SRF Heavy Industries

The illustrations in this story make no sense. I see the images whether my eyes are open or closed. I don’t know where they are coming from. Are my eyes even open?

A turtle hatchling on a beach? Why do I feel no sand under my feet? I’m on a train maybe. Could be on a bus. There are other people around. I smell cold sandwiches in paper bags. I smell leather clothing, like old shoes. Or a purse.

I can’t feel anything. Am I in a coma?

I hear a soft sound, like squeezing toothpaste. Like unscrewing an Oreo cookie. The turtle moves. The turtle doesn’t move. I can’t tell. Is it making the noise? What does an egg yolk sound like?

When I shift my head the image fractures with a feeling like a brief loud buzz would feel like if you felt it instead of heard it. Like a jangle of a struck nerve. Like maybe there’s a splinter of something in my brain. Is that possible?

I think about shaking my head but I can’t make myself do it.

I feel like I’m sitting up, but I can’t tell. I twitch, or at least I feel like I twitch, and now I see a baby hippo.

I don’t know what to do about the splinter. Would a splinter in your brain work its way out the way a splinter in your hand would?

It feels like it’s been days.

At no time do I feel the splinter trying to work its way out. Shift my head slightly, image fractures into static with the jangle-buzz feeling, then image is instantly back.

I still smell old leather and cold sandwiches.

Am I dying? I don’t feel like I’m dying. I don’t feel like much of anything. If I were dying, wouldn’t I be dead by now? Days of nothing, it seems. No hunger. No thirst. Just a baby turtle, then a baby hippo, illustrating a story that doesn’t tell a story.

Something happened, but I don’t know what happened. There is a splinter in my head. A short-circuit. A feeling of people around me, a soft sound, a feeling of sitting up, a smell of clothes and stuff people carry with them in the mornings. A turtle and a hippo.

How long have I been like this? What is up with that splinter?

How long can I live like this? Turtle, hippo, why don’t I feel afraid? I want to be afraid. I want to be afraid of the splinter in my head. I feel no fear. Is that how deep the splinter goes?

Am I breathing? I can’t tell if I’m breathing.

Turtle. Hippo. Splinter.

[*]

I’m thirty-nine-and-a-half today.

In front of me I have a signed cover-letter for a short story I’m itching to submit to a literary magazine of which I’m certain the non-Philistines among you have heard. It’s quite possible I can even afford envelopes and sufficient postage for putting it (and the story, of course) in the mail and getting an eventual response returned.

I have a short list of places to which I intend to send the submission if it gets rejected, sorted (in descending order) by cojones required for pestering them.

This isn’t the first time I’ve done this sort of thing. This is, however, the first time I’ve done this sort of thing with any measurable hope of success.

Provided you’d like me to be wealthy and/or famous enough to be in a good position to repay any favors or generosity you’ve sent in my direction in the past, please keep your gonads crossed on my behalf and make any appropriate sacrifices to the gods, muses, and other associated entities that you feel you can afford.

And someday soon I may have the free time to write more fiction.

[*]

I missed the first anthology, but that’s okay. I have two pieces in this upcoming sequel to the Shocklines best-seller The Dead Walk (Die Monster Die! Books, 2004).

In keeping with the 80s-punk theme of getting Stephen Blickenstaff, artist for the cover of The Cramps’ Bad Music For Bad People, to do our cover, I have a short piece in here called “Too Dead to Walk” (although “Too Dead to Fuck” would be just as appropriate).

I guess if we were going with an 80s-pop theme and had a cover artist from one of Prince’s albums, I would have a piece in here called “2 Ded (2 Walk)”. Maybe next time.

My other piece in this anthology is called “The Spare” and features med students, bowling, cheap beer, and more brutally kick-ass elderly folk of the sort you’ve come to expect from me.

Also, murnkay has stuff in this one, as well as Jim Chambers, CJ Henderson, John French, and a couple of other names you might have heard of but I won’t be able to confirm until I have the proof copy sitting in front of me.

It will be available for purchase in … August? August sounds right.

Anyway.

This overly commercial post has been brought to you by and and all of us authors who stand to make $4.17 apiece on the sales of this book over the next two years.

Thank you.

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And now, a stylized form of homoerotic performance art made popular in Japan:

From personal experience, I know what the backside of one of these looks like. There are some people in the audience back there gettin’ a good look. Look at them, craning their necks like that.

I dunno, man.

Meanwhile, our belabored US Attorney General’s office has decided to prosecute nine or ten people for plotting to overthrow the Communist government in Laos.

