Hugh Cook - Cancer Patient

one year has passed since Hugh died

2009-12-15T17:58:00.002+09:00

Hello everyone.I am Ms.Murasaki,Hugh's wife.I am just posting this comment to let you know how we have been doing.

The 8th of November was a very special day to us.It had been one year since Hugh had died.I feel as if it was just last month though.

Christmas time two years ago,we came back to New Zealand for his final treatment.The first year was a hard time,but the second year after Hugh died was much harder.

Our daughter and I came back to New Zealand this February as I decided to bring her up in her father's country.She became five in April and started school.I did this because I hope she will get to know her father through his books when she grows up.

Shortly after his one-year memorial day,we finally moved to our own house in Devonport,Auckland.

I thank everyone who sent comments to Hugh's blog and for your appreciation of his writings. I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year 2010.

Ms.Murasaki

Hugh Cook 9/8/56 - 8/11/08

2008-11-12T02:30:00.002+09:00

Hugh died very peacefully on a beautiful dawn. Our farewell ceremony to Hugh was interwoven with his poetry and with the words from so many of you who have encouraged and supported him over this past most difficult time. It is wonderful too though to remember that Hugh lived his dream for almost all of his life. He engaged in the almost lost art of finding joy and pleasure in the simplest things and because of this he was a man satisfied with his life.

Hugh's death notice appeared in the New Zealand Herald yesterday. His obituary, written by Dan Rabarts, will appear in the NZ Herald on 22nd November. Dan will also write a more extensive obituary that will be posted, among other places, on this blog in due course.

Thank you all for your recent comments and support.
Catherine

Hugh is now in the hospice

2008-11-01T14:49:00.002+09:00

Hello to all of you who care about Hugh. I want to let you know that he is now in a wonderful hospice close to our homes. Last Thursday his condition deteriorated so that he could no longer walk and in all ways he is fading from this life. He is not in any pain and he appears comfortable. He is truly in such good hands. He is surrounded by family and his much beloved wife is by his side. I took my children and his little girl in to visit today - they all happily did big floor puzzles and ate strawberries by Hugh's bedside - he's so familiar to lying on my couch with the 3 children playing around him that I thought there would be a lovely familiarity for him even though he seems to be only somewhat aware of his surroundings at times. He still has lucid moments. The children and I all chatted about what a hospice is and what dying is - such big conversations and yet so important to be had. With my other sister-in-law we are planning the ceremony we will have once Hugh has died - I thought we needed to think ahead as we may feel quite overwhelmed in the days immediately after he has died. We will organise the ceremony and conduct it ourselves - in my home I think - and making it as child-friendly as possible - a casket that can be drawn and painted on, helium balloons, etc. If the family all agree we will video the ceremony to keep for Karin for when she is older. We would love any of you who feel to to contribute to the ceremony. We will be using excerpts from the blog anyway. You are welcome to email any words/speech you would like made to my home email kraken@xtra.co.nz
Hugh is not religious and our family are not involved in any Christian church. However, all sentiments of any non-fundamentalist persuasion are welcome. Some in our family are Buddhists. I don't think Hugh has ever put a photo of himself on his blog so we will try to do that. Blessings to you all who have companioned Hugh throughout his illness - I know that your company has touched him greatly.
with blessings,
Catherine - Hugh's sister

wisdarinom of k

2008-09-13T18:33:00.002+09:00

having seen eight yellow chicks hatch outatrhe daycare center- karin shares hwe wisdom by telling methatevery bird has a spel tooth for opening its shell initlly i doubt this then relide yes the tooth isthebeak karas taken to declaring herself to beapeople and so amazingly she is person in herown right she goes to rot soon and will seattheagradomeesheep orua-ain haiacia

jane austen- her beowulf awakens

2008-09-08T17:39:00.002+09:00

we arre told yhat womengl0wmenpersp

jane auden her beowulf awakens

2008-08-27T08:55:00.002+09:00

French edition wizards and warriors

2008-08-27T08:41:00.002+09:00

war in ruropemy s0lution everyone surrenders unilatweally to canada whi ch i am sure would take it in their stride a french edition of the wizards and the warriors will br published in due course my profi]

MOVING HOUSE

2008-08-17T11:49:00.002+09:00

We have a new house in Devonport. We have a TV and a dial - up internet.
We saw a movie The dark knight. Very confusing as is war in Europe. Did not we get closure on this in 1918 1945 1989-fall of Berlin War. ( Hugh's wife ,Ms. Murasaki took dictation)

thank you and thinking about Karin

2008-07-09T09:30:00.002+09:00

Thank you to all of you who think about Hugh - you each know him in ways that differ to my way of knowing him and it is very touching to think of a network of people who hold thoughts of Hugh with care and respect. I have been thinking a lot about Hugh's daughter, Karin, who is only four years old. I imagine that she will want to find all the 'traces' of her father that she can as she grows older. Some of Hugh's readers carry these traces as his stories weave into their lives - with all sorts of consequences by the sounds :). And I wonder how it would be to ask if any of you would like to contribute letters to Karin that I could keep for her until she is older. You may want to pass letters to me privately and I will think of the best way to do this - I don't want the on-line obit writers flooding my private email! Karin has a very big spirit - such a wonderfully feisty little girl. She still jumps all over her father, treating him far more casually than the rest of us - and yet aware of his limits - fetching his shoes, making sure a gate is opened.
best wishes,
Catherine

update on Hugh

2008-07-05T04:18:00.002+09:00

Hello to Hugh's loyal fans. I apologise that I haven't posted regularly as I had intended to do so. It is just too hard to write often about my brother's fading life - to imagine what he would want me to say to you - instead I am flooded with my own thoughts and feelings about his predicament - and what his illness means and will mean for his wife, little girl and for my parents. Hugh is indeed alive and he, his wife and little daughter continue to live with my parents. He has now completed a 6 month course of palliative chemotherapy which has worked in that the tumour is again being held at bay. However, as the specialist said might happen, the treatment hasn't returned him an increased quality of life. He spends his days mostly on the couch, listening to the radio and writing in short bursts by hand. He feels too unsteady to sit up for too long, but manages occasional trips out to our local village and can mange to visit family. He was unable to use the voice-activated software we organised for him - learning new skills has proved too difficult. Despite the ravages to his brain from the treatment and the cancer, he is remarkably lucid and sociable, although he tires very easily and dozes a lot. Amazingly he is in no pain. He needs some steroids to help him to retain some steadiness with mobility and to keep hallucinations at bay. The specialist says the treatment is likely to work for months not for years. In the meantime Hugh faces all the health risks of being so sedentary and a few months ago he was in hospital for a week with clots in his lungs. I will let you all know how Hugh is and if his life is shorter than my own (we all live with uncertainty although like most of us are spared having to acknowledge how fragile life is on such a day-to-day basis) I will let you know of his passing so no need to scan the obituaries! For my husband and I, we try to companion our family as best we can, at odds with and surrendering to the lessons of patience, kindness and tolerance.
with best wishes to you all, Hugh's sister, Catherine

Kiwi pub crawl circle line London Saturday

2008-02-08T12:21:00.000+09:00

Haka same day Big Ben for Waitangi Day

Drugs News

2008-02-06T08:33:00.000+09:00

Good. My unfunded cancer drug now funded. Bad news. Vital HIV retrovirals unfunded for some Kiwi patients.

the limits of medicine

2008-01-05T12:20:00.000+09:00

Thanks so much for the words of acknowledgement and support. Although, to my knowledge, Hugh doesn't have a spiritual faith, he is appreciative of all goodwill towards him including prayers. Yesterday was a heart-aching day after Hugh saw the specialist, accompanied by some family members, and was told of the limited treatment available that may give only brief respite from the advance of the lymphoma. The treatment offered is called temozolomide, in case any of you have an interest in these specifics. The specialist gave Hugh the following article:
Reni, M et al (2007) Temozolomide as salvage treatment for primary brain lymphomas. British Journal of Cancer, 96, 864-867. (www.bjcancer.com)
The next step is for Hugh to have an MRI scan as part of the assessment to see if he is a suitable candidate for this drug. It's an oral regime which I gather means he won't need to be hospitalised for the treatment. Hugh, his wife and ball-of-energy daughter are living at my dear parents' place - we all live in the same city and relatively close-by each other.
Keep sending your thoughts and also if you have any great cake recipes, send those also!
Catherine

River Styx Film Festival

2008-01-03T16:12:00.000+09:00

Munich,
Drugstore Cowboy,
Brazil,
Elephant's Dream,
Gladiator,
Blade Runner,
The Fugitive,
Flags of our Fathers
Letters from Iwo Jima
The Legend of Marilyn Monroe

Becoming an Emperor

2008-01-03T16:01:00.000+09:00

This blog posted on Hugh's behalf by Alan the brother in law and Hugh's general factotum. [Hugh writes these in big letters on a pad and I transcribe them]

On diagnosis, I kicked away my reality controls and crashed into a hallucinatory fantasy which merged into the absolutely real. 300 years in the future I am Emperor no less, of Aotearoa New Zealand. The (platonic thank you) embrace of my sister. The more responsive embrace of my wife, this too. But the rest? Fantasy or fact? The grim judgement of the bathroom scales is that every single mouthful of wine, chocolate, and banana cake with lime flavoured icing was not the stuff of fantasy but rather, appallingly real.

journeys with my brother

2008-01-01T16:33:00.000+09:00

Hello, I am Hugh's sister, Catherine (he also has 2 brothers) and he has given me permission to post updates on his blog and he also wants to thank everyone for their words of encouragement and support - it is very sustaining for him to imagine that other people are taking the time and energy to think of him at a period of his life which is filled with such uncertainty. I'll just keep this note brief. Hugh has an appointment with his oncologist on Friday 4th and this conversation and assessment will give us all some idea as to whether some palliative treatment is potentially available. I very much try to stay with the day-to-day of enjoying Hugh's company, and that of his delightful wife and exuberant daughter. I have worked as an oncology nurse which is both a help and a hindrance - in terms of getting caught up in imaginings of what might be ahead. We've managed to have a memorable Christmas and New Year - it amazes me that, with all that has ravaged Hugh's brain, he is nevertheless incredibly lucid, articulate and breathtakingly brave in facing what he has called 'the descent towards the River Styx.' He gave his own funeral speech at Christmas dinner in his own inimitable style. His words will, I hope, stay with me forever. There is so much to celebrate about a man who has lived his dreams and so little reason to believe that an early departure from the body is warranted. I want to assure you all that Hugh has a circle of support here and that we will companion him as closely as we can. Fortunately he is in no pain and loves to eat, can still watch DVDs with his very minimal eyesight and between dozing can enjoy friendship. Please keep in touch if you wish too - he enjoys your messages which we make sure reach him. With thanks, Catherine

Cancer back death certain

2007-12-22T05:50:00.000+09:00

In New Zealand for last-ditch cancer treatment. no email reply, sorry. EYES TOO FUCKED TO SEE

कैंसर बेक डेथ सर्तैन नो ईमेल रेप्ली सॉरी एएस तू फुच्केद तो सी

2007-12-19T06:45:00.000+09:00

Mr McGoo- Improbability Man

2007-11-27T14:45:00.000+09:00

Mr McGoo- Improbability Man

When, as a child, I went to the movie theater, there would sometimes be a short cartoon movie before the main feature - a custom which Disney, I believe, aims to revive.
On occcasion, the cartoon would feature Mr McGoo, who was amusing because he was so short-sighteddd as to be blindddd. As a short-sightedd child, I found this vein of humor a bit off.

That granted, I must confess that I can reach back across a gulf of more than twenty years and vividly recall some vivid detaila of an episode I saw in childhoodd.
Mr MCGoo, blind as a bat, drives into a construction site and, miracle by miracle, accidentally survives a series of potentially fatal encounters with obstacles, machines and murderously dangerous terrain.
It's fun, up to a point, watdhing Mr MGoo but no fun becoming him and enduring his reality.
Okay ...I'm on an upper floor in someone's house on a balfony ... a door here leads into the house ... I could knock on the door, confess my existence, explain (how? ... then beg the way out
Or I couldd get up on the railing here, drop eown to the roof and esdape over the roof tops...
Okay, it' ... how far down?
About ten meters.
Let's brainstorm possible outcomes ...

a. I break both legs, badly, and have to be airlifted out of there by helicoptrt ... or

b. I smash fhfoufh fhe impfressively flimsy roof and end up on the dinner table or in a honeymoon bed, and aest a coupld's twoesome into a threesomeeeeee

Shock, pain and physical damage will prove instrudtice, all going well.

2007-11-22T01:11:00.000+09:00

Shock, pain and physical damage will prove instrudtice, all going well.
Night,cold, dark, blind, can't find home..
whag's this?

Yes, I can get around it ...
Wah! fALLING!
G-CHANG!
Smashed down, pain, broken, can't vreathe, MUST GET UP!

Uh-oh, large predator is emerging from lair ...
This was a neighbor, come to see why a truly catastrophic sound hzd emanaaated from the vicinity of his parked car.

He stated that he knew I was a local, so I asked him if he knew where "jivun no mon" - "my gate, inelegant but communicative.a"
He did, and led me there. As he was clumsily dragging me in the direction of the gate, I felt nauseous and wanted to vomit. I also tasted, at the back of my throat, something I took to be blood. It was then that I realized I was in a certain degree of shock.
In the dark, my neighbor found the gate that I had been unable to find, saw there waa an intercom button and pressed it repeatedly, rousing my wife from her slumbers. (It was then about 02:10).
My wife came down, apologized, took me upstairs, inventoried my injuries, made me a cup of tea then ran me a hot bath.
bath. I crashed out on the couch and slept until 0900, waking stiff, sore and chastened but functional.
All the foregoing is the setup for a joke. The punchline will be along next. You ARE expected to laugh. I put a LOT of work into this. I dd DO expect a payoff.
Before setting forth, blind and brain-damaged, to do supermarket shopping, I had been indulging in riddiculous fantasies of joining (wait for it...) the Foreign Legion. I'd gotten as far as finding a site which gives you the low down on Legion lifee:

http://www.foreignlegionlife.com/

You're young? sharp-eyed? haven't had brain cancer yet? Go for it!
Do note that the Mobile Light Infantfy is no longer recfuiting. Sorry, that game is over. We lost. The arachnoids won. Sic transit gloria mundi.

However, the Tung Leung brick kiln still has vacancids for perimeter guafds. Stone cold killers only, please.

Up Shit Creek in a Barbed Wire canoe.

2007-11-20T13:52:00.000+09:00

Up Shit Creek in a Barbed Wire canoe.
Recently, I have increasingly found myself up shit creek in a barbed wire canoe, to coin a phrase.
A combination of damaged eyesight and a damaged brain has so severely undermined my ability to navigate from one place to another that, from where I'm standing, it would seem that there is a question mark over my ability to prosecute my everyday life.
In the past week I have gotten lost at night inside my own home (not once but repeatedlya) and, in broad daylight, while trying to return home from the library and the supermarket - both familia r and well-traveled routes.
On one occasion, I spent almost an hour lost in the streets near our home, unable to find our gate.
Monday evening I left early to go pick up daughter Cornucopia from the daycare, hoping to complete the journey before it got dark.
On reaching the daycare earlier than I had planned to, I decided there was time for a side-trip to the Tsutaya video store.
However, after leqving Tsutaya, I blundered off in entirely rhe wrong direction, and got most monstrously lost.
While I was haphazardly exploring the increasingly bewildering streets of some unknown ciry in an entirely different universe, the daycare finally phoned my wife.
w [my spouse, not USA George] Hugh?
DC: Uh, Cornucopia's mum, right? Look, we've got a guy from a brick kiln here, and he'w offering to buy Corny. Six dollars. American dollars. Cash. Ddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd. Do you want us to facilitate this career opportunity for her?
No!
As a brick kiln survivor, my wife knew perfectly well that the market value of an untrainedd three-year-old slave is not US$6 but US$ 24.

Or, If sold as a virgin to a brothel in Africa, US $240.

By the time my fatiguing random walk through 32-dimensional space had brought me back to the daycare center,NOTGEORGE had uplifted Corny and had headed for home.

As I headed home myself, the batteries in my MagLite torch chose this moment to die. With my flashlight out of action, I was blind in the dark, but soldiered on.
I then made the mistake of taking some stairs which looked promising but which led me up one flight and into the interior of a private dwelling where I had no right to be.
Feeling around, I found the space was unfurnished. Good. That suggested that there was at least one door between me and any unsuspecting slumbering female. Still, this was anextremely weird situation to be in, and my unquenchable crearive faculty kicked in and came up with the following mot;

Surrealism is acceptable as an art form, but not as a way of life.

Then I heard a guy talking to himself, maybe to his cellphone. He was close, and I didn't want him to come at me with some kind of improvised weapon, and hit me in the head with, say, a baseball bat, the household washing machine, the family grand piano or a sheet of roofing iron.
"Sumimasen!"
["Excuse me.]
There was no response to this overture, so I eventually found my way down to the street level, where I eventually enlisted the aid of a passer by who took me all the way to the local Shinto shrine, from where I was able to make my way back home.
On my return, I found my wife had been on the phone to the cops, and had reported me as a missing person.

Confronting Social Terroridm: Attack snd Counterattack

2007-11-17T16:12:00.000+09:00

Confronting Social Terroridm: Attack snd Counterattack

ATTACK

You have a daughter named Cornucopia? Why? What a horrible name, and a horrible burden for her to carry the rest of her life. You and your wife are idiots. Some people just shouldn't be parents. What on earth were you thinking????

COUNTER-ATTACK

You have a daughter named Cornucopia? Why? What a horrible name, and a horrible burden for her to carry the rest of her life. You and your wife are idiots. Some people just shouldn't be parents. What on earth were you thinking????

Oksy, grt this: your violation of the sacred precincts of my family has been noticed, and there have already been consequences. More will follow in due course. By way of warming up, your ancestors have been exiled from their post-mortal repose. Each of them has been skinned alive and they are now sitting waist-deep in molten lava.

In due course, Golcrosh of the 37 msndibles will come for them, and they will be hauled sceaming into the white-hot environs of NetherFarb, the Ultimste Bfick Kiln.
As for you, cockroach dung, your just reward is being engineered for you. Meticuloudly. Enjoy your gastrointestinal tract while you still have it, toad spawn!

My first idea for a child's name was "veloci rar," to drive at the meaninf "velocirapror rug rat." But my wife, unaccountably, nixed that.

The name Cornucopia was chosen because I planned for Her to be a major goddess in Neo Mythos, which, if this exceedingly smbitious project had come to pass, would have been nothing less than a rewriting of the West's stock of myths and legends.

PS: We are planning to hsve three more kids to use for body parts (for family use and for sale on the open market.)

My Solution Makes Things Worse.

2007-11-17T06:14:00.000+09:00

My Solution Makes Things Worse.

Problem: Can't navigate in the dark. Get lost in my own bedroom.

Theory: If up in the night, switch on the lights, go for what you want without disturbing anyone - toilet, drink of water, cup of tea, bowl of ice cream. No problem!

Reality: The night is HUGE and the light switches are lost in the infinite folds of its immensity. Worse, the floor is cluttered with an infinite number of objects, these including an oil heater, my wife's sniper rifle, the surgical suite from daughter Cornucopia's dolls hospital, our cactus collection, a set of throwing knives, the needles of my extremely ancient army-issue sewing kit and an instructional manual called HOW TO BECOME AN EFFECTIVE SERIAL KILLER IN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS.
Having gone through a truly nightmarish struggle to find two light switches, I decided the smart thing to do would be to leave them on, but, when I woke again, later in the night, the whole of the downstairs area was, unaccountably, an inscrutable mass of myriadddddddddddddddddddddsdddddd-option blackness.

My Wife Pleads for Mercy as she is Trampled

2007-11-16T12:53:00.000+09:00

My Wife Pleads for Mercy as she is Trampled

"Nemutai," says my wife. "Nemutai!
She is protesting in Japanese, saying that she wants to sleep. She is proresting because it is now about 0130 and a large animal of some descriprion is trampling on her. The large animal is me, her husband. I am blundering around in the dark, trying to find the toilet but totally lost, and I keep treading on soft squishy things, such as my wife and daughter.
If you step on a small child and squash all the air our of her, as a general rule no lasting harm is donee, because she will eventually reflate and rhen be as good as ever. This is what happened to my three-year-old daughter Cornucopia, so, in the morning, I took her to the daycare center as usual.
Once back home, I hauled the following things downstairs: a mattress, a futon, two sheets, a blanket, a duvet and a pillow. Using that stuff, I set up a bed for myself in the living room, in front of the TV, and I plan to sleep there from now on, in the wild lands south of human civilization, where my brain-damaged dinosaur misdeeds will cause nobody any harm.
This exile, I must make clear, is self-chosen, not something inflicted upon me by my long-suffering wife or protesting daughter.

Our Criminal Family Plans Major Heist

2007-11-15T22:16:00.000+09:00

Our Criminal Family Plans Major Heist

Three-year-old daughter Cornucopia is the genius who thought this one up. We were coming home from the daycare center and she started free associating in a very creative manner. and, by the time we sat down for dinner, she had the whole thing figured out.

This is how it works:

I go outside and stand under the moonlit sky. Corny gets up on my back. My wife then climbs up and stands on Corny's shoulders. My wife then, with one convulsive heave, hurls herself into the heavens, grabs hold of Mr Moon and pulls him down. He is ours!

Looks good on paper, and I'm expecting we'll be able to pull it off. But where will we stash the kidnapped moon?

My first thought was our lock-up garage, but then I remembered it's crammed full of illegal refugees, all slaves who escaped from Chinese brick kilns.

My ife swears blind that she never gave anyone our address, but they keep turning up. They mistakenly think we are a station on some underground railway for escaped slaves, and will help them get back to their beloved North Korea.
They are wracked with nostalgia for grass soup, roast tree stump, placenta stew, bird dung omelettes.

If you want to buy all 27 for your organ bank, I'm open to any reasonable offers.

Paris Hilton Endures Taser Rorture

2007-11-15T17:16:00.000+09:00

Paris Hilton Endures Taser Rorture

My apologies to all my manye-mail correspondents who have been eagerly awaiting the launch of my new site paris-hilton-endures-taser-torture.kiwihughjapan,jp, but launch of the site has been delayed because of a technical problem.

The very first time Paris was tazed, her indiosyncratic reaction was to catch fife. Oily skin, I think - poor zit control.

Paris has since undergone a covert lobotomy at Hush Medics, a very discrete organ transplant outfit basdd in Ciudad Tequila, down in sunny Mexico, the place where our fist child will be born (we got secretly married two months ago in the Confederate city ofLynchopolis, marriage celebrant being Fred Presldey, a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
Paris is currently schdedulded to finish up with reconstructive surgery about five years from now. Post-lobogomy, she tases beaufifully!

Occult Knoswledge: Opening Plastic Bags

2007-11-15T01:25:00.000+09:00

Occult Knoswledge: Opening Plastic Bags

Some lifevital knowledge is deliberately kept occult, ie secret, so GOD can be amused by watching us thrash around in helpless frustration as we struggle to accomplish Very Very Simple Tasks. Such as opening plastic bags.

If this, for you, is effortless, then Congratulations! I award you the Pripiltzi, glitziest and most coveted of all the merit badges in the city of Gorbograd.

For lesser mortals, my mission today is a Promethean one: to reveal to Humanity the Truth of exactly how those wretched supermarker bags can be Forced To Open.

Back in New Zealand, in my BBC Days (my Before Brain Cancer Days), I could never figure this out, until the day when God, operating in His Japdester mode, fooled me with a False Revelation.

In the supermarket I was permitted to see a cashier place the top of a plastic bag between the flat palms of her two hands and riffle it this way and that until the static electricity which was clamping it shut gave up the Unholy Ghost and consented to answer.
That, I thought, was the Answer. But it was not. Rather, it was a Japester joke. Sometimes effective but usually not. this year, there are times when I have become so frustrated by an incalcitrant plastic bag that I have lost my onion and have physically ripped it apart.

Sometimes, oldsters of Alzheimer' Age will embarrass me by intervening and, seemingly effortlesssly,doing the necessary riffle.
Then, eaarlier this week, an alert cashier came all the way from her station to assist me. I watched closely so I could emulate, and saw her briefly dab each hand on something before doing the riffle.

Later, after she had departed, I found aa damp flannel on the packing table.

Experimenting at home, I found that if you spit on the palm of each hand then the palm will stick to the bag and the riffle succeeds.

Do NOT do fhis in your local supermarket because (aa) the locals may use it as an excuse for a pogrom afainst members of your ethnicity, and

(b) the cops may arrest you under the terms of the Avian Flu Pandemic Prevention Protocols.
Today, in the supermarket, I dabbed decorously at the damp blud flannel provided, riffled, then headed home feeling very pleased with myself.

Subsequently my ego took a knock when I got totally lost in broad daylight in streets very near our house, and blundered around for the better part of an hour before finally finding the gateway that is ours.

POEM FOR MY WIFE

2007-11-14T13:10:00.000+09:00

I am ragged with depletion.
I am lost.
The night
Has a billion spaghetti junctions.
In the wraith worlds of my mind, my departed daughter,
A tattered ghost,
Who does not recofnize me.
In the bowels of my confusion
The cool grace of your slender hand
Meets me, calms me,
Comforts me ...
And leads me into the light,
My salvation.

Fascist British state hauls cute girl creative writer into court

2007-11-14T00:09:00.000+09:00

An airport worker who wrote poems about beheadings is the first woman to be found guilty under new terror laws.

Samina Malik, who liked to call herself a "lyrical terrorist", called for attacks on the West and described "poisoned bullets" capable of killing an entire street in her poetry.

The 23-year-old Muslim wrote of her desire to become a martyr and listed her favourite videos as the "beheading ones".

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=492460&in_page_id=1770]

Paris Hilton interview: Jail Life, Drugs, Mystery Meat?

2007-11-12T00:32:00.000+09:00

Paris Hilton interview: Jail Life, Drugs, Mystery Meat? Author Hugh Cook interviews jailbird Paris Hilton, the girl who likes to cuddle up with a bottle in a car.

HUGH: What did you like about jail?
PARIS: Like?
HUGH: Well, there must've been something.
PARIS: "You're kidding."
HUGH: Okay, a few things you didn't like. Off the top of your head ..."
PARIS: Uh ... Mystery meat. Coke cut with talc. Pre-loved toilet paper."
HUGH: "Uh ... exactly how mysterious is the mysery meat?
PARIS:
Sometimes not nearly mysterious enough. I mean, sometimes it's just like, bleh, yuk, what IS this? Tinned baby snot? Second-hand placentas from the maternity hospital just down the road.
"But other times, gugh, I've seen ants, flies, spiders, bits of roach, once a wasp, and then there was this wee little tail, kind of cute but sad, some poor little mouse ... then I'm pulling on this thing and WHOA! it's not little at all, it's fucking huge, and at the end ofit there's this huge chunk of grickly-grackle stuff with bones and furs and legs, two legs, it's a Fucking Rat, the, how do you call it? - the bugger port?
HUGH: Hindquarters?
PARIS: No, we're not talking quarters.It was at least half, half a rat sitting on my plate!
So S I complain to the kitchen, and Jane, this mouthy black bitch, she says to me, Piss off, ho!"
HUGH: Ho, huh?
PARIS: Yes, can you believe it ? I mean, she's a junky, a coke whore - say, can I call this big fat bitch from watermelon a nigger.
HUGH: Uh, I'd have to check our style book but, off the top of my head, no, I rather think the answer will turn out to be no. We will retranscript the interview to reflect the fact that Ms Hilton went to the food preparation area to remonstrate about some unrequested protein additives, and the servitor, who was a member of that group which the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People exists to serve, had the temerity to make a remark suggesting that the sacred Shrine of aLove ensconced between Ms Hilton's thighs was a slutty piece of Las Vegas. Okay, Paris, another question. Now you've had a taste of reality - I mean real reality - how does it stack up against reality TV?

PARIS: "REALITY? It's bad. I mean, I can't tell you how bad it is. It's gruesome. Finally you understand why drugs were invented."
HUGH: And have you been able to get drugs in prison?
PARIS: Not as such, But they have this weird Chinese toothpaste, and if you eat four or five tubes of it - they're really small suckers - you can go to some really strange places in your head.

Japanese Cannibal Death Cult Temple

2007-11-10T19:24:00.000+09:00

Japanese Cannibal Death Cult Temple

Friday, my wife, daughter and I went to visit our local branch of TrioTheo, the Church of the Three-personed God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

It was founded about two thousand years ago by a guy called Judas Iscariot, who went with his buddies, got hold of the body of a dude named Jesus Christ ,who had been put to death by the Romans, took the body to the Garden of Gesthemene then consumed it in a riotous cannival feast washed down by enormous amounts of red wine.

Parenthetically, let it be noted that the question of who it was that went and wasted JC is disputed, with some people blaming the Scientologists, with some saying the Mormons did it, and with one big-name Australian actor pointing the finger at the Jews.

The oldest and most traditional branch of Cult Cannibal is based in Rome,and is known, for that reason, as the Church of Rome. Currently, it is presided over by an arthritic old guy named Benedict, one of the last living survivors of Hitler's Germany.

In the most sacred rite of the Church of Rome, a priest does some miraculous mumbo-jumbo, lightning descends from Heaven, the Voice of God is heard to speak, and a great quantity of red wine is converted into blood.
Scientific tests have demonstrated that the alcholic content of this blood is 67% and the whole congregation gets roaring drunk on it.

In a matching miracle, ordinary bread is transformed ino raw and bleeding chunks of the sacred flesh of Jesus Christ, which the Congregation battens on and devours.
This cannibal ritual is now outlawed in Japan because of fears about BSE. If you read GodBook, the sacred tract of the Cult Cannibal, you find no evidence that Jesus, while alive, was ever tested for BSE, and the Japanese authorities rightly take the view that it is better to be safe than sorry.

Our local church is a Protestant Church. Back in the days of the Reformation, a guy named Martin Luther set out to break the monopoly that the Church of Rome had on boozing, and it is thanks to his success that the Western world now has bars on every street, places where you can have direct access to the bar without any interfering priest demanding to act as an intermediary.

Anyway, today we did not go to the death temple for a drunken cannibal feast but for a simple sing-song followed by the simplest of all imaginable sermons - a''"God is made happy by little kids who believe hin Him" - and by a distribution of gifts to little girls in honor of ssSchichi Go San, the Japanese festival for girls agedd three, five and seven. My daughter received a Santa Claus ballpoint pen which plays jolly Christmas music when you turn it on; unfortunately, there is Absolutely No Way Of Turning It Off.

Note that this Christmas we will all have the privilege of watching a movie about Santa's loser brother Fred (the severely dysfunctional Fred, the loser). Advance reviews would have us believe that this is the Worst Movie Of All Time, but I find it hard to believe that it could possibly be worse than the movie I found online recentrly and unwisely downloaded, SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS.s

Reality versus Dream

2007-11-10T00:33:00.000+09:00

Reality versus Dream

I am now facing a problem that might be fun in fiction but which is no fun at all in real life: the boundaries between reality and the real world are not always clear.

Routinely, I get up in the night, leave my futon in the family bedroom on the third floor, head downstairs to use the toilet or get a drink of water from the kitchen, and end up getting lost in some huge and incomprehensible architectural space which is masquerading as part of our house.

Some days ago, for example, I found myself in a deserted movie theater. Was I dreaming? I put my hand down and explored, finding a broad wooden board which stretched away to a set of movie seats.
There was thick gritty dust on the board, totally real. This could not be a dream. Yet there was no place in our pristine Japanese house which had accumulations of filth.

In the morning, I compared the real house with my dream, and surmised that perhaps I had sleep-walked into my wife's personal room.

Then, last night, I ended up on the stairs going down. Uncertain of the footing, I shuffled my foot along the stair, questing for a suspected abyss. And felt grit.

Today I checked the stairs and, yes, there was thick gritty dust on a stair which, when I sat on it, was broad, and could have doubled for the broad board in my earlier movie house dream.

I recalled that my wife had optimistically chosen to divide the vacuum cleaning duties between the two of us, but I, sad to say, had taken the cleaner nowhere near the stairs. Today I at least cleaned up that grit, forensic evidence of God knows what kind of diabolical activity on the part of my imagination.

Given that I live in a dislocated reality, the last thing I need is a dislocated a logical fantasy, but that is what I have found online, ELEPHANTS DREAM, in which two weird hominids escape from somewhere and exit sanity into a disconcertingly weird world, the sensibility of which reminds me of ERASERHEAD.

If I can ever figure a way to describe what is going on, then I will write a review of this.

Private quiz show: Paris Hilton versus Eric Prince.

2007-11-09T01:34:00.000+09:00

?Private quiz show: Paris Hilton versus Eric Prince.

Hugh: Okay, Eric, your starter for five poins: pleae read the word on the card with the correct foreign pronunciation.

[Disappointingly, the founder and CEO of Velociraptor Global does an effortless take-down of the challenge word: VERSACE. From this one deduces that he has been shopping with Paris at least once, and one wonders what pretty things she chose do dress him up in.]
Hugh: Okay, Paris, here is the globe the Material Girl recommdended you buy. A steal at a cool $750,000.
The globe, which used to belong to one A. Hitler, was found in the course of the recent excavations associated with the removal of Lenin'w body from Red Square.

