perfidy

Yesterday, Buckethead emailed me a link to an article in that there Wired publication, about how the future of recorded music is... vinyl, which is gonna come back big.

Bucket commented at the time, "the idea that vinyl could make a real comeback seems absurd, but there it is in print, on the internet, so it must be true."

Ah, so pretty and so very naive.

Here's the deal.

What's a "real" comeback? Honestly. Vinyl isn't dead, and it's not dying, but it's not exactly picking itself up off the canvas and taking another bite out of Evander Holyfield, either.

The future of music recorded on physical media is this: it is going to slowly dwindle into a niche pursuit like the model train industry, or home brewing or whatnot. A hard core of hobbyists and aficionados will favor the sonic quality of analog or of audiophile digital over the portability and convenience of commercial digital, and by doing so keep vinyl and probably tape "alive" for decades to come. There's already thousands of independent used record stores around, and unless they are legislated out of existence by aggressive copyright law reform (a real possibility), they'll still be there a hundred years from now, a little run down, a little tattered, but crammed with more 12-inchers than Tiffani Towers. On the same page, there's hundreds of little local labels out there run by kids with Chuck T's and sideburns pressing small runs of vinyl (both 7'' and 12'') of their releases - sometimes as the only medium the album comes out in. It's art!

But a "real" comeback, that's more than a piss in a rainstorm? Impossible. The music business, no matter how it diminishes, measures its revenues in hundreds of millions of dollars. Vinyl doesn't need a lot to stay on life support, but no way it's going to *ever* be the domain of anyone but music nerds ever again. Music is a convenience nowadays, a *utility* like water or electricity or internet access, especially to the all-powerful demographic of people under 25. These days normal people don't have solar panels on their house, they don't carry a bucket to the well when they want a drink, and they sure as hell don't walk over to the turntable when the side ends. What's a "side?"

In fact, as we just saw with the new Radiohead release, habits form fast. The album was free if you didn't want to pay for it, available for download right there on the internet, and still many thousands of Radiohead fans went to Bittorent to pull it down illegally rather than visiting the official site, where it was right there for the taking. There was literally nothing standing in the way of getting the album for free and totally legally on the internet, and people still stole it (from the point of view of copyright law), only because they were in the habit of going to bittorrent and stealing music. Why? Because that's where music comes from! Flip this switch, the light comes on! Turn the tap, water comes out!

The lessons to take away from this?

That the modern major labels and the larger indies have doomed themselves to a slow and painful decline by giving their fans (and an entire generation of new ones) eight years in which to get used to getting music off the internet for free from places that don't pay copyright fees of any kind. Yep - music's a utility now, and the companies that make the most high-profile music have no way of controlling or monetizing that fact.

That vinyl will do just fine, if by "just fine" you mean "out there if you want to find it, and isn't that quaint."

And that the future of music belongs, as always, to people with Chuck Taylors and interesting sideburns.

Much hot air has been blown recently on the whole internet music/movie/copyright/ shenanigans. The music industry is being killed/is being saved by Apple's iTunes. Movie piracy is/is not killing movies. But has anyone thought of the porn industry? Their sacred copyright protections are being, uh, violated as much or more than music or less sexy movies. And while the smut peddlers were among the first to jump on the web bandwagon (and VHS before) they, like many other slightly more respectable businessmen, are finding it very hard to compete with "free."

Anyway, here is an interesting bit on how Web 2.0 and other buzzwords are if not killing, certainly maiming the porn bidness.

[wik] Apologies from the Ministry of Future Perfidy, the video and the account that created it on youtube no longer exist.

I can only assume that because she's now a grandmother, she must need money to buy belly shirts and dance lessons for the little ones.

Britney's mom to write parenting book.

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.

I'm going to be a guest on Turnbaby Talks this coming Sunday evening at 6 PM Mountain (8 PM Eastern). We'll talk about NaNoWriMo, The Milkman, my webcomic, and whatever else I've got going on (It, of course). Please tune in and call in so I don't have to hem and haw the entire time. If you can't listen live, the show will be archived for your future listening pleasure.

