perfidy

The Ministry was seemingly contacted by Bill Murray last fall at a crisis moment.

Expressed as a dream manifestation, the message- a plea for help from Murray- should have come via the Ministry Dreamgate Terminus at Muscle Shoals but appears to have been shunted to the south Asian substation in Karachi for reasons unexplained at this time. There it languished for several seconds before redirection to Byzantium Prime, Domnu-West, and Lytani, and finally going unflitered straight into my cerebral receiver. Had the communication been routed normally through MDT Muscle Shoals, I might have been able to decode, interpret, and react to it properly. As things stand, the misdirection allowed it to become garbled and the message was lost, nested in imagery of golfcarts and college reunions.

A shame, really, because it was the first oppoprtunity to deploy the Ministry's newly-formed Bill Murray High-Energy Reaction/Interdiction Team, formed for just such an emergency.

I've already tasked the Directors of the dreamgates in question to investigate the ethereal messaging in the relevant timeframe. Ministers or minions who have ideas about how this could have happened are asked to comment below.

End communication.

It provides a reminder that might be valuable to see more often than once every three years:

Will I Be 80

I recently turned 65 and had to choose a new primary care physician for my Medicare program. After two visits and exhaustive lab tests, he said I was doing "fairly well" for my age.

A little concerned about that comment, I couldn't resist asking him "Do you think I will live to be 80?"

He asked: Do you smoke tobacco or drink alcoholic beverages?"

"Oh no," I replied. "I don't do drugs, either."

"Do you have many friends and entertain frequently?"

"I said, "No, I usually stay home and keep to myself".

"Do you eat rib-eye steaks and barbecued ribs?"

I said, "No, my other doctor said that all red meat is unhealthy!"

"Do you spend a lot of time in the sun, like playing golf, sailing, hiking, or bicycling?"

"No, I don't," I said.

"Do you gamble, drive fast cars, or have a lot of sex?"

"No," I said. "I don't do any of those things."

He looked at me and said, "Then why do you give a shit?

The Onion reports:
Nation's Poorest 1% Now Controls Two-Thirds Of U.S. Soda Can Wealth

Related

Lately I've been thinking about how I might best avoid the Tyrannosaurus Rex in the event I went back in time 70-odd million years, either by design (time machine) or by accident (CERN's accelerator warping spacetime and hurling me back to the Cretaceous).

Howevermuch 12 gauge ammo you might have managed to bring with you will not be enough. The male T rex was 40+ feet long and every ounce of five tons; females even bigger. It would be like trying to kill a whale with a shotgun- I suppose you could do it, eventually. But imagine that the whale is not trying desperately to get away from you, but is instead bent on pursuing you until you are food. What are you going to do with your shotgun then? Look, when we're talking zombies, shooting your way out can be a valid option. When we're talking about dinosaur survival, I don't think firearms are the way to go.

So now what?

My thinking so far is that an animal as massive as a T rex must have had a similarly massive range. It is not hard to imagine a box 20km on a side, for example, that would encompass enough prey animals to sustain the beast. So that's something right there- you try to be the needle in this haystack, and that's really the natrual instinct of tiny mammals isn't it? Avoid. Hide. Dig. Burrow. Interesting that that's my initial thinking as well. This may be optimistic, but I don't think predators that size would be so hard to stay away from. A critical first step would be in indentifying what T rex liked to eat, and then staying the f*ck away from that.

Another bit that would have to be resolved quickly is understanding their mating habits. When they are in rut or pregnant appetites might be ravenous, even by dinosaur standards, bringing them into areas they may not typically go in their search for food. Similarly, we need to recognize possible nesting habitats, and stay out of those.

The success of the avoidance plan hinges on the things being solitary, and there's no way to be sure until you get there. It's possible they could operate as a team, or at least tolerate other individuals in close proximity at certain times of the year or under certain environmental conditions, the way crocodiles can. If that's the case, and you're hiding not from one scary monster but several, that's a more complex problem that I am not prepared to address at this time.

Bumwines, for your drinking pleasure

The Maximum Leader the other day had a post about a proposed royal taxonomy of booze.  He proposed that Scotch is the king of booze, and... well, just go read it.  In reading it, I thought that it was a good idea, but the dear leader was channeling the French and it was poorly implemented.