Paris: (uncertainly) This is like, uh, thingy...? Planet Earth?
Hugh: Right, Mrs President, correct. It is indeed Thingy. Now, how can we get to Thingy from where we presently are?
There is a long and somewhat sullen silence until Paris, after bludging another hit of cocaine from Hugh - with this girl you definitely need to have your incentive scheme in place - finally surfaces an answer.
"It's a trick question, isn't it, you ratbag? We're on Thingy alredy, aren't we?
Hugh concedes that this is so, but refuses to let Paris have any more nose candy. He also reminds Paris of two things:

1. This time he brought hi s Taser along;
2. He does NOT like being called "ratbag."

In revenge for the ratbag comment, Hugh challenges Paris to find Africa on the globe.

After a LONG pause, something suddenly clicks, and Paris fingers, in rapid succession, Australia, Brazil, Alaska and Antarctica.
Hugh sighs, and reaches for two things. One is the pack of brand ID cards ... guess the logo from the small visible fragment ...and the other is a similar pack featuring foods which have too many calories to eat.

"Okay," he says, "let's continue."

If you can teach elementary school in Japan you can teach anything ... right?
The bad point about being junior life coach is that he gets paid less than a tenth of what Madonna is raking in. The good point is that he is not, as a rule,required to spend very much time one on one with Paris.
Hugh notes that Eric I still fooling with the Glock which he (perhaps unthinkingly) pulled out after Hugh made his (in rerospect, regrettablea) Taser remark.

This is going to be, Hugh thinks, yes, another of those long nights.

IntroducingPresidential candidate Pafis Hilton.

2007-11-09T01:32:00.000+09:00

?IntroducingPresidential candidate Pafis Hilton.

It's early days yet, but things are firming up. The team will include Madonna (senior life coach), Eric Prince (vice president), Ron Wood (Eric's life coach) and horror writer Dean Koontz (philosopher).
Alan Greenspan will be "my money guy - do you know he doesn't even need to count on his fingers!?
Pafis was devastated to learn that John Lennon could not be appointed White House minstrel because he's dead. Ditto her second choice, much-lamented rapper Tupac Shakur.

ONCE PARIS is President, some adjustments will be made to reality.

The Statue of Liberty will be remodeled in Paris's image.

In one interesting legislative change, circumcision will be forbidden in the United States, as both Paris and Eric prefer their men uncu.
As Vice, Eric will be allowed to be Presdient on one day a year, always on his birhday, which is June 6. This will be a great annual payoff for him. Not only will he get to sleep in the Oval Office in the day, but, that night, he will be permitted to sleep in Paris's bed, and to do some of that anatomical variations stuff with her.
On his first presidential birthday, Eric will grant his wife a pardon for all the crimes of which she has been convicted. This will include, of course, inappropriate combinations of alcohol use and automobile use.
In addition, Erid will quietly pardon her for those little incidents which kind judges have, over the years, been persuaded to suppress.
That embarrassing shoplifting incident in Duluth, for example (two packets of Twinkies, one cheap pair of left-handed scissors and a pair of cheap nylon pantiess in a really strident purple.
Also that incident involving a very drunken NASA astronaut, a Catholic priest, a rinpoche (ie a monk high in the hierarchy of Tibetan Buddhism), Karl Rove's private smack dealer and two of Janet Jackson's bodyguards.
While President, Paris will retain her high profile role as the leader of Crusade, and will continue to work toward the goal of a global takedown of Islam by the combined forces of the West. (We have 3,786 mefatons ... you guys?
Locally, in the States, all adherents of Islam will be forced to convert to Pentecostal Christianity. Those who resist will be (a) be sterilized, (b) have their right hands cut off and © undergo a lobogomy.

On the immigration front, Puerto Rico will become a state, and all illegal immigrants will be forced to live there. They will be microchipped and tattoed with a scarlet "I" on the forehead, so they will be caught easily if they escape.
Escapees will be sent to the North Dakota death camps, such as Takedown (unique sales point: target ranges with live humans as targets), Primal (your chance to hunt the most dangerous game of alla), Rejuvenate (yes, do, with whatever it is you need by way of spare parts - kidneys, liver, lungs, hearr, intestines, bone, skin - we have it on the hoof and ready for the cutting.
Oh, and for minority tastes, the camps Anal Virfins, Grievous Bodily Harm and De Sadean Recreations. In each case, the names say it all.
Regarding the homeless, "bread and circuses" will be Paris's policy. Every wandering street person will be given a loaf of bread, a hotel voucher good for a three-night stay and a referral to a lab which does drug tests on human beings.
Anyone who doesn't cooperate will end up dying in prime time on the reality show Gladius Redux. (Unique selling point: everything you see is real. Lions, tigers, swords, knobkerries, razor blades - say goodbye to SFX and say hello to the world of the real.

George W. Bush Constitution speech: full text (November 2007)

2007-11-08T12:40:00.000+09:00

George W. Bush Constitution speech: full text (November 2007)

President Bush came to the steps of the Capitol yesterday (wED 7 Nov 2007) for a Second Inaugural do-over. Here is the text of his revised speech:

ON this day, when we celebrate the durable wisdom of our Constitution, we must remember: Constitutions don’t work for everyone. It’s not a one-size-fits-all type deal.

We are led, by recent events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the repression of liberty in other lands.

Once I thought my daddy was a wimp for cuddlin’ up real close with dictators, tradin’ stability for freedom. But now I gotta admit, that’s a darn fair trade. As I told Mushy last night on that cool, high-tech videophone I got in the Sit Room, the best hope for expanding peace is expanding dictators.

In America’s ideal of freedom, we are ennobled by a heart for the weak. But we must also have a heart for the strongmen.

Sometimes when the soul of a nation speaks, we must listen. But if that soul is housed in a bunch of trial lawyers wearing identical dark suits and calling my man Mushy a “dog,” I say, bring on the batons. Police tear-gassing lawyers is really just a foreign version of tort reform, which I support.

Those lawyers should be in jail. Mushy told me they were reckonin’ to represent Osama when General-General catches him. Which will be any day now. He’s a man of his word.

I don’t blame Mushy for dissolving that disloyal Supreme Court. When I needed to subvert the democratic process during the 2000 recount, my Supreme Court was totally supportive.

House arrest for that fired chief justice sounds very relaxin’, especially if he’s got a feather pillow.

I think Mushy should put Benazir Bhutto under house arrest in Karachi. They call her “a kleptocrat in an Hermès scarf.” I call her a chaos magnet.

She’s slippery. One minute she’s overlooking Mushy’s flaws, the next she’s appalled by them. I’m not even sure what nickname to use. Her friends called her Pinky at Harvard and Bibi later. I think I like Pinky. From the day of our foundin’, we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave.

But I looked into Mushy’s eyes and saw a master, a man committed to helping us fight terror. And sometimes we must fight terror with tyranny. He promised me he’d be a more low-key autocrat, stop wearing that scary uniform — at least when he’s playing tennis.

From now on, it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of tyrannical movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending democracy in our world so liberty can thrive.

We will persistently clarify the moral choice before every ruler and nation: Choose oppression, which can work, as we see with our Arab allies, or freedom, which — O.K., I admit it this once — we can’t make work in Iraq.

America’s influence is not unlimited. And unfortunately for the oppressed, Mushy’s open defiance is helping to further undermine America’s influence. But we will use what influence we have left to pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains and that human beings aspire to live at the mercy of bullies.

I’m gonna have to sweet-talk Laura on coming around on Burma. I might even have to kiss her hand, like Sarko.

Condi was very worried about Mushy suspending the Constitution, but Vice says Constitutions are for sissies. He doesn’t see anything wrong with Mushy’s press blackout. He thinks we can learn a few lessons from him.

Vice says if we had someone decisive like Mushy in Iraq instead of those floppy Iranian puppets we put in power, we’d be a lot better off.

All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will ignore your oppression and excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will not stand with you.

The leaders of governments with long habits of control need to know: To serve your people you must learn to mistrust them. Stop your journey of progress and justice, and America will not only walk at your side, we’ll give you billions of dollars and lots of big-ticket stuff, like F-16s — no strings attached. And we’ll take you at your word that you have no intention of using them against India.

In the long run, there is justice without freedom, and there can be human rights once the human rights activists have been thrown in the pokey.

Three years ago, I believed that the most important question history would ask us was: Did our generation advance the cause of freedom?

But now I am older and wiser. I know that the most important question history will ask us is: What’s a little martial law between friends?
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George W. Bush says America's gameplan is to support tyranny and suppress freedom.

2007-11-08T12:36:00.000+09:00

George W. Bush says America's gameplan is to support tyranny and suppress freedom.

No kidding.

The text of his recent speech on the Constitution says, in part:

[From now on, it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of tyrannical movements and institution s in every nation and culture, with the "ultimate goal of ending democracy in our world so that liberty can thrive."
The New York Times briefly had the full text of the speech online here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/07/opinion/07dowd.htmlhp

Some quoted material:

[We are led, by recent events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the repression of liberty in other lands.]

[Condi was very worried about Mushy suspending the Constitution, but Vice says Constitutions are for sissies. He doesn’t see anything wrong with Mushy’s press blackout. He thinks we can learn a few lessons from him.

Vice says if we had someone decisive like Mushy in Iraq instead of those floppy Iranian puppets we put in power, we’d be a lot better off.]

W. has obviously opened his big mouth a lot further than he should have done, so, if I were Vice, I'd seriously think about taking w. for a spot of quail shooting. Or placing him in bondage down in the White House dungeon so I could stick a red-hot poker up his bum.

Anyway, here is w, laying the bottom line on the line:

[All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will ignore your oppression and excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will not stand with you.]

After I became an adult (he magic moment was, I believe, 1507 on 27 October 1998) my adult self was embarrassed to think back to the adolescent excesses of my teenage years, particularly the immaturity of the unthinking enthusiasm with which I bought into the anti-American line.

But now, reflecting on what W has just gone and said, my feeling now is that when I, as a teenager, bought into the anti-American line, I was not sold a bill of goods.

Camelot Couple

2007-11-07T21:50:00.000+09:00

Camelot Couple

KFK is dead and Jackie O is no more, but, looking at the royal couple, rapturously in love and soon to be married, we know that Camelot will come again, and in our lifetime.

He is the romantic swashbuckling hero Eric Prince, CEO of the mercenary outfit Velociraptor Global (formerly Blackwater.) Right now his victorious forces, having crushed islamic radicals in the city of Fatwa-Purdah, are pursuing fugitives into the high mountains of Kashmir, aided by the battle lasers in the company's orbital forts.
She is Paris Hilton, the svelte and glamorous presidential contender, the ideal candidate.
She is a genuine hero, the bold and audacious Marine Corps commander who led United States forces to victory in the battle of Baghdad. She is a genuine saint, having devoted thirty year of her life to selflessly working with lepers in the horror lands of Rwanda. She is the glamorous film star, costarring with Eric in the DVD ANATOMICAL VARIATIONS, sales of which are soaring. (Though it must be admitted that some people's comfort levels have been exceeded by the central Abu Ghraib segment, with its human sex pyramids amd its raucous packs of Extremely Large and Erectile Dogs.
Of the couple, she is the heavyweight, the President for Life of Crusade. It was her idea, her brilliant concept: one last Crusade by the united strength of the West.
Last time round, some Muslim men were neglectfully left unkilled, some Muslim women inexplicably left unraped, some shops not looted, some graves undesecrated, some mosques not razed to the ground.
This time round, though, No More Mister Nice Guy!
Actual war has not yet been joined, but the Crusade concentration camps are up and running on North Korean soil, currently perpetrating the Robert Mugabe Memorial Genocide.
Meantime, Crusade's dearh squads are stepping up their increasigly efficient slaughter of illegal immigrants.

The wedding is now just one month off, and the Government of the Republic of India has graciously granted permission for the Blessed Pair to hold their nuptials at the Taj Mahal, in Agra. While Paris is in town, Agra's drink drive regulations will conveniently be suspended.
The Pope has respectfully declined an invitation, but King Charles and Queen Camilla will be on hand. As will distinguished Supreme Court judge Clarance Thomas, whose recent withdrawal from the presidential race has made Paris's victory almost certain.

Here in Baghdad, the temperature is a balmy 50 degrees Centigrade, significantly less than Fahrenheit 451. The Baghdad Hilton, a blimp-based luxury hotel, serenely floats five hundred meters overhead.
"A dream come true," says Eric.
"My darling," says Paris, and they kiss.
Paris Hilton, the all-round Renaissance girl: fashion model, author, product endorser and a brand in her own right. And, very soon, our President.

ब्लैक Water

2007-11-07T20:32:00.000+09:00

#black-water.txt

When I first showed up at Firebase Gung Ho, all those years ago, what really disconcerted me was not the incoming sniper fire - not even the round that wounded me - but the jet black water which came gushing out when you turned on a faucet.
Our BioWar guy assured me it was perfectly safe to drink, and mixed me up a medicinal dose of vodka (Finlandia, his favorite brand) and this liquid coal stuff which came guttering out of the tap.
More as a rite of passage than anything else, I drank it down, and woke up the next morning in a sleeping bag in the clinic. Woke naked as I' d lost everything, including my socks, my underpants and my boots, by playing Fatwa, a kind of poker we used to have back then, back in the days of the War on Terror.
The Good Old Days, let me tell you. The best was when we took down Sammy the Sniper, who had been harassing the firebas e for a solid seven years.
The Colonel told me that since I was on the books as the official counter sniper, it was my job to take out Slippery Sam.
Which I did.
I arranged for Ms platagenet, our dumb blonde medical officer, to covertly be given a massive dose of a disinhibiting rape drug. Once you have that drug running in your veins, you can say goodbye to caution.
I knew, approximately, which bombed-out bunker S the S was hiding out in, so I got a rifle with a big telescopic site and one single large-caliber round. I was going to be shooting at a range of over a thousand meters but, hey, I was the counter-sniper, right?
I arranged for a three-year-old kid to escape into the killing zone and for Ms Plantagenet to be on hand and to be enouraged to go to the rescue.
Which, drugged up to the eyeballs, she did.
In contravention of orders, the stuck-up bitch was wearing her captain'a crowns, which S the S would have identified through his own scope.

All he had was an AK47. aON balance, the best infantry rifle in human history, no doubt, but only really spot-on accurate out to 300 meters, so not exactly the optimal sniper rifle.
Still, she was an officer out in the open, so Sammy did his valorous best. I took my own sweet time lining up my shot, which smashed his shoulder, and that evening, after the Colonel left the communal bar and went to bed early, the guys gave me a small package which, when unwrapped, turned out to contain a knife (very small but very, very sharp), a knitting needle and a teaspoon.
"Careful," said one, "the edges are razor sharp."
Then they told me that Sammy was down in the generator room, and that someonewould drop by to wake me in time for my morning shift.
When I switched on the lights in the generator room, Sammy took just one look at me and, picking up on his situation, promptly started screaming.
He screamed a lot more before I was through with him, let me tell you.
I worked on him for a solid eighteen days until Father O'hare came in with a .44 and shot my poppet in the head so the Colonel could take a look and certify that the prisoner had died of an accdental gunshot wound.
I'm happy to say that the three-year old kid I'd used for my Sammy stunt survived, and that Ms Plantagenet adapted so well to her two artificial legs that she was ultimately able to swim (albeit only on the beginners slopes.)

Those were the good old days, believe you me. But they all came to an end after the fuss over the Abu Graib Reunion Conference, you know, when all those guys had those really big fish hooks shoved down their throats by special hand-crafted applicators, and were then dragged across cactus-infested minefield desert on thin wire ropes.
That was just after the election of Abraham Provo, if you remember. And, once Mr Mormon was in the White House, that was it.

He was the guy who instituted the Cheops Program, so every prisoner was welded into an individual cast iron pyramid and kept there indefinitely on a daily ration of one pannikin of vitamin-reinforced racoon's urine and two quarts of Lima Beans.
And the black watera? Oh, that was a kind of joke. By the time I joined, the outfit was alreay the FSF, the Federal Supplementary Force. But our roots were in a private corporation called Blackwater, run by the guy with the poncy name, you know, Royance Rajah, that was it ... in it? Pardon? Oh, the black water? Some kind of macrobiotic vitamin supplement that Paris was trying to get everyone to indulge in. That was the year before she made the mistake of banning hamburgers, and go assassinated by the nuke which took out her convoy on the road to Dallas.

Me? No, I never had the pleasure. Anyway, I don't begin to believe those rumors.

Mr Rajah? Is that a serious question? He's now the National Supervisor of North Korea.

You know, to tell the truth, when Paris won, I thought we were doomed. But nuking PyongYang, that made the whole North Korean weapons of mass destruction problem go away.

And nationalizing the North's organ donor resource, that was simply brilliant.

And then the simple way in which Bubble Girl wrapped up the whole ball of wax - have Rajah kidnap the entire Islamic leadership and Cheops the whole lot north of the Yalu River in Camp Macarthur, that was peerless.

What? No, I don't regret that and I never will. That baby was a bit too much on the bony side, if you want my honest opinion.S

I am Paris

2007-11-07T01:09:00.000+09:00

I am Paris.
My profession?
Rich girl.
I am a woman.
Obscenity Control has detected
EXACTLY what is playing in your filthy mind.
Get your perverted imagination off
My immaculate glands.
I am not like that at all.
I am a lipstick
Seven Empire State Buildings tall,
A tracer round that God intends
To smear across the universe.
My Taj Mahal is open.
I am flat on my back.
Take your nasty masturbatory hand off your doodling stick
And ATTEND TO ME!
How DARE you touch me there?
You presumptuous prick!
Take yourself off to the zoo
And go fuck a giraffe.
My problem?
My Nobel Prize for Peace
Went severely under-reported
How's that for starters?
A photo? Okay, then, pass it over, let me see.
LET ME SEE!!
Yes, that was me, the bad girl,
But that was then, and thiS is now.
When I finally get to Rwanda, then,
Then you will see what I can do!
I need an arena.
Milan, Darfur,
The porning eye of the video camera,
These are NOT my Colloseum.
Pardon? How does that relate to anything?
I have to tell you that Focus Control reports
That YOUR ATTENTION IS SLIPPING.
A question? Oh, okay ... if you really must.
No, thank you, I have no significant nostalgia for jail,
None at all.

Things Paris Hilton Might Like to buy in Tokyo

2007-11-06T22:02:00.000+09:00

Things Paris Hilton Might Like to buy in Tokyo:

My wife asked me about Paris Hilton and her sister, and what they were doing in Tokyo. I didn't even know that Paris has a sister, but it turns out that she does - Nicky, pictured. The two have been in Town so Paris can judge a beauty competition. And, of course, go shopping.

You'll be pleased to hear that Paris just LOVES Tokyo shopping. (So do I - especially the great range of international chocolate bars at Seijo Ishi.

So what kind of things might Paris buy in Tokyo ... some ideas follow ...

- tampons
- sanitary pads
- supplementary brain cells
- bigger tits
- five rounds of machinegun ammunition (tracer)
- authentic XP-compatible CD of MRI of someone's brain
- exotic Asian toothpaste (Chinese-made)
- exotic Asian children's toys (wooden, very brightly painted, Chinese-made)
- second-hand-brick kiln slave (as is, where is ... some reconsructive surgery yet to do.)

Hugh Seeks Public Archive of British World War One Service Records

2007-11-06T10:13:00.000+09:00

Hugh Seeks Public Archive of British World War One Service Records

Dear Uncle Camelot,

Recently my father sent me a great collection of annotated photographs of some people in the family tree, and he asked me how I would feel about going online to use the Internet to track down details of the wartime exploits of a couple of my ancestors.

I was all for it, but have hit a brick wall, and am writing to ask if you have any idea of what organisation might have such records available.

Let me tell you who I am looking for an what I have found so far.

Ancestor #1 is my paternal grandfather, Gilbert John Cook, born 1893.

I found a page of links to national archives. The page was on a site run by the Imperial War Museum, London, and this led me to a repository of details on cemeteries.

Following the link, I was able to access and search the records of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

I used the search box on this page:

http://www.cwgc.org/

That search was a failure, so I looked for Ancestor #2, Walter Butler. Killed in the First World War, I believe.

I got the following details for him:

[His rank is private, his service number is 8208, his date of death is 28/12/1914 (28th day of the 12th month rather than 12th day of the 28th month, meaning that he died just after Christmas - bummer!), dead at age 37, Royal Irish Regiment, United Kingdom. The grave/memorial reference is Panel 1 and the cemetery/memorial name is PLOEGSTEERT MEMORIAL.]

Google told me:

[The Ploegsteert Memorial stands in Berks Cemetery Extension, which is located 12.5 kilometres south of Ieper town centre,]

I took "Ieper" to be "Ypers," which I understand the soldiers of the First World War were in the habit of referring to as "Wipers."

What I know of Gilbert John Cook is that he was born in 1891, was wounded in the First World War but, fortunately, recovered in time to parcicipate in the battle of the Somme.

During the First World War he was in the Grenadier Guards and I believe he was in the artillery.

I found a site for the Grenadier Guards but it didn't give me what I was looking for.

I thought I'd send you this e-mail just in case you could think, off the top of your head, of a very obvious data repository which might not occur to me. Meantime, I will go on looking ...

* * *

Okay, the message has been sent, and has gone to my Uncle Excalibur, who lives in the British Isles and who has connections by way of blood and marriage to both the British military and the American military.

He's a cancer survivor, a part-time journalist and a late adoptor of the Internet, someone who got his first computer and his first e-mail address just this year.

Meantime, I will push on ahead with a search for service records world war one ... over 35,000,000 hits for that search, including this:

[British Army World War 1
www.ancestry.co.uk Start searching the British Army World War One Pension Records now]

http://landing.ancestry.co.uk/ukmilitary/collections.aspx?o_xid=30125&o_lid=30125&offerid=0%3a7935%3a0

The page above has an interesting set of links to other data repositories, including the 1901 census.

Site provides free facilities for building your family tree online, if you want to. There is a SEARCH button...

Okay, here we go ...

Gilbert John Cook, born 1893.

Gilbert John Cook, born 1893.

To look at records, you have to sign up. There's a free trial period if you want, but it's one of these things where you have to enter your credit card details ... so I decided to skip it.

This looks promising:

[Resources for study of the First World War: Tracing Service Personnel
Information regarding records for Service personnel who died in the First World War is available on ... The National Archives: World War One Medal Cards. ...
www.greatwar.co.uk/westfront/resources/trace.htm - 15k - Cached - Similar pages]

Goes to the National Archives, here:

http://www.greatwar.co.uk/westfront/resources/trace.htm

This site has books you can buy which will teach you how to search military records ... if you are seriously that interested.

With all respect to the honored ancestors, at this stage I think I'm going to head for bed.

Reply from my Uncle says, in part:

[There is a TV programme running on BBC at the moment where "celebreties" trace their ancestors and its amazing what archives are available if you only know where to look ... so I shall enquire and let you know.
Fond love Team Camelot
(Excalibur and Guineveve)

Hugh Seeks Public Archive of British World War One Service Records

2007-11-06T00:40:00.000+09:00

Five Rounds of Machinegun Ammunition

2007-11-05T06:06:00.000+09:00

Five Rounds of Machinegun Ammunition

Here in Japan, you cannot, as a rule, find machinegun ammunition in the shops. In fact, the only place in the whole world where I've seen machinegun ammunition on sale is on Crete, when I visited that island back in the 1980s.

By then, the Second World War had been over for decades, but they still had surplus ordnance on sale, including machinegun rounds. Very large, incredibly rusty and as dangerous as all hell. If you're visiting Crete and are attracted by the nifty bang-bang toys they have on sale in the market stalls, put the Devil behind you and Just Say No. Stuff that was designed to go bang will still be able to go bang, even if it's half a century old. And, when it does go bang, you, or someone in your neighborhood, will end up maimed or dead.

The only other place I've seen old ammunition which you could take home as souvenirs was in the Solomon Islands. I was there with a peace time medical mission which was bent on eradicating the skin disease yaws from one particular place (easily done: everyone gets a single shot of benzathine penicillin, and your mission has been accomplished).

We camped by an airstrip built by the Japanese and later used by the Americans, and the whole place was one big junkyard arsenal.

Before we got on the plane to go home, the Regimental Sergeant Major lined us all up and gave us the No Bang Bangs lecture. He was going to be on the same plane, and he didn't want it exploding in midair.

Some time later, I learnt that some guys from my unit had, at considerable risk to their lives, gathered up rotten old Japanese ammunition and had opened it up, had scraped out the explosive, and had put the shell casings in their baggage to take home.

I never even thought of doing such a thing. Not even for a moment.

These memories were stirred when a parcel arrived this morning. Inside were some fragments of bricks; a plate of bone which, at a guess, was from a human skull; and five rounds of ammunition which I took to be for a belt-fed machinegun. To my eye, the caliber looked to be 7.2 millimeters or thereabouts.

The bullets had pretty pink tips which made them look not like rounds of ammunition but lipsticks, so I presumed they were rounds of tracer. When I was training in the Waiouru military base many years ago, I saw machineguns firing tracer at night. Very, very pretty. The machinegun blurts out its message, and the bullets reach out into the night, death's finger stroking for a target, and you see the tracer, caught by the wind, swaying off to one side, yielding to the wind.

Okay. Five rounds. How to get rid of them? Can't put them out with the trash. All our garbage ends up in an incinerator, and if you put unexploded ammunition into an incinerator then it will cook off, and suddenly you're taking incoming fire.

When I was a kid, we spent two years on Ocean Island, one of the Pacific Islands which was overrun by the Japanese during the Great Pacific War. (Ocean Island has these days reverted to its former name, which is Barnaba, and is a part of the free and independent nation of Kiribati (say KIRI-BASS), and is one of those places which are doomed to sink as the oceans rise with Global Warming.)

Just before our family arrived on Barnaba, someone living on the island had been shot dead by a round of old Japanese ammunition which cooked off in a barbecue fire at a beach. So, at the age of six, I got my first (and, in retrospect, my most important) Unexploded Ordenance Is A No-No message.

After some reflection, I wrapped the machinegun rounds in the same Chinese newspapers, put them into an envelope, sealed the envelope, addressed it to AFRICAN UNION FORCES, BAHAI, CHAD, AFRICA, then dropped it into a post office box, without bothering about postage.

Bahai, as I discovered while reading up about Darfur, is a locality in Chad, not far from the border with Darfur.

Okay. Mission accomplished!

Which reminds me that I still have one military mission as yet undone: to hunt down the service records for two of my military ancestors. I have been remiss, and days have ticked by while I have been allowing myself to be distracted by things which are irrelevant to my mission, such as Paris Hilton's curves, the Mobile Light Infantry's recruiting propaganda, and my wife's increasingly hair-raising tales of life as an enslaved brick kiln laborer in Darkest China.

Well. Not tonight, I think. But soon. I will take another shot at it. And see how far I get.

Paris Hilton's Body Disappoints

2007-11-04T04:55:00.000+09:00

Paris Hilton's Body Disappoints

I somehow got the idea that Paris Hilton had at one time made a porn movie, so I took a shot at finding a torrent for it, and ended up successfully downloading this:

Mu +-+ ParisHilton torrent .avi.torrent

Though my bittorrent P2P software seems to be a bit hit and miss, th mystical Mu downloaded okay, so, with a trembling sense of boyish expectation, I played it ... and was stunningly disappointed.

The wretched thing is some kind of girlish food-themed song track with video of Paris (I presume that's her) chastely strutting her stuff and quacking something like "Shake a my body, move a my body ... oh HEY! Time out,
And a question: would you like to look at my ?
Yes, I would, but it's not there to be seen.
What is there to be seen is occasional shots of Paris seemingly eating or drinking. Okay, so we're in the food zone. Does this stuff count as soft porn for the anorexia bulemia mob?
I went to Wikipedea to see if I could find out anything more about the somewhere-asserted-to-exist Parisian porn movie ...

I tried the search "Paris Hilton Porn Movie" and ended up at a page for a movie called THE GIRL NEXT DOOR. The page says, in part:

[# During the scene in the strip club when Emile Hirsch is trying to figure out how to smoke the cigar, it falling out of his mouth is an accident. The director liked it so much, he left it in.
# Paris Hilton parodies this movie in her music video for "Nothing in This World" (2006), in which Elisha Cuthbert has a cameo.]
I then did a search for "Nothing in the World," which turns out to be a single by Atomic Kitten from the album LADIES NIGHT.
I then did an Internet search for "ParisHilton porn movie"

Over five million pages, the Google snippet for the first being this:

[Paris Hilton xxx video - porn movie
Paris Hilton famous porn video! So you heard the news about xxx tape with Paris Hilton on it? She doesn pretty hardcore stuff in this home made movie :) ...
www.celebsdb.com/Paris-Hilton-xxx-video-porn-movie/ - 7k - Cached - Similar pages]

From that page you can click to this page:

http://www.celebsunzipped.net/

... which gives you a montage of Paris in various clothed poses. One photo is an obscure piece of what might conceivably be food porn. Sh's biting some kind of biggish fruit, but I can't tell what it is. A choko?

Another snippet:

[News results for paris hilton porn video

Okay, we have innocent video of Paris in the shower here:

http://www.totallynsfw.com/videos/videos_paris_hilton_exposed_in_the_bath/

E Canada Now Hilton Threatens to Sue Porn Shop - 21 hours ago
Paris Hilton threatened to sue the manager of an adult video store in Toronto ... footage online documenting the socialite's October visit to the porn shop,]

[In the heated exchange, she can be heard asking for the manager, before saying, "I really want those taken down, because you guys can't use my image in a porn store, so you've got to take those down. I'm gonna call my lawyer now to sue the [bleep] out of this place."]

I think that's all the time I want to spend on this, though I wouldn't mind seeing authentic erotic video some time of Paris Hilton. (Or ditto of Madonna, George W. Bush, New Zealand's Helen Clerk or Queen Elizabeth the Second.

However, if you yourself wish to pursue the Hilton Truth, you might try this URL:

http://www.smutgremlins.com/parish-hilton-sex-scandal.html

The page says, in part:

[mutGremlins knows just how hard it is to find Paris Hilton nude pictures and Sex Movies online, So Smut Gremlins has put together some links to Paris Hilton - your favorite celeb. Our goal at SmutGremlins.com is to bring you some of the hottest naked celeb images, Including the scandulous Paris Hilton and Rick Solomon sex tape. In addition there are other nude celeb links here.]

You could also go straight to this page:

http://galleries.hotelheiress.com/a/095/index.php?id=11483

This has photos of (1) Paris Hilton, (2) her open mouth, (3) something I hope she is not going to be vicious enough to bite off.

If I somewhere find some torrid video of the Queen and George W. then I will tell you about it. However, in the interim, let me recommend a blow job video. This is free, innocent, witty, amusing and guaranteed not to gross anyone out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CX9p3OZsiDA&eurl=http://www.vz5.net/index.pl?tag=childsex

THISISNOTAPEAR

2007-11-02T23:38:00.000+09:00

Nova is dead: Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

2007-11-02T23:30:00.000+09:00

Nova is dead: Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

Recently, while I was home alone in Yokohama, Japan, and my wife was away in the glitzy supercity of Shanghai, in the south of the People's Republic of China, I wondered what she might be getting up to in her comfortable hotel room, with no male family member to supervise her. Later, she confessed, so I found out.

Unleashed, she had chosen to dabble in the exotic, and had spent her evenings watching NHK Japanese-language TV sourced from the Land of the Rising Sun. On NHK she had seen news that Nova, the English Language Conversation School That Tried To Eat The Universe, had gone bust.

I was stunned. Could this possibly be true? After all those brave plans? I mean, the daring strategy of opening up branches in the systems of Alpha Proxima and Betelguese, and then pressing on to the Andromeda Galaxy. Had those meticulously wargamed plans somehow come unstuck?

My wife having returned, we assumed our own exotic homelife, spending long hours chasing the dragon (ie smoking heroin) and decrypting mysterious letters from the heartland of China.

(The most recent missive in the series was one that arrived today, a bill demanding payment for the abduction of a certain number of North Korean slave brick kiln workers, the expenditure of quite a large quantity of machinegun ammunition, and the wanton destruction of some very expensive high-tech landmines.)

Thus occupied, it was a while before I could go to Google News to check out the "death of Nova" story. But, when I did check, I found, to my horror and consternation, that it is true. Nova is no more.

[Japanese Lesson: How Do You Say, 'Taken for a Ride'? Wall Street Journal]

[Nova staff 'fed by students' The Age
Students feed foreign teachers as Japan school fails Reuters.uk]

[Union reveals plan for feeding unpaid starving NOVA teachers ...
Mainichi Daily News, Japan - ]

[Union representatives of the scandal-plagued NOVA Corp.' foreign employees met the foreign press in Tokyo on Thursday, to unveil their relief plans for their fellow instructors who struggle to survive while their wages remain unpaid.]

[The announcement at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in Tokyo's Chiyoda-ku came a week after NOVA, Japan's largest English conversation school chain and the nation's largest employer of foreigners, applied for court protection from its creditors under the Corporate Rehabilitation Law.]

