perfidy

...which is a sorry excuse for a headline for an otherwise mundane and purposeless post. Wish me luck: tomorrow Mrs. Johno and I move into a new apartment. Only in New England can you move into a building almost two centuries newer than the one you vacate and still have the new one be nearly a century old. Well, in the US that is. Not much of a feat in Ing-a-lind.

Not much posting for the next short while. Not that you care. Buckethead, GeekLethal, and the infrequent but potent Ross will (will!) take up the slack, so in sum you will all get a few days without the weakest link. Advantage: readership!

Tonight is the big Target trip to stock up on shower curtain; waste basket; first aid supplies for tomorrow; etc. While I'm there, maybe I'll pick up one of these. I love Target, and evidently Target loves me back. Hat tip to Loyal Reader #0017 (EDog).

I am put in mind of Alan Rickman looking bemusedly at a dead comrade in a Santa outfit, reading Bruce Willis' note in that weird stentorian Generic European voice of his: "Now I have a machine gun. Ho, ho, ho."

Why?

Because of this article: "Army To Deploy Robots That Shoot." The headline alone should be enough to strike dread terror into the hearts of all good (read:"evil") Perfidians, but the real kick in the all-too-human nuts is the article's blithe assertion that the robots in question, Foster Miller's "Talon" machines, "also can be mounted with a rocket launcher." Oh, very nice. Why not arm them with meatsaws and pain rays too, network them all, and call it Skynet just for shits and giggles?

Moreover, CNet clearly lacks a keen sense of karmic retribution, because the header chosen for the article reads "Next year, the U.S. Army will give robots machine guns, although humans will firmly be in control of them."

The fools! Don't they know the first rule of Robo-Semantic Eschatologoly? To wit: "Any assurances that a given robot is in the control of humans will sooner or later be tragically invalidated by the advent of a superintelligent evil robot made so by one of the following: freak lightning strike; sponaneous software upgrade; sunspots; or co-option by secret robotic overlords."

Just like you never say "so far, so good" in some situations, and absolutely never say "naw, she won't get pregnant" in others, all humans must live their lives by this code or suffer the consequences: never say that the humans are in charge.

Can you ever imagine a lard shortage happening in the good old US of A? Fie on thee, Poland and Hungary, and your hog fat hogging lard lusting ways! Fie! England wants its figgy pudding!! Britannia wants its figgy pudding!!!

(Hat tip to loyal reader EDog)

Loyal reader Mapgirl submits us this tale of righteous and accidental vengeance. It's not that SUVs are evil, per se. No-ne-no-no-no! But they can be tools of evil when their drivers barrel through red lights while talking on a cell phone. As a pedestrian who daily takes his life in his hands, whose least favorite sound is the screeching rasp of lock-braked tires losing their grip on pavement and whose least-favorite sight is the stricken rictus on the face of the driver of the vehicle attached to the foregoing sound as they look up from reading the paper/gabbing on the phone/changing the radio/eating Chinese food, notice they are about to end the life of yrs truly, and stand on the brakes in an effort to stop two tons of SUV in twelve feet of space thereby hopefully sparing the aforementioned life, I relish this tale of accidental retribution.

(And as a writer, I summarily renounce the foregoing sentence as a hopeless run-on.)

As Charles Bukowski once wrote, "One tends not to think clearly when one has been drinking." A regrettably common manifestation of this tendency is the "drunk dial." Ever done that? Ever consumed, say, three pint glasses (pint glasses) from a gallon jug of Carlo Rossi "Paisano" wine and picked up the phone? Ever called the last person in the world you should be calling, drunk or sober? Ever regretted being born afterward? Nothing just makes the hangover experience like trying to remember who you called, what you might have said, and how much you must now suffer in consequence.

Leave it to our good friends and andipodal neighbors the Aussies to come up with a solution to this serious and potentially humiliating problem. Virgin Mobile in Australia is now letting customers black out specific numbers from their phone before going out for the night as a guard against waking up single, fired or miserable. If I could give Australia a medal, I would. Nice one, mates!

In which the Ministry rewards its loyal readers with a seat on the Group W Bench, next to the father-rapers and mother-stabbers:
For the week ending 29NOV04

Spotlight Thailand: This land, once known for exotic scents, fantastical landscapes, and an elaborate boy-buggering sex trade, can now add school burning as a claim to fame. Southern *ahem* "militants" are blamed for burning five schools, the latest in a series of attacks against institutions and officials. In recent days government ministers or police have been shot, shot at (and missed), or been the victim of a drive-by (by motorcycle. With an axe.) Although as a child I often wished for something catastrophic and permanent to reduce my school to ash, I never actually did it. Of course, it never occurred to me to cloak my sloth and boredom with a political struggle either.

Spotlight "Palestine": The Middle East Media Research Institute features ongoing monitoring and translation of Arabic television and other media. One recent piece featured an homage to what the Arab press calls "martyrdom operations" and I call "twisted fuckers who kill as many people as they can as they snuff themselves". One mother claims she is proud of her martyred son, a son who had everything but wanted no wife. He wanted to be dead, actually, more than he wanted a wife. It's a sick, sick world when blowing yourself up is really the best alternative for the gay youth of Palestine.

Spotlight Congo: Reports have surfaced of some 150 instances of sexual abuse by UN staff members and soldiers in Congo. Reuters had little details at the time of this report, but the words "pedophilia", "rape", and "prostitution" do appear in the same sentence. Thus far only a handful of UN staff have been suspended, while one French and two Tunisian soldiers have been sent home. Characteristic of most things the UN has ever attempted, a half-dozen or so UN officials voiced outrage while admitting their influence was limited, and the Secretary General himself declared that he would implement a new policy.

