New One

On my roof last evening as the sun was going down. I was cementing the gutters running from the peaks of my roof. This was real work. Good, not hurting anybody, get lost in concentration work.

When cementing your roof gutters you have to raise the shingles at the gutter-line and apply the cement, a thick and viscous material that is essentially a tar substitute, evenly along the edge while not laying it on too thick. This process provides an extra seal against water getting under the shingles. It is extra in that it is not necessary but it helps. It is the right way to do a roof.

Now, if only I can apply the same concentration and care and pride into everything that I do, I may become something more than I am now.

Hexagram 7

The Army.

The army needs perseverance
And a strong man.
Good fortune without blame.

Sorry about the absence. Been mulling over some things. Thinking about what needs to be done in my life and with this blog. It is funny how things become important to you, like this blog. It is also funny how you can lose sight of not really where you want to be, but how you go about getting there.

I meandered. I tried and got lost on some short cuts. But now I've learned from my mistakes. I've gotten a better lay of the land and I'm going forward. And I'm going to try and not let the world get in the way of me living. Everything that is not important and productive I'm going to let slide.

I promised myself that I was going to write a novel; I'm back on that.

I promised that I was going to get better a paying job; I'm back on that, too.

Of course the answer was right in front of my face: FOCUS. I'm narrowing down my projects and picking very few things to concentrate on. I'm going to perfect my skills in one programming language. I'm going to study for one certification exam. I'm going to write one story at a time.

And as far as the blog is conerned, I'm making changes here, also. I'm going to try something a little different. I'm going start wittling away at my shotgun blast approach to blogging and see where it takes me. If it means dismantling my online persona and this blog and rebuilding it into something else, I'll do it.

Change is good.

Hexagram 23

Splitting Apart

Splitting Apart. It does not further one
To go anywhere

I haven't been feeling well lately - As if you haven't been able to tell from the past posts.

My body feels run down and I've been so angry and nothing is helping. The Yoga and Tai Chi offer a brief respite from the stressors of my daily life.

Finding it hard to concentrate on simple things. Can't seem to go to sleep easily. Almost everything on the TV annoys me. Can't wake up early enough to do my exercises before the hellish commute.

I cut off all of my hair yesterday. Buzzed short.

The word chrysalis in my head and in reading. A message?

I won't be posting anything for a while here, at least until next Monday. Goodbye.

A Slow Moving Kind of Death

I can feel the anger rise in me. It starts just below my heart in my solar plexus and rises. My heart feels constricted. I can feel its beating increase.

Spread out before me like some horrible scene from an end of the world movie is an ocean of cars crammed into a river all flowing sporadicly. Red brake lights flash on and off. Start and stop. Cars gun their engines speeding for thirty feet only to have to slam their brakes - red lights flash - and come to complete stops only inches from each other's bumpers.

And I hate my commute. My morning drive in my shiny blue coffin.

My god! Highways and morning commutes are the creations of some devil. Forget about apples and forbidden knowledge! Damnation is driving to work. Hell is a gridlocked highway. The morning commute is evil in-car-nate.

Heny Ford was a son of a bitch.

My hands tighten on the wheel. Knuckles go white. I find myself screaming the words "Fucking hell" as loud as I can between gritted teeth!

This morning commute, this hour on the road every bloody morning is a Bataan-like death march. Is this life? Is this what life is supposed to be like? A slow, brake-crunching, pocket of teasing moving highway only to arrive at an underpaid job under bleaching white lights.

Be my second in seppuku, my kaishakunin. Let me end this hell existence of being chained to my desk like a slave Judah Ben-Hur, under the lash and rowing to the beat of the drum. Let me live and die with some shred of dignity.

And the how the hell was your morning?

My Own Private Intel-Commando Force

When Seymour Hersh broke the story that Rumsfeld had a secret commando force that was gathering intelligence within Iran, more people should have started to worry.