[# NOVA plans to decide on firm to bail out business by next week
# Company-funded luxury office of ex-NOVA boss unveiled
# Ex-NOVA boss Sahashi suspected of profiting unfairly from video phone equipment]

[OSAKA -- Collapsed English-teaching company NOVA Corp. has unveiled the luxury office used by its former boss Nozomu Sahashi to the public, showing a bathroom overlooking the night scenery and expensive champagne and scotch whisky lined up at a bar counter.

The 330-square-meter office, which has its own sauna and tea room, is located on the top floor of a 20-story building in Osaka's Naniwa-ku. The 70 million yen makeover of the apartment and the monthly rent of 2.7 million yen was picked up by NOVA, but hardly any NOVA employees have been there.

"I had heard rumors about it, but I never imagined it was as luxurious as this," one surprised company employee who saw the office said.

A lawyer serving as a protective administrator for NOVA, which has sought court protection following its collapse, said the office was a symbol of how Sahashi had used the company's profits to his advantage.

"We decided to unveil it as a symbol of Sahashi's misappropriation from the company," the lawyer said.]

Meantime, in other news, Japan has abandoned its Indian Ocean mission. It has been supporting America's war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan by bravely refueling American warships at sea, but now the Japanese military is signing off, pleading terminal boredom, and citing the following statistics:

Japanese military personnel dead or injured as a result of Japan's valorous participation in the War on Terror: zero.

Naval battles at sea: zero.

Japanese fighters downed: zero. (But two of the latest and greatest crashed and burnt this week while test pilots were trying to land them at an airport in Japan.)

Medals for Valor awarded in the Long Campaign: zero.

Number of Japanese nationals kidnapped from Japanese soil by North Korean agents during the War on Terror: Unknown, but believed to be non-zero.

Number of Innocent Japanese Tourists kidnapped in the People's Republic of China and forced into brick kiln slavery: Unknown, therefore anything is possible. For all we know, could be in the tens of thousands.

[Japan ends 'war on terror' mission
AFP - 20 hours ago
TOKYO (AFP) — Japan on Thursday ordered home ships engaged on a refuelling mission in the Indian Ocean, halting the close US ally's main role in the "war on ...]

While no Japanese nationals have died recently as a result of either the Nova meltdown or Japan's participation in the War on Terror, one enterprising Japanese video journalist made headlines here recently by getting himself killed in Myanmar.

[Hundreds bid farewell to Japanese journalist killed in Myanmar ...
International Herald Tribune, France - Oct 7, 2007
AP TOKYO: Hundreds of Myanmar expatriates in Japan joined family and friends at the funeral Monday of a Japanese journalist killed last month during the ...]

"Kenji Nagai, 50, was among at least 10 people killed in the Sept. 26-27 crackdown when soldiers fired automatic weapons into a crowd of pro-democracy demonstrators."

Meantime, back home in New Zealand:

[Naplam link to terror traning camps
TVNZ, New Zealand - Oct 15, 2007
A napalm bomb at an alleged weapons training camp in the Bay of Plenty prompted police anti-terrorism raids on Monday. A huge police operation saw raids ...]

Image of a pear appeared in the New Zealand Herald with the following rubric:

"Here's something to refer to next time someone complains of being described as pear-shaped, says Anna Curnow of her fruity find at Warkworth New World. "Funnily enough it was……"

Sidebar: if you Google "napalm recipe" you get "about" 740 pages.

Here's one snippet, the degenerate culture of the West evidently in full swing just before being taken down by the fanatical teetotalers of the Caliphate:

[Fuzzy Napalm recipe
A delicious recipe for Fuzzy Napalm, with grain alcohol, peach schnapps and orange juice. Also lists similar drink recipes.
www.drinksmixer.com/drink11613.html - 15k - Cached - Similar pages]

Mysteriously, "starving Nova teacher" DID NOT MATCH ANY DOCUMENTS.

Report to the Sanctuary Council on Darfur

2007-11-02T13:25:00.000+09:00

Report to the Sanctuary Council on Darfur

With humility and in a spirit of trembling awe, I bow my worthless head and petition the Council to accept my wretched report.

True to the vow that I took on my Day of Ordeal, I must cleave to the truth, though the truth is so shocking that my bowels turn to water as I approach it.

The truth, the bald and unvarnished truth, the hideous and unpardonable truth, is that the shocking rumors which have been filtering out from this planet are true.

The last of the ice has indeed retreated, and now the mammoths of Darfur are no more. The Holy Animal is gone from the Holiest Place, sanctified forever by the role it played in the Ascension of Vezaletta Hilton, the One Pure Virgin.

Where the Sacred Lords once roamed, now there is nothing but a slightly radioactive wasteland infested by hominid apes. On consulting with Survey's Evolutionary Potential report, these homids would seem to have evolved from a creature which the report choses to designate as "baboons," which are rated as being intrinsically smart, murderous, cruel, curious, destructive and barbaric.

In light of the hominid ape behavior which has been observed by my own humble eyes (see the appendix marked ATROCITY EXHIBITION and its companion piece, BODY COUNT DYNAMIC) these truly disgusting ape things have fulfilled all the worst that was latent in their baboon ancestors.

At the risk of causing offence, and conscious that I am breaching protocol by trying my hand at something which it is not legal for me to do, I hereby venture to put forth a suggestion.

The insult to the sacred sanctum of Darfur must be avenged. The blood of all our ancestors for the last ten billion years thirsts for the blood of appeasement.

I, humbly conscious of my status as living excrement, tentatively submit, therefore, that these unspeakably vile hominid apes be extirpated forthwith. A suitable method, I suggest, would be to crack their planet into rubble then add the waste rock to the asteroid belt which is, as I am sure you will all be aware, one of the leading features of the system of this unitary sun.

May the spirit of God be with you and with the mercy of Zad the Impaler, blessed be His name, be forever with your shadow.

[signed]
Hozola Rabista, Director, Deathspan Consultants Transgalactica.

A Great Way to get Arrested, Put on Trial, Fined and Jailed

2007-11-01T22:16:00.000+09:00

A Great Way to get Arrested, Put on Trial, Fined and Jailed

If you want to get your hands on intellectual property, one elegant solution is to buy it. Or rent it.

When I wanted to watch the movie LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA I found an illegal copy floating around on the Internet. But, rather than committing a serious crime by making my own equally illegal copy of that pirated counterfeit, I went to Tsutaya, the local video store, and paid 400 yen to rent an authentic DVD copy for a week. (At current rates, 400 Japanese yen is roughly four New Zealand dollars, ie significantly less than US $4.)

The reasons why I hired a DVD instead of pirating one were two in number. First, Paris Hilton has already gotten out of jail, so what's the point of heading in that direction? Second (and more critically) the only software I have to get the illegal copy is frustrating and doesn't seem to work consistently.

The software in question is bittorrent 6.0, available as a free download from bittorrent.com.

This software works with torrents. A torrent is a file which points you in the direction of a data repository somewhere online, for example a video or an album in mp3 form. The torrent allows you computer to use a bittorrent program to download the bits and pieces and to put them together in a coherent fashion.

Many people (millions of them, at a guess) have been putting illegal videos and music CDs online, and have posted the torrents that you need to get at these stolen goods.

To find such torrents, you can do the following search on your favorite search engine:

[bittorrent "stealthis" free download avi English]

where "stealthis" is the name of the movie or album you want to steal.

The words "avi English" are advisable for two reasons. First, some files, particularly movie files, are in cryptic file formats which make no sense, so you can't figure out what software might be able to play them. By contrast, an avi file can be played by Microsoft's Media Player.

The word "English" is advisable because, unless you are a keen student of the Russian language, a Russian-language version of Shrek Three will be useless to you, particularly if you are in a shrekless position. (As I am, having never seen either Shrek One or Shrek Two.)

Having found the torrent for what you want, you then download the torrent itself, which is very small, and, when you click on it, the target file itself (the movie or the music CD) starts to download. All going well.

But, when I try this, a lot of the time nothing happens. My own copy of Bittorrent 6.0 seems to work on a "sometimes I will, sometimes I won't" basis, with "won't" the dominant player.

Presumably I'm doing something wrong and should find an online manual and read it, but I am oppossed to reading manuals on principle.

The standard reading of the Holy Bible is that we are all sinners because we have inherited the guilt of Adam and Even, who ate of the forbidden fruit, the fruit of the tree of knowledge, when they were in the Garden of Eden.

Well, if that's true, then, surely, as a payoff for being victims of the sinner label, we are entitled to having knowledge granted gratis, without going and reading any stinking manual.

That principle (plus a reading of the said stinking manual) will take you, given time, to Computer Enlightenment. Meantime, however, where torrents are concerned I am struggling in a decidedly Unenlightened state.

Which is not my fault. The Bible is quite clear: Adam and Eve went and did what they did off their own bat, and they are the ones who should carry the can.

After quite some trying to get at Clint Eastwood's latest project, I succeeded in downloading a trailer for LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA, but, in the end, after many failures I gave up on stealing the whole thing, and went to Tsutaya to hire the DVD.

I Want To Sign Up

2007-10-30T20:55:00.000+09:00

I Want To Sign Up

The movie STARSHIP TROOPER 2: HERO OF THE FEDERATION opens with a marvelously convincing promo which encourages us to enlist in the Mobile Light Infantry.

"We need heroes!"

Note that his is an equal-opportunity slaughter force, and they will happily recruit girls as well as boys.

The guy they put up on screen to talk to you is very much the Ultimate Recruiter, and just looking at him gives you a warm "me can too" feeling, and you want to sit down to have your "sign here, please" moment with him.

I am persuaded, and wish to join, for the reasons given below, but there are problems, which I will itemize later.

To begin with, we are cued to the background, which is that the monstrous and monstrously evil aliens, the arachnids, have launched an unprovoked attack on the planet Buenos Aires. The heroes of the Federation have struck back and have archived victory on the field of valor.

Now, "armed with victory" (marvelous words!) the forces of the Federation are pushing on into the heartland of enemy territory to "bring war to the bug."

The ultimate Recruiting Sergeant, a most wonderfully enthusiastic militarist, invites you to join the heroes of the Federation, and "Press on to glory!"

Which you will surely want to once you see the amazingly gaudy banner, a flag that anyone would be proud to die under, raised in victory on a battlefield on some planet far off in outer space.

So I ardently wish to join this magnificent enterprise, but have to confront the following unpalatable facts:

1. I am too old.
2. I have family commitments.
3. I would never pass the medical.
4. My rusty high school French is inadequate for me to function effectively in the Francophone environment of the Mobile Light Infantry.

Over and above that, on searching the Internet I have found an ominous silence on the subject of our war against the evil aliens of Arachnid. This silence suggests to me that maybe the war is over. If so, I sincerely hope that we won.

However, that said, even if reality were to be revised and the Mobile Light Infantry were to be ready to sign me on, I think I would bow out at that stage.

The thing is, I don't like creepy crawlies, not even little ones. And these arachnids - oh boy! The very lightest and smallest of these monstrosities must weigh at least as much as a hippopotamus.

I haven't seen the first STARSHIP TROOPERS movie but I did once read the Heinlein novel on which it was based, and if there was ever a book which was capable of bringing out the latent militarist in you, that's the one.

Mr Vegetable Goes For A Wander

2007-10-30T11:43:00.000+09:00

Mr Vegetable Goes For A Wander

Mr Vegetable woke up in the middle of the night and found, to his delight, that his wife had forgotten to chain him up for the night. He decided to go for a wander, so headed out confidently, but got no further than the landing just outside the bedroom door when he fell down a rabbit hole, which he did not remember having been there.

If you know for a fact that you are a vegetable, then you should accept your status and should learn to live within your limitations. But Mr Vegetable persisted in seeing visions and dreaming dreams. He did this far more often than was good for him.

He imagined, for example, that he joined up with the mobile light infantry and ended up on a battlefield fighting hordes of chittering spider-collosal aliens, as showcased in the movie STAR TROOPER 2: HERO OF THE FEDERATION.

In another fantasy, he was the Emperor of Alberta, the most oil-rich nation on planet Earth, and he led his severely outnumbered forces to victory in a nuclear war against CanaFed, the cruel imperialistic power of Federated Canada, which had the rapacious hegemonistic aim of seizing Alberta's oil wealth so the Feds could do a Communistic divvy-up and share Alberta's God-given birthright with all the children of the Federation.

And, worse, he had made the mistake of thinking he could wander off into a realm far from the comforting touch of his wife's slim but reassuring hand. And now he was paying a terrible price for his presumption.

He was falling down the rabbit hole, and it seemed to be infinite. However, it was lined with shelves, and there were books on the shelves. He decided he had time for some light reading, so he started plucking up volumes as he passed. But they were all propaganda works from the Ministry of Information of the Chinese People's Republic. None of the titles looked tempting:
THE DALI LAMA: ARCH-SPLITTER AND MAJOR DRUGLORD; THE DALI LAMA: HIS ROLE IN THE THALIDOMIDE SCANDAL; THE DALI LAMA AND THE CASE OF THE INFANT SEX SLAVES; THE LOVE NEST: THREE IN A BED (GEORGE W. BUSH, KARL ROVE AND THE DALI LAMA.) THE DALI LAMA: HIS EARLY YEARS AS COMMANDANT OF THE AUSCHWITZ DEATH CAMP.
One by one, Mr Vegetable discarded the books, which went screaming down to inflict serious injuries on tourists sunbathing on the coastal beaches of Libya, the new Mediterranean playground. Those beaches were what lay directly below.

Giving up on the idea of reading, Mr Vegetable began to daydream his way into the palace of the Emperor of Alberta. There, after spending a little time fooling with a few of his twenty-seven concubines, he went to the Senate Building to give a speech:
THE CASE FOR FREEDOM-LOVING ALBERTA TO MAKE WAR ON HEGEMONISTIC CANADA, LAND OF EVIL, AND DESTROY THAT POLLUTED MUTANT ENTITY UTTERLY.
The speech was amazingly good and was rapturously received.
The moral of the story is this: even if you are irrevocably doomed to living as a vegetable, life can still be fun.

About Alberta's oil, if you're sceptical about this, the following page will put you in the picture:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4649580.stm

Quote:

"Canada is a modest and unassuming place when compared with its great big neighbour to the south. But now it has plenty to boast about: world-beating oil reserves in Alberta which are finally being brought into production after decades of talk.

Oil sands from the air
The oil sands could hold trillions of barrels - if it can be extracted

[Alberta is experiencing a huge and expensive oil rush, and Fort McMurray is at the centre of it.]

[The oil is bound up in black bituminous sand close to the surface. But even though the reserves are so huge and so obvious the oil sands have to be steam heated to release the oil.]

The Americans who are fighting in Iraq are obviously too far from home. Instead of making war in the Middle East, America should just have invaded Canada, which has more oil than the Middle East has ever dreamt of.

A Significantly Scary Experience

2007-10-30T10:59:00.000+09:00

A Significantly Scary Experience

We live in a modest and entirely conventional two-storey house set on a hillside in the city of Yokohama, with views across the city to the distant horizon where, if weather conditions are favorable, we can see Mount Fuji (though only from the upper floor, the second storey.)

This is a small house, though significantly bigger than a rabbit hutch. It is definitely not huge. However, during the night of Monday 29 October, for some reason (which I cannot now remember) I went for a wander, with only my damaged brain as company, and ended up getting totally lost in a huge cavernous space upstairs. It seemed to be an abandoned movie theater.

Once there, I could not find my way out. I explored, looking for an escape route, but found none. What I did find was a wall with doors which folded inward to give access to a cavernous space stuffed with hanging coats, very much like the wardrobe in the CS Lewis book THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE, the said wardrobe being a door into an alternative reality, the world known as Narnia.

I also found a window with a gulf of blackness beyond it, and I found a balustrade with various items sitting on top of it. Beyond the balustrade I had the sense of an empty auditorium sitting, waiting.

I blundered about, finding seats, and some places thick with huge layers of dust, and eventually, somehow, I accidentally stumbled on a staircase which led down. Ultimately I arrived downstairs, and found my wife doing some night time preparation before heading to bed.

Today, in the cold clear light of day, I looked for the theater but did not find it. It does not exist. I ended up concluding that I must have been sleep walking, and must have blundered into my wife's personal room.

If you put out your left hand with the palm down, then the palm is the landing on the upper floor, at the head of the stairs going to the second storey. The thumb is the door to the room where the three of us nightly sleep on futons, and the fingers, working round anti-clockwise, are the doors to 1. my wife's personal room, 2. my personal room, 3. the start of the stairs going down and 4. the upstairs toilet.

On checking out my wife's personal room I found that, yes, the doors to her wardrobe push inwards, just like the ones in my "I am lost" dream, and, yes, there are coats inside. I also found the expanse of glass - the French doors to the balcony - which I encountered during my perambulations. And one of the window ledges is lined with oddments, and this could have been the balustrade that I felt while I was asleep.

If, before this, you had asked me if I ever sleep walked, I would have said, no. Never have, never will. But, on the balance of probabilities, it seems quite likely that I did.

My Caped Crusader Daughter

2007-10-29T20:43:00.000+09:00

My Caped Crusader Daughter

In daily life, my three-year-old daughter masquerades as mild-mannered daycare attendee Cornucopia ("Corny") Boadicea Nishikawa. However, in the realm of the super heroes she is none other than Petri the Dish, the svelte bio war hero who is not uncommonly cruising through the stratosphere in the Tokyo-Yokohama area, always garbed in Italian fashion apparel from the house of Tony Perotti.

Her aerial activities not infrequently cause consternation to American warriors manning the screens of the war radar system which the United States operates in our vicinity. However, these activities have never yet provoked a nuclear launch.

Petri's self-appointed mission is to troll through the human community, to find diseases which are circulating in the generate population, and then to culture them in her own body until they produce symptoms crude enough to be evident to the average doctor.

She then reports sick so the results of her latest scientific investigations can be delivered to the nearest appropriate hospital or clinic.

Today we were at the Diseased Kids And Infectious Infants Outpatient Plague Post at Myorenji, a short train station away. Petri had a fever of 37.7 Centigrade plus a runny nose and a cough.

By evening, she had a significantly higher fever, was vomiting monotonously, and was testing three of her superpowers: the Scream of Death, the Wail of Despairing Lament and the Filibuster, the last being a flexible talent which allows her to maintain any complaint, demand or grizzle indefinitely.

I found this wearing and suggested to my wife that perhaps we have been too gentle with Corny when it comes to discipline. "Maybe," I said, "she would benefit from a Boot Camp year, a year in the structured and disciplined environment of a Chinese brick kiln."

My wife told me she would get back to me on this idea.

A Gift from my Daughter

2007-10-29T00:55:00.000+09:00

A Gift from my Daughter

Three-year-old daughter cornucopia came home from the daycare bazaar with an "o-miyage," a traditional gift from the holiday maker to the one who stayed at home.

"Ageru," she said, meaning [I] give [this to you.]

I took it. Some kind of vegetable matter, maybe a mutant broccoli or something like that. Tempura, at a guess.

I put it in my mouth, expecting to find some kind of tempura-type layer beneath my teeth. Instead, the food item had a plasticized surface. I took it out of my mouth. Not broccoli at all. Rather, some kind of weed festooned with poisonous berries.

Survival note (but you knew this, right?): the basic rule here on planet Earth is that animals are safe to eat but plants are poisonous.

If you go out into the garden and catch and eat anything that you can find which is working around, nothing critically bad will happen to you. Maybe food poisoning, maybe dysentery. Hydatids is a possibility. Tape worms, too. But you probably won't die.

If, on the other hand, you go out into the garden (any garden) and start eating plants at random, the probability is that you will shortly find yourself dying a gruesomely horrible death.

Cornucopia has, thank God, long since outgrown the phase when she would eat absolutely anything that found itself into her mouth. But I should make sure that my evolution does not recapitulate hers in reverse.

House Husband Messes Up And Forgets ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING!

2007-10-28T02:00:00.000+09:00

House Husband Messes Up And Forgets ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING!

On her return from China, my wife entered the house to find dishes in the drying tray. The dishes included a suite of small bowls ideal for the serving of ice cream, and her female brain jumped to the conclusion that, in her absence, I and my three-year-old daughter had been pigging out on ice cream.

My protestations that, no, no, we had eaten nothing but broccoli, yogurt and water cress were ignored. Plainly, the BAD label had been hung around my neck, and I would have to lift my game to restore myself to my wife's good graces.

That night, my wife had a horrific nightmare in which she was being machinegunned while lying in a minefield with bits and pieces of exploded North Korean slave laborers pattering down upon her. On waking, she realized that this was not a dream but a memory. This realization did not, apparently, make things better for her.

I had recently (by a means which I am not presently disposed to disclose) got my hands on a movie by the great comic master Charles Chaplin. The movie is THE GREAT DICTATOR, and is a spoof on Adolf Hitler, Mister Nine Million. I thought a little light relief would be appropriate to the situation, so fired up the computer and set Charles playing.

But, unfortunately, the movie opens in 1918 with scenes of trench warfare, and the subsequent humor involves, amongst other things, an unexploded artillery shell, jolly japes involving grenades and that kind of thing. Not exactly what the doctor ordered.

As my wife was seriously breathless, my own guess was that what the doctor would order, if he set eyes on her, would be a blood transfusion. The bottom line on being machinegunned is this: you leak. Having leaked quite a bit of blood, my wife must surely be low on red blood cells, and this is one of the things which can cause breathlessness. (There are other causes. Try running up and down the stairs in the Empire State Building some time and you will discover at least one for yourself.)

I persuaded my wife to call an ambulance, and she ended up spending the night in Meijin Hospital with good red blood flowing into a receptive vein, and with some "we'll take a shot at doing this a little better" surgery scheduled for later in the day.

Once I got home, I was tired, so, after delivering Miss "I Am Three" to the daycare center, I flaked out on the couch to catch up on some sleep which had gone missing in the night.

Later, on waking, I realized that the peace and quiet left me free to take some photos of the baby chaos which dominated the household landscape. So I did so. I wouldn't have been able to do this unless my daughter was at the daycare. But she was. And would remain there safely until ... what's today? Saturday. Okay ... until 1230. So what's the time now? 1330.

No, it can't be! But it was. Time flies when you're having fun. It also slips by unnoticed if you're sleeping. I then realized that I hadn't bought food for the evening meal, and it was my turn to cook.

Okay. First reclaim the daughter, then think about shopping.

By the time I'd reached the daycare I'd figured it out, and daughter Cornucopia and I headed for the supermarket. En route, she saw the library, and wanted to go there. So, on returning home, we gathered up the library books and headed to the library. Which was closed.

So we revisited the supermarket to buy two things I'd forgotten, Canola cooking oil and margarine.

Before going shopping, I always make a shopping list. Then, when I'm in the supermarket, I gather up things from memory. Then, just before heading to the cash register, I check the gathered things against the shopping list. This procedure is intended to be a kind of training tool.

But tody I was intellectually arrogant enough to think that I could skip the shopping list. ("Shopping list? We don't need no stinking shopping list!)

That, it turned out, was a mistake, though I had remembered to buy the most important thing on the list: another tub of Lady Borden chocolate ice cream.

After the library and the supermarket, we then went to Tsutaya to return two videos and to borrow four more. By the time we headed home, it was windy and pitch dark, and furious cold rain was falling, as a typhoon had come sneaking in. We were soaked by the time we got home, to find my wife waiting, and looking a little better than she had at the hospital.

I heard about her trip. She'd been pigging out in Shanghai on crab (now in season, apparently) and on Peking duck (a little greasy for her taste, apparently.) She had two very classy Chinese yin and yang T-shirts for me, and a fun story about a corpse.

The corpse was lying by the road connecting Shanghai to the airport, and a fellow tourist told my wife that, in China, people don't like to call an ambulance because, if you phone one, you have to pay for it. So - this at least is what my wife alleges that the tourist alleged - in China, if you have an accident, you need money so you can bribe someone to make that expensive telephone call.

With Charles and Hitler in mind, I thought of giving this blog entry the tile "Machineguns, Roadside Corpse and Genocide and Other Jolly Japes." Then I thought that might somewhat in bad taste, so I canceled that idea.

I did get dinner cooked, by the way: salmon, scallops, baked potatoes, rice, edamame (boiled soy beans) and tobinoko (flying fish eggs). I was all set to dish out ice cream for dessert, but my wife insisted, no, it must be fruit. Or vegetables. No broccoli being left, we ended up settling for a nashi.

Salvation for Mental Health Problems!!

2007-10-27T02:57:00.000+09:00

Salvation for Mental Health Problems!!

While surfing online, I was amazed to find a miraculous new therapy for Repairing Damaged Brains. The details are here:

http://www.kadir-buxton.com/index.htm

Here is a quote:

"Decades ago I discovered a cure for mental health problems. The cure, which I term the Kadir-Buxton Method, has been used on a wide variety of mental health problems. The procedure stuns and resets the brain of the patient, so that the patient returns to a normal condition. The Kadir-Buxton Method is done by making a fist of both hands, and striking both ears of the patient at exactly the same time and pressure with the soft part of the inner hand which is where the thumb joins the hand. The arrow in Figure 1 shows this point for your ease of use."

Thought of the day: all CIA interrogators should be trained in this neat mental health technique.

Disclaimer: any downside as a result of the use of this technique is strictly between you and your medical insurance provider, and is none of my business, thank you very much.

Supplementary thought of the day: maybe my sometimes significantly demented three-year-old daughter would benefit, on occasion, from being treated by this radical innovative technique.

My Wife Returns From China

2007-10-27T01:22:00.000+09:00

My Wife Returns From China

My wife returned from China last night, somewhat the worse for wear, having been slightly damaged by machinegun fire while trying to escape from slavery in a Chinese brick kiln.
She escaped in the company of 300 North Korean slave laborers imported from Pyong Yang. All but 3 of the Northerners died during the escape. Some got shot dead as they writhed on the electrified barbed wire. Others died in the unmarked minefield just beyond the wire.
As for the three who escaped, when they finally arrived in Shanghai my wife sold them to a gourmet restaurant which caters for upmarket dogs. In the West, there is a canard that people in Shanghai sometimes eat dogs. In today's increasingly affluent Shanghai, it is more likely to be the other way around.
My wife arrived at 0337 and spent the next hour on the phone, trying to find a beauty salon which was open at that time. She finally located one in the annexe of a private mental hospital. It was 50 kilometers away, but she phoned a taxi and set off immediately. I had no idea how she was going to pay for this because, after her departure for the People's Republic of China, I had taken the precaution of phoning the bank and canceling her credit card. However, it turned out that she was able to pay the taxi driver using counterfeit Japanese currency which she had bought cheaply from a North Korean street vendor on the streets of Shanghai.

In my wife's absence, I successfully got myself to Meijin Hospital for my latest post-cancer checkup. Friday 26 October the key thing was the blood tests, which checked out fine ... the dreaded magnesium deficiency is, it seems, a thing of the past.

My other challenge has been to be home alone with three-year-old Cornucopia. On this challenge, I give myself a B-minus.

On the good side, the house did not burn down, Cornucopia did not become road kill, and we were not attacked by any of the components of Imperial America's war machine which are based in our neighborhood.

Additionally, on the Thursday night, as per my wife's prior instructions, got Corny to sit in a warm bath so her "private spot" could benefit from the all-dissolving powers of water.

On the downside, toward the end of my time alone with Corny, the whole thing degenerated into a three-year-old kid's idea of orgy heaven, with bananas, videos and bowls of ice cream (BOTH the chocolate and vanilla, thank you very much) following one another in a kind of Triumph for the Baby Emperor.

Well, we did survive, and I didn't set fire to the house, and I guess that's what's really important.

Regarding the American war machine, a chunk of this is just down the coast from us, at a place called Yokosuka. Amongst other things, the bloody Yanks insist on bringing their nuclear-powered aircraft carriers all the way into our nuclear-free backyard. And, of course, these atomic crates, on arrival, leak radioactivity into the water, in total disregard of any theory which says that they shouldn't.

My wife has benefited greatly from her trip to China, and is now ready to face the prospect of doing what she can to resolve Japan's pension system mess. A brief stint in the brick kiln has filled her with zeal for the comparatively sybaritic life of the tax department bureaucrat.

Pity about all the dental work she now needs: the brick kiln manager saw fit to put a shovel into her face, and the damage will take anything from six months to two years to fix. Well, worse things happen at sea. And in Blackwater's playground, Iraq.

My Wife Flees Japan to Seek Political Asylum in China

2007-10-25T23:08:00.000+09:00

My Wife Flees Japan to Seek Political Asylum in China

Wednesday 24, my wife threw a few designer labels into a suitcase then headed off for the train station. Her plan was thus: fly to Shanghai, take the train to Lhasa, go by train from Lhasa to Beijing and there apply for (and obtain) political asylum.

I thought this was a hare-brained plan, and told her so to her face. I warned her that, quite possibly, the Chinese authorities might choose to:

1. laugh in her face;
2. outsource her case to a North Korean labor camp where the most nourishing thing on the menu will be refried cockroach shadows;
or
3. sell her as a slave to a brick kiln in Central China.

However, my wife stood to her guns, arguing thus:

1. The pensions mess in Japan is of political manufacture. ("Sorry, sir, you say you paid into the national pension plan for fifty years? I'm sorry, but we have no record that you ever even existed.")

2. As a bureaucrat who is at the sharp end of the pension screwup crisis, my wife is a victim of political oppression, suffering under the yoke of the All-Time Idiots Who Really Screwed Up This Time.

3. As a victim of Japanese political oppression, the oppression of the competent by the incompetent, my wife can legitimately apply for (an expect to be granted) political asylum in China.

I have pointed out to her that there is no point in going to China. That magical Chinese toothpaste with the amazingly unexpected additives? You can buy that stuff right here in Japan, if you shop around for it. Those chemically potent Chinese vegetables with the hyperloads of insecicides? They have clearly labeled "Chinese garlic" at the veggie shop down the sidestreet by the station.

Plus, I don't buy into my wife's concept of how political asylum works. She chose to specialize, after all, in early childhood education, not in international law.

However, I must concede that, in some cases, my wife turns out to know more than I do.

She knew, for example, that I have a hospital appointment tomorrow, Friday, something which had completely slipped my mind.

She was able to lay her hands on the family photographs, intended for my parents (daughter Cornucopia in a kimono, husband and wife team togged out in formal gear) which I had gone and lost (somewhere) in the cluttered chaos atop the old kitchen table in my personal room.

She, too, turned out to be right when she asserted that there is now a train which goes all the way to Lhasa in far-off Tibet. I was inclined to doubt this, but, when I went and checked, this outlandish theory turns out to be true.

Tuesday, the day before departure, my wife showed me two tubs of curry defrosting on the sink bench. Dinner for me and daughter Cornucopia for Wednesday. The small one being "amai," ie "sweet," and intended for Corny. The bigger one (much hotter) for me.

Wednesday morning, after my wife's departure, I was planning my day and went to look for the curry. It had vanished, and was nowhere to be seen. I said some words about my wife which she, fortunately, was not there to hear.

Much later, toward the end of the day, I finally found the curry, hidden in plain sight in the fridge.

Good. We would have curry plus some of the rice from the rice cooker, my wife having promised that there would be a four-day supply of rice in the cooker, enough rice to feed the entire population of North Korea for the rest of the year.

The rice cooker was suspiciously inert, no friendly electronic light showing. On inspection, it turned out not to have been plugged in. I opened it up. Nothing. Nada. Either some sly crook had burglarized our rice or my wife had forgotten to put it on to cook. I said some more words about my wife. Pretty shocking words. (Fortunately, because of the limitations of the damaged brain I work with, immediatley forgot precisely what I had gone and said).

The phone rang.

I do remember what I said then:

"Now who can that be?"

In my mind, she, the regal Murasaki Nishikawa, was promenading through the streets of Shanghai wowing the local yokels with her stunning Italian fashionhouse getup. What had she been wearing when she left on Wednesday? Pada? Fendi? Versace? So many labels, so many brands! Can't keep track...
"Welcome to China," I said.
"I'm still at Narita," she said. "I forgot -"
"To put on the rice. I know. I just found out."
"You know where the rice is, don't you?" said my wife.
"No," I said.
Ignoring this assertion, my wife told me to take four cups of rice and put them into the rice cooker. Then fill the cooker to the "4" level. Then press the TORIKESHI button. Then press the button on the right.

This sounded horribly technical, and I had grave doubts as to whether I would be able to either (a) remember or (b) carry out such a complicated instruction set.

However, by happy accident the rice was sitting out on the kitchen floor in plain sight, and I succeeded in doing what I had been bidden to do. One small problem: none of the buttons is labeled in English. Japanese only for this rice cooker. But, for once, my Japanese was equal to the task.

All set to go, I pushed the button on the right. Much to my amazement, the rice cooked.

We have the ultimate high-tech rice cooker. No rice washing and no soaking time required. Just load it up then hit START. And the rice, once cooked, will keep warm for three days, easily.

American Death Camp

2007-10-25T23:07:00.000+09:00

American Death Camp

News has recently surfaced online of a disgusting American death camp where prisoners innocent of any crime are subjected to lethal doses of radiation in order to establish survival outcomes in the aftermath of a nuclear war.
Presumably this research is related to the upcoming nuclear strikes which the United States will, in all probability, launch against Iran later this year.
The prisoners are, of course, terrified, and struggle to escape. But, in today's world, American genius is expressed by detention camps, interrogation rooms, torture chambers, secret star chamber proceedings, covert abductions and masterful disappearances. For those in the grip of the American claw, there is no escape.

