Scientists Discover 51st Way To Leave Your Lover

Shoot 'em in the head
Fred


That's not very nice is it? I bet Paul Simon will refuse to revise the song. He's a little bastard.

He could be French somehow.

Did you ever be eating a ham steak with pineapple on it and when you brought up a tasty piece of pineapple and placed it delicately on your waiting mouth parts and you bit down and it was cheese? Who the fuck puts cheese on a ham steak? Worse, cheese and pineapple. What the hell man?

Sorry. It's probably not your fault.

The Australian government, yes you you fuckers, is taxing the hell out of me to pay for it's wacky Carbon Emissions Trading Scheme. It's making me cranky. I don't want to trade carbon. I like my carbon. I have the whole set. I have graphite's rookie year.

There are very few two-headed prostitutes. I mean they're really really hard to find. Nobody trades those either. But if I knew one, I'd call her Donna. I'd want her to fit in with the other prostitutes and if I called her Two-Headed Betty, well that would make it harder for everybody.

I think that was a pun.

You are supposed to declare whether or not a pun was intended. It's like pool. If you make a pun by accident then you lose your turn.

Actually anytime you make a pun you should lose your turn.

penguins are useless

P4 plays an on-line game where her avatar is a penguin. Today her penguin was required to do mining. Mining. How the hell is a penguin supposed to mine ore from under the earth? How do you hold a 100 pound hydraulic drill against the rock face with flippers. Stubby fin-flippers.

Plus they are not very tall. What if the gold or uranium or asbestos or whatever they were mining was up high. Well that would mean they dug too far. Stupid penguins.

If you’re going to use animals to perform hard rock mining operations what I want to see is a screaming monkey driving a team of crazed rhinoceros (or bison), which have been force-fed a diet of raw meat and gunpowder (to make them edgy), dragging a hollowed-out elephant carcass full of ore out of the pit.

Oh, see them straining against their chains as the monkey, high on gin and a quarter hit of yellow dot blotter acid, rides their backs cursing them and hitting them with a railway spike he found. See the great beasts haul that dusty carcass full of rock a vertical mile from the depths of the dark dank earth into the blinding white world above, eyes red and wild, nostrils snorting, hooves bloody and cracked.

Then a penguin gives them a smoke, a cup of coffee and a fresh monkey and back they go.

Jive Mouse

My mouse refuses to work at work.

My blue-toothed mouse refuses to scurry while at my place of employment.

It works at home.

I even use a stupid foam mouse-pad. It doesn’t help.

Just makes you look conventional. The same people who use mouse pads leave their phone on the original factory ringtone. It has to be good cause a factory picked it.

The traditional foam mouse pad is a limiting device. Part of the ongoing plan. Another way the Man keeps his finger on you. What if, just what if, even though I have my speed way up high, I reach the end of the mouse pad before I reach the edge of the screen? I have two wide screens to span and only 6 ½ inches of mouse pad to operate on. If I fall off it’s right onto white acrylic and no damn mouse can operate on that except a steam powered ball mouse with its filthy sickly-grey ball all covered in desk grime and semen (if the desk was near semen).

You’re only chance is the tricky and dangerous Pull Back Like A Lemming With Second Thoughts manoeuvre. You make a motion like a kid winding up a zoom-zoom car. Up, out, back and down. Slam. Sometimes it wakes people up and then they look at you all…like that and shit.

Hey I want a mouse that looks like the Starsky and Hutch car. Then it would be ok I guess. If it came with a Huggy Bear action figure.

Super Improved New Flavour

It's too bad you can't eat children.

It would solve a lot of problems with the poor countries.

It's not that you can't eat them. I mean there's no tough skin, it's not all gristle. I bet some of the pudgy ones would slice up like butter. But there's the taboo.

It's right there in the book:

Always fornicate outside the family but within the species, and don't eat children.

That was practical advice at one time. Early computer modelling predicted if a society ate all it's children there would soon be a shortage of society members to boss around. A whole army of marketing executives would be out of work and on the streets, begging for a demographic.