Talk about mixed messages.

This guy over here on the right is General Vang Pao, who, back in the mid seventies, got CIA-backing to do this exact thing. Although in the seventies, he was a Loatian general, in Laos, and was fighting against Communist guerillas. Problem was he lost, they won, and we just “normalized” relations with Laos in 2005. So the Feds picked him up.

You can almost hear Laos Foreign Minister Yong Chanhthalansy snickering as he tells Reuters the following: “We hope the United States will prosecute them strictly under the Patriot Act and punish the violators of the law severely…. I am sure that such vigorous investigation will lead to the uprooting of the network of the villains who have caused the most difficulty in bilateral relations between the Lao and Thai governments.”

Chanhthalansy can’t be serious, right? Because, you know, the Patriot Act is for catching and punishing US collaborators conspiring with foreign terrorists fighting insurgencies against governments we’ve installed versus catching and punishing US collaborators conspiring with foreign terrorists fighting insurgencies against governments we’ve failed to topple and now merely tolerate. It’s like he doesn’t even know what Patriot means!

And, although Nancy Pelosi said impeachment for Bush was off the table, we have this wonderful list compiled by David Swanson:

• Cities and towns that have backed impeachment by resolution, public vote, or both: 79.
• Largest cities: Detroit, home of the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, and San Francisco, home of the Speaker of the House.
• Earliest and most frequent city: Santa Cruz beginning in 2003.
• States where impeachment has been introduced into the legislature at least once: 10 (California, Hawaii, Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, New Mexico, Texas, Washington, Wisconsin, Vermont).
• State legislative bodies that have voted on impeachment: 3 (Vermont Senate, Vermont House, New Mexico Senate).
• State legislative bodies that have passed impeachment resolutions: 1 (Vermont Senate).
• National political parties backing impeachment: 1 (Green).
• Non-Democratic state political parties backing impeachment: 2 (Vermont Progressives, California Greens).
• Democrats Abroad Chapters backing impeachment: 1.
• Local political party organizations that have backed impeachment: 32.
• Labor unions backing impeachment: 1.

(Updated list with extra details available here.)

We all know that articles of impeachment against Cheney have been drafted by Dennis Kucinich. Articles against Bush have been drafted by wacky and lovable Cynthia McKinney, who is basically a neighbor of mine.

And back in Guantanamo, a US military judge has already thrown out charges against a Canadian man accused of killing a US soldier in Afghanistan with a grenade and the famous Yemeni who has been accused of being Osama bin Laden’s driver. The reason for this is that they are designated as “enemy combatants”. Fine, says the judge. Soldiers fight enemy combatants all the time. We call them “enemies”. We kill them or capture them as the situation warrants, and if they survive we send them home. We do not put them on trial. If they were “unlawful enemy combatants”, on the other hand, then we could have some show of legal proceedings.

Amazing.

As of ten minutes ago there were exactly zero detainees at Guantanamo that were designated as unlawful enemy combatants. We’ll see what that number looks like tomorrow.

[*]

It’s been tough to catch my breath lately. I have it on good opinion that things do indeed continue to happen in the outside world. Like, for instance, The Footnote experienced a fourth anniversary and has lots of new stuff up, including what I think is the first overtly political piece I’ve written for them since I joined up. Also, Presidential candidates (of whom we’ll be tired of hearing long before time to actually vote for any of them) have been exhibiting themselves publicly here and there, and meanwhile holidays and bombs and shit have been happening and who cares because none of it impacts American Idol.

Not that I watch American Idol.

Whenever Sporty Spice isn’t drooling hydraulic fluid onto the pavement I work on learning to drive a manual transmission. I fear for the next manual transmission car I get to drive because this one lets me get away with shifting directly from second to fifth. Going uphill. And still accelerates. It’s gonna be a while before I’m invited to join the racing team.

Business stuff is weird as usual. I’m losing count of the number of non-disclosures I’ve signed (or made others sign) in the past few months, which I can only hope is a good thing. Lately I’ve taken to wondering why we use the French word entrepreneur for the purposes to which we put it, and then I realize that our native-language option is, um, undertaker. Or enterpriser. Which actually sounds even worse.

[*]

On 5/28/07 1:28 PM, “g” <g> wrote:

>
> http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-6883441047197474365&q=richard+gage
>

I have to respect you for continuing to try, but I’d love to have that hour of my life back.

All of the sources in the presentation cite each other or sources I’ve already read. There is no new material here except a presenter who has consumed all the same material you have — the same material you’ve already presented to me — and believes what you believe. The movie segments that get played over and over again show nothing new, because those are the same movie segments I’ve seen over and over again already.

