The three little children that died miserable fiery deaths

Once upon a time in an airliner flying above the Great American Desert there were three naughty children. They enjoyed kicking the backs of the seats of people that had never done them or their people any harm. Despite the patient pleadings of those people and stern warnings from their drink and drug addled mother they continued their naughtiness.

“They can’t throw us off the airplane,” said Jimmy the oldest most repellant boy. “We’re up too high!”

“They can’t give us a well deserved beating because they aren’t relatives and they stand to do some serious time, child abuse laws being what they are, if they lay a finger on us!” Said Maria, the noxious middle girl.

“Lets run in aisle and throw some of the tasty seasoned bits of fried dough, corn chex and pretzels the airline provided at passengers who paid full fair for their tickets.” Said Hector, the imaginative youngest cur and unholy spawn of Satan.

Soon the three naughty children were frolicking in the cabin and people many rows away came to despise them. An elderly woman undid their shoelaces and gave them a razor sharp pair of scissors she’d smuggled on board to hold while they ran around the cabin. The sky Marshall gave them his service revolver to play with in the hopes that an accidental discharge might kill the loathsome creatures. Everyone in the airliner offered controlled substances to the mother to sedate the noisome pack but she gobbled down the collection of opiates and horse tranquillizers herself and fell into a stupor. Various kinds of English and Spanish commands were tried to control the unruly trio but it was to no avail. They continued to annoy the paying passengers.

Because of air traffic delays caused by personnel cutbacks that saved money the airline could pass onto their executives in the form of well deserved pay raises, the airliner had to stay aloft for far longer than was expected so the three naughty children got to play long into the evening being hopped up on caffeine, sugar and Ritalin. For hours they played, kicked, and screamed until the youngest finally filled his pants with a partially digested broccoli and beans mixture that oozed out of his huggies and down his legs. This was the cause of much hilarity among his siblings.

All good things must come to an end however and in this case the airliner had pushed away from the terminal with just enough gas to get from Chicago to L.A. Because of cutbacks and labor troubles this fact wasn’t noticed by the cheaper if somewhat lesser skilled replacement workers now in charge of noticing things like that. The airliner was soon plummeting like a rock through the clear desert sky. It got very quiet in the cabin as the all too reasonable pleadings and prayerful wailing of adults replaced the insane rantings of children.

Some one or some thing must have heard because the temporary secretary that had replaced the striking pilot in this case was able to land the 737 with minimal damage even though she’d only been given 24 hours to study the manual and was only certified on Word for Windows.

Safely on the ground the three naughty children surveyed the cabin and began scampering through the debris and playing with the oxygen masks that hung down from the ceiling. They splashed through the residual jet fuel that had leaked into the cabin as the other passengers evacuated. A quiet man who had been in the row just in front of the kids, tossled the eldest’s hair and told them to stay in the plane until their Mom came to. “Do anything you want.” He said, “the planes a write off anyway.” He gave Maria a lighter he had modified to be not so child proof. He left the plane and shut the emergency exit behind him.

The passengers danced around the subsequent fire in celebration of their good fortune as the superstructure burned with a steady blue flame until it was a pile of twisted metal. The only injuries were to rescue workers who tried to enter the burning wreck to save the children. They were inadvertently clubbed by irate passengers who mistook them for baby harp seals in firemen’s turn outs.

AUSTRALIA

Australia of the antipods, a blessed sun kissed land of beaches, great stands of explosively combustible gum trees and an odd looking collection of endangered agricultural pests is populated almost exclusively by descendants Irish settlers who sought their fortunes in either farming, prospecting or on parole.

The Brits selected it as a penal colony because they felt that the prospect of internment in its moderate climate, good air and clean water would terrify into good behavior any inmates dispatched there. When compared to the drafty, foggy and tuberculosis ridden climate the inmates were used to it was indeed terrifying, so terrifying in fact many never returned. Its only when you see the acres of pink Irish flesh basted in SPF 1000 sun block then burned to a ghastly crisp on Bondi that you realize the Pommy bastards might have been on to something.

Among the charms of the island continent is that death comes at you from a variety pack of different sources. Australia which is Latin for Southern Land means “Get Me The Fuck Out Of Here!” when freely translated from the aboriginal languages. It’s a wonderful place of great beauty and grandeur and some of the most dangerous flora and fauna on the entire planet.

