An update on the rathole situation: A few days ago someone put trays full of pisin in front of the holes. Now they're all knocked upside-down.

They're getting pissed.

Lest this become an all-bike blog (and take away from its focus on grave robbery), I'll not go into much detail about riding bikes on Friday. But for bike nerd posterity I'll list some of the bikes I saw.

• Sharpest bike in the parade: Definitely the Phat Cycle "Limo" tandem. The luxury sedan of bicycles. It was from Urban Bikes, the store where I got that fork to chop. The employees were all representin' on the Phat line of stretched-out cruisers, including a beautiful chopper.


• They employed the method of making the guy who stokes on another tandem also the guy who yells stuff into a microphone carried by a third biker. Those bike guys, they'll figure out how to do anything on bikes!


• Some lady had this bad-ass snub-nosed muscle bike of some sort, but it was tough to ride and I don't blame her for just biking a little while. People tend to join up and leave the ride constantly, as the noise attracts other curious bikers.


• This guy named Chopper Bob rode Hoser, a ten-speed with a second set of forks jammed on the end of the first pair and secured with expoxy and hose clamps to make a big J.


• An old velocipede and an old proto-bike from the Wright Bros.


• The Red Mouth Ghost on his xtracycle.


• A guy with no seat (brave, brave man) and a guy with no chain


• A guy playing a trumpet


• A guy with a big 3-foot pickle strapped to the back of his bike. The pickle had some sort of historical significance to CM, but we were far away from the speaker explaining why due to the metric shitload of attendees. Someone observed that it seemed like the "blessed are the cheesemakers" scene in Life of Brian.


• Of course, the evercircling couriers: Riding between two lanes of oncoming traffic(!), riding 2x2 on the berm between lanes on a concrete overpass(!!), and playing chicken with CTA buses(!!!)


• The owner of Urban Bikes, Tim, who sold me the fork to chop but strongly objected to my modification of "such a beautiful old frame". When I tried to tell him that I was only going to add to the bike, he stuck his fingers in his ears and chanted "LA LA LA LA LA" until I shut up. That happens to me a lot.


• Two rollerbladers who rapped about how they were there representing workers of the sex industry.


• Someone wearing a big sign that said CAPITALISM BITES with lots of little piranha on strings.


• About 350 other hooting honking howling hooligans, as shown here.
  

Here are some preliminary photos of Noam Chopsky.

I just wanted to show a picture of these huge fucking ratholes in our backyard. Compare that pile of dirt to the window behind it. They've gotta have a whole fucking Nimh city going on down there. While one rat doesn't scare me, the number of rats it would take to accomplish this, the tip of the rat-city iceberg, scares the living shit out of me.

Well I finally figured out that that funky bike I saw at last month's Critical Mass was called a "lowracer". It actually differed from this one pictured in that the guy was between the wheels and had his feet up in the air. I can't imagine how fast these things could get goin'*, and as a former go-karter, I know that perceived speed increases as you get closer to the ground. It must have been a real treat for this guy to bike on city streets, since in traffic he'd be a smear. He could ride right under an SUV!

That picture came from this site. Check it out, lots of weird bikes there. Make sure you click on the picture at right to see this wacky tridem, which has only one crank for all three riders. This site seems to be dedicated to the funky things people build in order to go fast under their own power.

*70 km/hr on rails, according to this site.

Project: Noam Chopsky phase 1 has been completed. You can learn all about it in the upcoming Noam Chopsky site. Friday is the implementation phase. In the last few weeks of testing, I've made the following observations:

• The most dangerous person on the streets of the city is the young male. However, alone, the young male is harmless. It's only in groups that he becomes dangerous, for then he has something to prove by fucking with me. If he wants to, though, he's gotta catch me. Noone has caught me yet.


• Young males with tricked-out cars, no matter how thuggish they may appear, are allies of Noam Chopsky.


• If I don't move to phase 2 quickly, I'm going to become King of the Kiddies. They follow Noam Chopsky like I'm the damn Pied Piper.

...and issue #23 of The Roommate is finally up.

