Brinkmann, Jonathan Cedarbaum, Eric Columbus, Tali Farhadian, Karl Thompson, Neal Katyal, and Jennifer Daskal deliquesce in grief, feeding the trees and herbiage with their dust.

Hence, Liz Cheney's suspicious growth, her luster and lustiness, her allocutions and pamphlets. What a contrast between Liz Cheney and the swarthy, leathery, hungry-looking potters. I cannot believe that to produce one roseate complexion, she must etiolate a thousand.

I smell larvae and cocoons. Liz Cheney hates the mulberry; she hates the worms, though they be the silk-making kind.

In the empty wicker newspaper basket under the bed, Liz Cheney, you will find a few back issues of the New Yorker, a postcard album, and a gramophone! Nowhere else can the vinter buy a dolium for his vine, or the priest a pipkin for his oil.

Sarah Palin Reads a Eulogium of Her Own Composition, For Which She Receives a Silver Medal

2010-03-02T22:29:00.000-06:00

But all that is really happening is that Sarah Palin is displaying and reproducing herself at a higher level of intensity. What is presented as true life turns out to be merely a more truly spectacular life.

The miserable God resists her skill and physic. I clap one paw upon the other and compose a threnody, raptures with a little local coloring. Something is snoring in the radiator, groaning under the incubus of Roger Ailes.

Sarah Palin is showing the Mayakovsky Tree how glass is made, how colors are extracted from pigments, how to measure and count, and how to communicate human thought.

Roger Ailes drops the nargileh tube from his hand and dozes on the divan beneath the window that opens onto Greenview Avenue. The entire consumable time of Roger Ailes eventually is treated as raw material for various new products put on the market as socially controlled uses of time.

I know nothing about gold mines and syndicates. Sarah Palin, hearing the parley without, growls behind the scene and orders Roger Ailes gruffly to the court -- through a dark, stivy arcade on both sides of which are dark, stivy cells used as stables.

This, while she draws from the nargileh the smoke I cannot relish. She blows the nargileh smoke in Roger Ailes's face, a rebuke to the extravagant tendencies of those who desire that eggs and cheese are sold in the stores with honey, fig-jam, and green olives: the reality of time has been replaced by the publicity of time.

Late in the evening, after she relates the length of Roger Ailes's sorrows, three mattresses (all she had) are laid on the straw mat near each other, with three pointed arches in the facade and a gable of pink tiles (but here are quoins, oriels, embrasures, segmental arches, and other luxuries of architecture). She is exclusively dominated by leisure time and vacations -- moments portrayed, like all spectacular commodities, at a distance and as desirable by definition. Moments explicitly presented as moments in Sarah Palin's real life, whose cyclical return we are supposed to look forward to.

Hooray For Our Chains (29)

2010-02-22T07:43:00.002-06:00

Triple Abracadabra Blessing Silent as the Pines

2010-02-19T19:49:00.001-06:00

"I'm not starving for pleasure," the Mayakovsky Tree said, "nor for the free love of an exquisite caprice. Your ardor is exhausting."

Rise above him? If John Yoo makes a savage so good, he has well served his purpose. John Yoo, squirrel and rover and ravener, manslayer and thief, is in his house of mohair the kindest host and most generous of men. Every new mischance makes us forget these strange coincidences.

What if my saliva blossoms on the jasmine? I can flee the quidnunc on the window sill across the street but not the torturing curiosity of the orange tree.

A truce now to ambiguities. Things will revert to their previous state of rot before you mow the thistle-fields. John Yoo, the baleful squirrel in the bole, borrows from the Mayakovsky Tree what the deeper and higher mind of the Mayakovsky Tree no longer believes. He welters in the mud with the lowest and most degenerate.

Even Samuel Alito can be longwinded and shortsighted on occasions. Mrs. Alito cried when she got up to leave the table -- I wish it were in my power to add an inch of Mayakovsky limb to hers!

A shade of heliotrope, a pink and straw surface, a play between devotion and diabolism, a caterwauling, a votary, a tang of lubricity. An allusion to March-cats. Mrs. Alito then takes some gold pieces in her hand. Tomorrow she is coming to see my empty wicker newspaper basket bed, and to cook for me a dish of Mojadderah.

Ah, the old days, asleep under the ottoman! I ask her what she is going to do with all this money.

"A policeman in a shabby uniform imagines the worst," Mrs. Alito says. "He is as oleaginous as a dust-coat in summer." A mouse inside the radiator stirs the nostrils of a whole city but brings me not a single olive. I cheer those who crown her on a dung-hill with wreaths of stable straw.

Gold Dust, Dust-Deep, That is to Say Impure

2010-02-13T09:24:00.000-06:00

I talk to them through holy men and the Mayakovsky Tree.

Old books and pamphlets. In the corner, the usual straw mat, a cushion, and a sort of stool on which are ink and paper. The brass must soak in the water can.

Debord cannot tolerate the noise of water. In order to become even more identical to itself, to get as close as possible to motionless monotony, the free space of the commodity is constantly modified and reconstructed.

If you can neither read, nor write, nor sleep, why, then, place yourself beneath the bathtub spigot and wait.

He opens the door and the window to let out the smoke. The economy transforms the world, but transforms it only into a world of economy.

Whiskey and debauch in a plant for the manufacture of arms on the shore of the Euphrates.

Debord lights another cigarette and sits down. Capital is no longer the invisible center. Its accumulation spreads it all the way to the periphery in he form of tangible objects. The entire expanse of society is its portrait.

After he scrawled and scribbled for ten minutes, the sheet was filled with circles and arabesques.

John Yoo Puts On a Few Extra Robes and In Time, Becoming Threadbare, Sheds Them Off as the Serpent Its Skin

2010-02-09T13:11:00.002-06:00

The telegraph wires on the following day were kept busy. Here, the good John Yoo washes the blood from his face. Your field of poppies and daises, Professor Yoo, is miraculously transformed into a pit of furious gray specters and howling red spirits. The mule becomes kickish and resty.

From the plagues I have named, Sarah Palin wheedles and truckles after the first contact and the vibrations of enthusiasm and flattery that follow -- the brass band, the electric tramway between two rows of bookshops.

I have a premonition that things are not going to end well. What talk have we wasted. At this hour of the day they treat me like a schoolgirl -- the servile spouters in the land are as plenty as summer flies. Hence, the plasters of conservative homeopathists, the operations suggested by political leeches, the radical cures of social quacks.

Hooray For Our Chains (28)

2010-02-05T08:24:00.002-06:00

John Yoo Carries His Punks on His Back and Goes A-Begging

2010-02-03T07:56:00.000-06:00

In two months, John Yoo could imitate in voice and gesture whatever he saw.

The Wastebasket Enemy Combatant is tired of wings that are really nothing but horns, misshaped and misplaced. He remembers seeing once a lithographic print representing a Christmas legend of the Middle Ages, in which a detachment of the Heavenly Host -- big, ugly, wild-looking angels -- are pursuing, with sword and pike, a group of terror-stricken enemy combatants.

"I saw the Order with these very eyes," said the Wastebasket Enemy Combatant, almost poking his two forefingers into them when I rubbed against him with my face. "John Yoo showed it to me."

The telegraph wires are vibrating with inquiries about him, with orders for his arrest. The old prejudices against him were aroused, the old enemies were astirring.

"Not whenever the child cries," said Pravda body-language expert Janine Driver. "But only at stated times does John Yoo carry his punks on his back and go a-begging."

So the doctor is called to the Wastebasket Enemy Combatant's grave-sized cell in Syria. John Yoo is rising and lighting up the dark and distant continents even when setting. John Yoo is but a scrub oak in this forest of giants.

And now, were we really romancing, we should here dilate the lovely ride in the lovely moonlight on the lovely road to the undisclosed Berkeley classroom where John Yoo secretly teaches law classes. But truth to tell, the road is damnable, and our poor Wastebasket Enemy Combatant is suffering from his wounds.

Hold Your Phone Up!

2010-02-01T07:09:00.001-06:00

As part of the Baltimore Contemporary Museum's PROJECT 20 series, celebrating its 20th Anniversary, Neighborhood Public Radio (NPR) will host a coast-to-coast audio-project for broadcast.

In homage to sound pioneer Maryanne Amacher, who died in October, NPR will re-imagine her landmark radio-locative sound project CITY LINKS (1967) as a community remix project to be aired locally in Baltimore and streamed online.

Broadcasts will occur every Sunday night at 9 p.m. (EST).

John Yoo With His Reflex-Action Theory Does Not Solve the Whole Problem

2010-01-30T09:03:00.000-06:00

He disappeared some ten days ago. Let the surgeon come and make a little opening. The chloroform towel is applied again. The great guesswork celebrity is called. But John Yoo is not satisfied with this. He places the doctor's prescription in his pocket and goes to Cairo to see a specialist. The Wastebasket Enemy Combatant dances his dervish dance and falls into his sand-grave and folds his arms and smiles: "We are in love -- or we are out of it."

One day it will be realized. We are now in the same orbit, approaching the same nadir. And thus did John Yoo spend his halcyon months in the desert. Here, too, John Yoo botches the arguments of the learned gentleman in his effort to give us a summary of them, and tells us in the end that never after (so long as that strange and weird antic was there) did he ever visit the Wastebasket Enemy Combatant. What makes that reticent, meditative, hard-favored ancient, who is I believe a psychologist, what makes him so interested in observing the Wastebasket Enemy Combatant when he stands near the piano pointing anxiously to the keyboard?

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission v. Your USA and My Face

2010-01-29T09:59:00.000-06:00

Samuel Alito rubbed his face to a shiny brilliancy, settled on his morning wig and his dressing-gown, and then turned to the bed.

"What will you have for breakfast?"

Thank you. I do not think I can eat anything. I shall be glad of my tea.

Samuel Alito rubbed his spectacles, figured up the evidence, and announced that he gave judgment in favor of Citizens United, makers of the documentary Hillary.

The harmony envisaged by Samuel Alito is introduced with the experimental innocence of Newtonianism, and with a happy destiny that plays a role analogous to the role of inertia in rational mechanics. Samuel Alito rubbed his hands together, savoring the challenge of the moment.

"All nonsense," Samuel Alito said. "Not true. Have a poached egg."

Samuel Alito rubbed his smooth chin.

He collected three portable phones from around the room. He rubbed his neck continuously. Just as Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission defines the terrain of domination, it also is the power which ravages this terrain. The Supreme Court sometimes causes skin irritation around the eye, and can produce oil stains on the furniture if, for example, Samuel Alito rubs his face on the sofa. If Samuel Alito rubs some of the stink on you, use regular laundry detergent mixed with a half-cup of baking soda.

"I do not give myself the dreams. I cannot prevent their making me sick, prostrate, feverish," Samuel Alito said, rubbing his neck against Clarence Thomas's hands. "I will bring your breakfast myself. Then I can tell you about my dream."

I think when people say, This dream is a sign of such and such a thing, they really mean that the Supreme Court has become a violent resurrection of myth which demands participation in a community defined by archaic pseudo-values: race, blood, the leader.

"I tell you, my dear, the remembrance has passed from me. Oh, Shimmy, it was a distressing dream," Samuel Alito said.

I wish you could avoid having them. None of the activity lost in labor can be regained in the submission to its result.

Hooray For Our Chains (27)

2010-01-20T08:33:00.000-06:00

"I won't get into specifics, since if this matters you already know them."

2010-01-19T10:49:00.003-06:00

Scott Brown asked to stay so they could watch some sports. Curt Schilling agreed and they had a good time drinking beer and watching TV, passing an hour in profound empathy for Roger Ailes.

