perfidy

Not a webquiz per se, just a question asked amongst friends.

When you hear "Sonic Reducer", how do you keep from punching people in the fucking face?

Not with a bang, but a whistle.

Longtime Ministry minion and consummate wordsmith Othershoe sums up his final hours at the job he detests. The poetry of his remark ought not be lost on the reader, as Othershow does in fact have a MFA from a respectable program and surely had TS Eliot in mind as he penned,

"Friday is my last day -- get my check, rub my balls on the computer keyboard, and leave whistling."

Confounding us with their "words". To western ears it sounds like gibberish, but it must be the language of maskirovka, multi-layered and nefarious.

Never mind the science at stake; the ineffectiveness of the proposed American program against not just weapons currently fielded by the commies, but the ones they could quickly manufacture; or the weakness in Russia that American moves like the missile shield spotlight.

If someone could just square this headline:

Putin warns of new Cuban missile crisis

With the last paragraph:

Mr Putin added: "Thank God, we do not have any Cuban missile crisis now..."

I'll say spassiba.

Just like most other people, I tend to lose track of the days as I age.

It's not out of a desire to retain my yoot, clutching it well past the time when it's no longer OK to wear t-shirts advertising liquor brands. I made peace with aging and maturity awhile ago. Still stings sometimes, but fighting it is so pathetic and sad, and anyway, without getting too Holden Caulfield about it, no one likes a phony.

So we get on with our lives, work our jobs and and generate debt and make genetic replicants of ourselves, and while we all know the day (usually) and the date (after some reflection), we just lose the single days, flushed downstream in the time torrent with our last jobs, our old debt, and the baby pictures of grown children.

Occasionally we get a reminder that really hits home how far we've come, that makes us pop our heads above the time stream, look around, and say "Oh, is that where we are", then are overwhelmed by the weight of passing years. In my case, it is a detail- a turn of phrase, a scent (no, really), or, like today, a number.

As of today, the euro is worth $1.43. When I was stationed in Germany, a doillar was worth about 1.40 deutschmarks. I don't recall the exchange rate getting higher than about DM1.37 or so, but a few pennies here, some pfennigs there, and close enough.

So with the relationship inverted, for some reason that triggered my temporal awareness, and the rest of the day I will be thinking about how that year is very nearly the median of my lifespan thus far.

There is no form of life lower than the barracks thief.

Doesn't matter what it's for, how much money it was, or what the stolen item was; stealing from comrades who trust you with their lives is beyond the pale. If you are a barracks thief, you can only pray to someday be preferable company to an intestinal fluke. After, one would hope, you got the beatdown you richly deserved.

At least this one got nailed.

Cause the communist party in space

The fact that there are now enough Chinese astronauts to make a formal commie party in space is interesting, I guess. I mean, nothing wrong with that if those are your rules for doing things.

This bit was kinda creepy though. From Yang Liwei, first Chinese astronaut in space:

Like foreign astronauts having their beliefs, we believe in communism, which is also a spiritual power

I believe in the holy power of the workers owning the means of production, and I thank His Eminence the Party Chair every day I am chained to this machine turning out fake vomit and Silly Putty. Amen.

[wik] Eh, looks like the linked story is crapping out. Well, it was about Chicoms in space. Until it works again, enjoy this picture of a Cheese Doodle sculpture.

At one point back in mid-April, I stepped on the bathroom scale and was surprised by what I saw. Shocked, even. I was a solid fift...no, more precisely, I was a flabby fifteen pounds heavier than I thought, or believed, or fantasized, I was.

I finally reached a point where I was not only disappointed in my own appearance, but sickened.

So I started swimming, and after a couple months started regular Nautilus circuits. I ran a little during the day, but- as expected- it's a little too hard on my tibiae; treadmill might be better than the track in that regard, but I loathe treadmills.

Much of September was a total wash, due to a ridiculous side project I was working on, and frankly I needed that hour-a-night of gym time to work on it. I'm trying to get back into an exercise routine but that project is becoming like poop on your shoe, except for the most peritnent distinction: that the poop is paying you for being there.

Anyway, as of last Saturday I was down 31 pounds from my April grossness. Given the vagaries of the last six weeks or so, I probably scraped 30 in early September. All of my fat pants have gone to Goodwill, and a coupla pairs I bought to replace those are on their way out. But without all this extracurricular work, and a little more discipline, I would probably be closing in on 50 pounds by now. I've pushed that off to the end of the calendar year, but as long as my side work doesn't go away, the weight probably won't either.