I believe that there are in fact three warring states of booze.  The three kinds of booze do not generally get along.  Here's how I'd break it out:

The High Test Kingdom of Liquor, The Principate of Wine, and the Republic of Beer.

The High King of Liquor is certainly Scotch.  And many of the roles the Maximum Leader suggests for other distilled spirits are appropriate.  But really, the wines would never submit to the rule of another alcohol.  The Prince of the Wines (after a recent civil war) is the House of Cabernet from California.  They displaced the French Cabernets, who are now plotting in return.  The nobility of the Principate is largely the red wines.  The awkward bourgeoisie - putting on airs, but still with red clay on their feet, is the blush and zinfandels.  The yeomanry is the white wines, though some white wines still cling to noble titles like saxons in Plantagenet England.  The serfs are the box wines. 

The republic of beer is a low place.  The vast majority of the population is low income industrial workers, the proletariat of thin American style lagers.  There is a vibrant entrepreneurial class, though, of independent craft brewers.  Some of these have become successful, and have started aping the manners of the nobility of the Liquors and Wines.  There is also a large corporate managerial class, wholly owned by the large lager magnates, but who aspire to higher quality than they actually possess.  In a curious inversion of life in America, the darker beers are the more respected and wealthy.

In the mountains between Wine and Liquor, there is a barbarous, semi-independent state inhabited by piratical and impoverished fortified wines.  The high sulfate content of the soils there leaves life very hard indeed.

The Vatican has announced that belief in extraterrestrials - even the smart, ravenous and highly lethal kind - does not contradict faith in God.  While I could make any number of snarky remarks about the relative uptodateness of Catholic thought, Galileo, Bruno, the Inquisition, etc., I will simply content myself with noting that Monty Python knew this was going to happen a quarter century ago, and depicted alens coexisting with messiahs in Life of Brian.

The Vatican astronomer noted that denying that there is no life anywhere else in the universe is putting limits on the (presumably unlimited) creativity of God.  Sadly, the article does not go into more interesting territory - I'd like to see what Vatican policy is regarding missionary efforts to aliens, and whether the holy mother Church feels that the anal probing greys have souls.  Cause, if they abduct me, I'm killing them sumsabitches.  But I don't want to commit a sin.

And you euro-weenies better pray we don't have to do it again.  Because, you know, we might not want to.  We're tired, and we'd miss The Soup on E!. 

Well, not EVERYONE, exactly...just those of us who intend to make our living through our creativity.

There's a Bill sneaking its way through the government, called the "Orphan Works Bill," and it's absolutely worthy of Germany ca. 1935 (which, if you think about it, wasn't ALL that different than America ca. 2008). I'm parroting the email I received from my local writers' organization.

There's a reason why Google, Getty, Disney, et al are interested in seeing this bill pass:

http://www.youtube. com/watch? v=CqBZd0cP5Yc

PASS IT ON

The Orphan Works Bill promotes theft of creative work, pure and simple. This bill, currently under consideration in Congress, will deny you the right of immediate ownership over the product of your own creativity, and therefore makes it increasingly difficult to make money--much less a living--from it.

Copyright law, as it is now, acknowledges that the work you create is legally yours--your own property--as soon as you create it.

The Orphaned Works Bill will deny that right of ownership. It requires that the creator of any work must pay to register that work before it can be legally deemed the property of the creator. It means you have to register with a private company to have it copyrighted. That means your work can be "orphaned" as soon as it's created, especially since such companies don't exist right now.

Should someone copy your work and leave off your name, it becomes "orphaned" especially when the copied work is copied again and again. These days, this happens all too easily. That repeated copying makes it difficult to discover who created the work in the first place--even for the "diligent" copier.

In addition, it pits million- and billion-dollar companies that want easy access to creative work against artists who can hardly make ends meet from their own work as it is. Why? Because it puts the burden of proof on the creator of the work, rather than the copier.

Worse, it seriously erodes the property rights of citizens of the U.S. as outlined in Section 1 of the 14th Amendment to our Constitution.

Write your senator and congressperson now. Find your state representative: https://forms. house.gov/ wyr/welcome. shtml Feel free to forward this e-mail.

"The three great rights are so bound together as to be essentially one right. To give a man his life, but deny him his liberty, is to take from him all that makes his life worth living. To give him his liberty, but take from him the property which is the fruit and badge of his liberty, is to still leave him a slave."

- George Sutherland, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, 1921.