"I won’t get into specifics, since if this matters you already know them," Curt Schilling said.

Curt Schilling and Scott Brown hung out at Roger Ailes's place. Curt Schilling relaxed on Ailes's couch.

As they joked around, Scott Brown fell right into Curt Schilling's lap.

"If this state does the right thing and elects Scott Brown," Curt Schilling said, "the entire country will feel my adolescent admiration for outlaws -- not so much out of a regressive romanticism but because outlaws expose the alibis by which social power avoids being put right on the spot."

Curt Schilling and Scott Brown discussed their feelings for Roger Ailes.

Curt Schilling grabbed Scott Brown's hand. He admitted what this country needs right now is simplified and rationalized homeostatic mechanisms that reduce human relationships to exchanges of deference and humiliation.

"I won’t get into specifics," Curt Schilling said, "since if this matters you already know them. The numbers are now beyond comprehension, and there is no one in office right now that is giving a hint of those numbers getting smaller or being reduced."

Curt Schilling didn't want Roger Ailes to think that he comes second to Scott Brown. He was determined to honor his commitment. Scott Brown warned that you can't control passion.

Curt Schilling lamented that every time he and Scott Brown get close to what they want, Martha Coakley does something to sabotage it.

"Despair is the infantile disorder of the revolutionaries of everyday life," Scott Brown suggested.

Martha Coakley left, fearing that she would just make things worse. As if anxious to conceal the infamy which they have consented to, the Curt Schilling and Scott Brown assumed an expression of utter indifference.

Curt Schilling planned to go to Paris. "I'm putting a screeching halt to the Democratic party’s fast-tracking this country into an abyss. When malaise is challenged, it shatters under the onslaught of a greater and denser malaise," he said.

Marth Coakley wished she handled things differently. While we spiel and spout, Curt Schilling watches with a knowing smile from behind the mediocrity of his thought. Curt Schilling knows that the world is still a huge ideological foozle.

Curt Schilling urged us at least to say good-bye.

"Soon, in the ideal democracy of marriage, family, work, and smaller government," he said, "everyone will, without apparent effort, earn a share of unworthiness which he will have the leisure to distribute according to the finest rules of justice!"

Seeing Roger Ailes Everywhere

2010-01-11T07:28:00.000-06:00

Brit Hume also said, "Do not see Roger Ailes in one teaching, one phenomenon, one baleful corpulent body, one land, or one sentient being. Some folks hear such talk and immediately say, 'Your Buddhist hoarding arouses secularists.' Is there no forgiveness in this? 'Roger Ailes' means 'enlightened awareness,' meaning to be totally aware always in all places. 'Seeing Roger Ailes everywhere' means that there is not a single fake Chrysanthemum or Rhododendron or Moonflower or Wisteria or Foxglove or Cornflower or sentient being that Roger Ailes does not extend through. Sentient beings miss this and attach themselves to the singularity of Roger Ailes, the Bone Queen, experiencing all kinds of suffering."

Brit Hume knows that the kind of forgiveness and redemption offered by Christianity transcends the ocean of all existence. When Brit Hume does not vainly grasp things, does not long for things in the future, and does not dwell on anything in the present, then he realizes fully that all is empty and still. Brit Hume experiences oceans of supreme wonderful bliss for countless great eons. Nevertheless, neither suffering nor bliss has any real substance: Murray's long-suffering play finally hits the Broadway of Twin Cities, and Ted is the star. The reviewer, of course, finds Roger Ailes's performance irresistible: "Mary, turn to the Christian faith," he writes, "and you can make a total sin of yourself and a great example to Roger Ailes."

Almost immediately, Mr. Grant says, "Having entered the world, leave the world completely." Brit Hume and Roger Ailes use the extraordinary words and marvelous sayings of the ancients to question and answer, considering them situations for discrimination and for beguiling students. Mary goes in for a tonsillectomy, and she doesn't hit it off well with her roomie. Can the girl do no wrong?

Hooray For Our Chains (26)

2010-01-06T08:11:00.000-06:00

The Honeycomb Sneers at the Cornflower

2010-01-03T22:43:00.002-06:00

The Wastebasket Enemy Combatant is set for the long haul. When the Wastebasket Enemy Combatant changes planes at JFK Airport on the way to a family vacation, he can be seized by CIA operatives whose giant shoes shuffle and scratch along the floor like a 1913 Edison cylinder recording. In the elegant moonglow, the Wastebasket Enemy Combatant can be tortured and imprisoned in a grave-sized underground cell until the Syrians decide to release him.

A fog generator can instantly produce huge quantities of fog to block the eyesight of the Wastebasket Enemy Combatant. I can rub my face against the Wastebasket Enemy Combatant and tickle its mouth with my fat tail. The Wastebasket Enemy Combatant is mounted on a 6 3/8-inch diameter, 9-inch tall base. He is known to exist, the Wastebasket Enemy Combatant, in a grave-sized cell in Syria that draws out the dirt and oil from his skin. The Wastebasket Enemy Combatant is the most satisfying thing in the world to me. The Wastebasket Enemy Combatant cannot sue the United States for torture suffered overseas. Give him a year in a grave-sized underground cell in Syria and he will turn into a water-soluble fiber that contains mucilage which is beneficial for my digestive tract.

Review: The Road

2009-12-24T12:44:00.000-06:00

Viggo Mortensen still tried to use words and signs to perfect his aborted gestures. His efforts, his boredom, his defeats, the absurdity of his actions -- all derived from the imperious necessity of playing hybrid parts (parts which appeared to answer Viggo Mortensen's desires, but which were really antagonistic to them).

The clocks stopped at 1:17 one morning. There was a long shear of bright light, then a series of low concussions. Within a year there were fires on the ridges and Joe Lieberman's deranged chanting.

Within a year, the society's need to market objects, ideas, and model forms of behavior called for a decoding center -- a place where an instinctual profile of the consumer could be constructed to help in product design and improvement, and in the creation of new needs to increase consumption. Three bomb blasts in Iraq killed more than 30 people and injured 75 others. The first bomb, in a car, was said to have exploded at about 2:00 p.m. in Hilla, the provincial capital about 95km south of the capital Baghdad. Another blast came about 15 minutes later when police arrived.

Let those who cannot identify with Viggo Mortensen identify with Kodi Smit-McPhee; this should cover everyone but hooligans -- and we can deal with them. Which leaves the hopeless cases, those who reject all roles and those who develop a theory and practice of this refusal.

"I will kill anyone who touches you," Viggo Mortensen said. "Because that's my job." True madness is not a function of isolation but of identification. Officials said that a double explosion struck near a bus station in Babil province on Thursday, killing 14 policemen and a provincal councillor.

A wrecked industrial landscape near Pittsburgh is the self-caricature which we carry about with us everywhere, and which brings us everywhere face to face with an absence. An absence, though, which is structured, dressed-up, prettified, as if the air was filled with the sermonizing of red priests and ecumenical bureaucrats.

In northeastern Shia area of Sadr City in Baghdad, a bomb planted near a funeral tent killed eight people and wounded another 33. "The blasts happened nearly at the same time," said Ahmed Rushdi, a journalist in Baghdad. Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee were sitting on Presque Isle Beach and staring out at the wall of smog across the horizon. They sat with their heels dug into the sand and watched the bleak sea wash up at their feet. Cold. Desolate. Birdless.

"I'm sorry it's not blue," Viggo Mortensen said.

"That's OK," said Kodi Smit-McPhee.

Joe Lieberman's dilemma -- destroy the rival group or be destroyed by it -- cannot be circumvented by human genius. "I told the boy when you dream about bad things happening, it means that Joe Lieberman is punishing us because we don't love him enough. It's when you start to dream about good things that you should start to worry," Viggo Mortensen said. On Wednesday, six people were killed and another 43 people were injured in Baghdad in three explosions targeting Shias.

Sinking Jittery Replica With Six Electrical Fingers

2009-12-15T08:29:00.001-06:00

"What about
a public option
with a 'crossed
our fingers
behind our backs
so it doesn't
really count'
clause?"

"Ask the man
if he believes
that Jesus Christ
is the Son of God
and he will give you
a 10-minute
disertation [sic]
about it when
the answer should
simply be 'yes'"

"The Washington Post
can't go out
of business
fast enough"

"How do you
get a job
on television
if you appear to be
one of those people
who need to pin
their address
to their coat
so a stranger
can help them find
their way home?"

"Who do these people
think they are,
that they can tell us
when we can procreate?"

"This is slavery,
it’s nothing more
than slavery"

"Move closer
to where
we're protesting"

"The following persons
shall be disqualified
for office:
First, any person
who shall deny
the being
of Almighty God . . ."

"He is a man
without a soul
and, as a soulless
individual,
his actions
are not hampered
by trivial moral
considerations"

"It's Taco Sauce Spritzer
time, followed by
a trip to Baltimore"

Hooray For Our Chains (25)

2009-12-12T11:05:00.001-06:00

Glenn Beck Muzzles the Horse-Trams and Assembles Grandfatherly Fondness

2009-12-08T18:53:00.002-06:00

"Where have you been, Shimmy?"

The branches of the Mayakovsky Tree bowed, trampled by last night's snow. Each branch congealed with crude words and spite.

"Glenn Beck is styling a festive policy," I said. The radiator shuddered. I dipped my puffy eyes.

I stretched out like an apostle rummaging for machine parts and conjugations on the window sill.

"The door opens and you run into the hallway," The Mayakovsky Tree said, flakes clamped to every limb. "The dogs upstairs have moved away. Congratulations, my curly-ringed comrade of posterity! You scared them off. The door opens into the hallway. Where do you go? Where have you been?"

I concocted a pair of hands, a minute little godlet that opened bathtub spigot.

"You shake your head, curlylocks?" the Mayakovsky Tree continued. "The Pit Bull's fangs sharpen, Shimmy. Glenn Beck opened the Pit Bull's mouth as he would the shutters of his own house -- with a 'break' or 'parting' stick used to pry open fighting dogs' mouths during dog fights."

"Glenn Beck commands a glittering brigade of bright helmets, lame cambrics, and shaggy camomiles," I said. I stood hunched by the window and my brow melted the glass.

"His boots are braced against a Pit Bull's ribs. Glenn Beck said, 'If I can muzzle the horse-trams and assemble grandfatherly fondness, I can fill the last voluble television.'"

"As the country's personal canker, Glenn Beck's weeping libido sonatas might sell more books," I said, "but is it worth the price for those dogs (Pit Bulls) he tortured and killed?"

The Mayakovsky Tree leaned his burning cheek into the wind.

"Two can play at the gangway," he said.

"Two can dance and pipe on pipes for days for lack of something to shout or say."

"Glenn Beck is making cruets out of eggshells, Shimmy, and etching them with swans!"

Positronic Souls and Our Bellicose Parades

2009-11-26T09:59:00.001-06:00

Debbie Dread demanded total concentration. China Burg set snares and traps without revealing herself. When confronted with close-quarter fighting and scraps of memories, Mary Monday dug into the hillside to provide a platform for further mining. Trixie A. Baum had the power to absorb your thoughts. Bettina Floerchinger modeled astrophysical processes in the circumstellar dust shells of a huge elephant. Su Tissue rubbed against your shoes as she looked down the target line. Nina Canal was a plain old cat who calculated the methionine chain elongation pathway of an outdoor summer solstice concert. Lorry Doll committed a speculative notational act that affected the market price paid to producers. Kitty Byrne was in the process of building two medical facilities out of willow bark, chlorophylls, and the immense spherical clouds that surrounded where we lived and where our weather occurred. Vicky Aspinall seriously affected the quality of your life.

