If there was ever anything on YouTube that screamed “LJ Icons,” it’s HAPPY MORNING!
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You may all help yourselves.
Monthly Archive for June, 2006
I’m turning myself in. By the time you read this, I’ll probably either be on my way to Gitmo, or successfully flushed by the Bush Administration down Winston Smith’s Memory Hole. You see, I’m guilty of exactly the same thing the seven alleged “terraists” in Florida have been accused of.
I admit it, I’ve plotted crimes. I’ve even conspired with other people about them. I’m guilty of plans to blow up skyscrapers, rob banks, murder, wage religious war, and most recently, pull off a Columbine-style school shooting. And I’ve gotten about as far in all those schemes as the Liberty Seven have.
You see, I’m a writer.
That’s right. I write sketches, plays, novels, and short little humorous snippets. And a number of them entail acts similar to what the Liberty Seven (as they are fast becoming known) are accused of plotting.
For my most recent novel, Rumpled Trenchcoats and Rubber Bullets (currently looking for a publisher), I meticulously laid out a plan for four boys to pull off a school shooting, take on fake identities, and escape across the Canadian border. I went through enough detail in my planning (so it would show in their planning) that I could conceivably do the same exact thing myself. Of course, I have neither the means nor the desire to do so, but I’ve still plotted it.
And yes, I conspired with others in this plotting. They’re members of those insidious creations, writers’ groups. We sat around tables, quietly sipping coffee (although not singing the Folger’s “Happy Morning” song as we did so), and discussed how my boys could conceivably get away with their crime. We also discussed how one writer’s doctor could successfully head off a tuleremia outbreak, and how another’s protagonist could kill the man who turned her into a vampire.
These kinds of actions must not be tolerated!
What do we know about the Liberty Seven? They were seven people pissed off at George Bush and his little war of aggression, like my friends and I are. They talked theoretically about how to pull off terrorist acts. So have we. And they acted on….
…huh? They didn’t act?
Well, they were stockpiling arms and bombs and….
…huh? They weren’t?
Well, they were preparing to….
…huh? They hadn’t made any preparations at all?
Gee, maybe I’m even more guilty than they are! Crap! Come and get me, Georgie! I’m at work right now, so I’ll be easy to find.
All we really know is that they had ideas. We all have ideas. And an FBI agent, possibly even an agent provocateur, “infiltrated” their group and got wind of their schemes. He claimed to be connected to al Quaeda, and offered them help. After that, it’s all hearsay. They’d done nothing but talk. My crime is worse: I committed my thoughts to paper.
Ladies and Gentlemen, barring some huge discovery (and from what we’ve been told, there won’t be one) these seven people are guilty of nothing but thoughtcrime. When the mere thought of how to pull off a crime becomes enough of an excuse for an FBI agent to smash down your door, without knocking I might add (thanks Sammy Alito!), and haul you away, we are setting the bar dangerously low. My discussions last year with a theater friend about doing a production of Julius Caesar in modern dress and with “Caesar/Pompey” election posters in the “Bush/Cheney” font suddenly becomes plotting the assassination of our Fearless Leader.
Think twice, while you still can think. Do we really want to go down this road?
Consider it carefully, George, because by these standards you’re going to have to arrest your own mother. If she is like any other pregnant woman I know of, when she first discovered she was carrying you the idea of an abortion briefly passed her mind, most likely for only a split second but passed nonetheless. That’s a retroactive attempt to kill the President of the United States.
At least by the standards you’re setting with the Liberty Seven, it is.
We can talk about it more when you come to pick me up. 40 West Landis Avenue, Vineland, NJ. My assistant manager is prepared to take over when you arrest me. But he’s a writer, too, so maybe I’d better call in some backup. Oh, the things you have to worry about as a small businessman.
This is just one example of why I love The Mike Malloy Show!
Dear reckless asshole:
I am a big booster of safety, and do believe in sharing the road. I especially appreciate your decision to use your own motive power instead of fossil fuels. But for the sake of all that is holy in this world, I beg of you
RIDE WITH THE FLOW OF TRAFFIC, NOT AGAINST IT!
Not only is it the law in the State of New Jersey, and most other states, too, but there are some basic, sensible reasons for doing this.
- I am bigger than you.
- I am faster than you.
- I will suffer a lot less damage than you in our collision.