For those of you who missed it today, Harry Potter scribe J.K. Rowling outed main character and dead guy Albus Dumbledore, saying "she always thought Dumbledore was gay."

Excuse me, what?

I don't particularly care that he is (well, okay, was - he's kicked the bucket) gay. What bugs me is that she wasn't willing to bring it up in a series that deals with ALL KINDS of adult themes like, um, murder, torture, evil, the inability of governments to effectively control their populace, abuse, etc. My question to Ms. Rowling is this: Why would you bring this up now after you've already written the books and made your zillions of dollars? It does NOTHING to improve (or detract) from the series. Unless her first draft of book 7 was written significantly differently with a working title of, say, Harry Potter and the Unsheathed Wand of Albus Dumbledore, there is no reason she couldn't have actually touched upon (no pun intended - well, hardly any) Dumbledore's sexuality WITHIN the pages of the books. I wonder how many teens dealing with their own sexuality might have felt more comfortable reading about a main character who went through similar trials. I mean, she's J.K.-fucking-Rowling. She outsells the Bible! Any editor who dares to question her will probably have to get his or her resume in order quickly. She could have put this little nugget INTO her book instead of waiting until after everything's done to out the character.

Oh, but wait - the book-buying public wouldn't accept that! A gay character? In today's modern world? *gasp* The scandal!

Never mind the fact that anyone narrow-minded enough to be unable to deal with a homosexual literary character probably wouldn't be able to deal with all the "evil magic" in the series in the first place.

Shame on you, J.K. Rowling, for being a coward.

I didn't try to buy World Series tickets this morning when they went on sale at 10 AM MST. The Rockies, in their questionable wisdom, opted not to allow any sales via phone or box office and went exclusively with online sales. The rationale behind this is that it gives every fan an equal opportunity to buy their tickets.

"What about ticket brokers?" we asked.

"We're limiting sales to only 4 per person. That will stop people from buying up hundreds or thousands of tickets at a time and reselling them," they said.

"But what about people who can write programs to do this automatically?" we asked.

"Hey, look...bunnies!" they said.

And then, after the "box office" was open for approximately two and a half hours, the vendor's server suffered catastrophic failure after trying to swallow about 8.5 MILLION hits. That's 1500 hits a second, folks. Now, I know the Rockies are a super-popular team around the world, but I'm finding it a little rough suspending my disbelief that there were really that many people trying to snag one of the 22,000 tickets for sale. That's about twice the population of the entire state of Colorado. Even if there were a tenth that amount with everyone hitting the site ten times during the first two hours, that's still a ridiculously large sum of people trying to get to watch a team that (honestly) nobody really cares that much about outside of our nice square borders.

The more conspiracy-minded have advanced the theory that this is a Denial-of-Service attack by Red Sox fans. Or Arizona fans. Or Giant Evil Space Robots. In the meantime, the Rockies and the ticket vendor are still trying to figure out what to do.

[wik] It occurs to me that when dealing with a sporting event of this magnitude, going with the lowest bidder for ticket sales might not have been the smartest thing to do.

[alsø wik] Ticketmaster routinely deals with huge venues and events. And online sales are second-nature for them. Cleveland was going to use them if they beat the Sox.

[alsø alsø wik] I am not, nor have I ever been an employee of Ticketmaster.

[wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?] The title of this post refers to the countdown page every potential buyer was redirected to, informing them that the page would automatically refresh when the timer reached zero and try to connect once again.

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.

Everyone off the train! It's gonna crash and burn!!

BoingBoing made my morning today by linking to this incredible metaphorical trainwreck that happened last week at a Van Halen concert in North Carolina.

Y'see, the recorded backing synth track that starts "Jump," their concert finale, was played back at the wrong speed - not just at the wrong pitch, but in between pitches, so no matter how hard Eddie tries to find a key to play in that works with the disaster in progress, he can't.

Which is awesome. The Van Halen brothers are widely reputed to be world-class jerkholes, most recently proving this hypothesis by kicking founding bassist Michael Anthony out of the band in the press. That's right, Anthony found out on TV.