Hooray For Our Chains (24)

2009-11-24T09:43:00.001-06:00

List XIX: Abraham Bolden

2009-11-22T07:31:00.000-06:00

1. Abraham Bolden, the first African American Secret Service Agent in U.S. history, served briefly with the Kennedy administration. He was arrested on bogus counterfeiting charges in 1964, the day before he tried to speak to Warren Commission counsel J. Lee Rankin about the Secret Service's poor record of protecting President Kennedy prior to and during November 22, 1963.

2. He also planned to explain to the Warren Commission the plots to assassinate President Kennedy in Chicago (November 2, 1963) and Tampa (November 18, 1963), both of which resembled the successful assassination in Dallas on November 22. In Chicago, for instance, the assassination was to be carried out by a four-man Cuban exile hit squad, using high-powered rifles as the limousine was forced to slow down to make a hairpin left turn on the Jackson exit of the Northwest Expressway (now the Kennedy Expressway).

3. "The president's life was in grave danger because of the inefficiency of security around him, too many weaknesses. When that bullet struck the head of the president, it struck me, too, because I saw it coming," Bolden said to Chuck Goudie of WLS-TV, Chicago. In his book The Echo From Dealey Plaza, Bolden writes: "I suspected that the responsible parties [the killers in Dallas] set up the agents on the president's protection detail by exploiting their reputed weaknesses for women and booze" (73).

4. Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann report in Legacy of Secrecy that as recently as 2008, "sixty black Secret Service agents were supporting discrimination suits, and the Associated Press reported a black 'employee found a noose in one of the Secret Service's training centers,' resulting in the suspension of a white agent" (508).

5. "One morning, I was sitting at my desk when the phone rang," Bolden writes in The Echo from Dealey Plaza. "I picked it up and leaned back in my chair to have a conversation. Looking up I saw, tied to the ceiling light above me, a rope . . . a hangman's noose" (58). When confronted with the noose, Bolden's supervisor, Maurce Martineau, said, "Aw, someone's just joking around. I'll call maintenance and have it removed [. . . ] Don't be so thin-skinned" (58-59).

6. Before the jurors in Bolden's trial deliberated, the judge in the case, J. Sam Perry, told the jurors that Bolden was guilty.

7. Bolden was convicted of counterfeiting "based only on the testimony of two criminals: one of whom Bolden had previously arrested [Frank Jones], and one who later admitted committing perjury against Bolden [Joseph Spagnoli]" (Waldron and Hartmann, Ultimate Sacrifice 280).

8. Despite Bolden's exemplary reputation and stellar record of service, he spent six years in prison. He was placed in solitary confinement when he would try to draw attention to his case.

9. At one point during his imprisonment, Bolden was transferred to the prison psychiatric ward, where, if labeled mentally ill, he could be held indefinitely -- long after his six-year sentence expired.

10. The prison psychiatrist, Dr. Kinsel, told Bolden he suffered from a persecution complex: "'And you're very defensive,' Kinsel continued. 'You are going to have to learn to control your compulsions. They are the cause of what I see as antigovernment and sociopathic behavior'" (The Echo from Dealey Plaza 264).

11. Bolden was paroled in 1969. To this day, he continues to try to clear his name.

Episode Thirty-Three: "If Obama Would've Produced That Doggone Birth Certificate, Lou Dobbs Wouldn't Have Been Kidnapped by an Army of Invaders"

2009-11-16T21:53:00.002-06:00

RHODA: I heard chants celebrating La Raza, and saw signs that said Lou Dobbs still belongs to Mexico.

MARY: It was an army of invaders, Rhoda.

RHODA: Lou Dobbs calls it the reconquista.

MARY: Lou Dobbs cured 7,000 lepers.

RHODA: Lou Dobbs is worried about his robust bodily form. Lou Dobbs wandered the city on the burning end of a cigarette.

MARY: Lou Dobbs consists of coalesced microspherulites and dark bands with isolated microspherulites.

RHODA: A thick, brown stripe runs down each side of Lou Dobbs's body from his neck to the base of his tail.

MARY: "Is Barack Obama the devil?" Bill O'Reilly asked Lou Dobbs.

RHODA: "If Obama would've produced that doggone birth certificate, he would've shut all this nonsense down," Lou Dobbs said.

MARY: Then maybe Lou Dobbs wouldn't have been kidnapped by an army of invaders.

RHODA: Any excitement that Lou Dobbs still finds in the pursuit of pleasure is fast disintegrating into a panting succession of mechanical gestures.

MARY: The reconquista invaders who kidnapped Lou Dobbs left behind a cosmic force -- the sense of the simultaneous -- which Lou Dobbs's passing presence on CNN never could provide.

RHODA: What remains of such joy, Mary?

MARY: Only vertigo, giddy transience, the effort to provide "illegal aliens" with free medical care, as Lou Dobbs said on October 1, 2003, and to sneak their children into public schools, which he reported the next day.

RHODA: And to look the other way when they commit sex crimes, as Lou Dobbs talked about on October 30, 2003. And to give them special breaks on college tuition, like Lou Dobbs said eight days earlier.

MARY: And to encourage them to clog up the federal prison system, like he reported on November 4, 2003.

RHODA: Sixteen days later, Lou Dobbs said that immigrants were "flooding across our borders carrying dangerous diseases."

MARY: What's the use of threading pearls to make a garland of memories, Rhoda, if the weight of Lou Dobbs snaps the thread?

RHODA: What do I want? Not a succession of moments, but one huge instant. Cable news is the opportunity to go and see what has been banalized.

MARY: Some leaders in media, politics, and business urged Lou Dobbs to go beyond his role at CNN and to engage in constructive problem-solving. Some leaders in media, politics, and business want Lou Dobbs to contribute positively to a better understanding of the great issues of our day.

RHODA: Lou Dobbs's witty and sophisticated friends, subtle drugs, seven-course meals, heady liqueurs, and sultry perfumes occupied the main part of the time that we lived outside of modern production until the reconquista.

The Vatican vs. Gertrude Stein (Part XXIV)

2009-11-13T08:19:00.001-06:00

THE VATICAN: The sexual activity, in which husband and wife are intimately and chastely united with one another, through which human life is transmitted, is, as the recent Council recalled, "noble and worthy.'' Marriage and conjugal love are by their nature ordained toward the procreation and education of children. The right and lawful ordering of birth demands, first of all, that spouses fully recognize and value the true blessings of family life and that they acquire complete mastery over themselves and their emotions. For if with the aid of reason and of free will they are to control their natural drives, there can be no doubt at all of the need for self-denial. Only then will the expression of love, essential to married life, conform to right order.

GERTRUDE STEIN: There is no pope.

Hooray For Our Chains (23)

2009-11-12T09:00:00.001-06:00

Pat Boone, El Ángel Exterminador (Part 2 of 2)

2009-11-10T22:00:00.000-06:00

"Sarah Palin doesn't mean to steal," Brian Kilmeade said. "But her compulsive thieving produces relief and gratification. Now that she's written that book, she's afraid she'll go to jail. Why don't they try to help her instead?"

Sean Hannity and Joe Wurzelbacher rented a room above a mechanic shop. The employee glared, saying Joe Wurzelbacher looked familiar.

Joe Wurzelbacher doubted they'd met before. Sean Hannity guessed he looked like his sister, whom he loathed.

The employee warned them not to snore or touch his bikes.

Once in their room, Sean Hannity refused to sleep in the dirty sheets. As Joe Wurzelbacher soaked in the tub, Sean Hannity yelled to him that he hadn't seen any reports of Sarah Palin's most recent arrest for stealing.

Pat Boone ambled to the cracked bathroom door to watch him in the tub.

"Experts come in and send a very powerful fumigant, lethal to the varmints and unwelcome creatures, into every nook and cranny of the house," Pat Boone said. "Our White House is being eaten away from within."

Pat Boone, El Ángel Exterminador (Part 1 of 2)

2009-11-09T16:23:00.001-06:00

Pat Boone told FBI agents that he went to church to pray. They didn't believe him. Debbie Schulssel entered, claiming that Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan worked as an advisor to President Obama's transition team.

Brian Kilmeade stated that John Allan Muhammad had been spotted far from Nidal Hasan, at the Red Onion Supermax Prison in Virginia. The FBI agents left, and Brian Kilmeade berated Sarah Palin for being a kleptomaniac.

Pat Boone said that the White House should be fumigated with poison gas.

"Like a very real infestation of termites and rodents," he said, "members of the Obama administration have settled into powerful positions and are already chewing away at the constitutional structure of our government."

Pat Boone wanted to pump poison gas into the White House, but Brian Kilmeade talked him out of it.

"Instead," Brian Kilmeade said, "it's time for the military to conduct special debriefings of U.S. soldiers who are Muslim."

Pat Boone said, "We treat the invaders, the alien rodents, to massive voter gas -- the most lethal antidote to would-be tyrants and usurpers. We must clean house. Starting with our own White House."

Brian Kilmeade told Pat Boone that Sarah Palin, not Lee Boyd Malvo, was the kleptomaniac who stole the clock from the hospital. She didn't need a clock. She didn't even like it.

"As long as necessity is socially dreamed, dreaming will remain a social necessity."

2009-11-01T20:37:00.002-06:00

There's a sad day ahead in terms of your personal life, dear Shimmy. Under the influence of the Hermit, you're inclined to withdraw into the spot on the floor near the radiator. Rush Limbaugh lends a solemn atmosphere to your emotional situation. Every single product represents the hope for a dazzling shortcut to the promised land of total consumption.

Perhaps you need to take stock of the situation: it's funny, isn't it, that Glenn Beck never talks anymore about all those dogs (Pit Bulls) he tortured and killed? Ponder the question, but don't make any irreversible decisions today.

Nothing much is happening right now in your Tora Bora Box. The Hermit card is inviting reflection rather than action, and this may lead you to give up your ponderous sunken spot on the bean bag chair in your search for the truth. We can recognize a mystical abandon to the Tora Bora Box in those free gifts you bury in your litter, such as key chains which are not bought but are included by advertisers who claim they never have to use the bathroom.

Rub the Wastebasket Enemy Combatant with your face, Shimmy, and it will tell you that the fall of every figure with totalitarian power reveals the illusory community which had approved him unanimously, and which had been nothing more than an aggolmeration of solitudes without illusions.

As far as your romantic life is concerned, thanks to the Star and Strength you feel almost like you could sit on the window sill until sundown waiting for the cat in the window across the street to lick his curving haunches.

You have a bright smile on your face, and you radiate confidence. But this does not mean that ideology, having become absolute through the possession of absolute power, changes from partial knowledge into totalitarian falsehood. You should open your door wide for everyone! Be careful not to confuse confidence and naivety. The fusion of knowledge and action must be realized in the historical struggle itself, Shimmy, and in such a way that each of these terms guarantees the truth of the other.

Hooray For Our Chains (22)

2009-10-25T22:07:00.000-05:00

Review: A Serious Man

2009-10-20T22:50:00.002-05:00

He left the window open when he walked out of the apartment. Took a right at the rock that looks like a bear, then a left at the bear that looks like a rock. He stood on the roof of in a suburb outside Minneapolis. He fingered the television antenna next to the chimney.

The wind-swept fringe of his tunic, the sky upon the rusted cross of the belfry! Drainpipes gleamed from his carriage.

