perfidy

My son, having become cognizant of the existence of this blog, has offered to participate. If anyone has any questions - about anything whatsoever - ask and he will make up an answer for you. Just leave a question in the comments and I'll pass it on to him.

Here's a small one to get you started:

Q: Son of Buckethead, who killed President Kennedy?

A: It was the butterflies. Butterflies ate Oswald's brain, enraging him. Enraged, he went to the Book Depository building and shot the president.

Q: Son of Buckethead, why did the butterflies hate Kennedy? And were they responsible for Oswald's death as well?

A: Butterflies hate everybody. Usually, they just flutter around and stuff. But sometimes, they get mean. The ninja butterflies ate Jack Ruby's brain to cover up the eating of Oswald's brain. Butterflies are pretty sneaky.

I just had a dream that Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, came up to my house to tell me he wanted to cowrite an sf novel about a car built with nanotechnology.

He was driving a green Ford F350. The interior was spotless.

He was tired of all the banal means that had been used to imagine inanimate objects waking up to sentience. He said he wanted a book that was "Killdozer meets Old Yeller."

I think I'm feverish.

The only detail I remember from that night's dream was watching CNN. Tells you what kind of hair-raising shenanigans I was up to in my unconscious that Saturday night, when friggin' CNN was the most memorable piece of it.

The dream basically ended with me reading CNN's ticker. The last item I saw said something along the lines of, "Fans shocked by Howard Stern's apparent suicide". I had just enough time to be surprised and puzzled by this news before I woke up and realized it hadn't really happened.

The next day, Sunday, a friend was over. As we were enjoying potent coffee and putting a dent in my son's absurdly oversized birthday cake from the day before, we were talking about the usual topics- military policy, foreign policy, non-fiction books we were reading, politics, and chicks- and CNN was on in the room. I happened to be looking at the tv when I saw the words "Howard Stern..." start to creep across the screen on the ticker, and I about fell out of my chair.

Holy shit!, I thought, did he really kill himself? Did Howard really kill himself?! And I frakking dreamed about it just a few hours before?! I'm a psychic! A precog! And how do I parlay this into a payday?

And then the rest of it came over "...weds his girlfriend in NYC".

Ah.

Well, suicide after a fashion, I suppose.

I gave myself half-credit and a little more cake.

I was the first human explorer to set foot on Mars.

The dream began with me stepping onto the planet, so don't ask me anything about the trip, the balance of the team, the mission objectives, or even the mode of conveyance- wasn't there.

The surface had much more terrain excitement than is seen in actual imagery. My dream-Mars was all crushed stone, almost like a carpet of gravel with bits of bigger rock here and there. It looked like the remnants of a long-extinct glacier, or huge flood- possibly two sides of the same coin, I thought. I walked around a bit, quite satisified with my spacesuit, which was very lightweight and not at all uncomfortable; in fact, I may not have been wearing a helmet at all. In short order I found that the landing site was on a shelf, really a titanic mesa, and from the edge I looked down into a huge canyon. I could see the bottom- the ambient light was pretty good, and not nearly as red as prior missions would have you believe-and one edge, but the rest of it went off to obscurity.

That's when I saw the hut.

Further down the mesa's rim I saw a small structure, unmistakably an Earth-type dwelling space. I walked over, perhaps a half-mile (hard to gauge Earth distances on foreign planets, dontchaknow), and walked inside. I don't remember there being a door. The hut enclosed a single space that mimicked my own bedroom, at least in size and the layout of the bed. Yes, the bed- there was a king-sized sleigh bed in the middle of this hut.

Then things got weird.

On the bed, just kind of hanging out, was my stepfather, who has been dead for over three years now. Or so we all thought. He explained that he had faked his death and moved to Mars to just kind of get away. You know, leave it all behind for awhile, and he wasn't particularly excited to see me. I was trying to make sense of that when I realized there were two other people in the room. I think it was one of his brothers and his sister-in-law, neither of whom at this writing is either dead or pretending to be. They knew he had been faking, and had gone back and forth to Mars a couple times to visit.

