The Sporadic Curmudgeon

Last night I did something that’s been a dream of mine since I was a zygote: I saw the surface of Mars with my own eyes.

Over the years I’ve viewed Mars many times through telescopes, of course, including the close approach in August 2003. But last night was the first time in my life that I could actually identify surface features. And I almost didn’t bother.

I was feeling tired and more than a little queasy (I mistakenly drank a sip from a week-old soda, don’t ask) and was seriously considering not going to all the trouble of hauling out the scope and dragging it into the front driveway. I figured that since the closest approach was the next night it could wait until then. My wife, bless her heart, convinced me that since Mars wouldn’t be this close again until 2018 and it might be cloudy tomorrow night I’d better get my ass outside.

Front-yard astronomy is fraught with peril here in Vegas, mostly because the people in my neighborhood assume my telescope is a weapon of some sort, so I’m always a little nervous about setting up. Nobody was around, though, so there were no SWAT teams to deal with this time.

And what a view! The Red Planet was huge in the eyepiece, about the size of a Soviet kopek (roughly 2/3 the size of a penny), with greenish-brown markings. I couldn’t make out the polar ice cap, but Syrtis Major and the Hellas Basin were as plain as day.

My daughter fetched me a piece of paper and a crayon so I could make a sketch. You can imagine how jazzed I was when I got inside and found it matched photographs of Mars precisely.

That’s my sketch to the right, along with a 2003 Hubble photo showing the same features, although not from the same precise angle of rotation. South is at the top in both images, because that’s what I saw through the eyepiece. The sketch was done at approximately 9:00 PM Pacific Daylight Time on October 28, 2005, from the south end of Las Vegas, Nevada.

Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who declined to declaw the tiger when she had the chance, is now upset that Microsoft is shredding the furniture again. In a blatant violation of the 2002 antitrust settlement she’s overseeing, the Beast of Redmond tried to force MP3 player manufacturers to tie their products to Windows Media software.

Give me a break.

Since when has Microsoft ever played by the rules? If she’s so indignant about Microsoft’s well-documented standard M.O., perhaps she should have dropped the Pollyanna act. They have always violated the antitrust laws whenever they thought they could get away with it.

She was supposed to do something about their thuglike behavior. She chose not to. It was her responsibility, and she failed to act. Whose fault is that?

Update: There’s a more in-depth account here.

“Now there’s something you don’t see every day, Chauncy.”

“What’s that, Edgar?”

“A naked man jacking off while ordering coffee.”

A man in Woodstock, Ontario has been arrested for masturbating at a coffee store drive-through. His defense? “Fantasy got the best of him.” I dare you to read the following two sentences without laughing:

When the car pulled up to the window, the employee noticed a man alone in the vehicle, completely nude and masturbating, Carnegie said.

The man handed money to the employee with his unoccupied left hand, court heard.

I know the long Canadian winters have been known to drive strong men batshit crazy, but it’s only October, for Christ’s sake.

A Dallas cabdriver is being tried for sprinkling dried shit over the baked goods in a grocery store.

Customers had complained that the fresh-baked items smelled and tasted like manure.

The defendant, who allegedly had a beef with the store over the way he’d been treated, faces punishment ranging from probation, to two to 20 years in prison.

I wonder if there’s a slang meaning of “beef” I’m unaware of.

In the spirit of “it’d be hard to do worse than the jerkwads we’ve got now,” a new candidate has thrown his hat into the ring: General Zod is running for President. Zod, you may recall, is the megalomaniacal super-villian who was imprisoned in the Phantom Zone at the beginning of Superman: The Movie and escaped with his accomplices to give our hero a tough time in Superman II.

On Zod’s website, he lays out his reasons for running:

I can win no tribute from a bankrupted nation populated by feeble flag-waving plebians. In 2008 I shall restore your dignity and make you servants worthy of my rule. This new government shall become a tool of my oppression. Instead of hidden agendas and waffling policies, I offer you direct candor and brutal certainty. I only ask for your tribute, your lives, and your vote.

While life under Zod would certainly be more efficient, I’d actually prefer life under Ursa. But that’s probably just me.

Cheney: (bleary) Yeah? What is it?

Rove: Oh my God, I’m going to jail.

Cheney: It’s you. For Christ’s sake, man, get a grip. People like us don’t go to jail. Well, Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Mitchell did, but still…

Rove: I’m too pretty for prison! (sobs uncontrollably)

Cheney: Oh, boo-hoo. Dammit, get a hold of yourself before I drive over to your place and bitch-slap you! Whatever happened to “unflappable” Karl? Jeez, you make me ashamed to even be talking to you.

Rove: Okay… (sniffle) Okay. I’m alright now. The grand jury testimony was harder on me than I–

Cheney: That mean old Fitzgerald keeps asking me questions. Waah! Waah! You make me wanna puke. Now you want to explain what kind of goddamned emergency is so fucking big you had to wake me up at two in the morning?

Rove: I… I think he’s beginning to suspect.

Cheney: Yeah, right. Pretzel-boy couldn’t put two and two together if it was written on a blackboard. Heh. Hold on a second, I want to write that one down… couldn’t… two… blackboard. Memoir gold!

Rove: What, sir?

Cheney: Nothing. Why do you think Chimpzilla’s getting wise?

Rove: He said he wanted to watch the news today.

Cheney: And?

Rove: Well, he just walked over and turned on the set. We had no warning. The crew was eating dinner.

