You see, blogging is the simplest damn form of non-solipsism there is.  You don't even have to know how to write what you think.  You merely have to know how to think while writing.  Unless, of course, the Muse sings your blues.  Then it's just a matter of how you tap to the dance before the beasts begins to prance. 

Good, now that that's out of the way, I have no qualms about posting another one.

I refuse to process into someone's notion of a 'New Year' without blogging another post.

I don't really celebrate End Year's Day/New Year's Day per se , though I 'observe' it as a member of society.  It is, after all, a pure invention, not even celebrating a deserving occasion of any astronomic or historic significance.  It is, at base, Trickster Time elevated to a stature divine.  And since Time, in the full course of life, serves variously as both a light and dark faerie (ultimately, consort of the faerie Death), I opt out as a full-fledged celebrant, preferring instead to watch a candle burn imprecisely rather than a ball drop with deadly precision.

Time, after all, is a truly strange notion and the calendar is a quirky invention to try to manage it.  Yet in hopes of mastering the powers of prophecy and predictability provided by accurate synchronicity, people of all ages and cultures have seemed preoccupied with measuring and recording the passage of time.

The earliest recorded year in history seems to be 4236 BC, 6239-6240 years ago. The ancient Egyptians, like probably almost all ancients, observed cycles of things: for instance, the yearly inundation of the Nile while the ‘dog star’ Sirius danced close to the Sun. They devised a 365-day year to 'capture' this cycle.Problem was (and is): the cycle they were observing was closer to (but not precisely or constantly) 365.25 days.

Contesting with the precision of solar events, was the need of farmers to know when to plant.  The moon seemed more attuned as an indicator to them: 12 moon cycles between one planting season and the next.Hence, the Babylonians devised a lunar calendar based on alternating 29-day and 30-day months to furnish a 354-day year.  So, in center ring,the Egyptian Sun (and Sunday) battled the Babylonian Moon (and Monday) for the hearts and minds of timekeepers.

But there were, to the even more observant, a lot of other ‘time skirmishes’ preventing time from being pigeonholed precisely.  The Mayans, apparently high on drugs (my intuition), devised 17 concurrent cosmological calendars, to handle observed discrepancies.  Their calendar based on Venus (the ‘Sacred Year’) provided a 260-day year (4 ‘quarters’ of 65 ‘days’, subdivided into 5 groups of 13 days) !  Yet their ‘solar’ calendar (the ‘Seasonal Year’), chained to cycles founded on their base-20 counting system, had 360 days (18 ‘months’ of 20 ‘days’ each) to which they added 5 ‘unlucky days’.  Both ‘years’ ran in tandem and started anew on the same day every 52 years.

Such complications!

Even the current western world’s pope-prodded calendar (Gregorian—Gregory XIII) employs a system of ‘leap years’ ( 1 ‘leap day’ added every 4 years, ...like this coming year!).  Except…years that are evenly divisible by 100 are excluded as leap years, unless they are also evenly divisible by 400, in which case, they are re-included as leap years!

And, in a tenaciously clinging attempt to maintain this pope-prodded calendar (devised essentially to make church ‘holy days’ eternally repetitive, even if, like Easter, some of them would end up ‘floating’), the current scientific/money-based ("Time is money, money time.") western world needs to tweak the calendar even further by inclusion of either positive or negative ‘leap seconds’ about every 500 days.

It’s like this:  'Current time', as you and I know it, is measured with the precision of the ‘atomic second’, that is, the length of time required for 9,192,631,770 cycles of the Cesium atom at zero magnetic field (a carbon-based life system, a cesium-based time system!).  This ‘atomic second’ when first devised in 1956 was then ‘back-linked’ to the Earth’s 'rotational second' in the year 1900.  The atomic second thus defined was equivalent to the interval defined by the fraction 1 / 31,556,925.9747 of the year 1900.

Complicated enough for you yet?  Don’t groan.  For the sake of scientific precision, what’s a few more manipulations?

So here’s the clincher: the year 1900 is no longer equivalent in length to the year 2003 or any year hereafter.  Tidal braking, core fluctuations, even atmospheric anomalies (and scientists aren’t even really sure what else) slows the Earth’s rotation constantly.  Hence, the ‘cesium second’, post-anchored to the length of the year in 1900, would soon become imprecise unless those ‘leap seconds’ were added on, now and then, to ‘match’ the earth’s rotation to time.