Our government needs to be asking some very important questions in an oversight committee like: How will this affect the CIA's effectiveness? Exactly what are these guys allowed to do? Can they kidnap people? We know they can interrogate people, but can they torture them? Can they disappear them? Are they really operating within the borders of other nations that we are not currently occupying or at war with?

And this secret little force most likely operates above the law and is not beholden to the rules of combat and the Geneva Convention. You know that makes rest of the world, the other billions of people who are not too happy with us right now, pretty worried. And when nations get worried they either do two things: They either try to hurt us or fall in with us half-heartedly.

Either effect is not good for foreign relations between possible enemies or allies. And our cowered and unbalanced press has been treating the whole thing like everything's just fine.

Having a military spy unit that can operate anywhere in the world and do whatever it wants to get the job done is fine for fiction, television, and movies, but not in the real world. And maybe that's what I find very discomforting about watching 24 on Fox: It is too close to reality. A reality that should not be praised and encouraged.

And why the hell do I have to go to a European news source to get the most in-depth reporting on something happening within our own borders? I don't want PR and propaganda. I want facts and the truth. And that's something that the news media in this coutry have largely forgotten about.

The End of Haiku

Not really. I've just ended the Kung Pow Haiku blog. I've transferred all of my haiku over to Awake, what used to be my NaNoWriMo site, and what has now become a sort of online writer's journal.

And yes, you may peek.

Bad, Bad Day

Yes, I am having a bad day.

I want to explode with the force of 10 supernovas ripping across solar systems and warping space and time. I want to send planets reeling off their orbits. I want people billions of light years away to see the light of my dying star in fifty years and say, "Wow, that guy was pissed!"

I need a drink.

Oh dear, sweet god: I need a fucking drink.

"I'm gonna knock you out!"

Complacency and success are not good for keeping alert and moving on up to that deluxe apartment in the sky. And my recent contentedness with having graduated school and getting a raise have made me extremely complacent. Hence Life coming out of the corner of my eye and landing a good one on the kisser.

The punch landed hard. A fiscally motivated hit, but it wasn't a KO punch, more like a jab, a "Hi, wake up or I'm gonna kick your ass" kind of punch. I am bloodied, but not dazed. Keep your hands up. Don't get caught flatfooted.

"Momma said knock you out."

So you tighten the purse strings, tighten your belt, and start making a plan. You find out that you charge too much, you pay too much in interest, and that you need a better paying gig.

Fine. Tear up a credit card that actually has an available balance on it. Pay down the one that is nearly maxed. I've read that you shouldn't bother saving until you manage and pay down your debt. And it makes sense; why would you want to put money away and still charge items and pay out interest for them? It's like taking two steps up and one step down when you could just take a step at a time. It's less stress and work and eventually you can start taking two steps at a time without worrying about going back down.

"Don't call it a come back."

So I'm starting to study hardcore for my certifications again. Renewed purpose is an act of will that can be invigorating if you stick with it. I find the only way for me to get things done is to be single minded to the point that it drives the people around me nuts. I have to keep moving forward toward the target. Everything else is noise and chaff.

"BLAAAAW, how ya like me now?"

So I'm going to study now. Word to ya mutha.

(Note: The author asks you to forgive the boxing analogies: He used to kickbox a little.(As for the LL Cool J references, he asks for no forgiveness.))

Thank You for Using the Time Traveling Freedom Export Co.

Welcome back to the latter half of the 20th Century. "Please exit the time machine and remember to take all of your personal belongings with you," says the friendly automated female voice as you step off of the machine onto the moving track that is conveniently matched to your machine's velocity. The weirdness of the moving floor as your feet touch the track gives you a moment of vertigo, of the world not being right. You adjust and walk.

Have you arrived at the time that you think you're supposed to be in? Iran. War. Nuclear bombs. You remember the MAD doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction of you go, we go, we all burn. Or die slowly from radioactively induced cancer and liquidization of your organs while trying to survive in a Mad Max nightmare world.

And Bush does not rule out war with Iran.