When I was a little kid in Social Studies class, I was fascinated by the Gold Standard, and the idea that a dollar is backed by a dollar's worth of gold in Fort Knox, and I believed I had the right to take my dollars into the bank and slap them on the counter and demand their value in gold. Well, of course, it doesn't really work that way. The Coinage Act of 1792 established a "Dollar" as 371.25 grains of pure gold, and the paper currency that is backed by that Dollar became our Dollar bill... until we abandoned the Gold Standard in the '30s, although foreigners in other countries could still exchange their U.S. Dollars for gold until the '60s. Since then our money hasn't really been "Dollars"... it's been Federal Reserve Notes. Start looking up "Federal Reserve Bank" and "Gold Standard" in a search engine and you'll come across a ton of conspiracy theories about the vice grip that the Federal Reserve holds our dear citizenry in by forcing us to use their worthless pieces of paper. But the point is that I can't demand my dollar's worth in gold.

But this guy can. Some oh-so-Chicago landlord has demanded that a bank on his property pay its rent in gold dollars, as stated in the lease, which predates 1933. The gold dollars, of course, are worth about 1500% of their face value. But the lease says $1333 a month, paid in gold dollars, so... I can't really feel sorry for a bank that's been paying on a rent-controlled lease for a hundred years. I mean, $1300 a month for a six-story bank?

I'll reprint the article below, since it's from Crain's Chicago Business, which requires you to register. I'll bet you anything this guy is my landlord, Victor. I wouldn't put it past him to demand rent in gold, teeth, or firstborn children.

A Greektown landlord who would prefer to be paid rent in gold coins has won Illinois Appellate Court backing in his not-so-outlandish quest.

The gold content of the coins would amount to $1.3 million more than their face value over the last seven years of a 99-year lease, according to Foley & Lardner lawyers representing the owner of a six-story bank building at Madison and Halsted streets.

The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld similar "gold clause" provisions that predate Uncle Sam's going off the gold standard in 1933. The catch is whether the stipulations have been preserved in subsequent lease agreements. Landlord Nebel Inc. says that happened in 1988, when the lease's original terms were reaffirmed during negotiations over an amendment to permit construction of a pedway.

A counterclaim pending in Cook County Circuit Court by a predecessor to tenant MB Financial Bank argues otherwise. "We're hopeful, but we were plenty surprised by the Appellate Court," says Mitchell Feiger, president and CEO of holding company MB Financial Inc. "It's an unusual case."

The bank is paying only $1,333.33 a month on the ancient lease. Gold coins in that amount would be worth nearly $20,000.

I added a rating system to The Roommate, because I wasn't sure if folks thought some of these stories were a little whiny. Then again, my cartoonist idol and fellow Dayton escapee Ted Rall includes in his real-life comics a range of experiences, since what one person considers horrible could be another person's "eh". So I leave it up to you, the reader, to tell me what you think of each roomie (not my skill at depicting each roomie- I don't want each comic rated zero!). The top ten worst (and I plan to get my ass into gear and draw them more frequently, I've got some really juicy stories) will show up on another page.

Unfortunately, I set it up using Vodkatea, because it was really really easy and took me five minutes and I was happy with the glossary I built there for Them. But it turns out that the whole time, I was logged in with a cookie, and you need to register to vote in the polls! Grr! So I'll let 'em sit until I can find a better polling system (anybody know of one?), and in the meantime, if you really really care enough, you can register for Vodkatea right quick and give those roomies a rating!

Anyone who is in the public eye for more than 15 minutes eventually comes face to face with the decision to gracefully step off the stage and be remembered fondly or cling to the spotlight desperately and let the world watch them fall apart like a time-lapse film of a dead rat. Molly Ringwald, with a few exceptions, left the spotlight in her prime and will always be remembered as the John Hughes dream queen teen and not like Heather Locklear, who was once on many a dorm room poster but will now float from prime-time soaps to Hollywood Squares until VH1's Behind The Aging Starlet tells the story of the three starving african kids killed when the staple at the back of Heather's head snapped and she exploded all over the set of a "just pennies a day" adopt-a-third-worlder commercial.

I'm not just talking beauty. I'm talking about peaking. Knowing when to hold 'em, and knowing when to fold 'em, as a stranger once told me on a train bound from Georgia. Danny Elfman? He ditched Oingo Boingo, who could maybe get a gig with five other 80's bands sponsored by a radio station, and went on to make a career out of variations on the same marimba theme for the Simpsons and every Tim Burton movie. Bob Dylan? He ditched the Wilburys to keep pushing the Dylan thing until he became, well, a Saturday Night Live sketch. When Bill Bradley lost his game, did he become a sportscaster like every other celebrity with a gimp knee? No, he became a politician, following in the hallowed footsteps of Ronald Reagan, Sonny Bono, and Jesse "The Body" Ventura. Elvis? He went from being the King of Rock'n'Roll, sex symbol to millions, to being a hunka-hunka-bloated love. I mean, have you seen the "Elvis In Concert" video, filmed two months before he died on the shitter? The guy is so buzzed, baked, blitzed, doped-up, and strung-out that he can't remember the words to "Can't Help Falling In Love".

