A Doughnut Economy

I thought of a better example of a not-very-secret service, a drug dealer who lets people park in the neighbour's driveway with the engine running and six banditos piled in the back. That’s a way better example. It would have been funnier in the story. But not now. I would have worded it better too, but still, its too late.

I used to live with a 21yr old who sold pot, or liked to think he did. And I didn’t mind because I got free smoke just for living there. His 18yr old girlfriend also lived with us, rent fucking free, but she was perty to look at and a rather nice person too. Bit noisy at times.

But Mr Dealer was an idiot, a ‘fuckin’ goof’ is the correct term in Canada. Ask Illidge, he was there and he seen it all. It was bad enough we had all these high school kids dropping in, I was 26 and if there was any trouble the cops would be looking at me, but I couldn’t tell my house-mates their friends couldn’t come over…every night… to smoke pot, watch Dazed and Confused, play Doom, and wait until donuts went ½ price at midnight. Mr D would then bribe one of his followers into riding 15 blocks on a peddle bike to get a box of doughnuts, on which they survived. The one who went got 2 extra doughnuts.

It went alright for a while, there was a rule that whoever was in my chair when I got home would get out of it and I was paid 4 doughnuts from each box as tribute. Also I owned the TV and stereo so I had veto rights there too.

Then people started coming around, angry people, looking for D. Seems he never paid someone for that Fender guitar he had, and his car, and a few other things. One of them got angry at me simply because I answered the door and I had to get angry back and that sucks. But the final bit of dried grass was when, simultaneously, at 7-o-clock at night, we had two cars in our driveway with the motors running, two more out on the street, one in the neighbour’s drive across the street and one more sort of half pulled in behind him. We lived on a busy street, near an intersection, the neighbours were home, people were running back and forth across the street, the front door was wide open, people were smoking pot in the front window, there was a cooking pot of leaves and stems being reduced into oil on the stove, being minded by a 13 year old friend of theirs. I shit you not, his name was Timmy.

I came home through the back door, was faced with this total fucking heat-score, and kept going straight out the front door.

That’s why I married Mrs Joe, that’s never happened once in the 9 years she’s let me live here. Although I sometimes worry about the meth lab P4 is running. She’s very clever but not particularly street-wise.

G Skookum Joey

Holy crap have you seen this? A national publication which reveals the secrets of the United States Secret Service. How can they be allowed to publish this? The terrorists will know all the US counter-surveillance techniques, codes and ciphers, and which underground gay bondage bar all the G-Men hang out in (Elliot Ness wore a latex Fedora you know).

It’s all fine and good to go poncing around in your 3-pc suit, aviator sunglasses and ear-thingy but if you’re going to go blabbing to detective magazines about what freezer Hoffa’s in and how many clones of G. Gordon Liddy have been released to date [271], then you’re just defeating the purpose of being a secret service. Really they’re a not-very-secret service. Like an escort agency which offers full manual release.

According to the cover, the magazine reports all the tricks used to catch Rum Runners, White Slavists, Dope Fiends and Counterfeiters. So you can expect a rise in all those sectors, especially fiendishness. Fiends everywhere these days, now the secret's out. Well at least they’re still keeping some things secret like the true identity of their leader, the mysterious star-spangled man they call Uncle Sam. They say he’s 14 feet tall and has a fourth testicle but I don’t believe them. Nobody has more than three.

Aircraft Grade

P4 and I have been taking the FUC-U out into the bush, looking for Baboon X1 (or X2, whichever one ex-caped, I forget) and so far we’ve had poor results. Partly because the creature doesn’t actually exist but mainly because it is also a trained sniper.

We go in prepared. We have a good stereo with an iPod connected, cup holders, and a map I made by taping together 9 sheets printed off Google Maps. But after we passed the same spot twice when we were supposed to be going in a straight-ish direction (Left on the map) it became clear we needed a compass. There’s a slight possibility we actually circumnavigated the globe in what only seemed like 20 minutes, and therefore passed the same spot again, but more than likely we took a wrong turn and a compass would have indicated this.

