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prolonged sausage party of one
Saturday, April 10 2004
Late this morning Gretchen was listening to the stream of Air America, the new liberal radio network being developed as a counterweight to such splotchy blowhards as Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly. She wanted to hear it with the superior house-filling qualities of the living room stereo, so I got the stream going on WGUS, my low-wattage FM radio station. We caught Al Franken in the middle of one of his many shows. I will say this about the heroes of the resurgent left: they're willing to work hard, a lot harder than their constituency of druggies, war protestors, and welfare queens.
Because I prefer my radio waves to be about information relevant to me, I set Gretchen up with her own FM radio station on the computer in the first floor office. I used one of those tiny Mp3PlayerStore.com Chinese-made $9 FM stereo transmitters that transmit hundreds of yards out of the box. (Instead of going for their website, I'd look for their stuff on Ebay.) I can't get over what good transmitters they are, especially if you remove them from their cigarette-lighter housing, encase them in shielding, and draw the antenna out on your own wire. You can also alter the frequencies they transmit on by altering puddles of solder along their dorsal spines. (Info on BH1417F, the chip it's based on, can be found here.)
I just had a great idea for a movie fade! It's my idea and I expect royalties. You are watching the scene and the camera draws back to show that it's just another window open on a crowded Windows desktop. There's another window open playing the next scene and the camera swoops in on it.
Parse this paragraph from the Boston Globe:
Militants hit a U.S. air base with mortars in Balad, north of Baghdad, killing an American airman. Other fighters attacked government buildings and police stations in Baqouba, setting off firefights in which about 40 Iraqis were killed. Several U.S. troops were wounded, said Capt. Issam Bornales, spokesman for the 1st Infantry Division's 3rd Brigade.
If I was from outer space and read that passage, I'd immediately assume that the American species was a super sort of beast, perhaps much bigger and having much larger teeth than the species of pathetic creatures known as Iraqis.
What do you think the chances were that those Japanese hostages in Iraq would be released without direct communication between Japanese officials and hostage-takers? I'd say those chances are small. The telephone and the internet allow any hostage-taker of moderate competence access to the highest levels of Japanese government. My guess is that the hostage-takers were paid off, big time. And Japan is probably going to withdraw its troops in a couple weeks. It will probably announce that withdrawal before the Japanese hostages are actually released.
What's with Geocaching? I can't imagine getting excited about anything someone might plant in the wilderness unless it was hallucinogenic. Which leads me to my next theory: I'll bet Geocaching is actually a wonderful new method of secret drug distribution. I love it! A P2P network of material object exchange! It's Gift Culture by way of Napster, all managing to further metastacize the freedom discovered on peer-to-peer networks, violating laws far more fundamental than copyright.
Back to Iraq...
"There is no military solution"
Why must I read a French newspaper to see this? I was actually reading the Washington Post when I saw this line, but it was being quote from Le Monde.
Every war is a bet, a bet that, as the Ruler, the money and lives (another currency of money) you spend will be worth the results. How much have we spent on this bet, 100 Billion? Small countrys declaring war have the additional risk of being wiped out entirely. Then again, so do big democracies. The way the shit is adding up for Bush, the losses he suffers might not be much worse than the humiliations offered by a conquering foe.
In case you couldn't tell, I was hopped-up on marijuana, pseudoephedrine, and gin when I wrote the preceding entry. It had been a prolonged sausage party of one. When Gretchen burst in at about 1:00am to ask me to turn down the thumping bass component of my blaring indie rock soundtrack, she found me wearing a guilty expression. Figuring she could already smell the pot, I owned up to it (not that she even cared - but I don't want her thinking me a drug addict). She wanted to know why I felt the need to hide it from her. But the truth is that I wasn't really hiding it from her, I was just doing it by myself. It's not like she'd want any.
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