SRF Heavy Industries

I’m minded to leave out the push to purge the district attorneys’ offices to replace office-holders with party loyalists because everybody does that.

You can’t see Gonzales’s hands in this picture because his left hand is down by his side and his right hand is raised in his typical oath-taking-in-front-of-a-congressional-subcommittee gesture. It’d be about in the right place to give Rove a pair of bunny ears.

I’d like to point out that the rules of the attorney general game aren’t “how close can we come to the edge of the civil liberties toilet without falling in?” but, perhaps, “how do we best provide liberty and justice for all?”

Ex-attorney general Alberto Gonzales, please accept your Swirly. You know you deserve it. Thank you for all your hard work.

[*]

If any of you are wondering what happened to the alarmist/political stuff that used to happen here once or twice a day not too long ago, it’s not just that I don’t have much time to write. The actuality is that the populace in general seems to have gotten the message.

Gitmo Bad. Bush Administration Bad. Iraq War doomed. Iran War ludicrous. War on Terror risible. Healthcare system collapsing. Mortgage crisis too late to fix.

All the buildings on the block are on fire, yes, but by now everyone knows.

Master Knows about the Danger, Lassie. Good Dog. Stop Barking.

Takes the pressure off a bit.

Meanwhile … there is no meanwhile. Every project I’m working on other than the wake-up-go-to-work-come-home-sleep project is on hold, waiting for … stuff that is in other people’s hands. Been waiting for months, have months more to wait.

It’s 100°F outside. The haze has become a rapist of throats and sinuses and lungs. It’s healthier, no kidding healthier, to filter every breath through a burning cigarette. The temperature speeds up the rate at which the chemicals in the air, particularly the ozone, does nasty things to you. If you suck that through actual fire, you at least know the ozone isn’t making it into your head and lungs. It also gives the carbon monoxide a better chance of being carbon dioxide, and similar things happen with all those spurious nitrous compounds. You can almost see a blueish tinge to the cigarette’s red glow…. It’s a shame about all that nicotine and tar and superheated particulate matter.

Today is, for any of a number of reasons, not the least of which included spending a few happy hours in communication with Dun and Bradstreet and filling out forms to allow access to federal funds/government contracts, a Good Migraine Day. Good for migraine, bad for head. But hey, now I know my DUNS number and I’ve certified my (corporate) identity well enough to accept federal grants and contracts.

It’s also apparently Giant Bug Season. On my desk right now is a dead stag beetle and a cicada, both in the two-inch-plus category. On the front window glass is a three-inch-plus katydid, about the size of last year’s kick-ass wheel bug. I had a coreid bug at the house for a while, but it’s laid eggs and died already. Two weeks ago I took pictures of a moth the size of my palm, but I have no idea what kind it was. Every year I get those huge black-and-yellow orb weaver spiders in my yard, but this year I’m down to one instead of my usual four or five.

Right now I’m hungry enough to consider eating the giant katydid.

[*]

Time for writing is still quite quite close to zero. Time for reading is an order of magnitude higher than that — maybe close to half an hour per day. Possibly double that if you count time for reading stuff in books I’ve had for years while waiting to wind down enough to sleep or waiting to inflate a saggy tire on the car.

I got an uncharacteristic chance to read a bit about new findings regarding the Casimir effect and van der Waals forces yesterday, a topic hyped in the press and near-press tabloids as “levitation”, as it seems the normally attractive Casimir-Polder force can be reversed with an appropriate lens made out of a kind of metamaterial construct that is at least theoretically possible to build…. but understand here we’re talking about forces that operate over distances of around a hundred atom-widths. This isn’t quite a flying car scenario. “Levitation” is a reversal or nullification of gravity. Levity, gravity. Get it? At a hundred-atom distance, we’re not operating on a scale where gravity is measurable or detectable.

Except.

We are talking about nullifying or reversing friction. We’re talking about tinkering with the forces that govern whether a substance is a solid or a liquid or a gas or whatever. For certain classes of substances. In certain carefully exact configurations.

Which means the press that serves the geek audience missed the chance to herald the impending advent of Super-Lube.

I expect they’re really kicking themselves now.

A side track drew me into looking up excitons, magnons, phonons, plasmons, polaritons, and polarons. Makes me wonder how many other (merely) microscopic or even macroscopic effects might be harmonics of quantum forces driven by stuff on the sub-atomic or atomic scale acting in near-concert. Or a bunch of things we haven’t noticed yet. Not exactly wavicles per se, but phenomena that act like them enough to adhere to the weirdness of quantum math. It also reminds me of the entirely consistent “Dark Suckers” theory of light bulbs (“when you turn on a light it sucks all of the dark out of the room”), complete with “speed of dark” calculations…. I swear some of that math looks an awful lot like the “negative pressure” math for the expansion force, and certainly a lot like the “electron hole” stuff for semiconductors and Cooper pair formation in superconductors.

