It’s 4am and I’m trying to get to sleep.
I have a non-schedule. It’s almost like I don’t have circadian rythms. I’m here in my little house, a sort of alien outpost from a planet where people sleep whenever they think it’s a good idea, smack dab in the middle of the highly regulated collective circadian rythm of suburbia.
24 hours ago, I was waking up from about 5 hours of sleep. I went to the grocery store, because I needed to buy some stuff, and, frankly, there was nothing else to do. So I wandered in. There was one car in the parking lot, but the store was very busy with shelves being stocked and produce being loaded, and all kinds of stuff like that. Huge tall palettes of packaged foods filling the back row, turning it into a maze. A flurry of activity before the wave of morning customers.
Things are often like that. You’d assume, entering an empty quiet grocery store at 6am, that it’s been empty and quiet all night. Little do you realize that the Grocery Elves were there just a few hours ago.
Via Tom Tomorrow, it’s a link to an article in the New York Press which has this description of the rehab clinic where Rush Limbaugh is currently residing:
From “psychodynamic role-playing and yoga” to “adventure therapy,” “Climbing Wall,” “the desert experience” and “equine-assisted therapy” (yes, bonding with horses), Limbaugh may just think he died and went to “feminazi” hell. The website depicts photos of people with a decidedly Berkeley look sitting around on the floor in what seem like consciousness-raising sessions. Picture Rush holding his fellow travelers’ hands and singing Kumbayah. Surely he’ll be reciting a line from the very president he lambasted for years: “I feel your pain.” How many on the right would have thought that Bill Clinton would be getting the last chuckle, out there aiding his feminazi wife’s successful political career while their man Rush is wandering the desert reciting New Age mantras?“Self-discovery often crystallizes during an experience that requires physical and mental exertion in the face of a potentially fearful activity,” the description for the Climbing Wall says. “With its height and verticality, the Climbing Wall serves as an important therapeutic metaphor.”
We here at the Homepage of the Brave wish Rush well, but we also can’t help but giggling.
[..]
Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us? Does the U.S. need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists?
The U.S. is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists’ costs of millions. Do we need a new organization? How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools? Is our current situation such that “the harder we work, the behinder we get”?
[..]
– leaked memo from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, October 16, 2003
GOVERNOR: Holy underware! Sheriff murdered! Innocent women and children blown to bits! We’ve got to protect our phony baloney jobs, gentlemen. We must do something about this, immediately, immediately, immediately!
ALL: Harrumph! Harrumph! Harrumph! Harrumph! Harrumph!
GOVERNOR: I didn’t get a ‘harrumph’ out of that guy!
HEDLEY LAMARR: Give the governor harrumph!
REPORTER: Harrumph!
GOVERNOR: You watch your ass.
– ‘Blazing Saddles’
So I wrenched my back out a couple weeks ago by standing in a shower. How embarrassing.
Yesterday I torqued my knee standing on a ladder, cleaning the rain gutters. Am I getting, like… OLD or something?
Speaking of the rain gutters, Seattle had 5 inches of rain a couple days ago. FIVE. The most rain in a day ever, since they’ve been keeping track. The whole region has had flooding problems, which is really unusual, but hardest hit have been the bigger rivers, like the Skagit. For instance, here’s what NOAA says (Concrete is a town at the top end of the Skagit valley. Above it the river runs through an alpine gorge, for the most part):
WAC057-230100-
SKAGIT RIVER BASIN
1045 AM PDT WED OCT 22 2003
SKAGIT RIVER NEAR CONCRETE...
FLOOD STAGE: 28.0 FEET. LATEST READING: 31.7 FEET AT 1030 AM.
FORECAST: CRESTED AT A RECORD 42.2 FEET AROUND 6 AM
TUESDAY. RECEDING BUT REMAINING ABOVE FLOOD STAGE
THROUGH AT LEAST THURSDAY MORNING.
SKAGIT RIVER NEAR MOUNT VERNON...
FLOOD STAGE: 28.0 FEET. LATEST READING: 35.2 FEET AT 715 AM.
FORECAST: CRESTED NEAR 36.2 FEET AROUND MIDNIGHT.
RECEDING BUT REMAINING ABOVE FLOOD STAGE
THROUGH THURSDAY AFTERNOON.
THE CREST ON THE SKAGIT AT CONCRETE WAS A RECORD HIGH CREST. SEVERE
FLOODING CONDITIONS ALONG THE SKAGIT WILL IMPROVE TODAY.
People had to be evacuated, there was mayhem and destruction, so on and so forth.