Brave new world indeed. Glad we're exporting freedom. For a while there it only sounded like we were exporting metal, fire, blood, and anguish.

Push the Button, Monkey

They conducted an experiment where a monkey had two buttons to push. When the monkey pushed the first button he would recieve a banana. The second button was connected to a machine that was wired to the monkeys brain. If the monkey pressed this other button, he would recieve extreme pleasure like an orgasm. The monkey kept pressing the pleasure button and starved himself to death.

We're all monkeys. We're also all human beings. We just need to act like it more often.

In the last 25 years we have lost a part of life that allows us to enter into adulthood and accept responsibility for ourselves and our actions. We instigate frivolous lawsuits. We ask for laws that don't make sense, don't provide security, and soften us up by taking away our own accountability. Our elected leaders pass the buck. Our "heroes," overpayed athletes, take the money and the fame but don't want the responsibility of being a role model and disregard their responsibilities to their teammates and fans.

In The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell talks about how boys were put to a test so they could pass from childhood into manhood. Motherhood is a sort of right of passage and we don't have many of those anymore (maybe that's why some women are better men than some men). These rites were performed to ensure that people understood the importance of being accountable and to ensure the survival of the tribe. Maybe the lack of rituals and acts of taking on responsibility have made us become stuck in an adolescent mode of childish selfishness on a global scale and the tribe is the less for it.

We want bling and big cars and to look beautiful and have sex with beautiful people. So the credit card companies and television give us our choices and being monkeys, we push the button: Want a hot meal, drive through and pick it up. Want to get slim, take a pill or have surgery. Want something fixed or built, pay someone else to do it for you. Want sexual gratification, go to the internet. Want money, get a credit card.

We have become content to drive through life. Drive through relationships. Drive through fiscal responsibility. And that leaves us obese, ignorant, neurotic, and in debt and close to bankruptcy.

So fuck reality TV, celebrity breakups, celebrity, no talent wannabees, revolving credit, internet porn, fast food, ignorance as cool, has-been celebrity car wreck shows, diet pills, MTV, marketing, punditry as journalism, conservative newspeak, formulaic movies, music that all sounds the same, overpaid athletes, and heroes who are only heroes because they make more money than you do.

All of those things are illusions or a perversion of the pure. They don't really matter. They are there to distract us from what's important, like spending time with the people we love, watching our spending, making sure our politicians properly represent us, and finding out more about ourselves.

We shouldn't let someone else limit our choices and our freedoms. We shouldn't let ourselves be monkeys. We should stop pushing the wrong buttons.

Catholicism "Wow!"

Finally, something us Catholics can be proud of: The Catholic Church in Spain says condoms are OK.

Of course the Vatican didn't have a comment. They're probably working on moving a sex offending pederast priest into a more remote parrish to keep him out of trouble.

Cult of Stupidity

When CBS News ran a report based on false documents, the White House, along with many other agencies and organizations cried foul. An independent investigation was initiated and blame was laid and people were fired. Then CBS issued an apology for not thouroughly checking the veracity of their claims and documents.

That'll do CBS, that'll do.

Now what I'm completely disgusted with is that Bush's White House and Cabinet invaded Iraq based on false documents. Lives were lost. The moral and ethical conduct of our government was called into question, as was the soundness of our armed forces and intelligence agencies and the people who ran them. And no one got fired.

Sure, Tenet quit after a while, but thousands of lives were lost because of these false documents and claims and no one lost their job. Not Rumsfeld or Wolfowitz or Rice. Hell, they're promoting Rice, a person who thought that a memo entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US" was not important.

And our fellow countrymen even reelected the whole bunch of them so they could run the country with the same bang-up type performance they've exhibited in the past.

Thanks for welcoming me to Jonestown, Jim. I'm quite parched from the flight. You wouldn't happen to have any cyanide-laced Kool-Aid around, would you?

Conditioning Program

"You can run a government without police if your conditioning program is tight enough..." - William S. Burroughs from The Ticket That Exploded.

