~ KATRINA REDUX

Everybody at the office has been talking about the bullet we dodged today. There was a picture of New Orleans on the front page of the Sentinel with a bunch of the panels that make up the roof of the football stadium... looks like the superdome is leaking but it isn't blowing completely away.

What's interesting is the flatness of affect that comes from knowing that the hurricane is not coming towards us... the way four of them did last year. Just knowing that the lights are on back in my little hovel in Orlando makes me very unexcited and even indifferent to the current nightmare being enacted in south Louisana. Don't get me wrong. I feel their pain (like the good hypocrite I am), but it ain't coming after my ass... so who cares?

What the storm represents to me now is just a festering pain in my behindery. I'm sure that the evil gas moguls will use this opportunity to jack up the price of regular to $3 a gallon. Sure as death.

I tell you what I dream of: somewhere there must be some mad chemist who is working on the miracle process that transforms water into high test. I know, I know. Lead into Gold! Lead into Gold! But listen... every shift in the main paradigms has come as a surprise that has been a long time coming. I'd like to think that somewhere there is a laboratory which is working on some way... some heretofore unnoticed process to make energy cheap again. We've had a cheap ride on fossil fuels for the last... what? Hundred years? Seventy five? I'm not sure. But energy ain't cheap any more, and we need it to be. What we need is somebody to come up with the fabled dilithium crystals that run the starship Enterprise. You know, unlimited energy means unlimited growth. The crystals of the last paradigm were petrochemical. What is around to replace it? And why aren't we working our asses off developing that technology? I'm not talking bullshit schemes to turn cow methane into geodesic dome houses full of Mother Earth hippies. I'm talking about something that will replace gas.

We used to run the world on steam which was acquired by heating water with coal. Before that we heated water by burning wood. Then we ran out of wood. And gasoline just about replaced coal with the advent of the internal combustion engine. What's next? Some new magic box with a fusion supeconductor electricity maker that will fuel the electric car of the future? I don't know. But I do know that we need to get off of our asses and get seriously looking for a real alternative to the gasoline driven paradigm.

This dog just won't hunt any more. We need SuperDog!

Bob

Doc Russia (Bloodletting) got me ranting about the coming confrontation with the Nation of Islam that seems so inevitable to me. Doc is of the opinion that we should just snuff them out. All of them. That was the general idea that Pershing had back in the good old days of the China Marines... and I believe that it will come to us again. Then I remembered an html page that was on Strange Cosmos a few years ago and I had to go looking through old dusty corners of the hard drive until I could come up with it. I can't recall the author or date, but it is worth dredging up again.

Bob

KATRINA FROM SPACE.

~THE ANGEL

My friend is just about convinced that I'm a bad person. Maybe she's right. She said that she could look at a man... look into his face... and tell what was in his heart. I said that we were surrounded by perfectly normal looking men, attractive gentlemen with good manners and clean clothes, who were in fact monsters. She said... show me. Well, I got her a copy of Sophie's Choice by William Styron. She agreed to read it and I told her all about the Angel on the left, a young, good looking German officer doctor type named Josef Mengele, who ran one of the camps that tells the story of that terrible choice that Sofie had to make.

I asked what Elaine would do if given that choice. She is still crying and is not sure if she wants to like me any more.

Why do we have to keep relearning such lessons?

Bob

A GIRL WITH A GUN

The state of North Carolina recently marked the official shift of the pendulum from left to back to center... and who knows, maybe to the right. Anyhow, the state is recommending that women who are at risk of being victims of domestic abuse get a gun and protect themselves. My god... common sense intrudes into government. Is it possible that there is hope yet? Imagine that yummy little crumpet to the left being any kind of victim. Hmmm. I tell you, it's no wonder that they can get by with an all volunteer army these days. I never saw anything like that when I was making deliveries of bullets, beans, and bodies.

Bob

~BODIES

The Museum of Science over in Tampa opened up a special exhibit yesterday called Bodies. They have a couple of dozen specially preserved corpses from China that have been preserved and dissected so that you can see their organs.

I'm gonna go over tomorrow and see it. Looks neat. Just the preservation process itself sounds fascinating. The way the newspaper described the process the bodies are impregnated with a plasticised resin rather than formalin so that the tissue is sort of fossilized, similar to the mummification process that the Egyptian mummies were preserved. Sort of a latter day King Tut I guess.

Interesting.

Bob

~ A TASTE

I just thought that it might be time for a little taste of George Grosz. This one is from 1916 and is called The Lovesick Man. I figure that after a week of CPI in a sophisto place like Bartow that it would be appropriate to connect with the Germany of the pre-depression/pre-Fascist/ pre-Mondrianist cafe society of late night Berlin. You know, all that stylized funk that comes from decay and impending disaster.

Bob

WHAT'S THAT NOISE?

On Aug. 10, 1945, the day after the detonation of an nuclear bomb over Nagasaki, Japan, a Japanese photographer, Yosaka Yamahatma, went out with a couple of friends and took some photographs of the carnage. His notes said that he surprised himself by being calm and unemotional... perhaps he was in shock. I would be. But, here's a message about the resiliancy of the human animal... up pops a smiling face of a young Japanese girl out of a basement hole with a big smile on her face. Ready to get her picture taken.

I doubt if she lived a week after the blast. To this day the "black rain" as it's called in Japan is the secret legacy of that day in August. The incidence of birth defects in southern Japan is 200 times higher than the world average. But... think of the millions of lives that the detonation saved both of American as well as Japanese lives. We were getting ready to stage an invasion of the island when the opportunity to end the war came. Truman took it.

Anyhow, just look at that smile.

Bob

THE WEAKER SEX (YEAH... RIGHT)

After hearing about fellow blogger Kate losing some teeth I reflected on the strength of women in general. The gal to the left had an interesting Saturday night recently... even after all this she was still willing to bond the evil boyfriend out of jail. Amazing creatures these frail flowers of feminine loveliness. This particular one was still willing to take on the entire crew of the Orlando chapter of the Florida Outlaws motorcycle gang. The quote was... "Which one of you assholes stole my beer?"

Amazing. Anyhow, enjoy the painkillers my dear. You'll be a sore tooth tomorrow for sure. And yes, those in fact are bite marks on the child's left shoulder. Ain't love grand?

Bob

GOOD LANDING

Elaine has joined the family of flying Bobfriends. This is her first safe walkaway. Soft, easy, quiet, and quick. Straight out of the book. I've got a feeling this is going to cost me though. Now that she has the class stuff behind her she is gonna want to start building some hours doing touch and gos. I'm not complaining. What this means is that I can sleep while she does all the work. My master plan pays off!

~ POETIC JUSTICE TEXAS STYLE

How many times have you been screwed over by someone and been helpless to do anything about it? Car stolen? You'll never be able to do anything about it. Apartment ripped off by crackheads? Catch them? Ha.

But here comes this story. This lizard snatches a 2 million dollar boat in Texas then heads off for Cozumel. Later they find the boat... and the thief is there too... with a bullet in the brain. YES!

I love it!

Bob