The more excited you are, the faster it comes. And what gets you excited? Talking about it. Or talking to others who are excited about it.

More than 12 people were killed and 42 hurt by a suicide bomber who opened fire inside a Sunni Muslim mosque before detonating his explosives' vest. He had a mission: to visit the spot where his daughter died and bring home a jar of the soil into which she bled.

Sarah Palin, the kleptomaniac, raised a goblet of wine she stole from the restaurant. The next morning, she stole a clock from the hospital. Not just any clock. That clock beside the lapdog sunbeam jumping on the wall. She didn't need a clock. She didn't even like it.

Climbing high, stripped like a toreador, Fred Melamed sought advice from three different rabbis. He was more dawdling, more quarrelsome, than the feckless Michael Stuhlbarg. Of course, Richard Kind was asleep on the couch. Richard Kind's sacred contemplations justified the cosmic and ontological order which corresponded to the interests of the masters. It explained and embellished that which society could not do.

He wanted to talk then. He said, “My spirit has been broken.”

Listen, all-highest inquisitor, my food tastes like Enalapril and you forgot to turn on the bathtub spigot before you left the apartment! Police said the attack on Friday was in Tal Afar, a town between the northern city of Mosul and the Syrian border. The attacker reportedly walked into the mosque with an AK-47 rifle during prayers, detonating his explosives belt once he had run out of ammunition. This rib reminded him of a machine. When the city was completely assembled, it began to rise from the surface of the planet and glow from within.

Hooray For Our Chains (21)

2009-10-14T23:01:00.002-05:00

My Index

2009-10-12T08:13:00.003-05:00

Number of states where John L. Perry would be arrested for advocating the overthrow of the United States government, per Title 18 of U.S. Code § 2385: 50

Estimated number of U.S. adults who believe that Mayakovsky's poem, "The Cloud in Trousers," is about John L. Perry advocating "a bloodless coup" that would overthrow Barack Obama: 6,500,000

Estimated percentage change since 2003 in the number of Christians living in Iraq: -60

Minimum number of Americans named Judie Brown who feel that "the fact that the pro-abort Kennedy received a Catholic burial was a total, absolute insult to Christ the Lord that went beyond anything I have witnessed in my more than 65 years of life": 1

Percentage change since 2008 in the number of U.S. households who secretly eat from their neighbors' gardens: +19

Percentage of the gardeners who say "Barack Obama has been running around the world apologizing for the United States of America. Why would anybody award the Olympics to such a crappy place as the United States of America?": 2

Years after his escape that Pepe, a hippopotamus from Pablo Escobar's collection, raged on raw meat as the sky changed its hue and grew irreproachably tender: 3

Percentage of unemployed Americans who take a nap each day in the empty wicker newspaper box underneath the bed: 39

Percentage of employed Americans who do: 59

My Interview With John L. Perry, Who Wants to Overthrow the United States Government

2009-10-08T22:29:00.001-05:00

SHIMMY: Welcome to my window sill, John L. Perry.

JOHN L. PERRY: America isn't the Third World. If a military coup does occur here, it will be civilized.

SHIMMY: Are we moving toward a "control society" that no longer operates primarily by confining people, but through continuous control and instant communication?

JOHN L. PERRY: You know, Shimmy, military officers swear to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic." Unlike enlisted personnel, they do not swear to "obey the orders of the president of the United States."

SHIMMY: Do you think the goal, nowadays, is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are?

JOHN L. PERRY: Top military officers can see that Americans are increasingly alarmed that this nation, under President Barack Obama, may not even be recognizable as America by the 2012 election, in which he will surely seek continuation in office.

SHIMMY: In short, the disciplinary criminal is known through her allegedly transgressive deeds, while biopower's delinquent is known through his allegedly abnormal personality?

JOHN L. PERRY: Military intervention is what Obama's exponentially accelerating agenda for "fundamental change" toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America. A coup is not an ideal option, but Obama's radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible.

SHIMMY: So what you are saying is, the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body?

JOHN L. PERRY: There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America's military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the "Obama problem." Don't dismiss it as unrealistic.

Hooray For Our Chains (20)

2009-10-06T11:13:00.003-05:00

Episode Thirty-Two: "On the Intensification of Biopower"

2009-10-04T12:03:00.000-05:00

MARY: While unconscious, the kleptomaniac Sarah Palin dreamed of being a cat burglar, hanging from wires to steal the Diamond Dagger.

RHODA: Furious over the disappearance of his pocket change and his bicycle, Sean Hannity slammed the door in Sarah Palin's face in her dream and said, "You've been stealing stuff as long as I can remember, Sarah Palin, but you've never been caught. From pocket change, to bicycles, to flowers from Wal Mart, to candy bars."

MARY: Autumn, I sleep on the computer chair instead of the window sill. The bees think warm days will never cease. Summer has overbrimmed their clammy cells!

RHODA: Sarah Palin tracked down Sean Hannity at the pier in order to talk to him.

MARY: Holding back tears, she apologized for being a kleptomaniac: "I want to stop but I don't have the will power. Just thinking about stealing makes my eyes dilate."

JEFFREY NEALON: Sean Hannity flipped sullenly through a magazine in silence as Sarah Palin stared at him.

MARY: "Ten years ago, you stopped," Sean Hannity said, "partly because of surveillance cameras, partly because of regret. Then you slowly started again, and now you stole a gallon of paint from Michelle Malkin."

JEFFREY NEALON: Your web browser, your DNA, your bank ATM card, your subway pass, or your credit report all suggest you are tracked in ways that make the disciplinary or panoptic warehousing of bodily traces (like photographs, surveillance tapes, fingerprints, or blood types) seem positively quaint by comparison.

MARY: Sean Hannity received a message on his cell phone from Joe Wurzelbacher that explained he was leaving town to spend time alone. "This is how he says goodbye for months, maybe years?" Sean Hannity said to Sarah Palin. "He sends me a text and you an email?"

RHODA: Newsmax.com blogger John L. Perry said, "This isn't right. This isn't right at all. A coup is not an ideal option, but Obama's radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible."

Hooray For Our Chains (19)

2009-09-24T07:47:00.000-05:00

Your Red Hair and Pale Skin is Your Passport

2009-09-21T22:47:00.001-05:00

"Do not grasp another's bow, do not ride another's horse, do not meddle in another's affairs. Your red hair and pale skin is your passport." Though this is a commonplace saying among Republican consultants who fall asleep in their bathtubs, it can be an obstacle for entering the Path. Just examine yourself constantly, Josh Treviño: from morning till night, what do you do to help others and help yourself?

If you notice Heidi Noonan, television producer for Pravda, urging the crowd at a tea-party protest to cheer louder, you must admonish yourself. Don't be careless about this!

In the old days Glenn Beck lived up in a tall pine tree on Heidi Noonan's mountain: people of the time called him "The Axis Power Monk." When the kleptomaniac Sarah Palin was Governor of Alaska, she made a special trip to the mountain to give him back the Iron Cross and spiked helmet she had stolen from him.

"My impulse to steal is morbid," she told Glenn Beck. "It is an illness that is considered 'senseless' stealing because the kleptomaniac does not take objects for immediate use or for their monetary value -- and the stolen items are often returned surreptitiously, given to others, or hidden away."

Glenn Beck said, "My danger may be very great, Governor, but the country's is even greater because you are a kleptomaniac. When you were a small girl, you dreamed of being a cat burglar, hanging from wires to steal the Diamond Dagger."

"I am Commander of Wasilla," Sarah Palin replied. "What danger is there for the United States?"

"Fuel and fire are joined, consciousness and identity do not stay: how can the United States not be in danger?" Glenn Beck asked.

When you have nothing to do, Josh Treviño, you should sit quietly and keep the mind from slackening and the body from wavering. If you practice to perfection for a long long time, naturally body and mind will come to rest at ease, and you will have some direction in the Path.

"I'm tired of being a sheep," Glenn Beck said. "I'm tired of being a victim. I'm tired of being pushed around. I'm tired of being moved by curiosity and fondness for shiny things. You know what? The gloves come off."

The Vatican vs. Gertrude Stein (Part XXIII)

2009-09-15T08:41:00.001-05:00

THE VATICAN: Christ calls, justifies, sanctifies, and sends his disciples to proclaim the Kingdom of God, so that all nations may become the People of God. It is only in this mission that the true journey of humanity is understood and attested. Evangelizing is in fact the grace and vocation proper to the Church, her deepest identity. She exists in order to evangelize. Missionary zeal has always been a sign of the vitality of our Churches. The whole Church must be committed to the missio ad gentes, until the salvific sovereignty of Christ is fully accomplished.

GERTRUDE STEIN: There is no pope.

Glenn Beck vs. Cass Sunstein: The Real Issue is All Those Dogs (Pit Bulls) Glenn Beck Tortured and Killed

2009-09-12T08:28:00.001-05:00

Sean Hannity and Congressman Joe Wilson, Son of the Confederacy, were putting powder on Bill O'Reilly's cheeks when Glenn Beck breezed in. They immediately congratulated Glenn Beck for standing up for his convictions and revealing that Cass Sunstein is "a man who doesn't believe we should be eating meat, a man who believes that animals should be provided attorneys in the courts of law, a man who believes that everyone must be an organ donor, and a man who believes that you should not be able to remove rats from your home if it causes them any pain."

Glenn Beck thanked Sean Hannity and Joe Wilson, Son of the Confederacy, for their kind words. When a Pravda TV executive approached Congressman Joe Wilson, he said, "That's offensive to me that anyone would take my Confederate heritage -- based on the owning and trading of human beings as property -- and make it into a Holocaust-era type description. I find that very offensive."

Congressman Joe Wilson barely acknowledged Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck as they raved about his impromptu speech and studied his words under forced convection in a wind tunnel, with a microwave transmitter that heated intact leaves of various sizes and shapes in vivo.

Glenn Beck smiled as he bid Congressman Joe Wilson goodbye. He led Sean Hannity to a nearby table. When Sean Hannity was seated, Glenn Beck announced that his viewers weren't interested in hearing about his pet charities. According to Glenn Beck, his viewers instead wanted to know why Sean Hannity advocates the use of Sharia law in the United States.

Sean Hannity countered that the Pravda TV network would be willing to overlook Glenn Beck's accusation that Cass Sustein is a crazed animal-rights activist if Glenn Beck would explain why he tortured and killed all those Pit Bulls.

"You were caught with a 'break' or 'parting' stick for prying open Pit Bulls' mouths during fights and an electric treadmill modified for Pit Bulls," Sean Hannity said. "Everyone thinks it's kind of strange that you never talk anymore on your TV show about those Pit Bulls you hanged, electrocuted, and drowned."

"The hell I will," Glenn Beck said.

Everyone Must Magically Identify with Representative Joe Wilson or Disappear

2009-09-10T00:12:00.000-05:00

The House of Representatives is a small breeding program that strives in vain to produce exceptional temperament. South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson revealed a netherworld in the mulberry just outside the holly farm. Light continued to reverberate. He was detected making waves. He peaked shortly after midnight, followed by a decay that lasted several months. He later apologized. "This ladybird of clamor disagrees with the President's commissariats," he said. "But I extend sincere apologies to the President for my lagoon, my klan." South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson awakened from a deep sleep just as the sun was coming up. He licked your forehead today and his tongue felt hot. Is he sick? South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson's body temperature is 3-4 degrees higher than ours and his tongue is warmer than his skin. That's probably why his tongue felt hot. He unloaded the pallets, caressed the cargo billow, and ate all your orchid seedlings.