Television stations are afraid to broadcast material that may be racy in the least saucy kind of way for fear of FCC retribution and fines.

They pixelated a cartoon ass out of fear.

It's like watching Austin Powers say randy instead of horny. Pay no never mind to the fact that he says shag as many times as he wants. I wonder if the shagging FCC even know what that means?

Philosophy Vs. Math

Numbers do not lie. 2+2=4. 10 divided by 5 = 2.

Philosophy on the other hand is an exercise in thought based on assumptions and beliefs.

I'd choose math over philosophy when dealing with my hard-earned dollars any day. You can't balance your checkbook or do your taxes with philosophy. If you did, you'd probably end up broke and in jail.

But our governement seems to think that using philosophy is a good way of solving the Social Security problem. And since their philosophy of preemptive war, constant war, torture interrogation, and limiting freedom have worked so well all ready, why shouldn't they be able to just muck up our futures any old way they please?

Bravo.

You know; if I was an E.T. or alien from another world I would probably tune into the Bush Presidency as some kind of primetime comedy show. But I'm not an E.T. I'm an American, and this is one of the worse sitcoms I've ever witnessed. I hope they at least break for commercial because I'm bleeding from the eyes and ears right now.

Having a Good Time

Our fearless leader wants a party for barely winning the popular vote while people are dying in the streets of a far off land.

Nothing like having a little champagne before you dance on someone's grave.

Proposals and Car Wrecks, Or How the Universe Evens Things Out

The day after I asked my then girlfriend and now wife to marry me and she said yes, I was rear ended and sent across two lanes of oncoming traffic onto the shoulder of the road. I was told by the docs that I was always going to feel some kind of discomfort. And now, up there on the roof, replacing the half of it that got eaten away by the three hurricanes that had their way with Central Florida and skipped town like an easy lover, I am feeling pain.

Lots of bloody pain. All across my lower back. But like a player in the game, I take the pain killers, I go back up onto the roof and put my mind elsewhere; like on the ladder, in my shoulder carrying bundles of shingles, or on the grey, grey sky always threatening rain.

But I digress.

What I'm trying to say is that the day after the best thing that ever happened to me happened, one of the worse things that could have happened to me did. And the Universe levels the playing field in her need to keep the books balanced.

I still think I came out ahead.

Back on the roof. Goodbye.

Under a Flat Grey Sky

Roofing today with the father-in-law. Let's do an equipment check:

33 Bundles of roofing shingles: Check
Ladder: Check
Nail gun: Check
Nails: Check
Father-in-law that knows what he's doing: Check
Beer: Check
Scotch: Check (Don't worry, this is for tonight. I'd never drink on the job. And having a beer is not drinking - It's having a beer.)

Rock'n Roll!

If you don't hear from me on Monday that means that I have injured myself in a freak roofing accident. If this happens, expect me to be laid up in bed with a book, a big glass of water, a Johnny Walker Black on the rocks, and painkillers. Now that's a party.

Charlie Don't Surf

Robert Duvall's courageously mad and misguided Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore says those lines in Coppola's Apaocalypse Now as his reason for taking a village during the Vietnam War.

"Charlie don't surf!"

And the people of Darfur don't surf either, so why give them any aide? There's only something like 70,000 people dead in a genocidal purging that the world could have quelled if it had stepped in earlier. And the killing's still going on. But Darfur doesn't surf, so I guess their screwed.

But the people in Thailand and India, with their miles of beautiful surf and sand, well...if they don't surf, at least they allow us Westerners to do so. Tsunami victims get our aide. Black people in the deserts of Africa don't. Sorry. Maybe you should have started killing people near a beach.

Don't worry people of Darfur. We'll feel badly about it later and wring our hands in sorrow after we admit that there was more we should have done...like in Rwanda. So you have that going for you, at least.