So, sit back and dig the horror as Van Halen do their best to carry on as the wheels come off.

[wik] And if you relish the gory technical details of what went wrong, here's an explanation.

Brew #18 - Beamish Genuine Dry Stout clone
(from a recipe in "Beer Captured" by Szamatulski and Szamatulski)

The wife requested a nice dry Irish stout in the mold of Guinness and Murphy's, so it is my duty to oblige.

13.5 oz roasted unmalted barley
6 oz black patent malt
8 oz flaked unmalted wheat
5 lbs light dry malt extract, 2 lbs Breiss, 3 lbs Muntons
1 oz Challenger hop pellets, 7.5% AAU, bittering
.4 oz Fuggles hop pellets, 3.8% AAU, bittering
.25 oz Fuggles hop pellets, flavor
1 Whirlfloc (Irish moss) tablet
White Labs WLP 0004, Irish Ale Yeast
1 Tablespoon 88% lactic acid, added at kegging.

The place I'm getting my grain from now doesn't grind to order (jerks!) so I crushed the grains using a cast iron pan and a sheet pan - which produced lots of dust which had to be filtered from the steeping water it was added to the kettle. Will this cause tannins to come through in the final beer? Sure hope not!

Steeped grains in 1 gal Market Basket spring water at 160 degrees. Sparged grain sack in kettle water at 180 degrees-ish.
Brought 2.5 gal approx Market Basket spring water to boil, added steeping water

Added malt extract and bittering hops at boil

Added whirlfloc and flavor hops at 0:45

Cooled pot in ice bath, combined with 2.3 gals (approx) chilled Poland Spring water. Pitched yeast at 74 degrees. Total volume about 5 1/4 gallons.

OG: 1.044, which means I got amazing efficiency out of my steeping grains. Huh.
Target FG: 1.009-1.010
Actual FG: 1.013, which is high. Maybe I just need to learn to read my hydrometer better, as the target OG was 1.041. Knock three points off each reading and I'm in the zone.

Fermentation proceeded at about 68-70 degrees, a little high for the yeast but I don't really have a choice. Racked to secondary after 8 days and held at 66-68 degrees.

Kegged after 1 month in secondary. Siponing went irritatingly, and I had to leave a good quart of beer in the bottom of the carboy. Final yield, about 4.75 gals.

Added 1 tablespoon of 88% food-grade lactic acid to keg. Force carbonated at 35 PSI.

Delicious stout. Lots of body, and though not milkshake-smooth it is well integrated. Aroma is of roasted barley (natch) and a whiff of malt. Flavor balances a drying roasted note with a malt backbone and just a touch of yeast character - some neutral esters and a touch of diacetyl (which is appropriate to the style). Bitterness is present but not too assertive, and the hop flavor is present but just sort of behind the scenes. The lactic acid added that Guinness tang and really brought everything together. Aftertaste is of roasted barley giving way to sweet malt and Fuggles hops, and a lingering bitterness. I could probably have stood to undershoot the bittering, but that's niggling on what has turned out to be a really good beer.

Anyone else know that song?

I digress...

Last week the wife and I were out in the woods north of here, just south of the border with Cow Hampshire, hunkered down in a blind in the foggy morning dew. And just as the sun peeped up over the horizon, there he was! A magnificent specimen, just sauntering through the meadow before us without a care in the world, making for the Lego cache we'd placed.

Long story short, first day of the season and we bagged us a heckuva prize. Look at this pelt! Gorgeous! And the meat... I did a thigh roast with roasted pears, rosemary and a few juniper berries, and it was spectacular. I'm salting down the rest for winter tomorrow.

Just look at that pelt!!!

Build a man a fire, you keep him warm for the night. Light a man on fire, you keep him warm the rest of his life.

Did your mama hit you? Then you said it right.

Recently, my son has been exposed (as all children eventually are) to foul language, cursing, swearing, oaths, and the like. Surprisingly, little of this exposure has come from me. As responsible parental units, we have taken a moderate approach in discouraging the boy from dropping the F-bomb and its cousins. We don't freak out, we don't appear shocked and horrified; we just calmly beat the crap out of him, point out that it is impolite to say things like that, and that it is something that we generally don't do. This method has proven to be fairly effective.