Perhaps only slightly more dignified than mall-opener, half-time-show-performer, or infomercial host is the role of game show host. John MacEnroe, Paul Reubens, and about a million former sitcom dads are all hosting game shows now, and you can see the shame in their eyes as they pretend to care while interviewing the contestants. But the absolute worst is Louie Anderson. Louie wasn't really that big of a deal in the first place, nor was anyone whose routine hinges on being fat and annoying. I thought he was funny. I used to watch Family Feud on my break at lunch and even played along from home for shits and giggles. Louie's total lack of respect for the contestants, his bitterness and boredom, his get-it-over-with style are all very unique in the world of peppy game show hosts. Once I saw the question was "what would you say in place of a cuss word" (Answers: Dang, Darn, Shoot, Doggone, Fudge) and a contestant guessed "crap" and I got to see Louie say, "Show me.... crap!" Maybe if Ray Combs'd had that sort of contempt for his job he wouldn't have hung himself in a closet like the sweater grammaw gave you, distressed over "professional problems". Then again, he was from Hamilton Ohio, so he had a lot to feel bad about.

Remember Orville Redenbacher's old commercials where he would say "Hi, I'm Orville Redenbacher" and then his "grandson" would take over? Or the declining years of Dave Thomas, "Founner of Wennies", where they would dress him up as a hockey player or jetskiier and relieve him of his dignity? I'm convinced that these people are either a) puppets made to look like them, b) puppets made from their corpses , or c) zombies. The fact that Jim Henson died ("of a cold") the week Reagan left office had me leaning towards a) or b). But recently the picture at left has been showing up, four-foot wide, on city buses. In it, you can see a lot more detail.

Louie Anderson looks like a fuckin' zombie. And this picture of Orville Redenbacher doesn't make me any less scared.

Here's the AIM transcript of a recent conversation I had with my mom about her jury duty on a murder trial in Georgia. [edited for clarity]

AsIfIdGiveYouMyMomsScreenname: A woman killed her live in lover with a butcher knife.

Johnny Payphone: Oh reeeally. How Angela Fletcher.

MOM: They had lived together seven years but never married. The attorney asked her why they never married if they lived together seven years. She said she had promised she would divorce her husband if he divorced his wife.

Johnny Payphone: LOL!

Johnny Payphone: What was the motive?

MOM: They had a fight and he moved in down the street. She went to "talk to him" about the argument and as an afterthought stuck a butcher knife (a BIG butcher knife) in her tight lycra pants. She was real sorry, and cried from her one eye.

Propped up on Red Bull and DayQuil (two great tastes that go great together!) I managed to shuffle like some sweaty zombie to Double Door with Singular, Lupe, Vix, and Serene for a concert. Experienced Double Door patrons know that in order to get from the green room to the stage, rockstars must pass through the downstairs billiards room, where nobody ever hangs out during a show except the band and those in the know. So if you have a really important, obsessive-fan question to ask your favorite rockstar, that's the place to catch them alone. You're guaranteed to at least have a 'brush with fame', in the sense that they will brush by you on the way to the stage. It was so cute watching Serene and Vix and Lupe squeal like N'Sync fans when Melissa Ferrick passed that I refrained from approaching her and saying, "Dude, I like, really liked that song you wrote, 'Both Hands', where you go 'and your bones have been my bedframe and your flesh has been my pillow' cuz that like, really expresses what it's like to sleep with someone". Besides, I was getting enough entertainment watching Serene, last-year dumpee of Vix and still roommate, play "who's better friends with Vix?" versus the incoming challenger Lupe, current sweetie-pie of Vix and leading contender in said game.