Also, I challenge you to go through this presentation and make a collection of all the sensationalist adjectives: “shocking”, “devastating”, “damning”, etc. You’ll need several pages of paper. These go in the same category as the “nearly” and “almost” from previous discussions. These words have no value except to manipulate the emotions of the viewer/reader, and if your argument can’t get by without them, then you don’t have an argument. I’m offended as a journalist and a scientist, and I’m insulted as someone who is theoretically capable of looking at evidence and making my own decisions.

The more I look at these video segments, the more I am utterly convinced that this is not any kind of demolition other than the kind planned for and hoped for by the building designers.  No controlled demolition would involve “squib” demo-packs on every single floor blowing out every single window. The flames we see popping out of the windows are clouds of superheated material getting sudden access to oxygen and igniting — something every trained firefighter on earth knows about. I see nothing in this presentation that is inconsistent with trapped air from a collapsing building being puffed out floor-by-floor as the ceiling above comes down in less than a tenth of a second.

And even more importantly, nothing ever addresses the most important question of “Why?”. Here are a bunch of “why?” questions that, if there were a conspiracy that blew up the WTC buildings, need some plausible conjectural answers, at minimum:

If the buildings were going to continue to stand, why bring them down at all?

If there were ways that the buildings could have come down that would do more damage, i.e., toppling, why (hypothetically) go to truly exceptional lengths to bring them down in a manner that would cause the least amount of collateral damage?

Why go through all that trouble to pancake the buildings then and there when, as damaged as they were, demolition companies would have to have done so later anyway?

Why involve planes at all if the buildings were already mined with explosives? Why not just pin the bombs on whoever they chose?

Why involve planes at all if the building designs show that planes wouldn’t be sufficient?

Why pin the crime on someone other than Saddam Hussein?

I’ve asked all of these questions before. I assume you don’t have answers. I can’t come up with any either without resorting to the same unfathomable bullshit spewed supporting “Intelligent Design” theories — a vast all-powerful intelligence that makes deliberate mistakes in order to amuse and confound. I understand that we’re not dealing with cosmic-level intelligences, but an alliance of imperfect human beings, but that’s yet another strike. Conspiracies keep things simple to keep down the risk of mistakes creeping in and compounding. Conspiracies keep just a couple of people involved to keep down the chance that someone will rat the rest of them out.

Each time a level of complexity is added to the theory, if becomes less likely to have succeeded and less plausible. Each time you add in a factor that means another individual, another expert, another team had to be involved, that’s another strike. For someone who already has some personal credibility invested in the theory, each new explanation is an angel — an endorsement and a salvation. For someone who hasn’t bought in, however, each new addition that doesn’t simplify other details is just another elephant to swallow.

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? As many as you like. How many elephants? Zero. Your angels are my elephants here. Every explanation that complexifies rather than simplifies? I can’t swallow ’em.

The simplest solution is that these buildings were designed to collapse like a stack of pancakes if overstressed beyond their tolerances, just so they would not topple and wreck the entire south end of Manhattan. I know this to be the practice of engineers who design skyscrapers.

I know these buildings were designed to withstand the impact of the largest aircraft known at the time. I also know they’ve been standing for forty years ungergoing normal stresses. I know that buildings tend to get weaker instead of stronger as they age. I also know that builders and subcontractors skimp if they think they can get away with it because it improves their profit margins. Suburban Atlanta is rife with houses and buildings that have been shown to have been built deceptively out of poorer materials than the specs called for. There have been many scandals, including people who have disappeared or been murdered before they could testify.

On one hand: 19 terrorists. Planes larger than designed tolerances. Old buildings. Buildings designed to collapse into their own footprint.

On the other: 19 people pretending to be terrorists. An individual or team of individuals who could design a non-standard building demolition scenario that specced out explosives to demolish three buildings, including possibly a fourth that no plane ever impacted. An individual or teams of individuals who could build those explosive devices. An individual or team of individuals who could deploy those devices. An individual or team of individuals who could trigger those explosives. (I concede the possibility of one bomb designing/deploying/triggering genius, but odds are low that a single individual would be up to the task. Odds are better that a single team of individuals could do all three tasks.) An individual or team of individuals dedicated to subtly poisoning an ongoing investigation with disinformation. At least semi-rational answers to absolutely all of those “why” questions above, plus possibly a couple more that I haven’t thought of.