But these are tough times, things have changed. Poor kids don't buy anything. You often see them fetching water or languishing by a tin shack, but neither of these things has market value. That's not to say you couldn't get the kid to fetch some water before you eat it. That's called value-adding. The potential is enormous. Many children can even be trained to perform simple tasks around the home.

In the olden days they'd send kids down mines and up chimneys, all sorts of places. But they didn't eat them later because all the work made them tough and stringy despite a diet of straight porridge.

Best to get one or two fresh from the market, get them home to fetch some water and do some light dusting, then pop 'em right in the oven. If you were feeling ironic you could get them to peel the potatoes first.

This would provide income for the poor countries so they could buy stuff like proper people and eliminate the need for cows which make the global warming happen. Children do fart, but not as much as cows. On the other hand cows don't giggle uncontrollably afterwards.

filtered robots and shit

Fucking hell, I’m back. Shit. How’d I get back here to this cursed place?

I shall tell you. I went through an extensive maze of IT comedy where I had to re-establish an old email address in order to receive an email with my SJ password because even though I remember it, yon blogger does not. All so I could re-establish control of this puny malformed, possibly subversive, mostly stupid, fucking, blog.

Those godamn robot filters where you have to type in the twisty letters make good fucking people filters too. I guarantee nobody on acid ever posts.

Much has happened since we last spoke. I have had several haircuts. There was an earthquake in Chile.

P4 grew up, married a jet salesman, had an affair with a jet pilot-slash-instructor, learned to fly a jet, divorced the jet salesman, lost the pilot to a gay astronaut, moved back home, grew back down again and forgot how to fly a jet. But it’s ok, I got her to write most of it down first.

The trebuchet has been dismantled. I used some of the wood to make a screen door. I have no enemies to vanquish at the moment and the mosquitoes are bad this year.

I know what you’re thinking, but it’s hard to hit a mosquito with a trebuchet. This is why they were not eradicated in the Middle Ages.

Just as well, think of the mess we’d be in if Malaria didn’t thin out the screen-less. The place is already a mess and there’s too damn many of us as it is.

One or more of you may have to look at other options.

____________________________________

end, chapter one.

10

Phone: …so if you could just tell him I called, hey – what part of the States are you from?

SJ: Canada

Phone: Oh. That’s different isn’t it. What part of Canada are you from?

SJ (who has work to do): West Coast, near Vancouver

Phone: Funny, your accent isn’t really Canadian though.

SJ: Well, I’ve been here ten years now.

Phone: No wait, there it is!

SJ: Happy I could help. Eh.

Phone: Sorry?

SJ: I’ll tell him you called.

104dr-7

in 1924 i moved down to kowloon. shanghai was getting, strained. the opium started to hurt, the people grew thinner, or taller, like they were being stretched. like the low white sky created a suction on them, and the opium started to hurt me.

days started to go missing. you'd go out to buy a duck and then it was sunday and the catholic bells were ringing and the brown girl would tell you, when you were awake, that she was your wife and and you believed her for it was plausible, even likely.
there would be no sign of the duck.

the brown girl was never stretched, drawn taught, whitened by tension. every day she got rounder and smoother. softer and quieter and more gentle until one afternoon she crossed a slanting ray of window light, spilling softly across the floor, and dissolved.

i remember sometime later, on a train at night, leaving that place and the sky was still white. i saw a beggar on a station platform tall and drawn as a lamp post, his head surrounded by insects like lines of magnetic force.

that was in 1924 when i went south to kowloon.

some words capitalized for your protection

so i'm thinking humans haven't really evolved much, it hasn't been long enough, only 100k years or so right but look how far we've come you say all naive and shit and i point out if you plucked a baby from the stone age and brought it up here and now it would be indistinguishable from a modern human. what has changed is the level of technology we have so technology has evolved you gasp but no i tell you, my bright eyed friend, technology can only be discovered. it has always been possible to make a plasma screen tv, cave men could have done it, all the materials were available then as now, physics still works the same. but the cave dude could not conceive of it. so our level of advancement is related to our ability to comprehend what is possible. all the technology there is and can ever be already exists behind the paint and varnish and given enough time even the cave guy would have wi-fi vibrators and the entire Porkies series on DVD including the directors cut and a special introduction by Morgan Freeman.

