(Tue, Dec 05, 2006)
These people are never going to make NaNoWriMo. "It's a 2095-word story published exclusively in tattoos, one word at a time, on the skin of volunteers." That's right. They call it "a mortal work of art." Which makes me imagine the story shrinking randomly, quickly losing coherence, until some sentence like "dog fantastic truck" is all that remains of it, inked onto the wrists of three geezers rocking back and forth on some rest-home porch.
(Mon, Dec 18, 2006)
I don't know if it's the new beta or whatever but Blogger has begun doing many things never authorized. So I'm back to using my own post-monkey app. RSS handlers may need to be updated since I'm returning from Atom to RSS 2.0.
(Mon, Dec 25, 2006)
Ah, Christmas in Coventry! The crisp air, the bustling shoppers, drunken santas staggering guided by the Misfit Protector over sheets of ice and through loitering teenagers, piles of recent holiday suicides growing pungent, the bright bows around the hats of merry carolers, my sixth favorite time of year! And what of my grinning neighbors?
Dr. Jones has been industriously clanking away in his laboratory cum garage on his new project (it's what retirement will do to an otherwise angry soul). He's decided he's sick of bilaterally symmetrical automobiles, so he's building one in the style of the Millennium Falcon: driver's seat way out in front in its own little pod, passenger section in the middle, guns on top. He's making slow progress though for lack of major parts (hyperdrive, etc), and the mostly clumsy suit of transparent body armor the bad doctor has taken to wearing at all times. The armor is made from a material so refractive you can see right through his skin to the organs and muscle and fat and fluids and bone beneath -- and it's disconcerting enough to make most people run away screaming, allowing Jones to go wherever he pleases. Most evenings he dines alone in ordinarily busy restaurants (prepares the food alone too), like a north magnetic monopole lounging about in a north magnetic monopole world. Or something like that.
Meanwhile, Beefy Lou has become fabulously wealthy due to an IRS error. He knows they'll eventually realize their mistake and come after him, but that could be a year from now, or five years, and let's face it, there's not all that much time left anyway (mere moments on the slim margin of life left before the walls come down and the barbarian hoards rush in gibbering their strange tongues and clanging their breastplates with anthrax tipped Russian-made spears, or so Lou is convinced). So in the meantime he's living the American Dream. He's rented the seven apartments adjacent to his own and bribed Sally the Complex Manager to let him knock out some walls, install stairs and doorways, an elevator, a bowling alley, a swimming pool, a terrace. Big comfy furnishings abound in there, a couch that can drown an average sized man (and has -- it killed Teddy Klink last week, bones still unaccounted for, stench palpable), a phalanx of easy-chairs with a four-door refrigerator at its center. He's gotten himself dozens of wall-sized televisions thin as paper and draped them onto every vertical surface as wallpaper, a gaggle of his own live-in women (from the Ukraine I think), diamond encrusted slippers, an ivory backscratcher. He spends most of his time drunk and rowdy, throwing lavish parties. It's like Hugh Heffner exploded in there and splattered everything with his sensibilities. Which is no less disgusting that it sounds.
ZXC meanwhile has changed careers again to become a full-time Beefy Lou thief; he steals half the stuff Lou buys with his IRS money, and fences it into currency. There are big green rolls of it in his pants pockets, like a double-barreled [bleeper] (so says ZXC, who lacks the holiday spirit). The fence, a Miss USA candidate named Pudwig, can't keep up with it all, and has to outsource to a pair of thugs known only as The Bad One and The Bad Two, who sell most of it back to Beefy Lou, who doesn't know it's stolen from himself. Dr. Jones calls it the perfect model of a real economy.
It's all petty like the politics of hamsters to Sally the Complex Manager, who sits atop her quondam throne in Complex Control and regally summons her minions for long sessions of overstated hubris, sometimes three times a day. (They mill about and pretend to listen, most reading magazines, playing portable game consoles, or rolling dice in the back corner behind the plastic ficus.) A crown of carved jade in emerald waves beneath ruby sailing vessels sits atop Sally's powdered brow, enmeshed in the leaves of her burnished hair, looking much like a little Christmas tree twinkling with the tiny lights of reflection from the ten-thousand candles that typically illuminate that palace of doldrums. A glare from one crazed eye upon her Master-at-Arms, Captain Zogwort, the other eye off searching for assassins or relations come to beg holiday gifts or a place to sleep that night, and a demand for the head of Flash Gordon, for a mightier army, for the royal jester dead these seven years now following a fit of pique over an improperly executed Who's on First, and suddenly there's a moment of tension. Captain Zogwort knows to keep his eyes low, his posture impervious, and his words restricted to obsequious grunts of presumable submission. In an hour she will forget whatever she's said here, and in another hour will repeat it. It's the Dance of the Bureaucracy, the bit parts off in the background by the fake piles of snow and the stage trees, humbly enacting memorized motions while Sally wiggles ever onward out in front. A pint of brown microbrew and a plate of orange chicken wings will probably help him recover from it.
