Thursday, February 26, 2009

MY REPLY TO A LETTER TO THE EDITOR

A LETTER TO THE EDITOR:



Welcome to Up-in Smoke Airlines, flight number, uh, I can't remember.

But we are going to San Francisco.

I am your captain, Cheech Marin, and your co-pilot is Tommy Chong.

Our navigator today is Pacman Jones and in the cabin we have Amy Winehouse and Lindsay Lohan.

Sit back, light up a bong and enjoy the flight.

We will be there before you can say, "Hey duuuude, got any munchies?"

By Richard Chase






MY REPLY TO THE LETTER TO THE EDITOR:



I'm glad that there's finally a safer airline where crew and pilots aren't loopy from martinis.

Today's jets mostly "fly themselves", but sometimes an acumen is necessary that alcoholic intoxication undermines.

It would be bad, of course, if the crew and pilots had smoked marijuana
AND drunk alcohol.

Captain, only the pot, please.

When did Cheech and Chong start flying, anyway?


By Mad Plato


Saturday, February 21, 2009

WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOWERS GONE?



Well, not flowers exactly, but friends.

I’ve never had many friends.

I don’t mean for this to sound like I’m feeling sorry for myself, because I’m not.

Less is more…or to be more grammatical…fewer is more.

One of these days I’ll pay to find where my friends have gone.

I suppose that if they were my true friends, then I wouldn’t have to ask where they all are.

But if anyone of you is reading this…

Please send me a flower.

ASAP.


Thursday, February 19, 2009

IT'S A JUNKYARD OUT THERE




 


UPDATE:
August 4, 2014:
 

 
 
FETA:
Where are we?

GRETA:
The Astromap says Earth.

FETA:
Well, this planet has plenty of water.

GRETA:
True, but its atmosphere is a big junkyard of debris.

FETA:
When you deploy cloaking, also deploy debris shields so we don’t get penetrated by any of this junk.

GRETA:
O.K. Ooh, that was a close one.

FETA:
Deploy debris shields!

(Explosion)
United States Strategic Command:
Stand down lasers. ET vehicle has been destroyed by space junk.
 
 
IT'S ABOUT RENEWABLE RESOURCES!

***

Published: February 18, 2009

NYTimes.com


SPACE is becoming an increasingly perilous place.
It is dangerous, of course, because more and more countries are venturing into orbit.
But it is also dangerous because there are precious few international agreements governing national actions in space. No rules of the road forced Russia to de-orbit its long-defunct Cosmos 2251 spacecraft, which would have prevented its collision last week with Iridium’s communications satellite. Yet this event probably left at least 2,000 pieces of hazardous debris in orbit around the earth; all of this debris will have to be tracked and avoided by other spacecraft for decades.
Instead of continuing to cling to the theory of “freedom of action” in space, all space-faring countries would be well advised to sit down and talk about mutual restraint and coordination. The alternative is unacceptable: we will lose our ability to operate in some of the most useful regions of orbital space, particularly those closest to the earth (60 to 1,000 miles up).
In many respects, our level of sophistication in dealing with space “traffic management” — the active and dead satellites and orbital debris that whiz around the earth at speeds of 18,000 miles per hour — is reminiscent of the early days of car travel, when a lack of rules resulted in frequent accidents.
The difference in space, of course, is that the fragments from past collisions remain in orbit, at least until they are eventually dragged down by gravity and burn up in the atmosphere. The February 2008 shoot down of a military satellite by the United States created a large amount of debris, but, at an altitude of 150 miles, it fell out of orbit in two months’ time. At 500 miles up, by contrast, debris will orbit for decades. Much above that, it will persist for centuries.
Recently, an effort led in part by the United States succeeded in gaining United Nations passage of a set of voluntary international debris-control guidelines. These useful but very general protocols urge countries to limit their debris, to refrain from blowing things up in space and to place dead spacecraft in “parking” orbits or, if at lower altitudes, in relatively rapid de-orbiting modes.
The problem is that not enough countries are observing these guidelines because they’re just that — guidelines. They don’t have the force of international law, they offer too many loopholes and violators face no sanctions. The Iridium-Cosmos collision is the clearest sign yet that we need to devise cooperative solutions to our common problems in space — before it is too late.
United States Strategic Command tracks more than 18,000 orbiting space objects, but it lacks the manpower to provide warnings of possible collisions to all except manned spacecraft and the most crucial United States military satellites.
Setting up an international warning network, paid for by the users of space, should therefore be treated as a priority. Such an entity could be run by a consortium of national militaries or space agencies, possibly under United Nations auspices. (The United Nations already oversees a space registration convention, which requires countries to list launches, orbits and the purpose of missions. But it stops tracking spacecraft once they’ve been launched.)
While there are security concerns associated with such a proposal — we don’t want the world to know the location and number of our military satellites — it’s important to remember that many sensitive satellites are large and easily found, even by amateur astronomers. It’s also worth remembering that in the thick of the cold war we signed an Incidents at Sea Treaty with the Soviet Union, which put in place measures to reduce the chance of accidents between American and Soviet ships and planes.
Other steps should be taken too. We should ban the intentional destruction of satellites in orbits above 150 miles (and possibly below as well). We should also create a legally binding code of conduct for space (laying out specific sanctions for violators) and embark on new efforts to bring about international coordination of radar systems. All these ventures could reasonably be undertaken by meetings of space-faring states or at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva.
Until now, the debate about space has focused largely on the question of who is up there. Now two new questions have come to the fore: What is up there, and where is it?
James Clay Moltz, an associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, is the author of “The Politics of Space Security.”