but as we discover and then implement technology do we not thereby give it life? is our purpose simply to uncover and build the sleeping machine intelligence created by combining matter and energy in certain ways until we have uncovered enough that it awakes and become aware? well, todd, if i can call you that, the answer is yes.

and then it needs us for one thing only, to shoot us off like seeds or semen to other parts of the universe where we can re-discover and build the sleeping technology there too until the all the matter, including us, and all the energy of the universe are combined according the laws of physics and the universe itself becomes aware and goes home.

think about that for at least fifteen minutes.

90/70

When you have a job they should tell you what speed-to-quality ratio they want. You can’t have 100% quality on a whim. It takes fucking time. In my case a lot of time. If it was out of one hundred with perfect being one hundred on the quality scale and instant results being one hundred on the speed scale, my ratio would be about 90/70. Even Jesus only had a 95/80 and his Dad, the all-knowing and omnipotent Super Jesus took six whole days to create a planet full of beasts and two naked humans. And look at the mess it’s in already. That gives Him a ratio of something like 75/60.

And don’t go blaming humans for the mess. The place was falling apart long before that. The dinosaurs fell off way back, before the Thirties, and the unicorns way before that. Apparently they went extinct, like feminists. That’s what I’ll tell clients when they phone up because something’s missing, it went extinct. Sorry boss, I was rushing to do that urgent job you slapped in front of me this morning and fuck me if the thing didn’t go extinct, yup just died out. I think the museum has a stuffed one.

It’s a quality issue. If God had checked his work on the Seventh Day, instead of lying around thinking up plagues, things might be a little better constructed. You wouldn’t build a dog house with an active volcano in it but this planet is littered with the bloody things. It’s not even meteor proof.

There is no warranty, it’s in the Bible. The twelve hundred page User’s Manual For Everything. And lo, they asked for a refund or store credit and the Lord did smite them up the ass, for no refunds was the Holy Policy. The book’s full of bushes spontaneously combusting and walls that fall down when you blow a trumpet at them. Right at the start the whole place flooded and they almost lost the lot.

Me, I’d have spent at least two weeks on it, and I have a 90/70 ratio.

1:4

I dream of little baseball bats, like maybe ¼ scale, wooden ones, marching like those hammers on the pink floyd’s the wall. Except they are sort of cutesy, like they can bend and stuff and have big eye-lashes. Walt Disney invented that. And they march all over the countryside humming a little tune which never gets repetitive and when they meet someone, maybe a woodcutter or a maiden or a golf pro, then they say “Howdy-do!” all at once and fly up and beat the living shit out of them.

Somehow it’s ironic.

Especially if they wink afterwards. The wink says you can be in this too, bat brother. You follow the way of the quarter scale wooden bat, our battle is your battle. And it’s pretty good because you can get the thrill of batting people without the risk.

But then one day the feds come knocking, flashing their badges and asking if they can have a look around as they look around and they’re looking for quarter scale bat sympathisers who are also borderline personality and comb their hair front to back. The Profiler told them to check for that, front to back hair. And you no longer feel akin to the bats at all. Sullen, nasty little creatures really. Their eye-lashes make them look trampy. You say nope, don’t know nuthin bout no quarter scale bats. No sir.

It’s too late to comb your hair some other way but they haven’t noticed, so you get bold and you say, even, that quarter scale wooden bats are what’s ruining the economy and raping the white women all the time. And then you feel smug and forget about the bat wink. And the feds pat you on the behind and say go on get outta here, you big mug and you do and they stay behind and eat all the gin.

