America that was

Obituary for America

Military Commissions Act of 2006
Bush's Torture Bill

"You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to be speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you at government expense."

Remember our Miranda Rights? Today, Tuesday October 17, 2006, the Republicans revoked our Miranda Rights, silently turning America into a police state.

Until now, America promised freedom from despotic governments that pluck citizens off the street, out of our homes and lock us up in secret prisons ... indefinitely ... even torture us to death without having to ever make or prove any charges because today our Miranda Rights and all but one of our Constitutional Rights were wiped out by the signature of George W. Bush. In our cowardly fear of "terrorism" we have abandon our freedom and now cower behind the NeoFascist dictatorship of the Republican Party.

What a shock Bush's Torture Bill will be to the couch potatoes for whom nothing is real until it happens to them.


There is nothing I can say that will make a difference but I can't let this sad moment pass unnoticed. Seems Eliot was right.

Hollow Men
by T.S. Eliot (1925)


I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralyzed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed stavesr
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer --

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Saturday at the Roxy - Dexter, Puppet Rapist, Skidboot

Welcome to the Roxy.










Dexter's Lab - Dexter's Rival




Puppet Rapist #3




Skidboot










dexter's laboratory puppet rapist skidboot

Bunny's letter

Pinky gets a letter!

Pinky (finally) got a letter from Bunny and is she ever happy. She's been showing it to everybody. She even persuaded me to post the news here at the language barrier which the whole troupe heartily endorsed as they're getting a little tired of hearing about it. They are a pretty cynical bunch but happy for her. I don't know about this Bunny fellow though, if his friend Slippo is any indication. And what's up with that banana? Well, at least he didn't suggest they meet in a bar.

Iraq for Sale

I just got back from Tahoe where I attended a MoveOn.org house party. We made calls encouraging people to vote in the upcoming election, ate and then watched the video Iraq for Sale , a really irritating documentary. It exposes the brazen greed of our "conservative" government. It is staggering. STAGGERING .... mercenary corporations like Dick Cheney's Halliburton partnered with their stooges in Washington, Bush and Company, have bilked American tax payers of billions of dollars in "Cost Plus" overruns not to mention the insufferable tragedy of so many lives lost, and so many more hopelessly ruined in their jagged swath. It's criminal and the whores in Congress rubber stamp every bit of it ... for a cut. These guys have got to go!








moveon iraq for sale halliburton blood money caci titan

Coyote

I was privileged to see a coyote at the base of the Sierra this morning ... gray and angular, moving in time lapse precision through the grass. Seeing one is to me an omen of a good day.

Republican 3 point plan

The Republican 3 point plan:

DENY EVERYTHING.
When that fails ...
BLAME A DEMOCRAT.
When that fails ...
BLAME AlCOHOL.
Skivvy bastards!

Global warming.
Over a half a million citizens dead from war in Iraq.
Sexual abuse of minors by Republican Congressman.
Sexual abuse of minors covered up by Republican leaders.
Congressmen pimping their votes to lobbyists.
The President of the United States is insane.
Fill in the blank ___________________________.
Don't worry. Lie about it!

If you let the Republicans buy you off with their "tax cuts"
you are no better.

republican plan conservative politics bush co.

Saturday at the Roxy - Lil' Superstar, Puppet Rapist, Desiderata

Welcome to the Roxy.

Little Superstar has become wildly popular
on YouTube since he first appeared here a few weeks
ago so he returns today for an encore in the following
clips from of the same Tamil film, Adhisayappiravi.

Little Superstar kicks some ass

00:31

Little Superstar fight scene (1)

02:30

If you want more, there's another fight scene here. In case you'd like to personally own this Tamil classic, you can purchase it here for a mere $16.95. Without ruining anything, here's a plot summary I found on the site:

Rajni, is supposed to marry Sheeba, an alliance not approved of by her father. He is killed and goes to Heaven only to learn that his death was a mistake. He is offered another body to inhabit,that of a timid villager whose uncle and aunt are plotting to kill him. He takes up the offer and teaches them a lesson while romancing with Kanaga. But coming into contact with some characters from his earlier life, reminds him of his duties over there too. He solves all problems and all's well that end well.

Now we turn to Channel to 101 for
another exciting episode of
Puppet Rapist - #2
about 5 minutes

After all this violence and tension it only seems fitting
to conclude today's show with this charming short by
Claudia Lauricella (story), Marco Perugini (animation),
and Goran Bregovic (playing Vivaldi).
I hope you enjoyed the show.

Desiderata

about 01:30

Friday the 13th

While looking for something else I came across an audio clip of a poem I wrote sometime this summer and just posted it (quick and dirty) to my website. It kind of fits the mood of the day or should I say night...

Number 19

If you are viewing this page with FireFox
you may have to open the link
in Internet Explorer to hear this clip.