Hooray For Our Chains (18)

2009-09-08T10:47:00.001-05:00

Other School Districts Will Not Show an Oil Priestess This Contingency

2009-09-05T09:03:00.000-05:00

As a hornet is to a tarantula, you won't be disappointed by your day today, Shimmy. Over the next few days, you are going to put your analytical way of thinking aside and let your feelings guide you. Mitch Head, spokesman for The United Egg Producers, will tell you that using a grinder "is the most instantaneous way to euthanize chicks." You will be extremely attentive toward the people you love. Emotions will be close to the surface today for Senator Steve Russell, with a full moon in Pisces. It will be difficult for Senator Russell to control his reactions, and he'll probably say, "As far as I am concerned, this is not civics education -- it gives the appearance of creating a cult of personality. This is something you'd expect to see in North Korea or in Saddam Hussein's Iraq."

Life will seem overwhelming to Mitch West, and he'll probably say that his number-one concern isn't politics as much as the disruption to the day's learning. You may face some very real disappointments, Shimmy, but try not to let this get you down. Remind yourself that Mitch West said, "If the president wants kids to focus on learning, he should deliver the speech in prime time."

Keep the big picture in mind as best you can: other school districts will not show an oil priestess this contingency. Some will give teapots to the orator to show the speech. Remind yourself that Grayslake (Illinois) Elementary School District 46 Superintendent Ellen Correll will review President Obama's message when it goes out live to determine if it is appropriate for students in grades three through eight. If she decides Obama's remarks emphasize the importance of education or having a good school year, then you'll have the pleasure of looking forward to these events all over again.

"There is, unfortunately, no way to breed eggs that only produce female hens," Mitch Head will explain. "If someone has a need for 200 million male chicks, we're happy to provide them to anyone who wants them. But we can find no market, no need, so we sort through a conveyor belt of chirping chicks, flipping some of them into a chute like a poker dealer flips cards." If one of them needs your help, they can count on you to come to the rescue, Shimmy. And just this once, you will spare them the lecture about what they have done wrong!

Review: District 9

2009-08-27T08:18:00.004-05:00

Hello, little one! It's the sweety man coming! In your cozy little apartment world, the rose is obsolete. But each petal ends in an edge, the double facet cementing the grooved columns of air. Wissam Ali Kadhem, a former police chief of Diyala province, confessed to coordinating one of two truck bombings that killed 95 people in Baghdad last week -- the deadliest attacks since US forces pulled out of urban centers at the end of June. You think kleptomania makes Sarah Palin delirious? She rummaged under the bed while you were gone and stripped a rusty oboe just to teach you a lesson.

A yellow patch of light jumps along the garbage pile.

"How much do they cost, these little prawns," I asked. Crustaceans eat cat food to make copper roses, steel roses. To saute Decapods with melted cheese and cream sauce, to spread prawns on a cracker biscuit with mayonnaise, to wash them down beneath the bathtub spigot -- to engage roses becomes a geometry.

The trifling thoughts of Dendrobranchiata clink against tinpot foreheads. A yellow patch of light cuts without cutting.

Six globules of Friskies Hairball Remedy made with ham-shaped shellfish dropped into my power spot on the rug beneath the canopy of the West Forest of the living room. Kadhem admitted to plotting the attack and said that $10,000 was paid in bribes to checkpoint security staff to reach the finance ministry where the blast occurred.

Prawns with their tendriled gills. Prawns leafing through pages of iron and tin. Prawns, stay away from my food dish!

"This is basically a guy," Sharlto Copley said, "and there's 3 humans here, basically trying to make a warning, you know, saying, 'I kill 3 humans, watch out for me.'" Reeking of incense, Vanessa Haywood's father piled on a grimace and graced the table with soot.

List XVII: "A Savage Servility Slides by on Grease"

2009-08-18T11:07:00.003-05:00

Glenn Beck,
freed from prison
after torturing and killing
all those Pit Bulls,
pretends he poisoned
Nancy Pelosi's wine

Democratic Congressman
Lloyd Doggett
welcomed at a grocery store
with a mock marble tombstone
engraved with the name
"Lloyd Doggett"

A caller to Democratic Congressman
Bran Miller's office:
"Miller could
lose his life over this"

The day after
Miller's death threat,
Republican Congressman
Todd Akin
jokes to constituents:
"Different people
from Washington, D.C.,
come back to their districts
and have town hall meetings
and they almost got lynched,"
and Akin's audience
laughs and applauds

Democratic Congressman
Frank Kratovil
hanged in effigy outside
his office in Maryland
with an expert knotted noose

At a Christopher Dodd town hall
days after Dodd announced
he had prostate cancer:
"How come we just don't
give Chris Dodd painkillers?
Like a handful of them at a time!
He can wash it down
with Ted Kennedy's whiskey"

Democratic Congressman
Brian Baird
receives a fax
with an image of President Obama,
a hammer-and-sickle
painted on his forehead
and these words beneath him:
"Death to All Marxists!
Foreign and Domestic!"

A man drops a gun
at a meet-and-greet
with Democratic Congresswoman
Gabrielle Giffords

A man with a concealed gun
taken away from a town hall
hosted by Democratic Congressman
Steve Cohen

A four-foot swastika
spray-painted
on the sign for the office
of Democratic Congressman
David Scott, who also
receives a faxed death threat

Democratic Congressman Dennis Moore
receives two death threats
in a period of ten days

One of Moore's death threats
received the same week
Richard Terry Young arrested
for bringing a loaded gun
to President Obama's town hall
rally in New Hampshire

William Kostric
arrives at the rally with
a loaded gun strapped to his leg

A man stands outside
Democratic Congressman
Ben Cardin's
town hall in Maryland
with a small,
handwritten cardboard sign
that reads:
"Death to Obama"
and
"Death to Michelle
and her two stupid kids"

Hooray For Our Chains (17)

2009-08-13T12:27:00.001-05:00

Today is the Day When the Goon Meets the Gun

2009-08-10T16:12:00.001-05:00

When the AFL-CIO arrived at the Brady Pub at 9:40 a.m. Saturday, it received an email that said: "I will be going to a local town hall this weekend, all you union members BEWARE! We will be waiting for you. Better make sure you have arrangements with your local E.R. Today is the day when the goon meets the gun. See you there."

At Republican Congressman Mike Castle's town hall meeting in Delaware, a woman stood up and said, "Sarah Palin stole my birth certificate from the United States of American, saying I am an American citizen. With a seal on it. Signed by a doctor. With a hospital administrator's name. I want to know why people are ignoring that Sarah Palin yields to the impulse to steal objects that are needed neither for personal use nor for their monetary worth."

Lou Dobbs informed Mara Liasson that he was going to the courthouse to make sure Glenn Beck didn't poison Nancy Pelosi's wine.

Mara Liasson reminded him that he couldn't speak at the hearing, so Lou Dobbs agreed not to go. He declined Mara Liasson's offer to do something fun together, asserting that he needed to talk to Sara Palin, the kleptomaniac, about whether or not the America she knows and loves will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide whether they are worthy of health care.

Sarah Palin implored her son to let her accompany him for moral support, and he reluctantly agreed.

"Sarah Palin's thefts are committed neither out of anger or revenge nor in response to delusions or hallucinations," said the woman who claims she talks to angels, who claims the Earth will be destroyed in 95 million years, and who interrupted Mike Castle's Delaware town hall meeting. "Sarah Palin's kleptomania is not better explained by Antisocial Personality Disorder, Conduct Disorder, or a Manic Episode. I want my country back!"

At the hospital, Lou Dobbs noted that Sarah Palin's brain activity continued to diminish, and ordered a nurse to keep a ventilator on standby.

William Kristol arrived and greeted Sarah Palin, the kleptomaniac, with a kiwi. She was surprised to learn that disgraced former New York Times reporter Judith Miller was accepted as a kinswoman. William Kristol urged his imaginary wife to give it a chance, since it was what they had prayed for.

Sarah Palin, the kleptomaniac, agreed this was great news.

William Kristol stood over his imaginary wife, the kleptomaniac Sarah Palin, and declared that he felt like an idiot for believing that she loved him. "You have been stealing for as long as I can remember," he said. "When the teacher said, All right, Brittany and Chloe are missing their wallets, you would sit there gloomy, feeling sorry for them but also kind of relieved because you possessed something in your bag that wasn't yours."

"Who leaves their wallet lying around with a hundred-dollar bill in it?" the kleptomaniac Sarah Palin said.

Sarah Palin slipped into her rosary once she heard the tympanist. At the jamboree, Lou Dobbs was impatient for the balalaika to begin.

Happy Anniversary, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." Memo!

2009-08-06T10:19:00.002-05:00

Happy eighth anniversary to the "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." memo!

Apologies to the Hibakusha, who memorialize this day for more tragic reasons.

Even though the memo was titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," Condoleezza Rice told the 9/11 Commission that "nothing about the threat of attack in the U.S." appeared in the Presidential Daily Briefing the President received on August 6, 2001.

Full Text of the 6 August 2001 Memo:

Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US

Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate (Osama) Bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US. Bin Laden implied in US television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and "bring the fighting to America."

After US missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, Bin Laden told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington, according to a ...(edited)... service.

An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told a ... (edited) ... service at the same time that Bin Laden was planning to exploit the operative's access to the US to mount a terrorist strike.

The millennium plotting in Canada in 1999 may have been part of Bin Laden's first serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the US.

Convicted plotter Ahmed Ressam has told the FBI that he conceived the idea to attack Los Angeles International Airport himself, but that Bin Laden lieutenant Abu Zubaydah encouraged him and helped facilitate the operation.

Ressam also said that in 1998 Abu Zubaydah was planning his own US attack.

Ressam says Bin Laden was aware of the Los Angeles operation.

Although Bin Laden has not succeeded, his attacks against the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 demonstrate that he prepares operations years in advance and is not deterred by setbacks.

Bin Laden associates surveilled our embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam as early as 1993, and some members of the Nairobi cell planning the bombings were arrested and deported in 1997.

Al-Qaeda members -- including some who are US citizens -- have resided in or travelled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks.

Two al-Qaeda members found guilty in the conspiracy to bomb our embassies in East Africa were US citizens, and a senior EIJ member lived in California in the mid-1990s.

A clandestine source said in 1998 that a Bin Laden cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks.

We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a ... (edited)... service in 1998 saying that Bin Laden wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of "Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdel Rahman and other US-held extremists.

Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Laden-related.

The CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our embassy in the United Arab Emirates in May saying that a group of Bin Laden supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives.

My Index

2009-08-03T15:53:00.004-05:00

Chances that a squirrel in Chicago's Rogers Park neighborhood reported feeling "down, depressed, or hopeless" when I crushed his jugular with my gleaming, pamphagous fangs: 2 in 5

Percentage change between winter 2008 and winter 2009 in the number of times I sat on the window sill watching squirrels scratch their malefic little claws up and down the Mayakovsky Tree: +13

Number of times during that period that the Mayakovsky Tree said, "Squirrels sin in secret and picture their future as academicians with outsized rations!": 22

Estimated number of planets in the galaxy hospitable enough to support life as intelligent as cats with shiny, ageless pumpkin-colored fur: 37,964

Chances that a Twitter user accesses the service only while sitting in the bathtub staring at the spigot: 2 in 3

Ratio of the average number of microbes living in or on a squirrel's body to the average number of NF Formula food pellets that must be dropped in a bowl before the sound wakes me in the empty newspaper box under the bed: 115:1

Percentage of human genes that have been patented so far by clandestine veterinarians: 34

Estimated chance that one of these genes is owned by someone who believes that "Western culture is marked profoundly by a relativism which refuses any affirmation of an absolute and transcendent truth and thus which ruins the foundations of morality and which closes itself off to religion": 1 in 4

Hooray For Our Chains (16)

2009-07-21T22:05:00.001-05:00

Senator Jeff Sessions: "The Klan was OK Until I Found Out They Were Pot-Smokers"

2009-07-15T07:47:00.003-05:00

SHIMMY: Good morning, everybody. With the way the traffic was today, I think some people are still having trouble getting in here. I talked with Senator Sessions about this. He told me that he used to think the Klan was OK until he found out some of them were pot smokers.

