Hooray! My email is down!
And my JOB today was "answer email."
PRAISE "BOB"! MY JOB QUIT ME!
Actually I can answer and/or refile the stacked up email, I just can't send the replies or get new mail. I can do web browsing and probably newsgroups. I looked at my ISP's website and sure enough, they have been having some kind of drastic email problem that culminated last night. Their status report was full of all manner of blubbering about how they're sorry, and serving email through cable modem stuff is harder than dial-up, byeh byeh byeh. Maybe I should switch to DSL. They cost the same. It's just that word around town is that the DSL companies are all liars and take forever to get you up and running.
But then, everything mechanical seems fucked up this week. Must be those pesky sunspots again. The transmissions on Wei's car and my mummified Mazda both started leaking. Her video cam died, froze up in the process of ejecting a tape. I mean STOVE UP SOLID. Her printer... can't spew black inkjet ink no matter how many auto-cleans we tried. Oh, and my main stereo video deck. Eject mechanism broke. And the garage window. Misery and pane.
Since I couldn't do my JOB, email, I looked at the news. Everything there was fucked up. Of course. It's NEWS. A fellow minister in our Church, Rev. Paul Reubens, aka Pee Wee Hermann, had had his COLLECTION of COOL SHIT hauled away by the LA police -- who WILL steal from it -- because somebody told them he had child porno, or something that could be stretched to fit that description, which no doubt he DOES, in some nook or cranny of a place like that. I haven't been there, but I can well imagine from the descriptions. I know LA SubGenii who are kitch collectors, who know him, and there WAS probably EVERYTHING COOL in there. Like a Noah's Ark of bulldada. And fucked up weird magazines and bizarre-ass videos. Like you probably have, only a lot more of it. Ironically, the Vatican has a larger collection of pornography than anyone, they say.
It got me to thinking, okay, when the trumped up IRS and Treasury search of MY house happens, what would they be able to ferret out to make me look like an evildoer? Not MONEY or hidden tax assets. Certainly nothing political -- looking at my browser history they'd see I was just a snoop, like them, skimming crackpots and know it alls of every variety. They'd be able to find plenty of porno, but the magazines all came from convenience stores and are over 8 years old, and the Internet porno is nothing but porky ordinary amateurs trying to look sexy like Normal Models do. They might find that one naked picture of my son when he was 3, and come to think of it, there was a woman in N. Ohio who almost went to prison because she had nude photos of her own children, playing in wading pools etc. (Imagine what the Cleveland Art Museum has in its basement in the way of old paintings of naked flying cherub boys!)
They could look at my website and my email and they'd find a load of sarcastic and non sarcastic material about terrorism and the war -- they might even find documents questioning the official reasons for the war. Hmmmm. In my house they'd find a GUN, too. And PIPES!! A buttload of pipes. There's a whole Pipe museum. Literally, God only knows what "Bob" was smoking in those Pipes. The bowls smell like it was cheap tobacco, though.
What would they find in YOUR house, my friend? Sure, you probably aren't rich like Pee Wee, so your collection isn't as big. And you're probably not a Jewish Liberal homosexual who had a popular kid's show and acted silly on it, WITH IMPUNITY for awhile, thus contributing to the "Pee Wee-ization" of America, so The National Enquirer and The Drudge Report aren't going to care about "GETTING" you.
But what WOULD they find?
***
ASTRONOMERS LOCATE HELL IN OUTER SPACE!
And also in the news, astronomers not only detected a new PLANET at a star 150 light years away, but they were able to get a reading on its ATMOSPHERE!
But the reason for them being able to detect it is that it's a broiling Jupiter-like gas giant orbiting so close to its star that it must be hotter than Modemac on a Saturday night. Not likely to be the foretold Pleasure Dimension Zero of Planet X.
But from what I also read, our own planet's atmosphere has been all riled up, and apparently half the country is freezing their asses off suddenly. Here in Northern Ohio, it remained unseasonably warm -- but we're subject to this incredible imported foreign Lady Bug infestation. I hear much of the Eastern US has this problem. Wei just got back from New Orleans, and they're down there too -- worse! No shit, any area beneath a lightbulb here is littered with Lady Bug corpses. (I suppose we COULD clean them up, but...) Lord knows what they lived on until they died. Every aphid in America must have been devoured. So what of the aphid farming ants? They'll starve. And then the Last Horny Toad will starve because the only ants left to eat are Fire Ants... which eat HIM. It is SO SAD. The last Horny Toad.
And then... and then... WHAT OF THE WILD PRAIRIE SQUID? What is to become of THEM? And when the Prairie Squid vanishes, so vanishes the SubGenius.
My friends, it's like the classic science fiction novel by John Brunner, STAND ON ZANZIBAR. It's all come true.
BUT WE'LL KEEP PLUGGING ON, IN and AWAY UNTIL THE SAUCERS GET HERE!! 'Cause the next book in the "science fiction" section at Borders that's gonna come true is REVELATION X!! And it'll be ABOUT TIME!