And the children zigzag on plastic sheets, hurl snowballs at passing cars, block roads with felled trees, all in the hopes that St. Nicholas soon will be there, so they can rob him, tie him up, murder him for trinkets, build a cage with his bones, and dance, dance, dance.
Merry Christmas!
Dr. Jones has been industriously clanking away in his laboratory cum garage on his new project (it's what retirement will do to an otherwise angry soul). He's decided he's sick of bilaterally symmetrical automobiles, so he's building one in the style of the Millennium Falcon: driver's seat way out in front in its own little pod, passenger section in the middle, guns on top. He's making slow progress though for lack of major parts (hyperdrive, etc), and the mostly clumsy suit of transparent body armor the bad doctor has taken to wearing at all times. The armor is made from a material so refractive you can see right through his skin to the organs and muscle and fat and fluids and bone beneath -- and it's disconcerting enough to make most people run away screaming, allowing Jones to go wherever he pleases. Most evenings he dines alone in ordinarily busy restaurants (prepares the food alone too), like a north magnetic monopole lounging about in a north magnetic monopole world. Or something like that.
Meanwhile, Beefy Lou has become fabulously wealthy due to an IRS error. He knows they'll eventually realize their mistake and come after him, but that could be a year from now, or five years, and let's face it, there's not all that much time left anyway (mere moments on the slim margin of life left before the walls come down and the barbarian hoards rush in gibbering their strange tongues and clanging their breastplates with anthrax tipped Russian-made spears, or so Lou is convinced). So in the meantime he's living the American Dream. He's rented the seven apartments adjacent to his own and bribed Sally the Complex Manager to let him knock out some walls, install stairs and doorways, an elevator, a bowling alley, a swimming pool, a terrace. Big comfy furnishings abound in there, a couch that can drown an average sized man (and has -- it killed Teddy Klink last week, bones still unaccounted for, stench palpable), a phalanx of easy-chairs with a four-door refrigerator at its center. He's gotten himself dozens of wall-sized televisions thin as paper and draped them onto every vertical surface as wallpaper, a gaggle of his own live-in women (from the Ukraine I think), diamond encrusted slippers, an ivory backscratcher. He spends most of his time drunk and rowdy, throwing lavish parties. It's like Hugh Heffner exploded in there and splattered everything with his sensibilities. Which is no less disgusting that it sounds.
ZXC meanwhile has changed careers again to become a full-time Beefy Lou thief; he steals half the stuff Lou buys with his IRS money, and fences it into currency. There are big green rolls of it in his pants pockets, like a double-barreled [bleeper] (so says ZXC, who lacks the holiday spirit). The fence, a Miss USA candidate named Pudwig, can't keep up with it all, and has to outsource to a pair of thugs known only as The Bad One and The Bad Two, who sell most of it back to Beefy Lou, who doesn't know it's stolen from himself. Dr. Jones calls it the perfect model of a real economy.
It's all petty like the politics of hamsters to Sally the Complex Manager, who sits atop her quondam throne in Complex Control and regally summons her minions for long sessions of overstated hubris, sometimes three times a day. (They mill about and pretend to listen, most reading magazines, playing portable game consoles, or rolling dice in the back corner behind the plastic ficus.) A crown of carved jade in emerald waves beneath ruby sailing vessels sits atop Sally's powdered brow, enmeshed in the leaves of her burnished hair, looking much like a little Christmas tree twinkling with the tiny lights of reflection from the ten-thousand candles that typically illuminate that palace of doldrums. A glare from one crazed eye upon her Master-at-Arms, Captain Zogwort, the other eye off searching for assassins or relations come to beg holiday gifts or a place to sleep that night, and a demand for the head of Flash Gordon, for a mightier army, for the royal jester dead these seven years now following a fit of pique over an improperly executed Who's on First, and suddenly there's a moment of tension. Captain Zogwort knows to keep his eyes low, his posture impervious, and his words restricted to obsequious grunts of presumable submission. In an hour she will forget whatever she's said here, and in another hour will repeat it. It's the Dance of the Bureaucracy, the bit parts off in the background by the fake piles of snow and the stage trees, humbly enacting memorized motions while Sally wiggles ever onward out in front. A pint of brown microbrew and a plate of orange chicken wings will probably help him recover from it.
And the children zigzag on plastic sheets, hurl snowballs at passing cars, block roads with felled trees, all in the hopes that St. Nicholas soon will be there, so they can rob him, tie him up, murder him for trinkets, build a cage with his bones, and dance, dance, dance.
Merry Christmas!