Entries from May 2004 ↓

The more I look at these horrible pictures coming out of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, soldiers wearing my country’s uniform leering over the bare piled flesh of helpless Iraqi civilians, the more my gorge rises. But I think that’s probably because I’m a weak-kneed pantywaist liberal elitist, and because I don’t love my country quite enough. So thank god there’s people like Rush Limbaugh to tell it to us like it is:

This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You of heard of need to blow some steam off?

Look, they’re just a bunch of red-blooded American soldiers having a good time, ok? Sure, it’s the kind of good time that those globalist weaklings at the UN like to call “torture”, but who the hell listens to those guys anyway?

Despair is like gravity, everywhere and always, a tug you spend your life resisting and succumbing to, by turns. Some people are able to shrug it off more easily than others; for a select few, it’s no effort at all. But sunny dispositions aren’t natural, they’re earned. Despair is the end-state of emotional entropy. It’s the bedrock, the canvas on which we paint our lives.

I don’t know where it comes from, or why it needs to be this way. Maybe it has to do with mortality, or our consciousness of mortality. Or our smallness in the larger scheme of things. Or the fact that we’ve transcended the primordial survival instict that got us where we are today, and now need a reason, outside of simple species promulgation, to keep breathing. Maybe we weren’t ever supposed to become aware enough to think about such things, and our brains just haven’t evolved to the point where they can deal with it naturally.

So we do what we can to stave off the sadness. We seek purpose, we find love, we have children. We do not go gently into that good night. It’s a classic struggle against the void, and there’s a kind of beautiful dignity to it: leaning into the wind, refusing to let the storm carry us away, always clawing our way toward something like happiness.

It should be easier to just give up, let the night close over us, let ourselves sink into it. But it isn’t. We carve out a niche of daylight for ourselves, and guard it jealously, heroically, as best we can.

Holy shit, I’m listening to an amazing mix of Public Enemy’s Bring Da Noise and The White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army — the former’s lyrics and rattattat machine gun beats, the latter’s deep thrumming baseline and wailing guitars. What a great idea. It’s on a BBC stream called Essential Mix, which near as I can tell is just a bunch of odd music thrown nonintuitively, delightfully, together without much regard for consistency or compatability.

Ok, now they’re playing some kind of Cuban music, trumpets and chachacha and whistles and pianos, strange discordant stuff.

And now … a bit of electronica with an unmistakeable 80’s groove to it. If you want to ride, don’t ride the white horse.

And now … MC Search, from 1992. I’ve got more rhymes than a prostitute with ghonorrea.

This sure beats the endless rotation of the same 25 goddam songs we get around here.

It’s 2am in England. Apparently strange things happen over there at night.

Harbingdon, DANSENNE – The trial of the notorious Pandora Killers came to an abrupt end today as Mr Alfred Harper and Mrs Helena Harper, husband and wife, were found guilty on all counts and sentenced to death by a process of slow asphyxiation. As the families of their victims looked on, His High Magistrate Rep Distall Gloucester read the jury’s verdict, and then his sentence, adding that he sent them to their death without qualm or hesitation, and regretted only that the laws of the state and of mortality allowed him to execute them only once.

Mr Harper looked on without expression, as he has for the duration of the trial. Mrs Harper, however, stood up and began to scream at the judge and the fifteen jurors, much to the amusement of the gallery. The bailiff dogs moved in quickly to still the outburst, but it took three of them to wrestle her back into her seat and compel her silence.

The outburst was entirely in character. Ever since her arrest, Mrs Harper has passionately denied all the charges levied against herself and her husband, alleging that they had been framed by the Dansenne Civil Defense Corps, who she maintained – and continues to maintain – are the real perpetrators of these crimes.

The Pandora murders transfixed the nation for a period of six months in 1355. A total of twenty-five men and women were murdered in their homes, each in the same way: they received a package in the mail, and, upon opening it, were set upon by one or more daemons that had been secreted within. Most of these daemons were of the gaseous or watery variety, and took on solid form just long enough to disembowel their victims and scrawl a pentagram portal on the floor and escape through it into Hell.

The Arch Regent of the infernal regions has maintained from the beginning that his government had no hand in the murders, and could find no record of any daemons escaping through the firmament locks into the world. After a brief investigation into their claims, the Dansenne Unsecret Police turned their focus inward, on the theory that the deamons had been admitted through human agency; this led, eventually, to the charging to two of their own investigators, Mrs and Mrs Harper.

Legal experts have expressed surprise at the verdict. The opinion of many in the legal community has been, from the beginning, that much of the prosecution’s evidence was circumstantial, consisting almost entirely of inference and hearsay. The Harpers’ attorney was clearly enraged in interviews conducted outside the courthouse. “This is a gross failure of our judicial system, and a travesty of justice. We will continue to pursue every avenue at our disposal to exonerate Mr and Mrs Harper of these spurious charges.”

“They don’t have any avenues left to pursue,” commented a visibly elated Unsecret Police Commissioner Lanken Lanken Hordaden, and most legal experts agree. Appeals are not permitted for convictions in daemonic channeling, a crime considered far more serious than first degree murder. Unless they receive a pardon from president himself, Mr and Mrs Harper will likely (continued on p.36)

The Sydney Morning Herald has an excellent and hillarious interview with Robert X Cringely, one of my favorite columnists and easily among the best tech writers out there. Well worth reading. Here’s my favorite bit from the interview:

Microsoft is about money, not innovation. They aren’t opposed to innovation and like to be seen as innovators, but what really matters to them as a company is the money. Think of it that way and a lot of what they do starts to make sense. When I give speeches … I like to pull out a $US20 note and point out that there is something about that note that bothers Bill Gates - that it is in my pocket. Microsoft really does want all the money and I’m not sure they won’t get it.

He is also given the opportunity to comment on whether Steve Jobs has ever retaliated for the time Cringely called him a sociopath, and whether he thinks he’s better-looking than Steve Wozniak. Good stuff.