I am WAY behind because of a critical illness in my most immediate family -- I had to go home to Texas very unexpectedly for a week. (The family member is recovering well now.)å
I am also behind because, since I was suddenly able to borrow a digital HandyCam for transfers of old analog tapes, I started to learn video editting programs on my computer. I KNEW this would happen -- when I finally started, I couldn't STOP. Even with a huge ACE thanksgiving party going on nearby, and with SubGenius visitors at my house (Prostata & Joy, Lil & Thea), I STILL couldn't resist running upstairs every half hour and adding just that ONE MORE DISSOLVE or that ONE MORE SUBTITLE to my Burning Man home movies, which is what I was practicing the editing on. (I finished it in 36 hours. Or left it alone then.)
Since then I've been trying to catch up on Hours of Slack, and a lot of media transfering -- videos of last year's devivals, pulling audio off them which has lain dormant until now. Blind Lemon in Cleveland, Starwood 01, Strange Daze, Amsterdam. Tampa. Tucson. There was some KILLER ranting in those, and finally my High 8 tapes aren't the ONLY copies.
Also, I took that psychedelic background-video collage that we use at Devivals, broke it into 3 minute chunks, and slapped SubGenius music with them, which (needless to say) magically linked up as if the picture had deliberately been edited to match the music. Two St. N-Hellena Handbasket songs, "Instant Instructions" and "Total Faith", and 2 by The El Queso All Stars, "Planet X or Bust" and "Save Your Soul for "Bob." (Copies are going to the arteests this week.)
I have been methodically transfering certain SubGenius video clips to various small web-friendly formats -- MPEG, RM, Quicktime -- and uploading them to alt.binaries.slack. I am uploading one of each format, because we learned after a test and survey that each of the dozen respondents were only able to play ONE of the 3 formats offered.
They don't make a DivX converter for Macintoshes. If somebody wants to convert these 3 minute DV masters (on CD, 700 mb each) to DivX, you're welcome to 'em.
Needless to say, SubSITE has languished, but don't worry, I have to return that borrowed video camera so I'll have to cease my obsessive compulsive video editing.
Also we are totally renovating our mail order. This will be about the last week you'll be able to buy the CDs, CDRs and video tapes (besides ARISE) from the main SubSITE catalog. After that, you'll only be able to get them directly from me, and only if I feel like it.
Then there are the JOB-jobs for Pinks that I'm gonna have to GET so I'll be able to repair or replace this van when it finally conks out for good. I can't BELIEVE I kept that Mazda running this long, though. It's from 1990. Looks it. NO self respecting thief would bother. In fact, I kept it on the street in a Cleveland ghetto neighborhood for 2 years, crammed with all my camping gear, and it was never touched. Hidden right out in the open.
***
WIRED Magazine has an article that says there's an outbreak of autism in Silicon Valley due to nerds marrying nerds and having little double-nerd kids who are like RAIN MAN.
According to this article, about half of us SubGenii have Asperger's syndrome, the name for a type of autism that doesn't make you retarded intellectually, in fact it makes you capable of fantastic mental feats and geekery. But it retards you socially. We all know lots of people, perhaps our very selves, with high IQs but shrivelled little raisin-like EQs or Emotional Quotients -- know-it-alls who don't have a clue, so to speak. A thousand variations on The Simpson's Comic Book Guy. Known all over the Internet but without a single friend who would help them salvage the place if their house ever burned down, for instance. The ambulatory and indeed often highly paid mentally ill, with great jobs in software or engineering but who can't seem to get even one date, not even with a HOOKER.
There is a cute little Asperger's syndrome test in the Wired mag; if you score high, you may have it. I was afraid to try the test. I skimmed the thing and a lot of the questions might as well have been right out of our WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING questionairre. I DON'T EVEN WANT TO KNOW.
I am a pretty severe geek, but I PROBABLY don't have Asperger's syndome. For one thing, I'm not capable of mental gymnastics -- I have to read the instructions to get anything to work -- and for another, I have plenty of friends. Then there are the people who HATE MY GUTS, but they all have Asperger's syndrome and EVERYBODY hates THEM. The poor AntiStangians. I pity them, actually. Denied the light of my attention... so sad. At least some of them still have "Bob." Can't get rid of him in fact. FLEEING "Bob"... and the faster they go, the more tenaciously he DIGS IN. And it ain't even "Bob" doing it... it's just their own overworked little brains. Trying to AVOID Slack.
Do you have Asperger's syndrome, my friend? Are you an Emergentile only about your own Rewardianism?
Is your computer or secret attic chest full of things that could conceivably be construed, in a court of law in a time of war, as illegal pornography? Or seditious literature?
Did LOOMPANICS send you review copies of all their books on lockpicking, changing your identity, revenge, other survivalist stuff... you didn't order them or read 'em, they're all in a box in the basement, but THEY'D BE FOUND, wouldn't they? And what of all those UNDERGROUND COMIX from the 60s and 70s? ZAP, YOUNG LUST, etc.? Clearly just satire, goofy hippie funny book shit, but you KNOW there are pages among them that some hick cop from Parma would take one look at and say, "AHA! I found it! CHALD POE-NOGGERFEE!"