The prisoners did not take well to being corralled within a tiny block arrangement designed to make sure each ... gets the same dosage.

The American mad scientists who are participating in this holocaust of the innocent seem to be, for the most part, shameless. Though one admits to faltering:

"I had to put myself in quite the mind-set to do it," Byron said.

The institution where this American dream of absolute power and violence is being enacted is the following House of Shame:

"The crew is using an irradiator in the basement of Hanford's 318 Building just north of Richland. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory usually uses the device to calibrate dosimeters, which measure radiation exposure to humans and animals, and to check for radiation damage of video cameras, fiber-optic cables and other equipment."

As for the prisoners, they, it seems, were born in captivity. America, like North Korea, now has trans-generational prison colonies, with infants being born in captivity and facing, from their first moments, a life of Living Hell.

That fact can be gleaned from the following:

"A scientific supply company sent 200 cockroaches for the tests, "all laboratory-grade, farm-fresh," Imahara said."

The actual URL where America's shame is on display is the following:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003963482_roaches20m.html

and I got there courtesy of this well-worth-visiting site:

http://newsoftheweird.blogspot.com/

From this site, I learnt that there are now braille tattoos for the blind. Here are a few words relating to that:

[Call me superficial, but I love cute haircuts, hot make-up, and creative tattoos, but lately I've wondered, if you're blind, can you enjoy these very visual things. Well one student has thought up a way where the visually impaired can express themselves through tattoos that can be read. The Braille Tattoo, designed by Klara Jirkova (a student at the University of the Arts Berlin), is a series of implantable surgical steel, titanium, or medical plastic that's placed under the skin. The tattoo can then be read via touch. Subdermal implants are nothing new, but using them to create body art for the visually impaired is an interesting idea. Jirkova thinks the implants could be used in the divet between thumb and pointer finger, so when people shake hands they can "read" each other's names and info.]

The quote above is from the following:

http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2007/10/tattoos-for-the.html

In the best tradition of American volunteerism, public spiritedness is what facilitates this research:

"Lab operators agreed to the research for purposes of science education, and workers donated their time, in some cases using part of their vacation allotments."

Magnesium Deficiency

2007-10-24T06:59:00.000+09:00

Magnesium Deficiency

Quite some time back, after a round of blood tests, my hematologist saw fit to ask me about my drinking habits. My wife being on hand, we confessed that we do imbibe, but only modestly, limiting alcohol to one or two glasses of wine on the weekends.

The question turned out to be because my blood tests had shown that my magnesium levels were low.

Initially, I was not worried about this. Magnesium? So what. I knew it was a constituent in some fireworks, but did not otherwise think it significant.

However, after someone kindly sent me some maagnesium data, I got seriously related. Not having enough magnesium can really screw you up. Most worryingly of all, part of the downside can be kidney stones, an agonisingly painful condition that I want to avoid at all costs.

Magnesium-rich foods include potato peels and certain nuts. But which nuts? I've lost the data I was sent, so, rather than eating magnesium-rich nuts, I've been eating nuts in general, which is not really the way to go.

So, with my next set of blood tests coming up this Friday, the 26th October 2007, I've finally gone online to refresh my magnesium deficiency concept.

Google "magnesium deficiency" and you get "about" 1,830,000 pages.

If you put the search term in quotes then the pages drop to about 300,000, with the snippet for the first being this:

[Conditions Linked to Deficiencies of Magnesium
Reviews mitral valve prolapse as a symptom of a magnesium deficiency as well as anxiety and psychiatric disorders, asthma, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue ...
www.ctds.info/5_13_magnesium.html - 36k - Cached - Similar pages]

Now, if you add in "nuts" ... you get barely 41,400 pages ... of which one is the following:

[Health Magnesium, Magnesium Deficiency and Benefit of Magnesium ...
Rich vegan sources include legumes such as beans and peas, nuts and seeds, ... Severe magnesium deficiency can result in low levels of calcium in the blood, ...
www.amazines.com/article_detail.cfm/211497?articleid=211497 - 67k - Cached - Similar pages]

The actual page in question is this:

http://www.amazines.com/article_detail.cfm/211497?articleid=211497

Here is a quote:

[ Magnesium is the fourth most abundant mineral found in the body and is very essential for good health. It is mostly found in the bones (around 50%), teeth, and red blood cells. The other half is largely found inside cells of body tissues and organs. Only 1% of magnesium is found in blood. The body takes magnesium from the diet and excretes the excess through urine and stool. A balanced diet contains enough magnesium for the body's functional requirements.]

It's a long article so I did a wrap-around search for "nuts" and hit "cashew nuts". I then did a Google for ["cashew nuts" "magnesium deficiency"] and got about 299 pages, one suggesting that cashew nuts are pretty magical things:

[Eliminate Tooth Infection (Abscess) With Cashew Nuts
It is proposed that anacardic acids in raw cashew nuts will cure tooth abscess or ... Magnesium deficiency has been proposed as causing lower tooth density, ...
members.tripod.com/~charles_W/tooth.html - 39k - Cached - Similar pages
Plus]

This was not giving me what I wanted, which was a list of magnesium-rich nuts, so I decided to see if Wikipedia had a page for magnesium deficiency.

It turns out that Wikipedia has two pages, one for this deficiency in plants, and the other for the same problem in humans. I believe that I am a human rather than a plant, so I went for the human-relevant page, which is this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnesium_deficiency_%28medicine%29

Note that diet can fix you up, up to a point, but "intravenous supplementation is necessary for more severe cases."

("Nurse! His magnesium is critically low! Put up a drip! Now!")

Here is a quote from the page's SYMPTOMS section:

[Possible symptoms and pathologies as a result of magnesium deficiency are widespread, but may include: Hypertension, cardiovascular disease, Vitamin K deficiency, depressed immunity, depression, diabetes, erectile dysfunction, increased levels of stress, insomnia, migraine, cancer, ADHD, asthma, and allergies.]

And note that:

"68% of the US population do not meet the US RDA for levels of magnesium."

There is also a page for Hypomagnesemia, which is this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypomagnesemia

Quote:

[The prefix hypo- means low (contrast with hyper-, meaning high). The middle magnes refers to magnesium. The end portion of the word, -emia, means 'in the blood' (note, however, that hypomagnesemia is usually indicative of a systemic magnesium deficit). Thus, Hypomagnesemia is an electrolyte disturbance in which there is an abnormally low level of magnesium in the blood. Usually a serum level less than 0.7 mmol/l is used as reference. It must be noted that hypomagnesemia is not equal to magnesium deficiency. Hypomagnesemia can be present without magnesium deficiency and vice versa.]

All I wanted was a list of magnesium-rich nuts, which I thought would take 30 seconds to find ... but when I started this search it was Tuesday, and now, suddenly, it is Wednesday.

Okay, let's try:

[list magnesium-rich nuts]

Looking at the results, this is NOT the search I need to do. Okay, try this:

"magnesium-rich nuts"

Okay, only about nine pages, with the snippet for one being this:

[Why Breakfast is the Most Important Meal of the Day- Quick & Simple
Combine leafy greens like spinach or broccoli, which are high in magnesium, with a protein-rich omelet, or add magnesium-rich nuts like almonds, ...
www.quickandsimple.com/article.php?id=403&menu=2 - 41k - Cached - Similar pages]

Okay ... cashew nuts, almonds ...

The page is this:

http://www.quickandsimple.com/article.php?id=403&menu=2

And here is a short list of relevant nuts:

[Combine leafy greens like spinach or broccoli, which are high in magnesium, with a protein-rich omelet, or add magnesium-rich nuts like almonds, peanuts or cashews to your cereal or oatmeal.]

Okay, already done ... my daily cereal, Alara Deluxe Muesli comes already with a bunch of nut fragments. Here in Japan we buy it at Seijo Ishi, which has a number of branches scattered around the place, one at Atre at Ebisu, for example, and one down in the basement level below the JR station on the Yamanote Line which is the terminus of the Toyoko Line ... can't remember the name of the station ... the magnesium deficiency must be hitting me real hard! ... humiliatingly, I ended up having to Google this. The answer is "Shibuya." Of course ...

Okay then, here it is, a list of magnesium-rich nuts: cashews, almonds, peanuts ... and Googling that list in conjunction with the term "magnesium" I arrve at this:

[Nutrition | Ludlow Nut Co.
Magnesium is a mineral that is abundantly found in nature. ... Products: peanuts, almonds, sunflower seeds, cashews, walnuts, brazil nuts, hazelnuts, ...
www.ludlownutco.co.uk/recipes/270_nutrition-home.asp - 19k - Cached - Similar page]

The page is this:

http://www.ludlownutco.co.uk/recipes/270_nutrition-home.asp

And it has a good list of magnesium-rich nuts, as follows:

[Products: {sources of magnesium} peanuts, almonds, sunflower seeds, cashews, walnuts, brazil nuts, hazelnuts, macadamia, pecans, pine nuts, pistachios, walnuts, dates, prunes, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, linseed and tomatoes.]

The good news, obviously, is that peanuts are a good source of magnesium. Good because peanuts are the cheapest nuts of all.

We don't currently have any nuts in the house, for the simple reason that I've gone and eaten them, but I think we do have some choco pies downstairs, and I'm going to head down to the kitchen now to check out that hypothesis. It's now 06:20 and I feel in need of some nutritional assistance ...

I used to think the three important food groups were chocolate, ice cream and liquorice allsorts, but obviously this theory, while attractive, was insufficient ...

WRAITH SHIPS III: THE SECRET OF THE TERRORIST TRAINING CAMPS

2007-10-18T05:07:00.000+09:00

If you've had a taste of glory - I mean, real glory, victory parade glory - then it's addictive. Instantly and forever. Just that one sweet taste.
You get into your hotel suite and it's huge, with an enormous vase of fresh cut flowers on the genuine antique table and with a bottle of the best possible sparkling white in a bucket of ice by the flowers.
And when you get to the bedroom you find Miss Flower Festival naked in you bed, and she smiles at you as you turn back the covers to inspect this trophy.
You weren't expecting this, so, seeing that you look slightly disconcerted, she asks, very politely, if perhaps you would prefer your brother. If you would, well, he's just upstairs in a matching suite, oiled, perfumed, lubricated and ready to begin. Just say the word and he'll be right down. Or, if you prefer, he can come down here.
That was the memory I had in mind when I had my meeting with Colonel Cuthbert. Not a fantasy, but a fact. A real memory. Something that actually happened.
One taste and you are addicted.
If we lived in an age of warlords, I would want to be first warlord then emperor. In the absence of such opportunity, celebrity is not a bad substitute.
In the downfall of the Save Our Snails mob, in the police sweep which had brought them into the orbit of the state, I saw my opportunity. If unleashed upon them then I, with my ten years of experience and my fearsome reputation, would crack their secrets out of them and get at what they had been doing.
Rumors were surfacing. Electronic equipement carried into the mountains. Odd, bulky packages being carried over difficult terrain along trails usually seldom or never frequented. In an age of terror, this stank of organized murder in the offing.
So my meeting with Colonel Cuthbert was important. But went badly. he did not like me, and I did not like him, either. And I think our mutual dislike was all too apparent.
Even so, he approved of the report that I had written on my client, a classic piece of ratutil - that is to say, of rational utilitarianism. It boiled down to this: he is old, he is senile, he remembers nothing and the chances of him ever surfacing useful data are precisely zero. We expend resources on him with no possibility of reward. It is time for him to be surceased. Grant me the permission and I will do the job myself, no executioner's fee required.
It was that final point, perhaps, which decided the colonel in my favor. Much to my surprise, he signed the surcease papers permitting me to liquidate my client.
For a moment, it seemed that the path to the gateway of my celebrity dream was clear and lit. But then the situation went horribly pearshaped.
Our bottom-feeding tabloid, Pravda, had scored a journalistic coup by cracking the secret of the terrorist training camps.
Pravda had done this by the simple expedient of sending journalists out to the huts and survival shelters in the Traken Mountains, the place where the Save Our Snails mob were said to have been doing mysterious training involving oddly-shaped pieces of equipment and portable electronic gear, and harvesting personal details from the log books.
The log books are mainatined in huts and shelters by DOC, the Department of Conservation, which has "Safety first" as its motto for the mountains.
Here on planet Sentosa, we all think of ourselves as survivalists. We are, after all, all members of the same congregation, all adherents of the Reformed Church of Jesus Christ Survivalist, Christ being the Ultimate Survivor. (Yes, he was crucified, we know that, but he survives because we embody him. We, then, are his immortality.)
But, while our self-image is that of the rugged and independent outdoor expert, the truth is that we are effete city dwellers who have very little hope of surviving once we get very far from the nearest electrical outlet. So, to optimize the chances of recovering either lost hikers (or "trampers," to use the Sendosan word) or, failing that, their bodies, DOC makes it a rule that hikers (in Sendosan, "trampers") should record in the log books (a) their names, (b) their contact details and (c) their intended route.
DOC is hated by most trampers because it ruthlessly enforces the pay-five-dollars-a-night rule. Way back when, you could sleep in the huts and shelters for free, because they were built on public land with donated money and volunteer labor. But then Planetary expropriated the whole lot, and DOC was charged with the mission of setting up a toll booth on the network of mountain trails once known as Freedom's Highway, hallowed ground on account of their role in the bitter guerilla campaigns of the Long War.
Such was the resentment at Planetary's high-handed arrogance that, for the first twenty years of the five-dollar system, it was commonplace for DOC officers to be gunned down and left for dead on distant trails. But those times are gone, and now most trampers toe the line and, obediently, fill out the safety-first log books.
By contacting people who had been in the area, Pravda was able to surface eyeball testimony backed up by digital photographs and home-made video, and, when the truth of the "military training" came out, the supposed terrorist emergency disintegrated into utter farce. And, with it, my dreams of glory.
What the SOS guys had been doing in the mountains was an extremely eccentric sport called "extreme ironing." This requires oddly-shaped packages, weird equipment which is anomalous in a hiking situation, and electronic equipment, the said electronic impedimenta being in the form of a portable steam iron.
The sport, if you can call it that, involves trekking into the mountains and taking along with you (a) a small ironing board, (b) a steam iron which can function as such once it no longer has access to a mains electricity outlet and (c) something to iron.
You iron in extreme conditions and in extreme terrain, braving snow, ice, frost, fog, hail, lightning storms and, in the Plektorite season, descending meteorites.
For the second time in my life, my dreams have been shattered by the Save Our Snails mob, sneaking the whiff of victory in front of my nose then snatching it away again.
So what is left?
Only tottering old Captain Slocum, whose death permit I have in my possession, safe for the moment in my biometric safe. And he, perhaps, is my one last shot at glory. It is, I think, almost impossible, but, even so, I will give it a try. I will attempt the impossible and seek from him the secret of the Wraith Ships.
If I can succeed, and can summon the ships themselves from out of the depths of time and space where they have been lost for so many centuries, then I will be not just a celebrity but a World Historical Figure, which, if you play it right, means, I think, top-quality hotel suites and happy girls forever.
Well, roll on tomorrow!

WRAITH SHIPS Part II: SAVE OUR SNAILS

2007-10-17T16:17:00.000+09:00

WRAITH SHIPS Part II: SAVE OUR SNAILS

I hate Save Our Snails and all the rest of that mob. They destroyed my childhood dream when I was just eleven years of age, and the damage they have done to my life is permanent and beyond repair. At age eleven, my hope, my dream, my life flame's desire, was nullified by SOS, and for that I will never forgive them.
So here I am, one day after my eleventh birthday, sneaking by night on the lumpy terrain of Rebthot Peat Diggings, property of Jonathan Lucent Rebthot. You have to get past barbed wire (very rusty old wire) which is adorned by red signs saying "MINE FIELD."
I'm half way out, only twenty paces from the Bunyip Tree, when I freeze up. A panic attack. The MINE FIELD signs have been working on me, and now they've precipitated a panic attack. I am marooned. Can't move.
And that's when I hear one of Johnny Reb's dogs waking up inside Blackheart, the Rebthot stronghold.
The dog galvinizes me into action, and I do my own little one-boy infantry assault (yes, I was a mere boy, then, for all that I imagined myself to be a man) to the Bunyip Tree, which was heavy with big orange-purple Bunyip Snails, unique to our planet and doomed to extinction on account of the pollution that would inevitably result from the polyvinyl chloride plant that was soon to open in our neighborhood, over the dead bodies of our Local Council. (All nine members of the Council had committed suicide to protest against Planetary's decision to force us to host the PVC plant.)
The snails - I still remember how they felt under my trembling touch - were velvety, with tiny little prickles in amongst the velvet of their fur. I gathered five, ten, twenty. I only needed half a dozen for my Grand Scheme, but the others would come in handy for trading purposes. I would be the only person in Known Reality to have surplus Bunyip Snails available, and, even at age eleven, I had a realistic appreciation of the kind of leverage that would give me.
I shoveled the snails into the shoplifting pockets built into the lower legs of my denim jeans, and that was when I was grabbed from behind. By who? Johnny Reb, it turned out.
Once he had me down in the basement of the Rebthot stronghold, he did a full-scale Military Interrogation. I mean, the whole thing. Face slapping, a strangulation mask (an efficient alternative to water boarding) and adroit use of both a Taser and a cattle prod. The cattle prod, boy, that was brutal.
I withstood all. If I could resist interrogation, there was a chance that I would get out of here alive with my sacred dream intact.
Here on planet Sentosa, we have more snails than all the planets in the rest of Known Reality put together. I'd always been fascinated by snails, ever since I was old enough to walk, and I'd been collecting them seriously since I was three.
By the time Johnny Reb was interrogating me, I was supported by my dream. Give me a why and I will endure any how.
My dream was to have my own snail museum, a place of elite spaces and crystalline light, a meticulously ordered alternative universe entirely divorced from the sweat and vulgarity of daily life, life as lived by the peasants who inhabited my planet.
So I endured.
But Johnny Reb did not give up. He had his daughter Mezlot phone my mom and con her into believing that I was going to be saying over at the Rebthot place to play mahjong. Actually, I did not then (and do not now) play mahjong.
My mom bought it. She had been a serious alcoholic for at least five years by then, and she wasn't anything you could seriously think of as as a "mother."
Having secured time in which to work, Johnny Reb picked up the phone and summoned five of his cronies, all whiskery whiskey drinkers aged between, I would guess, fifty-five and sixty-five. And, for a solid week, we played games in the basement. Mahjong was one of them, but there were a lot of other games, too.
What happened in that basement is something that I have never discussed with anyone, not even the psychiatrist who worked with me for six months, doing a Deep Dissection, during the first year of my five years of training as an Interrogator.
He wanted to know why I was phobic to, amongst other things, mahjong boards and the tablets used to play the game of mahjong.
I hung tough for the whole week, then Johnny Reb threw me in the shower, shoved a vial of Invigorator into my veins to get my legs working again, had his wife do a makeup job on me and forced me to take three tablets of Sluggard to make sure that I didn't turn friskily informative when I got home.
When I got home, I laid out my precious Bunyip Snails on my quilt, the one my grandmother had made, completing it just the week before. My snails, my precious snails. The achieved foundation of my dream.
"My real life has started," I said.
That was a line straight out of a comic book, I know that. But, with so many years having passed, I can no longer remember which comic book.
A week after Johnny Reb sent me home, a helicopter winched two kids out of the lumpy terrain of Rebthot Peat Diggings. One of them was winched out on a stretcher, having lost both legs, as he had stepped on a Deep Waltz longlast mine (an A#22-7/0-mod-redux#9, if you happen to be an afficionado of the very interesting universe of land mines.) The mine had been there since the Long War, one of the estimated seven billion unexploded mines on our planet, so Johnny Reb didn't get into trouble on account of it.
I gloried, then, in the possession of my snails, all the more precious becuase (albeit unknowingly) I had hazarded my life in a minefield to win them.
Nobody else, I was sure, was going to be doing any snail poaching in, on or near the Rebthot property. My monopoly, my lifelong monopoly, my unique sales point, was locked in and secure for the rest of my life.
Then those Save Our Sails sods, those unspeakable excremental urine-drinkers, they did me in, trashing my dream, destroying my hopes, and sending my dream castles tottering down to ruin.
The Conservation of Species Act, that was what did it. Having strongarmed Planetary by an eighteen-year campaign of terrorist acts, including the use of polonium bombs, cobalt 90, ricin and the mutated and highly lethal strain of nanovirus known as Quelp, they had broken the will of the Central Government to resist.
Under the terms of the Conservation of Species Act, it became illegal to own, kill, farm, breed, collect, sample, scientifically investigate, archive or DNA-type dolphins, whales, penguins, wombats, quokkas, platypuses, tarantula spiders, any cephalopod certified as having an IQ higher than 17 ... and snails.
Any and all collections of any such organisms, whole or fragmentary, were to be surrendered immediatley for destruction.
I saw the details on the TV news in the evening and, that night, set my alarm clock so I woke before dawn. My parents were, convniently, out of the house for the day, attending one of the compulsory marriage-counseling sessions mandated by the court.
Like all boykids on Sentosa, I was competent at basic carpentry, which was a subject that we actually studied at school, where it was called "woodwork." With a boy's lifetime of comic book reading behind me, I knew exactly what I had to do.
By the time I was finished - it took more than a whole working day, but I got it done before a taxi decanted my extremely drunken parents outside the house shortly before four in the morning - if you reached up to the top of my bedroom door then there was a panel you could slide away.
The panel would slide right off, then you could lift it up. And, suspended from it by thin threads of fishing line nylon, there were my precious Bunyip Snails, each in its own little plstic bag, safely wrapped in cotton wool.
I knew from my boyhood comic book reading that, historically, this was one of the stash-em-and-hide-em tricks that had been used, way back when, back in the Twentieth Century, by the Israeli Secret Service ("Israel" being, depending on what reference book you consult, (a) a planet that was part of the Home System, (b) a nation state or (c) a leading chain of fast food restaurants at atime when Planet Earth was ruled by coalitions of such chains, each coalition always at war with all the others.
In my smugness, I was sure that my secret was perfectly safe, and my only bad moment came when my mom, whose sense of smell was much sharper than mine, enquired as to why my bedroom smelt of wood shavings.
A week later, one hour before dawn, my bedroom door shattered into splinters as an elegantly calculated incursion charge blew the door off its hinges.
As I stumbled out of bed, a tear gas grenade went off in the room. And, as I was making futile efforts to open my lock-back pocket knife, I was clubbed into submission. My entire room was smashed, ripped and shredded, and, of course, they found my snails. They had grown up reading exactly the same comic books that I had.
I was interrogated for a solid three months but they got nothing out of me. Nothing. Not one single word. In consequence of this unprecedented feat, I was computer-selected for the career track I am on now.
I have, at this writing, the honor of being an Interrogator, a full colonel in Planetary Interrogation. I won my rank by extorting from General Cheops the prevacise location of the Happy Valley thermonukes. When I got to work, we were only two hours out from Deadline, the moment at which the nukes would do their stuff and cobalt 90 would render our planet uninhabitable.
To do the job, the only piece of equipement I had with me was granny's quilting hook, the one she had used to make the quilt that used to adorn my bed (one of the many things that vanished in my parents' suicide pact fire).
I broke General Cheops in precisely ninety minutes, the most intense ninety minutes of my entire life, so shattering in their intensity that I needed a month to recover.
That is what I am famous for. But now, I think, my apotheosis has arrived. Over the weekend, Planetary has had armed police taking down a whole range of dissident groups, everything from Save Our Snails to Clean Air Now! They have been hauled into court on murky charges, with gagging orders slapped on those few of them who have been granted bail.
I am itching for the call which, I hope, will come before the week is done. But now I have to leave this file for a moment and head off to Brynderwyn Hospice, where, all going well, I will be able to persuade Colonel Cuthbert to sign off on the surcease papers that I need to bring an end to the life of Captain Slocum, the client I have been working with for a solid five years now.

WRAITH SHIPS ON MY MIND - PART I.

2007-10-17T10:33:00.000+09:00

WRAITH SHIPS ON MY MIND - PART I.

When I left home to head for work, I heard screams coming from the Plantation. This is the woodlot out behind our homestead. All we grow there is manuka, a shrub that grows to the size of a small tree and makes nice firewood. We use the firewood for smoking snapper, a name applied to the kind of sea bream which we catch in local waters.
Judging by the screaming, it was a woman who was making the noise. I was all dolled up in my new dress uniform, because I was going to be meeting with Colonel Cuthbert, and I wanted him to sign some surcease papers for me. The last thing I wanted to do was to paddle down the wet and muddy path that leads into the Plantation, but that's what I did.
When I got to the clearing where the incinerator stands, there was a woman staked out on the ground, fresh blood red on her pale thighs. Half a dozen of the Gwenty brats were standing around, three of them with vivid blue paint spattered all over their pubic area. She's obviously had one of those anti-rape packets stashed in her panties, and it had gone off, and now three of the Gwenty brats were splattered with it.
"Get lost, Eater,@ said the largest Gwenty on hand, Barolo, eighteen years of age and a head taller than I was.
I didn't mess around. I hauled out my Taser and I tazed him. Twice. I just love the way they kick around in screaming convulsions. That really does it for me. I love the Taser so much that my first stock purchase ever was ten shares in Taser Transcosmica, our beloved T-trans, most important commercial outfit in Known Reality, if you ask me.
"Call the police," said Miss Bloody Thighs, struggling to the feet.
"Get out of here, bitch," I said.
I didn't want her bringing any cops here. My dad had not yet finished harvesting this year's marijuana crop. Plus I had five totally illegal plants of my own growing in the back of the Plantation - tobacco plants. You get caught with those, it's a death penalty offence. And on top of that there's the methamphetamine lab.
"Get out of here, bitch," I said, "or I'll taze you."
That upset her so much that she started pissing, right then and there. I was disgusted to see the stuff vomiting out of her. I hate it when a woman can't control her excretory functions.
My hatred goes back to the day when I murdered my sister, who was twelve years old at the time. It was my dad who had tasked me to perform this honor killing, just one day before my fourteenth birthday. Here on Sentosa, when you turn fourteen you become criminally liable for your acts, but up until then you get a free ride.
Although sister Belinda was as tall as I was, and almost as strong, taking her down was easy enough, thanks to the piano wire garotte that my father had recommended. But toward the end she lost control of her bowels, and all the excrement she had packed inside herself came shoveling out all over my best suede dress uniform shoes, which were never the same thereafter.
So when I saw Miss Bloody Thighs doing her Me Big Leaky act, I lost my onion, and I tased her. Three times. Just love that sinister clickety-click. In my imagination, it sounds like the hugest scorpion in the world coming scrabbling over wet rock to grab you and do you.
I tazed her three times, leaving her in a weeping heap huddled on the ground.
"Can we do her now?" said Putty Gwenty.
Only nine years old, but, much to my surprise, fairly well hung, and already standing at attention.
"Yeah, okay," I said. "But no knives! That means no blades, no chisels, no screwdrivers, no bamboo stakes, nothing apart from what you were born that. Got that?"
Once I made sure they weren't going to overdo things, I headed for the Brynderwn Hospice.
By now, I wasn't
worried about the raped foreigner going and blabbing to the police. After our local custom of raping tourists got out of head, the govenment put pressure on the cops to crack down. Accordingly, if the rape rate stays below ten percent of what it was formerly, back in the louche days before the crackdown, each cop gets a tax free cash bonus which is equivalent to twice his annual salary.
The cops do a great job of keeping the rape complaint rate right down. They have a simple but effective method. When a woman comes in, they stuff her mouth full of modeling clay then gag her. Then handcuff her and stuff her in a bait bag, one of those big bags which are big enough and strong enough to hold a full-grown cow. Then, that night, they take her out fishing. What they fish for is megasharks. And her function is to make herself useful by going on the big hook and serving as bait.
I used to be friendly with a cop, once, and got invited to a copshop beer bash where they showed off trophy videos. So I saw uncut video of megashark fishing. Boy! Talk about a turn on! Some day, I'd like to get hold of some expendable girl - an unsatisfactory wife, for example - and take her out on the Big Deep to do a bit of that fishing myself.
But I'd need help getting her on the hook. I don't know how that is achieved, getting her meat on the steel, so I'd need some help with that part.

New Zealand: World's Best Outdoor Anarchist-Terrorist Training Camp!

2007-10-17T04:46:00.000+09:00

Words Heard Through A Gag

... or, more exactly, through a gagging order.

One of the many people arrested by police in New Zealand who has been brought before a court and who has had the "terrorist" label stuck on him and who has been subjected to a gagging order, says the following:

"Its still all very murky, but what is clear is that the cops have used it as an excuse to harrass and raid as many different activist spaces & activist's houses as they can possibly think of. The net they've cast is simply MASSIVE."

The above surfaced on the following blog:

http://climatechangeaction.blogspot.com/

Blogger Calvin Jones has a long post about the terrorism angle on the following page:

http://climatechangeaction.blogspot.com/2007/10/terrorist-arrests-or-state-repression.html

A quote from Calvin:

[There is also an anti-coal mining campaign that has been targeted, one of its members houses have been raided. Possibly the police are using some real armed Maori nationalists as an excuse to arrest some politically inconvenient campaigners...nothing is clear. It is also possible that the whole thing is being cooked up: it is true that one of the Maori guys arresed had worked as a security guard for high wealth businessmen, hence a need for arms...although not molitov cocktails that have been roumoured!

One of the social centers raided is called 'A Space Inside'. New on one of their conferences here.]

The "here" clicks through to an anarchism blog, and to this page on that blog:

http://anarchistnews.org/?q=node/2122

Quote:

[Two weeks ago, the A Space Inside anarchist collective in Auckland held the Anarchism Is Organising conference, the first national conference for anarchists since the Anarchist Tea Party in December 2005. Anarchists from Auckland, Raglan, Hamilton, New Plymouth, Wellington and Christchurch attended (a fairly decent geographical spread) although total numbers were slightly less than the Anarchist Tea Party, and considerably less than the 2004 conference in Christchurch, and the 2003 Anarchist Tea Party.

The organisers had planned the conference agenda to first analyse the current state of anarchism in Aotearoa (day one) and then, on day two, to move towards what they saw as the best way to move forward, a broad Aotearoa anarchist network for communication and coordination between centres. Day two of the conference kicked off on a sour note, when before it had started, police arrived at the conference venue, allegedly to do a “bail check” on an activist who lived there, but on sight they arrested him, beat him up and pepper sprayed three others. The activist was eventually released around 27 hours later, with no charge.]

Aotearoa, for anyone not familiar with New Zealand, is an alternative word for "New Zealand" and comes from the Maori language.

Now, to wrap up, here's a scary concept for you: ANARCHIST KIDS! As if all kids weren't natural anarchists anyway.

Quote:

[Early in the conference, one attendee commented that it was the first anarchist conference she’d been to where there weren’t any children present. The lack of children certainly changed the atmosphere (one later joined, but she was relatively old and was happy to join in with the conference activities), and I wonder whether part of the reason for the lack of children (given that there’s no shortage of them within the anarchist community!) was because in the advertising for the conference, no mention of children or the conference being child-friendly was made (a stark difference to previous conferences). Part of the reason for this could be that, unlike the 2004 Christchurch conference and the 2003 and 2005 Anarchist Tea Parties, none of the organising group had children, and therefore it was able to escape their mind (and, in an extension to this, that unlike the Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin communities, there are very few anarchists with children in Auckland full stop). This shouldn’t be an excuse however, and I wonder what would have happened if people from other centres had brought their young children up. Given the lack of space I mentioned in the previous paragraph for alternative meeting spaces, I wonder if a “childrens space” could have been created, and who would have kept the children company (and entertained) throughout the conference.]

A quick peek at the website for the New Zealand Herald, this being:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/

[High Court sends bailed terror suspect back to jail
5:00AM Wednesday October 17, 2007
By Herald Reporters
Jamie Lockett faces gun charges. Photo / Richard Robinson

Jamie Lockett faces gun charges. Photo / Richard Robinson
Anti-terror raids

* The bush that Tuhoe rules
* 'Leftie' backs police action

A man charged as a result of the investigation into alleged guerrilla camps was last night back behind bars - less than eight hours after being freed on bail.

The High Court in Auckland overturned a District Court decision and told Jamie Beattie Lockett there was "just cause" for his continued detention.

He had earlier been freed after Judge Josephine Bouchier said that on the evidence before her, Lockett could not be considered such a significant danger to the public that he should be in custody.

But in the High Court, Justice Helen Winkelman over-ruled that after receiving more information from police on Lockett's activities. She suppressed the details.]

I went to Google News and searched for "terrorism New Zealand." It responded, in part, by asking me if I actually wanted to search for "tourism New Zealand."

Well, that used to be our image: a tourist destination rather than a big outdoor terrorist training camp.

And this from the Bangkok Post:

[Wellington (dpa) - New Zealand police refused to confirm on Tuesday reports that Prime Minister Helen Clark had been targeted by a paramilitary group, which has also reportedly tested a napalm bomb and trained dissidents planning terrorist attacks.]

It does not define "napalm," but perhaps, in context, the word simply denotes a mix of petrol and detergent, or something like that ... but to say even that much is, I guess, unwise under the circumstances, so I'll avoid the temptation to look for stuff online about Molotov cocktails, and will call it quits here.