One of Auz’s proudest claims is that it is home to nine of the ten most poisonous snakes on earth. There isn’t a cobra or rattlesnake in the top ten so unless you happen to be in southern Africa and step on a black mamba, you aren’t ever likely to stumble across anything as venomous as anything playing in Australian snake league. And what a large league it is, of 400 or so native species of snakes the majority of Australian snakes are venomous, the only place on earth that can make that claim

Although they make asps and sidewinders appear almost cuddly Australia’s killers have homely even prosaic names. Although being bitten by something called a Death Adder is pretty alarming, how bad could the bite of a Collett’s snake be? Well almost instantly fatal in fact, like wise the Taipan and both Brown Snakes. Yes, it seems that two species of the world’s ten most poisonous snakes happen to be called Brown snakes.

Thanks to either incredibly bad luck on the part of two Mr. Browns who independently discovered how lethal the snakes they were handling were thereby earning the distinction of having the species named after them or a profound lack of imagination on the part of Zoologist, two of the world’s deadliest reptiles have identical names. They could have named one the Khaki Colored Man Killer or Taupe Death Dealer but no, Brown Snake was good enough! I imagine this is a problem when a man goes to a doctor complaining of snake bite and the doctor has him describe the snake.

“Brown,” the patient answers and the doctor tells him to come back in a half hour and he’ll know which anti-venom to give him. The patient wonders why it should take so long to identify a snake and the doctor tells him it if he’s still alive in half an hour they’ll know he was bitten by the less dangerous of the Browns.

Of course there are many other deadly animals in Australia some surprisingly convenient for tourists and the unwary Australians to stumble over. There are huge salt water crocs that denizens of the out back are fond of poking at. There are a variety of man eating sharks swimming off shore, including the Great White, the species popularly credited with eating one of Australia’s prime ministers. Most heads of state have security details that rehearse scenarios to see how they’d react in a given situation; I wonder how many have to rehearse what to do when the old man wants to go for a swim?

Of course in Australia a critter doesn’t need to be big to kill you! Sydney is the home range of the Funnel Web spider, it’s about the size of you fist but it has the largest fangs of any spider, period. There is none of that bullshit about percentage of body size these fangs are bigger than camel spiders or tarantulas carry. The nice thing about the species is it’s aggressive, particularly when it has loving on its mind, it will attack a full sized human under the misapprehension the human is after its girl. Fun Fact: Female Funnel Webs live in holes that bare an uncanny resemblance to shoes, at least to Male Funnel Webs, so be sure you shake out the espadrilles before you put them on when visiting down under.

And don’t forget to check out Redbacks and White Tail spiders on your way to the morgue or the aptly named Paralysis Tick if hiking in high grass is your thing.

Of course you are only likely to encounter Funnel Webs in Queensland, Sydney, Adelaide and Melbourne but when you head down to their famed beaches death can stalk you in exciting new ways. Lots of dangerous things lurk under the waves, including more lethal snakes, blue ring octopuses and a venomous snail but aren’t considered interesting because they live to far out at sea to rack up a decent body count and their victims usually drown in terrified agony and are ripped to shreds by voracious sharks before they’re missed.

So lets just consider the killers of waders, Stonefish and Toadfish are considered the most dangerous fish on earth and freely available to be trod on in the surf. Victims of the Stonefish’s sting have been known to beg to be killed rather than endure the agony of the injury.

Varieties of jellyfish float on the gentle tide. Portuguese Men O’War or blue bottles if you prefer trail long strands of tentacles studded with stingers that inflict painful wounds and inject toxins. Fortunately the treatment for the agonizing injury is fairly mundane, just apply vinegar or urine to the affected area, it may or may not work. So if you see a bunch of Auzi’s peeing on one of their ilk, it may or may not be what it appears to be at first glance.

Ordinarily the Portuguese Man o’ War is the top of the stinging order when it comes to bobbing lethal blobs of goo but the Auzi’s go one step further and have box jellyfish, all species of which are venomous but with one variety deemed to be the most venomous animal on earth. That’s right the capo d’tui capo of venomous creatures great and small and it wasn’t discovered until some one stumbled ashore screaming “something bit me!” and then died. It is microscopic and apparently so lethal its copious previous victims were presumed to have had heart attacks and drowned. Fortunately medical science has discovered an anti-venom for this mini man killer so a victim of its sting can make a partial recovery with a minimum of disfigurement and surgery if he makes the agonizing ride to the hospital in time.

Urine is of no use for treating the Box Jellyfish sting but do pee on the victim anyway, you'll enjoy it and the victim will probably be dead in a short time.