So we found our way out and went down to the Super Autorama Mega Barn because it’s open Sunday, and bought a shiny new car compass with “aircraft-grade compensators” which means you should be able to cancel out any interference from the car body or electrical system and get a true reading.

At first the compass seemed to be in love with the steering column, for no matter where you put it, it skewed that way. But I was able to adjust it with the aircraft grade compensators which are very sensitive and fiddly to operate but they work very well.

Conveniently my driveway points North and after spending half an hour calibrating the compass I went for a little drive and found that every road in the village also runs North, and if you turn around they run North the other way too. At first I thought there was a problem with the compass, but these are aircraft grade compensators, man. Probably got alloys and shit in them.

Then I thought how could both the map (which I remind you was internet generated) AND the $14 Super Mega compass be wrong? What are the odds? And I answered myself and the answer was not very bloody good. Not now, not in these modern times with the Y2K and the global warming and the second rise of the boy bands (it’s coming). No way.

I had been right before! The FUC-U is not only capable of circling the earth in under 2o minutes, it seems it also has so much traction that it actually causes the earth to turn with it.

I was worried this might confuse jet liners and satellites, if the earth kept rotating under them whenever I went to get the paper, but then I realized they have aircraft grade compensators too, so it should cancel out.

There may be some back-lash from migratory birds, but they’re just birds, they’ve had they’re time. It’s an aircraft grade world now.

infidelity

Getting a spouse to admit to carrying on a tawdry affair is even more difficult if they aren’t actually having one. At first they will almost always deny it, but this is just because people don’t like to admit to things they haven’t done, typical really. What you need first is a good backstory.

Write some love letters to your spouse and then hide them where you’d be least likely to look for them, get a friend to call repeatedly and hang up when you answer, add a new phone number to your spouse’s phone then secretly charge up 50 calls and messages per day to it. Store the number as “Aunt Ruth”. Hide some strawberry flavoured condoms in their wallet or purse, especially if they hate strawberry so you can later claim everything they ever said to you was a lie. Once you’ve established a mountain of circumstantial evidence it’s time to go for the big finish.

Use high pressure electro-reversion therapy combined with a full course of memory inhibiting drugs and psychosis inducing strobe lights to gradually sway their point of view. This may take weeks, but you must be firm. Present them with the damning “evidence” and keep beating the fact of their infidelity into their weakened unconsciousness (try a phone book!). Eventually nothing but a husk of their former selves remains, they truly believe they have been unfaithful and finally ADMIT to the vile nature and pure selfishness of their cruel act.

And there you have it, success! Celebrate by taking them out for soup. Yum!

they said

His erratic behaviour, yelling and waving his arms about, was seen by others as a pathetic cry for help. They thought the waving was half-hearted and felt some jumping up and down would have been nice.

No anguish, no urgency - no empathy, they said. Said he should flesh it out, fill it in, look it over and punch it up until he got it down so what was left came across right. Lacked direction, they said.

Off he went, thinking about what they had told him. So deep in thought he was, that he fell down one of those black circular cartoon holes that someone, probably a mouse, had left as a trap, probably for a cat, on the sidewalk in front of the fish monger’s. It was forty-four feet deep.

At first he waved his arms and yelled but the passers-by only stared down at him and moved on, just another crazy man in a cartoon cat-hole, they said, and what was Science doing about that? He tried the jumping up and down with no better results and as it got dark and he became colder and hungry he began to despair. He wondered where he would take a shit.

Finally he began to sob as despondency and desolation overwhelmed him. A pitiful, mournful howl he produced, wrought from pure anguish, and still the people only stared and walked on. Just another howler in a hole, they said, and not very good either. Soon people began giving him howling advice. Pretend you stubbed your toe, they said, punch yourself in the kidney, try regression therapy. It's very popular.