Thus it is infinitely more important that I see you than you see me!
If you are riding against the flow of traffic, you will be able to see the cars coming towards you, but you will be cutting down on both your own and the driver’s reaction times, believe it or not, which makes it more likely that a car will hit you before you can swerve out of its path.
Let me explain this somewhat scientifically. Here you are:
…and here I am:
(In the interests of verisimilitude, the surly guy hanging on to the back quarter panel may not be riding along with me all the time.)
Now, let’s say you come turning our of a driveway, right into my line of traffic, going five miles an hour (not unreasonable with some of the people I’ve seen on bikes). I’m proceeding at 25 miles an hour. You are 50 feet ahead of me.
Normally, if you were sitting still, this would give me a little over one and a quarter seconds to swerve and avoid you. However, your forward motion during that same time would carry you ten feet closer to me, shaving a quarter second off the time available to me. Any driving instructor will tell you that more than half of that will be eaten up by my eyes telling my brain you are there, and then my brain telling my foot to slam the brake or my hands to swerve.
Now, let’s pretend that you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing, and travelling WITH the flow of traffic, and we’re going the same speeds.
With 50 feet between us, I have my second and a quarter. But, by the time I get to where you were, you’ll be an extra ten feet ahead of me. Thus, more reaction time, more margin for error.
It’s that simple. Riding with the flow keeps you alive. Riding against the flow, you’re taking a big risk. Keep yourself alive. Follow the law.
Thank you.
I’ve got a cute idea for an upcoming week of The New Adventures of Queen Victoria but it necessitates some actual artwork.
I know a couple people on my Friends List are aspiring or actual manga artists. I’d like a couple of manga poses of Victoria, Edward, Liz, Maurice, and Mary. Nothing fancy, pretty much just manga-style versions of my usual poses, maybe one of them (like Liz) would work superdeformed, too. I’ll cut and paste much the way I do right now to keep the spirit of the strip intact.
I don’t have much to offer right now, but I will make sure proper credit is given, and if the book of collected strips becomes a reality next year, I’ll make sure you’re compensated for the use of your artwork.
Thanks in advance. I hope I can pull this one off.
I’ll let
Anyhow, one thing I found going through the box of stuff from my mother’s trash pile was a box of tapes from my college days, most of them unlabelled. Or, at least, not properly labelled. They had little tags like “Washington Journal” or “Voices Of Our World.” Back in the days before CD-R’s (heck, before the ubiquity of CD players even) a lot of radio shows, especially little low budget ones, were distributed on cassettes to affiliates. WSBU was signed up with a number of them that never got played, unless the overnight DJ didn’t show up and something needed to go on the air quick. Those tapes would pile up in the production room, and if you needed to record something really quickly, you grabbed one.
I was in the habit of recording my show every morning onto two 120 minute cassettes. At the end of each hour, I would stop the tape, fast forward to the next side (or switch tapes as needed) and start over right before the start of the next hour. Sometimes, unfortunately, if the show ran slightly late, part of it would get cut off as the tape stopped or auto-reversed to the next side.
A Monday morning in 1990, I don’t remember the exact day, Jennifer Comerford, Brian Sanger, P.J. Adams, and I were finishing up my show and segueing into P.J.’s. We were doing a segment I had ripped off of John DeBella where we read messages from listeners (or ourselves if we came up short) over the end of Monty Python’s “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life.” I scribbled the messages and handed them over to the news booth for Jen and Brian to read in the middle of the song.
My handwriting, if anything, was worse back then. Especially if I was in a hurry.
On the “official” tapes, which I’ve long since lost track of, side A of that tape ends with me throwing it over to Jen to read the first message. The next side started with all of us cracking up laughing, barely able to read the remaining messages. What you didn’t hear was Jen flub the message “Again, Brenda, ‘click.’” She misconstrued my CL as a lowercase d.
For years, I had thought that this unique moment was lost forever. However, one of the tapes labelled “Voices Of Our World” had a Bright Side segment on it, and it turned out to be the infamous one. Uncut and uninterrupted.
I had no idea I had that tape in my collection. I must have been running two tapes for some reason, or recording off-air in Production as well as the air studio, and didn’t realize I had recorded this segment I thought was lost.
Nothing remarkable, but still nice to find out I still had it.
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