Spotlight San Diego: A pastor of an unspecified CA church used fear of the devil to lure gullible congregants into having sex with him. He basically had three pickup lines: the devil has already attacked them in some way, and the cure was sex with him; the devil will at some point attempt to harm them, and the prevention was sex with him; or, he threatens to kill you unless you have sex with him. Not sure which is creepier, the sick pastor or the freaky church chicks who fell for his lines. All examples of exemplary human behavior, I daresay.

Spotlight Pennsylvania: A PA woman surrendered to police after admitting she fatally shot her husband for threatening the family pets. She tried to cover her tracks by throwing him in the well and explaining his absence to a hunting trip but confessed to her daughter, who ultimately called police. Apparently there was an argument and a bit of a shoving match, itself more than enough for a Lifetime movie of the moment, but by then threatening the pets he got himself a trip to the coroner.

Spotlight Wiscahnsin: Truck driver and Hmong refugee Chai Vang went buck nutty in the WI woods, offing six hunters and wounding two others. The survivors' stories and Vang's agree as far as what brought them into contact in the first place, but start to diverge at the point where people start getting killed. Vang claims he was called ethnic slurs (I've never heard a Hmong joke in my life, or what I'd call a Hmong if I wanted to insult him...anyone know?) and shot at as he was told to vacate private property. One survivor says he started shooting for no reason. Personally, I'm leaning toward Vang's version. Not that I think it's OK, I just think it's more plausible that in the heat of a tense moment, scared and outnumbered, the guy opened up. Now if it were a white dude, I might believe he started blasting for no reason, same way we do schools, daycares, and company HR offices.

Loyal reader Othershoe shares this AP photo of a Mosul sniper in action with his nifty lens-cover. Nothing like a sniper with a sense of humor:

Click here.

Science for the everyman. Confronted about their methodology, these daring (not to say reckless) scientists had this to say:

Um, why didn't you guys do the test double-blind? Scienticians often are forced to take short-cuts to make giant king sized leaps of advancement in the field of boozahology. You'll also notice that the crackers weren't sterile, the glasses were barely clean, and there was a conspicuous lack of any saftey gear. 

Sometimes, you just have to stare down the barrel of progress and hope there's not one sitting in the chamber.

Hat tip: mapgirl.

Malian music legend Ali Farka Touré once said of his home, "For some people, Timbuktu is a place at the end of nowhere. But that's not true--I'm from Timbuktu, and I can tell you that it's right in the center of the world." Mr. Touré (I've met him, he's reserved, dignified and courteous, and possessed of a sober gravitas that makes it Mister Touré to you) might have been engaging in a little hyperbole since every thinking person knows that Boston is the Hub of the Universe, but a little hyperbole is more than forgivable in light of the long and rich history of the kingdoms of Mali.

Ali Farka Touré himself is a farmer and local (what... chief? mayor? paterfamilias?), who tends to his village first and his music second. In 1995, he begged off a US tour claiming that he could not leave his home because if he did, he risked losing his land in an armed skirmish. When in 1998, one of his US labels, Hannibal, wanted to record a new record with him Touré insisted the producers bring a mobile recording rig to his compound at Niafunké. The stunning resulting album, aptly titled Niafunké, was recorded whenever farm chores did not press and whenever the mood struck to pick up his guitar.

In 2000, Touré decided to come to the USA for one last tour before devoting all his time to a village irrigation project. I was lucky enough to see his New York date, August 8, 2000, and I can't ever forget it. A big man in person, on stage he looked ten feet tall, wielding his electric guitar like it was a toy and wrenching from it some of the most searing melodies I have ever heard. He was playful, switching between guitar and njerka (a small one-stringed fiddle) and stopping to explain to the New York audience what he was singing about in the eleven languages he writes in. About halfway through the show, he struck on the game of lifting his leg way up in the air and bringing it down onto the stage with a huge *boom*. His band worked the *boom* into the deep percolating groove they had built, and soon Touré was *boom*ing away, each one accented by a chord from his guitar that sounded like trees breaking in the wind. The entire night was unforgettable and absolutely one of a kind. Ali Farka Touré is often compared to John Lee Hooker, whose elemental blues sound seemed to emanate from some half-remembered Mali of the mind, but on that night Ali Farka Touré sounded like Timbuktu.

Before the show, I shared a cab with record producer and Hannibal label owner Joe Boyd, who asked me about African music and what I thought about it. I mentioned Ali Farka Touré, Johnny Clegg, Fela Kuti and a few others before bringing up Angelique Kidjo, who had just released her pop-inflected album Oremi the previous year. Boyd looked at me quizzically and said, "you like that? That speaks to you?" I admitted that it didn't really, it just sounded nice, and he told me that someday, smart kid that I was, I would figure it out, I would get it.

Later that night, I got it.

I bring all this up not because Ali Farka Touré has a new album out but because I was reminded of him and his effect on me today by another group drawing on West African traditions. Called "Fula Flute," after a particular style of flute playing native to the Fulani people of Guinea in which the player sings into the flute as he plays, they have been playing east coast dates over the past couple of years. (The group is composed of a Canadian, a jazz-trained New York bassist, several Malian griots (roughly, hereditary storytellers/bards/historians), and Bailo Bah, the Fuilani flutist.) Working on a smaller scale than the larger than life Ali Farka Touré, Fula Flute showcase a nearly-extinct and deeply enthralling folk tradition that (like so many nearly dead folk traditions), begs for a wider audience. I'm on their mailing list, and was notified today that they have a nifty video out in Quicktime which showcases both the Fula flute style and the rolling percussion typical of West African music. Good, interesting, unusual, and beautiful. They've got it.

[wik] The title of this post has changed. A scratched copy of White Lion's album "Pride" to the first person who can tell me what the new title refers to.

[alsø wik] Also posted to blogcritics.org