But back on point, it's pretty sobering to lose 12-13% of your body weight and still be a fat bastard. I mean, I keep realistic goals in mind- like fitting into the shorts I bought months ago with the 32 waist. Looking like Brad Pitt in Fight Club is out of the question for a working slob who just crossed into the latter half of his 30s. But I know though that slicing off another 20, 25 pounds is possible and achievable (besides, I did it once before as a much younger man), and if I can look in the mirror and not feel nauseous, I think I've won.

And those 32 shorts: I can button them, but I look like a balloon with a rubber band around it.

Which is progress.

A dream from the other night:

I was at a reunion at my alma mater, Big State U. Also attending was Bill Murray, who in the dream was a fellow alumnus (if ~30 class years apart).

We hung out a bit between different reunion events, and ended up grabbing a drink at his golf cart. We sipped on something in rocks glasses over ice, shooting the breeze but he seems distracted. He tells me that he wasn't getting into the swing of things because his wife of many years had just been indicted for murder.

Really? Whoa...uh, tough break, man.

Totally unprepared for the awkwardness of that moment, I broke away and wound up on a train, a cross-country alumni train trip that boarded on campus. Soon after departing though I learned that the train was stopping nowhere I had even heard of, but couldn't get off for a couple days. It was only then that I realized that none of the complimentary bags we had recieved at reunion check-in were of LL Bean quality, and I was sorely disappointed.

The supplies you want on hand as a last survivor is a fairly common topic here at the Ministry.

We have riffed extensively on weaponry, equipment, security and storage, and packing lists in case of disaster (never forget your potable water or your iodine tablets!). In a similar vein, we have discussed desert isle-castaway books, essential reading material if you knew you were going to be marooned forever. Somewhere along the line, we probably fit musics in there as well- asking what might be your essential 3 or 5 or ? albums absolutely neccessary for your long-term survival.

They're really not so far apart; they're just different ways of expressing the same sentiment- making do as the last person on Earth, whether literally or, in the case of the desert island, figuratively.

But there is an opposite, as with all things in our universe. There can just as easily be a list of things that, if you had them with you, would virtually guarantee sapping your will to live and letting yourself fail and die, prey for infection, predators, and scavenger birds; or simply just giving it up altogether and throwing yourself off the first conveniently-sized cliff you came upon.

If any of the following records somehow wound up in my castaway bag, I would first laugh at whoever it was that put them in there; laugh at my own hubris in thinking I could assemble an effective survival kit in the face of irresistible, implacable Nature; and then, ribs sore from laughing so hard but still managing a final sardonic chuckle, drown myself.

Forthwith:

-Anything by the Eagles

And that's about all I can think of right this second. I could get by with just about anything, but please Lord please spare me any more fucking Eagles music.

Feel free to add your own contra-castaway selections.

and all I can say is, "Let the wild rumpus start!" Ministry pal and certified smart dude NDR discussed children's books a little bit ago, and what he's been reading to his son. Our sons are pretty close in age (mine turned two last week), and I was not surprised to find similar behaviors and interests between them. While I read to the Li'lest Lethal at night primarily, we still play games and such when appropriate during the day. We'll point out letters on signage, for example, or play with his little foam letters during tub time. As with NDR's boy, mine will follow along as best he can remember. S'funny the stuff they remember; I'll never fathom why certain bits are worth the storage space in the mind and some aren't. Eh, same with everybody I guess- I can recall a lot of minutiae about Jimi Hendrix, say, but have largely forgotten what little trigonometry I ever knew. Anyway, here's what's in heavy rotation at my house:

For reasons that are unclear to me, the House's Foreign Affairs Committee has agreed that the Ottoman Empire's treatment of Armenians after Dubya Dubya The First was genocide. Well, close enough to actual (?) genocide so as to be tantamount to genocide. I think.

I'm not sure why this discussion even has to take place today, as opposed to anytime in the intervening 80 years between the events described and, say, the third Sunday in March, but that's where we are with it.

Predictably, the Turks are annoyed by this vote; Turkish PM Gul going so far as to call the decision "unacceptable" and their ambassador saying something about it damaging the Turkish psyche. Now that's pretty good stuff, but I will save discussion of the apparent ease with which a minor foreign government committee can send the entirety of the fragile Turkish consciousness into existential crisis another day.