My Duty is not Clear and I am Worried

2007-10-16T22:51:00.000+09:00

My Duty is not Clear and I am Worried

Something strange is happening in New Zealand, and I can't figure it out. Because the bottom line is not clear, I am not sure where my duty lies. Do I treat this as spectacle, or am I, implicitly, involved? Put it another way: is this just another disaster movie, interesting but none of my business, or is this the Time of Testing, trundling into town but with no standard bearer to clearly advertise its arrival?

What is happening, if the international media can be believed, is that armed New Zealand police have been cracking down on terrorist organizations which have been stockpiling arms and undergoing military training in mysterious camps.

From an international perspective, it all looks very simple. For example, www.bloomburg.com has a clearcut headline which says "New Zealand Anti-Terror Police Seize Weapons in Raid (Update2)"

To the BBC, the story is nice and simple, and runs thus:

[Police Commissioner Howard Broad said those arrested had used firearms and other weapons at military-style training camps.

Among those held was the prominent Maori rights campaigner, Tame Iti.

The North Island raids were the first use of the country's Terrorism Suppression Act.

The people targeted were from "a range of motivations" and from various ethnicities, the police chief said.

"Based on the information and the activity known to have taken place, I decided it was prudent that action should be taken in the interests of public safety," Mr Broad said.]

But if you are from New Zealand then you know that these people with "a range of motivations" are not new on the scene. They have always been there, and it has never, until now, been thought to call in the Waffen SS to come storming in with live ammunition chambered in their guns.

It seems pretty clear that the people on the scene are familiar faces. A "save our sails" mob which may have got a bit out of hand, as they apparently seem to see taking down and defeating the coal industry as part of their snail-saving mandate.

But the eco movement is not exactly new on the scene.

And, in New Zealand, unresolved tensions over land rights have been grumbling on all through my lifetime. While I was at university, there was a major standoff involving the police and Maori activists who had laid claim to some land near the coast in Auckland.

However, why the guns and raids now? What has changed?

I have been watching, for the second time, Terry Gillian's BRAZIL, his brilliant comic riff on George Orwell's 1984. It's about a world of jackbooted repression and state intimidation in the name of security. It's significantly scarier than the movie I've been watching back to back with it, that movie being STARSHIP TROOPERS (plotline: brave gung-ho military types fight Very Large Bugs, Extremely Noisily (and fight them in French for some reason, presumably because of a quirk of the download I've managed to get my hands on.)

Looking at the New Zealand situation, it seems that there are two ways to interpret it. One is to think it is symptomatic of a government which, being short, for the moment, of useful ideas, has chosen to create a homegrown terrorism problem out of the thin stuff of its own imagination.

One might imagine that, if everyone keeps their heads, this will all blow over, and that the New Zealand government will not actually go down the same Fascist dictatorship route that the United States of America has been taking in recent years.

But, alternatively, it's possible that the long-awaited hour of testing has come at last. That this is the time to send out the signal, to waken the sleepers, to pour water on the dehydrated dragons teeth, to turn the key in the lock and open the secret armory, the one which holds the repository of Semtex, polonium and cobalt 90, along with the well-oiled machineguns.

Is this, then, the hour to hand out the guns and ammunition? Or is it, rather, time to go look for some popcorn and enjoy the show?

I can't decide.

Probably I will think better once I close down STARSHIP TROOPERS so I can think with an unoccupied mind, but I have no plans to do that until I have succeeded in downloading LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA, the Warner Brothers trailer of which I have successfully downloaded and watched.

On top of the problem of the movies playing (or soon to be played) on my computer screen, I have the problem of the movies playing in my own mind, most recently the wraith ships. Of which more later, but not right now ...

FIRST WORLD WAR POEM

2007-10-16T16:00:00.000+09:00

FIRST WORLD WAR POEM

In my dreams,
I am unable to recover Flanders.
My white-bread soul
Has no authentic equivalent
For gangrene.
Happily asleep,
My three-year-old daughter says
(Speaking, it seems, in Japanese)
"Corny come too!"
In her dreams also,
It seems,
The black cows of tank attacks and mustard gas
Are missing.
My dreams move on,
Chaotically.
From the shattered plaster-of-paris replica
Of my mother's soul,
I cannot recover
My younger brother's identity.
An attempt to salvage it in mp3
Is thwarted by a bureaucratic popup
Demanding his surcease number.
Which I do not have.

Lacking authentic cataclysm,
I will content myself with the Grand Armada,
And our last-ditch assault on Pivot.
Our wraith ships spewn across transcosmic battlefields,
Falling and failing,
The last barrage of our suicide ships
Death-dwindling in a firefly kamikaze.
My father's father fought at Somme
And lived.
The missing Wraith Ships
Are no more recoverable than he is.
On a planet of buried battlefields I attempt
To dream to the black cow stratum,
To dream down,
Descending,
Falling
Past Madonna's contract,
Paris Hilton's fragrance,
Marcel's mime
To a death mask which will answer to my name.

Beyond Freudian psychology,
Beyond the realms of the ego and the id,
There lies the truest self,
The self called marzipan,
The reveler who enjoys
Bouncing in the mind's bright plastic play pen
On bean bags stuffed with empty eyes and surcease numbers.
Reclining on the bags, I fall to sleep,
And night, at last,
The true and real black cow night,
Descends,
With its buckets of faceless faces,
Settles upon my face ...
To shroud them.

Ancient Archives

2007-10-16T09:58:00.000+09:00

I'm taking another shot at historical research using the links found on the following page:

http://london.iwm.org.uk/server/show/nav.00b00a

My target now is as it was before: the military career of my paternal grandfather, Gilbert John Cook, born 1893.

What I noticed yesterday was a link marked NATIONAL ARCHIVES. That link goes here:

http://london.iwm.org.uk/server/show/nav.00b00a00b

You are here:

IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM LONDON >> LINKS >> NATIONAL ARCHIVES

Here is one that looks promising:

[Commonwealth War Graves Commission
Responsible for the graves of the war dead. The on-line Debt of Honour Register provides personal and service details and places of commemoration for the 1.7 million members of the Commonwealth Forces who died in the First and Second World Wars. Details of the 60,000 civilian casualties of the Second World War are also given]

That link goes to here:

http://www.cwgc.org/

There is a search box here:

http://www.cwgc.org/debt_of_honour.asp?menuid=14

I try:

Search for: Casualty
Surname: Cook
Initials: G. J.
War: First World War
I op for from 1914 to 1918 since I have no data that would let me fine-tune things further.
Force: army
Nationality of the force served: United Kingdom

Okay, fingers crossed ...

SUBMIT!!

""Here are the results of your enquiry. There are no records which match your search criteria""

Bums!

Okay, I'll give this one more shot ... try for Walter Butler, though I only have on initial ... see how I go ... killed in the First World War, I believe, so I will be looking not for "casualty" but for "cemetery."

No, won't work. If you choose "cemetery" then you have to specify the cemetery, which I don't know, so I'll go with "casualty" after all.

Here are the results of your enquiry. There are 90 records which match your search criteria.

Select a name to see more details

The direct link to the page is this:

http://www.cwgc.org/search/SearchResults.aspx?surname=Butler&initials=W&war=1&yearfrom=1914&yearto=1918&force=Army&nationality=6&send.x=47&send.y=13

There is only one Butler, Walter. His rank is private, his service number is 8208, his date of death is 28/12/1914 (28th day of the 12th month rather than 12th day of the 28th month, meaning that he died just after Christmas - bummer!), dead at age 37, Royal Irish Regiment, United Kingdom. The grave/memorial reference is Panel 1 and the cemetery/memorial name is PLOEGSTEERT MEMORIAL.

Never heard of it.

Doing a Google ...

[CWGC :: Cemetery Details
Location Information:, The Ploegsteert Memorial stands in Berks Cemetery Extension, which is located 12.5 kilometres south of Ieper town centre, ...
www.cwgc.org/search/cemetery_details.aspx?cemetery=88800&mode=1 - 17k - Cached - Similar pages]

"Ieper town??!!" ... oh ... misread it as "Leper Town," and did a double take ... Google Ieper town ...

[Map: Ieper town
Ieper Town. Heading. Introduction Maps Silver Line. France Belgium Silver Line. Guest Book E-Mail Silver Line. filler Go Back filler. Ieper Town ...
www.webmatters.net/maps/ww1_map_ieper_town.htm - 5k - Cached - Similar pages]

[Poperinge New Military Cemetery
Poperinghe New Military Cemetery is located 10.5 km west of Ieper town centre, ... From Ieper, Poperinge is reached via the N308. From Ieper town centre the ...
www.webmatters.net/cwgc/poperinge_new.htm - 15k - Cached - Similar pages]

I think this is the place sometimes written as "Ypres," which, if memory serves, I read somewhere that English troops, not big on authentic Continental pronunciation, used to refer to as "Wipers."

Okay, that's as far as I intend to go today. For my next stunt, a First World War Poem. I think ...

Brain Damage

2007-10-16T01:13:00.000+09:00

Brain Damage

After my brain got shrunk by chemotherapy and then boiled by hard radiation, I lost my capacity for night navigation. Put me on a dark road at night and I can't find my way back home. Even more alarmingly, wake me up in my bedroom in one of the darker hours of the night, and I'm lost. Marooned. Can't find the door out.

I fixed the bedroom problem by mapping the room in my mind. Not so hard to do because the family bedroom that I always sleep in is a rectangle. All I have to remember is to lie flat on my back on the futon and stretch out my right arm. My fingertips will now be resting against the line of build-in cupboards, and I can follow that line of cupboards to the door out.

So, the other night, I was very unsettled to wake in my bedroom and to find, whoops, I'm lost again. Can't make sense out of this. What's this floor to wall window doing here? Don't remember that!

After a couple of really disconcerting minutes, I finally clicked. Not in my own bedroom. No, not at all. Instead, I'm up in Gunma, sleeping in the tatatami-mat room which opens directly off the kitchen in my mother-in-law's house.

I worked out how to get to the door, and got there, but I was seriously alarmed for a moment.

The next day, I took three-year-old Cornucopia out for a walk. We went past a stable where they keep cows, and I explained to Corny how it is with cows and little girls. The cows start by eating the hair, because it looks like grass. Then they realize that little girls are salty, and they love salt, so then they really go to town. Gao! GAO! (Munch! MUNCH!)

I don't think Corny had been expecting to have an adventure that day, but suddenly she was.

Then, suddenly, less amusingly, so was I, because I had gotten the pair of us lost.

Since returning to Japan, I'd at least twice been to the cow barn and back, but now, on the return journey, I was lost.

There were a few people on the streets, so I could ask for directions. But, in this pretty featureless landscape, it's difficult to think of a place which is known to me (once I'm there, I'm oriented) but also to the average local resident.

My brain still being at least partly functional, I hit on a good location: the library. A little out of my way, but I really do know the way back to my mother-in-law's house from there.

So we got home.

I passed that test, despite having a damaged brain, but failed another, which was to untangle, in the privacy of my own mind, the genealogy associated with the closely annotated set of old photographs I had received recently in the mail. Sorry, no can do.

However, I've started nibbling at the problem. And now I'm going to go online to see if I can find any details about two people upstream in my family line.

One is Walter Butler, and, sorry, I can't see how he fits into the picture, though, when I take another shot at the paperwork, it will all fall into place (probably). What I know about Walter B. is that he was killed in the First World War, which doesn't really seem fair, as my understanding is that he, personally, did not start that war. Nor was he the guy who decided that his nation, England, should be part of it.

The other one is simpler. Gilbert John Cook, born 1893. He is my father's father, which makes him my paternal grandfather. He didn't start the First World War either, but he, too, got dragged into it. Wasn't killed, but did get wounded. However, was lucky enough to recover so he could participate in the Somme. Which you wouldn't have wanted to miss, because it was one of the longest, bloodiest and most all-round horrific battles in the history of the human race.

(Sorry, looking at my notes, I think the brain damage may have done me in yet again. It seems, from re-reading my notes, that he got as far as the battle of the Somme in an unwounded fashion, but got wounded then.)

Anyway, apart from waging war on a bunch of Europeans who, personally, hadn't chosen to start the First World War either, my paternal grandfather worked quietly at the St Cuthbert's Paper Mill, then owned by the Inveresk Paper Company.

During the First World War he was in the Grenadier Guards.

My mission now is to see if I can find anything, anything at all, about the military careers of these two people who stand in my ancestral line, Walter Butler and Gilbert John Cook.

Gilbert John seems the easier, because I know that he was in the Grenadier Guards, so my first move is going to be to see if Wikipedia has an entry for the Grenadier Guards. And, if they do, is there an external link to an online repository of data on veterans?

Once more into the breach, dear brain, and fill the central cerebral fosse with the faces of our faceless English dead ...

(I had not plans to write a First World War poem, not this year, not ever, but maybe that is where this line of research is going to terminate.)

Okay ... Wikipedia ... Grenadier Guards ... instead of one entry, there are 707 ... I'd rather it were the other way round ... can't find any compact little list of external links ... okay, guess I will Google this ... about 750,000 pages for "Grenadier Guards" ...

You have to start somewhere, so I started with this page:

http://www.army.mod.uk/grenadier/index.htm

Prominent top right was this message:

Soldiers and members of their families looking for the most up to date information should be using the www.armynet.mod.uk version of this site.

https://www.armynet.mod.uk/

Okay, on this site they invite you, if you are a relative of someone in the British army, to apply for guest membership of something which seems to be called ArmyNET.

""This is a monitored proprietary system for authorised users only. Access by unauthorised individuals is prohibited and is an offence under the Computer Misuse Act 1990. If monitoring reveals evidence of misuse or criminal activity, it will be used to support disciplinary and/or legal proceedings.""

Better watch myself ...

If you want to sign up as a guest, there's a snag:

""This process requires you to have a sponsor who is already a full member of the ArmyNET community, for example, a serving soldier. You must know the ArmyNET username of your sponsor in order to complete your request to sign-up as a guest.""

Okay, scratch that. Where else can I look? British War Museum? I seem to think that there is such a place, the reason for so thinking is because I believe I once visited it, many years ago, in London. Let's see ...

Okay, welcome to the Imperial War Museum ...

http://www.iwm.org.uk/

Okay, and the London branch of the museum has a short and convenient page of links:

http://london.iwm.org.uk/server/show/nav.00b00a

Links to links and links to links ... the Internet, the ever-self-complicating brain, or the nearest thing that we as a civilization have to it, begins to unfold ...

Can I short-circuit this search by looking simply for "Gilbert John Cook"? Well, nobody will shoot me if I try.

To my great surprise, I get two pages for that exact search. The snippets for these two say:

[RootsWeb: COOK-L [COOK-L] FW: Cook Family tree
More About GILBERT JOHN COOK: Records: Marraige Certificate show John Gilbert Children of GILBERT COOK and KATIE SCOVILLE are: i.WALTER M5 COOK, b. ...
archiver.rootsweb.com/th/read/COOK/1999-11/0941759411 - 14k - Cached - Similar pages]

[Staplehurst Marriages by Groom 1695 - 1792
... widow 1772 13 Oct GARNER William WOLLET Elizabeth Both OTP 1700 22 Oct GILBERT John COOK Elizabeth G: of Smarden, B: OTP 1779 19 Sep GILBERT Richard ...
freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~staplehurst/Mar_Groom_1695.htm - 56k - Cached - Similar pages]

I try the first one, drawn by the "Walter," which is my father's personal name, which he inherited from his father. I searched the page for "Walter" and came up with this:

[More About GILBERT JOHN COOK:
Records: Marraige Certificate show John Gilbert
Children of GILBERT COOK and KATIE SCOVILLE are:
i.WALTER M5 COOK, b. February 1885, Santa Rosa, California; d. February
28, 1929, Paradise ,Eldorado Co, California.
Notes for WALTER M COOK:]

So far, I've drawn a blank. I'll rethink and try again another day. Now, before I go, a search for "somme" "grenadier guards". Doing this search, I find that the battle honours of the Grenadier Guards include the following:

"Somme (Baupaume). 28 Mar1918. Arras. 30 Mar 1945. Rhine. 12 Apr 1918. Hazebrouck. 23 Apr 1943 ."

While doing the same search, I also find that there is something called the Grenadier Guards Association, which I will Google next ...

And here we are:

http://www.medwaygrenadiers.org/association.htm

A sister site is here:

http://www.grenadierguardsassn.freeserve.co.uk/

Almost done for tonight. But, at a way of touching base with at least one of my forebears, I will take a quick look at the Wikipedia page for SOMME ... here is the guts of it in two paragraphs:

[In 1916 Somme was the location of one of the largest battles of World War I, with more than one million casualties. It is also one of the bloodiest battles in human history. The Allied forces attempted to break through the German lines along a 25-mile (40 km) front north and south of the River Somme in northern France. One purpose of the battle was to draw German forces away from the Battle of Verdun; however, by its end the losses on the Somme had exceeded those at Verdun.

While Verdun would bite deep in the national consciousness of France for generations, the Somme would have the same effect on generations of Britons. The battle is best remembered for its first day, 1 July 1916, on which the British suffered 57,470 casualties, including 19,240 dead — the bloodiest day in the history of the British Army to this day. As terrible as the battle was for the British Empire and Canadian troops who suffered there, it naturally affected the other nationalities as well. One German officer famously described it as "the muddy grave of the German field army." By the end of the battle, the British had learned many lessons in modern warfare while the Germans had suffered irreplaceable losses. British historian Sir James Edmonds stated, "It is not too much to claim that the foundations of the final victory on the Western Front were laid by the Somme offensive of 1916."]

And night,
With its buckets of faceless faces,
Settles upon my face ...

Santa Claus Conquers the Marians the Martians

2007-10-12T17:52:00.000+09:00

Santa Claus Conquers the Marians

Downloaded via GET STUFF option for BitTorrent 6.0 from "free movies" selection. Downloaded file is "santa claus conquers the martians.mpg," and its size is 540 MB.

Credits. Jaunty Santa music. Cartoon of Santa seen in background as credits roll. "Hang up that mistletoe, / Soon you'll hear 'ho-ho-ho" / Hurray for Santy Claus."

"Special Toys by Louis Marx & Co."

We see a TV. The TV reporter is at the North Pole at Santa Claus's workshop for an interview. Reporter is at the North Pole in furs. But his hands are bare: no gloves. Verisimilitude breaks down at this point.

Santa's workshop. A couple of bearded dwarfs in the background. Santa looks like a pipe-smoking alky. He nixes the rocket sled idea, says he's going with the retro reindeer. Santa has a CRS stuff problem. He can't reliably remember stuff, such as the names of his reindeer.

Mrs Santa shows up, proclaims that her hair is a mess, didn't know she was going to be on TV.

Winky the dwarf has made a weird doll. What is it supposed to be? A Martian. Santa seems to be a bit of a bully. He workers obviously need a union organiser. No, wrong. The bossy guy is a Martian, and he's chewing out a guy called Droppo. Martian kids spend all day blobbed out in front of the TV watching "ridiculous Earth programs."

We see Martian kids watching Earth programs. They don't know what a "doll" is or what "tender loving care" is. Martians look exactly like us but seem to have a somewhat stronger sense of hierarchy.

Keema, the leader of the Martians, says something strange is happening to the children of Mars. We, being faster on the uptake than him, pick up on the fact that the probable cause is the noxious influence of the Santa Claus stuff that the Martian kids are being exposed to courtesy of Martian TV.

Keema goes to the forest to meet one of the old ones. "Chochum is eight hundred years old. You can't dismiss the wisdom of centuries."

"Chocum, are you here? Ancient one of Mars, I call upon you."

Blurred guy looking like King Lear in the days of his decreptitude shows up. Chochum knows what the problem is: "What is a Christmas?" "It is an occasion for peace and great joy on planet Earth?"

Chochum has seen this disaster coming for centuries. The kids are electronically tutored from birth so have adult minds once they can walk, so have never played, have never learnt how to have fun, so now they are rebelling. Solution: the kids must be allowed to have fun, to be children again.

"We need a Santa Claus on Mars!"

The Martian leader decides to snatch Santa Claus from Earth and bring him to Mars. A confrontation, obviously, is in the offing.

Note on Martian technology: launch of a Martian spacecraft involves a trumpet fanfare.

We are not going to destroy anyone. "Our purpose is to bring Santa Claus back to Mars."

They think they see a Santa Claus, but what they are seeing is the begging-for-charity Santas who infest American streets at Christmas time, ringing "please give for charity" bells.

The Martian space ship has been spotted by the defenders of Yankland, who are cranking up their Star Wars stuff to confront the menace.

The President of the Unite d States orders the Strategic Air Command into action.

The movie has now been running for 22 minutes with a body count of zero. A bit slow by our standards, I think.

At this stage I abandon the mission. Sorry, free is not good enough. If I'm going to watch any more of this stuff, I'm going to have to be paid. Seriously good money.

Most obvious retro note: a computer, which I presume we're supposed to perceive as being "powerful," which is so huge that it takes up a number of sizeable rooms. The one surprisingly modern touch: when the Martians view one of Earth's cities from near Earth orbit, they immediately pick up on how stunningly vulnerable it is to attack from the air.

Stupid Earthlings, they should have built the sucker underground!

Yes, We Have No Bananas

2007-10-12T16:07:00.000+09:00

Yes, We Have No Bananas

Some time back, when three-year-old daughter Cornucopia was only two, I denounced her behavior online as being that of one of the most terrible of the terrible twos. In response, one correspondent saw fit to e-mail me with the warning that the threes can often be more terrible than the twos.

As Corny's behavior had, at the time, been apocalyptic ally awful, I was inclined to doubt that this was the case, but some of her behavior in the last week or so has convinced me that perhaps my correspondent was right.

On a recent day, I delivered a breakfast banana to the kitchen table, and her response was to throw it on the floor and bellow "Chisai!" (= "Small!).

I responded by saying that, on my last outing to our local outlet of Bananas R Us, all they had in stock was very small bananas, so a small banana was all she was getting. With that, I politely replaced the banana on the table.

Her response was a scream of agony, as if I had just gone and shoved a red-hot needle up her nose. All the torments of the Twenty-First Century were compressed in that operatic scream, a shriek of agony from the doomed m of Gotterdammerung.

"Chisai!" she shrieked.

And, with that, hurled the titchy banana to the ground.

I contemplated my options, which were two in number.

#1. Take her to a psychiatrist, have strong drugs prescribed, and, a few years down the track, deliver her to a mental institution for treatment in the form of ice cube baths, insulin injections, electroshock therapy and, eventually, a lobotomy.

#2. Ignore her.

I chose option #2, and the titchy banana remained where it was on the floor until, some hours later, I added it to my lunch.

It is now late Friday afternoon, and I am pleased to report that my food shopping expedition today means that the house is now stocked with bananas of a proper size, the same size as the ones we routinely import into New Zealand by the shipload from places such as Ecuador. And, in addition, I have bought more of the chocolate ice cream that Corny has almost exhausted.

My next task is going to be to view and critique SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS, a free (and, I hope, not just free but also legal) movie that I succeeded in accessing and downloading by using the GET STUFF option provided by BitTorrent 6.0.

My dark suspicion is that perhaps it is free for a reason, ie is free because it is every bit as crappy as the title suggests it might be. But we will see.

Free Movie Downloads, Some Effort and Frustration Involved

2007-10-11T23:55:00.000+09:00

Free Movie Downloads, Some Effort and Frustration Involved

First step, for me, was to download BitTorrent 6.0, which you can get from http://www.bittorrent.com/download. There are versions for Windows, the Mac and Linux.

Be aware that there are Agents of Evil at work in the universe, putting False Bit Torrent Software online, with the intention of (a) plundering your bank account and (b) stealing your immortal soul. Be careful what you download and where you download it from.

Once you have BitTorrent you will be able to grab some juicy downloads, as this page explains. I assume these downloads are legal, otherwise the site would have been taken down and all the people involved sent to jail, but , while I assume these downloads are legal, I could be wrong on this.

If you do end up in jail or get hit by a US $200,000 fine, well, sorry about that, and good luck with your next reincarnation.

Once you install BitTorrent and open it, you will see, if you are in the process of downloading some torrents, the picture up the top. Note the GET STUFF opion. Click on this and you have options for getting movies, TV, music and games. If you click on MOVIES, eventually (give it time) you will see a page with a FREE MOVIES option at the top left. Click on that and (once again, eventually) you will see page one of many for some really great movies, such as TERROR IN THE MIDNIGHT SUN, billed as "invasion of the Animal People, space invasion of Lapland. Monsters walk the earth in ravishing ramp ..."

Ravishing what? I'm downloading this one now, and I just can't wait to see what. I'm sure you can't wait either.

I'm also downloading SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS and I've already downloaded JESSE JAMES MEETS FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER. Also LOST WORLD, which I understand is from 1925.

(Funny, one of my previous reincarnations took me all the way through 1925, but for some reason I missed that movie. Have no recollection of ever having seen it before.)

Some of these movies are labeled as "cult" material, but I don't think this means you have to join a cult to be allowed to watch the movie.

On the technical side, BitTorrent is file sharing software, and using it involves your computer becoming a kind of waystation for files which are being swapped around the Internet. That's all I know and that's all I wish to know. For those who aspire to become uber geeks, Wikipedia has an entry on the BitTorrent protocol, which is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent

This article says, in part, the following:

[BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P) communications protocol. BitTorrent is a method of distributing large amounts of data widely without the original distributor incurring the entire costs of hardware, hosting and bandwidth resources. Instead, when data is distributed using the BitTorrent protocol, each recipient supplies pieces of the data to newer recipients, reducing the cost and burden on any given individual source, providing redundancy against system problems, and reducing dependence on the original distributor.]

An entry on programs ("clients") that use BitTorrent is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_client

This page says, in part:

[The first client was created by Bram Cohen in the summer of 2002, and most of the other ones started out from BitTorrent and on, even more are being created right now.]

There is also an entry about a company associated with this peer-to-peer protocol, this page being:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent%2C_Inc.

This page says, in part:

[BitTorrent, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California, is an American corporation that develops Internet content distribution technology based on the BitTorrent protocol. The company was founded on September 22, 2004 by Bram Cohen and Ashwin Navin, BitTorrent's CEO and President respectively. BitTorrent, Inc. also maintains the BitTorrent protocol.]

For practical purposes, if you download Bit Torrent 6.0 and use the GET STUFF button, it is a way to get at costless movies and mp3s and so forth.

However, there is a certain amount of work and frustration involved.

For a start, the files are a mish-mash of different formats. Some, for example, are in the form of Nero image files. If you know what Nero is, and if you have Nero (it is not freeware) and if you know how to use it to burn an image file to a CD, then you will be okay. I am in that happy position, but, if I was not, I would be scratching my head.

I soon encountered formats I did not recognize, including MOV and mp4. My version of Windows (XP Professional) did not recognize them either, so I had to Google my way to freeware players for the mystery formats. And learning how to use them took a little bit of time.

Additionally, downloads are massive, usually half a gigabyte or more, and are far from speedy.

Looking at the screenshot of 6.0, if you right-click on any torrent then you will see a slew of options, including REMOVE and also REMOVE AND (DELETE TORRENT or DELETE TORRENT + DATA or DELETE DATA).

And, speaking of the data, where is it? The right click gives you the option OPEN CONTAINING FOLDER, and that folder is where that particular torrent's data will be stored.

Some of the files I downloaded proved to be mutilated in some way which made them useless, and this adds another element of frustration.

That said, it's kind of fun, and the free stuff does contain some interesting retro material which is engagingly different from the slick modern stuff we have in the modern age, the age of Halo Three and Blackwater.

To wrap up, if you want to write something online about me, thanks to Google Alerts I found a new wiki which is about me, the URL for this being as follows:

http://www.aboutus.org/ZenVirus.com

It's very bare bones at the moment, with a message up the top saying "This is a collaborative website. Please make constructive edits anywhere you see fit." There are associated JOIN US! and LOG IN! links.

I made the user name Hugh Cook. Once I'd made it, the first thing that I was presented with was a page which let me make a "personal page" and add a portrait ...

When I have time, I might add a little biographical information. Something, for instance, about the seven years I spent with a Mayan Revival peyote cult on the Yukatan peninsular.
Or the happy years I spent with Blackwater, meeting people of interesting ethnicities and killing them. Or I might give an account of some of the adventures I had in the company of Santa Claus, Jesse James and Frankenstein's daughter.

Or I might write something about the project I'm trying to finish off right now, an SF fantasy book with the title ANOINTED OF GOD, the mission statment of which might be, if I were to make it, something like "Let me see how deeply I can shock you."

But right now I see that TERROR IN THE MIDNIGHT SUN has finished downloading. It's at 100% and is now, myseriously, "seeding."

Can't wait. Absolutely have to look at this. Now.

But a final word before I shoot through to Movie Heaven. I'd been seeing this word "wiki" around for a while without knowing what it meant, and what it means is a web page or site that anyone can edit, like Wikipedia. In the e-mail that I received after I made my user id for the new wiki about me, I got a link to a page which explains about wikis and wiki culture and how to get started editing. The page his this:

http://www.aboutus.org/WikiAnatomy

A good place to start, I think, if you want to learn more.

The main online wiki about me, by the way, is Steve's wiki, ChronicLesoFanageOfDarkness.info

And this wiki has, I now discover, its own wiki, which is as follows:

http://www.aboutus.org/ChronicLesoFanageOfDarkness.info

Another Scheduled Blood Test

2007-10-02T00:16:00.000+09:00

Another Scheduled Blood Test

Autumn, season of mellow fruitfulness. The apples are plentiful, and, here in Japan, the nashi pears have also begun to fruit. The season of corn on the cob is at its end, and, for this reason, I have been told to buy no more. What there is come over-priced, and is not of good quality. For some mysterious reason, which I have not been able to figure out, in this country you cannot buy frozen corn on the cob. Only frozen corn kernels. Which we eat daily.

A regular part of the routine clockwork of the year is now, and will be for some years yet, I imagine, the routine tests. My wife reminded me that I had a blood test coming up this month. Which month? This one.

Which turns out, to my surprise, to be October. Only yesterday it was August, unless my memory plays me false. On investigation, it seems that my memory has played me false.

Hauling out my hospital documents, I find that my next blood test is scheduled for October 26. I am supposed to meet my doctor at 1100, so I think I'm supposed to have the blood tests before then.

My key task at the appointment will be to get a date for an MRI in December. A Friday, if possible. Ideally after 2 pm in the afternoon, to make it possible for my wife to attend the session with the doctor.

An earlier blood test showed a shortage of magnesium, and I hope the upcoming test will show that this problem has been fixed. The downside of not having enough magnesium in your system is that all kinds of terrible, terrible things may happen to you, the worst of these being the development of kidney stones, something I would prefer to live without, thank you very much.

Until the discovery of the magnesium deficiency, which is fixable by diet, I quite failed to see the utility of having any ongoing tests at all, since the bottom line with this cancer is, quite simple, if it comes back (and the statistical pattern is that, usually, it does) it kills. Quite without mercy. Very much the Texan executioner.

But the discovery of the fixable magnesium deficiency problem has quite changed my mindset.

Studying for my Blood Test

Studying for my blood test
I try to remember
The true and real colors of the sun.
They come to me chewed by babies,
Dumbed down,
Their radioactivity leached and saddened,
Their moss
Dry and friable.
In the mixing dish of my battered eyes
The cheatsheat proves not quite adequate.
No Wikipedia rainbows will replace
The actual arc of eternity,
The vaunting prism
That I remember.

Food Court from Hell

2007-09-29T23:48:00.000+09:00

This evening, the evening of Saturday 29 September, three-year-old daughter Cornucopia told me reprovingly (in Japanese) that we do not eat cereal in the evenings. Only in the mornings. That's a rule, got it?

I was having some cereal by way of recuperating from quite a long hard day. First we attended the daycare sports day, which was held at the local elementary school (inside in the gym on account of the fact that it was raining).

Then we got on a bus and traveled for half an hour to a place called LaLaPoto, an absolutely huge shopping center.

Here we had photos taken on account of the fact that Cornucopia turns three this year. There is a festival in Japan called Shichi-go-san, which Wikipedia defines as a rite of passage for girls aged three and seven (and also for boys aged three and five.)

The actual date is November 15, which was some days ago now, but, in honor of the festival, we went to a photo studio at LaLaPoto to have portrait shots taken of the three of us (me in a suit for once) and of Cornucopia (adorned first in a dress and then in a kimono, both chosen from the plentifully stocked racks of dress-up clothes at the studio.)

It took forever, and, when the photo shoot was done, there was a one-hour wait before we could go back, have a look at the results and choose what we wanted to buy. So my wife suggested that we go to the food court.

A food court in Japan is conceptually similar to a food court anywhere else: a bunch of fast food restaurants with common seating (and, often, a common cutlery resource.) But this one had a couple of twists.

First, each individual restaurant did not have its own cash register. Instead, you went to a central cash register. As you stood in line, a guy would hand you a menu showing the offerings of all the restaurants.

You paid and took away not a receipt and not a meal, either, but a pager. Or, in our case, three pagers.

You then went and sat to wait for your pager to go off.

The environment was extremely noisy, with pagers going off all the time, and it was very, very hard to tell which might be ours. I found the whole place confusing and disorienting - one place where I definitely would not be able to cope on our own.