Occam’s Razor is frequently too sharp. I don’t like to use it much, because I also know that sometimes complex things happen to simple people. Occam’s Razor has sent plenty innocent people to jail. However, our current administration over here has already shown themselves to be incapable of running a conspiracy, which is why Scooter Libby is headed to jail.

If they had geniuses around that could pull this stuff off, then they’d have geniuses around that could have implicated the right enemy. They’d have had geniuses around that would have double-checked the underlying reasoning and come up with something that would have been way more clear-cut, way more plausible, and way more effective in achieving a way more useful goal.

I’m tired of saying the same things over and over again, G. Feel free to keep sending me links to material. I’ll read and watch what I have the time for. But I’m not responding anymore to anything that requires me to say what I’ve already said. And all I’m doing now is solidifying my arguments to convince people of the opposite of what you believe. You can keep giving me fuel for that if you like, but it’s not in your best interests.

Cheers,

— X

[*]

[*]

I had a nightmare once where I saw the moon crack in half. There was this horrible sudden feeling of lightness, like the ground was dropping out from under me, and then the moon lurched from side to side and broke.¹ I remember talking to a friend or two in college about the possibility that one could throw a baseball at a system of ultra-dense objects (stars or black holes or such) with just the right trajectory for it to get slingshotted back out of the system at a substantial fraction of the speed of light, which would give it an apparent (relativistic) mass of what we decided would be a metric fuckton² and a velocity that we just mentioned and, if it were headed our way, our ability to see it coming would be just about nil.³ In any case, tidal disruption would totally wreck the weather and proceed to destroy all life.

I’ve tried to write a story about this kind of thing several times. Another one of my favorite scenarios has our solar system spotlighted by a slowly nutating⁴ beam of radiation emitted from the pole of a nearby collapsing star that builds up a large enough imbalance of electrical charges between the earth and the moon that we get lightning-like static discharge between them whenever they line up with the star (not that it would ever be a good idea to be outside when the star was in the sky anyway).

Frankly, it hardly matters how the earth is being destroyed.⁵ The plot is always how humanity deals with the fact that the earth is being wiped clean of life over the course of a year or so in a non-preventable way that shows exactly how much God seems to hate us. The other part of the plot is a panicked and rushed attempt to archive as much of us as possible in some meaningful way before the end comes–given that five or ten years of steady baking is guaranteed to vaporize all the oceans and re-melt the earth’s crust. Not that nearby space will be any safer if anyone is thinking of escaping via rocketry, as the earth’s magnetosphere is actually providing a limited amount of protection.

I’ve done sketches for this story from a bunch of different angles–from the viewpoint of a lottery-winner being moved to an underground bunker, from the viewpoint of someone (a number of someones, even) in a not-quite-so-successful ark project…. I keep floundering. A believable drawn-out end to the world is a really big story with, at least for part of it, a cast of seven billion characters. Finding a few as tools to tell the story and then likely killing off everyone regardless of how much I like them, slowly, over the course of a few hundred pages–well, I expect I’ll need frequent breaks and/or therapy and/or a much larger liquor budget.

It may turn out that the whole storyline is a bit too grim to immerse myself in until I find a better happy place to visit, so to speak.

[*]

---

¹ I understand that this is part of the backstory of Thundarr the Barbarian. Shut up. It could happen.
² Work with me here. Deca-, Kilo-, Mega-, Giga-, Tera-, Peta-, Exa-, … Fuck-.
³ Absolutely nil to see it directly. If we were actively looking at specific objects in the Oort cloud at the time of the fastball’s approach, we might see them getting yanked and/or slung away with maybe an hour or two’s warning. If it came at us from the side away from the sun.
⁴ Not a typo. Definition here.
⁵ …though I do like the mental picture of humongous lightning bolts from the moon. Misery loves company.

Tastes like Chicken:

Like popcorn. Like popcorn, I tell you.

I like ’em when they lie real still.

Some right bastard is selling tickets. Charging admission for the ride. I’m willing to bet.

And another thing: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0.

This is a description of a large hexadecimal number. Apparently HD-DVD manufacturers use this number described as a “processing key” — basically an encrypting password — to make sure their HD-DVDs play on “approved” machines only — specifically ones that employ a recognized form of protection against copying their disks — or, as it turns out, only on devices for which one of the world’s lamest anti-piracy/anti-copy protections is actually functional.

