Mount Shasta Superstars

These pictures were taken last week with Mishka the Russian. He is now in St. Petersburg and not pleased to be there.

This Was Cute...Please Read.

According to the story, after every Quantas Airlines flight the pilots complete a a 'gripe sheet' report, which conveys to the ground crew engineers any mechanical problems on the aircraft during the flight. The engineer reads the form, corrects the problem, then writes details of action taken on the lower section of the form for the pilot to review before the next flight. It is clear from the examples below that ground crew engineers have a keen sense of humor - these are supposedly real extracts from gripe forms completed by pilots with the solution responses by the engineers. Incidentally, Quantas has the best safety record of all the world's major airlines.

(1 = The problem logged by the pilot.) (2 = The solution and action taken by the mechanics.)

1) Left inside main tire almost needs replacement.
2) Almost replaced left inside main tire.

1) Test flight OK, except auto-land very rough.
2) Auto-land not installed on this aircraft.

1) Something loose in cockpit.
2) Something tightened in cockpit.

1) Dead bugs on windshield.
2) Live bugs on back-order.

1) Autopilot in altitude-hold mode produces a 200 feet per minute descent.
2) Cannot reproduce problem on ground.

1) Evidence of leak on right main landing gear.
2) Evidence removed.

1) DME volume unbelievably loud.
2) DME volume set to more believable level.

1) Friction locks cause throttle levers to stick.
2) That's what they're there for.

1) IFF inoperative.
2) IFF always inoperative in OFF mode.

1) Suspected crack in windshield.
2) Suspect you're right.

1) Number 3 engine missing.
2) Engine found on right wing after brief search.

1) Aircraft handles funny.
2) Aircraft warned to straighten up, fly right, and be serious.

1) Target radar hums.
2) Reprogrammed target radar with lyrics.

1) Mouse in cockpit.
2) Cat installed.

Just a Few Words About This NSA Spying Game...

Bullshit!

A friend of mine had sent an article describing the Chimp's latest pinning up against the walls of legality. It seems that the phone calls of a pretty good chunk of Americana have been illegally monitored by the NSA, and the Chimp calls it all legal. Of course it's legal...the coke fiend says so.

It seems that things never cease to get more absurd in this country. The Iraq War is an unmitigated disaster; the economy remains on the bring; energy prices are moving north faster than the S&P 500; Republican scandals continue to litter the nation from coast to coast; the environment is weeping and Mother Earth is pissed off....

Bullshit seems to pretty well describe the current state of affairs today. The Republicans are predictably crooked, but the Democrats have stood weak-kneed and helpless: obsessed with polls, focus groups, and this "Middle America" which can just take a flying leap for all I care. Of course, this has not happened in a vacumn. There is a very scientific explanation for the apparent rise in bullshit coming out of Washington and Madison Avenue in recent years. Unprecedented? Not quite...please, let's take a walk through history and comtemplate the epic saga of Bullshit.

Bullshit was a rather common thing found throughout nature. Pre-historic man knew of it's existence, but was unable to harness it's power until somewhere around the 43rd Century BC. In the many moons that followed the taming of Bullshit, humans began to form what would be known as civilizations, primarily through the use of agriculture and the formation of great cities. These civilizations were built upon legal structures and religious traditions, neither of which could have survived without a healthy abundance of Bullshit, which mankind became ever more adept at utilizing to his own ends.

And where man went, so followed Bullshit. The Roman Empire: Bullshit! The Holy Roman Empire: Holy Bullshit! Europeans were so enamored with their own Bullshit that they eventually decided to export it to the New World. They would find that the uncivilized populations had quite enough of their own Bullshit, but
European Bullshit was of a higher quality and therefore, more potent. And it was also very transportable, as opposed to the less-sophisticated, lesser-grade indigenous Bullshit.

Apparently, as time would show, the natives of the New World could not quite handle Old World Bullshit and millions died as a result. This became problematic, but not as much so as the arrival of the Age of Enlightenment and revolutionary movements of the Eighteenth Century. At no point in the epic of mankind has the existence of Bullshit been so threatened, so close to eradication. But the Anglo American people are resourceful, pious, hardworking, and inherently adept at the promotion and distribution of Bullshit... they knew just what to do.

So, in short, the Age of Industrialization saved Bullshit by enslaving the
masses and making them greedy, poor, and stupid... otherwise known as middle class.

Our modern capitalist economic system thrives and survives on Bullshit. In the late 1800's, this was threatened by the rise of civil unrest in both in Europe and across the waters in the land of the world's industrial wunderkind: the United States. An era of expansion following the War of Southern Bullshit had led to the creation of great wealth among a select few and the virtual enslavement of the masses in dirty, crowded, over-populated cities. Muckrakers, reformers, and middle class bozos whipped up fury and indignation over the plight of the hapless millions. Strikes sparked up in cities across the Midwest and Northeast. Workers demanded better conditions at the workplace, better pay, job security, and the right of arbitration. The producer class knew that something had to be done about this. They saw the warning signs, and in those days before NAFTA and LSD, they couldn't just outsource jobs to Neptune. They needed a diversion; they needed... a war.

