Grok This

If you compressed 750 million years of Earth's history -- that's back to a time before life existed -- into a year, the Declaration of Independence would be signed seven seconds before midnight of December 31st.

They Should . . .

 . . .  print this out and send a copy to the mother of every starving child in Somalia. They'd really get a kick out of it.

Quote of the Day

From a wraparound-sunglassed rapper-cum Bedouin-looking dude, among the throng of rebels whooping and chanting near the drainage ditch where Gaddafi was yanked out and whacked, speaking to a British news camera in a very heavy Arabic accent, addressing the deceased "King of Kings":

"I will go to Paradiss and you will go to Hell, in'sh'allah!" (hearty chuckles all round)

A Couple of Folk Seriously Watching Their Asses Right About Now

They would be:

Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen

Bashar Al-Assad of Syria

Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa of Bahrain

Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia

Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria

and presumably half a dozen or more rulers of failed African states.

Regrettably, we cannot yet add to this list Kim-jong-il of North Korea. The key words here are “not yet.”

And look, they’re doing it all by themselves, with no intevention from “The World’s Policeman.”

That is what I call progress.

Two Sentences We'll Never Hear again; One Regrettably, One Very Happily

"Apple CEO Steve Jobs started off his keynote speech with a dramatic flourish, announcing the highly-anticipated . . ."

"A defiant Muammar Gaddafi on Monday appeared on Libyan TV, lashing out at . . ."

Kindling Part II: The Dumbness

My Kindle 3 arrived yesterday. I was so excited I could barely wait to try it out.

Works GREAT! I thought as I watched the crisp text on the screen, while downloading a book from Amazon. Then I thought: Hmm, this is kind of dim. Where's the brightness control? I turn off the light next to me. Can't read a word. Turn on the light. Hold it under the light. Crisp, clear text! Where is the brightness control? The contrast? Google "how to increase brightness Kindle 3."

Guess what? THERE IS NO BRIGHTNESS. You CAN'T read it except under circumstances in which you would normally read a book.

Why the fuck would I want to get a little machine that I can't enjoy in dim light, that they actually SELL A $40 LIGHT FOR????

Guess what, Amazon: the operation was a great success but the patient was dead before we began.

Kindling

I have a habit that drives Brigitte nuts (she has one that drives me nuts, but more on that later). I love to read in bed. I think I've done this since I was very small, but I can't remember. I certainly didn't in boarding school. The only thing to do there after lights out was to annoy the "dorm boy/master" or whatever the fuck he was called by deliberately pronouncing the word "Countstable" the way it was supposed to be said except changing it back to the way it reads when he asked me "What was that you said just now, Robinson?" I got a huge bunch of laughs out of that one, because I was "The Yank" and wasn't supposed to be able to speak the British Language the way the folks at Tottenham Gdns. Estates did. So I got away with a lot of things, even with the masters, whom I would ridicule mercilessly, at great risk (oh believe me, I always paid for it in the end).

Cunstable. Take that, Bothwick. Cunstable. That's what I said.

Anyway, It disturbs Brigitte because invariably I have to have a source of light. (Well, duh.) But these stupid Itty-Titty book light fuckers burn out on a regular basis an the only other source is my table halogen . . . which people in Japan at dawn see rise majestically every time I turn it on.

So yes!! Instead of lugging Gerald Durrell's massive 1,000-page-plus biography and the Titty light I will have a KINDLE. Three weeks of battery power!!!!!!!! (The lying fucks.)

 I have to go empty the dishes now but at some point I'll tell you what Brigitte does that annoys me. If I could only think of something . . .

New Horror Flicks

Don't you think we need more horror flicks? No, I mean really horror. Kind of like the one I watched the other day where two men, hands tied behind their backs against a white wall, got decapitated in living color, one in spectacular chainsaw fashion and the other just mugged like a goat.

Oh quick "Well, why did you watch?"

Because I had to watch these two Mexican men's lives being snuffed out in Hollywood glory because YOU HAVE TO. "Scarface" is no longer a fantasy. The drug trade is no longer a game. These people are monsters. Fuck Afghanistan. Launch 2,000 drones on these cabrons and WIPE THEM ALL OUT.

Oliver Stone, get your ass on the task. It's obvious you're the only one qualified.

New Struggle

Looks like I'm now going to have to fight for this boy:

Hang in there, Tai-chan!

Fall Poem

The tinkle of a Lulu bell

The hiss of rain on autumn streets

A sleeping Brigou dreaming dreams

Describe the place my cosmos meets.

How Steve Made Me

No, this story should be more accurately titled "How Steve Unmade Me," since I wasn't made by the time Steve got to me.

At the relevant time I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Macintosh came out. Quicker than you could say "split" a friend of mine had one.

So I had to get one. For some reason I wasn't at all interested in these clunky boxes that came along, all called "Packard" or "HP" or "IBM." Nope, even a USED Mac was better than them.

What's up 2-Nite?

Seeing as how I'm in such an expansive mood, I was wondering how you eighty or so followers would feel like getting together right here in my living room this evening? I mean, no pressure, I'm making Pizza anyway, so an extra 80 of you wouldn't be overmuch. (And you can't smell it yet, but there's even  a hint of Hermès, the brand of men's, uh . . . perfume so ridiculous you have to reacquaintify yourself with, I believe the game's name is Twister in order to actually type it . . . .