One particular user bought a player for playing HD-DVDs, bought a few HD-DVDs, and then discovered that they anti-copy crapola in the player was busted and wouldn’t play his legally obtained media. So he took a few pains to discover the processing key so he could make copies of his discs that would play in his player. And then he posted the procedure to the system of tubes we all know and love so that other people who were having the same or similar problems would be able to play their movies on their players, no matter how poorly designed they were, and also to publicize the problem so that potential buyers of the technology and media could be suitably warned.

The manufacturers of the systems involved are now claiming that the number listed above is a “tool” for getting around anti-copy/anti-piracy or other Digital Rights Management measures, which, according to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, is a criminal activity punishable by law to publish and/or provide to others. They will also claim that, by reporting this news about this exciting string of numbers — and please note I have not published the actual number itself but merely the minimum sufficient information describing that number so that it may be identified with 100% certainty in a police line-up of similar numbers, plus some dashes to make it readable and, should you feel inclined, memorizable — I have also violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (although I am convinced I have not or else I would not be posting this) by publishing its description above. Be aware: if you know this number and report about it in a public place, you could also be charged with violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by people who, if they are willing to set the precedent that information — like a simple string of digits, and I would be hard-pressed to find any kind of usable information that could not also be expressed as a string of digits (you’re soaking in it right now, Marge) — is a tool, could make it a criminal act merely to know a particular item of information, like, but possibly not exactly, 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0. Maybe in fact your own name could be encoded by some process into this very same string of digits, and then possession and publication of your own name, for instance, could be a criminal act.

In fact, “enforcers” who believe that “publication” of this “tool” is in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act are busy even as I type this trying to send notices to absolutely everyone who is responsible for having posted the number described above, including demands that ISPs pull the plug on hosted services and that those very same service hosters pull the plug on allegedly offending posters, who also get their own copy with a chance to delete their posts — if they beat their hosters to the punch, who may or may not already have been shut down themselves. Last I heard, however, enforcement of Federal- or International Treaty-level criminal code was the purview of the FBI, who I am not sure anyone has heard from. I do hope, however, that the producers of this horribly crappy anti-piracy DRM technology (that hinges on a string of digits that you can query the player hardware to tell you) are not trying to waste the FBI’s time with trying to stop the nearly ubiquitous spread of the description of this innocent number as, by now, it is a literally impossible task and pointless as well. The FBI, I have heard, has much more pressing matters of National Security to attend to, including inappropriately spying on US citizens without a warrant and protecting us from shampoo on airplanes.

I would like one of these notices. I will probably frame the first one, although if I get as many as some people are I could consider wallpapering my study. But if I get one of these notices I will immediately turn around and sue the bejeezus out of the issuers for the attempt to improperly use a piece of questionable legislation to suppress my constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech by way of the mechanisms of frivolous lawsuits, various methods of blackmail and coercion, and malicious prosecution.

[*]

In honor of today being declared by our President to be Loyalty Day (please please please go read this bullshit), I just mailed the following:

From the Desk of Laszlo Xalieri

May 1, 2007

Dear Hon. Mr. President,

In light of this administration having the worst record ever concerning violations of the freedoms upon which our nation is founded,

In light of this administration having the worst record ever concerning violations of the public trust by dealing in massive untruths that have cost thousands of lives, many billions of dollars, and irreplaceable credibility domestically and internationally,

In light of this administration having the worst record ever concerning corruption and cronyism,

In light of this administration having the worst record ever concerning flagrant disregard for the Constitutionally guaranteed right to a fair and speedy trial, the Constitutionally guaranteed right to know upon what charges one is being imprisoned, the Constitutionally guaranteed right to materials and capacity to defend oneself against accusations and criminal charges, the Constitutionally guaranteed right to protection against unfair search and seizure, the Constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech and the Constitutionally guaranteed right to demand redress for wrongs from one’s government,

In light of this administration having the worst record ever concerning dishonoring international treaties that according our Constitution are to be inviolable law of the land,

In light of this administration having the worst record ever for the mistreatment of our soldiers and veterans, especially with respect to fair compensation, guaranteed medical care, and deserved acknowledgment of their duty and service,

In light of this administration having, as detailed above, the worst record ever for having shown its own disloyalty to this nation, the Constitution, the soldiers of the Armed Services, and, certainly not least of all, to the citizenry and the freedoms we all hold dear,

I declare the declaration of any kind of Loyalty Day by _this_ administration to be ironic in the extreme, disrespectful in the extreme to any citizen or lawful resident who has shown _true_ loyalty, and in extremely poor taste, as it recommends that the citizenry of this nation show qualities of which our government and its administrators have demonstrated themselves to be fundamentally incapable.

Loyally,

Laszlo Xalieri

[*]