The whole scene was making me a little uncomfortable, so I went back outside to the mesa's edge. I looked again down into the canyon, and was thinking it would make a pretty good lake if someone filled it. After some moments of indecision, I figured I'd go back inside and try to get some more details. As I turned away from the canyon I saw movement farther down the rim. I could make out two, maybe more, figures slowly walking toward the hut opposite the place I had started, but at about the same distance. In short order I found them to be tourists from Earth, startled to see not just one but several people already there. They had paid a premium for the exclusivity of the destination, and were kinda pissed that it wasn't quite so exclusive.

My stepfather, meanwhile, was getting kinda pissed that all of a sudden all these people had showed up uninvited at his place.

I had inherited my mother's house and property. It's a decent-sized house on about five acres. But the house is in general disrepair, and in my dream I didn't have the inclination to get it all fixed up. What I did instead was have the house razed, with the intention of building a kickass underground structure on the same spot, using the existing foundation and cellar as a template. I had in mind part bunker/catastratorium, part cozy hobbit-hole.

So with the upper structure demolished, I began cracking though the concrete in the cellar. In my dream I was alone doing all this, which is utterly ridiculous for a variety of reasons, but primarily because I have zero training on any tool or construction principle and the most sophisticated bit of toolery I ever did was installing a cat-flap in the door to my basement.

But none of it mattered in the end, because as it turned out the earth beneath my mother's cellar was already inhabited.

A wizardly-looking fellow sort of appeared, surprising me as I was just taking sledgehammer to concrete. He looked like Gandalf if not quite so imposing...rather dumpy, really...and explained that he had been living in his own underground building for quite some time now on the very same spot, and would I please knock off trying to crash through his roof. After some back and forth, he ended up giving me a tour of his place, and it was pretty impressive. There was a very deep...shaft, I guess, but not a cold and drafty and sooty shaft, but a bright and interesting shaft, with little niches here and there with tasteful if uninspired bits of art in them. Think the inside of a very deep well, with the big stones and the curved surfaces everywhere, but without the panic that comes with falling down a deep well however tasteful the art inside may be.

We finally reached the bottom, although now I'm not sure how. I don't remember stairs now, and I think we may have been just falling very gently. As it happened, the bottom level of his place ajoined a largish chain bookstore. I thanked him for the tour, and went to poke around the store. I ran into someone I knew inside...all I remember is she was a she...and we browsed together for a bit but ended up separating. I wound up buying a copy of The Green Berets.

I had a dream last night that Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush were having a secret love affair, and for some reason, I was sharing a one-bedroom apartment (and comically-oversized bed) with the two of them. So, at some point, they want to get freaky, and I have to stomp out of the bedroom in a huff.

Next thing I know, I'm in the kitchen frying bacon (because what ELSE do you do when two of the nation's most formidable political superpowers are making the beast with two backs in your apartment?) and suddenly, Bill Clinton comes bursting in, all "WHERE ARE THEY?" and I gesture toward the bedroom with my spatula. As he's heading toward the scene of the crime, I ask him to please not hurt anyone or break anything. He turns to me and starts laughing his ass off.

"Sweetie, I ain't gonna hurt nobody," he says. "I just wanna see what the hay-ull this looks like."

And then he starts hitting on me.

I really need to stop watching so much CNN.

I had organized the first annual Ministry Million Dollar Carnival.

It was a large-ish, open-air affair with all manner of booth, contest, and confection. I was walking around the carnival, half-surprised that everything had gone off as planned. There were legions of people in attendance, and all appeared to be having a good time. Even the weather was nice. Well, nice according to the aesthetic of most folks.

So after a bit of all this, someone...I'm not sure who, but someone from the Ministry circle...might've been a Minister, or possibly Murdoc...came over and pointed out that we don't have a million dollars to give away, or even a million dollars' worth of merchandise; the whole thing was basically a sham. I thought that was odd, and started to argue that that was entirely irrelevant, but decided to finish out-processing from the Marine Corps instead.

As a former soldier I *have* had dreams about people I knew and units I was in, but I never once dreamed of being in another service branch.

So I walked over to the admin building and found myself explaining to a retention officer why I wanted to leave the Corps. As I recall now, it was a famous actor...Jeff Goldblum, maybe?...who was the officer in question. I said that I had done my time and it was just time to get out, to move on, that sort of rap. We finished the paperwork, shook hands, and I walked out to join a waiting expedition to climb Mount Kilimanjaro.