Of course death stalks the tourist in Australia no matter where you go or what species you encounter. The Emu, a flightless bird is the third largest and most dangerous in the avian order. It has bad eyesight and an evil temper which when combined with its gently curious nature has produced some notable encounters of the last kind. Typically the bird will wander over to the unlucky tourist apparently interested in his head wear or whatever until it comes into visual range, realizes it’s a human he’s been stalking and in flurry of feathers and claws, guts the poor traveler like a catfish.

I could stop here but I won’t because in Australia death hides where you least expect it, kind of like a lethal Candid Camera. Australia has one of the very few venomous mammals: the platypus. Most venomous mammals are small shrew like creatures, not dangerous to man and very rare, Platypus are large, common and lethal. The males have a spur on a hind leg that is connected to a venom sack, the nice thing is when a male has hooked a victim he voids the entire sack into the victims blood stream since the Platypus has no control over the process.

I hope you found these tips handy if you fancy a trip down under. In spite of their incomprehensible English the Auz are a fair dinkum bunch O’lads with more euphemisms for vomiting than any other country on earth. So loosen up in this land of firsts, mosts and deadliest, set your mind at ease, sit back, relax and enjoy Australia until a Dingo eats one of your children.

Telethon

Recently I was involved in an archaic form of entertainment(?), the telethon. A telethon, in case you've been in a coma on a distant planet without cable for the last seventy years, consists of people begging and screaming at you to donate money between musical or comedy acts that make you wish they'd get back to begging and screaming at you for money.

Telethons differ from pledge breaks on Public Television in that the pledge breaks interrupt nothing entertaining, just the usual BBC documentaries and dreary BBC costume dramas where as nothing stops a telethon.

In the past these endless juggernauts of entertainment mediocrity aimed to wipe out diseases, cerebral palsy, arthritis and muscular dystrophy spring to mind. I have participated in telethons for Muscular Dystrophy, Arthritis and Easter Seals although I never understood why a concerted effort against piniped aquatic mammals was necessary or how they ever became associated with the resurrection of our Lord and Savior. And let me say with added emphasis I have nothing against the people fighting cerebral palsy but they never asked.

Lately with Arthritis apparently eradicated and Easter Seals exterminated I help out on the MDA or Jerry Lewis Telethon and a relative new comer on the Telethonic scene, the Armenia Telethon. It is a valiant and successful effort to raise money to pay for infrastructure and educational facilities in impoverished areas of Armenia.

Armenia is a small country in the Caucasus that has a view of Turkey (The Country) from every window, this would be less distressing if the Turks hadn't spent the best part of WW1 trying to exterminate the Armenians. To put it in perspective the Armenians regard their occupation by the Soviet Union as more or less benign, Stalin and Communism were apparently less lethal to the average Armenian than a determined Turk so we are talking some hard backed persecution vets here. At any rate, for 12 hours on Thanksgiving they raise money in prodigious amounts for their homeland, paying for new roads and schools so the Russians and Turks will have new things to destroy next time they decide to go Genocidal.

All this Telethon talk has reminded me of the time I did an Amish Telethon. We had to go door to door but we raised eighty seven dollars and a barn.








You see the Amish don't have telephones or television, so they'd have to go next door to a Mennonite family that had those things to call in. I'll explain the Amish in a latter blog.

Good Bye Columbus

As the Holiday Season draws to a close and by Holiday Season I mean the one between Halloween and Veteran's Day, my friends and I like to reflect on the various civil liberties and protections against unwarranted government intrusion that have fluttered down the old memory hole like a non-person being excised from history.

There is a curious universality to this, my right wing and lefty friends agree that secret government cadres are working against their particular political wing by compiling dossiers on their Internet porn preference and listening in on the politically dangerous telephone conversations they have with their Mom. I think this is a promising trend, it shows the government is using foresight and will be in a good position to help the right or left wing, which ever one wins, round up their Kulaks of choice.

The black helicopters, Council on Foreign Relations, Bilderberg Group, Illuminati, the Masons (either Pamela, James or Perry and possibly Mason Reese and Mason Williams) Tri-Lateral Commission and Skull and Bones are stipulated by both right and left wingers as bete noires of their personal liberty, although I must have missed the passage of The Personal Liberty and Freedom Act since I still have to pay taxes and I 'm still not allowed to shoot my neighbors. My Commie and Wingnut friends are never the less convinced that the above stated groups' purposes are diabolical, that their given public raison d'etre is duplicitous and they're really dedicated to taking away the same liberties and freedoms that the left and right wings are so fond of taking away from their opponents.