The other day, I was watching a zombie flick late in the evening. The boy woke up, and we watched some brain munching for a bit. John pointed out, accurately, that there was a rather copious amount of bad words along with the brain eating. I explained that when people are scared, they often use bad words. (Screenwriters also use bad words when they are frightened by deadlines or being viewed as "inauthentic" or "not edgy.") This led to a discussion of the appropriate use of bad language.

The boy played with the envelope a little.

"Well, I'll just use bad words when I'm scared." No, not really.

"Okay, just when there's a spider." Nope. If it's dark. If my sister sits on me. If mommy doesn't buy me a toy. If I see Brittney Spears. If...

Well, I wanted to watch the rest of the movie. "It's time to go to bed, and not use bad words."

"Well, I'll just use bad words when I'm being chased by zombies."

"Son, you have my permission to use any bad word you can think of, as many times as you want." His eyes lit up with the possibilities.

"But only if the zombies come, and not before." Despair. "Now back in bed."

I was reminded of this incident when I ran across this little gem, from someone who takes a rather opposite approach to swearing for the very young:

For reasons that are not yet clear to me, a lot of parents we know are worried about their children learning cuss words. This is a truly charming display of futility. In the world we live in, even the most sheltered Amish child will have learned enough swear words to cuss like a longshoreman or the Irish by the time it is five.

So I am approaching the issue from a much more realistic perspective. I am not going to waste energy keeping Cordelia from swear words. Instead, I’m going to skip a step and just make sure that she is able to use them in more colorful ways than her schoolyard chums.

If some dirty little sprog says she is a poo-poo head, I want her to be able to call him a “ball-draining cum junkie”. She should be able to deflect all those silly little schoolyard taunts by tossing off a casual “Lick my ass, fucktard.”

And if some boy says she has cooties, I want her to fire right back with “Yeah. Well, we’ll see how easy you say that when my cock’s in your mouth.” This doesn’t make any sense, of course, but hopefully it’ll confuse and distract him enough for her to really put the boot in.

I see this as simply giving her the skills she needs to function in a complex and ever-changing world.

[wik] I realized, just as soon as Johno pointed it out, that my post was mysteriously truncated. In reconstituting the post, I realized that the text at the link is different from the quote above. Sometime between Thursday, May 15, 2003 4:55:06 PM and earlier this afternoon, Jeff Vogel bowdlerized (a bit) his own text. This is the new version on his website:

For reasons that are not yet clear to me, a lot of parents we know are worried about their children learning cuss words. This is a truly charming display of futility. In the world we live in, even the most sheltered Amish child will have learned enough swear words to cuss like a longshoreman or the Irish by the time it is five.

So I am approaching the issue from a much more realistic perspective. I am not going to waste energy keeping Cordelia from swear words. Instead, I’m going to skip a step and just make sure that she is able to use them in more colorful ways than her schoolyard chums.

If some dirty little sprog says she is a poo-poo head, I want her to be able to lash out with an uninterrupted spray of obscenities, most of which will have no meaning to either her or her opponent. The enemy may not understand why he has just been called a “fucktard,” of course, but hopefully it’ll confuse and distract him enough for her to really put the boot in.

I see this as simply giving her the skills she needs to function in a complex and ever-changing world.

How disappointing, and how glad I didn't empty the trash after I deleted the word doc that contained the original.

Erector sets are now classified as a weapons-grade munition and are illegal to export.

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.

First post. Here I go!

As a general rule, I don't write much about politics. Lord knows I have my own political views. Mr. Kate, I'm sure, would be happy to tell you how much fun it is to listen to my bilious gibberish during any given presidential address. However, in everyday life, I prefer to avoid it. It's pointless. If I'm with a group of people who share my political affiliation, then the conversation just seems like verbal wankery. And there is nothing I deplore more than, say, listening to a couple of half-drunk douches engaged in a scintillating debate about the socio-political implications of Roe v. Wade. How bloody original. Hey, who wants to do shots?