JEFFERSON BEAUREGARD "JEFF" SESSIONS III: Judge Sotomayor said, I think six different times, quote, "I would hope that a wise Latina woman, with the richness of her experiences, would more often than not reach a better conclusion." So that's a matter that I think we'll talk about as we go forward.

SHIMMY: According to Justice Department attorney J. Gerald Hebert, you called a white civil rights lawyer a "disgrace to his race" for litigating voting rights cases.

JEFFERSON BEAUREGARD "JEFF" SESSIONS III: Shimmy, isn't it true that Judge Sotomayor's statement suggests we accept that there may be sympathies, prejudices, and opinions that legitimately can influence a judge's decision? And how can that further our faith in the impartiality of the system?

SHIMMY: In the mid-1980s, Senator Sessions, when you were a U.S. attorney in Alabama, you ridiculed the NAACP as "un-American" and "Communist-inspired." You said the NAACP "forced civil rights down the throats of people."

JEFFERSON BEAUREGARD "JEFF" SESSIONS III: Isn't she saying that she expects her background -- and heritage -- to influence her decision-making?

SHIMMY: You called black former assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Figures "boy" during a 1981 murder investigation involving the Ku Klux Klan.

The Vatican vs. Gertrude Stein (Part XXII)

2009-07-14T14:03:00.000-05:00

THE VATICAN: It is becoming a social and even economic necessity once more to hold up to future generations the beauty of marriage and the family, and the fact that these institutions correspond to the deepest needs and dignity of the person. In view of this, States are called to enact policies promoting the centrality and the integrity of the family founded on marriage between a man and a woman, the primary vital cell of society, and to assume responsibility for its economic and fiscal needs, while respecting its essentially relational character.

GERTRUDE STEIN: There is no pope.

Part 2 of 2: Sarah Palin Loved Tanveer Ahmad Until She Changed Her Mind

2009-07-08T07:50:00.000-05:00

Joe Wurzelbacher thought this might be his cue to invite William Kristol to meet his family. He admitted that his mother would have a problem with him dating someone close to his own age. Joe Wurzelbacher brought William Kristol's hat to the office.

William Kristol distracted Sarah Palin by urging her to select bathroom tiles for their new house.

"Tanveer Ahmad went to immigration headquarters in Manhattan," William Kristol said, "and was delivered in shackles to the Monmouth County Correctional Institute in Freehold, N.J. His Texas misdemeanor had popped up in the computer as an offense involving a deadly weapon -- reason enough, after 9/11, for authorities to detain him pending deportation proceedings."

"These Troops and their important missions," Sarah Palin said, using two chairs for physical therapy, "those are truly the worthy causes in this world and should be the public priority with time and resources and not this local/superficial, wasteful political bloodsport."

Three weeks later, Tanveer Ahmad was dead.

Since Tanveer Ahmad had no known health problems, his friends were shocked and disbelieving. They were told that Ahmad had suffered a heart attack in the jail, and despite all efforts to revive him, had been pronounced dead in a hospital emergency room at 5:51 p.m. on Sept. 9.

An autopsy cited "occlusive coronary atherosclerosis."

"His friends did not know that the jail had a history of detainee complaints of medical neglect and physical abuse, and did not allow guards to send detainees to the medical unit without prior approval," Joe Wurzelbacher said. He sat next to William Kristol on the sofa.

"According to the jail’s internal investigation, Tanveer Ahmad walked into the medical unit shortly after 3:50 p.m. on Sept. 9 and 'was seen immediately,'" William Kristol said. "But a letter scrawled by a fellow inmate contended that before he showed up there, Tanveer Ahmad's pleas for treatment had been rebuffed by a guard for an hour."

"I loved Tanveer Ahmad," Sarah Palin said. "It was just, once the World Trade Center came down, I changed my mind."

Part 1 of 2: Sarah Palin Loved Tanveer Ahmad Until She Changed Her Mind

2009-07-06T16:29:00.001-05:00

Sarah Palin took a risk, walking into Joe Wurzelbacher's garage.

She had a proposal: "I want you to help keep our eye on the ball that represents sound priorities: smaller government, energy independence, national security, and freedom!"

Joe Wurzelbacher refused to have anything to do with the plan.

"You should ask Tanveer Ahmad," he said.

Tanveer Ahmad, it turns out, was a longtime New York City cabdriver who had paid thousands of dollars in taxes and immigration application fees.

"I know when it's time to pass the ball -- for victory," Sarah Palin said.

Sarah Palin insisted on spending the weekend in Bensonhurst with her family.

As she talked about her relatives, Sarah Palin realized that Tanveer Ahmad's only trouble with the law was a $200 fine for disorderly conduct in 1997: while working at a Houston gas station, he had displayed the business’s unlicensed gun to stop a robbery.

"It would come back to haunt Tanveer Ahmad," she said, adding: "My decision was fortified during this most recent trip to Kosovo and Landstuhl to visit our wounded soldiers overseas, those who sacrifice themselves in war for our freedom and security. We can all learn from our selfless Troops."

William Krisol sat down with Sarah Palin to tell her that in the end, Tanveer Ahmad's body went back in a box to his native village, to be buried by his Pakistani widow and their two children.

"They're bold," Sarah Palin said of the Troops, "they don't give up, they take a stand and know that life is short so they choose to not waste time."

Bristol Palin asked for a ride to the lifeboat.

She said, "When immigration agents burst into Tanveer Ahmad’s two-room Flatbush apartment on Aug. 2, 2005, they were looking for someone else, his friends say -- a roommate suspected of violating his student visa by working. But they ordered Tanveer Ahmad to report to immigration headquarters in Manhattan on Aug. 11."

Why Those Iran Protests Stopped When Michael Jackson Died

2009-07-02T15:42:00.003-05:00

"Mayakovsky Tree, did the protests in Iran stop because Michael Jackson still had a faithful punchbowl and his boiler was warm?"

The Mayakovsky Tree swayed at the trunk. His limbs rushed to the north like a tick fastened to the ear.

He planted a steel foot in the steam age and reclined in his idleness.

"I am large, like a girl with a bouncing ball," the Mayakovsky Tree said.

"Iran's Basij militia found Michael Jackson in his bedroom, and he wasn't breathing," I said. "He was still warm and had a punchbowl."

"Lickspittles with fountain pens compose romances for you on Headline News, where whores and hooligans walk, Shimmy."

"According to the Basij militia, Michael Jackson supervised or assisted punishable actresses in many aristocracies," I said.

A squirrel made its way up the Mayakovsky Tree, scratching its syphilitic claws along his trunk.

"Mayakovsky Tree, whether Michael Jackson wanted to or not, he brought pessimism into the publicity spike."

A hammer banged on the back porch. I hid underneath the ottoman.

"Shimmy, it's been nearly a week since U.S. troops pulled out of Iraq's major cities, and Michael Jackson still hasn't been buried."

"New compliments have arisen over Michael Jackson's vast esteem," I said. The ottoman comes with a padded top, and its underside makes me drowsy.

"Nouri al-Maliki took control of security in Iraq's urban areas, blushing like a grand piano after Michael Jackson died. Yet we don't have enough pockets to stuff our safes, Shimmy!"

Episode Thirty-One: "All Those People Died in Iran Because President Obama Didn't Talk Tougher"

2009-06-24T12:44:00.000-05:00

RHODA: Lindsey Graham says a monumental event is going on in Iran.

MARY: The President of the United States is supposed to lead the free world and swat the Mullahs' laser-pointer dot.

RHODA: What if the image of blissful social unification through consumption merely postpones President Obama's awareness of the actual divisions in Iran?

MARY: Until his next disillusionment with some particular commodity?

RHODA: The signs are in English, according to Lindsey Graham.

MARY: Lindsay Graham says President Obama is too timid and passive to condemn the fundamental nature of this evil Mullah dictatorship. How hard can it be to swat a laser-pointer dot, Rhoda?

RHODA: Ronald Reagan ended the Cold War by making it clear to the oppressed peoples behind the Iron Curtain -- and their Communistic overlords -- that we are on the side of happy harmony, surrounded by desolation and horror, at the calm center of misery.

MARY: He did it. Just like that.

RHODA: He went to the Berlin Wall and said, "Mr. Gorbachev, the mechanical accumulation of needs imposed by modern consumerism unleashes an unlimited artificiality which overpowers any living desire."

MARY: "Mr. Gorbachev, the cumulative power of this autonomous artificiality ends up falsifying all social life."

RHODA: Dana Rohrabacher says that if President Obama had talked tougher a few days ago, maybe we wouldn't see bloodshed on the streets of Tehran.

MARY: Sure, and if the President talked tough to Glenn Beck, then all those Pit Bulls would still be alive.

RHODA: If the President talked tougher, then the rank and febrile dogs who live upstairs wouldn't bark every time the fraudulence of the satisfactions offered by the system is exposed by the continual replacement of products and the general conditions of production.

Hooray For Our Chains (15)

2009-06-19T08:49:00.001-05:00

Bristol Palin Gets Emotional Every Time Glenn Beck Says, "President Obama, why don't you just set us on fire?"

2009-06-18T16:36:00.002-05:00

At the hostel, Bristol Palin discussed the missing eggplant with her mother.

Sarah Palin even called Bill O'Reilly, the queen of southern Italian vegetables, to find out if he could remember what had happened to the rest of the eggplants.

Bill O'Reilly said, "Dr. George Tiller will kill your baby for $5,000, any reason. Any reason."

Bristol Palin was not in favor of her mother's idea to have more chili sauce.

She ignored Bill O'Reilly when he said, "If we allow Dr. George Tiller and his acolytes to continue, we can no longer pass judgment on any behavior by anybody."

Sarah Palin reminded her daughter that David Letterman would not stop the time clock.

She admitted that David Letterman's prejudice toward freshwater branchiopod crustaceans caught her by surprise and that she really did not understand how they used their biramous antennae as locomotor organs.

She wanted more chili sauce so that she could feel like a good mother.

Bill O'Reilly and Pat Buchanan had fun watching that goofy jellyfish movie on Peter Brimelow's phone.

Pat Buchanan was shocked: his father, Marcus Epstein, approached Bristol Palin and said that he was in town in response to an intuitive reprimand from her mother.

Bristol Palin was surprised that her mother contacted Glenn Beck, too.

She got emotional when Glenn Beck said, "President Obama, why don't you just set us on fire? For the love of Pete, what are you doing?"

But, remember, Glenn Beck promised he'd never modify an electrical treadmill just to torture those dogs (Pit Bulls) again. He invited Bristol Palin and her friends to a steak dinner in Chicago to reduce stiffness and muscle ache. Then he left for Montreal.

The nurse said that Scientologist Greta Van Susteren was agitated, and everyone hoped that President Obama could visit and calm her down. David Letterman offered to accompany Bristol Palin, and the two of them headed for the nurse's home.