Friday the 13th

Day in a peanut shell

Long day in Reno. I thought I had an appointment with the knee doctor but there was a scheduling mix up and I have to go back tomorrow. I'll make a day of it if the weather's nice. We had a pretty good snow here last night, not in the valley but right down to the bottom of the Sierras. It's the first one worth counting this year. It rained here ... Oregon style. The 7am magpie was even late for breakfast but when we got home this afternoon I see someone scooped up the goodies.

No big adventures to report at the moment but Mr. Lee has finally finished revamping the off-road trailer, it's looks pretty slick, so at some point we'll do a little back country camping, whatever I can do given the current limitations of my knee. We're also planning a trip to L.A. and will stay in a campground there. That should be interesting. Now, he's back to scheming about sailing the Sea of Cortez. I, on the other hand, have a deep seated, admittedly irrational, fear of drowning so that sounds a bit risky to me but I have to admit that exploring the Sea of Cortez sounds kinda fun. Just no deep sea voyages please although he keeps telling me that sailing is the most dangerous in sight of land. Ah well. One dream/nightmare at a time.

One last thing. I've been getting completely hammered with spam the last few days. Hundreds of emails in one shot. It's a drag. Spammers are total scumbags.

Saturday at the Roxy - Puppets, Hamlet and Roy

Welcome to the matinee. At the moment I'm sitting in Dreamer's Cafe in Reno having a cup of coffee and posting this on my crippled old lap top with corrupt Java so, at least until I get home and can use my regular computer, I'll have to do without the graphics, spell checker, even font resizing. I know only the most rudimentary HTML and, on my own, am a crappy speller. Life in the rough.

Nevertheless, it's a special day as one of the rare Roxy regulars is celebrating his birthday this Saturday, something that only happens every seven years, give or take leap years I suppose. I'm not an expert on the calendar. At any rate, this one's for you (it make take a moment to load so be patient) ...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ROY!
Have a great day, trip and year

DIE LOSER DIE!
2:01



As the Roxy is modeled after the old Saturday afternoon matinee, serial stories are supposed to be a regular feature. Keeps the little darlings clamouring back each week to see what happens next and buy popcorn and bon bons (which, sadly, have since become extinct). I don't have such sinister motives. I just like serials and hope you do too. As there isn't a new episode of The Defenders of Stan yet, I'm going to start a second serial. This one is already complete so we'll be able to power though this one. Five shows...five weeks.

PUPPET RAPIST - EPISODE 1
about 5 minutes




As it's Roy's birthday I debated long and hard over this next one. Cakey! The Cake From Outer Space or Cat Head Theatre? I decided Cakey ran the birthday theme into the ground plus Roy's a writer so I went with this excerpt from Hamlet.

CAT HEAD THEATRE
03:28



That's it for the day. Hope you enjoyed the show. If you haven't voted for the Hero of the Year yet, be sure and do it before you go! The elephants thank you.

Clocks

I brought the clock back in from the garage today. I put it out there last winter because I got sick of listening to it tick. The sound of its blunt second hand goose stepping circles around the face bothered me. It still does. It's a cheap plastic clock I bought used for two dollars. It would be a better clock if it stopped all together. Nicer yet if Time stopped with it for a while so I could get off the train and stretch ... limber up ... flex my knee a bit.


I had a friend in Oregon named Joey, an old Sicilian fellow who grew up in New York City. Hard life. Killed a man in prison in a fight over a loaf of bread. Nice though. Joey wouldn't hurt a fly willingly. He paid me to clean his apartment just before he died. It was filled with clocks, mostly pendulum clocks, small ones, wall models, desk models, and a couple of grandfather clocks, all in a very tiny place. Joey was a dealer at an antique mall and found them on his rounds through flea markets, yard sales and second hand stores, but they we nice. He had an eye. The clocks were unsettling though because they all ticked very loudly and no two were set exactly the same. This was especially puzzling because Joey was a fastidious fellow, not one to miss the fact that each clock marked a different hour with its chimes or coo-coo. What made it even more strange was that during his last year I kept sensing that Joey was getting ready, wanted to die, nothing specific, just something about him and the clocks reinforced that impression. It seemed they were busy measuring, from their different perspectives, how much time he had left in an effort to synthesize a universal hour from all his overlaps and contradictions.


In that last year Joey had reconnected with an old lover from Paris, Queenie. He met her during the war when he was a deserter instead of going to Normandy. He went back to France determined to finally face the beach and the ghosts that had haunted him all his life but, although they hadn't talked for 50 years, hooked up with Queenie instead. She still loved him. They made plans for her to come to America and live with him. And the clocks. Instead he died. Pneumonia. Dead in a week. It didn't surprise me. Tomorrow I'm going to put that clock back out in the garage.







clocks normandy paris ghosts