I’ve been spending much too much time lately moving across our Texas highway system trapped inside the damnedest repeated clusterfracks. (Yes, that’s the technical linguistic term for a group of Texas drivers who have bunched up at high speed.)

I’m a gentle old man, but I’ve had too many recent inner visions of flames, explosions, and the deployment of my personal bazooka, to be satisfied with the current state of affairs.

Therefore, I’m posting so that everyone who drives in Texas will know how to better keep Rory alive and happy on the highway.

Here’s the One Rule to Rule Them All: Get Out of My Way.

Here are the Three Laws of Velocity:

1. If you’re driving faster than me, you’re a maniac, and should be removed from the road.
2. If you’re driving slower than me, you’re a granny, and should be removed from the road.
3. If you’re driving the same speed as me, you’re pacing me, and should be removed from the road.

This set of rules is simple, elegant, and results in me having the highway entirely to myself, which is as it should be. However, we live in an imperfect world, so I’m willing to put up with you as long as you Get Out of My Way.

There are, of course, some behaviors you shouldn’t indulge in, unless you want to make me suffer from Road Annoyance.

To be perfectly clear, I’m not doing this for your own good. I don’t care if you kill yourself and all your loved ones by driving stupidly. Darwinism in action is what that is. I just don’t want you to kill me, okay? I’ve already got enough problems with that whole natural selection thing as it is.

Though, since I’ve already passed my DNA along, I suppose it really wouldn’t be that wrong to run over me. And I know it won’t really upset you to kill a feeble old man whose life is practically over with anyhow, for more than a few hours, or until you’re distracted when the next episode of  “Jon & Kate Plus 8” airs.

But what if you hit Jon & Kate and the eight cute little kids and smushed them all? That would make you sad for a long time, wouldn’t it? Okay, maybe not about Jon and Kate. I mean, who cares about those two idiots? But the kids for sure, right? I bet that would make you sad for a loooong time.

So – remember these things I’m about to list, because you might kill a bunch of adorable little soon-to-be-adoptees instead of me, if you don’t.

Here are the Ten Tips to Avoid Bazookas:

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All right.  I’ve been a bad Madeleine, absent for yea, this long time.  But I’m still here.  I’m checkin’ in, right?  And look!  I brought you something.  ::rummages around for embed code.::  See?   

Feel better now? Of course not. You have cholera!

This is a transcendant piece of video- and music-making. Sean e-mailed me the link, suggesting that we might enjoy it.

At least in my case, he was absolutely correct in his surmise. It’s a version of Ben E. King’s classic ‘Stand By Me’. It starts out small and personal, then quickly achieves orbital velocity as it goes global.

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It’s too late for us to be among the earliest adopters on this song. But, if you haven’t alrady seen it, you have my heartiest encouragement to click the pic. It’s uplifting. And it rocks.

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Hey, guys – Go visit any of the major news web sites. Cool stuff today. According to the CDC, the Swine Flu Pandemic is going to slam into us sometime in the next few weeks, slaughtering the population and destroying civilization as we knew it.

Finally.

I mean, just between you and me and the pigs, I was beginning to doubt that civilization as we knew it was going to end at all. It sucked to find myself being pessimistic about my pessimism.

Some days, I just wanted to smash my forehead into something, hard enough to hurt, but not hard enough to actually damage my brain. You know?

That Bird Flu thing just never seemed to be able to get off the ground. And it looks like Apophis is going to stubbornly refuse to smash the earth into molten flinders.

The Global Warming thing was coming along nicely, after we convinced Bush and his crew that it was all a liberal conspiracy against Hummers – and you know how insanely freaked out they were with Clinton and his hummers in the Oval Office. Then we messed up and elected an administration that actually believes in science. Who knows what the hell they’ll do to demonize GW the climate like they demonized GW the Bush?

Nuclear war? Well, the Soviets were a great disappointment to me, personally. They had the capability for about thirty years, and could never sober up from the vodka binges long enough to push the red button. North Korea and Iran are just laughable wannabes.