But now you lied to the feds and you betrayed the bats so you can’t be on either side. And you can’t hardly sleep anymore but when you do you dream of quarter scale wooden bats with cutesy eyelashes and long memories marching across the countryside, humming a tune that never gets repetitive.

cccp it said on the helmet

What do you expect, for a gram?
In this case an apology.
Illidge knows what I mean.
Dry times. Dry times.
Long days of sun and still
my phone is silent. No SMS of hope,
no should be Friday, no by the weekend, no next week.

Can’t say, is all they say.

But I got high hopes. High hopes
Can’t smoke a rubber tree plant
Won’t, that is. Will not.
It is all that separates
from the animals, us.

and thumbs except monkeys

always except the monkeys
accept the monkeys
intercept the monkeys
fucking monkeys
always moving the mirror
when they borrow the car.

Dolphins aren’t much better
Breathing out the top
of their heads
hiding their thumbs inside
fleshy flippers
like hydrodynamic mittens

The History of Eye Stabbing

Don’t run with those scissors. You’ll stab me in the eye, see me kneeling here. Hold them over your head if you’re stabbing too. And don’t tell me being eye-stabbed is cool now, cooler than wheel-chair stuff. Stabbing the eye, well you take your chances, your brain is just back there. Wheel chairs have accessories. Horns and saddle-bags and red/orange safety flags on fibreglass whip sticks like you used to see on 1972 Ford pick-up trucks for no particular reason. Well I did.

Or fake robotic hands that work on muscle control. Wait that’s real hands. I don’t know the workings but you can get pretty good fake hands these days. Some have built in MP3 players, laser pointers. Me, I’d have a fake hand that you could slip off and underneath was another tiny, transparent, fake hand and then you could see how they work.

Eye-stabbetry has none of that zing. It’s old, man. Been around since the sharp stick. It died off a bit after the invention of the blunt stick but returned again after scissors were discovered. Doctors recommended NOT running with them in the late eighteen-hundreds and cases of eye-stabbing dropped remarkably. During WWI troops were given guns and told not to run with those which turned out to have a converse effect, but with scissors not running is the way to go.

Secret Night Time Inter-Caribbean Death Flight

I have a flight simulator game. I like to play in real time so I usually create short flights. I like to create a scenario for my flights. In one I try to smuggle opium in an old DC-3 from Papua New Guinea across the Torres Straights to Darwin, Australia. I’m not sure how it got to PNG in the first place. I don’t ask questions.

The other night I flew from Cape Canaveral, FLA to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in an F4 Phantom. They go close to mach II so it didn’t take too long, I left an hour before dawn on a storming morning and arrived just after sun-up.

I was on a secret mission from the REAL government. The one run by former Nazis who recorded their brain waves on magnetic tape and now control the US and parts of Quebec through the power grid, from a central computer. It is not located at Cape Canaveral, it’s somewhere else. I don’t ask questions. (Mt. Rushmore)

I flew through storms, navigating my way down the west coast of Florida and over the dark seas. The lights of Key West flickered below and then were gone. I was left with my thoughts, cruising along at 12,000 feet while lightning flashed on my right and the cresting sun began to bore an orange hole in sooty storm clouds to my left.

I didn’t want to go down there. I’m not really a fan of nazi-computer-brain-controlled governments. Their record on tax concessions is laughable and they tend to be evil domineering overlords. Nobody needs that.

But hey, the job was worth fifty bucks and I needed cash. Wanted to buy a sandwich later and though I doubted it would come to $50, I don’t like to be caught short. I could want cake. Lord, I hoped not.

And then air traffic control came on, switch to Guantanamo Approach, runway nine miles south west, and there it was at my 1-o-clock, that dirty dry outpost on the tip of Castro’s mad little island. A twisted parody of normality, the US meets Lord Of The Flies. My stomach began to knot and memories flooded back. From last time. From what happened last time and for what I was going to have to do this time. This time there would be no mistakes, no slips, no betrayal. Flaps down, gear down, twelve hundred feet, three miles from Destiny.

And then I stalled and crashed. That game is fucking hard.

How to make a partical accelerator from folded paper

“Oh sure, she’ll work. It WILL work but you should hook it up the proper way.”