What’s the point of all these man-invented time-synthesized adjustments?   Precision.  What’s the cost?  A truer harmonic relationship with the naturalness of the cosmos.  As a society, we love time.  Yet true love, backgrounded by the unfolding of cosmic processes, is timeless .

Indeed, we become in the image of the gods we worship, and Time, Chronos, currently sits atop the pantheon.  Hence, are we ever so precise a people unto ourselves.  But ever increasingly out of synch with much of everything else.  If Love, Eros, sat atop our pantheon, it seems our days would lengthen, time would ‘slow’.  Chronos, dear Chronos forbid!

Still, the rotation of the Earth is slowing (days are getting longer by leap seconds at the rate of 2 ms per day, or .7 seconds per year) and will continue to slow until, just as one face of the Moon now always faces the Earth, one face of the Earth will someday always face the Moon, too.  And, apparently unmoving vis-à-vis one another, the Earth and Moon will have a stare-off for forever more.Now that’s true cosmic love for you.

The FBI has warned the public to be wary of suspicious travelers carrying almanacs.  Supposedly, they have credible information that terrorists are carrying these almanacs during the planning and/or execution of terrorist activities.

Is an almanac a credible threat?

I doubt if almanacs have been transformed into James Bond-type chemical/biological/nuclear bombs.  First, an almanac is probably too small to be of use.  Secondly, there are much better surreptitious ways to disguise such devices, if one has a design to.

Well, are the almanacs being used as informational sources?  What is the population of New York?  How many naval bases are there in San Diego?  What’s the latitude/longitude of Las Vegas?  Probably not.  There are much better sources of information available (the internet, for one) that could be micro-published from the desktop.

So, is the almanac the choice of the terrorists for a codebook?  A low-tech, non-traceable, almost uncrackable way to translate (key) some broadcasted (internet, radio, pager) gibberish into target coordinates and mission coordination?  Well, that’s a possibility.  All branches of the military still employ such codepages (typically, reset daily) to help encrypt communications.

One other possibility: Although the FBI memo was 'intended strictly' for law enforcement purposes and ‘leaked out’ (most predictably) through the AP, the ‘item’ to look for may just be an invented surrogate to get people to look around more warily in the first place.  Vigilance, from time to time, requires a wake-up call.  If people around the country are looking for terrorists with almanacs, what else might they notice of some intelligence value that otherwise would make no impress?  In this case, it's not so much the 'item' (almanac) to be noticed, but the heightened noticing in the first place that serves the call of alert.

Now the Christmas bashing begins...

Christmas spirit sours in Novato: 2 San Rafael men hospitalized, then jailed after bonking each other with flower pots 

Woman upset with gift tosses Molotov cocktail into home

Yeah, some gifts come back to haunt.  No wonder some people feel safer not giving gifts at all.  Of course, the Trojan Horse was the original entrapping gift.  But gifts given generously to the wrong peeps, or a 'wrong' gift to a certain person,  can become an entrapment for the giver, too.   Sometimes, you're just damned if you do.

Vacation Day 1.

I fucked off most of  the day.

Yet ran in Dreamland, the cemetery, well past sunset.

In this photo, although the sky seems relatively bright, it was actually post-run and dismal dark.

My digital camera is like that (light over-reactive)..

I think it's the greatest thing that a retirement home in Shreveport, LA is being built for retired chimp actors and poorly confined chimps who were once used as laboratory specimens.  Chimp Haven is in the news.  After taking a look at the design of their retirement dream, I'm feeling awfully hungry for a banana myself.

To write as if there is nothing else.  To be driven by the next word to meet the page.  To scribble madly and never look back.

There is nothing else.  Not even the drugs that got me here.  Not even the signs that say “Beware”.  Not even the reader who will never care.

Damn optimists we are.  Always imagining there will be something else, another moment, an opportunity to flip the page forward…or back.

There are spots on the surface, and holes in the corona, and flares constantly flinging. Yet we never dare doubt that the sun will rise in the east again.

Would I bet against it?  Hell, no.  Because if I won, how to ever collect?  That’s the safe thing about gambling: the real dares are exempt.

Go to sleep, my baby.  Go to sleep, my baby.  Go to sleep, my baby, my baby go to sleep.

“Of that which one cannot speak, one should consign to silence.”  That’s from the Tractactus Logico-Philosophicus of Wittgenstein.  Not only cowardly, it’s bullshit.

Do you want to be a ghost when you croak?  I’ve designed a kit.  You open it and swallow the pill inside. You die. You become the ghost of an opossum.  You feign sleep six feet under for the rest of time.