I’ve got a small bet going that Pakistan will fall into the hands of the Taliban next year and, maddened by the presence of infidels somewhere on the rest of the planet, will launch their hundred nukes at somebody. If they hit India, then my job is less likely to be outsourced, so this is a two-fer. They’ve got enough bombs to trigger at least a Nuclear Autumn.

But that’ll be offset by the damn global warming that we’ve been trying so hard to cause. Unless Obama or Steven Chu or Paul Krugman fix it first.

I’m immensely cheered by today’s news, though.

I went out this afternoon and bought my survival kit. Here are my top ten items:

1. Three boxes of Kleenex – Will need them if I get the flu, and the allergies have been really nasty all year anyhow.
2. Three containers of Crystal Light no-cal drink powder – I already got a bunch of iodine pills for purifying water, at Rachael’s insistence. Now I can drink both safely and deliciously.
3. Three boxes of wet kitty treats – Little Tex and Secret Kitty are likely to get grumpy while trapped in the house for a month or so, and this will help. I’m contemplating buying some more catnip toys tomorrow, before there’s a run on them.
4. A pound of Kraft Mild Cheddar cheese – It was on sale, and I like cheese.
5. Two pounds of Skinner Vermicelli – Yummy and nutritious and would survive a nuclear war, I think.
6. Two glass containers of Ragu Roasted Garlic spaghetti sauce – To make the Vermicelli taste even yummier. Also, the Ragu has catsup in it, which, as Ronald Reagan taught us, is an essential vegetable.
7. Four pounds of Folger’s coffee – Life isn’t worth living if I don’t get my coffee in the morning. Also, it’ll be worth its weight in hummers after the apocalypse.
8. Lots of cans of Dinty Moore beef stew and microwaveable plastic lunches of various types and brands – I think I forgot to get crackers to go with these. Dammit.
9. Four pounds of Imperial Pure Cane Granulated Sugar – Screw the Splenda if civilization ends. I want real sugar in my coffee.
10. A 1.75 liter bottle of Bacardi Gold – Should make a great internal antiseptic to help me avoid getting infected. I forgot to get the Coke that potentiates its healing effect. Dammit.

***

Personally, I think I did pretty good, considering how off-the-cuff and panicky this was. I already had plenty of toilet paper. And you can use the Kleenex that way in a pinch, in case you didn’t know.

I think I’ll be able to survive in my apartment all through the Great Dying. Surely they won’t disconnect the Internet. It’s all satellite communications these days, anyhow, and the satellites will keep on working fine for years and years.

Then I can come out and the glorious dream of my childhood will begin – me, being one of the last ragged inhabitants in a post-industrial nightmare wasteland. Kind of like moving to Detroit, only more fun.

I’ll have my gun with me. I bet I can find some bullets for it, somewhere out there. Unless they’re all buried in some Teabagger’s back yard.

Rachael and Jesse will survive, as will all of you, and my sister and her husband, and all of my Goddam Neopagan Tribe™. We’ll form the nucleus of a new and intrinsically pessimistic society, as I’ve always hoped for. With motorcycles.

It’ll be great!

We should all meet at that filling station right outside Bastrop, where you turn to go to or from Austin, depending on the direction you’re traveling in. You know the one.

See you all in a couple of months!

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Hey….

….I just had the inevitable thought…

The CDC says the Swine Flu is mutating. Maybe we’ll get lucky and it’ll mutate into —

Zombie Apocalypse Virus !!!!

Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

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This is what I said on Twitter:  Oh my god, OH MY GOD, OMYGHOD, OMIGHOD!

I saw it when Rachel Maddow twittered it. (Yes, I follow Rachel Maddow slavishly.) I’ve watched it six times and every time I end up with a big grin on my face.

A piece by Simon Johnson (a professor at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management and a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund) and James Kwak (a student at Yale Law School) examining the lessons learned by the financial disasters in Asia in 1997:

The argument that A.I.G.’s traders are the people that we must depend on to save the United States economy is as weak and self-serving as it was in Thailand, Korea or Indonesia. A.I.G. is essentially advocating survival of the weakest. Thankfully, the American people are not buying it.

Essentially the countries (Korea and Thailand) that rejected the argument [that the traders who got them into the collapse were the only ones who understood it enough to get them out] ended up with banks that recovered more quickly and are handling the current economic crisis better.  Indonesia, which bought into this argument, ended up with failed banks.