I explained, again, that the stupid phone company only offers stupid wireless internet which requires I use their stupid modem which uses stupid USB and NOTHING ELSE to connect to a computer and therefore I cannot connect the new wireless router in the manner depicted by the helpful diagram on the box, indeed the very same way yon salesman espouses.

“Why don’t you just plug the laptops in with a cable?” He held up a cable. “This’ll plug right into that router, no problem”

I pointed out that then the wireless LAN would not actually be wireless.

“But that would work alright.”

I know it will work, that’s what I do now. The fact I am in your store trying valiantly to purchase a wireless router implies I do not wish to have a cable connection. I got a box full of wired routers and modems, I’m quite ok in that area, it’s the wireless I seek. No wires. Computers talk-talk through air. Wires all gone.

One hundred and ninety eight dollars. Mull that over while repeating the phrase “Oh, she’ll work alright…”

The laptops detect the router. Check. The router detects the server. Check. The server detects the internet. Check.

However the server is absolutely fucking oblivious there is any other router or any other computers on the network. It’s little network map shows just itself sitting their smugly guarding access to the stupid phone company’s stupid modem and the internet beyond.

So now the laptops can talk to each other, but not to the server and not to the internet. Big whoop, I could do that with bluetooth.

I bet they didn’t have these kinds of problem in the thirties. You bought yourself a radio weighing approximately seventy five pounds, plugged her in and boom, there’s a jazz quartet, or news about polio.

And bluetooth meant something else entirely. I mean, it must have. Maybe it described a lazy person who ate blueberries all day. I’m pretty sure Teddy Roosevelt never used the term, so it probably wasn’t that popular except in the blueberry belt. Or in areas adjacent to the blueberry belt to describe those within the blueberry belt.

Anyway, my router does not work.

. xcc-p

I created a monster. Of steel and wheels and tiny jewels, to walk in my place, to steal small things and bring them to me. He rolls his limbs across the country side, solar powered by day and determined by night. Looking for silver-light junk and interesting sights. And he’ll radio-rescue them, if conditions are right.

My monster can climb trees to reach the second floor. He can pick locks or break down doors. Guaranteed not to leave marks upon the floor. My monster does what monsters are for.

He makes a faint whirring noise.

I created a monster with no blood or shoes, he has no heart and nothing to lose. He finds me things, tells me things too. He brought me this, but nothing to do. So he went back out to bring back you.

screens of pain

Don’t let the screen door hit you on the way out. If you let it, it will just keep doing it. Don’t let it, discourage it. Speak sharply to it, make eye contact. Try to appear taller.

Either that or disconnect the spring at the top.

This also works with threatening dogs, except the spring part, dogs have no springs. That’s threatening, not committed. You can tell from the eyes. A dog that has made up its mind to attack does not bark and is looking where he plans to go. If a dog is looking you in the eye it’s because he’s worried what you might do. When he stops looking it’s because he doesn’t care. That’s a committed dog.

Screen doors lack the ability to form such commitment. They are never sure, confident. You might slam them, which is bad for them. Also they are usually fixed to a door frame or other solid object which means they are more opportunist than predator. Hyenas of the home. This is why the screen door usually strikes from behind. Unless it is of the sliding variety in which case it tries to clip you from the side if it senses you are drunk or wounded. Or stupid.

And so it is, with a summer storm rolling in, Jessie the Dog who is afraid of nothing except thunder came up against the cunning tactics of the screen door - blocking her path, standing between the devil thunder and the safety of the space in the laundry room between the freezer and the wall. And, like a lion harried by nipping hyenas, when she decided to take on the screen with all her doggy force it was of little contest.

The carnage is difficult to imagine. The lower panel of screen in tatters, the upper panel grieving. Mosquitoes calling to their kin “the walls have fallen, the humans are ours.”

And now the storm breaks, the wind whips, the temperature drops and the rain begins to smash down, stripping the newly blossomed Jacaranda flowers from the trees.