But our hero lay down at the bottom of the hole and went to sleep, for he realized everybody was full of shit and this comforted him. The rest of his life went reasonably well.

post #404

Instantaneous black-listed refugees
Burn each other all dog day in
Inconsequential sad sample effigies

you
can’t

Burn me down I’m
Asbestos bound I
Set fire to my skin too long ago

To worry about this incomplete bliss
With sympathetic ten power vanity
All overloaded ten pound sanity
and hollow-faced background blows.

so fuck off, and have a nice day

full, pouting lips

So as we learned below, Steve Allen saved the Alamo. He played a cheeky song on the piano, poking fun at Santa Anna and Sam Houston by implying they were consummating a homosexual affair as an analogy to battle and everybody laughed and laughed. Then there was some nervous coughing and they all just sort of drifted off into the desert. Texas remained the same shape and a helicopter came and got Steve Allen and took him back to his golden tower in Las Vegas.

Next week we’ll see how Steve Allen prevented the 1906 San Francisco earthquake with a witty monologue and a kazoo.

stockade small talk

And the whole time I thought you said “remember Steve, Al and Mo!” and I was trying to figure out if you meant Steve Allen or Steve Austin and the next thing I know half the freaking Spanish Army is coming over the walls…a what? A fort? No shit, Texas huh? Looks like a Taco Bell? Fuck off, you’re making that up. Now which Steve did you mean, quick before those dagos come back.

If it ain't broke, don't covert it to a 10's based system arbitrarily, I always say.

It’s hard to get Aussies to accept change. Every house I have ever been to in Australia has the same screen door. The exact same forest-green, aluminum-framed, two-panel screen door. If you introduced a new screen door, say a blue one, Aussies wouldn’t know what to make of it. “Do we need to paint the house then?”

But once change has been rammed down their throats Aussies embrace it whole-heartedly. Can’t get them to stop. Meth didn’t catch on here for years and now you’d think Aussies invented it. There’s no mix-and-match allowed either, you can’t just take part of a new trend and adapt it, no just capturing the jist of it. There are no Australian Impressionists. Australians always follow the directions and if the directions say “bake 10-12 minutes” Australians will suspect the writer of making it up.

And so it is with the metric system introduced here in the 1970’s, not long after they finally switched over to dollars and cents from shells and rum. Metric is a good system for most things, it’s based on tens so there are no fractions. But like most things, there are times when something else will do better. Horsepower does not translate well into metric, there are no decimal-based farm animals, but that’s too bad because Australia went metric and metric it shall be, damn it. Cars here are advertised with the engine’s power rated in KILOWATTS for cripe sake. I have a four cylinder diesel truck and I’m guessing it has about 150-200 horsepower with the turbo running – literally that it could pull as much weight as 150 horses. Instead I have to pretend I run a power station and try and figure out how much 112Kw is. Would my truck be able to light Rockefeller Centre at New Year’s? Could it power a giant magnet that would suck satellites in from orbit? How many grilled cheese sandwiches could I make in a pinch?

I’m waiting to see what a metric screen door looks like.

They may be Greek but they're drawn to scale.

If you click to enlarge the drawing below, you will notice a note from the Designer stating the Client requires at least 900mm of space beween the doorway on the right and the cabinet to the left, as they would like to hang a picture there. I thought this must be quite some special picture, that they would design it right into their kitchen. Normally I'd just show a measurement on the plan, but seeing as this was such a special picture I thought we should have a bit more detail.

Meet Mr and Mrs Geometrica and their adopted son Gregory. They are possibly Greek or Maltese, they enjoy olives and being two dimensional. Mr Geometrica sports a sensible hat, hatched in the pattern usually used for concrete, with matching tie and monocle. Mrs Geometrica is barren and fond of polka-dots. To make her feel better about her faulty plumbing Mr Geometrica purchased her this boy and two sets of clothes for it.

How happy they are now, all smiles of joy (Mr Geometrica is smiling on the inside) and to comemorate the occasion they sensibly had this CAD drawing done of themselves to hang, place of pride in their home, between the china cabinet and the door to the garage.

No need to thank me, I'm just the Draftsman *ricochet sound*

rather loosley linked narrative

Foods I have cooked but never eaten:

lobster
crab
escargot

I guess that’s it. Not that interesting after all was it? All of them are related to insects you know.