What I keyed in on was the word "unacceptable", which got me thinking about other things that They have found "unacceptable" about Us. I'll start; feel free to add your own:

-Russia, and our complete Bill of Rights

-France, and our cheeseburgers

-The Entire Muslim World, and our sense of humor

-China, and our hippies

-Canada, and our everything

-England, and our iced tea

-Yemen, and our hot chicks

There are three ways that I never imagined I would begin a Ministry post:

“After the first time I docked my yacht in Barbados, I vowed it would be the last.”

“This is my cock. There are many like it, but this one is mine.”

“I ditched my .45 for a 9mm.”

I don’t own a yacht, and my emergency plan to convert my wheelbarrow into a small boat will not yield a seaworthy vessel. I do have a wang, yet prefer not to write about it- for everybody’s sake- whenever possible.

But I did get rid of my .45. For a 9.

Before anyone gets all goofy on me, hear me out. Losing a red-meat, by-gar Amurrican round like the .45 ACP in favor of something European was not a decision I undertook lightly. But it was the right choice, and I think you’ll agree.

My first handgun was a S&W 686P, a 7-shot, .38(+P)/.357 with a snub 2.5” barrel. Really sweet, smooth as silk. It was rated for the +P and heavier rounds (200grain+), but I found that lighter .38 loads were ideal. Anyway, I got rid of it because I needed some dough, but didn’t miss it (much) because it was too fat and chunky to carry concealed anyway. It was a fine weapon, just not ideal for me.

A quick aside about concealed carry in the Bay State: strictly speaking, open carry is *not* illegal in MA, but this white boy isn't gonna be the test case. I have never, ever seen anybody walk around with a visible weapon on his hip (barring a uniformed person with a duty rig). Ev-ar. And since agents of the state hereabouts are not above making up gun laws as they go, it's better for everyone to just keep your shit under wraps. So concealed carry was foremost in my mind, a weapon I could carry wherever I was permitted to do so.

Next in line was a S&W 4006, a full sized auto in .40. As a lefty, I liked the ambidextrous controls, I liked the size and weight, but it was a touch too big to carry concealed- I bought it as a duty weapon when I was moonlighting at ArmCo- and frankly I wasn’t keen on the cartridge. I felt .40 had a little too much snap to it; it seemed to flip the front sight more than I could control. I’m sure I could have trained to greater proficiency, and would have if it was the last weapon on Earth- there’s just too much choice though to settle for good enough.

I moved up to a .45 when I traded the 4006 for a SiG-Sauer P220. At first I found the furniture a little awkward for the southpaw, but got myself together in fairly short order- still plenty of room for improvement, mind you. The round gave a solid thump in the palm when fired, and I never felt the weapon to be quite as light in the muzzle as the .40 was. Terrific duty weapon, good round, all was well.

Except that I couldn’t do a thing with it off the clock. Yes I *could* carry it concealed, inasmuch as I could physically put it on my hip and wear a low coat over it. Kinda like the way you can transport a canned ham by stuffing it down the front of your shirt- no one’s real sure what’s in there, and no one’s gonna ask, but it’s obvious there’s something going on in there. That’s what it felt like trying to conceal the P220.

In time that brought me back to my friendly local purveyor of deadly machines, and a choice between a 9mm Sig P239, a compact Glock in .40 (I forget the model now), or a NIB Smith M&P compact also in .40.

I went with the Sig.

But all told I think my reasoning is valid. I ended up with a weapon I can actually leave the house with. Ammo is cheap and plentiful. The weapon design is familiar, as it’s basically a cut-down P220, and is robust- probably overbuilt for the round. It fits my hand well, and feels OK in an IWB holster.

None of my sound reasoning of course will deter those of you who want to jack me up for going Euro. To you I say this: the zombies will not care what size projectile is tunneling through their cerebellum.

Just reading the quotes for “Red Dawn” on the IMDB makes me want to punch a commie in the face. I don’t think I could be trusted to keep things playful at the event in question.

I can’t make it, but I hope anyone who is dresses appopriately.

Flyer below the fold:

Ok, sorry- the image was too big to re-size nicely here. Here’s the link instead to the kickass flyer.

Anything I might have cared to say about the distinguished- and empahatically hetero- Senator from Idaho was published years ago.

Apparently Messrs Siegfried and Roy have decided to publicly own what has been blatantly obvious to everyone but Siegfried and Roy for years.

Note the word "schwul", which made this Minister laugh out loud when he read it.

[wik] Which is funny because the adjective "schwul" means "queer" or "humid"; and the adjective "hitze" means "hot" in both the ambient-temperature sense and the libidinous sense. And when I saw the article, I remembered one time rappin' to some fly madchens at this little dive I frequented... I was talking about the weather; they were hearing about what a flaming homo I was.