Anyway. Levitation? Not quite. An important widget for creating nanomachinery? You betcha. Turning on and off intermolecular attraction gives a nanomachine a hand. A literal hand. Like for picking stuff up and putting it down. That could be useful.

[*]

Every once in a while you just have to do what the public demands. This time what the public has demanded is a follow-up to the Shocklines best-seller The Dead Walk!, a zombie-themed horror anthology edited by Vincent Sneed and published by Die, Monster, Die! Books. So we done it. This new zombie-themed horror anthology is called, unsuprisingly enough, The Dead Walk Again! and is currently available for purchase at Amazon.

Like, this very instant. And you know you just got paid. Go do your duty.

For less than a yuppie foodstamp you get, bound under a single cover (pictured at right, artwork by Stephen Blickenstaff, who did the cover for The Cramps’ “Bad Music for Bad People” album), the following stories:

“2 Dead 2 Walk” an introductory piece by Laszlo Xalieri
“A Large and Rattling Stick” by C.J. Henderson
“Fast Eddie’s Big Night Out” by John L. French
“Of Cabbages and Kings” by Nate Southard
“Laundry Day” by Steven A. Roman
“Married Alive” by D.J. Kirkbride
“High Noon of the Living Dead” by Adam P. Knave
“Ragged Bones” by Bruce Gehweiler
“The Spare” by Laszlo Xalieri
“Zombies on Broadway” by Jack Dolphin
“Zombie and Spice” by Patrick Thomas
“The Dead in their Masses” a novella by James Chambers
“Ode to Brains” a poem by Adam P. Knave

…also edited by Vincent Sneed of Die, Monster, Die! Books. So you know that the pieces were hand-selected and typeset by zombie-loving sensibilities you can trust.

And yes, you read that right. Two pieces by Yours Truly. Written specifically for this compilation and never seen before except by beachsomewhere, to whom I am am married and therefore has the right to see and revise anything that could potentially shame the family brand before whatever it is hits print; murnkay, whom I occasionally pester with new pieces so he can offer valuable critiques and suggestions for titles when I can’t think of something sufficiently satisfying; and the aforementioned Vincent Sneed, book designer, typesetter, and publisher, who assumably has to read these things at least in the act of laying out the text on the pages.

And there you have it. Or, at least, there you will have it when it ships.

[*]

Medical research has always had a bit of a drawback, and that’s that healthy people typically don’t want doctors and researchers poking about in their innards. Think about it. If you’re feeling fine, why are you at the doctor’s office?

Okay, maybe you’re poor enough to be selling plasma. Or taking ten to twenty bucks for participating in some study or other. If you need the money that badly, stuff that wouldn’t normally sound like a good idea starts to sound better. Why else are they offering money in the first place, except to encourage you to be there to be poked and prodded and bled?

Fine. Research is important and $10 is $10. Take what you can get. $10 is another three or four days of eating if you’re frugal.

But there’s an important consideration here. Doctors and researchers need to remember that they’re getting their data from poor people. Poverty means poor nutrition as well, and poor nutrition means poor health, both physically and mentally.

Western medicine finally figured this out less than a hundred years ago. This was around the end of the era where the “resurrectionists” were digging up the recently dead to sell cadavers to medical schools. City officials still donate unclaimed corpses from flop houses and orphanages because burials are expensive and medical research will always need cadavers of every age.

But this kind of exclusive source of cadavers can lead to serious medical goofs, such as “status thymicolymphaticus“, which, in the late eighteen hundreds, right after the discovery of X-rays, was believed to be the cause for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. See, when babies were taken in for their checkups they were X-rayed to hell and back because no one knew that was particularly bad for you, and the X-rays showed this huge thymus gland apparently weighing down on the babies’ pulmonary apparatuses, and, since studies of little baby cadavers showed tiny little shriveled thymuses instead of bloated, lymph-filled thingies, the doctors would use said X-rays to irradiate the fuck out of the thymuses until they were suitably shriveled and/or nonexistent and declare the babies healthy.

No one particularly thought that maybe dead babies had died for a reason, and among those reasons might be poor nutrition and poor hydration, and that that, in turn, might lead to a tiny shriveled thymus in addition to death.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that the thymus was discovered to be pretty damned critical to the immune system–particularly during childhood–as the body learns friend from foe, immunologically speaking.

In any case, trying to figure out the medicine of health from sick and dead people is tricky business. You have to study healthy people to get a good baseline.

Which is why this worries me a trifle. “Game worlds show their human side” is the title of the BBC article. I guess it’s accurate enough.