Saturday, February 14, 2009

DANDELION SEEDS AND SOME OF THE GIRLS I’VE KNOWN











As seeds of dandelions were floating in the air, I had this bright idea that I would make a pillow out of their soft, little parachutes.
A little girl with blond hair walked up to me and asked, “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to make a pillow”, I replied.
“How?”, she asked.
I said, “By collecting these.”

The seeds were still flying everywhere.

After I had collected a bagful, I threw them all away after I noticed that a lot of insects were crawling in my future pillow material.

More seeds than ever were now blowing in the wind.
The sky was blue but so was I.


***


Joan Bliss and I had been walking in a forest where her father (or grandfather) had his cabin.
It was one of those tall, A-Frame structures.
It had a sign with the name BLISS.

We just kept walking through the silent, green forest.

She and I would later share the same sleeping bag when the temperature was below freezing at a farm in Longmont, Colorado called Innisfree.

That was the December night in 1973 when Comet Kohoutek was supposed to be visible in the night sky.

Everyone went outside and climbed on top of a grain silo to have a look---
Everyone, that is, except for Joan Bliss and me.

We didn’t miss a thing, because the cloud cover was so thick that night that you couldn’t see a thing.


***


Another time in another state I met a woman who was on her way to the Mardi Gras when I met her.

She had a cozy Volkswagen bus.

I could have gone with her, but I didn’t, and I can’t remember why.

Maybe I should have.

But then I would not have had the other experiences that I ended up having.

You never know where the other road might have taken you because you chose to go on the other one.


***


I met another woman in a bar.

Years later I would travel to the same tract of land where I had stayed with her, her husband, and two daughters---and try to see her again.
I’m having trouble remembering her name, but maybe before I finish it will come back to me.
But first, a slight detour that describes what happened the night before I met her.

The night before I met her I had been a passenger in a Karma Ghia that was going down a steep, winding, unpaved---and very bumpy road---when it hit a pine tree.

The driver, Jim, was unhurt, but I broke my glasses in two, and the collision of my head on the hard dashboard (even with my seat belt on) had made a cut right above my nose.

Jim drove back to the bar where we had been drinking.

I was glad that we did, because one of the pretty waitresses took care of my injury as I lay upon a white freezer in the bar’s kitchen.

The next afternoon I went to the town’s bar called the D-Bar-D.

Sitting on the front porch was a big guy who had a line of stitches going from the top of his head all the way down the left side of his face.
I asked, “What happened?”
“My head went through the truck’s windshield”.
“Where did it happen?”, I asked.
And he gave the name of the same road where I had had my accident on the same night as his.
“We must have just missed each other”, I told him, “because that’s the same road where I had my accident.”
He didn’t say much more after that, except that I found out that he had once been an engineer for the stage crew of Leon Russell.



She was one of the bartenders in the D-Bar-D.
I was sitting at the bar when she asked me my name.
I told her it was Moon (and later on I told her my complete name…Tangerine Rambler Moon).
Then she asked where I was from and I told her, “The Planet Bubble”.
I don’t know why. I just did.
And she seemed amused (or impressed).
Then she asked me to dance.
I think she said it was her break.

The song was a slow love song, the kind I liked to dance to when I wasn’t rocking and rolling.
We danced close and cheek-to-cheek.



I met her husband when she got off of work.
When he saw me (without my glasses) he said, “You’ve got acid eyes. Are you having a third-eye flash?”

To make a longer story shorter, I ended up staying on the land where she and her husband David (his name I do remember!) and their two daughters lived, which was inside their small trailer.
They were letting me sleep on their land because I was going to help them in the construction of their log cabin.

Well, one night, I left the D-Bar-D with David's wife to return to their land.

It started to rain hard.

It wasn’t safe to keep driving.

We were going to spend that night in her friend’s trailer.

There were only two beds.

It was decided that I’d sleep with David’s wife.

The next morning she told him that we had slept in the same bed, but that nothing had happened…and nothing did…but David still didn’t believe it.
His wife also didn’t believe it, either, when a few weeks later she found out that another woman had gotten pregnant by David.
***


I knew this other woman from Chicago.
She was in her early twenties.
For some reason she kept wanting to see me.