NASA's site commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Apollo landing read, "On July 20, 1969, the human race accomplished its single greatest technological achievement of all time when a human first set foot on another celestial body."

But the NASA text, and other sources, typically ignore one important and obvious detail:

We CONQUERED it!

The British created a world spanning empire through the simple expedient of planting the Union Jack on soil inhabited by wogs who didn't know that flags meant ownership. Benighted natives woke to British officers telling them that they now lived in the British Empire. When they disputed this, the officers merely pointed at the flag and said, "See, there's the flag. England." And when they continued to disagree, there was always the Maxim gun. In keeping with this grand tradition of symbolic declaration strecthing back millenia (but without getting too into the semiotics of possession) our guy put our flag up there- so it's ours! Happily for the granola crunchy set, there were no Lunar aborigines that needed to be convinced more... strenuously.

Today is the 38th anniversary of that glorious event, when not just homo sapiens in general, but specifically God-fearing Amurricans left the cradle of Earth to begin the conquest of heaven. We sent men into space on a tower of fire, backed with nothing more than whiz-wheels, slide-rulers, and less computing power than my car's fuel injector. A relatively modest start, some might say - the Moon being low-hanging fruit, solar system wise - but it was a start nonetheless on the long road to interstellar domination.

And someday, when Old Glory waves on 10,000 worlds and our mighty fleets cruise the galaxy, our fair descendants will look back at the Moon and Apollo as the start of it all. The only question is how they'll fit all those stars on the flag.

Huzzah! Huzzah! For the bonnie striped flag borne by a single moon!

Awhile back I toyed with the idea of regular posts alerting our reading public about the kooky junk I saw on a regular basis on my way to work.

I never did, because 1, it would have meant regular posting which I am not against, mind you, but am basically incapable of; and 2, I left the job to which I commuted, which took me over the sketchiest bits of Crackton and was the source of the enterprise in the first place. All kinds of stuff the poor, miserable, or spiteful threw from passing cars wound up on that little spur off the interstate except the kitchen sink. The bathroom sink however was a victim, still sitting in a busted up vanity on the side of the highway, long dead and just waiting for porcelain-eating vultures to start in on the carcass.

Anyway, I still have alot of highway driving for my new gig, but none of it cuts through the city. Although my new commute does take me through some nasty streets of Little Newark, I'm too focused on not getting carjacked to notice much else.

So, the other day I did see something on the highway I'd never seen before: the most grisly roadkill ever.

To be sure I have seen the gruesome remains of prior victims of the critter-bumper interface. One time in particular, out in the leafier parts of the state, I came upon the aftermath of a moose that had been thoroughly killed by a big tour bus coming back from a casino. Oh-dark-thirty, middle of nowhere on a dark stretch of interstate and whammo. Now, what I saw that time was very messy indeed, but the body was long removed and all that remained was a gory swath in the road and bit of busted headlight and bumper on the median. The rest was left to the imagination.

But what I saw last week was still...eh, fresh.

I was tooling along when suddenly the traffic started thickening up in a place and at a time when it never does. That is, the mouthbreathing fuckwits who usually do mess up everybody's commute by rear-ending each other or catching their cars on fire typically do it closer to the city proper. This was still in suburb terrain. After many miles of stop and go, it turned out that everyone was slowing to go around the...scene.

I *think* it was a deer.

What I saw was...ok, I've poked around my thesaurus and racked my brain for a better choice of words, but I just come back to "pile".

It was a big pile of deep red glop, with a single tawny leg stiffly sticking out of it.

And that's it.

Whichever of Deity's wonders that animal had been the night before, by that morning it had been reduced to its basic components and left in a heap. It was almost as if a petulant child-God had started to create a lifeform and had begun monkeying around with some parts, but then got bored and went out to round up some of his God chums to find something more fun to do, like inspiring mortals to wage wars in their names, and have a good solid holy yuk at it all. Meanwhile his model animal project was left in the corner, unfinished, perhaps to complete later, perhaps never to complete at all.

It was like that.

C'mon....I couldn't let this pass without saying something.

Actually, I think the pic they used for the story is right before the scene when the blades pop out and the thing flies straight into his eyes:

Apparently Israeli nuclear tests shattered the Phantom Zone carnival-mirror prison these guys inhabited.

If there is an Islamic analogue to Superman (II), he needs to get his caped ass to Gaza and get it done. 
 

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