They say the world will end with a whimper.  But I roam and run in the night with eyes that could terrorize terror itself, seeking a glimpse of auroras that afterburn and leave a twinkle in the sky.

Today is a good day to die.

Lose-the-Cynicism Blog

Lose the cynicism.  I say: lose it or it will never go away…

“Iran's
embassy in France said about 10,000 people might have been killed in a
powerful earthquake in the ancient city of Bam in southeastern Iran on
Friday.”
     - China View

What else should you have expected if you lived in a place called ‘BAM!’ ?

Other places to avoid if you know what’s good for you :

Disaster Peak Reservoir, OR

Hazard, NE

Tornado, WV

Calamity Ranch, NV

Terror Trail, CO

Explosion Lake, WI

The Apocalypse (peak in the Revelation Mts.), Alaska

Tidal Wave Church, KY (do they expect one to reach their doors?)

Rape Place, ID

Destruction Island, WA

Morgue Fork, KY

Smallpox Well, TX

Murder Hole, VA

(All above locations were randomly ‘top-of-my-head’  located by me through the USGS National Mapping Information search form.  However, I was unable to locate an ‘Orgasm Chasm’.  That is really hard to believe.)

~!~

Remember
that ‘trampled’ Wal-Mart Christmas shopper from a week or so
back?  The one that became a symbol of the dark side of marketed
materialism?  Well, it looks like she’s an appropriate symbol for
the dark side of litigation, too:

'Trampled' Wal-Mart Shopper Has History Of Injury Claims
Report: Woman Has Filed 15 Previous Claims, 8 At Wal-Mart Stores

Remember the slogan: “Shop until you drop.” ?  Apparently, “Drop so you can shop.”  has its advocates, too.

~!~

Do you believe in Robin Hood?

"Dennis
Cheatem, 47, went so far as to buy a used cable company repair van,
prosecutors said, and was known around his neighborhood as "the cable
guy."

Cheatem
claimed to be a modern-day Robin Hood, telling authorities he provided
cable to needy families with children.  But in at least one case,
prosecutors say, he stole cable service to turn a profit."
     -IndyStar

Cheatem…hrm…do you still  believe in Robin Hood??

~!~

So…when
is Xanga going to come out with “The Best of Xanga” hardcover for
$19.95 that you pre-order and then, lo and behold, your very own “best”
post (which you indicated in your order) is there right along with all
the other pre-paid 'renowneds' of Xanga? !!!

I just got done running 7 miles in the non-stop snow. Now waiting for my 7-mile muse to tease me into some strange word frenzy over which I have no control…

On Christmas Eve, how does one gift someone who can't have anything?

A newly-placed bundle of about 30 fairly evenly-cut, carefully-bound tree branches.  Significance unknown.

Is Christmas dying? 
Elves laid off…
‘Mr. Christmas’ pulls plug on light display…

Let
me state unequivocally, I don’t believe there exists a unique
energy-entity with its own volition called Santa Claus, even though the
metaphor of Santa bringing children gifts is the precise recapitulation
of the Wise Men bringing the Christ-babe gifts.  And, in that
sense, all Christmas gift-givers are Wise Men and all receivers
Babes-in-Toyland.  As Col Frank Slade (Al Pacino) exclaims so often in
Scent of a Woman (1992): "hoo-ha"

But
I do believe in Faeries and in realms of the unexperienced (though
never unimaginable).  And I’ve had visions of time spent on worlds
of unmitigated sunlight amidst alien civilizations that perished kalpas
ago.  And life seems ever a startling vagabondage as
mosaically tapestried with surprises as the pattern of craters on the
moon.  And thus I find myself once again...

Caught up in the cosmic stream

Where children’s imaginations play,

And comic book characters dream,

And visions converge into curvatures

To begin each day anew.

Here Dorothy soars high over her rainbow.

And E.T. flies straight through the moon.

And the sun rises each day as an alien orb

While the dish elopes with the spoon.

And the baby cries 'cause the spoon’s gone

And finds succor in sucking instead,

As mommy-genius devotes her entire life

perfecting Mr. Potato’s head.

And the Green Lantern meets up with Diogenes

As he’s looking for one honest man.

And Tinkerbell teases poor Capt. Hook

by acting like a slut who is damned.

And sailors wafting aimless on odysseys

Are taken captive by Sirens at sea.

And Lost Worlds are adrift beyond remorse

As they’re embraced by eternity.