Just as long as you realize that Brigitte's bathroom is off limits, mine in the only good one, and no, you can not take a bath, and if you don't bring your own wine, Balzac is a trusted friend that will deliver you to the ambulance with infinite compassion, then a good time should be had by all.

Balzac

Progress

Did you know that, according to the psychiatric thinking of the time, when I was a child, I could have been lobotomized? Not only could I have been routinely lobotomized, it would have been by the method of pushing the equivalent of large knitting needles behind your eyes while you were in a coma from electroshock therapy and just wagging them around inside your head until they'd cut as many connections as the "surgeons" saw fit?

Then you'd hopefully be cured. Yes, the surgeon's rabbit's paw, "hopefully." This, my dear friends, is WITHIN MY LIFETIME.

Thank god for Tom Cruise and his eternal wisdom.

A Supercomputer that Confirms the Past!

A supercomputer in America predicted the revolutions in Egypt and Libya and located where Osama Bin Laden was, according to an academic - but only after the events had happened.

Kalev Leetaru from the University of Illinois fed over 100 million articles into the University of Tennessee SGI Altix supercomputer Nautilus. The computer analysed the mood of international news stories focusing on the incidences and locations of emotive words like 'terrible' or 'good' - which Leetaru called 'automated sentence mining' - before converting them into geographical co-ordinates.

Using the tone and location of the reports, Nautilus predicted the outcome of the Arab Spring and the location of Bin Laden to an area with a 125-mile radius in northern Pakistan, when many experts thought Bin Laden was hiding in Afghanistan.

In his study 'Culturomics 2.0: Forecasting Large-Scale Human Behaviour Using Global News Media Tone in Time and Space', Leetaru explained: "Applying tone and geographic analysis to a 30-year worldwide news archive, global news tone is found to have forecasted the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, including the removal of Egyptian President Mubarak, predicted the stability of Saudi Arabia (at least through May 2011), estimated Osama Bin Laden's likely hiding place as a 200km radius in Northern Pakistan that includes Abbotabad, and offered a new look at the world's cultural affiliations."

Leetaru said that although his study was done retrospectively to things that had already happened, it could be adapted to work in the present.

OMG. OMFG.OMG.OMFG.OMFGG.OMG. OMFG.OMG.OMFG.OMFGG.OMG. OMFG.OMG.OMFG.OMFGG.OMG. OMFG.OMG.OMFG.OMFGG.OMG. OMFG.OMG.OMFG.OMFGG.OMG. OMFG.OMG.OMFG.OMFGG.OMG. OMFG.OMG.OMFG.OMFGG.OMG. OMFG.OMG.OMFG.OMFGG.OMG. OMFG.OMG.OMFG.OMFGG.OMG. OMFG.OMG.OMFG.OMFGG.OMG. OMFG.OMG.OMFG.OMFGG.OMG. OMFG.OMG.OMFG.OMFGG.OMG. OMFG.OMG.OMFG.OMFGG.OMG. OMFG.OMG.OMFG.OMFGG.OMG.


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OMG. OMFG.OMG.OMFG.OMFGG.

Bagger Bastard Part II

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs died. He was only two years older than me. He did nothing wrong! By all rights he should have lived to a hundred. If someone had crazily ever come up to me and said "Steve Jobs is going to die at 56 -- only you have the power to stop this happening. Unfortunately, in order to do so, you must die in his place." I would have done it a hundred times over.

It's just not fair! My father died at 86 after fighting the Nazis and being a good guy for the rest of his life. He died of old age. That's fair. But the dying of Steve is just not fair . . . the "god" that so many people evoke is a laughing, vengeful god . . . an aberration of that kindly old man we all know. No, more like a bitter, arbitrary god, given to sadistic displays of angry impulses, a god who looks at His work and frequently gets pissed off and destroys 50% of it whenever he hasn't had His morning cigarette.

Not that God has anything to do with Steve. I mourn the loss of him. There will never be another Steve. there never has been and there never will be again. He has joined the ranks of the Impossibles, the true superhumans who somehow one day decided to come down and join us mortals here on Earth.

I guarantee, much like Captain Kirk will echo on into ages who only can read of him on history pads, Steve will live on among us for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.

Go good, Stevie boy. The garage was a good choice.

Could I be . . . DEPRESSED?

Nah, that's not possible. But the clinician in me argues with the denier in me. I see signs where there are none; to wit, my accidentally misspelling of "argues" above.

Just the fact that I not only let it stand but actually commented on it confirms my initial diagnosis: I am depressed. Depressed people let not-typos get by. (A not-typo is an actual grammatical or punctuational mistake, like saying thing like  "and I could tell the passenger's were all on dope." See? Apostrophes don't just hop along for the typo-ride, they appear because you deliberately typed them.)(Because you are depressed and just don't care any more.)

So (left hand fingers thrumming on desktop while right hand does all the typing) what can be done? What SHOULD be done? I'm now seriously thinking about resurrecting Bagger Bastard. To shake you clod of sheep of my flock AWAKE again.

Hell-OOOO . . . . (rapping of knuckles on forehead sound) . . . . ANYBODY HOME?

I should mind-slough my depression onto you with my meta-psychic techniques developed over YEARS and mind-parasite YOUR feelings of goodness, happiness and general self-worth. Oh wait, that's Facebook.

I hate it when I insult my intelligence. I am not depressed; I'm merely praying for an Uzbek Spring.