However ...

My mother is in the habit of forwarding me electronic manifestos that appear to have been written by some Cletus sitting around in his underwear and tube socks while on break from 24-hour online border surveillance. The one she sent me today, however, got me all riled up because it essentially implied that the vast majority who voted Democrat in the 2000 presidential election are/were tenement-dwelling, welfare-abusing murderers, and that the Democratic party is systematically destroying democracy as we know it.

So, after replying-all to the e-mail (thereby involving a large portion of my extended family) and feeling very self-satisfied with my thoughtful, intelligent response, I started digging around online and eventually realized that the offending e-mail was the apparently-notorious "Fall of the Athenian Republic," which has its own debunker page on snopes.com.

Ahem. Foot, this is Mouth. Mouth, Foot.

Lesson learned. Just more evidence that I have no business whatsoever talking about politics. Perhaps you'd like to hear a story about my cats?

Coast to coast in 32 hours or less.

Facinating discourse on the redemptive and cathartic power of cursing.

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.

Ugliness ensues, and the internets get weakened.

You should read the whole Wired article, honestly. The money quote from Mr. Schneier:

Oddly enough, Storm isn't doing much, so far, except gathering strength. Aside from continuing to infect other Windows machines and attacking particular sites that are attacking it, Storm has only been implicated in some pump-and-dump stock scams. There are rumors that Storm is leased out to other criminal groups. Other than that, nothing.

Personally, I'm worried about what Storm's creators are planning for Phase II.

Be scared, but also be aware that breaking the internet for one country breaks it for all developed countries. The wonders of interconnectedness!

From last week's Economist (subscription), in a story explaining the inevitability of Hillary's ascension to the presidency:

Most Americans are happy with the idea of a female president (if not with this particular female). And the presidential field is full of people who are “different” in some way, from John McCain, the oldest man to run for president, to Rudy Giuliani, the most divorced man to run for president, to Mitt Romney, who is a Mormon, to Dennis Kucinich, who is, well, Dennis Kucinich.

As a side note, the reasons they cite for Hillary's inevitability are the same reasons that would cause me to give consideration to casting a vote for Mrs. Clinton. She's head and shoulders above all the other contender. (yes, it's singular - Silky Pony is a spent non-force, and the rest are even more laughable).

As a further side note, they also list multiple excellent reasons she shouldn't be elected - high negative ratings, continuation of a two-family dynasty that's been in place for a quarter century, her presumed underlying shrillness and dictatorial nature, the risk of her husband outshining her at every turn, and the return of the same cast of cronies who made a hash of many elements of the first Clinton presidency. Whatever - she's still the class of the Democratic slate, right now, even though she's "different".

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.

Can you guess which of the ministers might have been responsible for this gem of succinct, trenchant commentary?

If I pooped on a sheet of paper and used my finger to smear it into ones and zeroes, I would have written a better Windows browser than Safari.

Just saying.

And this follow-up, for those who might have thought the first comment wasn't ambiguous?

if I may be succinct:

ass browser.

First person to guess correctly gets, free, the URL from which they can download Apple's Safari browser.

Aside from "My name is Al Sharpton" (which I take at face value to be the truth), this:

"Our position has nothing to do with whether the person using the language is black or white, rich or poor, friend or foe," Sharpton said on Saturday, reiterating what he has been saying since the trial ended. "We cannot have different standards for sexism or racism."

*tap tap* Is this thing on?

Greetings and salutations, Faithful Readers! Or breathings and salivations as the case may be (if you're an asthmatic zombie).

I am Minister EDog, and this is my first Perfidious Post about All Things Dark, Evil, and Twisted (those things in particular cause the riding up of certain kinds of underwear). To celebrate this momentous event, I feel it my duty to do what I've done for a couple years now via email to other ministers - that of pointing you towards some of the oddities I've discovered in this magical digital world we've created. And barring that, just show you some Pretty Weird Shit. Being as my nickname is EDog, I thought I'd fire off some cannons of canine-ical canon. And if you're still reading after that fusillade, then we'll get along just fine.