Here I lay my head down gently

Upon a sacrificial stone in a ruin

And see virgins led to deflowering beds

For the Hero who will join the gods soon.

And the raised sword lusters brightly in sunlight

Just before the swift strike on that stone.

And the virgins deflowered and laying in bed

Have finally learned how to moan.

And the little dog laughs to see such a sight!

This just in... "A Brooklyn cop is being investigated for Internet postings in which he brags about beating suspects, writing phony tickets and ignoring calls to his precinct.

The officer, identified by Internal Affairs investigators as a patrol cop who works in the 75th Precinct, uses the pseudonym "Brooklynbacon" and posts his messages on a site accessible through Xanga.com.

Alongside pictures of motorcycle trick riders, naked women, photographs with comical captions and pictures of human oddities, he posts messages supposedly about his job and, in some instances, his own misconduct. Any one of the offenses he describes could cost him his job."

This guy is totally disgusting and a disgrace as a blogger.  Notoriety in our society, however, being what it is, if this eventually makes news beyond New York, Xanga gets a free commercial.

more here .

Update: 12:08 pm est, at this very moment, this site is being erased post by psot.  But that's OK because I already spidered it into cache Standby...i will make some of this cache available here shortly.

Update 1:30 pm est: Here's a couple of typical cached pages (site is now completely down so comment links don't work):

Now defunct brooklynbacon 1
                   brooklynbacon 2
                   brooklynbacon 3
                   brooklynbacon 4

And here's a follow-up story ID-ing the cop/blogger.

Just out Yuling around...

and hoping that your log blazes brightly
in this moment of diminished sun.

What is considered, perhaps, the most momentous graphical depiction of modern angst?

What popularly constitutes the ultimate artistic outpouring of psychological inner gloom?

What became, for hallucinating hippies, the quintessential portrayal of the'bad trip'?

Of Course, The Scream !!!

(..."I can't believe I ate the whole thing!")

But where art historians have long seen this creation as a projection of purely psychical despair, scientists have now connected the scenery to a specific historical geological and atmospheric phenomenon. 

A Short Chronology of Xanga

10/1998        Xanga starts up in a form that would be barely identifiable today.
Jewel is the first initially identifiable user.

11/1999         Xanga Alpha (not public).

 05/2000        Beta Xanga (still not public)defines itself as a site for small online entrepreneurs to become affiliates (think: Amazon.com)and write/sharereviews.

10-2000         The Xanga testbed gets hotter, but still not public.

11/05/2000     First xanga post with a link in it. (...by John, Xanga CEO-type).

11/29/2000     The soon-to-be infamous ‘bianca’ (“Bianca Broussard”) is created and developed for PR purposes; there are several ‘bloggers’ about, but most, if not all, are apparently either 1) related to the Xanga enterprise by inside invitation or 2) fictional personalities created to shake out the testbed and to create a pre-public and fictitious sense of community.

12/18-19/2000 Xanga goes bigtime public as the first GeoCities members respond to a spam email recruitment from Bianca Broussard, a fictional PR personality of Xanga.

12/20/2000     ‘notforprophet’is born; he gets the strange intuition that not everyone in the neighborhood is for real.

12/26/2000     I identify the first real “face” behind the Xanga enterprise.

12/30/2000     I identify more real “faces” behind Xanga.

3/10/2001       Angelfire spam recruitment underway (Bianca returns after 1-2 month hiatus).

4/28/2001       Bianca is deactivated!

5/2001            Many structural changes to popularity and ranking metrics; Premium appears.

Winter 2002    “Xangalympics” marketed by Xanga, winner to get Lifetime membership, winning ‘Team’ to get other prizes.  Winners are never announced.

1/25/2002       James, the daily fix for a strong following of Xangans,  "leaves" Xanga (returns 2 weeks later).

7/2002            Xanga Store announced (never launches, now defunct).

                       Xanga Personals started.

7/29/2002       The Asian community on Xanga (now 95% of all bloggers) 

coalesces and ascends to the top of Featured Content.

12/20/2003      In relative obscurity, an unfinished chronology of Xanga gets devised.

the world is as large as an only dream
of you 

             I think quite endlessly

for hours

            on end I twist restlessly

unable to 

            sleep almost breathlessly

I whisper

            a craving for.

the future is as bright as the night

lost to

            the sun rises compellingly

in sky

            the clouds sashay lazily

by noon

            I’m so mystically high

I slurp

            this yearning of.

a solitary dew pond, if there but were

of moisture

            left on this planet

most precious

            that very substance would

as essence

            reflecting all life’s sparkle

be and thus

            are you to me.