Somehow the Rockefellers and the Jews are at the center of this universe of conspiracy, either as creatures of the United States government or the United States government being a creature of theirs. Since the Rockefellers are sort of the Beverly Hillbillies of World Domination with Nelson or David in the Jed Role and Happy Fitler (The trampy Philadelphia girl Nelson married after he divorced Mary, although not as trampy as that Megan chick who was blowing him the night he died.) as Granny I'm thinking maybe they've been in charge all along although judging by some delicatessens I've been in, it takes a Jewish mind to master chaos.

I had very serious doubts that our Government would be able to take away very much in the way of personal liberties, the Patriot Act, the Library Snooping Enabling Act and the We Want to Know How Many Times You Downloaded "Opps I did it again" And Shared It With Your Cousin Act not with standing. So far they haven't they haven't been very good at taking away Personal Liberties even from Al Quiada (This is America damn it, a Q its followed by a U no matter what the stinkin' Arabs say.) of the five hundred we caught and released about 450 have turned up fighting us again in either Afghanistan or Iraqu.

I thought we had little to fear that our poor incompetent Liberal democracy would turn into the soul destroying oppressive nightmare depicted in Orwell's 1984 unless Americans suddenly became law abiding. (By the by, I did put on my INGSOC jumpsuit the morning of January 1, 1984, faced the Telescreen and participated in two minutes of very satisfying hate over the continued sabotage of Oceania's war effort by the followers of Emmanuel Goldstein, just in case.) I always figured lefties were better at that sort of thing, since the giants of their pantheon, like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro and the guy in charge in China that had tanks run over all those students over in Tienanmen Square, are all giants because they are standing on mountains of dead Kulaks, the sine qua non of consensus left wing government.

But I would be wrong. Behold the new face of Big Brother, the nice lady in the lavender but business appropriate suit at the top. She's Helen Jones-Kelley and she just got thirty days of unpaid quiet time for peeping at Joe the Plumbers records with out a legitimate reason. She is head of Ohio's Department of Job and Family Services and like any good bureaucrat she was just exercising due diligence, investigating a private citizen that happened to ask Barack Obama a pointed question. She was particularly concerned that Samuel J. Wurzelbacher owed child support, received public assistance or owed unemployment compensation taxes. Although Inspector General Tom Charles disagreed Ms Jones-Kelley denied her search of Joe the Plumber's records was politically motivated since she did the same thing to any Ohioan who happened to surface on national media. With past practices and precedents like that that guide her she dumped the whole weight of government on the poor dumb idealistic shmoo.

She's probably back at the state capital by now, investigating anyone she feels she has a good reason to investigate because she's a good person that wants to do the right thing. So she's busy doing the right thing and poking around in lives that have done nothing wrong except attract her attention letting the ends justify her means as she goes along.

I love Big Brother.

Res Politicata

According to reports lately received in California some kind of election is occurring beyond the far horizon. It is apparently between an Octogenarian and an Octoroon, I don’t know what those words mean but since between them and their running mates they have eight legs they are an Octoped. That is not important right now.

Lately political discourse has left me with many of the same questions African Americans have after seeing a Lawrence Kasdan movie, specifically: “Why are all these rich spoiled crackers carrying on like that and what is it they are carrying on about?” I have no idea.

I recently wrote a lengthy satire on our two year long electoral process based on Richard Henry Dana’s immortal yarn about merchant seamen called Two Years before the Mast. It was called Two Years before the Election and was 85,000 words of brilliant narrative about a lad who signs on as a volunteer for a Chicago politician and two years later, after learning the ropes of election rigging, emerges as a master politician albeit a corrupt Under Secretary of Commerce presumptive.

Having never read the Dana book my work was ambitious on too many levels and was largely incomprehensible to those who read it. This effort was reminiscent of my attempts to popularize Soren Kierkegaard, the philosopher and immortal author of "Fear and Trembling" in a sit-com. We got as far as the theme song, some jokes about the James Gang (William, Henry and Harry James, Harry wasn't much of an intellectual but he played a mean trumpet and was married to Betty Grable.) and a scene in the Long Branch public Library where Soren learns he can't take out "A Critique of Pure Reason" because some Hegelians have taken over the town. Fortunately my hard drive exploded before it was finished and I walked away with nothing to answer for although I now know how Lawrence Kasdan feels.

