perfidy

Nobody's posted about zombies in a few days, and I just happen to have something here.

I spent a day in Legoland, California this past week, and was frankly astounded at their Miniland - a place where they have used some 40 million bricks to make stunningly accurate recreations of real-world places. You could spend hours looking at their Las Vegas Strip, New York City, New Orleans, and more, and still not see everything.

However...

With the obvious pride in attention to detail, a few things jumped out at me (or crawled, or shambled, as the case may be). I shall let the pictures do the talking from here on out.

It is a good day to be a Cleveland Sports fan. I have proof. Cleveland is often slighted by the national sports press - most recently, ESPN devoted nine minutes to analysing the aftermath of the Yankee's defeat in the first playoff series and mentioned the Indians not once. Granted, the possible demise of Joe Torre's storied career is significant. But really. The Yankees lost, the Indians won.

Between episodes like that, and the constant pain of watching highlight reals where, seven times out of ten, the victims of the highlighted star is a Cleveland team, it gets kind of annoying. Even when Cleveland teams do well, we still get ignored.

Yet, today was a good day. Looking at my Google News page, I scrolled down to the sports section, and look at this:

All three of the featured stories are about my teams. (Counting OSU as a Cleveland team, which is fair, I believe.) I've never seen anything like it before, and unless the NBA moves its opening day back to October - which is not totally implausible, given that their post season stretches into July - will never be topped.

Despite living more than a year quite contentedly without cable, I have summoned the cable minions to my home, because I think, hope, that I will have cause to watch the World Series this year. I may even buy a bigger tv.

[wik] I will note, however, that they still couldn't bear to put up a picture of someone in a Browns uniform.

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.

Over the last two years, the Ministry has taken on a new mandate. Aside from our work ensuring that small-time cheats, liars, scammers, skivers, scoundrels, sharps and thieves are well subsidized in their retirement (hey - someone's gotta do it!), protecting the world against bigger human-based threats (dictators, wingers, mimes), monitoring ongoing developments on the nightmare front (zombie infestation, alien invasion, enslavement by giant fighting space robots, enslavement by regular Earth robots, Blue Man Group), we have also founded the Perfidy Home for Wayward Bloggers.

Founding ministers Johno and Buckethead first came upon GeekLethal plinking rats with a .50 caliber frigging handgun and muttering about zombie attack. We knew immediately he would be a great asset. It was only afterward that we found out that his cat was also an emissary to the lords of the Outer Darkness, and an expert in unholy contract law. Bonus! Ross, the most shadowy and mysterious of our number, was the next to join us. We think. There's a room for him in the Ministry Bunker and Catastratorium, and sometimes we hear noises from within. And sometimes the commissary shows evidence of a meal of moose steak and pouteen. But what we can be sure of is, since joining the Ministry's ranks, his coding skills have exploded and all the web applications of the world bear his subtle mark. When Patton first hove himself upon the shattered slates of our courtyard, he was a haunted and hunted creature of skin and bones, barely able to lift his head out of a puddle of his own sick. Now, he is a sleek and powerful creature of plastic and steel, and those who hunted him are just memories, if by "memories" you mean "their skulls are our goblets."

We agreed to let Mapgirl come on board for at least three reasons, leaving aside the fact that until she joined us this place was a total sausage party. First, her incisive wit and probing mind have increased our litigative and actuarial might tenfold. Second, her financial acumen has resulted in a drastic overhaul of Ministry assets. Some of the moldier parts of our centuries-old portfolio saw light for the first time since the age of pantaloons, and the truly stupendous fruits of three hundred years of compounded interest have been rolled into more modern investment strategies such as MITTS, STRIPS, and fabulously complicated Gamma scalping and delta hedging schemes that even Harvard Business School has yet to discover. Finally, she knits. The recent acquisition of EDog, one of our oldest and most loyal allies, was partially for the chuckles and partially for his skills in writing, forklift operations, and zombie deterrence. You can read his own introduction to himself here. And finally, we must hasten to introduce the latest addition to the Ministry, Kate, AKA Six Layer Kate, AKA Teeamora the Improbable, Potentate of the Lower Reaches. Both Buckethead and I know Kate from college (Clown College), and have long appreciated her sardonic humor, technical acumen, and incredible facility with code gnomes. She will be taking control of our massive, 300 Petabyte data center and the legions of pasty faced minions who keep it running. What she does with those minions is her business, just so long as the uptime on the Halo3 server stays about six nines... Welcome to Kate, and all hail!

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.

I am well familiar with the brilliance and technical virtuosity of the guitarist Buckethead. Largely because his fans regularly email me to tell me how brilliant and virtuosoesque that other Buckethead is. I also sit amazed at the apparently stupendous sex appeal of a KFC chicken bucket worn on the head and the effect that it has on impressionable (and no doubt deeply disturbed) young females.

I have learned of another Buckethead, though, and one whose fans will likely never email me. The other day I picked up PJ O'Rourke's Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence and a Bad Haircut at a second hand store in a dirty little Virginia town improbably set amidst some of the most beautiful countryside east of the Mississippi. It was shelved, appropriately enough, in the religion section.

PJ, apparently, had his own encounter with a buckethead almost thirty years ago in Marlette, Michigan:

Now motels are always cheery and attractive places, especially when you're sick, and, let me tell you, this particular motel is a monument to the art form. It's run by some semiretarded no-necked bucket-headed member of an Eastern European ethnic type so dim that they were driven to our shores by shame at the comparitive military success and intellectual brilliance of their Polack neighbors. We'd already had one conversation with this oaf:

"We have reservations for six rooms."

"Ve half only six rooms reserfed."

Right, we have reservations for six."

"Dere is no six of yous."

"The other people are in the cars outside."

In dose car? Dat is more dan six!"

"Look we're not all staying here. Only six of us. The rest are staying at the farm."

"Farm? No farm! Ve half only six rooms reserfed." And so on. His particular commetn to me had been, "Ve give you da room wif stuck storm door." ...

Bolted and chained in one corner was a color television set - by "color" I mean mostly orange - with reception as fuzzy as I was, and I lay there all night, too nauseated to sleep, watching movies like Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster and Hercules Unzipped, plus three versions of our national anthem and one of Canada's and four varieties of sermonette (Methodist, Lutheran, Roman Catholic and Total Immersion Baptist Evangelical Church of Christ), and, finally, something called the "Hog-Watch Sun-up Early Rural Feed and Price Pork Report" until I dozed off a little before six, Friday morning. At 6:15, there was a calamitous banging on the door. It was Buckethead, the landlord: "Dis storm door stick, you know!" Then he shoveled snow under my window for an hour.

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

The French have invented something cool, and it's the NYorker reporting it, natch.

Typographical criticism, Death from Above and Frank Admiration.