It’s high time that serious studies of the sociology of online interactions come into being. There’s a lot more of it now that there used to be, say, twenty years ago, and there will be a lot more later on than there is now. But I cringe to think that researchers will try to find extrapolatable facts from rules they discover from studying populations rife with people who prefer contact with others to be filtered through the impenetrable shield of online avatars.

Health is defined by what’s statistically “normal”, or at least prevalent enough to be accepted as a workable strategy. Homosexual inclination, for instance, is not particularly concerned with replication of genetic material and rearing children, but since non-breeding populations are not exactly detrimental to society in general and individuals have other worths that completely trump the decreasingly relevant choice to spawn biologically (a tendency neither unique to homosexuality nor a requirement of it), homosexual inclination becomes accepted. And a useful part of regulating population size without, say, culls. Or wars. Or famine. Or pestilence. Which are basically culls.

I don’t want doctors telling me in therapy that I will feel less uncomfortable among other people if I construct an exaggerated, physiologically unlikely, and aesthetically idealized self-image I’ll never be able to achieve in real life and use it like a puppet to talk to people I’d never have the nerve to talk to otherwise. Frankly, if I never needed to talk to human beings in the real world that might be fine, but, in fact, if I ever need to sit through a job interview or a thesis defense or talk to potential investors or (God Forbid I ever need to do this again) date, I should possibly have a less ludicrous and more realistic self-image.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to say that in another twenty years’ time, but I’m fairly convinced it’s true for now.

[*]

I’m not making this up.

UK military spokesman Major Mike Shearer says, “We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area.“

I’m not sure how well I’d be handling things if the choices I had made throughout my life had led me to the point where, while wearing my uniform with a bunch of shiny brass on it, as an official spokesperson for a serious first-world military organization complete with nuclear stockpile, I’d have to issue that remark as an official statement to the press.

I’d suppose being raised British would help. For that matter, supplementing my uniform with a pink tutu and holding a rubber chicken by the neck would likely also help. Because anyone present who even cracked a smile would be beaten senseless with the chicken, I shit you not.

Okay, this part I am making up. Because I’m fed up with the Christian churches hijacking pagan festivals and painting saints all over them, I’m creating a new pagan holiday right fucking now, complete with cute fuzzy animals and enslaved workforces creating and delivering goodies AND BLOODY FUCKING DEATH to the deserving. This festival involved DRUGS AND BOOZE and is for ADULTS ONLY. The kids have enough holidays already.

The festival is one of a number of festivals called BEERMAS because I don’t care that there might be other festivals called Beermas to the extent that I’m not even googling it. Don’t care. Don’t Care. Because there are no copyrights and trademarks on traditional pagan festivals even if they’ve only existed for forty-five minutes. Got that, you intellectual-property-grubbing Wiccans? Fuck you. On with the show.

On BEERMAS, the hard-working rock hyrax named Throaty Kneecap McForehead, having filled his last keg with zebra-and-donkey-piss magically transmuted into beer, whips his hordes of enslaved brewer bush babies into rolling the kegs onto the huge razor-wheeled chariot pulled by two ass-raping, man-eating honey badgers. (One, “Lefty”, female, is pictured above. “Penisface” is never pictured, as he is known to seek out and eat photographers.) Every Friday the Thirteenth, also known as BEERMAS, around 9:05 AM Throaty K. McForehead the Rock Hyrax hops into his chariot, “Rosebud”, pulled swiftly and eagerly by Lefty and Penisface the Honey Badgers, to tour the world, stuffing the fridges of the deserving with zebra-and-donkey-piss beer AND THE BLOODY HEADS OF ALL WHO CROSS ME^*, their mouths stuffed with peyote buttons and magic mushrooms, before the deserving motherfuckin’ workers of the world make it back home from work to find the goodies. The undeserving will find their fridges stuffed with snakes — or would, if their own heads weren’t already in MY fridge stuffed to the gills with peyote and magic mushrooms.

Throaty, Lefty, and Penisface will heartily tie up and assfuck^** the layabout slackers who stay home from work on a Friday the Thirteenth without being well-and-truly-and-in-Technicolor® ill and will only stuff the fridge for the slackers if they had a good time. Everyone deserves a second chance.

For the truly sick they deliver bush-baby-made chicken soup. Made from zebra and donkey piss. Be warned.

On days while the beer is brewing and they aren’t making deliveries, Throaty, Lefty, and Penisface go bowling, and the bush babies have to keep setting up the pins.

There you go.

Merry Fucking BEERMAS.

[*]

______________________

^* Technically it’s the bloody heads of all who cross ladykinbote, since this part was her idea.
^** Using a strap-on, in the case of Lefty.