In a moment of insane truthfulness, I'll admit this once and only to creating the following blogs:  God, Goddess (openly multi-authored), Jesus (no posts, a long story, but an interesting guest book), theoncegreat_Pan, ournightmare (clandestinely multi-authored flame), and vagina (one post).  I also, early on, had cornered the blog market on penis and pussy, but the Xangods, unannounced, decided to invalidate the names forever more.  Gods, nightmares, and sex organs. 

Oh yes, and eProps - (another god, at least for many xangans ).  That is all.

I applied for a
position in my company—but in a different department—with a title of
“Senior Information Security Analyst” about a month ago.  I was
one of two finalists.Neither of us got the position.“None of the
Above.”  I was told that I didn’t have the “project management
skills” necessary to justify hiring, but that I was otherwise fully
qualified.  The job offer was unfilled (left vacant) and now
the offering department wants instead to post a position a step down that requires less “project management skills.”  I might apply and take this lesser position if offered, but only if
they’ll start me at the same base pay I was going to negotiate for in
the former position (‘starting base’ is always a negotiable item before hire).

Not enough
“project management skills” ?  Let’s see…I was a platoon sergeant
in the Army, head of a jungle meteorological observatory, one of the
lead managers in the repeated deployment of a station technical control
facility (communications hub) in the desert….  Nope, that doesn’t
count—it’s secludingly military.

Okay…I’m a
graduate college professor (albeit part-time and not currently)
meaning: I take on the project of not only teaching students, but
teaching myself, organizing a syllabus, preparing homework, preparing
tests, grading both, facilitating tutoring, securing necessary academic
supplies and resources (ordering books for the bookstore, arranging for
equipment in the classroom, securing copies of everything for all,
setting up my class’ own website, etc.)  Nope, that shouldn’t
count—it’s mere academia.

Okay…I just spent
the entire summer managing a team of five in the conversion of about
460 people-and-PCs (like owners and pets) in the workplace and field
from an archaic dialup remote access service to a state-of-the-art VPN
(virtual private network) remote dialup and broadband service.  We
not only completed the project on time, but were only 1 of 3 districts
out of 13 in the country to do so.  I believe I was expected
(though not encouraged) to fail.  We didn’t.  I did just get a bonus check equal to about 5% of my salary in recognition for our success.  Um…nope, that doesn’t count???

I wonder, for
myself, if it would be a worse curse to have the time to write, and be
writing, and yet struggling to make it as a writer, than simply to
languish, as I do, in jobs that disallow me the time to make writing a
serious effort.

Need I wait for
'retirement' to give it a go?  Ha...I think I'm just going to have
to hone my survival skills for social living, compress time, get rid of
excess baggage, follow the belly-fired path of a
mad-authoring medieval monk, and play manic with my laptop.

I just have a sense today that the world is stirring, stirring, stirring.    Something's about to break loose, don't know what. Stay tuned for the unknown.

Somewhere, far over the rainbow...

Microsoft's PowerPoint is being implicated in the crash of the Space Shuttle Columbia.

It has also been implicated in the fuzzifying of the minds of all the stats students I ever taught using in-class PP presentations.


Six new potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) have been discovered within the last month.

And they'll keep coming until an actually hazardous asteroid ( AHA! ) steals the spotlight.


Earth's magnetic field has been steadily weakening and scientists warn that such raises the possibility of a 'pole flip' …

It sounds like something out of a bad science fiction movie: Compass needles go haywire, cancer rates rise, new ozone holes pop up all over the globe and a plague of glitches descends on all things electronic.

unexpected pumpkin hiding in a forest rivulet

till rust shall we death

I just went shopping at the supermarket—at midnight—and left the groceries sitting in the store.  Deliberately.

Seems that they closed all the registers but one right at a time when a nearly cashless couple with a handful of food stamps was postured at the remaining lone checkout with 1) a hell-load of items, 2) a discount coupon that wouldn’t scan and couldn’t be cleared except by ‘Customer Service’ which wasn’t opening till dawn, 3) unmarked merchandise requiring a price check, and 4) a total sum value of items scanned in excess of the amount of food coupons they had in hand.
.

I stood three deep in that line with three others behind me witnessing that stalled shopping spree.  And, after staying patient for 5 minutes without any visible sign of progress, I shook my head and remarked, softly yet audibly, “Fucking people.”