I have to say I feel partially responsible. A few ‘blogs back, I reminisced about the fun and excitement of severe weather. ‘Careful what you wish for,’ the saying goes.
Personally, I suffered no ill-effect, since I live on a hill, and the drainage systems in this part of town are well-designed. I did get forceful reminder that I needed to clean out the rain gutters, however, with tremendous amounts of runoff splattering on my front porch. I also had to take a detour to go shopping, because a low bridge over a creek was under water. Such a hardship.
Read this. Commentary later.
‘Marred’ indeed. Somewhere between Gilliam’s ‘Brazil’ and Heller’s ‘Catch-22.’
THE STOVEPIPEby SEYMOUR M. HERSH
How conflicts between the Bush Administration and the intelligence community marred the reporting on Iraq’s weapons.
If you know me, you know what I always say: “The day is not full until you’ve heckled amateur magicians in a mall food court.”
Today I’ve had a full day.
When I entered the food court, I heard the spooky/cheesy organ music emanating from the area of the stage. I thought, ‘Hmm. Halloween presentation, perhaps?’ See, this mall is one where various community groups put on presentations on a stage in the food court. It’s a pretty cool thing, usually.
But there was this music, and then I ordered my burrito, and sat at a table and started reading the alternative news weekly, waiting for them to bring me my food.
While I was waiting, the music stopped, and a tedious magician came out and started doing an involved card trick. He was doing the whole esoteric magician schtick, with a polysyllabic pseudonym of indeterminate eastern-European origin. Dressed in black, bald-headed with black goatee… The whole thing. And he was going on and on (and on and on and on) about the spiritual reality of a deck of playing cards. His act was ‘is this your card?’ dressed up as some kind of spirit reading. It might have been entertaining if I wasn’t waiting for a burrito.
So he finished, and my burrito came. Herr Magick introduced the next act, a pair of highschool-aged boys who really, profoundly sucked. They didn’t have a rap, they didn’t have anything. They were just there in suits to do a magic trick. I tried to ignore them, but they were amplified. Their delivery was poor enough, however, that I could only make out the occassional word or phrase.
I heard: “[blah blah blah blah blah] death defying [blah blah] stunt double [blah blah] introduce… Goliath the Wonder Budgie!” I glanced over. He was holding up a yellow budgie. I also saw a blender on a stool, center stage. I had only eaten about three bites of my burrito, and realized I wasn’t going to be able to eat any more.
It isn’t that I’m unsophisticated about this stuff. I knew exactly where this trick was going. I knew that it was, in fact, a trick. They were going to pretend to put the budgie in the blender and turn it on. Something disgusting would happen, and then the bird would be revealed as whole later on. But it hadn’t occurred to me, while I was ordering food, at a food court in a mall, that someone would come along and pretend to put a budgie in a blender before I could, for instance, get my food to go.
So I sat there for a while, waiting for their act to end so I could maybe go on eating later. They did a really awful slight-of-hand transfer of the bird to a cone of paper which was then placed in the blender. They did the kind of banter a pair of teenagers would do, joking about budgie soup and so forth. Their game was to leave the budgie in the blender for as long as possible before turning it on, because that’s where the anticipation is. I sat there, looking at my burrito, wondering if it was made of previous unlucky budgies. It went on forever and ever and ever.
The resentment grew and grew. These twits had just sacrified my dinner for their utterly predictable, amateurish, unending magic trick. They could have had the common courtesy to at least be good.
Finally, I rose from my chair, made my way closer to the stage and the audience, and yelled, “Hey! Some of us are trying to eat over here!” They turned to look at me. One of them came back, “Not after we’re done!” Groans from the food court, giggles from the audience. I raised my middle finger at them. Shot the bird, so to speak.
Then I realized… There are little kids in this audience. I had assumed there weren’t, because I hadn’t seen any, and… you know.. the folks on stage were dealing in budgie puree. But there were, and I had just shot the bird at someone in front of them.
I guess that was my contribution to community involvement, there at the twenty-first century commons.
Anyway. They went back to their act, I went back to my table, sure in the knowledge that I had, to some degree or another, trainwrecked their act. The next magician on the stage made reference to the fact, as well… “I make it a policy never to follow something like that, but… well, here we are.” The burrito fared better than the fake budgie guts in the blender, in that it was never masticated.
Fast forward to the end of the show (I didn’t get to eat my burrito, so I migh as well try and enjoy the other acts, who were actually pretty decent). The audience applauds, the curtains fall. Who approaches the girl sitting behind me but one of the budgie-killers! He recognizes me. I have to say something.
“Nice job of putting me off my burrito.”
“Sure thing. Thanks for flipping us off.”
“No problem.”
Exeunt.