We made the summit in rather short order, only to find that the peak was actually just level with a little, scrubby city and the fact that it is among the largest natural features on the planet really is just an accident of relative observation and associated physics. In short, after cresting the mighty mountain I was rewarded not with an astonishing view of Earth's grandeur but an eye-level view of a rather shabby and dark empty parking lot that I could step onto from the peak.

So I looked around a little, but went back to our camp just short of the summit and told everyone what the deal was. Then I noticed that my cat had actually followed us up the mountain and was being a pain in the ass in the tent, so I bitched at him for a bit.

I went to visit Johno and the lovely and talented Misses Johno.

I was by myself, and had a rental car because I didn't want to take my warwagon so far. Because, in my dream, they lived in Texas, I think...maybe Arizona. Someplace scrubby.

So I got down there, and they had a sweet place. It was a big second-floor apartment. It was new, but had alot of interesting spaces and unexpected nooks characteristic of older, re-purposed accomodations. The net effect was very positive. Johno even had the space to have his whole baking set-up the way he (mostly) wanted.

I guess we hung out through the night...I dunno, or maybe I just got down there really early in the morning. I got a hankerin' for a McDonald's breakfast sandwich, which is odd for several reasons, and I was astonished, even in my dream, that Johno wanted one too. I don't think I ever left to get any though, because I couldn't retain his directions to the nearest one. We ended up playing pool on the huge red felt pool table that dominated his living room that I guess I hadn't noticed before.

But by then Misses Johno was trying to sleep on the little daybed nearby, and kept yelling at us to stop making so much noise. I was trying to puzzle through how to play pool quietly, then realized they didn't have a bedroom at all but slept either on or next to the pool table.

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

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.

Patton has accused me of being overly concerned about wasting a scarce natural resource. The category tag. In this, of course, he is completely wrong. Naturally, I could have argued that over-categorizing a post dilutes the utility of tags. And I would have been right. But that wasn't the point. I was attacking him on aesthetic grounds, and just to stick a stick in his eye.

Just to prove that I am not some sort of homo-tree-hugging-enviro-commie, this post, which really is about everything, is tagged with every category we have. And, when I have a free moment, I'll add some new categories, and add them to this post.

So there.

The Russian tradition of matryoshka nesting dolls is descended from the medieval practice of burying the dead in concentric circles around the corpses of the previously deceased family members.

Harristown, Pennsylvania was named for its founder, Ffloyd Snodgrass.

Originally, the hour was merely an arbitrary period of time.

A former Canadian defense minister is calling for governments around the world to release the alien technology that they've gathered, and use that knowledge to fight global warming. Well, hey, why not?

This story makes several implicit comments: 1) on the seriousness of the Canadian military efforts of the last few decades, 2) solving magical problems with magical solutions is appropriate, and 3) people assume that alien technology will be better just because it's alien.

Of all the domestic animals, sheep are generally the least appreciative.

Eminent smarty science types maintain that the one thing that truly separates us from all the other animals on the planet is our cleverness. That, and thumbs, but definitely cleverness.

And while there are some things which can hardly be improved upon that have endured unchanged for centuries, even millennia (the wheel, beer, the music of Slayer), that doesn't stop people from trying to perfect the already perfect. Get that? That's perFECT the already PERfect. The written word is such a blunt instrument.

A good friend of mine, an enterprising and endlessly creative cook whose inventiveness, whose cleverness never fails to astound me, found something in the endless wastes of the internet that's so shockingly creative, so incredibly clever, and so far beyond even his most inspired moments, that I just have to bring to your attention.... season shot, the shot made of seasoning.

Cook a game bird in one piece
No shot left in the bird
Season on impact
The answer: Season Shot

Season Shot: Ammo with flavor

Hot damn. It's environmentally sound, potentially quite tasty, and totally safe on human teeth as well. Let's see a dolphin come up with that! Boo-yah!!!!

Somewhere in the rainbow of tacky products, sandwiched between commemorative coins for events of only passing interest, and "collector's editions" fast food beverage cups, lies the novelty chess set.

In modern tymes, the game of kings is so widely accessible that it has become just another victim of mass tackiness. Long reserved for the wealthy and noble who didn't have to work for a living and had time for trivial pursuits, chess can now be no less attractive than your plastic dinnerware that celebrates "Fifty Years of the Dragster".