The store management, also witnessing the checkup line backup, opened a second register after some internecine who’s-job-is-it bickering.  While I could have bolted to the newly opening ‘Register 5’ to be first in line, I considerately allowed the three shoppers behind me to move over first.

So there were then four shoppers in Line 5 (myself at the end of the line) while the coupon people still litigated in the other aisle along with one other shopper, the one previously ahead of me and still directly behind the coupon people, who decided to stay pat.

My aisle cleared quickly with the three shoppers ahead of me (all with just a few items) processing through at comparatively breakneck speed.  So it then came down to just me left and that’s when the cashier said: “The till has moved.  See.  The till has moved over to Aisle 10.  They’ll take you over there. The till has moved.”  The cashier in referring to ‘Aisle 10’ was attempting to herd me over to yet another register that had just, just opened.

No forewarning.  No “Register Closed” sign.  No indication whatsoever that the “till” was about to migrate.  I actually got the immediate impression from all the confusion that the store must have had a computer system policy that allowed only two registers max to be open simultaneously after midnight.  So when the Register 10 ( "over there") opened to assist in the ongoing backlog, Register 5, where I was, automatically shutdown.

But I had already unloaded half my groceries from the cart.  I looked away in disgust from the Register 5 retired-cashier-now-traffic-cop.  And responded; “Fuck your shit.”   And walked.

I know it was rude, but don’t ever herd me, dammit.

Besides, the food was already dead.

This is 'two' funny ... (though snagged from 'the Internet' I have added and modified several lines (in blue) )

Two Cows

DEMOCRAT
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
You feel guilty for being successful. Barbara Streisand sings for you.

REPUBLICAN
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
So?

SOCIALIST You have two cows.
The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor.
You form a cooperative to tell him how to manage his cow.
No one can decide on the most appropriate color for milk.

COMMUNIST
You have two cows.
The government seizes both and provides you with milk.
You wait in line for hours to get it.
It is expensive and sour.
All proceeds go ino a propaganda campaign touting the miraculous dialectical benefits of communist milk.

CAPITALISM, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows.
You sell one, buy a bull, and build a herd of cows.
You disguise them as buffalo and start a 'reserve' where 'sportsmen' (pretending they are Buffalo Bills) can shoot them from the comfort of a Jack Daniels-stocked train car as it circles around the 'reserve'.

DEMOCRACY, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows.
The government taxes you to the point you have to sell both to support a man in a foreign country who has only one cow, which was a gift from your government.

BUREAUCRACY, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows.
The government takes them both, shoots one, milks the other, pays you for the milk, and then pours the milk down the drain.
You are expected to pay the sewer bill (which exceeds your compensation from the milk).

AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You sell one, lease it back to yourself and do an IPO on the 2nd one.
You force the two cows to produce the milk of four cows.
You are surprised when one cow drops dead.
You spin an announcement to the analysts stating you have down sized and are reducing expenses.
Your stock goes up.

FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You go on strike because you want three cows.
You go to lunch and drink wine.
Life is good.

JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk.
They learn to travel on unbelievably crowded trains.
Most are at the top of their class at cow school.

GERMAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You engineer them so they are all blond, drink lots of beer, give excellent quality milk, and run a hundred miles an hour.
Unfortunately they also demand 13 weeks of vacation per year.

ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows but you don't know where they are.
While ambling around, you see a beautiful woman.
You break for lunch.
Life is magnificent.

RUSSIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You have some vodka.
You count them and learn you have five cows.
You have some more vodka.
You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.
The Mafia shows up and takes over however many cows you really have.
You have some more vodka.

TALIBAN CORPORATION
You have all the cows in Afghanistan, which are two.
You don't milk them because you cannot touch any creature's private parts.
Then you kill them and claim a US bomb blew them up while they were in the hospital.

IRAQI CORPORATION
You have two cows.
They go into hiding.
They send radio tapes of their mooing.
You send one out on a mission and it explodes at an American military checkpoint becoming the world's first 'cow bomb'.

POLISH CORPORATION
You have two bulls.
Employees are regularly maimed and killed attempting to milk them.
You pray to the patron saint of cows for enlightenment. 

FLORIDIAN
You have a black cow and a brown cow.
Everyone votes for the best looking one.
Some of the people who like the brown one best, vote for the black one.
Some people vote for both.
Some people vote for neither.
Some people can't figure out how to vote at all.  They can't tell a teat from a chad. 
Finally, a bunch of guys from out-of-state tell you which is the best looking cow.