The happy news is that the photos look great. And, additionally, while Cornucopia told me it was wrong to eat cereal in the evening, she did not actually go so far as to stop me from doing so.

Embarrassing Truths

2007-09-27T14:37:00.000+09:00

Embarrassing Truths

Some years back, I read a blog for the first time in my life. It was maintained by a coworker, an American colleague who was teaching English in Japan and pursuing his interest in karate.

What struck me about this blog was the naivety of its exposure, the direct access to the unprotected person.

As a rule, any creative writer tends to present a public face to the world, a synthetic face which is not that person's real face. In the case of the writer Ernest Hemingway, for example, his public persona was that of a hearty, brawling hunter and fisherman ... an image that was certainly a world remote from the comparatively insecure, sensitive and rather bookish person that he really was.

If you are a creative writer then you can have your cake and eat it, in the sense that you can peg yourself out for public display while, at the same time, selectively hiding facets of your life or aspects of your personality that you would prefer not to have out in the open.

In my own case, I've been choosing, for some time now, to live a public mistruth, pretending to be gainfully employed as an English teacher in a conversation school here in Japan.

However, successfully maintaining this masquerade is becoming increasingly problematical, as news of what seems to be the impending financial collapse of the company in question has reached members of my family in New Zealand.

So I've decided to come clean.

The embarrassing truth is that I no longer work, and, instead, am spending my days as a house husband. Which comes in handy on occasion, as when three-year-old daughter Cornucopia needs me to stay home with her because she is not quite ready enough to return to daycare life.

I quit the company a couple of months back. At the time, I did not know for certain that its financial collapse was probably on the agenda, though I had seen, one time, a notice on the teacher's room corkboard apologizing for the delayed payment of one tranche of wages.

I came to Japan to live and work over ten years ago, and, because my wife is a civil servant who spends her life dealing with tax matters, she made very sure that I went and signed up for, and paid, all the taxes I should have been paying.

Consequently, because I had been a good boy and had paid all my taxes, after my eyesight got trashed by radiation therapy, my wife was, after a rather involved paperwork exercise, able to extract from the system here in Japan a small disability pension, and this money, though modest, is sufficient to balance the household budget.

When I first came to Japan I needed sponsorship from my employer, but, after I married my Japanese wife, the elegant Murasaki Nishikawa, I moved to a spouse visa. That, however, did have to be renewed every few years.

This year, however, my wife did the laborious paperwork involving for an application for permanent residence, and, after a hiatus of six months (they check you out pretty well) I was granted permanent residence.

Although I will still need to apply for a re-entry permit to facilitate any trips in and out of Japan, my days of going to Immigration and applying for a visa extension are now over.

Regarding the disability pension, there is in Japan no such legal category as "legally blind," no "you are or you aren't" categorization of the kind that we have in the West.

Rather, in Japan, there is a sliding scale of disability, divided into six levels, called dans. Depending on the degree of your disability, you can get some kind of financial assistance, and you can qualify if you fit into either or both of the following categories:

(a) you can only see really big things or (b) you have a significant visual field defect.

I have (b), and have been assessed as being on the third dan level of the visual disability scale. On account of this, my wife has been able to negotiate a small disability pension for me.

In addition, I have a disability carnet, a little photo ID booklet, which gives me free travel on local buses (though I never use the bus), free access to many municipal swimming pools (though I never go to the pool), free access to the Ueno zoo, a ten percent discount from many taxi services (such as the one up in Gunma Prefecture where my mother-in-law lives), and half-price travel on trains if me and my wife are traveling together (two can travel for the price of one.)

As mentioned above, question marks are hanging over the financial viability of the chain of English conversation schools that I previously worked for, and my guess is that the organization will have gone down the tubes before the end of the year, if not earlier.

Similar question marks are hanging over the long-term viability of the Japanese welfare state, but, for the moment, the cranky machine is lumbering along without any sign of imminent breakdown, and, for the present, it serves my purposes well enough.

Well, enough for the world of embarrassing disclosures. Back to the world of the closeted artist, keeping to the recipe that we associate with James Joyce: silence, exile and cunning.

Setagaya Park

2007-09-27T13:58:00.000+09:00

Setagaya Park

My wife and I were home with three-year-old daughter Cornucopia for three days in a row, Saturday 22, Sunday 23 and Monday 24 September. I stayed home an additional day with Corny, Tuesday 25, so she could completely recover from her impetigo before going to daycare, where she would have contact with other kids.

On the Sunday, we went to Setagya Park, in metropolitan Tokyo. You can get there by going to Shibuya then taking the train one stop to Ikejiriohashi. If you know where you're going, it takes about 15 minutes on foot. If, however, the person who elects to lead you takes the wrong exit and heads off in entirely the wrong direction, then it can take somewhat longer.

That day, we saw a dog hotel, a dog restaurant and a dog cafe. Setagaya is obviously nuts about dogs.

We went to this park because daughter Corny chose it from a range of options, the unique selling point being that it has a working steam locomotive. We all took a ride. Kids under six are free, but for us adults the fare was 70 yen per circuit. It's a small steam locomotive but strong enough to pull a bunch of small passenger cars holding a bunch of kids and adults.

One of the good points about the Tokyo-Yokohama area is that it's fairly generously provided with public parks, to which admission is always free, and the photo of the public fountain in Setagaya Park gives an inkling of the scale of this park. (Image on its side, I now realise. Sorry.)

On the Monday we went to the Jidokaikan, Tokyo city's free entertainment facility for people 18 and younger, and attended a free drum concert (Japanese taiko drums) in the adjoining orchestra hall.

The 90-minute program exceeded Corny's attention span, so we called it quits early and went to the Jidokaikan itself to see a free magic show.

All in all, then, Corny's sickness was handled reasonably well.

Setagaya

In Setagaya,
In metropolitan Tokyo, Japan,
We find a dog hotel,
Sumptuous,
A dog cafe
And a dog restaurant -
Fresh bones for Fido going walkies!
The eminent scholar who fled Darfur
Has been four years in the dusty deserts of Chad
Living in a hut of twigs.
His options, as you may imagine,
Are less opulent.

Sorry, Tobihi and Densenseinoukashin denote NOT scabies but impetigo

2007-09-21T22:51:00.000+09:00

Sorry, Tobihi and Densenseinoukashin denote NOT scabies but impetigo

Daugher Cornucopia saw the doctor on Friday and was told to come back Tuesday evening, meanwhile to stay in a cool dry place. No daycare, no hospital.

In a dinner table discussion, my wife pronounced herself unsure as to whether I had correctly identified the Japanese terms tobihi and densenseinoukashin as being equivalent to English scabies, so I went online to look.

I first tried to Google "translate English Japanese" and decided to give the Babel Fish site a shot:

http://babelfish.altavista.com/

I tried to translate this:

"My daughter has scabies which is caused by a mite."

This failed because the site did not know the word "scabies," which it left in English.

I tried another site:

http://dictionary.reference.com/translate/

This also failed:

"Sorry, translation is taking too long. Please try again later."

I tried just the one word, "scabies."

Same response.

My next try was at this site:

http://www.trussel.com/f_nih.htm

It has an English to Japanese option so I tried "scabies" and got the response "Temporarily offline - the database backend is not responding or the server is too busy."

At this point I was starting to get the impression that the age of efficient machine translation had not yet arrived.

Okay. Next site:

The next one promises romanised Japanese to English ande vice versa, and is:

http://www.freedict.com/onldict/jap.html

Okay, it pops out this term: kaisen.

I then tried it on this:

tobihi

Going from Japanese to English it gives "flying sparks, leaping flames," which is a possible translation but not the desired one.

How about densenseinoukashin?

"No match found."

I next tried this:

http://www.popjisyo.com/WebHint/Portal_e.aspx

English to Japanese: scabies.

This is far and away the best. It gives an answer using katakana, hiragana and kanji, which display okay on my computer because I have East Asian Fonts installed under Windows XP, and also have my browser set up to display any Japanese that it encounters.

It seem that "scabies" is "kaisen."

I then tried "tobihi," going from Japanese to English, but didn't get a usable result. Densenseinoukashin? Again, I didn't understand the result.

I then tried an Internet search for "tobihi" and got "impetigo" from this site:

http://www.tokyowithkids.com/discussions/messages/35/391.html?1070635536

Searching the page I found the following quote, which I put here in square brackets:

[By Kit Nagamura on Thursday, January 10, 2002 - 3:52 pm:

Dear Victoria,

Impetigo is "tobihi", or "jumping fire" in Japanese; my child has had it, and it is very different from mizuibo, which we've also been unfortunate to encounter. I haven't been able to find a translation of mizuibo in any dictionary, and I have most of them by now, but it is a mild form of wart, or tumor (I've heard it called both) which is extremely contagious (mere skin contact will pass it along).
On some patients, the number of warts rapidly multiplies, and this is why most dermatologists pluck the little buggers off with a special tool as fast as possible; it's not pleasant for anyone involved, but a skilled doctor can be swift about it, and prevent an outbreak.
Incidentally, tobihi is also very contagious, and just as you described, with comparatively large blisters which crust over. ]

I then did a Google for "tobiko impetigo" and got about 17 results.

I then did a Google for "densenseinoukashin" and got just one result, which was for my own blog entry, which I now realise is erroneous.

I then went and checked Wiipedia to see if impetigo matched my daughter's condition.

From Wikipedia:

"Impetigo is a superficial skin infection most common among children age 2–6 years. People who play close contact sports such as rugby, American football and wrestling are also susceptible, regardless of age. The name derives from the Latin impetere ("assail"). It is also known as school sores."

Okay, so this is the infamous "school sores," which I'd heard about while living in New Zealand.

So I need to correct my earlier blog with this addition:

Sorry, the Japanese terms "tobiko" and "densenseinoukashin" do NOT mean "scabies." Rather, they denote "impetigo," which is sometimes referred to as school sores.

Tobihi is Densenseinoukashin which is Impetigo

2007-09-21T00:00:00.000+09:00

Tobihi is Densenseinoukashin which is Impetigo (NOT scabies ... I thought it was scabies, which is why the cute little scabies mite is pictured above, but I stand corrected.)

Wednesday, my wife took a bit of time off work to take our three-year-old daughter Cornucopia (who we usually call Corny) to the doctor, on account of an alarming red rash which was causing her to complain of itchiness.

The doctor identified it as tobihi, and said that if it's not better by Friday then he will seriously recommend having Corny hospitalized.

Thursday 20 September I stayed home with Corny, as this condition is contagious, and we don't want every kid in the daycare center ending up having it.

Corny and I spent the day quietly at home, apart from a trip out to Tsutaya, the local branch of the Japanese rental outfit where you can borrow CDs, DVDs and good old-fashioned videos.

As we don't have a DVD player, we borrowed two of the good old-fashioned videos, and Thursday we hunkered down in an air conditioned room, since the autumn weather has recently turned summer-hot, and watched videos, and played a fishing game of my wife's invention, involving fishing for paper fish with a bauble which can catch fish with the aid of a bit of sticky cellotape.

Thursday evening my wife and I went through an ordeal of the dictionaries, of which we have quite a few in the home, and finally determined that Corny's condition is scabies [wrong, impetigo], a disease in which tiny little mites, far too small to be seen by the naked eye, get under the skin and cause severe itching.

Wife and daughter will show up at the doctor's at 0930 tomorrow Friday, and, if Corny is to be hospitalized, my wife will try to arrange for her to go to Meijin Hospital, the hospital in Yokohama where I go from time to time for cancer checkups.

Corny seems sanguine about the prospect of being in hospital, a fate which I explained to her by reminding her of the Dick Bruna Miffy-chan book in which Miffy has to go to hospital, a book that Corny, a big Miffy-chan fan, knows well.

The Wikipedia entry on scabies says the following:

"Scabies is a transmissible ectoparasite skin infection characterized by superficial burrows, intense pruritus (itching) and secondary infection. The word scabies comes from the Latin word for "scratch" (scabere)."

I have taken the liberty of borrowing the scabies pic from the Wikipedia entry and placing it at the top of this blog entry. However, because what is pictured is a canine scabies mite (I believe, rightly or wrongly, that every animal is privileged to have its own version of this mite) it is probably not the particular mite which has afflicted Corny.

With my radiation-trashed eyes, the amount that I see with my own unaided eyes is limited, but one thing that I can see quite well is fireworks, brilliant against the black of the night sky. And another thing that I can see very well indeed is the gaudy red rash that has afflicted Corny's body.

If Corny ends up in Meijin Hospital, I will become her daily visitor. If she is to be hospitalized, then this would be the ideal place, because I know the route well and can get there easily.

Because I'm a parent, I'm more likely than I used to be to pay attention to news articles which relate to parenting, and one that caught my eye on today's Google News was a piece headlined thus:

"Some moms defend Britney Spears' nudity around her kids."

Apparently pop star Britney is involved in court hearings that will determine whether she does or does not retain custody of her kids, and for some reason the issue of whether she does nor does not wear clothes has been deemed to be of interest to the courts.

Her bodyguard has been blabbing, and has denounced Britney for appearing naked in front of her sons.

So, how old are the sons? Are they young teens going through puberty, with all the hormonal implications of that state? No. Little Sean Preston is aged two, and little Jayden James is just one.

Here' a comment on this from nydailynews.com, a quote in square brackets:

[Not according to some moms.

"When your kids are under 2, it's near impossible to use the bathroom or the shower without a pint-size audience. So avoiding nudity is extremely difficult," says Jen Singer, mother of two boys and creator of MommaSaid.net, a humor site for stay-at-home moms. "My boys would run around with their diapers off and think nothing of it, so why would they notice if I was naked?"

Romi Lassally, founder of the online confessional TrueMomConfessions.com, agrees.]

The bodyguard's name is Tony Barretto, and if I could put a question to Tony it would be this: If you take life so very very seriously, why don't you get a serious job? Why not sign up with Blackwater, where you can do serious work by shooting people dead, instead of wasting your time snooping on Britney naked with her kids?

The two sites mentioned sound interesting, so I'll take a moment to check them out ...

I took a look at http://mommasaid.net/ and find it bills itself as "The stay-at-home mom's coffee break," and you only need to look at the links on the page to know that you're not alone, one link being "When your kids won't brush."

There's kid-related news at this URL:

http://mommasaid.net/mommaheard.aspx

And one item is about "Parents go to jail for serving teens booze."

The link, unfortunately, doesn't seem to work ... I tried Google News with "parents teens jail booze."

I got some hits, including one at enquirer.com, from which I have taken the following quote:

[You may have heard a lot this week about the problem of underage drinking and the need to keep alcohol out of the hands of minors.

That is because the Federal Trade Commission on Monday launched "We Don't Serve Teens Week" to emphasize the responsibility adults have to not provide booze to anyone under age 21. The nationwide campaign - in cooperation with the U.S. surgeon general, parents and leaders of government, industry, education and health care - seeks to make a concerted public effort to stop underage drinking.

While there is an ongoing debate among some people whether it is better to allow minors to drink under adult supervision than to risk teens consuming alcohol surreptitiously and endangering themselves and others on the road, there is no debate when it comes to the law: Furnishing alcohol to minors or allowing drinking on your property is illegal in all 50 states. Adults who violate the law could face criminal or civil penalties, as highlighted by several recent high-profile cases where parents were sent to jail for providing teens with alcohol.]

I feel another "Fascist United States dictatorship" rant coming on, so I think I'll abandon this topic at this stage. If the Yanks have crazy liquor laws, what is it to me?

Anyway, let's look at the other site ...

http://www.truemomconfessions.com/

I like this that I see on the homepage:

"Terrible Twos my ass. How come nobody ever mentioned the Ominous One?"

If you're a parent, and if you're afflicted by the hard judgments of a terribly judgmental world, then maybe this site would be the site for you. Brief and funny glimpses into the decidedly imperfect world we live in.

Correction on definitions:

Sorry, the Japanese terms "tobiko" and "densenseinoukashin" do NOT mean "scabies." Rather, they denote "impetigo," which is sometimes referred to as school sores.

Websites by or on behalf of Madeleine McCann's Parents

2007-09-20T22:59:00.000+09:00

Websites by or on behalf of Madeleine McCann's Parents

I have found two sites either by or on behalf of Madeleine McCann's parents, these sites being findmadeleine.com and bringmadeleinehome.com.

The content on both sites seems to be about the same, and both carry the same blog by Madeleine's father.

Madeleine posters in various languages (and desktop wallpaper, if you are interested) can be downloaded from this URL:

findmadeleine.com/campaign/#t

I personally find that contemplating the disaster which has befallen the McCanns has the effect of making me more patient with my three-year-old daughter than I usually would be. I stayed home with her for the whole of today Thursday 20 September because she is a bit ill, of which more later.

The United States of America is a Fascist Police State

2007-09-19T10:49:00.000+09:00

The United States of America is a Fascist Police State

I went online to check Google News for the latest on Madeleine, but got distracted by a link promising video of a guy getting zapped by a Taser by cops in Yankland.

He was getting mouthy at a meeting which was being addressed by Senator John Kerry. He was asking why Kerry lamely conceded defeat when Kerry knew that the election had been stolen from under him by fraudulent means.

Mr Mouthy then went on to ask why there isn't a move to impeach Bush. After all, there was a push to impeach Clinton on account of a blowjob, no more than that, so why not go after Bush?

Finally, the cops elect to try to hush the guy, and eventually take him away, with him crying "Get your hands the fuck off me!" - naturally, since this video comes to us from America, the land of sanitary speech, the "fuck" gets bleeped out.

Finally, after a lot of loud-mouthed protests from Mr Mouthy, one of the police draws a Taser.

At this point the protester is at the back of the room and we can't see what is happening, but we can hear him yelling. He knows they are going to Taser him, so he tells them not to. But they do.

What struck me about this incident was that Senator John Kerry said absolutely nothing. He made no attempt whatsoever to tell the cops to lay off. He didn't say "Cool it! Hold it! Wait a moment!"

He was Mr Passive Observer, as if he was a remote spectator observing this on YouTube.

Kerry, in my opinion, failed in his duty. The cops went over the top and did their police brutality thing in front of what is now a global audience. And Kerry said not one single word to stop this going down.

Protester:

"Are you going to arrest me? What are you arresting me for?"

This is only the second time in my life when I've seen Yankland cops arresting someone. The first time when I was sitting on a Grayhound bus which was going through the gritty suburbs to the east of San Francisco. I was at the start of an ill-advised bus journey right across the continental United States, from San Francisco to New York, with the mistaken idea that I would see interesting scenery en route. All I saw was four-lane highways, coast to coast.

Shortly after our journey began, the bus came to a halt and the cops got on board, cheerful cops with guns on their hips, and they escorted one of the passengers off the bus. I asked another passenger why the cops had done that and was told the driver had noticed that the guy was waving a handgun around, and had thought this behavior inappropriate.

That first arrest was gracefully managed by good-humored cops who did their job without any fuss at all, but the debacle at Kerry's forum was shameful.

"Don't Taze me!" says the guy.

But the cops are going to take this guy down.

But they do. We hear a kind of mechanical clickety click and the guy yells "Ow!" Repeatedly. And then "My God!"

The Taser is proudly brought to you by an outfit which appears to actually be called Taser [no, actually Taser International], and which has a website at www.taser.com.

"Our mission is to protect life by providing safer, more effective force options and technologies."

Yeah, very safe. You can use these handy gadgets to torture prisoners, electrocute mentally ill homeless people or rough up mouthy protesters, all this without getting your hands dirty. Great technology!

Now that I've highlighted the wonders of the world of Taser on my blog, what chance is there that Taser will give me one of these wonderful gadgets for free, so I can restore order to the family home on those occasions when my three-year-old daughter goes off the rails?

Right now, if you Google the term "taser," one of the snippets that you see includes this question:

"Why are students getting Tasered on video?"

Kerry was speaking, it seems, at UCLA [NO, WRONG! SEE BELOW!], and the student who had his own personal experience of American police brutality was a guy named Andrew Meyer.

No, I misinterpreted the snippet. Kerry was actually speaking at the University of Florida where the university cops did the Tasering.

UCLA comes into it on account of an earlier incident, which is noted on this page:

http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2007/09/18/university_taser/

Here, in square brackets, is a quote from the page which the URL above leads to:

[ Don't university cops have YouTube, too? These people work in the most visible environments in the world, where every witness has both a cellphone cam and a broadband connection and knows how to use them. You'd suppose that after just one of these well-publicized incidents, every campus P.D. in the nation would decide that whatever advantage there might be in using the Taser, the inevitable fallout is too much.

I called up the University of Florida Police Department to ask about its Taser policies; I'm waiting for a callback.

In the aftermath of the Taser incident at UCLA last fall -- when a student named Mostafa Tabatabainejad was stunned multiple times after he refused to show his I.D. card at a campus library -- the university asked the independent Police Assessment Resource Center to investigate.

PARC concluded: "While the student should have simply obeyed the order to produce the card, and by not doing so brought trouble upon himself, the police response was substantially out of proportion to the provocation. There were many ways in which the UCLAPD officers involved could have handled this incident competently, professionally, and with minimal force."

The group also criticized UCLA's Taser policies as "unduly permissive, giving the police unnecessary latitude, and are inconsistent with the policies of other universities and leading police departments across the country, including other University of California campuses, the LAPD, and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD)." (The PDF of the report can be found here.)

Police at UCLA stunned Tabatabainejad using the device's "drive stun" mode, and in the video it seems that Florida campus cops used the same mode on Meyer.

In typical Taser operation, the gun shoots out electrode darts at a target. The darts incapacitate the target. Drive stun mode, on the other hand, is meant for close contact. There are no shooting electrodes -- the gun is placed directly on a target's skin. Drive stun does not incapacitate a target. He merely feels a great deal of pain that officers hope will induce compliance.

According to the Palm Beach Post, Taser International, the company that makes the device, warns officers that drive stun mode can lead to "prolonged struggles" with targets and that "it is in these types of scenarios that officers are often facing accusations of excessive force." (I called Taser with questions about its stun guidelines -- when I hear back, I'll update this post.)]

The Salon site has a video of the guy who was Tased by the police when he was leaving the library, and this time we hear a clear "Fuck off" from the guy. This one is not bleeped out.

We then hear the extremely sinister clickety click of the Klingon Pain Inflictor going into action once again. If you are a Star Trek fan, then you know that the distinguishing feature of the Klingons is that these aliens have no concept of mercy.

And seems that the Fascist cops who police the United States of America have, similarly, no concept of mercy.

The video of the zapping of Mostafa Tabatabainejad goes on and on and on and on and on. It is absolutely horrendous.

I had planned to blog again about Madeleine McCann, since I've found two websites set up by her parents, both including the father's blog, but I think I'll call it quits for today.

The spectacle of Fascist America in action has me in its thrall.

As for John Kerry, well, on account of his sterling war effort, up until today I'd always had a measure of respect for the guy. But after his Me Mr Passive act on campus, my respect for him has totally ceased.

A footnote on Kerry's performance: it is true that, very late in the piece, long after things have gone from bad to worse, Kerry does finally find his voice, and puts his senatorial intellect into play, coming up with a playful response. What he says is this:

"I want to answer his question ... Unfortunately, he's not available to come up here and swear me in as president."

Well, very senatorial. The polished elocutionist on display. But, while that is how a senator may act, it is not how a man should act in this situation. And my judgment on Kerry remains the same: he played Mr Passive when he should not have.

An American Perspective on Madeleine McCann

2007-09-18T23:11:00.000+09:00

An American Perspective on Madeleine McCann

I was impressed by a perceptive piece by Victoria Burnett that I found on a New York Times page datelined 18 September 2007. Here is a quote, which I have put in square brackets:

[When Lindy Chamberlain went on trial in 1982 in the killing of her 9-week-old daughter, Azaria, the prosecutor presented the jury with two alternatives: either the baby was snatched from her crib by a wild dog in the Australian desert, as Mrs. Chamberlain contended, or she was killed by her mother.

Furnished with incriminating forensic evidence and a profile, infused with innuendo, describing a strange, emotionally detached woman, the jury convicted Mrs. Chamberlain. In what became one of Australia’s most notorious miscarriages of justice, she served four years of a life sentence before the evidence against her was exposed as faulty and she was released in 1986.

Two decades later, the Chamberlain case finds disquieting echoes in the investigation unfolding around Kate and Gerry McCann, who were recently declared suspects by the Portuguese police in the disappearance on May 3 of their 4-year-old daughter, Madeleine. And it raises many of the same questions.

Did the McCanns, as the Portuguese police are now said to contend, accidentally kill Madeleine, hide her body and then mount a savvy international publicity campaign as a smoke screen? Or did the police, under severe pressure to solve the case, seize on dubious evidence to set up the couple as culprits?

The McCanns say Madeleine was snatched from the apartment where she was sleeping while they ate at a nearby restaurant on May 3. The case dragged along inconclusively until the British police were called in to jump-start the investigation.

With British forensic material in hand, the Portuguese police reportedly told the couple this month that the evidence suggested that they killed Madeleine and hid her body, eventually moving it in the trunk of a car they rented 25 days after the child’s disappearance. The police offered Kate McCann a plea bargain if she confessed to killing her daughter accidentally, family friends and a spokeswoman said.

The McCanns strenuously denied the accusations, which are being evaluated by a Portuguese prosecutor, who will decide the next step. They may never face a jury, but as they undergo public trial around the dinner tables of Britain and in the international news media, Mrs. Chamberlain’s experience offers cautionary notes on how flawed evidence and speculation can turn victim into convict.

In each case the initial explanation — that Azaria was killed by a dingo, and that Madeleine was taken by a random predator — was trumped by an accusation that the mother was in fact the culprit. Through a prism of suspicion, both women began to appear odd, aloof and insufficiently bereft to fit the profile of grieving mother.

Whatever the truth in the McCanns’ case, overnight they found themselves in a “world where lack of hard evidence is taken as proof of guilt and innocent explanations are twisted to fit our darkest suspicions,” Allison Pearson, a columnist for The Daily Mail, a British tabloid, wrote Wednesday.]

This very nicely captures the similarity between the case of the McCanns and that of the Chamberlains.

The URL on which I found this text was as follows:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/world/europe/18portugal.html?ref=world

However, the usual pattern with New York Times pieces is that they very shortly become unavailable unless you sign up for an online subscription, which gives you access to their archives.

To my way of thinking, this American perspective on the McCann situation is cool, perceptive and level-headed, engaged with the situation but with rationality not overthrown by emotion.

The same cannot be said for a web page that I was led to by a link which someone chose to tack onto the end of my previous blog about the McCanns and Lindy Chamberlain.

The URL for this is as follows, and this one, I think, will still be there for the foreseeable future:

http://www.petitiononline.com/McCann2/petition.html

This page gives you an anti-McCann petition to sign, if you care to, and it is written in terms of utter hatred, the petitioners setting themselves up as the champions of Madeleine, fighting for justice for her, justice which they seek to impose on the McCanns, who they see as being aided by the evil British Government.

The page is headed thus:

"Madeleine McCann: British politicians should stop interfering and spinning in this case."

Gordon Brown's government has tasked someone to look out for the McCanns, this someone being a guy whose name you will find in the following diatribe:

"We, the undersigned, find it wholly inappropriate that a Gordon Brown spin doctor (A.K.A. Director of the British Government?s Media Monitoring Unit, Clarence Mitchell) has resigned to immediately become the Official Spokesman for Kate and Gerry McCann, parents who not only regularly neglected their children, but are now suspected of killing Madeleine McCann. The Madeleine McCann case should never have been politicised. The case should only be about seeing justice served for Madeleine."

Class hatred surfaces in the next paragraph, reminding me of the class conscious society that I remember from a time spent living and working in London back in the 1980s.

(Parenthetically, though, what really drove home in my mind was the conversation of a group of Brits who were chatting over a trailbreak coffee outside a mountain hut deep in the Nepal Himalaya, in the general vicinity of Annapurna. There, in one of the most majestic landscapes to be found anywhere on planet Earth, a world removed from Britain, they were talking about the British class system, and about how it is no longer an important factor in British life. I kid you not.)

Anyway, here is the petition swinging into guillotines and tumbrels mode:

"It is unheard of for British politicians to back possible murder suspects and we understand that Clarence Mitchell had previously been acting as the McCanns? media advisor, courtesy of the British taxpayer. We also understand that Gordon Brown has already personally interfered in this case. Would Gordon Brown have interfered in a police investigation if the McCanns worked in a factory or down a coal mine and left three children alone in an unlocked council flat to go down to the pub? Of course he wouldn't."

My own take on Gordon Brown, viewing him remotely from a distance, is that he is a tough guy who is going to be capable of facing up to the challenges of the turbulent waters that he is swimming in. But, while tough, to my mind he also comes across as sober minded and level-headed.

Reading the rhetoric of the diatribe, it's difficult to avoid coming to the conclusion that "possible murder suspects" is intended to translate in the minds of readers as "murderers."

"We urge that due process is allowed to take place without any more British political interference or spin by Clarence Mitchell, which may be construed as a disgraceful attempt to save the face of the British Prime Minister. It is essential, therefore, that Clarence Mitchell immediately resigns as spokesman for the McCanns and a clear separation is made between the British government and the McCanns."

Speaking for myself, if I had been on holiday in the United States and suddenly found myself arrested on suspicion of having been one of the gang of boys who were in with O.J. on the hotel sports memorabilia heist, I would have no objection if the New Zealand Government came rushing to my aid, and provided me with a spokesperson to aid me against the American cops who were trying to frame me.

As for this Clarence Mitchell guy, how does he see things?

He's the guy seen in the picture with the piece of paper in his hands, the man on his right being Gerry McCann and the woman being Kate McCann.

Here is Clarence Mitchell in his own words:

"To suggest that they somehow harmed Madeleine accidentally or otherwise is as ludicrous as it is nonsensical."

He goes on to say this:

"The focus must now return to Madeleine and move away from the rampant, unfounded and inaccurate speculation of recent days."

I think I understand his motivation. He sees, I think, that we are living through a replay of the Salem witch trials, and he, for his part, doesn't want to just stand idly by and watch a lynching go down.

That's what I think I see.

But how about these Hatreds R Us people who organized the anti-McCann petition that I quoted above?

The petition has a copyright notice which reads as follows:

© 1999-2005 Artifice, Inc.

Obviously the copyright notice is out of date.

To try to get a handle on who these people are, I went uphill from

http://www.petitiononline.com/McCann2/petition.html

to

http://www.petitiononline.com/

This is what they say on their homepage:

"PetitionOnline.com provides free online hosting of
public petitions for responsible public advocacy."

The site also says this:

"We give you the ancient methods of grassroots democracy, combined with the latest digital networked communications, running live and free 24 hours a day."

If you do want to find out who the Artifice crowd is, there is an itty bitty little link right at the foot of the page which goes here:

http://www.artifice.com/about_artifice.html

They're a digital design outfit, apparently doing an excellent job of facilitating troublemaking on the Internet.

And there's a link on the www.petitiononline.com homepage that you can click, a very tempting link that says "Start your own free petition today!"

That's kind of tempting, yes. Who in the world do I want to make trouble for today?

This McCann petition, as I see it, is hate mail for the modern age, not hiding out behind the lace curtain but bold and brazen, standing clear in the sunlight and waving the banner of "grassroots democracy."

If you do by chance want to join a public lynching, well, the link to the petition is on this page. But me, I'll sit back and watch.

What this brings to mind, more than anything, is a performance of Arthur Miller's THE CRUCIBLE that I saw many years ago in Auckland, New Zealand, one of the very few pieces of live theater that I've ever seen in my entire life. It's ostensibly about the Salem witch trials.

With that memory in mind, I was curious enough to Google the play, and arrived at this page:

http://www.aresearchguide.com/crucible.html

Very well organized, or so my first glance seems to indicate. What caused me to click for this page was the word that jumped out at me from the Google snippet, the word in question being "hysteria."

Yeah, that's where we are right now, I think. Lynch mob hysteria, heading in the direction of Hell by way of a road which is paved by good intentions.

Madeleine McCann and Lindy Chamberlain

2007-09-17T21:46:00.000+09:00

Madeleine McCann and Lindy Chamberlain

As a regular visitor to the Google News site, I've become aware that the great British public is currently obsessing over the disappearance of a small child by the name of Madeleine McCann.

The British public's reaction to Madeleine's disappearance struck me as being, in many ways, similar to the Australian public's reaction to the disappearance of Azaria, Lindy Chamberlain's child, who was taken by a dingo while on a family holiday at Ayers Rock.

I became curious to know whether the similarity of these two situations had penetrated the consciousness of the Internet, so I ran two sets of identical searches, one on Google News and the other on google.co.uk. The actual searches, complete with quote marks used, are given in square brackets, with the numerical results in curly brackets.

Here are the results:

On Google News:
["Madeleine McCann"]{about 8,813}
["Lindy Chamberlain"]{66}
["Madeleine McCann" "Lindy Chamberlain"]{58}

On google.co.uk:
["Madeleine McCann"]{about 2,230,000}
["Lindy Chamberlain"]{about 56,200}
["Madeleine McCann" "Lindy Chamberlain"]{1,040}

Doing the Google News searches, the first two snippets that I found which included Lindy Chamberlain's name included the following:

"For Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton, the disappearance of British toddler Madeleine McCann in Portugal in May is a mirror image of her experience of losing her" [News24, South Africa]

"Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton said yesterday that people were viewing Madeleine's disappearance as a reality TV show with no ending." [Sydney Morning Herald, Australia]

To expand the second story, here's a quote from a version from the Herald Sun:

The quote is in square brackets:

[PEOPLE are viewing the disappearance of British toddler Madeline McCann as a reality TV show with no ending, Lindy Chamberlain said today.