When they come with a warrant and CART AWAY all your shit, and the thing they use to prove you're a CHILD RAPER is your DIVINE EXCUSE CERTIFICATE?
But here's what chilled my old froze bones. I was copying the sound from devival videos. At one of these devivals in 2000, I was just Spouting off the top of my head, not from notes. The Egypt Air crash had happened -- apparently a crazed religious nut Egypt Air pilot had crashed the whole plane load of innocents into the ocean while muttering about the Will of Allah. I was talking about it on the tape. Imagine my horror when I heard coming out of my own recorded mouth a completely facetious joke statement about what to do INSTEAD with an airliner if you're a religious nut pilot. Something about the New York Stock Exchange, let me put it that way. Hey, the movie FIGHT CLUB had just come out, it was a reference to the end of that movie. I am pretty sure I'm the only person who recorded that devival, and you can be equally sure that THAT video copy is now buried so many miles away that NO HUMAN will ever find it.
Also, please erase anything you may have recorded of us joking about the Church's 5 H-bombs and Disneyland. I hope that wasn't in REVELATION X. That was all a SICK JOKE and it isn't funny anymore. There, I said it. You can record THAT. We don't really have any H-bombs and none of us could afford to get into Disneyland anyway.
We DO have 5 strings of Black Cat Firecrackers that we want to blow up at Burning Man, but we'll make sure to ask a Ranger and get a permit first. Oh yes, and we were told we could launch one bottle rocket at X-Day. But only if we aren't Ruptured. And Burning Man is AFTER X-Day.
So I guess we won't be using those Black Cats or that bottle rocket after all.
--
4th Stangian Orthodox MegaFisTemple Lodge of the Wrath
of Dobbs Yeti,
Resurrected
P.O. Box 181417, Cleveland, OH 44118 (fax 216-320-9528)
A subsidiary of:
The SubGenius Foundation, Inc. / P.O. Box 140306, Dallas,
TX 75214
SubSITE: http://www.subgenius.com PRABOB
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Subject: Re: Stang Corporate Report 11-27-01
From: Botrytis Affected <bendouglass@cheerful.com>
bob "fucking" Dobbs, I thought this WAS going
to be a REAL corporate report.
Shit on a wooden skewer, man! I paid my $30 Rev. so
come clean with a REAL
corporate report. Pretty please.....with sugar on it...?
Botrytis Affected
****************************************
Court Jester Extraordinaire of Usenet
****************************************
bendouglass@cheerful.com
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Subject: Re: Stang Corporate Report 11-27-01
From: "Chas. M. Bee" <c-bee1@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
You're a member, not a stockholder.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: Re: Stang Corporate Report 11-27-01
From: mshotz@aol.comnospam (James T. Rex King of the
Monsters)
Newsgroups: alt.slack
Date: Wed, Nov 28, 2001 7:58 PM
Message-ID: <20011128195801.26932.00002276@mb-cc.aol.com>
>1) Plug Porn. Pug Dog Porn. Corn Dog Porn.
>2) Anti-Antidisestablishmentarianist screeds.
>3) Photoshop pic of Bush in leather thong.
>4) Picture of Adolf Hitler in some book.
>5) Satanic mask of Satan smoking a pipe.
>6) Disgusting thing in fridge.
>7) Expired prescription antihistimines.
>8) Defaced US currency, mashed novelty penny.
>9) "Assault"-style butter knives in
kitchen.
>10) Poster of Che.
>11) Poster of Jimi.
>12) Unlawful hemp shampoo.
>13) Study is fire hazard.
>14) PIRATE SOFTWARE!!!
>
1) My Official "Honorary 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment
Border Patrol
certificate"
2) My Vannesa Del Rio peronal Porn Collection.
3) Some old German Porn Magazine I got in 1979 in Germany
4) my Commision in the Reserve Forces of the United
States Army signed by
Ronald reagan in 1988.
5) one Ruger P-89 with 2 15 round clips and 5 boxes of ammo.
6) one Colt AR-15 Commnado with about 8 boxes of UMC
5.56 and three boxed of GI
issue 5.56 ( two boxed of ball one of tracer)
7) One olf C-ratioin with B-3 unit (John Wayner Bars!)
8) One Package of retirment papers form the US Army
Reserve (20 years 1 month 3
days of service)
9) one VA benifits ID card
10) 18 Star Trek Tapes (origanl serirs)
11) one autographed picture of Mark Leonard
12) Misc. collection of WW II Histroy books and related fiction
13) one zip drive full of downloaded porn
14 ) one photo of Laura Bush naked at a Gang bang
MSHOTZ: The Post Post Modern Man
"God made man, but a monkey supplied the glue!"
"Jocko-Homo" DEVO
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: Re: Stang Corporate Report 11-27-01
From: UnitCLXXX@SputSouth.Com (RevEl)
Item 6 *could* be used to prove that he's true-blue
apple-pie
loyal American, in spite of *anything* else on the
list.