The "special guest" (movie-industry slang for "opening scum") was Andrew Kerr, a really funny folk-rocker who had dreamed of being a rapper until he realized he was a rich whiteboy and totally out of touch, at which point he became a standup comic. So his music could be described as White-Folk-Rap-Standup. His first song was about receiving, by accident, two pieces of fan mail addressed to Brittney Spears ("I'm ten and a half and I think/You should marry Justin from N'Sync") and his subsequent ones involved a lot of drunken sing-along. This guy's likely to be playing in a bar near you rather than a concert hall, go see him, he's better background to beers than the damn jukebox.

The second opener was Anne Heaton, who seemed to me to be a very technical musician, the opposite of Andrew. Sometimes musicians get up on stage and just goof around and you feel gypped, but if they're entertaining like Andrew its okay. With somebody like Anne, they seem very concentrated on the performance, and you feel reassured that you're getting your money's worth even if you don't enjoy the music. :) I guess her problem is that, as a lesbian singer-songwriter, she needs a shtick to distinguish herself from the other countless lesbian singer-songwriters (do you KNOW a lesbian who hasn't done a little singing or songwriting?!?!) and being technically (but not actually) cute and playing piano rather than guitar don't really get you that far.

Which reminds me of a tangent, a hint to all the unlucky guys out there. Most guys I know, the manly, knuckle-dragging, Maxim reading, always-talking-about-getting-laid-but-seemingly-always-in-the-company-of-six-other-guys guys, spend a lot of money and time in pickup bars looking to score with armpit-purse-wearing, Old-Navy-Cuffed-Capris bottle-blond-Barbie-doll types. Of course, they never do. THOSE types of women end up with guys who a) have lots of money, b) play guitar or drums, or c) drive a sportscar/motorcyle. They take this to mean that the only way they'll ever get laid is to get one of those three things. Wrong, fellas! Because even if you DID get one of those things, you'd end up with a woman who thinks the way women are taught to think, which means she's only going to sleep with you in order to (in the case of a) attain some security, which means you're in for a lot more than a casual score, or (in the case of b and c) piss off mom and dad or the ex, which means you're in for a lot more than a casual score and you might get beat up. What you want is a woman who thinks like a guy, and a shitload of lesbians think like guys.

So hang out in lesbian bars! Go to lesbian concerts! Sure, the vast majority of them are strictly-no-dickly, but there's bound to be a few who are looking to toy around with a boy for the evening, and YOU'll be the only one in the house except for the occasional wussy fag! I guarantee you that a stated lesbian is not going to want a relationship, as that would betray some sort of political stance they've taken, and even if only 2% of the dykes in the place are looking to sleep with a guy, then your odds are way better than the million-to-one that exist when you're a tight-white-turtlenecked dingleberry standing with your cup at chest height among a crowd of six other tight-white-turtlenecked dingleberries and nodding slash hooting at the hoochies in some pickup bar.

WARNING- This method may occasionally result in you ending up on the- ahem- receiving end of the sexual transaction. If this happens to you, BEND OVER, STRAIGHT BOY! What the hell do you think the phrase "take it like a man" means anyway!?!?!

So anyway, then came Melissa Ferrick, who you might have heard on the radio playing that song that goes "everything I need is right here in my hands". The crowd was insane with lust. She was working it up there, but not for the benefit of my gender. This is a woman who belts out a song like she wants to kick its ass. I love it when your headliner demonstrates exactly why they're the headliner by kicking all sorts of opening act ass. Otherwise the evening's anticlimactical. I remember in high school, seeing a tired Red Hot Chili Peppers go through the motions of putting on a concert, while opener Pearl Jam was slightly better though much too whiny, with then-unknown opener-opener Smashing Pumpkins rocking the house and showing those old men Chili Peppers how it's done.

Speaking of the Smashing Pumpkins (sheesh, I saw them the year they put out their first album and they're broken up already? Damn I feel old), Billy Corgan's new band Zwan played Double-Door earlier in the week. If you're a Billy fan and don't care about the whole Pumpkins ensemble (and if you listen to Siamese Dream, you're listening to Billy, he played everything but drums on the album, the perfectionist bastard), come to Chicago and catch them in some dinky bar before they start to do the stadium tour thing. I'd be happy to tell you if the venue has a nosebleed section or not. Heck, if you hang out in the billiards room at Double Door, you might catch a glimpse of a very famous cue ball. ;)

Had to leave the "wallbanging" (as my dad would refer to any modern music) early as I was still suffering from the draining effects of some tropical disease that scientists thought we'd eradicated in the first world. Among the hallucinations I suffered the past three days were a six-hour nightmare about finding a part for my bike, thinking I shot Singular in a failed attempt to shoot an invading monster, and Neptunians popping out of my body. I simply must stop allowing the monkeys to bite me when I go to the zoo.