Of more concern are the propositions on California’s ballot which are as a rule in support of the trial lawyers full employment act. Usually they are about innocuous things like how much we should pay the state to dump asbestos and mercury in our back yards so the kitty cats will have a safe place to be wild but this year is different. A prop 8 seeks to prevent men from having a legally binding contract between them before they engage in anal or oral sex.

As much I enjoy watching men dress up in tulle before they can have sex and then watching them spend years in civil court trying to untangle a property settlement, which is, after all, what love is all about, I think Prop 8 is a terrible infringement on every man’s right to butt slam any anus that strikes your fancy.

I think that fostering marriage between men is a threat to other fundamental relationships. I am not talking about parenthood; we all know that issue, as in children, is impossible in these cases unless you’re a lesbian with a turkey baster and a male friend with romantic notions about turkey basters. No, I’m talking about the deepest attachment humans can have, the relationship between a captain and his helmsman.

Imagine my chagrin when I heard that a gay marriage ceremony and reception had torn apart the poorly maintained mask of civility between Kirk/Shatner and Sulu/ Takei. Will we will never again hear the words, “Set a course for Ipana 7, Mr. Sulu,” or the immortal response, “Aye, aye Captain!” Never again will we see Kirk and Sulu transporting down to investigate new life forms with Kirk investigating any attractive blue or green females and Zulu checking out the local bar scene to see if the men sing Karaoke and ejaculate in each others mouths. Of course Sulu is older, legally married and goes straight home after work so nothing like that could possibly happen now.

As we all know heterosexuals only engage in sex after getting legally wed, it’s the law you know, check it out its in all the literature. The marriage institution remains popular because quality masturbatory aids are so hard to find on the Internet, heterosexuals are compulsively law abiding and they enjoy the lengthy court proceedings that are required to extract themselves from wedded bliss.

Now I have many male friends and almost none of our activities involve showering and massaging each other, putting our penises in each others body or dressing up real smart and making snarky comments about whoever isn’t present. But I’d like to think that if ever that changed I wouldn’t have to go through the trouble and paperwork of marrying somebody just to smoke his dick. Vote yes on Prop 8 and keep government out of gay sex unless it involves Mark Foley, Larry Craig or Barney Frank. Do your homosexual friends a favor and keep gay sex freely available for the Priests, users of public restrooms and American Idol winners that enjoy it without the crushing burden of Government regulation.

Non, Je ne Regrette Rien

The best and brightest of French engineering suffered a major set back in their race with the Mayans to end the world. The Mayans famously renowned for their prowess at pyramid construction, skill at ball games involving severed human heads and carving big impractical pocket calendars out of stone had predicted that the world, or at least this cycle of time, will end on December 21, 2012. The French gamely took up the challenge and constructed a machine that, at least some people think, could end world before the Mayan imposed deadline.

The Large Hadron Collider is a 27 kilometer (17 miles for those still using God's ordained system of measures) ring tunnel designed to let scientist observe the destruction of atomic particles by smashing them together at nearly the speed of light. In other words its exactly the same as the time you put all those firecrackers in your cousins model of the Forestall and blew it up by ramming a model of the Bismarck, similarly packed with explosives, into it except its in a big ring in France surrounded by super conducting magnets at or near absolute zero, operated by CERN an acronym no one has figured out yet, funded with billions of euros and you're not hiding it from Mom or are high as a kite from huffing the airplane glue fumes. One possible side benefit to the reams of information we will reap by having Frenchmen smash things is there is a minuscule chance, and by minuscule I mean a one in three chance, they will accidentally create a black hole that will swallow the world.

As one who thinks being perched on the event horizon with one eye on the singularity and the other on the rest of the universe red shifting away into infinity is the perfect metaphor for my life,

(shit, thats the way the universe appears to observers who assume we're in an expanding universe not being sucked into a collapsing black hole which would produce identical observations. Note to self: call CERN and see if anyone answers the phone.)

I love these little ambiguities, particularly when I'm being reassured by engineers from a country that produced the Renault.

Things were going swimmingly at CERN, they were running tests, everybody looked smart in their clean white lab coats and invitations to the end of the world gala had gone out when a power bus melted down and pooped the party. A power bus by the way is usually a charged bar or power supply that other devices get their power from, they are usually bars of copper or iron, how they melted one at absolute zero I can't say. At the very least we will have to wait till April to find out if the French have created something at least as lethal as their grooming habits and sexual practices.

Anyone can laugh at himself...

Hurricane Ike beat up on Texas so bad they're changing it's name to Tina.