Ms Chamberlain, now Chamberlain-Creighton, was convicted of murder in 1982 following the 1980 disappearance of her nine-week-old daughter, Azaria, at Uluru [Ayer's Rock], but was exonerated six years later.

She said a lack of answers in the McCann case has led to wild speculation and rumour, which Madeline's parents, Gerry and Kate McCann, have been caught up in.

“It is as if we have run over the hour allotted for the 'show' and the viewers are saying, 'Where's the answer?',” Ms Chamberlain-Creighton wrote in Britain's The Mail on Sunday newspaper today.

“We're looking at it as if it were reality TV. Yet these people have to live their lives moment by painful moment.

“When the public atmosphere is like this, questions of justice or truth start to take second place.”

Ms Chamberlain-Creighton did not rule out offering advice to Madeline's parents, who have come under increasing pressure since being named as suspects by Portuguese police investigating their daughter's disappearance.

Mr and Mrs McCann both vehemently deny having any involvement in their daughter's disappearance.]

Wikipedia has an article on the Lindy Chamberlain case, and from this I was able to get the title of the pretty good movie on the case, which apparently goes by two names, EVIL ANGELS and A CRY IN THE DARK, with Meryl Streep playing Lindy Chamberlain. (The movie also starred, if memory serves, the New Zealand actor Sam Neil, one New Zealander who ended up making a career for himself in Hollywood.)

Lindy has her own official website, which is here:

http://www.lindychamberlain.com/content/home

Azaria's father also has his own website, here:

http://www.michaelchamberlain.com.au/

What interests me is this: What Lindy and Michael Chamberlain went through is very similar to what the McCanns are being put through by the British public.

And Lindy has evidently drawn out the similarity in The Mail on Sunday, which is a major British news outlet. But while the Internet has over two million pages on Madeleine, it has barely a thousand pages which connect the two cases.

I found it interesting that the lessons which could reasonably be drawn from the public hysteria concerning the Lindy Chamberlain case are, evidently, not being applied to the Madeleine case, at least not in the public's mind.

Basically, the Chamberlains were subjected to what was, in public relations terms, a public lynching, chiefly on account of three things: (a) they were members of a religious minority, the Seventh-day Adventist church; (b) their daughter had a non-standard name, Azaria; and (c) the TV audience didn't find Lindy sufficiently emotional when she showed up in front of the cameras.

That's all it takes.

In Japan, Official Money Funds My Daughter's Art Career

2007-09-16T22:39:00.000+09:00

In Japan, Official Money Funds My Daughter's Art Career

On the morning of 16 September 2007, my wife told me that it had been arranged for the Yokohama Art Museum to open its facilities for the use of our three-year-old daughter Cornucopia, the budding artist in the family. So, bright and early, we headed for Minato Mirai station, three minutes walk from the museum.

To my dismay, when we got there about a billion kids and parents were lined up, all, apparently, trying to horn in on Cornucopia's art session. Fortunately, the museum is pretty roomy, and soon we were in a huge room jam-packed with the artistic, with modeling clay in our hands.

Since a rolling pin was provided with the clay, Cornucopia's natural inclination was to roll out the clay as if rolling out pastry for baking.

In an effort to stimulate a more sophisticated approach to the clay, I tried to set an example by creating a suite of art works which would show the transformation of an evolving trilobite which would arrive, by various stages, to its ultimate crowning glory, Man.

But I got muddled.

First, though I distinctly remember having seen a picture of a trilobite in a book back when I was a kid, I can no longer remember what a trilobite looks like. So my trilobite ended up looking more like a piece of squashed dog poop rather than anything else.

Second, I wasn't sure precisely how Man should be emblified. What should I be aiming for? Who is the ideal Man? Michael Jackson? Karl Rove?

Muddled by the complexities of this choice, all I was able to succeed in coming up with was a blobby figure which could equally as easily have been anyone from George W. Bush to Osama Bin Laden.

Then I hit a third problem. I realized I didn't know what intermediary forms the trilobite went through to reach its human destination. Dinosaurs? No, dinosaurs were a dead end. They didn't evolve into us.

Instead of the grand chain of ever-more-complex organisms that I had in mind, all that I could come up with was a rat. At least, I knew it was a rat, but whether anyone else would have understood that it was intended to be a rat is questionable.

Finally, Cornucopia demanded a fresh challenge, so my wife took her outside to do outdoor graffiti art, which involved painting a spare wall that the museum had available.

There is, if you tour Japan, distressingly little graffiti on view, and it is perhaps for this reason that the museum thought graffiti training to be situationally appropriate.

The only place in Japan that I've ever seen decent graffiti was years ago on a wall at what was then the terminal line of the Toyoko Line, Sakuragicho.

The Toyoko Line has been reengineered and no longer goes to Sakuragicho, so I have no idea whether the wall is still there.

Some years before I ever saw it, this wall had been painted in American-style ghetto graffiti. The day I showed up, there were photographers on hand, popping off snapshots of this unique repository of Americana in the Land of the Rising Sun.

When I went up close to the wall, I saw that graffiti had moss growing on it. In Japan, nobody would be so disrespectful as to spraypaint graffiti directly over the top of someone else's art, so these quasi-sacred wall paintings had been left untouched for years.

If I have the time, I will one day head for Sakuragicho to see whether the wall is still there.

My understanding is that, for the forseeable future, the Yokohama Art Museum will be opening up for Cornucopia every Sunday at ten in the morning, for free, and (for some reason that I don't quite understand) other kids will also be permitted to attend her art session.

Our other big cultural experience recently was attending the local festival here in our neck of the woods in Yokohama, where Cornucopia was particularly attracted by the little goldfish that you can always buy at such street festivals.

I have to admit that I wanted to buy one, too, but I told her, no, we aren't going to buy one, because these things are notorious for dying.

They get bought by people who have absolutely no background in looking after fish, and who take them home in a plastic bag containing water, and who, on arriving home, really have no idea what to do next. The result is, pretty much always, a dead fish.

Though I did once have, in one of my classes in which I was teaching English to Japanese students of English, one male student who had a street market goldfish which he'd bought on the spur of the moment and which was still alive years and years later.

He didn't know why it was alive. He'd just been lucky, it seems. All the other students were amazed. And so I was I.

I have every confidence that my daughter is the ultimate Magic Artist, but I don't conceive of her as being the Magic Goldfish Keeper, so I did an authoritative paternal "no" on the goldfish. But Cornucopia did work her wiles on me to the point where we came home with two little festival souvenirs, a gaudy red plastic strawberry and an equally gaudy ice cream cone, both hanging on elasticated strings from little itty bitty fishing rods.

Apologies to Gmail

2007-09-13T16:48:00.000+09:00

Apologies to Gmail

After some experimentation, I finally figured out that the reason why photos will not attach to my Gmail e-mails is not because Gmail is broken but because my new installation of Windows XP Professional is already at least partly broken, less than one week after a fresh installation.

This XP saga is, unfortunately, a story that will run and run ...

* * *

Friday 14 September

A disapology reversing the apology above. Gmail is definitely having a couple of problems. After being temporarily locked out of my account, I finally got access and found that, yet again, Gmail is refusing to attach attachments.

I think it's legitimate to ask whether the guys at the top have been spending too much time lately figuring out on where to park their personal jets, and not enough time focused on the business which allows them to get their hands on those jets.

I was finally forced to resort to the humiliating expedient of using my Yahoo mail account to send a couple of attachments that I really wanted to send.

* * *

My Damaged Brain Has Caused Me To Damage Gmail's Reputation

After frustrating efforts to attach what I thought were small jpg files to a gmail message, I finally tried sending them from Outlook Express. This meant that they departed directly from my hard drive, and went through our local Internet service provider, Netyou.

Norton Antivirus threw up an error message saying that Netyou had rejected the e-mail because it was too big.

I then checked the three images, which I'd manipulated earlier, rotating them so they were sitting the right way up, and found that two of what I supposed were jpg images were now bmp images, and I'd done something to them, God knows what, which had bulked the size of each to almost twenty megabytes.

Gmail has, I think, a ten megabyte limit for attachments. Also, it refuses to attach *.exe files, even if they're in zipped archives, though you can get round this by simply renaming the *.exe file as a *.not file, making a mental note to yourself to re-exe it if you ever need to retrieve the attachment and use it as a program.

I got fresh copies of the photos from my stash of digital camera images and, now at a decent size, they attached and went okay.

The accompanying text included a mention of abalone, which, in New Zealand, we call paua, and which is called awabi in Japan.

I was amused to note that, after I'd sent this message to a couple of people, the Gmail e-mail related ads that were displaying on my Gmail page now included one that would have let me click through to a site that would explain to me how Australian farmers grow abalone.

Google, XP, Prime Minister Abe and Homeland Security have all Incurred my Displeasure

2007-09-13T09:13:00.000+09:00

Google, XP, Prime Minister Abe and Homeland Security have all Incurred my Displeasure

Let's start with Google. Recently, my three-year-old daughter, Aiko Cornucopia Boadicea Nishikawa, completed one of her very few three-dimensional art forms. A pictorial record is at the top of this blog entry.

The installation in question is a work in mixed media (air and plastic) and is entitled HOMELAND SECURITY. It is, in my opinion, a work of poised assurance which wittily encapsulates the hegemony of terror which has been imposed upon us by the so-called "protection" of Homeland Security, the ever-spawning and self-propagating bureaucracy which is currently in the process of trying to take control of the universe.

My daughter's forays into three dimensional art are few and far between. Usually, she contents herself with energetic two-dimensional "me can scribble!" sketches, expressive of the utterly confident artistic energy which Pablo Picasso so admired in small children.

Her last three 3D works prior to HOMELAND SECURITY are (the Japanese title is given first, with a loose - sometimes very loose - translation into English afterwards): SHINDA SEMI ("Dead Cicada"), BUTSUKATTA KATATSUMORI ("Smashed Snail") and TSUKARETTA WAN-WAN UNCHI ("Exhausted Doggy Poop".) All these three were in the "objet trouve" genre.

No shame in that. Picasso himself worked in this genre on occasion. However, by comparison, her HOMELAND SECURITY represents a giant stride forward in the development of this artist. And, naturally, as her proud father, I was keen to e-mail photographs to everyone in my communicative network.

This is where Google failed me.

While Gmail still works, it has failed (at least for me) to attach anything to an e-mail. For this reason, my "me proud father" aspirations have been thwarted, and I have been unable to e-mail the HOMELAND SECURITY pics to my father, my mother, my Uncle Don, and to the major art galleries which have begun to take an interest in my daughter's burgeoning art career.

I presume that Google will get its act together eventually, but, really, I had expected more.

My first ever experience with free web-based e-mail was with Hotmail, some years back, an experience that was such a downer that I became convinced, at least at the time, that free e-mail was worth exactly what you paid for it.

However, Gmail having performed pretty well for me for some time now (in particular, with its magnificently ruthless spam filer) my expectations have been raised.

My beef with XP is the same old whine: use this operating system for stuff that it's not really designed to do, such as running computer programs, and it falls over.

XP having fallen over yet again, over the weekend I reverted my ThinkPad to "factory contents" status, then resintalled all my backed-up data and software. The first couple of times I ever did this, it used to take about three days to get the system to my satisfaction. But I've now become such a master of the process that, this time, it barely took six hours.

As for Prime Minister Abe, well, this dude was so grotesquely irresponsible as to resign on Wednesday 12 September, right in the middle of a sumo tournament. So when I got back from the supermarket, where I'd been doing food shopping for the evening meal (salmon, scallops and flying fish eggs), and switched on TV with a view to blobbing out for a few recuperative minutes and watching a little sumo, there was, instead of the expected wrestling, the dismal political deconstruction of Abe's absquatulation from the political scene.

The TV showed various unsuspected passers by being ambushed by the news of his resignation outside Tokyo station. Nobody seemed remotely sad. Rather, typically, their faces lit up in what looked very much like pleasure.

So now this brings me to Homeland Security, and a very weird and almost inexplicable thing that happened to me recently.

I lately acquired a new domain name and, having bought it, went looking for hosting for it. I wanted bullet-proof Linux-based hosting that would be affordable and reliable, and I found just what I was looking for in the heartland of the United States of America.

I'll call the outfit that I signed up with War Criminal Nation Deathservers (hereafter "Warcrim.")

Before signing up with Warcrim, I did a Google on them, including a Google of Groups, to see if there was any bad-news scuttlebutt about them floating around. There wasn't. I satisfied myself that this outfit had been in business for some years, that people had done business with it but had not been provoked into saying anything bad about it, and that its terms of service were acceptable.

I then signed up, splashing out the munificent sum of US $84 (give or take a few cents).

I very shortly received an e-mail from Warcrim saying that my credit card payment had been accepted and that I would receive full details of my account (ftp protocols, nameserver details and so forth) inside of 24 hours.

More than 24 hours having passed, I got a bit worried. Since I'm conscious of the fact that, this year, on more than one occasion I've let my Atilla the Hun out of the kennel, I made a conscious effort to write a nice polite I-will-not-Atilla e-mail pointing out that I had not yet received the promised setup details e-mail.

Another 48 hours having passed without any such e-mail, I lost patience and let Atilla off the chain. I got hold of as many Warcrim e-mail addresses as I could find online, these being for Sales, Billing and Legal, and fired off three e-mail messages which were emphatic in the same sense as the Krakatoa eruption was erratic.

Result: zero.

I then got worried. Maybe I had given my credit card to some spurious site which was not the authentic Warcrim site. But, if so, why had they bothered to send me an e-mail? Any time you send anyone an e-mail, you risk self-exposure, because the spoor from your e-mail leads back to your lair.

With that in mind, I went to my Gmail account. It does not, as far as I can see, have any facility for downloading an actual e-mail message for analysis. No problem. I forwarded the e-mail to an e-mail account that I have here in Japan courtesy of Netyou, our local cable TV provider, then opened it with Outlook Express and saved the message as an *.eml file.

I then opened the *.eml message with NoteTab Light, which has become my standard text editor, and examined the trail which led back to the lair.

As an e-mail message bounces around the Internet, zinging from computer A to computer B, often taking a chaotic and circuitous route, it collects data which shows exactly what route it took. If you open up the actual *.eml file then you will find this data.

It's all technical gobbledygook but, in amongst a slew of stuff I didn't really understand, I finally found some plain English which seemed to say, very clearly, that, yes, the e-mail started off by being launched from a Warcrim computer.

As far as I could tell, then, the e-mail message was authentic.

This was very strange.

The facts I had to reconcile were these:

1. Businesses which have been online for some years are generally not fraudulent, or, if they are, will often have complaints about them which you can find by Googling Groups.

2. The provision of Internet services is extremely competitive, and it's no environment for slackers. If an organization promises to deliver something in 24 hours, it will generally do just that, unless prevented by acts of force majeure, comet strikes, alien invasions, a thermonuclear strike on company headquarters, or similar.

3. Since Warcrim has apparently eaten my US $84, this fact will show up on my credit card statement, and, with that evidence in my hot little hand, I will be able to go after them.

I then set about thinking about how I could get at these people, and I came up with the following ideas:

1. Write (both snail mail and e-mail) directly to the company's physical address, complaining;

2. Write, similarly, to the local media;

3. Ditto to the local cops (yeah, sure, they wouldn't be bothered, but I would send a copy of this correspondence to Warcrim itself, and that might bother them a little even if, in all probability, the cops had better things to do with their time);

4. write to the FBI, which, I believe, takes an interest in computer crime;

5. write to the senator who serves the local area;

and,

6. write to Homeland Security and denounce Warcrim as a terrorist organization.

This last idea struck me, at first, as being just a little over the top. But I thought that, in the present overheated environment, it might resonate. I could argue thus:

America is being held up for judgment by the world, with many people, globally, being critical of the United States. In this environment, any American company which indulges in computer fraud besmirches the image of America, and, in thus doing so, gives comfort to terrorists. We can say, therefore, that this kind of misbehavior is a kind of corruption in which crime equals terrorism.

That is, I admit, a bit of a stretch. But I was conscious of the fact that Homeland Security is an organization which long ago fled the realms of the rational.

After the no-fly list was magicked into existence by the warped wizards of Insecurity Is Us, the Homies (if I can call them that) were aberrantly delinquent in dumping people onto the list willy-nilly. Members of the United States senate ended up on the no-fly list. So did little babies. Sorry, ma'am, we know little Johnny is only three months old, but he's already on the watch list. Which means he can't fly. And you can't, either.

The question was not, really, whether Homeland Security would buy this idea. The question was whether Warcrim might think that Homeland Security might buy it.

By now I was thinking about the people who run Warcrim. Must be corporate officers listed somewhere online. Then, once I found out who they were, I could write letters to them.

Then, using a trick that I learnt back in my days as a debt collector (or, as we call ourselves, professionally, a "mercantile agent") I could get at them directly and personally in the following way. I don't know how this would play out, legally, in your jurisdiction, but this is what I did in New Zealand, routinely:

You want to collect a debt from X, but X fails to respond to your e-mail. You know that X lives at 27A Swindlecheat Boulevard. You then write polite letters addressed to "The Occupant" at numbers 26, 27, 28 and 29 Swindlecheat Boulevard, explaining, politely, that you are trying to contact X, but X has not responded to your letter.

You are at a loss to know why X has not responded, so you are wondering if you, Mr or Mrs Nice Occupant, could possibly take the trouble to make a quick phone call to say if X is still in residence at 27A or has shot through.

If you ask nicely, people will often (not always, but often enough to make this technique useful) respond. Sometimes they will actually drop you a line which includes X's forwarding address. Or sometimes, knowing that X is right next door (always cranking up that bloody lawnmower on Sunday afternoons) and they will wander across to X's place and knock on the door.

For X, who finds you coming at him (or her) from a completely unexpected angle, this is a shock, like having a bucket of scalding water dumped on top of you. The results can be gratifying.

So, my anger being on hot boil, I was all set to go.

Then I started thinking.

What is the worst that can happen? Assuming that I have not actually gone and given my credit card number to a fraudulent site (and the evidence of the e-mail headers suggests that I haven't) then, at worst, I have been ripped off for US $84. Which is not the end of the world.

On top of that, the wreckage of my printer is barely capable of printing. If I was going to fire off a string of snail mail letters I would have to either buy a new printer or go to an Internet cafe and pay to use their facilities, which would include a fully-functional computer.

By the time I was done, I would have burnt up a lot more than US $84 in terms of time, effort and postage.

So I decided, the hell with it. I didn't go so far as to say "Death to America" (at least not aloud - you never know who is listening) but I did vow that this was the last time, the very last time, that I would ever do any kind of business with any outfit in the US of A, if doing such business was avoidable.

I then went back on line to Google my way to another Internet service provider, and found a good one in Britain. Fractionally more expensive, but very high tech, and, when I looked at Groups, I found not complaints, not neutral stuff, but glowing recommendations.

So I signed up with them, and they delivered, and this, I decided, is the ultra high-tech totally bulletproof Internet service provider that I want.

But, meantime, my imagination kept returning to the US $84 question. I don't like being ripped off.

I've had the experience of trying to communicate with American corporations before. On a couple of occasions, I've written letters to American publishers with whom I've had business dealings, only to have both snail mail and e-mail vanish into an unanswering void.

But the business of providing Internet services is a lot more businesslike than the ramshackle machine known as the publishing industry. Warcrim's dereliction quite simply did not compute.

Given that my credit card account will show that they have taken my money, what makes them think that they can fail to provide services promised and paid for?

As my imagination revolved this problem, I kept returning to the Homeland Security behemoth, the outfit which makes a profession of paranoia.

America's terrorist problem is, as we all know, firmly based in the mountains of Pakistan, just across the border from Afghanistan. But America will never go in there and root out the terrorists because, quite simply, it doesn't have the balls.

The news in recent months included the information that, some time back, the American military had a major operation into those Pakistani mountains planned, but then one of the Yank politicians lost his nerve and pulled the plug on the operation.

So, absent the guts to fight terrorism, America has fallen back on displacement activities, like formulating nonsensical no-fly lists and cooking up the much-lampooned color coded terror alertness level system.

Homeland Security is in the empire building business, and, like Argentinian ants, empire builders will build wherever there is space to grow. Many years ago, back in the days when my parents used to read the Reader's Digest, I saw this apothegm: growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

And that is exactly Homeland Security's ideology.

While I went about my daily business, my imagination played with the following data, looking for a fit:

1. Reputable American computer outfits are, as a rule, not into rip-offs. It's too easy to out them.

2. The provisions of Internet services is a cutthroat business run by very slick operators who take corporate rivalry seriously, and will always go the extra mile to trump the opposition.

3. Modern American computer outfits are slicker than their publishing industry counterparts, and won't do delinquent stuff like simply lose your e-mail correspondence.

4. My initial "your payment has been received and details will arrive in 24 hours" e-mail message from Warcrim was surely computer-generated.

5. When an account is set up by an Internet service provider, typically a human being will be involved at the setting up stage. They check you out to make sure you're not fraudulent, and this task is not trusted to a machine.

6. It logically follows that, while a machine approved me, a human being flunked me. Why?

7. Homeland Security is an irrational organization which has a history of doing irrational things such as putting six-month-old babies on no-fly lists.

8. The no-fly list was cooked up in total secrecy, and nobody knew about it until people started getting turned away at airports. Even after its existence was revealed, the details (how do you get on this and how do you get off again?) were opaque.

All these details cooked around in my mind until, finally, I came to an outlandish conclusion which, despite its improbability, I now believe to be true. I believe it because, if it is true, it binds together the disparate data and creates a pattern which makes sense.

My hypothesis, which I have no way of proving, is this:

Just as there is a no-fly list which seeks to ban selected people from making use of the air travel infrastructure, so too there is a no-hosting list which seeks to ban selected people from making use of America's Internet infrastructure.

And I am on this list.

That probably sounds outlandish, but it is no weirder than the known and proven stuff that has been going on over the last few years: the CIA kidnapping people off the streets, taking them across borders then torturing them to death; quasi-randomly-selected hypothetical terrorists being incarcerated for years and years in Guantanamo in a largely symbolic assault on terrorism; and, yes, babies innocent of firearms training ending up on the no-fly list.

Now, if you accept that a no-hosting list exists, a list which specifies that American computer outfits must not provide server space to selected individuals, then it would be reasonable to hypothesize that any such no-hosting list will be a secret, and that the Feds will come after you if you blab about it.

If that is so, then it is reasonable to assume that, within each American Internet service provider, there is a human being who has the task of checking applications for Internet services against the no-hosting list.

Any such company would, undoubtedly, be under a legal obligation to keep the no-hosting list secret.

I took a shot at Googling "no-hosting list" in conjunction with "Homeland Security," but that was a bust. There are millions and millions of pages relating to Homeland Security, and I could spend weeks hunting for something which doesn't exist.

As to how I personally would end up on such a list, well, data mining could quite easily end up putting me there. A simple computer algorithm could sift my pages, deem me to be a bad apple then place me on the list.

This has its good points and its bad points.

One good point is that a decision I made some time ago, the decision never again to visit the territory of the United States, not ever, looks even smarter than it did before. If I am by chance on some mysterious no-hosting list then that would seem to amplify that probability that I am now (or will be in future) on the no-fly list.

Another good point is that the Internet is international, and Osama bin Laden can use it just as easily as George W. Bush can. Every part of the Internet connects to every other part, and it doesn't really matter where your server is, as long as it's in some place which has a reliable supply of mains electricity.

As for the bad point ... well, I may have been screwed out of US $84.

For the time being, I'm sitting back and waiting for my next credit card statement. If it shows, as I expect it to show, that Warcrim did, indeed, deduct the US $84 from my account, then I may start digging a little deeper, hunting for the names and addresses of the corporate heads of War Criminal Nation Deathservers. My Atilla the Hun does not like being cooped up in the kennel, and it is possible that, after mature consideration, I may decide that, yes, I will let it off the chain. And see how much damage it can do once it has been unleashed.

I don't, by the way, associate my problems with the Warcrim mob with the temporary (I assume it's temporary) delinquency of my Gmail account. I assume (correctly, I hope) that there are Higher Powers which are immune to the baleful influence of the malign Homeland Security. But perhaps this is wishful thinking, and perhaps the world in a worse state than I thought.

To wrap up, just a couple of comments on the sumo. Wednesday's session having been completed, with four days of the two-week tournament done, one yokozuna (grand champion) by the name of Hakuho is at 4-0, having won all his bouts. So, too, is Chiotaikai, and I my guess is that one of those two will win this tournament.

Another yokozuna, Asashoryu, is not competing this time.

He said he would skip some particular sumo obligation because he had a leg injury. He then went on a jaunt to his native Mongolia and was videotaped there playing soccer. Obviously nothing wrong with his leg.

The sumo federation penalized him by suspending him from the next two tournaments, and he has now gone home to Mongolia. With what long term plan in mind I have no idea.

Eight Meter Waves And 400 Millimeter Rain

2007-09-07T09:47:00.000+09:00

Eight Meter Waves And 400 Millimeter Rain

It's 0935 here in Yokohama on Friday 07 September and I have just dropped three-year-old daughter Cornucopia off at the daycare center. We went there in typhoon weather, with rain coming down in tropical downstorm mode. My shoes filled up completely with water.

A guy who worked in a shoeshop once told me that there is no such thing as a waterproof leather shoe, since leather needs to breathe, and therefore must admit the passage of water. But I'd always thought of these shoes as being waterproof, as, up until today, they'd always stood up to the heaviest rain without letting in a drop.

Fortunately, I had a towel and a change of trousers for Cornucopia in my waterproof backpack, which is made in New Zealand of canvas saturated with a chemical which swells when wet, to lock the fabric absolutely against the admission of water.

The waves at Chikura, the place where we went for our recent Chiba beachside holiday, are being billed by the weather forecast as eight meters, and today's rainfall is expected to be, here in Yokohama, 400 ml.

Typhoons often bring flooding to Japan, Tokyo itself being a place which has localities which are prone to flooding. The heavy rains also often cause landslides, and it is the landslides which are the usual cause of the fatalities which, as a rule, accompany every major typhoon.

Fortunately, we are up on a ridge, or, more exactly, tucked in just below the top of a ridge, and our house is not going to flood even if both ice caps melt.

Alas, I am on Homeland Security's no-hosting list

2007-08-30T09:27:00.000+09:00

I am tired of Windows.
Profoundly tired.
To host my Internet expansion I chose
Rock-solid Linux hosting.
The good stuff, Red Hat all the way.
I paid my money down, and a cheery machine
Spat a promise in my direction:
Cash received, setup details to follow
In twenty-four hours.
Then silence.
Profound silence.
Continuing.
Reasonable e-mails
To sales at, billings and and, finally,
To legal at,
Produced no response.
With difficulty,
I kept my Atilla the Hun in check.
At least for the moment.
I have been allowing myself to be
Too much the human flamethrower.
Patience, I thought,
Would produce an answer.
All it produced was silence.
Finally, I intuited the answer:
My loud-mouthed opposition to Imperial America's
Invasion of the planet Mars
Has brought upon me
Homeland Security's thunderbolts of wrath.
Invisibly, they have pasted me into their no-fly zone,
Which I haven't noticed for the simple reason
That I never fly stateside.
And never will.
Fascist America, as far as I'm concerned,
Is permanently off the menu.
You LA fingerprint machine,
You can take that and shove it
Right up a place
Totally remote from sunlight.
I have also been,
It may reasonably be hypothesized,
Placed on the no-borrow list at the Library of Congress,
The no-buy list that the real estate agents conform to
From arctic Alaska to equatorial Florida.
If they ever catch me coming across one of their borders
Then I'm in deep doo-doo.
But I want nothing from them.
Saving America's best,
The rock solid stability of the big machines
Housed on the continental United States.
There is a price for everything,
And Homeland Security's price
Is to inflict upon you
Horrors:
Windows hosting, at the worst,
In the Republic of Kosovo,
In Putingrad,
Or in Outer Eastern Berzerkistan.
This done to you in secret,
So you cannot protest.
All you have is silence,
And a failure to respond to e-mail.
All of which could indicate that the guys who are asleep at the switch
Are not, in fact,
A part of the oppression machine.
Just participating, for the moment,
In the life of the degenerate West,
Slumped at their Grand Theft Auto screens,
Watching Miss Booby Tits Hot To You Porno,
Or having cluster-grapple sex in the toilet,
Senatorial style.
Still, I like my hypothesis.
It makes sense.
However, America,
While it rules the world in porn production,
Lawsuits,
Gunfight fantasies made emergency room reality
And lies big enough for a whole Republic to swallow,
Does not own the computer hosting world entire.
I will get,
Sooner or later,
The extra hosting I require.
Somewhere.
Somehow.
And continue to protest.
The annihilation of the Martian people
By the orbital laser Golgotha
Is wrong.
The fact that the outraged billions of planet Earth
Say that it is wrong
Does not,
In and of itself,
Make it right.
Eventually,
Somewhere out in the reaches of the Deeper Abyss,
Somewhere between Alpha Proxima and Andromeda,
America will meet its match.
And go down.
Its history of coups, overthrows, cannibal dictator buddies
And gung-ho propaganda
Will come to an end.
And Homeland Security?
That outfit you'll be able to buy in cans,
Cans of dog meat at the America Was Us emporium.

Aiko Cornucopia Boadicea Nishikawa Has Completed Toilet Training!

2007-08-29T13:07:00.000+09:00

Sub-Prime Poem

Sometimes I'm glad I'm not a world bank.
I have run out of chewing gum, but that problem,
I think,
Is fixable.
My daughter's toilet training looked,
For the longest time imaginable,
To be intractable.
But she, now,
Miraculously,
Is dry.
(Most of the time.)
Into every life a little drop of rain must fall
So, when the bank does foreclose
(Which it probably will)
Accept it.
And learn from this experience.
Don't make the same mistake two times in a row.
Next time, be certain,
Really, really certain
To be born rich.

The poem tells the truth. After more than three years, my daughter has finally, at last, completed toilet training, this feat finally accomplished in the month of August 2007.

We were assisted and supported by the intolerably hot weather, which made it uncomfortable to wear paper panties, and strongly motivated the beloved daughter to do what was necessary to stay dry, ie apply consistently in practice the toilet-sitting skills which she had, in theory, mastered long ago, but, unfortunately, chose for a long time not to demonstrate consistently.

If I'd prayed for a miracle, then I'd say that one had been granted to us. But, as I didn't pray, I can't grant this as a miracle.

Today, 29 August 2007, the intolerable heat of summer has finally broken, and it looks, from the long-range weather forecast, as if autumn is finally upon us.

Mia Farrow In Darfur

2007-08-11T01:05:00.000+09:00

Mia Farrow In Darfur

She's there right now, or so I thought, when I took a hasty look at her blog, which has a post datelined 8/8/207 at Cassoni, a Camp for Darfurian refugees, its population 28,000.

Then, when I read it a second time, a little more carefully, I gathered that she's actually in Chad, but so close to Sudan that she can see Darfur from where she is.

She takes you right there, writing thus:

"Even the air strip is made of sand. It feels as if we we are at the edge of the earth. Look at the map. Bahai straddles Darfur and Chad. People cross the (nonexistent) border regularly to visit family or their fields. I can see Darfur from where i am typing this message, at the UNHCR compound in Bahai."

Her blog is here:

http://www.miafarrow.org/

I googled "bahai chad," and, yes, Bahai is in Chad. I got to a UNHCR page which has all the details, if you're interested. The page is this:

http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/chad?page=news&id=4126268f4

I then went to Wikipedia to find out more about Mia Farrow. I had already discovered, from a news article, that she's 62 years old, and I had a vague idea that she was a Hollywood actress.

Born 1945, American, more than forty films, and, according to Wikipedia, she's been not just to Darfur and Chad but, also, to the Central African Republic.

Personal relationships include those with Andre Previn and (and now I click, knew I'd heart that name before) Woody Allen. Oh, THAT Mia Farrow.

The questions about the Sudan genocide are these: If not now, then when? If not us, then who?

Well, if Mia Farrow has anything to do with it, it seems to be that case that "when" is going to be "right now" and it seems to be that "who" is going to be "me."

A very gutsy lady. But what kind of weirdly aberrant planet is it where, with the world awash with the talent of billions of people, leadership in a genocide crisis defaults to an American actress?