Three days of fever-induced hallucinations and no sleep. Hopped up on drugs. Experience tells me not to write anything in this state.

World Wide Waste of time

I was heading to Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle but added another 'o'. Lo, the site was registered by Yahoo! I decided to see how far they'd taken it.

www.yahooo.com is an error page owned by Yahoo. Why this doesn't just mirror their homepage, I have no idea.

www.yahoooo.com was 'recently registered' at register.com. Hmmm.

www.yahooooo.com bounces you to some stupid page.

www.yahoooooo.com is another error page owned by Yahoo. They must have realized at some point that people were snatching up the extra o's and gotten the available ones.

www.yahooooooo.com is 'under construction', and it says so in many languages.

www.yahoooooooo.com through www.yahooooooooooooooo.com are duds.

www.yahoooooooooooooooo.com is owned by Go Daddy. What a waste of $12.

So is www.yahooooooooooooooooo.com, www.yahoooooooooooooooooo.com, and www.yahooooooooooooooooooo.com.

There's another dud at www.yahooooooooooooooooooo.com, then back to Go Daddy for every address up to www.yahoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.com! Who is sitting there registering these domains!?! Somebody as bored as me, I guess.

But after that, it seems to be up for grabs! Hurry, before it's too late!

My friend Jorge sent me the description from the back of an unlicensed Nintendo game called "Dancing Block":

go ahead!
dancing block!
nothing can stop you dancing!
in the world of dancing block everything is the opposite of what it seems.
day is as bright as night and everything is unusual huge.
dancing block is an optimist and his friends - other blocks - are good people.
dancing block!

The Sugarbeet is a knockoff of The Onion by Mormons, for Mormons.

Warm day yesterday. Brooklyn, Singular, Guadalupe, Vix, and I sat on the stoop drinking 24-ozers of Bud Ice, watching life on the Square. All is good.

Last night I was over at Cabuto's using his drill and the conversation turned to the spanish saying, "es mi gallo." It comes from cockfighting, where the bird that you're going to bet on es tu gallo, much in the way that an english-speaker at the track might say "that is my horse!" when it's not theirs at all. So to say to a buddy "eres mi gallo" means that he is your boy, your home-skillet, tha man, your cha'DIch. The one you would bet on to win in a fight. However, in english, it doesn't translate well: "You're my cock, man, you really are. You're like a big cock to me."

Both he and Tejas go to the cockfights down at 26th street sometimes, not very often. Back home, Piloto used to train his dogs to fight, and he told me how:

-As a puppy, mess with the dog until it gets angry. Smack it if it bites you, and get an innertube for it to bite instead. As it bites and shakes the tube, say "shake it shake it shake it" so that it learns to bite'n'shake on command.
-As it's biting the tube, smack it in the legs, saying "down down down" to teach it to kneel on command.
-and so on. You train the dogs in its combat moves so that you can direct it during the fight. For example, dogs tend to rear up when they first start fighting. If you send your dog "down" and then tell it to "shake it", it will bite the abdomen or throat of the other dog, and might win very quickly.

Undoubtedly, this is a brutal and terrible sport, mainly because it transforms suffering on one party's part into entertainment on another's, which can't be good for society as a whole. But only the high-stakes matches are to the death. Why would you spend years training a dog from a puppy to expend it in one fight? When one dog gets a good grip on the other, the loser calls it off, and the dog only suffers minor injury. That is, if the people running the match allow it to be cut off. *gulp*

I don't think I could watch a dogfight. But Piloto said it was quite common to have some stranger knock on your door and say, "hey, can my dog fight yours, just for a little bit?" An informal, to-first-blood sort of fight. But he hated to make his dogs fight, they were his pets! He only taught them to fight because so many people would sic their killer dogs on yours just to be mean that a dog that couldn't fight didn't last very long. Similarly, the gay men in Mexico City are supposed to be the toughest fighters around, because they're picked on so much.

He trained roosters to fight just for fun, though. Apparently you gottta flip 'em backwards, again and again, to get them to kick their feet in the air. They get used to this kicking so that when you attach blades to their feet they'll use 'em to fight more readily. Then you pit your rooster against smaller ones to get it used to fighting and the taste of blood. At some point, you've got to get it in a headlock and cut off its comb, as it's like a handle for another rooster to hold while it kicks away. Then you chop up the comb and feed it to the rooster to make it extra tough and mean.