Cheney: You let him watch the real news, didn’t you? You screwed us, you little sonuvabitch!

Rove: No, sir! He just seemed puzzled the same commercials were playing over and over, is all.

Cheney: Well that’s a pretty good goddamned question, Boy Genius. Why the hell WERE the same commercials playing over and over? Those ads are on a ten-minute tape loop. If Captain Segway noticed it they must have played a half-dozen times.

Rove: Three, actually.

Cheney: Only three? I’m impressed. I take it you finally got a news crew in front of the camera?

Rove: Yeah, but then he fell asleep after a few minutes. It was like he was trying to catch us out, but then lost interest and took a nap.

Cheney: If he went to sleep then he doesn’t know anything.

Rove: I know, but it’s getting harder to keep doing this.

Cheney: Cry me a fucking river, Turdblossom. It’s only your goddamned job.

Rove: Yes, but–

Cheney: Now listen to me, you stupid little shit. The Blunderer-in-Chief is NOT going to find out ANYTHING. He’s not going to find out he’s been a prisoner in the White House since 2002. He’s not going to find out that the turkey was plastic, the hurricane relief station was fake, or the video-conference with the troops was staged. He’s not going to find out we had a robot doing his debates in 2004 and just told him they were cancelled, or that there were no WMDs, or that Saddam posed no threat. And he’s CERTAINLY not going to watch the news, or read a paper, or talk to a reporter we don’t have by the short and curlies.

Do you want to know why none of those things are going to happen? They’re not going to happen because as soon as I hang up you’re going to stop whining and do the fucking job you’re paid to do, and if you don’t I’m going to break down your door and squeeze your flabby throat so hard your beady little eyes’ll pop right out of that Mr. Potato-head you call a cranium. Do you understand me, Karl? Have I gotten through to you, you cringing asshole? Or do I have to come show you what your own intestines look like?

Rove: No sir. I understand completely.

Cheney: You’d better. Now I gotta get some sleep. Remind me tomorrow to kick your ass.

Rove: I will, sir. Good–

(Cheney hangs up)

I don’t know what’s more offensive: that our government is continually barraging us with propaganda, or that the quality of the propaganda is so abysmal. How stupid do they think we are? Perhaps it merely reflects the intelligence of its authors.

As suspected by anyone with a couple of adjacent neurons, the “administration” has admitted that the NYC subway threat was a hoax. Here’s the money quote:

The warning was announced Thursday after two operatives were questioned in Iraq based on a tip from an informant described by a city official as someone who has provided useful information.

Indeed. Information capable of pushing the casualties in Iraq, Abramoff, Delay, Rove, hurricane Katrina, Miller, Filipino spies, Safavian and rampant cronyism off the front page is about as useful as it’s possible to get. Timely, too.

I’m not blaming New York for any of this, mind you. They did exactly the right thing under the circumstances, erring on the side of caution when lives were at stake. But I’d sure be interested in checking the White House phone logs to see if anybody made any recent long-distance calls. I’d start with Karl’s office.

My wife and I took our daughter to see Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit tonight. I haven’t had that much fun at a theater in, well, decades. Anybody who doesn’t fall in giddy love with this glorious Tinkertoy of a movie probably doesn’t cast a reflection in a mirror, either. (Amazingly, there have been a couple of sourpuss reviewers out there who didn’t like it: 5 out of 105 according to Rotten Tomatoes. I suspect they lead sad lives devoid of meaning and affection.) In the movie Bladerunner a complex machine that measures empathy levels was used to detect soulless replicants mimicing genuine human beings. A screening of Were-Rabbit could accomplish the same thing with a lot less fuss.

One of the people leaving the theater in the row behind us said, “I feel like I just went to Disneyland.” I could not agree more. See this wonderful little film before it leaves the theaters. And then buy the DVD when it comes out. Nick Park needs to make lots and lots more Wallace and Gromit adventures.

Horrible Update October 10, 2005 The warehouse in Bristol, England where Aardman Animation housed its sets and models from all of the prior Wallace and Gromit films, as well as many others, has been destroyed by fire. The entire history of this groundbreaking animation studio has been completely lost. The timing of the fire is suspicious; I smell deliberate vandalism. More on this story as it emerges.

Another “terrorist threat” forced the evacuation of the Washington Monument a short while ago. Once again, the source is questionable:

A law enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because other agencies were handling the case, said the credibility of the threat was low but officials did not want to take any chances.

We’d better get used to this. If Rove and company are being reeled in for high crimes, they’re going to flop around on the line trying to tear out the hook. Anybody have a gaff handy?

How really, really convenient.

Tomorrow Karl Rove faces a grand jury for the 4th time about the treasonous outing of CIA counter-terrorist agent Valerie Plame, his Howdy-Doody puppet Bush has plunged to a 37% approval rating in the polls, it’s revealed that Cheney’s office has been pawed through by a Fillipino spy, and by some incredible coincidence those rather interesting headlines are pushed aside by news of a terrorist threat against the New York City subway system. A threat that is based, it’s revealed several paragraphs into the story, on “shaky evidence.”

Isn’t that the most amazingly not-at-all-fishy thing you’ve ever heard?

I’m surprised Bush isn’t out in the Rose Garden pointing at the sky and yelling “Look! It’s Halley’s Comet!” Have these slimy motherfuckers ever even read “The Little Boy That Cried Wolf?”