Unlike certain other Ministers here, I am a carnivore, and cheerfully indulge in All Things Meat, whether seared, broiled, boiled, fried, braised, baked, spoken to in anger, or given a dirty look. I'll admit that one of my favorite breakfast foods is the Gas Station Hot Dog, a taste I developed back in The Day when I managed a 7-Eleven. Now you don't have to go to a gas station any more to experience that wonderfully creative flavor of not-quite-grade-A-meat product. You can get it delivered right to your door!

Many are those of us who have canine companions. I myself have a lovely Australian Cattle Dog with a penchant for breaking out of the house through screens when frightened by approaching storms. Yes, I know. Dog logic. But here we cook and clean for our dogs - at least, some of us do - and take care of nearly their every need except one. Sure, you've probably neutered your male dog, because you've seen the Public Service Announcements. But if you haven't because, say, you intend to breed the animal, you have to deal with certain, ah, libidinous instincts. Someone has finally come up with a solution for the problem of the horndog.

And last but not least, if your dog is still of a mind to sow his wild oats, don't pray for crop failure. Instead, learn to help him practice safe sexual recreation with a time-tested method with approximately a 98% rate of effectiveness.

I know you're out there...I can hear you breathing.

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.

While I was checking out the wayback machine to find some old perfidy, I also found some old perfidy. Apparently just months before we acquired the perfidy.org domain, it was inhabited by someone from Singapore. For most of its tenure, it looked like this:

But it seems that he got tired of that, and it changed to this:

And then he got real tired of that, and it changed to this:

And shortly after that the domain lapsed and like a cave bear claiming an empty, ah, cave, we took over. Strange things you find on the internets.

The more attentive readers will have noticed that there have been a couple changes to the Ministry of late. Not least among them is the entirely new design. In the dark days of nearly a month ago, it was brought to our attention that there was a small problem with the comment function – readers wanting to comment were invited to type the magic word, but yet there was no word. This left many confused, hurt, and stymied. We at the Ministry are not ones for half-assed measures. (To be sure, there is a category entitled “Fake Blogging” which some might think indicative of half-assedness. They would be wrong, however – when the Ministry goofs off, we do it right and we don’t try to pass it off as real blogging.) So when we were presented this problem, we took steps.

We redesigned the entire site with a new content management system and relocated it to servers half the country away. Extreme? Perhaps. But that problem is solved. Some among you will be aware that this is the fourth incarnation of the ineffable spirit of the Ministry since it first took form almost half a decade ago. The first, proto-Ministry blog was Johnny Two-Cents, and the Ministers were Johno, Buckethead and Minister Emeritus Iron City Mike.

Here’s what it looked like – click on the picture to go to the wayback machine’s copy:

The next incarnation was the first officially-branded, Ministry of Minor Perfidy blog. We lost Minister Mike about the time of the switch, but we soon picked up a couple more – Geeklethal and the stealthy and nigh on to invisible Ross. The design was still primitive, but pMachine was about ten orders of magnitude better than blogger. Again, clicky on the picture to get taken to the wayback machine.

The third incarnation is the one most of you are most familiar with, it’s the one we had yesterday. It can still be viewed at old.perfidy.org – we didn’t want to bother importing thousands of posts, so we just mirrored the site and preserved it like a tick in amber. And so, here we are at the latest, most hip, up-to-the-minute, and generally swell version of the Ministry to date. We have eschewed the normal blog format, mostly because, well, we want to be special. Rather than scroll, scroll, scroll like most blogs, this one is click, click, click. The archives are accessible both in the nav bar above, and in the sidebar below. The two most recent substantive posts will always be displayed on the front page. If you click the “open sesame” button, it will magically reveal more links. On the left are the asides, which we plan on using for quick links to things we find interesting. They won’t show on the main page, or in the list on the right, which will show the seven most recent posts after the two on the front page. It shouldn’t take you more than two clicks to get just about anywhere on the site from the front page. And, it loads quicker than the old perfidy. We’ve loaded the last month’s posts to get you started, and click around to see what’s here. There's plenty of changes, large and small.