Unlike in Asia, in Mexico you don't eat the loser. So they start to pile up after a big cockfight day. They all have their throats slashed, too- if one rooster goes down, its owner can revive it with a little mouth-to-mouth, and a guy who wants to throw a match can take that opportunity to spit a marble down the rooster's throat so that it chokes to death. Thus the folks who lost their bets want to see that they lost fair and square.

I dunno... while a dog is a being capable of companionship and caring, a rooster deserves to die. I was chased around plenty by the big ol' roosters on the farm as a kid, and pecked, and stabbed with their little leg-spines. If it were me and a rooster in that ring, that rooster's not coming out alive. So if I'll kill 'em, and I'll eat 'em, why shouldn't other roosters get a chance?

Well, once again, this is a bloodsport. It's about watching things kill each other for fun, and suffering=pleasure is a dangerous, but not unmanageable, emotion to develop in someone. At least with a bullfight, there's a chance the bull will win. Heck, a bullfight is more fair than a McDonald's slaughterhouse! I heartily endorse bullfighting, I encourage the death of all *&^%*& roosters, but I wish people wouldn't make their widdle puppies fight. But these are judgements of another culture that I'm making, so I'm only really prepared to form a vague opinion without knowing more about the cultural aspects of the "sport". I can't imagine what someone from another culture would think about a fraternity initiation, or Elimidate, for that matter.

I was poking through the boycott index linked to above, which is nice because they list ALL boycotts, not just ones with a particular political leaning. I was checking out the Disney Boycott Official Page, because I hate Disney, yet the Baptist church says they're bad, and the Baptist church has also condemned things that I highly enjoy, such as premarital sex.

Okay, the site makes a wide range of accusations. Disney supports Planned Parenthood. Okay, if you're pro-life, you're anti-Disney. No problem with that. Disney has a homosexual agenda, with films like Priest and shows like Ellen. I tell ya, every queer I know just can't stop talking about how they'd all be tied to fencepost and pistol-whipped if it hadn't been for the progressive politics of the Disney corporation! I think what's really going on here is that Disney is just accepting we're here/we're queer like the rest of the world is. But hey, if you're against that, you're against Disney. I can handle it. Racism? I'd believe it. Sweatshops? Definitely. Corporate Greed? Undoubtedly. Anti-Union? Yep. The site makes no mention of the fact that ABC suppresses bad news about its parent company, or the prisonlike conditions that the employees endure, such as curfew and behavioral restrictions- heck, the employees had to go to court for the right to wear clean underwear after catching scabies from the Disney-issued dirty drawers!

But folks, if you want people to listen to you an join your boycott, drop the witchcraft charges. I mean, you had me up until you accused Disney of promoting witchcraft in- get this- the Sorcerer's Apprentice, and the movie "Bedknobs and Broomsticks" starring Angela Lansbury! BWAAAA HAAA HAAA! The greatest threat to our children and souls and society is an Angela Lansbury movie??!? "I was straight with the Lord until Angela Lansbury convinced me to turn to Satan in some old movie." Ah, can't tell you how many times I've heard that one.

I leave it to you, the reader. Ex-Christian? What caused you to lose faith? Was it Angela?
Christian parent? Would YOU let your kids watch "Bedknobs and Broomsticks"?
Boycott participant? What lynchpin issue caused you to sign up?
Hemorrhoid sufferer? Would YOU talk to Angela about your discomfort?

Andersen Consulting was indicted for obstruction of justice, lost 150 blue-chip clients, and has just laid off a quarter of their workforce. Some employees got the news by email, or voicemail. Everybody says, "Those poor employees... they shouldn't be punished for the actions of a few individuals." Others respond, "they knew what was going on at that company. They saw those shredders running." Well, obviously they had nothing to do with it. Unless they were on the Enron team, they were totally removed from the issue. They're losing their jobs because Andersen is losing all of its business.

But wait, wait wait! Andersen Consulting has allowed clients to overstate revenues to mislead investors before, AND gotten busted for it, AND helped those clients to tank, the clients being Waste Management and Sunbeam circa 1997. Oh ho ho! What's this? Another investigation into Global Crossing accusing the exact same thing! What's going on? Do they have a commercial that only plays during golf tournaments that says, "Executive officer? Looking for a way to make out like a bandit while dicking over your shareholders and employees alike? It's the American dream, and it's possible with Andersen Consulting"?!?!?!