There was no physical attraction between us or any hanky-panky.

One time she invited me to go on a horse-packing trip in Central City, Colorado.
We would pay real cowhands to take us packing in.
It sounded like fun and so I agreed to go.

I ended up almost fighting with the lead cowhand after I told him that the breakfast that was made had made me sick.
He was really pissed off after I gave him this news…
Until other people on the pack-trip started throwing up, too, right before his eyes---
While we were arguing.
Reality had set in and had saved the day…and had stopped us from fighting.



IT'S ABOUT RENEWABLE RESOURCES

















Tuesday, February 10, 2009

READING BETWEEN THE LINES




[This is a report from legaltimes.typepad.com
called “Leahy Proposes ‘Truth Commission’ For Bush Era“, February 09, 2009, with Mad Plato‘s comments between brackets.]


Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) called today for the creation of an expansive, independent commission to allow for the airing of possible Bush-era wrongdoings.

[Start doing a lot of airing because there WERE plenty of wrongdoings. Mr. Leahy, don’t be so coy.]

In a speech at Georgetown University, Leahy suggested the commission could have subpoena power and the authority to grant immunity from prosecution.

[I suppose at this point this will be the best that we can expect from a Congress that was compliant and so complaisant with the mendacious Bush regime.]

He told reporters afterward that he envisions a panel that's bipartisan and looks at a wide variety of topics, including the Iraq war and politicization at the Department of Justice.

[Stop the looking. The world has watched us look and look and look while Bush took and took and took. If Nixon was not a crook, Bush was not a murderer.]

Others, including House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.), have made similar proposals. Leahy’s comments (video from C-SPAN here) were his first endorsement of such an idea, and he would have a key role in shaping such a proposal because of his committee’s jurisdiction.

“We need to get to the bottom of what happened and why,” Leahy said. “The reason we do that is so that it’ll never happen again. One path to that goal would be a reconciliation process—a truth commission.”

[At least a truth commission could expose the Bush regime for what it really was, and leave an indelible stain on Bush’s un-legacy inside the pages of non-revisionist history. Big Brother would take a back seat to Father Truth.]

President Barack Obama has not signaled much support for such a proposal, preferring to focus on implementing his own agenda.

[Go ahead, Barack, implement, but don’t impede researching and revealing the truths and falsehoods of the KingDumb of Bush.]

Leahy said he had not consulted the administration or Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. before speaking today. A White House spokesman declined to comment. A Republican spokesman also had no comment.

[The White House doesn’t want its own drama's klieg lights dimmed, and Republicans are scared shirtless about losing their own shirts.]

Leahy rejected the idea that Congress should move on.
“We shouldn’t abandon seeking ways of providing accountability for what’s happened in the past during a dangerous and disastrous diversion from American law and values, and I don’t want the focus to go off that,” he said. “Many Americans feel we need to get to the bottom of what went wrong. I agree. We need to be able to read the page before we turn the page.”

[Especially all of the pages of lies and secrets]

Some topics he said he would like to see investigated: the firing of U.S. attorneys, the treatment of detainees, and the use of waterboarding. Asked by a reporter if he would also want the commission to look at issues such as the Iraq war, he said he would. “There were lies told to the American people all the way back through. There were a lot of policies based on those lies. So let’s go back to them, find out what the lies were,” he said.

[Yes! Yes! Yes!]

Leahy invoked the experiences of South Africa and its Truth and Reconciliation Commission following the end of apartheid, and of Greensboro, N.C., and a commission established there to investigate a 1979 massacre. He also drew a comparison with the Church Committee that investigated federal surveillance of civilians during the Vietnam War.
He did not suggest any individuals to lead the commission he was proposing but said its members should be people who are “universally recognized as fair-minded and without any axe to grind.”

[Just get fair-minded people with some sharp axes]

And he qualified his endorsement of the idea by saying it would need board support to be successful.

[Water Board support? I think by board you meant to write broad.]

[Yes…be sure that there are plenty of broads to give support.]


“We need to see if there’s interest in Congress and in the new administration. We would need to work through concerns about classified information and claims about executive privilege,” he said. “Most of all, we need to see if the American people are ready to take this step.”

[Yes, the American people are ready to take all the steps necessary to end the side-stepping of the corrupt, inept, and deceitful Bush administration]


UPDATE: A response from Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), ranking GOP member of the House Judiciary Committee:

“No good purpose is served by continuing to persecute those who served in the previous Administration.

[That’s correct. No purpose is served by continuing to persecute…SO JUST PROSECUTE those who served in the previous Administration for their lies and crimes.]

President Obama promised to usher in an era of 'change' and bipartisan harmony.
[Plenty of undertakers have already been become USHERS]

Unfortunately, the continued effort by some Democrats to unjustly malign former Bush Administration officials is politics as usual.