CALIFORNIAN
You have a cow and a bull.
The bull is depressed.
It has spent its life living a lie.
It goes away for two weeks.
It comes back after a taxpayer-paid sex-change operation.
You now have two cows.
One makes milk; the other doesn't.
You try to sell the transgender cow.
Its lawyer sues you for discrimination.
You lose in court.
You sell the milk-generating cow to pay the damages.
You now have one rich, transgender, non-milk-producing cow.
You change your business to beef. PETA pickets your farm.
Jesse Jackson makes a speech in your driveway.
Cruz Bustamante calls for higher farm taxes to help "working cows".
Hillary Clinton calls for the nationalization of 1/7 of your farm "for the children". 
Gov. Schwrazenegger admits the possibility of a past indiscretion with your cows on a movie set. 
The L.A. Times quotes five anonymous cows claiming you groped their teats.
You declare bankruptcy and shut down all operations.
The cow starves to death.
The L.A. Times' analysis shows your business failure is Bush's fault.

"notforprophet is the Beast. I know because he's my alter-ego."

     - God

...after the Nut Feast is over...

...merge again...

As a warrior, I find no honor in seppuku.  Those that take their own lives are stupid and selfish.

You should let the Earth give and let the Earth take, but not take your own life away from Earth.

The only reason we are here, after all, is to learn to love World in entirety.

Embrace life for the embracing, ungrip only in the clinch of  Faerie Death. 

Always follow the Golden Eternity.

The feminine form

wreaks havoc on my sensory: What, after all, am I looking at?

conditional curves, delicious dips, profound protuberances, accentuated accesses

a pelvis that wobbles like an ocean’s wave, a-surge with belly ripples that rushingly radiate

soft, fuzzy body hair that looks, in a light breeze,  like a wheat field a-waving from a take obtained hovering up in strato-space

knowing feet that step so delicately yet deliberately that I wonder if they don’t have more intelligence than half the human race

clear, casting eyes that fixate on the truth in a heart not a moment too late

a poking tongue that teases how easy any inch of flesh can to an erotically provocative use be put

a lower lip that dangles slightly with a word unspoken churning up a vision of love pouncing delight upon that pouty in the night

breasts that sway like chandeliers pendant and swinging during a minor earth tremor

buns that strap so tight that  the seam of a panty is a formidable ridge considered in topographical relief

engorging crevasses that mysteriously appear with inescapable allure at the very moment of a numinous heartquake

Havoc, I say, havoc!

Cry and let loose the dogs of Eros.

Okay, kiddies, since I’m nearly blog-dead (stillborn with words that find not time to burst into bloom and infuse the internet with their linguistic effervescence), I’ll just zoom-zoom-zoom and pass a long a few of my favorite fun facts:

The correct response to the Irish greeting, "Top of the morning to you," is "and the rest of the day to yourself."

(So greet your boss with "Top of the morning to you,"  and correct him/her if she/he fails to give you the rest of the day off.)

The right side of a boat was called the starboard side due to the fact that the astronavigators used to stand out on the plank (which was on the right side) to get an unobstructed view of the stars. The left side was called the port side because that was the side that you put in on at the port.

(Something tells me that astronavigators had to be good swimmers, too.)

The last thing to happen is the ultimate. The next-to-last is the penultimate, and the second-to-last is the antepenultimate.

(As with good sex, the antepenultimate: consumate intent; the penultimate: irrepressible orgasm; the ultimate: embracing, timeless contentment)

Greenland: The largest island in the world, got its name not because it has lush green fields which the name implies, but rather because people were purposely misled to believe that it had greenery, or good place to grow crop to make a good living. Viking explorers called the frozen island in the Arctic Circle Greenland to attract settlers, who otherwise might have been scared off. However, only the coastal area turns green and even this greening occurs solely during Greenland’s brief summer. But long after the Vikings had passed and their subterfuge had been discovered, the erroneous label remained as the island’s official name.

(This makes me wonder if "The Enchanted Kingdom" is truly enchanted. )

Oh, yes, and one scary fact:Many of today’s automobiles and trucks are already equipped with retrievable ‘black boxes’ that record the last seconds prior to a catastrophic accident.IBM and others are envisioning a scenario that will automatically transmit such crash data instantaneously via satellite to an online Global Data Safety Vault for analysis by intelligent Data Miner software.

(Ponder the acronym P.E.T. : personal e-tracking.)

I'm feeling lucky.  Aren't you feeling lucky, too?