Hey, next time your employer is in court three times in five years for the same crimes, consider that illegal business practices are bad for your company's reputation and thus their client base. Maybe, just maybe, the company that you picked to look good on your resume might make you look like an idiot or a criminal by association (when I was a copy jockey in a college town, I copied cover letters to Andersen more than ANY other employer... it was the holy grail of post-grad jobs. I hope every one of those smug business-school daterapers is being escorted by security to a cab with their framed motivational poster in a box right this moment). Maybe if you pick an employer without a long rap sheet of illegal activity, be it environment-poisoning, customer-killing, genocide-sponsoring, you name it- maybe then people will feel a little sorrier for you if you get laid off. Until then, SUCKS TO BE YOU!

So there's an advocacy group called Cousins United to Defeat Discriminating Laws through Education, or C.U.D.D.L.E., fighting for the right of cousins to marry each other. "CUDDLE"?!?! Now, I couldn't care less if cousins marry, being from Alabama originally, I probably wouldn't be here without it. But here's a free PR tip from Johnny, folks: If you're an advocacy group, especially one trying to promote a taboo sexual practice, DON'T choose an acronym that makes you sound like pedophiles, okay?

I noticed that ATA is now charging a "September 11th Security Fee" on top of their fares. Now, fuhgettabout the issue of capitalizing on tragedy- that discussion's been flipped. What I'm Pissed About And Blogging(tm) is the insinuation that before we paid this fee, it was an extra-chance-of-death flight. But you cannot object to this fee, right? It's your September 11th Security Fee!

Hey, it wasn't ME whose cheap wage and shitty job conditions caused airline security workers to leave their jobs most often for a job at McDonald's. Listen, I don't mind paying top dollar for an increased chance of survival when flying. Just don't try to pass it off as something I have to accept "In The Wake Of September 11th(tm)". Brooklyn's theory is that any rate hike would compromise market share, so they tack it on on the back end. Makes sense, still sucks.

Thinking about nine-eleven and its effect on the Israel-Palestine sticky wicket has me stumbling over one of the conceptual leaps that belief in a Higher Plan demands. I guess you could call it the "God Has A Plan" rule. If anything horrible happens, you must trust your faith in the fact that God Has A Plan.

Here's what I don't understand: Nine-eleven was the most horrible thing that I've ever seen, right? But who can know what its eventual results will be? Now the U.S. is sorta obliged to crack down on Northern Irish terrorism, because of Dubya's "If You're Not With Us, You're Agin' Us(tm)" speech. And now Israel is actin like the sycophant little guy hanging out with the schoolyard bully, and attacking a nation-state for the actions of its neither-condemned-nor-condoned (officially) fanatics. Does Dubya stand by his demand that Israel take a chill pill? Could the hawkish national attitude rebound to a more peaceful one when conscience prevails in world relations? My roundabout point is that 9/11, the deaths of a few thousand people, could prevent the deaths of many more by the lesson it teaches.

Same with the most extreme example, the Holocaust. Here we have the most expansive act of genocide in history, yet it would be nothing compared to what would happen if WWII never happened and we hadn't learned our lesson about agressive & nationalistic movements from good ol' Adolf by the time the bomb came around. Who are we, as humans, to judge the overall good of any one act or happenstance? How can we possibly obey the bible to not kill when we ourselves will be killed in return? What if Linda Hamilton commits a crime and destroys the Terminator's hand so that it won't be used to build the AI that sets out to kill all humans? What if I was nasty to my sweetie one time, it caused a 30-second delay, and an hour later it caused us to be missed by a fugitive car chased by the cops through a red light and into a pole? How can my conscience/bible/torah/koran/etc tell me not to be a butthole to the woman who brightens my life? If I hadn't, I'd be dead.

So you get my point. I'll accept 'faith' as answer, I understand entrusting your life to faith, but if you're trying to make rational decisions about the best course of action, how can you anticipate the results of any event? Again, I bring up questions that I myself have no answer for. Perhaps my fortune of having a much wiser readership than I will help me towards an understanding.

When I was in college, I did this, and I will never forget explaining to the police detective what water is made of. (From Fark)

For the geek who has everything. (from KC, & be sure to look at the interior pics)