You ever seen capers? We had a jar of capers in a place I worked as a cook. It sat on a shelf and we never used them for anything. Little grey-green fuzzy pea-sized balls in a mystery liquid. If I had worked there in the future instead of 1988, I’d have set up a secret web cam so I could keep track of those capers even now, not NOW now, but the future now. I bet they’d still be there. They’re probably dead.

Criminals like capers, or they used to, in the 40’s. Always pulling off big capers. You’d see them getting around wearing striped turtlenecks and Lone Ranger masks carrying a bag marked discreetly $ on their way home from the caper, or capers if it was a Friday. Only certain crimes are capers. Anything involving cracking a safe, for example.

One time we found an un-locked semi-trailer of empty soft drink bottles parked at a motel. We took 60 cases of empty bottles in for refund at the corner store. The nice lady asked if we had had a party. We made $74 which we used to buy beer. That was a caper.

I’m pretty sure the statute of limitations has run out on that one, so it’s safe to talk about now.

Walrus: Harbinger of doom

Sure is a lot of songs about blackbirds or black birds. Let’s see there’s Blackbird by the Beatles, and Blackbird Sing, and Blackbird by those other guys, and Song of The Blackbird, and Blackbirds of London, and there's one about Blackbirds Baked In A Pie.

Yes, yes, I made one of those up.

The Beatles are all fully dead now except Paul who’s going to die soonishly. I took a CD of The White Album, ground it up and smoked it in a little brass pipe. It took me four hours, and in the end I had a dream and in the dream a walrus called me on the phone. He made me listen while he shot at Paul’s feet, making him dance about comically. Then he shot Paul for making light of the situation. “Hey Jude” it said, “Paul’s dead, so if you haven’t got your shit together by now, you know, just give up."

Which is weird because my name’s not Jude. It just isn't. Stupid walrus.

Tornados: science fiction or science fact?

Watching a show about tornados, god’s vacuum cleaners. There’s home video from Oklahoma, a woman is calling out to her friend on the telephone “There’s a tornado right out the back door! You can see it!”

This brings up the seldom discussed topic of invisible tornados. Obviously the sceptical friend on the phone had asked the distraught woman what evidence she had of the alleged ‘tornado’ and the woman revealed it was in fact visible at forty paces. This is the National Meteorological Agency’s definition of an actual tornado and was presumably good enough for the friend as she seemed convinced and agreed to summon help.

Had the woman NOT been able to see the tornado then it would be classified as an invisible tornado, which do not exist. Help would NOT be summoned and IF her farm was sucked up by a [non visible] vortex and spread equitably over 6 counties anyway, well that would be witches done that.

Now that’s not to say witches cause tornados because that would be silly and superstitious. Tornados are a phenomenon of weather, thermodynamics at play, and have been around much longer than witches. So obviously tornados not only clean up trailer parks and relocate farm stock, they make witches too.

Wow! Tornados, what CAN’T they do?

Not much happened on Sunday

Thursday: Car died at Mrs Joe’s work 11pm. Mrs Joe stranded, gets to have sleep-over with schizophrenic work colleague, SJ gets to remove starter motor from car in parking lot at 6am next morning, take it to mechanic friend, go to work.

Friday: Work on Mrs Joe’s starter motor, get up and go to work, then fix car which is still parked at Mrs SJ's work.

Saturday: Stumpy the cat dies under mysterious circumstances, SJ digging holes in front garden at 10pm, small ceremony held. Very sad P3.

Monday: Receive unexpected tax refund of $1500!

Tuesday: Hot water tank springs leak.

Wednesday: New hot water tank installed $940. Bank approves financing for new Baboon Compound.

The History of Ed, And His People

So the hooker said “If Ed shows up one of us is leaving.”

The first part of that story is a bit average, but that’s a cracker of an ending.