Your Last Atomz  Xanga-notforprophet Index was Successful

The last index of your web site index completed 1 minute ago. It took 4 minutes to crawl 307 pages and index 307 pages containing 503624 words for a total of 14077906 bytes. 37634 word endings, 0 synonyms, 31657 sound-alike words, and 15 excluded words were included in the index.

(307 x 5 = 1507) posts over just less than three years, over 150 poems, half a million words, and immeasurable goodwill and love later…

I plant a bean and hope for better.

If it’s always just a matter of creativity, more creativity, new creativity, like a farmer introducing a new crop to a field without pummeling the previous, 

without the plowing of the ground bare and thus awakened to new ripeness,
all will rot.

Hence, have I sat fallow for a few days. 

But I’m like Jack with beans from the crone’s beanstalk.

So watch out.

By way of a re-introduction...

My name is Stefan Friedrich. I am at least three years old and am certainly an incorrigible mystical fascist who very much hopes some day to become Prime Minister of TuvaTuva or some other terra incognito thirstily in want of an aggressive, marshal lunatic with a highly-developed, cosmically-political imagination.

My favorite and probably my only hobby is communicating intelligently with space aliens (star children, we are all star children) which I do by scribbling messages in classical Chinese on sheets of Charmin toilet paper and flushing them down the toilet at midnight on the 14th day of every lunar month. As of yet I've received no reply communications, but you must understand that these things require time and much patience.

My philosophy of life is simple though arcanely drawn. It is found fully expressed in the sixth chapter of the Tao Te Ching by the ancient sage Lao Tse. It reads:

The valley spirit forever lives;
It is woman, primal mother.
Her gateway is the root of heaven and earth.
It is like a veil almost unseen.
Seize it: it will never fail.

Granted, it doesn't make much sense. And even less so before translation. But, then, a good, healthy philosophy of life ought not to make much sense, less to suffer the hazard and risk of a deadening bureaucratization.

Some people have said that I resemble Jesus Christ. These people are idiots. I do not at all resemble that man. In fact, I believe that I do not resemble anyone living or dead. I think I was born not to resemble. A solitary facial fingerprint in the look-alike pool of life. If you've never seen me but are curious to know what I look like (you must be strange), the best thing to do is to go to the mirror, gaze at your own image, and say "He does not look like this."

Affectionately.

DaimlerChrysler's Dodge unit is sponsoring a pay-per-view "Lingerie Bowl" during half time of the Super Bowl Feb. 1, that will feature models dressed in lingerie playing a seven-on-seven tackle football game, according to a published report.
        -CNN

How disgusting.  Who's going to pay $30 to watch a grogeous half-nekkid quarterback stick her hands up to the flashing hiney of a gorgeous helf-nekkid center?

I can hear the broadcast-mic play-calling in the huddle now...

Red-headed Quarterback: "Okay, let's run the Slant Right Rock."
Blonde Full-Bosomed Halfback: "Which one's that?"
Red-headed Quarterback: "Don't you remember? !  It's the one where all the linegirls slant block to the right and you just run through the hole up the middle."
Blonde Full-Bosomed Halfback: "Okay, but what's the hole's name, I mean, what's her number?"

Boys At Home:   har   har   har   har   *while spitting up beer*

Seriously, if I could, I'd hijack the program and feature instead a "Save the Wolves" educational promotion .

And the $30 bucks?   I'd rather dish out slightly more, $39.90 to be exact, and spend it on a GreenPoint,  one square meter (10 sq. feet) of soon-to-be-greened land in Queensland, Australia.

A Letter To Xanga

John, et. al.,

Thought I'd let you know that I have personally experienced bugs in posting since the last maintenance update on Thanksgiving ( a coincidence?)

For instance, I try to post or update a post and the xTools window just returns to the desktop instead of posting to the blog.

Also, others around xanga are noticing the same kind of things in lost posts and lost comments.  I've encountered enough complaints in the last couple days to suspect that it's a pattern of real significance.

Steve, aka notforprophet

A Reply From Xanga

Hey Steve,

It's Bob...

Yeah, we're on it. We believe the problem may be related to a cookie issue that cropped up when Microsoft released its latest security patch to IE. We need to confirm this and narrow the bug down further to fix it, and Janet/Monsur/Dan/John are actually all working on this as we speak.

Can you tell me if you recently upgraded your IE with the latest security patch?

Thanks,
Bob

My reply to Bob: Yep!  I'm a patchoholic.

P.S   I followed up with Bob to inform him that many of you are not patched yet still having the same problems as those who are.