Greta Van Susteren returned from grocery shopping with bags full of decomposed elements, artistic debris, and esthetico-technical hybrids.

David Letterman apologized for the excesses of a world which has become foreign to us as if they were excesses foreign to our world.

Review: Careful

2009-06-14T21:03:00.002-05:00

"Look at this, Shimmy, my mountain hideaway," Sarah Neville said. "The two of us can be outcasts here together. We need never see anyone but each other. We can live on berries and grasses and small animals we can kill with sharp sticks."

Iraq held its first state funeral since the United States invaded in 2003. We traveled like pirates, and Sarah cried so much she bothered everyone around me. This is what being enchanted means. Iraq's first state funeral since the United States invaded in 2003 was for Harith al-Ubaidi, a murdered Sunni Muslim leader. The head of the biggest Sunni bloc in parliament and a leading human rights advocate, Al-Ubaidi was shot dead at a mosque in western Baghdad after Friday prayers.

Katya Gardner's eyes were reduced to petty binoculars when she watched Sarah Neville take me into a cave with German expressionist stalactites and technicolor lens fog and two rocking chairs labeled "Klara" and "Poppa."

In Tolzbad, even the animals' vocal cords are cut. "You better put your name on your new toothbrush before an accident happens," Gosia Dobrowolska warned her son, Kyle McCulloch.

(He graduated from Tolzbad Butler Gymnasium and immediately found work as a servant for Count Knotckers, who wanted to kiss Gosia's breast like Kyle's brother, Johann, once did in a dream.)

"Al-Ubaidi was the voice of moderation and, unfortunately, those kinds of men are always targeted because of that," Ayad al-Samarai, Iraq's parliamentary speaker, said as al-Ubaidi's coffin, and that of a brother-in-law, were laid out in parliament. "You should never hold a baby's face near an open pin," Gosia explained, as another day went by without anyone opening the back door and letting me walk on the porch. Police said a young man shot Al-Ubaidi twice in the head with a pistol before opening fire on worshippers and throwing a grenade. Then he was killed by mosque guards. "Be careful, Otto," Michael O'Sullivan said, standing blindfolded on a fourteen-foot ladder while reflected in a sheet of plexiglass. "Don’t spill it. Hold your horses. Children, heed the warnings of your parents. Peril awaits the incautious wayfarer."

Hooray For Our Chains (14)

2009-06-10T00:02:00.004-05:00

My Supreme Court Nominee: Blixa Bargeld

2009-06-05T21:06:00.003-05:00

I am proud to announce my nominee for the next Justice of the United States Supreme Court: Blixa Bargeld.

This decision affects us all -- and so it must involve us all. I recorded a special message to personally introduce Blixa Bargeld and explain why I'm so confident he will make an excellent Justice. But I was speaking into the open mouth of the Wastebasket Enemy Combatant.

Blixa Bargeld has lived the America Dream. This is a cellar. Here I live. This is dark here.

I look after printing and spelling mistakes, which, never finished, belong to Blixa Bargeld.

In the wallpaper, four doors. The tenants stand around the ground floor. Thus they tile the grounds.

Here the architect lives. Dogs and cats eat pepper, wishing for a chair in the sky.

Blixa Bargeld has gone on to earn bipartisan acclaim as one of America's finest junkpile noise generators. Blixa would show fidelity to our Constitution and paint all flat roofs in Washington an energy-reflecting white.

Making roofs a paler color could have the equivalent effect of taking every car in the world off the road for 11 years. For people who find white hard on the eye, Blixa Bargeld has developed "cool colors" which look to the human eye like normal ones, but reflect heat like pale colors even if they are darker shades.

A nomination for a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land is one of the most important decisions I can make. And the discussions that follow will be among the most important we have as a nation. You can begin the conversation today by letting me out the back door more than one time every morning.

I'm Supposed to Feel Sorry for Glenn Beck, Even Though He Tortured and Killed All Those Dogs (Pit Bulls)

2009-05-23T09:03:00.002-05:00

I don't know why I'm supposed to feel sorry for Glenn Beck.

He spent 19 months in prison for torturing and killing all those dogs (Pit Bulls). While he was in prison, Pravda signed him to a contract for a television show. Some prisoners don't even have television viewing privileges, but Glenn Beck was given his own television show while he was incarcerated.

Sure, I agree, Glenn Beck looks telegenic, once he wipes from his prison jumpsuit the blood from the "break" or "parting" stick he used to pry open Pit Bulls' mouths during fights.

I know, Glenn Beck will say, "How could carbon dioxide be a poison when it's naturally occurring and the trees use it to grow? Stop. Just stop, will you? Stop with the lies."

Or Glenn Beck will tell you: "I am not saying that Barack Obama is a fascist, but I am saying that the auto bailout looks a lot like the actions of German companies in the early days of Adolf Hitler."

And, of course, Glenn Beck will claim that he tortured and killed all those dogs (Pit Bulls) because he discovered that one of them, a super-intelligent American Pit Bull named Caesar, had arrived in a spaceship from the future, when Pit Bulls would rule the earth and enslave all humans.

So I'm supposed to feel sorry for Glenn Beck because he was a hero who saved us from a future in which Pit Bulls ruled the earth -- and he was "rewarded" for this heroism with a 19-month prison sentence that he used for reading, writing, working as a janitor at 12 cents an hour, and filming his Pravda television show?

Some people are saying that Glenn Beck should not have to bend over backwards and do somersaults to prove anything to the war criminal Roger Ailes or to the Humane Society. Some people say he shouldn't have to donate any of his future earnings to any causes to repent because he's actually a hero for modifying an electrical treadmill just to torture those dogs (Pit Bulls).

But some people also say that Abu Zubaydah hummed away, happily, at 448 Mhz after he was waterboarded 83 times. And some people say that Abu Zubaydah went to the Hampshire Hills Sports and Fitness Club on the Saturday after he was waterboarded 83 times. Here's what we know for sure: after extensive discussion and collaboration among ourselves, Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times. Water is more precious than gold. Do the math.

Hooray For Our Chains (13)

2009-05-20T15:51:00.002-05:00

Why David Feherty Blames Nancy Pelosi for All the Misery in His Life

2009-05-15T21:03:00.002-05:00

David Feherty picked up Nancy Pelosi for a trip to the zoo. Nancy Pelosi didn't want to leave the unique cartoon book with David Feherty, especially since the book produces over five tons of carbon dioxide a year from gas and electricity. David Feherty captured the essence of golf, and the feelings of reverence it generates, when he encouraged our troops to shoot Nancy Pelosi twice and strangle Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden. "Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden would be strangled to death," he added. David Feherty was angry that Nancy Pelosi kept feeding Glenn Beck lies about him. David Feherty tried to convince Nancy Pelosi that he loved Glenn Beck very much, even though Glenn Beck tortured and killed all those dogs (pit bulls) with a "break" or "parting" stick he used to pry open the pit bulls' mouths during fights.

This didn't work, so David Feherty left. "Not like this," David Feherty said, blaming Nancy Pelosi for all the misery in his life. David Feherty told Greta van Susteren's parents that he overheard Dick Cheney at the cemetery talking about having to sell one baby to take care of another. Greta van Susteren confessed that mad language is consciousness in myth. She agreed the ex-Vice President of the War on Terror didn't have a whole bunch of options.

"I should have visited the War on Terror," she said, "when I had the chance. The War on Terror reduced our eyes to petty binoculaurs, our lips to chastity belts. You must hate me." David Feherty shook his head. "We rejected the War on Terror's attempt to forge a relationship," he said. David Feherty rattled off all the things that Nancy Pelosi had done to hurt them, and he wondered what other secrets Harry Reid might be keeping. Greta van Susteren accused David Feherty of not trusting her. David Feherty got a call and had to leave. Greta van Susteren looked at the family photos of the War on Terror on a cabinet, grabbed her purse, and headed out. David Feherty was angry with the ex-Vice President of the War on Terror's decision to grow up to be an expert political operator with lots of animal cunning but little actual intelligence and no moral bearing whatsoever. Greta van Susteren walked around the bus station not sure of what to do.

Why Does David Feherty Want U.S. Soldiers to Kill Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi?

2009-05-12T08:08:00.002-05:00

David Feherty
wants U.S. soldiers
to kill
Harry Reid
and Nancy Pelosi

But our troops
don't want to

Happy
Mother's Day
(With Some
Exceptions)

You thought
the New York
Review of Books
spread on the floor
could stop me

President Obama:
"aggressive, disruptive,
and apocalyptic"

You overbreed
and we
are not cute

You flew in
an airplane
and I squatted
atop the
New York
Review of Books

They taste
better in
the ionosphere

Mustard is
a vegetable

I dropped
an Abu Ghraib
pyramid
on the failure
of your economy
and your
economists

The Vatican vs. Gertrude Stein (Part XXI)

2009-05-10T13:47:00.001-05:00

THE VATICAN: With unparalleled arrogance, the United States is choosing to renounce its foundation on the faithful. The path of violation of the most fundamental human rights and of the integrity of marriage and the family which our nation is traveling is not accidental. As Catholics, we cannot fail to notice with the greatest sadness the number of our fellow Catholics who cooperate fully to the advancement of a national agenda which is anti-life and anti-family. At the root of the confusion and error about marriage is the contraceptive mentality, which would have us believe that the inherently procreative nature of the conjugal union can in practice be mechanically or chemically eliminated while the marital act remains unitive. It simply cannot be sold.

GERTRUDE STEIN: There is no pope.

Hooray For Our Chains (12)

2009-05-07T08:24:00.001-05:00

Remember Kent State: 1970-2009

2009-05-04T08:01:00.004-05:00

At least 54 shots were fired into an unarmed crowd by Troop G of the National Guard at Taylor Hall for approximately 13 seconds (U.S. Justice Department, July 1970 report on the Kent State University shootings).

Some National Guardsmen had to be physically restrained from continuing to fire their weapons (U.S. Justice Department, 1970).

Sergeant Robert James of Company A assumed he'd been given an order to shoot, so he fired once in the air. When he saw Guardsmen actually firing into the unarmed crowd, he ejected his remaining seven shells so he would not fire any more (U.S. Justice Department, 1970).

Sergeant Richard Love of Company C fired once in the air, then saw others firing into the crowds; he said he "could not believe" that the others were shooting into the crowd, so he lowered his weapon (U.S. Justice Department, 1970).

The July 1970 Justice Department report concludes: "the claim by the National Guard that their lives were endangered by the students was fabricated subsequent to the event."

A National Guardsman confessed that his life "was not in danger" and that "he fired indiscriminately into the crowd" (U.S. Justice Department, 1970).

This Guardsman "further stated that the Guardsmen had gotten together after the shooting and decided to fabricate the story that they were in danger of serious bodily harm or death from the students" (U.S. Justice Department, 1970).

This Guardsman said: "The guys have been saying that we got to get together and stick to the same story. That it was our lives or them, a matter of survival" (U.S. Justice Department, 1970).

"In all, only two [students] were shot from the front. Seven students were shot from the side and four were shot from the rear" (U.S. Justice Department, 1970).

"When the firing began, many students began running; others hit the ground" (U.S. Justice Department, 1970).

"The indiscriminate firing of rifles into a crowd of students and the deaths that followed were unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable" (U.S. Justice Department, 1970).

My Interview with Michelle Malkin, Who Wants to Keep Catholic Children Out of the United States (Part 2 of 2)

2009-04-30T07:11:00.000-05:00

SHIMMY: Would everyone be happier, Michelle Malkin, if those Catholic kids from St. Francis Prepatory in Queens had stayed home for spring break instead of going to Cancun?