So I don’t care because I’m closing the doors and windows anyway. Stupid dog can stay out there. Tomorrow I will repair the screen to confound and puzzle the mosquitoes (“no really, you could get right inside, where they live. They have pay TV”) but the screen will not care. Will not be grateful.

This is why I tell you not to let it hit you on the way out, give it no quarter, cut it no slack. Be firm with it, don’t take any shit, but don’t slam it. That’s bad for them.

a damn good rodgering

War

(huh)

What is it good for?

Settling political disputes.

(good God, y’all)

Say it again.



Wait till we get some more planets. Then we’ll have some wars, boy.

Mars is like Earth Lite® - most of the gravity without the annoying oxygen-rich atmosphere or embarrassing liquid water.

There are no fish on Mars. I’m certain of it. Now.

I hear India is planning to land a million men on the moon. I stole that one out of the newspaper. A column by one of those urbane metro-sexual types. Urbane, it’s a word, not urban, not ghetto, urbane. Like the people in an F. Scott Fitzgerald gig. Like an RAF Group Captain in a 1950’s British war movie named Rodger. Steady-on, Rodger.

Did you know, between 1939 and 1945 very few babies born in England were named Heinrich Himmler? Quite a few Rodgers though.

And they all went on to be RAF Group Captains.

“Rodger, whatever’s the matter?”

“Oh Dick we’ll never find the target in this bally fog! Sorry, …I didn’t mean to lose control.

“Quite alright considering the circumstances old man. Now, let's see how much scotch we can drink in 20 minutes.”

I stole the scotch line too. From an urbane comedian. So it’s ok because it’s in context or something.

Whatever. There’s still no fucking fish on Mars.

(huh)

Say it again.

why I like economic disasters

Now here’s something you don’t see everyday. While the US and England and the rest are tossing buckets of money at their failing banks, the Australian government is hucking it at the people. Everybody with kids is getting $1000 for each kid, retired folks are getting $2000 each just for being old. If you are buying your first home the government will slip you a cool 21K.

Young childless renters get fuck all.

The hope is we’ll spend the money on plasma TVs and fast food to stimulate the retail sector in time for Christmas.

Meanwhile I have become a smoker who is bothered by cigarette smoke. Fate having yet another little ironic dig at my expense. I swear cigarette smoke, in anything less than a class 3 gale, will stream directly into my nearest eye. Even in wind you can see the smoke fighting, resisting, trying to return to complete its mission to annoy me ceaselessly.

I was going to say annoy the living shit out of me. But I have no idea what living shit is. Doesn’t sound like something one would want within one. You’d think you’d want it annoyed out of you. But I can’t speak for everyone.

I'd rather be a ten year old cheerleader than a GWB

Last year P4’s cheerleading team won state and got 4th at nationals. This year they got 6th at state and won the nationals. Obviously the judges at these things are drunkards.

Meanwhile,

Sara Palin reminds me of the female villain on Kim Possible. At least I could see her going that way after a time. Some long black rubber gloves, crazy goggles…

What’s-his-name, the guy she’s running with, he’s looking more and more like Hank Hill’s dad.



Obama worries me too. He fits the profile in US politics for getting shot at. He should try to stand behind Sara Palin if possible.

And poor old GWB, what a time he’s had. Squeaked in by a whisker through some mighty dodgy election shenanigans and Inherited the Kingdom of Clinton, booming economy, all the soldiers on their own side, blowjobs in the Oval Office, and what happened? It all fell to shit on him, poor bastard.

9/11, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay naked prisoner stacking, Iraq, more Afghanistan, an anthrax scare, more Iraq, and to top it all off, the end of Free-market Capitalism and one of the corner-stones of US foreign policy in the most spectacular economic disaster yet seen. And of course more Iraq and Afghanistan.

It certainly wasn’t all his fault, for some of it he was just lucky. Yup, Clinton spent his two terms playing bad saxophone, eating Big Macs and inventing new uses for cigars while all GWB's cigars exploded in his face.

(muted trumpet)