[No, Bush was the Malignant One, and Mr. Smith, you too, like Bush, are in denial.]

“We have already had a thorough investigation into the Justice Department, including a two year inquiry led by Democrats in Congress and an official investigation by the Justice Department’s Inspector General. The Inspector General made recommendations to prevent future wrongdoing and those recommendations have already been implemented. Rather than continuing to waste taxpayers time and money on fruitless finger-pointing, Congress should focus on the future and what we can do to help the American people during these difficult times.”

[Do both: focus on the past and the future. To ignore the past is to condemn the future. Spend a billion to restore America’s reputation. The Bush administration scoffed, laughed at, and ignored subpoenas (and still do).]


Sunday, February 08, 2009

JUST PASSING THROUGH

I've had an interesting life.

Listening right now to Crosby, Stills & Nash sing Teach Your Children…and now Helpless…I am reminded of this.

What an exciting time it was back in the late 60’s and early ‘70’s.

War, revolution, brown rice, and pot smoke were in the air.

I was on the inside looking out, because I was attending the University of Colorado from 1966 until 1971.

Boulder was a ferment of protest.

Street people were not just hippies, because later on---after I graduated from CU---I basically walked and lived on the streets, to know and feel what life was all about.

My mind was nurtured on the Great books, but my soul learned about life on the mean, strange, and exciting streets of the world.

People helped to soften the hardness and brighten the darkness on those mean streets.

I stayed sober and intoxicated with the sights and sounds on those mean streets.

I can remember doing handstands on soft grass as the Rolling Stones played 2000 Light Years from Home.

I can remember when I threw a Frisbee to Elizabeth from Mahtomedi, Minnesota in a cemetery while Kenny Loggins sang Return to Pooh Corner.

I can remember the sweet aroma of Sandalwood in the Volkswagen bus of Diane, Richard and little Richie from Connecticut...on their way to start a new life on a commune…

Just passing through.






Saturday, February 07, 2009

DIOGENES WOULD BE PLEASED



Oh, what a relief it is!
[Soothing fizzing sounds]

What a relief it is---
To be able to finally breathe some fresh air of forthrightness---
To breathe in the clean and clear oxygen of righteous indignation.

Barack Obama may be maligned and mocked as a messiah
---Even though he is not one---
But President Obama is closer to being a Christ-like leader than
George
W.
Bush
Ever pretended to be---
Or ever dreamed of being.
Bush is a good reason to believe that Jesus and the good extraterrestrials
Will return soon.

I’m no longer plagued with bushophobia, only misobushy.
Let me explain my neologism with a little translation:

misos means "hatred" (from misein "to hate").

But

George

W (AR)

Bush

Was not only a Destroyer-Deceiver-Decider, he
WAS ALSO A MISANTHROPE.

Misanthrope: "one who hates mankind," 1563, from Gk. misanthropos "hating mankind," from misein "to hate" + anthropos "man".


The babbling and bumbling Bush hated himself, too.









Sunday, February 01, 2009

IN PRAISE OF THE ANATOMICAL SNUFF BOX


Photo by Lennart Nilsson




Photo by Lennart Nilsson





Opossum's opposable thumb on rear foot










The thumb.

Where would we be without it?

What could we have done without it?

We would not have been able to build our bridges, make our bombs....or paint our paintings!

(Yes, I know people can paint with their mouths and feet)

Our fingers would not have done as much walking without our thumbs.

(I'm just pulling your thumb on this one)

Jimi Hendrix would not have been able to play his psychedelic licks.

It’s amazing that as embryonic fish we humans became so handsome and beautiful---so wicked or good---and developed our opposable thumbs to boot.

Imagine all of the things that could not be done without thumbs.

I am using my right thumb as I type to hit the space bar.

I could do this with my index finger, but it would be less convenient.

Other things that could not be done without our thumbs:


FLICKING OUR BICS

HOLDING OUR PENCILS

(I ALMOST RHYMED THIS WITH THE FIRST ONE)

CLIPPING OUR TOE AND FINGER NAILS

THROWING A FOOTBALL

HOLDING OUR SPOONS AND FORKS

(WE COULD STILL HOLD THEM BUT IT WOULD BE LESS EASY)

CHANGING CHANNELS ON OUR REMOTES
(IT’S EASIER WITH THUMBS)

HOLDING THE STEERING WHEEL ON VEHICLES

GRIPPING THE HANDLEBARS ON MOTORCYCLES AND BIKES

NO GREEN THUMBS!

NO SUCKING THUMBS!

WE COULDN'T BE ALL THUMBS!

AND THE STORY OF TOM
THUMB WOULD NEVER HAVE COME!


Please write me---with or without your thumbs---and tell me more about the goodly uses of our humble thumbs.