Genocide Wallpaper

2007-08-11T00:06:00.000+09:00

Genocide Wallpaper

The decorations on my bedroom wall
Come free for nothing.
Nights, I sit and watch
Chasms circulating on the bedroom wall,
Abysms of despair where outcast shadows,
Intricate in silent dissolution,
Morph to perverted forms as they endure
All that Hell can provide them with.
You see
Villages
Go gibbering into flames.
Devils on horseback kill,
Then rape
That which they cannot be bothered to destroy.
You see all this, and see
Much more in a similar vein.
Taken stone cold sober,
It's not quite nice.
A little liquor later, though.
You get to like it.
An acquired taste, I'd say.
Wallpaper being what it is,
It's purely visual.
No hissing gas
In this muted show with the sound turned down to zero.
Charcoal, accumulating,
Adds no odor,
And is not added
To my personal portion
Of the carbon debt.
Free stuff ... well,
You get what you pay for.
And, at moments,
Even though it's free you play a price.
A girl's eyes bulge,
A grandmother's teeth
Totter down her face in bloody splinters,
And you,
By accident, of course,
Connect.
There are moments when you would prefer,
If granted choice,
Capri, Hawaii, Halifax or Cape Cod.
But all that elite costs money.
Genocide comes free,
Soft bodies a pillow for your dreams.
And if within those dreams of yours
You see the eyeless dead,
They, in turn, see you,
And know you do not grant them help
Or intercession.
They, where they reside,
Endure what they must endure,
And suffer
Fully aware that you permit their fate.
But do not worry.
They, in a place where they cannot consult with counsel,
Cannot, in practice, make demands on you.
And you, for your part,
Should not assist
The demands their desperation would insist.
Do not pity the dead.
What is done is done.
Mithering about it
Will not improve your cash flow.
Remember
That you have no moral mission
To rectify the pictures on the wall.
Your spiritual obligation on planet Earth,
Your ethical imperative in a world of war,
Terror,
Suicide bombers,
Incarceration camps,
Mugabe famines,
And the Genocide Olympics,
Your angel purpose
Is the beach.
Use sunblock,
Wear a hat,
Drink plenty of water,
And do not perve at women not your wife.
Enjoy
The heat,
The watermelon sun.
Embrace
The challenge of the two-meter surf,
The pounding triumph of the ocean.
Limbo
Needs no looking after.
Hell
Will take care of itself.
Abandon the wallpaper
And accept
This revelation:
The achieved beach,
The perfect setting
For another perfect day.

My Wife's Heroic Action In The Face Of Terror

2007-08-07T22:35:00.000+09:00

I was in the smallest room in the house (one of the pair of them) when three-year-old daughter Cornucopia came to the door with a message. My presence was required in my wife's personal room. My duty? To remove a corpse. My wife had encountered, and had slain, an unwelcome intruder.

The corpse was under the table, flat on its back. It was a cockroach, black, about half the size of my thumb. My wife had killed it with, of all things, the blast of hot air from her hairdryer. Mr Cockroach came sauntering out in the summer air and my wife holocausted him with her beauty machine.

Here in the Tokyo-Yokohama area, it's tropical. Temperatures of about 33 degrees Celsius. Two-meter surf breaking on the beaches of Chiba, where we will be, shortly.

When I had cataract surgery, before the operation I asked an eye doctor if, after the surgery, it would be safe to swim in heavy surf with an intraocular lens implanted.

My father, who was present, scoffed at the question. "When do you ever swim in heavy surf?" Well, almost never. In fact, I almost never swim. In the last fifteen years I've only swum in two places, one being the Bali area (Bali, Lombok, Gili Trewangan) and the other being Okinawa. For me to get in the water it has to be close to that of a comfortably warm bath, but I think maybe in Chiba it will be.

So, all going well, I'll be out there body swimming. I wouldn't call myself a strong swimmer, but I'm a very confident swimmer, and don't expect to get drowned dead by a wave of a mere two meters.

In my previous blog entry I posted a link to a blog by a guy who is in Chad. Here is an excerpt from the text near the top of the entry for Day 17:

"Editor's Note: In March, Kurt Pelda, Africa Bureau Chief of the Swiss daily the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, traveled to eastern Chad on the border with the Sudanese crisis region of Darfur. Over 200,000 Sudanese refugees live in eastern Chad, having fled the violence in Darfur. The region likewise serves as staging grounds for the Darfur rebels fighting against the Sudanese government. During his three weeks traveling in the region, Pelda kept a diary, which provides a portrait of the Darfur conflict that is perhaps unrivaled in its detail and nuance. In daily installments through the beginning of August, World Politics Review presents this important document for the first time in English, concluding with an epilogue penned by Pelda exclusively for WPR"

You can find the latest page of the blog by going to Google News and doing a search for "chad darfur."

Today I downloaded Day 19, which says, in part:

"We drive back along the same route on which we came from N'Djamena to Abéché two weeks ago. But there is one important difference: At the time I still had a valid visa. Fortunately, however, I am never asked to show my passport at any of the many roadblocks we cross. In the worst case, I have just to produce my ominous film and photo permit."

A pretty gutsy thing to be doing, I thought, roaming around an area like that, all on your lonesome, with no army at your back.

Just to wrap up, regarding the intraocular lens, the bottom line is that once you've healed up you can treat your eye exactly as if it was a normal eye. A post-cataract surgery eye with a plastic intraocular lens replacing the natural lens is no more vulnerable than an unmodified eye.

My father was highly amused when I asked my big surf question, but now, with the big surf, improbably as it might seem, almost on the doorstep of the future, I'm very glad that I did ask that question.

Oh, and one little thing discovered in the blog, a mysterious synchronicity at work: "it is already past noon. The thermometer has risen to over 42 ºC (107 ºF). The wind in our faces as we drive feels like air being blown out of a hairdryer."

The photo at the top of my blog entry today is by Kurt Pelda, and shows a boy and a rock formation on the way to N'Djamena.

I feel the tweaking of my psychic powers at work, not for the first time: my spellchecker isn't going to like that rubric one little bit.

And ... just one more little thing today. Recently I fired off some angry e-mails to Lulu.com because my latest book had been rejected for distribution to the likes of Amazon.com. Today I looked for a response and found that all six of my e-mail messages (a couple were duplicates) had been answered by a serene machine, the subtext saying "Be as angry as you like, but you would be able to unequipoise me!"

I guess the bottom line is that, in the end, I'll fold, eat humble pie, and sit down and figure out the technicalities needed to conform to the sacred rules of one of the modern world's branches of the Inquisition.

Since this spanner has been thrown in the works, I've already decided that I'll use this opportunity to enlarge and revise the book. So I'm at work on the printed copy that I have in my hot little hand, annotating it with marker pens.

It's an amazing luxury, using a real printed book as a revision tool. It rejigs my vision of the modern printed book. It's not a fixed item that rolls off the printing press and then becomes immutable. It's more like a bronze statue which, if you're so inclined, you can melt down and then reform. The Book Mutable rather than the Book Eternal.

Someone says, and I can't remember who, that a work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned. After about six months of really solid work on GENGHIS LOTUS POETRY COLLECTION, I did have the distinct impression that I was abandoning the book rather than finishing it.

So many things to do. A billion cockroaches on this planet, and, in the last two days, I've only managed to dispose of the corpses of two of them.

Cockroach onslaughts permitted, then, the True and Final This is Forever version of GENGHIS LOTUS POETRY COLLECTION will be a bigger, bolder book than the one of 141 poems and 312 pages that I have in hand.

Chad and Darfur

2007-08-07T09:29:00.000+09:00

[SCENE: We open in an apartment which is obviously not a lair of the Taliban. On one wall is a framed jockstrap with a rubric which attributes its ownership to Michael Jackson. This attribution is false.

[The big calendar on the opposite wall is of beach babes, prime Californian flesh, and the calendar cues us to the fact that it is August. The windows are open to the night, and the sound of a midnight saxophone can be heard. Also, traffic noise, at a distance. And, occasionally, gunfire. It's a highly desirable rent-controlled apartment in a central city area, but you do have to get used to the fact that drive-by shootings are a nightly occurrence.

[Sitting at a computer screen is SOCRATES, very serious, muttering as he clicks away. Sprawled on a couch is MELISSA, who is smoking a joint. She has dropped by without invitation and has now been in the apartment for six hours.

[So far, these two have not yet had sex. Not this evening, at any rate. Having twice divorced MELISSA, SOCRATES is firmly determined that the relationship is over, and there will be neither another shot at the dating game. Nor will there be a third marriage.]

MELISSA: What are you doing?

SOCRATES: Worrying.

MELISSA: What about?

SOCRATES: The guy who lives just across the hall.

MELISSA: Why? You think he might be cheating on you?

SOCRATES: I already told you, he's a narcotics cop.

MELISSA: Oh, Mister Serious! Come on, Socks, what are you chewing on over there?

SOCRATES: Chad.

MELISSA: Chad? I didn't know you were into autosport.

SOCRATES: No, Chad and Darfur. The rape of Darfur.

MELISSA: Chad raped Darfur? A nice guy like that? He raped someone? I can't believe it, you're putting me on. Chad is the motorsport guy, right?

SOCRATES: I'm reading a road diary online.

MELISSA: [stubbing out exhausted spliff] A road diary? A kind of Jack Kerouish thingy?

SOCRATES: This guy's on the road in Chad.

MELISSA: He's in Chad? Socks, are you at a porn site?

At this point, the door opens and COPERNICUS enters. He, like SOCRATES and MELISSA, does not appear to be a member of the Taliban. He is wearing a T-shirt which says "Born to Party, Forced to Do Time," and has a bottle of whiskey in his hand. From the light insouciance with which he swings it about, you gather it is mostly empty. COPERNICUS'S stance and gait indicates that some (or possibly all) of the whiskey is inside him.

SOCRATES: You explain it to her.

COPERNICUS: Explain what?

SOCRATES: [Handing COPERNICUS a newspaper.] Read it an explain it to her.

[COPERNICUS takes the paper, seats himself on a folding picnic stool, which is the only remaining seat in the room, and begins to read the newspaper in silence. There is a knock at the door. SOCRATES ignores it.
[The knock is repeated, and someone can be heard talking outside, loud but incoherent. SOCRATES gets up, walks to the beer fridge, opens it, and takes out his Glock. MELISSA fumbles in her once-chic backpack, yesterday's fashion, unfortunately, and pulls out her digital camera in case something interesting is about to happen. SOCRATES stalks toward the door, his personal High Noon fantasy evidently playing in his head. The voice outside the door falls silent.

[SOCRATES abruptly throws the door open and leaps through, disappearing from sight.

SOCRATES: [Loudly] Ha!

[Gunshot off. Very close and very loud. MELISSA gets up off the couch and dreamwalks toward the door, camera in hand, paparazzi fantasies evidently in her head. To her evident disappointment, SOCRATES returns, the Glock still in his hand.]

MELISSA: Who did you shoot at?

SOCRATES: Safety catch wasn't on.

MELISSA: You mean, it just went off? The guy was gone? There was nobody there?

[COPERNICUS abruptly bursts into a howl of laughter.]

COPERNICUS: This is priceless!

MELISSA: What's funny about Chad raping Darfur?

SOCRATES: He evidently wasn't looking at what he was supposed to be looking at. What we're talking about is a very, very serious situation with a lot of people having their lives totally devastated.

MELISSA: This is, uh, the collapsed bridge thing? Did you see the service in the church thingy?

COPERNICUS: It was a cathedral, I think. Say, did you see the news about that rich guy's dog which ate a worker?

MELISSA: No, the dog didn't eat him. It just killed him.

SOCRATES: And that's major news, huh?

MELISSA: Socks is angry with me. Okay, Socks boy, you can have me a thrill. Give me another of your oh so manly I-explain-politics lectures. You can't believe how wonderfully they turn me on.

[SOCRATES does not respond. He has refocused himself on the computer screen. The Glock is still sitting where SOCRATES left it, on the beer fridge. COPERNICUS takes another hit from the whiskey bottle, puts down the paper and walks out of the room. En route, he uplifts the Glock from the top of the beer fridge. MELISSA scoops up her digital camera and follows. SOCRATES is alone in the room. The agonies of Chad and the ongoing rape of Darfur play out, but not on stage. Nobody is interested, certainly not MELISSA or COPERNICUS.]

Footnotes:

#1. What Socrates has been reading online is a page which has the following URL:

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/article.aspx?id=991

It is Day 17 of a kind of blog which has the title "Among Darfur Rebels and Refugees: A Road Diary."

#2 What Copernicus was supposed to be looking at was a prominent article on the developing crisis in Africa which is spilling over into Chad. After leafing through the paper, what he has found, instead, is a Dilbert cartoon, which he finds screamingly funny.

This strip is about the comedy of dysfunctional companies, and it's online at www.dilbert.com.

In frame one, we see Dilbert, the expressionless engineer, sitting next to his point-haired boss. The boss is talking to Wally, the ultimate dysfunctional employee, and says "Are you wearing noise cancellation headphones?" Wally replies with an uncomprehending "What?"

In fame two, the boss shouts, VERY LOUDLY, "I said, are you wearing noise cancellation headphones?"

Dilbert, being an engineer, would be able to find a practical solution to the fact that Wally is obviously doing exactly that. But the boss, now at screaming pitch, stars over again: "I said - "

And Dilbert thinks to himself "This will not end well."

#3. Melissa is right. The dog didn't eat the worker. It merely killed him. One hopes that the worker was properly insured, and it would be nice to imagine that his boss splashed out and gave him a nice funeral as a kind of sayonara present.

Doubts on UN Peacekeeping Mission to Darfur

2007-08-03T22:32:00.000+09:00

On a British site I found an opinion piece which doubts that the UN peacekeeping mission to Darfur will be a stunning success.

This piece, on the site telegraph.co.uk, says in part:

"For starters, and despite what the [British Prime Minister Gordon] Brown spin machine would have us believe, this is not the first time the UN has authorised an intervention force for Darfur. Only last year the security council passed a British-sponsored resolution - 1706 - that envisaged a similar force being deployed to Darfur, but nothing came of it because of the hostile reaction from Khartoum.

"Sudan's declaration that it is prepared to co-operate with the new force should be taken with a pinch of salt. Its tactics all along have been to appear accommodating and conciliatory when under international scrutiny, but then to be utterly obstructive when it comes to implementing the deal on the ground."

The Christian Science Monitor has an article headlined "The UN blinks on Darfur".

The piece goes straight to the heart of the problem with the very first sentence:

"Despite the UN action to save it, Darfur still needs a peace to keep before it can use peacekeepers."

Peace keepers can keep a peace once a war has come to a halt, but they can't actually bring a war to a halt if their mandate is nothing than permission to take photographs and hand out free toilet paper. And the mandate, as given to the proposed force by the UN, is not, in practical terms, very much more than that.

The second sentence shows that the position of the Christian Science Monitor is the same as my own: What is needed in Darfur is not peace but war. Here is the second sentence:

"Rather than plan for an invasion of Darfur to end a genocide, the UN Security Council decided Tuesday to send in 20,000 peacekeepers – not peacemakers."

The CSM puts the blame for the UN debacle on two factors, one being the influence of China's veto power and the other being the malign influence of Iraq. America's screw up has dented the UN's enthusiasm for taking down rogue nation states.

The article gets precise about exactly how the arms of the UN force are tied:

"But even with the new UN African Union Mission in Darfur (Unamid), peacekeepers won't be able to disarm militias or arrest suspected war criminals. They can only protect civilians. And they are allowed to operate only "without prejudice to the responsibility of the government of Sudan," according to Tuesday's UN resolution. That's a loophole for Sudan to block anything."

The Voice of America quotes a UN expert as saying, in effect, that the intervention force itself will not turn the tide. To avoid making a mess of quotation marks inside of quotation marks, I put my quote from the VOA page inside square brackets, thus:

[Rodolphe Adada, Joint Special Representative of the U.N. Secretary General was more cautious in his comments.

["Don't forget that the force in itself is not sufficient to bring the peace in Darfur," he noted. "It will be after the agreement we are trying to get between the Darfurians, the work of the political side, this will be basis of the peace and we are there to help implement this peace agreement."]

One problem is made clear by the BBC news site:

"It will be a joint AU-UN mission, but it must be mainly African in character, a specification made to appease Sudan's initial antagonism to the force."

This would seem to rule out a significant contribution from Australia. In a world of whimpy governments which prefer to look the other way when the world is going to hell, Australia has, in recent years, been making deployments to various unstable areas in the Pacific, such as East Timor.

In my view, the Australian military commitment to its self-perceived role, that of playing deputy sheriff to the United States in riding herd on the world, has been carried out in an effective, responsible and highly professional manner.

The Australian armed forces are basically constituted as one big expeditionary force, and the Australian prime minister has indicated that Australia is favorably inclinted to contribute to a mission to Darfur. But what he has suggested is sending doctors and nurses.

Doctors and nurses would be very nice, of course, but it would be nicer if the military professionals of the Australian officer corps could be there on the ground in Africa giving directions to military affairs.

The BBC says that "Burkina Faso, Egypt, Ethiopia, Nigeria and Senegal have so far offered troops."

I see Africa, of course, through the limiting lens of my own stereotypes, but my own impression is that a peace keeping intervention by the likes of Nigeria and Burkina Faso would not exactly be optimal.

War In Sudan Or On Sudan - Now, Please!

2007-08-03T11:10:00.000+09:00

I was startled to see, in my ink-on-paper copy of the International Herald Tribune for Thursday 2 August 2007 a front-page article with the triumphalstic headline "UN to send vast peacekeeper force to war-torn Darfur."

The force is not going to be huge. It is only going to be 26,000 people, a mix of cops, troops and experts. Of these, some 7,000 are already in Sudan. They are troops from the African Union, and they are described as being "beleaguered," a word which suggests that they are in no position to rescue anyone but, rather, are in need of being rescued themselves.

The proposed force numbers are derisory when set against the military might of the civilized world and the scale of the problems in Darfur. On top of that, the very notion of sending in a peacekeeping force is absurd when there is no peace to keep.

What is needed, now, is a military force to make war on the janjaweed militias, to hunt them down and kill them dead. To make war in Sudan. Or, better still, to make war on Sudan, and take down the genocidal regime in Khartoum.

The UN, this week, flinched from agreeing to threaten to impose sanctions on Sudan, but what it would have done was to agree to threaten not just sanctions against Sudan but a war against Sudan.

As it is, the token force that is planned is a bad joke.

Darfur has a land area of about 493,180 square kilometers or 196,555 square miles. and a population of 3,093,700 in 1983 (various population figures for Darfur are kicking around, but this one is sourced from the page http://sudanwatch.blogspot.com/2004/11/darfur-population-figures-6-million-65.html).

By contrast, Northern Ireland has a land area of 14,139 square kilometers or 5,459 square miles. As of 2001, its population was 1,685,000.

One of the images in the photo montage at the top of this blog entry makes clear the size of Northern Ireland versus France. Darfur is roughly ninety percent of the size of France.

By coincidence, I recently read a news article that tells us that the British military has now ended its security mission in Northern Ireland. They were not there to fight a war - there was nobody running around Ireland going into villages and burning all the houses, killing all the men and raping all the women - but just to keep the peace. An uneasy peace with bombs going off now and then and people being kneecapped in pubs, but a peace nevertheless. A peace of sorts.

To cope with the troubles in Northern Ireland, at its peak the British troops strength was 30,000. (This statistic may not be razor-sharp exact, but it's within the ballpark; I got it from an article on the site Boston.com.)

In Northern Ireland, then, which is a titchy little area where civil strife was kept pretty much under control by military checkpoints and patrols, the British had thirty thousand pairs of boots on the ground. By contrast, to confront the genocidal war being waged by the janjaweed in the comparatively vast territory of Darfur, the UN has a smaller presence planned, and even this will be hampered by a "stand back and watch, please" mandate which will forbid UN forces from confiscating and destroying the illegal weapons which are being used for the slaughter.

Going to the war zone known as Darfur to play tourist and do peacekeeping is like going to an extermination facility and camping out overnight outside the gas chambers. And getting up in the morning to stage a barbecue cookout outside the ever-busy incinerators.

The UN has flinched from its responsibilities. The proper course of action is not to put together a peacekeeping force but to assemble an expeditionary force which is suitably equipped for an invasion, and then go and either make war in Sudan, and take out the janjaweed, or, better, to make war on Sudan, and take out the ruling regime in Khartoum.

The trouble in Darfur is often billed in the Western media as a conflict between persecuting Arabs and victimized blacks, but actually, it seems to be the case that, not to put too fine a point on it, the Darfur disaster is a case of black on black.

That's a simplistic statement, and if you really want a nuanced assessment of the religious and ethnic background, then I recommend a page from Islamica Magazine, in which university academic R.S. O’Fahey takes us through the details.

The URL for the page is:

http://www.islamicamagazine.com/issue-19/darfur.html

On that page, O'Fahey says, in part:

"The conflict is presented both locally and in the wider media as one between Arabs and Africans. This fits into the dominant ideology of the northern Sudanese elite who see themselves as Arab and Muslim, despite the fact that many have experienced color-based racism in the Arab heartlands. This ideology is practiced by the janjaweed who burn mosques, kill imams and desecrate the Holy Qur’an."

Skipping the complications, and simplifying in line with the teachings of a newspaper article I read recently, it seems to be the case that the ruling elite in Khartoum, the black elite, self-identifies as "Arab," though authentic Arabs such as Saddam Hussein and the king of Saudi Arabia would be unlikely to accept them as the real thing.

In the photo montage at the top of this blog entry is the smiling mug of the President of Sudan, Umar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir. A newspaper article that I read recently said that this supposedly "Arab" dude in Khartoum is actually from one of Sudan's African tribe, and, when you look at the pic, well, put him onstage with Bob Marley and some other Rastas, and he wouldn't look out of place.

This guy shouldn't be sitting in the presidential palace in Khartoum. He should be waking up in the morning in a prison cell in the Hague, getting ready to meet, yet again with his lawyers to prepare to defend himself in the trial which is coming his way, a trial for war crimes up to and including genocide.

Problems and Solutions

2007-08-01T12:40:00.000+09:00

Problems and Solutions

When I saw on CTV.ca that the United Nations had approved a resolution on Darfur, I thought that perhaps this ongoing genocide was going to be one problem that would finally be solved.

But obviously it's not so.

The deal that has been done is a watered-down version which lacks the originally proposed threat of future sanctions against Sudan and, additionally, does not permit intervening peacekeepers to confiscate illegal arms.

So it's a feel-good vote which will allow a whole bunch of politicians to go through the motions of dealing with the problem without actually solving it.

Here on the home front, we have our own problems, but, overall, we're making a pretty good fist of solving them.

Our biggest problem is the challenge of persuading three-year-old Cornucopia to make the transition from toddler to elegant young lady, an elegant young lady being one who does not poop in her panties.

Cornucopia has the theory of the toilet down pat, and can actually use the device, but very often opts not to.

However, at least she is now going to daycare in her "o-ne san" panties, ie the proper underwear worn by an older person. She still comes home, though, in paper panties, which are always dry when she's uplifted from the daycare center (they are, I check) but often wet by the time she comes home.

My wife has decided that in two weeks we will take the plunge and ask the daycare to send Cornucopia home in proper underwear rather than paper panties. It's summer now, so laundry burdens are a lot more manageable than they would be in the wet winter.

We have just been through the rainy season but the hot steady days of summer now seem to have settled in.

Cornucopia may have been causing another problem. My wife has always suffered seasonal spring hayfever because, like millions of other people living in the Tokyo-Yokohama area, she is allergic to cedar pollen.

The neighboring hills and mountains are awash with oceans of commercial cedar plantation, which has gone uncut for decades because the bottom has dropped out of the cedar market. The simple solution would be for the nation state to order the chainsaws into action, clearfell the cedars and replant the hills with pinus radiata, our standard commercial forestry tree in New Zealand, a tree which grows quickly on any kind of soil you care to plant it in.

The hayfever season is long since over, but my wife recently noticed eye itchiness. She started sneezing, and so, too, did Cornucopia.

Finally, my wife twigged, and may have cracked the problem. Over the past week, or maybe a little longer, Cornucopia has routinely been picking wild grasses to take home. These have feathery heads, the kind of heads you could use to tease a kitten, and it's quite possible that they've been shedding pollen or whatever all through the house.

I personally struck a small problem recently with my running program. After my first proper run (which was actually more of a walk) I was surprisingly stiff and sore the next day. I realized that, while I had warmed up, I hadn't bothered to warm down properly. An entirely fixable problem, I think.

The two photos at the top of the blog show, first, the railway crossing that I reach after descending from the daycare center, and, second, the big and usually deserted park which includes a bar which, although it is a little low, can be used for doing chinups, as long as you're prepared to bend your knees a little.

Way back when, years ago, I used to be able to do about ten chinpus in a row. But the first time I tried to pull myself up on the bar in the deserted park, the maximum number of chinups that I could handle was precisely one.

The bar (or, more exactly, the three bars) can be seen in the park photo in the foreground.

Running After Cancer and Chemo

2007-07-31T12:26:00.000+09:00

Running After Cancer and Chemo

I went running (well, for the most part, walking) in my new Asics running shoes, and I soon forgot that I was wearing them, which I guess is as good a test as any as to whether a pair of running shoes is good or bad.

I took our digital camera with me in case I saw anything interesting, and the first interesting thing I saw was an exercise bike. What was interesting was that to solve a space problem, the owner had decided to keep it outside on the street, just down from the illegally parked motorbike.

At the top of this blog entry is my photo of the exercise bike, parked on the slope leading up to the ridge that I have to climb to descend to my daughter's daycare center:

Any vehicle you see parked by the road is illegally parked because you're supposed to have your own piece of dirty, owned or rented, to park it. In fact, in Japan, you can't police permission to buy an automobile unless you can prove that you do have a parking space for the vehicle you hope to own.

After I started teaching at Waniguchi Gakko, one of the English conversation textbooks I began working with had a lesson about good and bad neighbors. And one of my students surfaced the fact that one of her neighbors is the neighbor from hell.

If you have guests drop by for the evening and they leave their car parked by the side of the road, then this neighbor will call the cops. Japan is a country where, if you call the police, they come, now, and none of this "Oh, well, if nobody's been killed, we're not interested business."

Summoned by the neighbor from hell, the cops will reliably show up and tow the car, and the guest who made the mistake of parking by the roadside will have to pay a substantial amount of money to get it back.

2008 Beijing Genocide Olympics

2007-07-25T08:02:00.000+09:00

2008 Beijing Genocide Olympics

I was struck by an opinion piece in the International Herald Tribune in which two reasonably high-powered American-based academics, both of Chinese descent, try to defend China's policies toward Sudan, and take issue with the increasingly popular notion that the 2008 Olympics in Beijing will be the genocide Olympics.

What really stood out about this opinion piece was that it is childish, or, at best, sophomoric, and I was surprised that responsible editors, first the editor of The Boston Globe and then the editor of the IHT, had seen fit to give it house room.

The two Chinese authors are not, I presume, in the pay of the Chinese government, but they might as well be, because their opinion piece is pure Ministry of Truth propaganda.

They mask the bare simplicities of the undeniable facts by trying to have us believe that the issues surrounding China's involvement in Sudan are complicated, nuanced, and by no means as simple as they seem at first blush.

I don't buy that for a moment.

What is happening in Darfur is genocide, pure and simple, a rape, kill and pillage operation that neither Genghis Khan nor Atilla the Hun would have had any trouble understanding, despite their lack of a modern university education.

In broad outline, the Islamic government of Sudan is facilitating the mass murder of black Africans living in Darfur, a region in the west of Sudan. This slaughter is being carried out by Arab militias who think that they are doing the work of God by using rape, murder and arson as instruments of ethnic cleansing. Their goal is to extirpate Darfur's black Africans, who do not adhere to their religion, and who are seen as being subhuman.

China's role in this affair is, amongst other things, the role of weapons supplier. China knowingly sells Sudan the weapons which are being used for the Darfur genocide.

In an act of stunning intellectual dishonesty, China's two academic cheerleaders pass over this fact in silence. In effect, they are lying by omission.

In addition to handing out the guns and ammo, China also supports Sudan's genocidal regime with direct aid, millions of dollars in pocket money with no strings attached. Additionally, China invests in Sudan's oil industry.

The two Chinese authors say, in part, that "Beyond development cooperation, China's principle of exerting influence but not interfering and imposing is consistent with African practice, and the final political decisions will have to be made by Africans."

If you're at the zoo and you're videotaping a lion in the process of mauling a hapless tourist to death, are you, by playing that passive spectator role, be in some sense "exerting influence." Well, you're certainly not interfering, nor are you imposing.

The subtext of the article seems to be that interfering and imposing are wrong when we're dealing with Africa. But certain regimes in Africa are run by thugs, tyrants, kleptocrats or out-and-out monsters, an example of an out-and-out monster being Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.

If we don't judge these people by our own standards, if we not just ignore but connive at bald-faced evil on the grounds that it is "consistent with African practice," then we become morally responsible for that evil.

By facilitating the genocide in Darfur, China is morally responsible for that genocide.

The authors seek to attribute the West's criticism of China's policies as an act of diversion. In particular, the United States of America is accused of trying to "divert public attention" from, wait for it, America's "oil-centered foreign policy" in the Twentieth Century, and its breach of UN sanctions against apartheid South Africa.

This is cloud cuckoo ideation. The adjective asinine, which I have never had occasion to employ before, seems apposite. Who, right now, in Brazil, Bolivia or Bhutan, is concerned about the rights or wrongs of America's petroleum policy in the previous century? And who, right now, in Cape Town, Johannesburg or Pretoria, is up in arms about American sanctions busting?

To complete this intellectual debacle, the authors finish with the following paragraph:

"If there is a linkage between the Darfur crisis and Beijing Olympics, it should be in the West and China together using the spirit of the Olympics - mutual understanding, friendship, solidarity and fair competition - with their sympathetic hearts to collectively create a better future for Darfur."

When Adolf Hitler was busy cranking up genocide in Germany, the rest of the world came to his Olympic games and played, judging that the Olympic spirit trumped any worries about expendable people (Jews, gypsies, gays, Communists and dissident priests) destined for gas chambers and incinerators.

Given a choice between allowing the 2008 games to be a propaganda coup for the People's Republic of China or pining the genocide label home where it belongs, I think that we should clearly state that the 2008 Olympics is, indeed, going to be the genocide Olympics.

The two clowns who perpetrated this propaganda stunt are Jason Qian, a fellow at the Harvard Negotiation Project at Harvard Law School, and Anne Wu, a research fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.

Cheng (Jason) Qian is currently at work on "a collaborative research/training program on bridging western and eastern negotiation theories and practices."

Whether he can be considered as an independent academic in the Western sense is, to my mind, unclear. He has in the past been a part of the machinery of China's government, for we read about him the following:

"Prior to coming to the US, he was senior expert on E-governance in Ministry of Supervision of China. His work covered e-government development, organizational reform, good governance, and knowledge management."

I don't find his e-mail address on the one page about him that I downloaded, but maybe I could find it if I looked harder.

His fellow author, Xiaohui (Anne) Wu, to my surprise, has not just her e-mail address but her telephone number and fax number online. To avoid being abusive, I won't give any of that data here, even though I assume it's all just her university coordinates.

Her specialty is atomic war, so, understandably, she's currently focused on North Korea, and she's teamed up before with Jason Qian on a couple of pieces related to North Korea. A cabal of two, evidently.

The reason why she speaks like a mouthpiece of the government of the People's Republic of China is no secret. If you Google him, you can find, amongst other things, the following information:

"Prior to joining Harvard University, she was a career diplomat serving as the Director of the Political & Press Department in the Embassy of China to Singapore and the chief analyst of the Asian Department of Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China."

With that background, I'd trust her to tell me about Singapore, but not about China and Darfur.

To get a simple background briefing on Darfur I went to the Wikipedia page on the subject, which gives a useful collection of links. If you want pictures, video, details, then follow the links.

In my quest for an enlarged understanding of the Darfur issue, one of the Wikipedia links I followed led me to an article by a Muslim writer who takes issue with the notion that the conflict in Darfur is between Islamic "Arabs" and non-Islamic blacks. In his opinion, everyone on both sides of this conflict is an adherent of the Islamic faith.

He is R.S. O’Fahey, who, writing in Islamica Magazine. He is Professor of History at the University of Bergen, Norway, and he is writing in November 2006. That is the "present" of which he says the following:

"From 2003 to the present, Darfur has been subject to all the biblical woes: war, famine, rape (on a horrendous scale), looting, etc., carried out by the Arab nomad militias, the notorious janjaweed (“devils on horseback”), in conjunction with the Sudanese army. Small mountain villages built out of stone and millet stalks have been repeatedly attacked with oil barrel bombs filled with stones and pieces of metal. These are tossed from Antonov transports into the center of the villages, killing or maiming mainly women and children. These attacks are then followed by a posse of Janjaweed horsemen charging in to rape or kill survivors, a policy that has been absolutely lethal.

"It is difficult for outsiders to comprehend the sheer scale of death, destruction and misery in Darfur. Visiting the IDP camps in 2005 was traumatic; I have a 5-year-old Sudanese grandson in Oslo, Norway, but the 5-year olds in the camps looked nothing like my Bushra.

"Khartoum has kept the Western media largely out while the Arab media seems to be generally indifferent. Why is the latter the case? Why are Muslims not more vocal about what is happening in Darfur?"

This is the truth of what is happening on the ground in Darfur. The news in recent months has all been of things getting worse, not getting better, so this situation is obviously neither self-healing nor self-limiting. Hence the growing concern of the wider world, when it does not have its attention firmly focused on other issues, such as the upcoming movie about the Simpsons, or the release of the latest Harry Potter book.

I confess, at this juncture, that I, for my part, have spent more time in the last few months reading about Paris Hilton and her escapades than about the more serious issues that beset the world. But I assume that I am not alone in sining thus.