perfidy

While it may surprise you, gentle reader, to hear that I am again guest posting on MO, considering that I am barely posting on this, my own website, the fact is that I have been Rossed to a large degree over the last couple weeks. The end is in sight (or at least the headlight of the oncoming train) and my time for blogging should be substantially greater in the immediate future. Unless I pick up all those freelance gigs I'm chasing. Anyways, here is the first of this week's Murdoc Online guest posts:

Greetings again, fellow Murdoc-cultists. The great and powerful Murdoc is once again goofing off, and has asked me to take up the slack with a few posts for you to educate and amuse yourself, and to productively use your time at work.

Our first topic is the troubled V-22 Osprey Tilt-Rotor, which is flying right over my head as we speak. The 418th flight test squadron out of Edwards in California has temporarily relocated to the tiny, tiny airport in Winchester, Va, only a half hour from my fastness in the wilderness. If you follow this link here, you can watch a very small video that shows some CV-22's landing and whatnot, and hear the reporter mispronounce several words.

The reason the Ospreys are in my neck of the woods is simple. They need the bad weather that California simply refuses to provide. In particular, they're looking for fog in which to test their terrain guidance systems. There's typically a lot of fog up here, so they shouldn't have too much trouble.

The Air Force version isn't scheduled to enter service until 2009, but the Marine MV-22 will be heading to Iraq in September.

I haven't actually seen one yet, they're actually flying a bit west of where I live. I am thinking of driving the boy up to the airport to see if we can catch a glimpse of one of those, and if I do, I'll post pics if I can get some decent ones.

[wik] Flash, and the video that was embedded in it, are long dead alas.
 

[wik] Not that I have a dog in this race, but I found myself thinking it would be fairly cool if the blender had broken and he'd been impaled by one or more iPhone parts. Nothing against Blender Guy, of course, and I'm sure that attitude is just a compensation for all the WWE & NASCAR I don't watch.
 

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!

So there's this website I am doing some work for, that's run by the Herb Alpert Foundation. Yes, that Herb Alpert as if there were any other.

In any event, while cruising through the site's content library I recently came across proof positive that being old kicks ass. Some of you may have heard of Teo Macero, the legendary jazz producer who basically helped Miles Davis invent like four kinds of jazz, plus fusion, funk and electronic besides. Well, he's old now and kind of cantankerous. But he's got awesome stories.

Watch this great clip of Teo talking about working with Miles Davis, and wait for the part where he says "so I said book it, you white motherfucker!"

I'm g-dd-mn dying here, with the laughing. You can't make Blazing Saddles today, and you can't tell that kind of story if you're under sixty-five. Absolutely priceless.

Gogol Bordello, if you are even less cool than I am, is an amazing gypsy punk band out of NYC. It's a mix of klezmer and thrash punk. Or as I put it last night, it's punk music with an actual melody.

Everyone has their favorite, the violinist, the bass player, the lead guitarist, the dancers, etc.

I'd never heard their music till I went to the show. Everyone I know went last year and said it was by far the best show they'd seen in ages and no one had a bad thing to say about them, so when tickets went on sale, I bought them blind. It did not disappoint at all. I haven't rocked out like that in I don't know how long, at least a year. I haven't truly danced and thrashed like that in years. I can tell I should pop a Tylenol now because it's going to hurt.

My friend R, put it well:

Everyone, please STOMP extra hard for me, wear your combat boots, dance with big legs, and crowd surf! Then, tell me who won the concert!

I can tell you without a doubt, I won the concert. It was amazingly high energy, melodic, funny, exciting, electrifying.

There aren't that many US tour dates left. Most of them are on the West coast, but if you can go, GO! GO! GO! DAMMIT!

A: Because the muslims just won't stop coming!!!

So, check out this utterly entertaining tale from Britain's Independent of one journalist's voyage on the National Review's recent reader cruise. Every sentence contains a new nugget of outrageousness that should have sprung from the pen of a young Tom Wolfe, or T. Coraghessen Boyle, or any other fiction writer whose stock in trade is wacky cruelty, not from a publication that despite its biases still must cling to some version of reality-as-lived.

The set-pieces are iconic: William Buckley, the founder of the magazine and grey eminence of American Conservatism, sulking shunned and mocked in his cabin as his movementarians flock around the spittle-flecked beard of Norman Podhoretz. The leggy blonde suntanner advocating gassing a few liberals to show them the consequences of treason, in the same distracted way as one might wonder if they could go for a nice mojito right about now. Mark Steyn at a table of admirers, holding forth on the brown tide threatening to subsume the white purity of Albion, and the rest of Europe too.

Go read this, and get a glimpse of a world in which George Bush is a steel-spined visionary hero, ululating hordes of sandaled beasts spit Betel nuts (or date pits... it's so hard to know what these brown people chew... do they chew Betel nuts or is that hashish?) at the very feet of l'Arc de Triomphe, and American liberals wake every morning with their hearts rising toward Mecca, fresh for another day of materially supporting America's sworn enemies.

What did the thousands of moths who kamikaze my porch lights do before there were porch lights?

And, what did four year old boys obsess about before we invented cars, trucks, trains and planes?

[wik] The highly educated and fearsomely well-read NDR sent me a brief footnoted note to the effect that a thousand years ago, Swedes were killing each other over religion.

One thousand years ago Sweden was, in fact, in the midst a protracted process of conversion (as well as throughout Scandinavia). Until the late 12th century there were still bloody encounters between Christians and pagans. These conflicts form the backdrop of Bergman's Virgin Spring and Undset's Gunnar's Daughter.

To which I replied,

I think you misunderstood my intentions in that post. Yes, they were in the midst of a protracted religious struggle. Exactly. They were killing each other, so the issue of "trying to assimilate" would have been a complete non starter.

And, they were Vikings then, not watered down euro-weenies. It's only in the last few hundred years that Swedes (or anyone, for that matter) have realized that when your only tool for argument is an ax, all problems look like necks.

I didn't have any movies to quote though. Thinking a bit further on the matter, religious conflict is, by way of gross misunderestimation, a huge problem globally and throughout history. Most people seem to imagine that most conflicts are about greed or economics. Of course for the Marxists, that's being redundant. If not money, then power or political ideals. This may be true for some leaders. But the people - and many leaders - are not quite so cynical as we are. Many of the leaders in the Thirty Years' War certainly claimed that they were following God's will in smiting the heretics. And there is little doubt that many were convinced of the truth of their religious beliefs, to the point of motivating them to follow those leaders regardless of their "true" motivation.

In the whole world, there are only a few places, and only for the last four hundred years, that have proved even mildly immune to the temptation to go a-smiting. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine where the home countries of those recent immigrants to Sweden fall in that classification scheme.

Sweden struggles to integrate Muslim immigrants.

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.