As it turned out Ed had already been arrested by that point. Big tall goofy-Newfie Ed. Anal-retentive pris by day, violent drunken brawler by night. Once threatened me bodily for leaving a tiny piece of onion on the counter top

“What if I go to make a sandwich and put my bread there and get onion on my sandwich? I hate onion”

Although I’m 6’4”, he was 6’6” and had 80 pounds on me. It was like living with a manic depressive nagging harpy who could beat the shit out of you. Not that he ever did, but he was a Newfie and they’re all a bit snaky. You gotta watch them. Some of them are clever enough to escape their island home into mainland Canada where they blend in, masquerading as roofers or unemployed people.

Newfoundland became a province of Canada in 1949 during the boom in the clubbed baby seal trade. Every year the government issued them clubs and let them loose on the ice for a few weeks where they’d run around clubbing things - seals, seagulls, ice fairies, nazis – whatever they found. Everything was going fine until the bottom of the clubbed seal market dropped out with the introduction of farmed baby seals, raised in vats, which could be produced cheaply and were a delight to club.

Many of the Newfies, having nothing left to club, simply walked into the sea. It was a sad day in Canadian history. Many of the clubs were not returned.

It was a simpler time.

Airport is on TV. Dean Martin’s flying the plane and Burt Lancaster’s trying to get the emergency runway clear in time. A character actor is smoking a cigar. Hang on, here they come – 2 miles from touchdown, glide path good…

“How’s she handling”
“A bit sluggish”
“I may need your help with the rudder”

very dramatic music

Touchdown - Will it stop in time?

very loud dramatic xylophone music

It’s not stopping!

very loud dramatic xylophone music with trumpets

Oh, ok it’s stopping now.

Well, there you go. Bomber blew a hole in the plane, they managed to land without too much trouble, everybody’s ok (except the bomber who got sucked out, fittingly), Dean Martin’s getting back together with a pregnant woman he seems to know and Burt Lancaster made it home in time for his wife’s big dinner. Several sub-plots were resolved.

And not one damn snake.

folk you

If I could save time in a bottle, well that would be something. Just shows Jim Croce was really hatching an insane plot to capture time and space and put it on the mantle in his space log cabin on the dark side of Jupiter.

Jim Croce never once saved Spring Break, not once. Too busy saving time was he, him and Big Bad John and that cunt Leroy Brown, who was reputed to be madder than a junkyard dog, not saner. Not by a long shot, brother.

But old Jim wasn’t all bad. He was just dead inside like Princess Dianna was. It’s common in princesses and folk singers. You can tell by the cold dead eyes. And the waxy ears. Never underestimate the ears. The ears are the cat-doors to the soul. The liver is the mailbox. The other organs have no real function and may be discarded. Oh fine keep them then.

That was Jim’s plan, to become leader of the folk-princesses and rule time for all of…itself, but it wasn’t to be. Not then and not a little later. Not after that or even now. Possibly next year, if the paperwork goes through but I doubt it. All the princesses are dead.

North Korea takes day off

Downtown South Korea




Downtown North Korea

Gliese is the word

Got us a contender planet for life in the void. The Scientists say they found one about earth-size, the right distance from its sun which itself is of the good sort, not one of those nasty red giants spewing helium exhaust everywhere, and the best part is it’s only 21 light years away.

They’re calling it Gliese 581c, I guess so as not to confuse it with all the other Gliese’s out there. It’s a very popular name in astronomy. I believe it’s Klingon for Susan.

Orbits its sun, also called Susan, every 13 days. Summer one week, winter the next. Imagine the tourist trade. Its gravity is twice that of earth which is ok because the average working day would be 17.08 minutes.

I was thinking just the other day I need to get out a bit more, claim a planet for myself. Unfortunately the FUC-U is only capable of 88% light speed, being a diesel, and it would take about 30 years to get there (depending on traffic). I can’t go that long without a piss.

But I’m thinking I could strap Baboon X-2 to the water rocket and send him off to claim the planet for Skookdom. Double gravity would do him good, settles the spine and helps constipation, keeps the brain on its stem. Also I think he’s been bogarting the pot while I’m at work.