I don't play chess. That is, I can, I'm just not very good at it, and have nothing personally invested in keeping at least marginally attractive chess pieces around. But just out of a sense of respect for a game of such rich and dignified history, I just can't accept things like The Animal Chess Set:

Baboon to Zebra 7...oh hell with it...

Or the Farmland Set:

Is it the pig that moves like an L, or is that the dairy cow...?

Or the Basketball Set:

Maneuvering your big balls onto the opposing cheerleader- a classic chess strategem.

But it doesn't stop there. You got about a dozen variants of cats vs. dogs. You got evil vs. good. You got skeletons vs, I believe, other skeletons. Taking it forward, the Ministry recommends these new chess sets for future development:

Bloods vs. Crips
Sunni vs. Shiite
Godzilla vs. Megalon
John Birch Society vs. COMINTERN
Boy Scouts vs. Girls Scouts
Aryan Brotherhood vs. MS13
Ford vs. Chevy
Bananas vs. Plantains
Typhoid vs. Penicillin
8 ½ x 11 vs. Legal
Coke vs. Pepsi
Paperclips vs. Staples
Tequila vs. Stomach Lining
Sutures vs. Scissors
Hawking vs. Newton
Guggenheim vs. Metropolitan
Turds vs. Daisies

Don't let your trailer's walls limit your imagination the way you let it limit your hygiene, nutrition, and job prospects. With a bit of imagination, the tacky possibilities for embarrassing chess sets are endless!

[wik] I forgot to add that I know what I'm getting Minister Buckethead for Chrsitmas this year: the Endangered Species set, complete with pandas as pawns. Extinction with every move!

Apparently, there is a company that specializes in creating or...preparing...animal bits for musuem and classroom use.

Skulls Unlimited has a spiffy online catalog with photos and prices of all their wares, from aardvark to wombat; chimpan-A to chimpanzee. It's alot more interesting than you think, and not nearly as creepy as you, also, probably think. Well, unless you personally need a creature processed, and we then get into their tremendously detailed and helpful directions for Fedex-ing a head:

1. Raw heads need to be drained of excess moisture.
2. Freeze heads prior to shipping.
3. Wrap heads in newspapers to absorb excess moisture.
4. Tie heads in multiple plastic bags to prevent excess moisture seeping out and ruining shipping box.

Did we mention the excess moisture? Did you infer that that's bad? OK then. Just so you know. No excess moisture though, OK?

The site includes an online store for t-shirts, most of which I found surprisingly lame for such an astonishingly weird and cool line of business. Being the thrifty sort, I made a beeline for the slightly damaged wares, the factory seconds, if you will, of the boiled and dissolved-in-acid taxidermy world. I found pirhannas with broken fins and pigs with missing teeth at quite reasonable prices. Also saw a pig skull with a hole in its forehead; probably don't need CSI to solve that puzzle.

I was more interested though in the creatures with horns, as they make the most striking display. They have your steer, your ram, your wildebeest, and about a dozen other horned beasts I've never even heard of but that have just great skulls. For some reason I found the critter heads interesting, too- raccoons, cats and the like.

It's also a terrific place to shop for the upcoming holiday season, for the man who has everything. Buckethead's fantasy present below the fold:

Florida manatee skull. Note the outsized molars for crushing the bones of humans engaged in aquafrolic.

Reminiscent of a Ministry favorite, Chuck Norris Facts, we find Bruce Scheier Facts. Security guru Bruce Schneier has a large rep in the security and cryptography community, much like Chuck Norris' reputation in the violence community. What by right should have been a lame pastiche of something wonderful, is in fact itself wonderful. Here is a sampling:

Bruce Schneier expects the Spanish Inquisition.

Most people use passwords. Some people use passphrases. Bruce Schneier uses an epic passpoem, detailing the life and works of seven mythical Norse heroes.

Bruce Schneier doesn't need steganography to hide data in innocent-looking files. He just pounds it in with his fist.

Bruce Schneier once found three distinct natural number divisors of a prime number.

Bruce Schneier doesn't need to hide data with steganography - data hides from Bruce Schneier

Amazing, really. They have captured the tone of the Chuck Norris Fact perfectly, even while using words like steganography that no Chuck Norris fan would understand. Read 'em all.

Thanks to Mark at Kaedrin Weblog for the link, and the link.