Contemplating the Rain

The rains are here and whenever it rains I am reminded of Ray Bradbury's short story, "There Will Come Soft Rains," which takes its title from a poem by Sarah Teasdale. The story is about an automated house that begins the day preparing for the family that lives there, but no one lives there anymore. No one lives anywhere anymore. The end of the world has come and our automated houses and appliances still cook and clean for us, the dead. I know it seems like doom and gloom, but there is a gentle kindness to this story that I feel is ultimately about hope and faith, and not only about nuclear annihilation.

The house waits for its owners, preparing and cleaning everyday until the day that it won't, always doing these chores in the hopes that the people that once lived there will live there again. Sort of like faith in god or humanity or goodness, or something like that. We are the house. We are the appliances.

And outside, here and in the story, the rain is coming down, lighter than before, filling puddles and keeping people inside like it was the end of the world, again.

Morning: Beautiful Day

I love mornings, even though I dislike waking. Smell the irony.

Pulling into downtown off of the highway and the birds of the city, the various pigeons and black birds and finches, are all taking flight as U2 gets together at Slane Castle with thousands of their friends all filling my car via CD. When birds take flight it makes me feel like I, too, have grace and can ascend to higher places myself. And in the midst of these morning euphorias I am usually jolted back down to the real world by the beeping of a horn - but there isn't one today.

Walking from my parking garage, the homeless woman, dressed in soiled jeans too big for her with her unkempt blond hair and the baggy red sweater, is on the corner having a conversation with the person no one but she can see. I pass on by and can smell that stale damp smell the homeless get from sleeping outside.

Across the street from her, the sun shines through the dust filling the air from the new construction in beams heating the morning coolness. Digging machines and hammering machines thump thump thump in a rhythm barely discernible from the other noises of the site that will someday hold a mega-movieplex, along with those boutique stores you always pass and wonder how they stay in business when you never see anyone buying anything from them.

I walk on toward the office.

Rounding the corner two motorcycle cops in their NAZI-like boots and white shirts and reflective, cliched sunglasses are standing at the corner doing what cops do best; nothing. One is shorter than the other and images of Abbot and Costello and Laurel and Hardy swim through my head in not-so-glorious black and white.

I walk on and the rest of the scene comes into view: Some kind of filming is setting up. Through the magic of movies the production has turned the very cool, antiquated building across the street, with its green tin siding and wood molding that you only see in classy old cities, into an old-time city store front. The kind of store front you find on side streets in Paris, New York, and London with the fruit stand and little cardboard signs telling the kind of fruit or vegetable and what the going price is. I've rarely shopped at these quaint little places; the last time was in Paris where I purchased the most delicious apple I've ever had from the mountains in the countryside of France. The time before that was in New York while looking for an advertising gig. My wife and I ate that apple the day we went to Sacre Cour, and that too was a beautiful day that had a sky like a Maxfield Parish painting.

I think about how most of us only know of these kinds of places from movies and television. Old city fruit stands and groceries with the food out where you can smell it and touch it and how odd it felt to actually have shopped from what seemed a simulacrum of the thing and how I was seeing the fake now. I wanted to go over there and buy an apple.

In the building a woman enters the elevator with me. She's near the buttons and asks which floor. I tell her my floor and the door closes and I feel like I just woke up, again.

Fawn Adopted by Ridgeback

This is so damn cute that it makes we wanna puke. From an email via the Dish:



"A lady found the fawn under her step (they think the doe might have been hit by a car) .. her Ridge Back dog is helping look after it. The family named the fawn Bella. Once she has regained her strength (she was not in good shape when the family found her) they are going to send her to some friends who (in the past) raised two orphan deer and released them to the wild. Right now she is being bottle fed. Their dog (Hogan) has basically taken over. The fawn even shares his bed."





What I find incredible is the gentleness that is capable from a dog that is over a 100 lbs and was used to hunt lions in Africa.

The Best Little Whorehouse in Germany

Mercedes Mueller, a brothel madame from Germany, is donating a portion of her house's proceeds for tsunami relief efforts.

You know it's bad when the whores are chipping in - Bless their little gold hearts.

Animal Kingdom

My Animal Kingdom pics are up at my photoblog on Buzznet.