Read the whole thing here.

… and will be until June 30th! Details here.

Okay.  So this is vulgar.  This is profane.  This is is funny.  Cause when it comes right down to it, don’t we  love our shit? Don’t we all want to have the latest shit? And don’t we all swear as we’re trying to get the goddamn technological shit to work the way the commercials and shit have led us to believe it would?

This made me laugh.  The fact that it was sent to me by my husband, the original Shit-O-Phile, made me laugh harder.

I’m in Chattanooga, Tennessee (the ‘nooga as us hep kids call it) at a combination writer’s retreat and birthday celebration (not mine, but our host’s, Mary Robinette Kowal.) It just so happens that her BD is one day (and fourteen years) after mine.

I was supposed to be the offeeeeeecial photgrapher for the following event but one of the Team Mary’s sous chefs came down sick and I was roped in.

Nobody really lost, especially all of us who got to eat it.

At midday on Friday, June 19^th, 1987, while en route to a convention in Minnesota, Barb and I stopped in Clear Lake, Iowa. I had just started writing my second novel, Buddy Holly Is Alive and Well on Ganymede, and Clear Lake was a logical place to take some pictures and do a little research. It was the town where Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson had played their last concert on February 2, 1959.

At the Clear Lake Public Library, a helpful librarian told me a story about Buddy’s glasses. It seems that someone (the county coroner?) from Mason City (the county seat) had taken the glasses from the site of the plane crash . . . and as far as the librarian knew, they were still locked up in a desk at the courthouse. Buddy’s widow, Maria Elena Holly, had even asked for them – and had been refused. The county, for some odd reason, thought they should hang on to them . . .

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It’s an actual toy.  The Playmobil Security Checkpoint*. Probably made to work with the Playmobil airport (now with extra delays and no in-flight meals!) and the Playmobil terrorist detaineecenter.

Actually, they do have a Playmobil Police Checkpoint and Playmobil Safe Crackers advertised on the same page.

I don’t know which is scarier.  The fact that this exists, or the fact that they’re charging $62 for the set.  I realize that Playmobil toys don’t come cheap, so maybe I shouldn’t fret about that.  But the fact that we’re now elevating All Fear All The Time to the same bracket as playing grocery or school makes me queasy.

But don’t just take my word for it.  The Customer Comments on this page are to die for.  Just note how many people have tagged the product under “Facism!”

*Found via Making Light

Over at Making Light it appears to be Zombie day, and people have been writing songs and poems to celebrate.  I just thought y’all ought to know.

The new puppy has arrived. Click the pic for the full Flickr set.

Pablo Defendini pointed me at this:

I’ve been thinking a lot about internet snarkiness lately, and what I keep coming back to is that snark was a defense mechanism that evolved perfectly in the truth-deficient, cynicism-rich compost heap of the Bush era. [emphasis Steve’s] When most of everything that’s told to you is bullshit, it’s easier to treat everything with suspicion. Genuineness is met with skepticism. Enthusiasm with ridicule. Optimism with derision. It’s easier to keep things at arm’s distance that way - keep them where they can’t hurt you.

A Post-Snark Era?  From Enter the Octopus

NOBODY MESSES WITH THE CONSTITUTION!

You should also go see the picture of him fighting Darth Vader.

On a less satirical note, click the pic below to see an incredible interactive panorama of the swearing in.

Do try it the full screen option.

(Action figure seen at BoingBoing.  LDA sent me the link for the Obama-rama.)

And finally, seen from Janice Gelb, but we’re not sure who wrote it:

Dear World:

We, the United States of America , your top quality
supplier of the ideals of liberty and democracy,
would like to apologize for our 2001-2008 interruption
in service. The technical fault that led to this eight-
year service outage has been located, and the software
responsible was replaced November 4. Early tests of
the newly installed program indicate that we are now
operating correctly, and we expect it to be fully
functional on January 20. We apologize for any
inconvenience caused by the outage. We look forward
to resuming full service and hope to improve in
years to come. We thank you for your patience and
understanding.

Sincerely,
The United States of America