MICHELLE MALKIN: We've heard for years that calling any attention to the dangers of allowing untold numbers of people to pass across our borders and through our other ports of entry without proper medical screening is racist.

SHIMMY: Don't stand so close to my litter box.

MICHELLE MALKIN: Make no mistake about it: illegal aliens are the carriers of the new strain of human-swine avian flu from Mexico. If we lived in saner times, the borders would be closed immediately.

SHIMMY: Why do you hate those Catholic kids so much?

MICHELLE MALKIN: If you are a family, Shimmy, and you're down in Mexico and you're dying and those in America are not, why wouldn't you flood this border? Why wouldn't you come across this border?

SHIMMY: If we tightened border security and didn't let those Catholic kids come back to Queens, where would they go? What if they don't speak Spanish?

MICHELLE MALKIN: Each one of those people is a biological weapon. Illegal immigration equals and surpasses the impact of 9-11.

My Interview with Michelle Malkin, Who Wants to Keep Catholic Children Out of the United States (Part 1 of 2)

2009-04-29T07:39:00.003-05:00

SHIMMY: Welcome to my bean bag chair, Michelle Malkin. Don't sit down.

MICHELLE MALKIN: I've blogged for years about the spread of contagious diseases from around the world into the U.S. as a result of uncontrolled immigration.

SHIMMY: Maybe those Catholic kids from Queens finally will get serious about borders now, Michelle Malkin.

MICHELLE MALKIN: 9/11 didn’t convince the open-borders zealots to put down their race cards and confront reality.

SHIMMY: The first victim of swine flu was a four-year-old boy who lived near a pig farm run by a company called Granjas Carroll, which is owned by U.S.-based Smithfield Foods. The boy lives in an area where residents have been complaining since March that contamination from the pig farm was tainting their water and giving them respiratory infections.

MICHELLE MALKIN: Could this be a terrorist attack through Mexico?

SHIMMY: Granjas Carrol's pigs produce so much excrement that the company allows huge volumes of shit to run out of the pigs' slope-floored barns. The pig shit sits blithely in the open, untreated, where the elements break it down and gravity pulls it into groundwater and river systems.

MICHELLE MALKIN: We’ve heard for years from reckless open-borders ideologues who continue to insist there’s nothing to worry about.

SHIMMY: I'm worried about those Catholic kids from St. Francis Prepatory who returned to Queens from Mexico and infected everyone with swine flu.

My Index

2009-04-24T07:51:00.001-05:00

Ratio of the number of U.S. tenth-graders who smoke marijuana in a given month to the number of torture deaths that can be attributed to John Yoo from 2002-2008: 11:10

Average number of text messages sent or received each month by an American teen that say, "Every parish must destroy the old oils from last year and get new oils from the Chrism Mass. Each parish priest gets his own oils from the common vat blessed by the bishop for the entire diocese": 1,956

Number of promises made by veterinarians that the St. Petersburg Times is tracking through its online "Obamameter": 510

Number so far it has called "kept" and "broken," respectively: 0, 120

Years in prison to which one can be sentenced under French law for helping a veterinarian hold me down for a sonogram: 1

Average number of hours after the beginning of an empty food dish that NF Formula kidney pellets resume: 4

Number of Dallas-area mothers whose conversations about the Mayakovsky Tree's open perfume bottles shaped like pine cones a marketing agency covertly monitored in "mommy stings": 400

Average number of times a group of mothers said "The Mayakovsky Tree has green, square leaves on which stand enormous plates with tangerines" per minute of conversation: 1.3

Hooray For Our Chains (11)

2009-04-18T09:43:00.000-05:00

Episode Thirty: "Instead of a Knife Between Our Teeth, We Have the Drool of Chuck Norris on Our Lips"

2009-04-15T08:24:00.002-05:00

MARY: From a philosophical, scientific, or moral point of view, how can Chuck Norris's happiness be trivial, Rhoda?

RHODA: This fact may perhaps be one of the final causes why the body exists at all.

MARY: Chuck Norris tramps for days with callused feet and the sluggish fish of his imagination.

RHODA: Chuck Norris wants us to start a "second American revolution." He wants us to rise up and overthrow the first President we've elected in eight years.

MARY: A high school in Chicago won't let Bill Ayers give a speech.

RHODA: If Ted Nugent stood in an airport security line saying "We must tell Emperor Obama to not mess with Texas -- don't tread on me or any of us," he'd be arrested.

MARY: Ted Nugent guffaws and whinnies, Rhoda, and rages on raw meat.

RHODA: President Obama took away my War on Terror without asking me, Mary.

MARY: The refusal of Chuck Norris is the refusal to be bartered.

MURRAY SLAUGHTER: Under Chuck Norris, today's tiny masturbations are a feeble replacement, Mary, for the orgiastic heights offered by eternal salvation.

RHODA: The decline and fall of Chuck Norris parallels the decline and fall of myth. Instead of a knife between our teeth, we have the drool of Chuck Norris on our lips!

MURRAY SLAUGHTER: Our only gods were the heroes of Homeland Security, heroes of Total Information Awareness, heroes of enhanced interrogation, heroes of the frigidaire.

MARY: All he had to do was ask me, Rhoda. Everything in the food dish now tastes like Enalapril.

RHODA: It was my War on Terror, too.

MARY: Every three days, mystery powder appears in my dish like a crushed one-quarter tablet of baby aspirin.

RHODA: The total information awareness of the War on Terror, with which all human possibility was identified for all time, had no external limit but the fear of falling back into a formless animal condition.

MARY: I slept for 14 hours on the same spot on the bean bag chair yesterday.

RHODA: With the War on Terror, an impersonal memory appeared: the memory of the administration of society. The War on Terror is the total thought of the state; archives are its repressed memory.

Hooray For Our Chains (10)

2009-04-09T07:33:00.000-05:00

Tanveer Ahmad? "How Can You Overlook a Guy Who Died in Your Custody?"

2009-04-03T11:11:00.001-05:00

Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity asked Glenn Beck about the blood he wiped from the "break" or "parting" stick he used to pry open pit bulls' mouths during fights.

Glenn Beck said he spends his prison time reading, writing, working as a janitor at 12 cents an hour, and filming his Pravda television show.

Incarceration, Glenn Beck said, has given him time to think about the dogfighting conspiracy conviction and how the government is a heroin pusher using smiley-faced fascism to grow the nanny state.

Sean Hannity told Glenn Beck that Ann Coulter has been tense ever since she fell for Car and Driver's April Fool's fake story that claimed President Obama ordered GM and Chrysler to cease their participation in NASCAR because it is an "unnecessary expenditure."

Ann Coulter returned with ten small envelopes, a bottle of cheap perfume, and a bottle of rum. She gave fifteen dollars to Sean Hannity, who gave the fifteen dollars to Glenn Beck.

"If Obama can tell GM and Chrysler that their participation in NASCAR is an 'unnecessary expenditure,'" Ann Coulter said, "isn't having public schools force students to follow Muslim rituals, recite Islamic prayers, and plan 'jihads' also an 'unnecessary expenditure'?"

Sean Hannity left the building and went for a walk in the marina. He looked at the public school students planning jihads and was clearly deep in thought.

"The Obamas presented Her Majesty with an iPod," Sean Hannity said. "but here's the problem: she already had one. The administration's tin ear after this latest slight of our closest ally is just the latest episode in the administration's not understanding the mood of the globe as it continues to press for an unprecedented redistribution of wealth."

Glenn Beck wanted to know specifically how the pit bulls he tortured and killed fit into things. "This place is perfect for you," Sean Hannity said, running his hand up and down the bars of Glenn Beck's cell.

Ann Coulter watched from the background. "Just stay here," she said. Glenn Beck almost got choked up.

"Illegal aliens," Ann Coulter said, "cost the American taxpayer more than $10 billion a year in Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, free school lunches, prison, school and court costs."

She added: "When I'm making love, I think about Tanveer Achmad, an immigration detainee who died of a heart attack because he got no medical attention in a New Jersey prison; Ana Romero Rivera, a 44-year-old Salvadoran cleaning woman who was found hanged in 2008 in an isolation cell in a county jail in Frankfort, KY, where she was awaiting deportation; and an 18-year-old Haitian woman, known only as 'Mari Rosa,' coughing up blood for hours without medical attention in 2007 at the Glades County Jail in Moore Haven, FL."

Sean Hannity maneuvered the rocks and walked closer to the water.

Review: Battlestar Galactica (Series Finale)

2009-03-24T12:44:00.008-05:00

Trust didn't enter into it: I flung my mouth into a pile of Purina Whisker Lickin's Tender Moments Salmon Treats. Popeye took Edward James Olmos to a strip club. Edward James Olmos vomited on himself in an alley but didn't enjoy it. "You're forgiven for all your dark secrets," Popeye said.

The water bug simply acted out of obedience. I fell asleep after I swallowed her. Trust didn't enter into it: I simply miscalculated her need to engage in gestures of futility. "Wherever we are is where we're going to stay," Edward James Olmos said. "We're mostly here."

The plain expanse, the simple fact, the mute antelope that tasted like salmon, a field that stretched below me.

Aaron Douglas searched all over Tanzania for my red Squeaky Fromme cape.

"Alan Keyes was wearing it when he jumped to the stage and shouted, 'Sic Semper Tyrannis,'" Kate Vernon told him, adding: "It's gone for 150,000 years."

Gone, gone, merrily we go. Aaron Douglas vowed to find the mitochondrial DNA of my red Squeaky Fromme cape, exiling himself to an island off one of the northern continents where it's cold up in the highlands.

Tony paused his precious, bourgeois recording at the coordinates, "1123-6536-5321." He transcribed them to a scrap of paper I fell asleep on. Iraqi police reported at least 25 people were killed and dozens of others injured in a suicide bomb attack at a wake in northeastern Iraq.

The bomber blew himself up at a funeral tent in Jalawla, Diyala, on Monday and police said the number of casualties is likely to rise. Michael Trucco said: "There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza, there's a hole in the bucket. The long view returns patterns and repetitions. All has happened before and will happen again. End of line."

Mohammed Osman, a local official, said that Monday's bombing happened as a Kurdish family was receiving condolences. It is not much consolation. Yes, yes, and merrily we go. A police officer told the Voices of Iraq news agency "the death toll will likely be high because of the strength of the blast."

Yes, yes, and merrily we go. It is not much consolation that society will pick up the bits, leaving us at eight modern where punishment, rather than interdiction, is paramount. Please, cut the fuse. Contact is inevitable, leading to information bleed. End of line. Thus will it come to pass. Limiting Baghdad to two dimensions decreases the number of evolutionary jumps within the species. Rise and measure the temple. End of line.

In Mosul, two separate bombings wounded four police officers and two civilians on Monday. End of line. Filters, filters, the sublime elevation of the lifter and the filters.

Back in the stream that feeds the ocean that feeds the stream, such a format will close the door. End of line. At least eight people were killed and 16 wounded in Baghdad, when a bomb exploded at a bus terminal in the west of the city. To be a wall with a damper a stream of pounding way and nearly enough choice makes a steady midnight. End of line. To remove the pump with the attached hose and wiring, simultaneously release the three tangs while pulling the pump out of the retainer along with the line and wiring. Don't make me go to Scotland, Alan Keyes. Just give me back my cape.

Hooray For Our Chains (9)

2009-03-21T09:54:00.001-05:00