Go ahead and take a gander.

I Miss Paris

Found this blogger who was in Paris for New Year's Eve (the lucky bastard!). After going through his site with pics of the pastries and Paris and his descriptions of his time there, I am feeling a longing for Paris.



I miss the Hotel Langlois and waking to the smell of freshly baked goodies from the nearby patisserie. I miss the parks and public spaces and the way the people dressed and how there was some kind of art almost everywhere you looked. I miss the puppet shows on the Metro. I miss eating in cafes and watching everyone order wine for lunch and drinking espressos.

I just miss Paris.

Hemingway was right: "...wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for all of Paris is a moveable feast.”

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Feeling weird. Time has become very tangible with the passing of the old year and the beginning of the new. I can feel it, like running your hands through cobwebs, strands of time and detris caught in its web clinging to me. I can't shake it off. It won't go away.

And then there's the strange dreams. Feel like something's going to break, going to give, and this time for real.Soon.

So what does that mean for me? For us?

Not sure yet. But something's going to happen.

Consider yourself warned.

Domesticated and Endangered Species

Now that we've heard about the human misery that was a result of the tsunami, we're starting to learn about the animals.

In an earlier post I discussed how the animals in the devastated areas knew to leave before the waves hit, but the animals that were domesticated, especially people's pets that were abandoned in the chaos, are in trouble and stand to suffer as much as there human owners if they don't get medical treatment and fresh water or food. Not to mention the danger that both human and animal waste pose to a typhoid outbreak.

Many animals on farms and in homes had no where to run, unlike their counterparts in the wild. As a result, many of the domesticated animals that were chained or restrained in any way suffered broken bones and other injuries. One veterinarian is headed to India to help.

In habitats, like the Wanariset Orangutan Reintroduction Center in Kalimantan, Timor, endangered animals that are being protected and nurtured through human intervention are in great danger of losing more of their numbers because of the reconstruction that will follow. The orangutans, like many other endangered species, are in danger of extinction due to deforestation or food shortages.

To rebuild the disaster stricken nations' infrastructure, people will have to clear forests for lumber and encroach on other natural areas for other resources.

A Very Long Engagement

What a great movie! My lovely wife, J, and I went to see A Very Long Engagement last night at the very cool Enzian Theater in Maitland, FL. The movie, the latest from the brilliant director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who also made Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children, and Amelie, is very moving, funny, emotional, haunting, and just great.

The story is about a superstitious woman who is in love with a man that goes off to fight in the trenches of World War 1. He is left for dead in No Man's Land, the area between the trenches of opposing armies, but Mathilde (Audrey Tautou) cannot believe that he is dead and searches for him after the war.

I think that maybe you should go see this movie.

Welllll...What are you waiting for? Go. Now.

Dead Deer Strikes Back at Hunter: Film at 11

A hunter has contracted TB from a deer he killed. This is the first time this type of TB has jumped from animal to human.

Maybe those deer are just trying to level the playing field a little, huh?

Haiku, Where Are You?

I've been neglecting Kung Pow Haiku, and for that I apologize.

Please notice that I've started commposing Haiku again.

Guernica Vs. Fallujah

"Smoke is everywhere," an Iraqi told the BBC (Nov 11). "The house some doors from mine was hit during the bombardment on Wednesday night. A 13-year-old boy was killed. His name was Ghazi. A row of palm trees used to run along the street outside my house--now only the trunks are left There are more and more dead bodies on the streets and the stench is unbearable."

Survival of the Smartest

Maybe they don't have an iPod (well, I don't either; I think they're a waist of money) or drive a nice car, but everyone from the indiginous Jarawa tribe from the Andaman Islands survived the tsunami. It is thought that the tribes'

"ancient knowledge of the movement of wind, sea and birds may have saved the indigenous tribes from the tsunami."

This just shows us that there are different types of intelligence and that we still have much to learn from so called "primitive" peoples and our own hastily forgotten pasts.

We've lost too much knowledge in relation to the world, how it works, and how we live with it. By trading a more intuitive and slower way of life for a faster, more gadgety reliant lifestyle, we've lost a great deal of practical, useful knowledge. Knowledge that could some day save our lives.

Bon and Buddhism

An interesting artilcle on Tibet's religions here.

The quiet, yet resounding truth within Buddhism has always fascinated me. If you have wondered about the Eastern religions and philosophies, this article has some good information on the history of Tibet in relation to its spiritual and mystical elements.

Oh, yeah: Om

Religion: Jedi

You, too, can become a Jedi at Jedi Academy in Romania. Learn to weild a lightsaber (I have always wanted one of those) and other "skills" from the Star Wars universe.

Wow...that is sooo sad. But I still want a lightsaber.

Magnum Force

How does one get a job testing condoms for Consumer Reports?

Caught Stealing

We elect them as our chosen representatives and pay their salaries and expenses for serving us, but they don't want transparency in their dealings. The harder it is to investigate a crime, the least likely the criminals will come to justice. And since we've chosen them to make laws in our names they feel that they have the right to limit the extent to which any of them can be scrutinized for unethical and possibly illegal acts and behavior.

So let me get this straight: You representatives (and you know who you are(Tom DeLay, of Texas, and friends) make laws that either take away or limit our freedoms and most of the time cause uneeded spending and frustration, but not only do you want more freedom than the rest of us, but you don't want anyone prying into your dirty laundry?

These people, our representatives, are essentially the waiters of our government. Their asking to be elected is tantamount to them asking may I take your order.

I'd like a balanced budget, fair laws, prudent taxes and tax cuts, and a side of ethical and lawful treatment of your duties, please. And there's a tip of relection if you do this right, OK?

Maybe we need our country governed by the same type of people that ruined a $101 billion company, eh? Is it too much to ask the people who run our country with our blessing and support to act like the rest of us do and abide by ethics and the laws of the land?

Maybe in America it is.

A Little Something Called Due Process

Could someone become the Count of Monte Cristo?

Ever seen when agent Sean Archer goes undercover as Castor Troy at a top secret prison and has to escape to clear his name and get his real identity back in the movie Face/Off?

Just some great ideas that can come to a life near you, maybe, if our government does away with due process for "terror" prisoners and builds a jail where they can hold people indefinetly without trial.

And I'm only paranoid because they're all out to get me.

Dreams, Jellyfish, and the Nagging Feeling that I'm Missing Something

Since Christmas eve, my dreams have been very strange.

I've had dreams that I'd awoken from and could not tell if they had really happened, like some repressed secret history. I've also had dreams in which after they ended and I awoke I had this nagging feeling that there was something important from my dream I was supposed to remember; something I needed to help get me through the day. All of this dreaming has become quite annoying because in each case my recollection of the dreams is hazy and seems just out of reach.

I'd share my dreams with you but they've kind of scared me a bit, so just imagine how they'd irreversibly warp your fragile little minds! (And no, I haven't had the one, lately, about me running barefoot, pushing a shopping cart, through the endless department store with the blue-light special sirens spinning and bathing me in blue strobes and the hillbilly at the register ringing everything I've thrown into the cart up to $1.98.)

And I'm wondering what do jellyfish dream of when they sleep?


Anyway, here is a site called Dream Tree that has a section on famous dreams by famous people.

And here is a site about dreams at Sleepfoundation.org.

Enjoy yourself and have a nice day - I'm going to get some more caffeine.

Elephants Save Lives inTsunami

I've always liked elephants. They were my favorite animals at the circus. Hannibal nearly conquered Rome with them as part of his cavalry. And elephants saved the lives of several people in Thailand before the tsunami hit.

And as I noticed after our hurricanes here in Florida, there seemed to be no dead animals after natural disasters. Animals' senses can pick up the impending trouble before we can, thereby allowing them to head to safer ground.

Dumb animals my ass.

You can read more on this and other weirdness at Posthuman Blues.