Enter William Randolph Hearst: Patrician, Entrepreneur, Lover, and Pioneer of
Modern Bullshit. All he wanted to do was to sell his damn papers and competition from the larger dailies in both New York and San Francisco made this nearly impossible. As every man has his chance at bat with two out in the bottom of the ninth, Hearst found his in February of 1898, with these mysterious war clouds hovering over Havana, Wall Street, and the White House. Hearst didn't see
clouds. He saw Bullshit.

Hearst was a man of true genius. Bullshit had already been discovered, mined,
refined, philosophized about, canned, pickled, and shot out of artillery. Mankind had known about Bullshit in much the same way that a government teacher
of mine in high school had tried to explain the First Persian Gulf War to our
class. He used a large, fresh, steaming pile of Bullshit as a metaphor of our
involvement in the Middle East, drawing upon our years in Vietnam to further
illustrate his point. He contended that when you placed your hand into that hot, fresh, steaming, smelly mound of Bullshit and then the realization of what
you had just done settled in, you naturally removed your hand, but yet noticed
that it was still on your fingers and you smelled and your decision to put
your hand there in the first place was not a wise one.

This story is NOT Bullshit.

But back to Hearst and what became known as the Aggregate Peak Bullshit
Production Matrix. Through the use of questionable facts, hype, distortion, lies, half-lies, and half-truths, Hearst was able to sell a war to the gullible masses. Millions of slaughtered Cubans and Filipinos taught the masters of industry and political power how to use Bullshit instead of bullets and billy clubs to confuse and restrain the herd, keeping them bloated and stupid in their own misery. Thus began the American Century and the modern era of Bullshit, which would see the United States surpass all other nations of the world and finish out the century with near complete economic and political hegemony.

To illustrate Peak Bullshit Production, let's see what it would look like on a graph. The axes are as follows: the y axis represents the amount of Bullshit being shoveled down the throats of mass-consumers of pop culture in millions of barrels (MB). The x axis represents the evolution of ideas, culture, technology, and baseball (x+) on Planet Earth. Traditionally, the scientific community saw the curve as a sort of ski slope, rising from left to right They called that "progress." The 1950's, however, brought forth some very disturbing trends that called conventional Bullshit theory into question. There began a small movement of social scientists, sportswriters, and activists who questioned the very nature of the curve.

Popular movements worldwide began to take shape in the 50's with Arab nationalism on the rise as well as other incidents such as the Uprising in Hungary in 1956 and the Beat Movement. People were beginning to say, "Bullshit!" At
about this time, some were beginning to see the existence of not a slope of
progress, as related to the PBP Curve, but more of a bell curve, theorizing that
Bullshit would raise the perceived value/consumer misery index, but only to a point whereupon civilization would then come crashing down in a fiery wreck under the weight of it's own insatiable and unsustainable need for Bullshit.
That moment became known as the "Peak" of production and then the question became one of not whether such a apex would occur, but merely when.

Peak Bullshit Production passed during the early Sixties with the loss of Richard Nixon to John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The world still felt tension from the Cold War, but a short era of peace and stability followed, ironically, even in the few years following the assassination of JFK. By the end of the decade, however, revolution seemed to be in the air. Political instability, war, civil unrest, and generational agitation mobilized the masses of people for action, as they shouted out in unison, that battle cry of the era that would encapsulate the fear and turmoil, yet the hope for a more utopian world, cleansed of war and poverty, misery and injustice...

"Bullshit!"

Peak Bullshit theorists were again seeing the coming of The Great Turn. Of
course, the national security establishment was already on top of the
situation. They too understood the theory of Peak Bullshit and saw it as threatening the status quo, which of course, was not acceptable. They would sacrifice Richard Nixon to Woodward and Bernstein, but something else had to be done, something much grander in scale, potent, and effective enough to bring the Civil Rights/Ant-War Movement to it's knees and crush it forever, thereby delaying the coming of Peak Bullshit. The answer was simple: a redevelopment of a prototype droid tested successfully against the North Vietnamese in 1971, but shelved just prior to the peace talks in Paris late that same year. This holocaust weapon would spell doom for millions of unsuspecting souls. Its name:

Dan Folgelburg: singer, songwriter, and mass CIA liberal poacher.

To be continued...

"My Hair is Blond....Dyed Blond."

I say, old chap....wasn't Roger Moore blond? At least early on....well, we have another James Bond. Couldn't they get Jude Law? I haven't seen "Munich" yet, so I don't really know what this Daniel Craig is all about. In fact, I haven't seen a James Bond flick since I was conned into seeing "Die Another Day." Too much kitch...and Pierce Brosnan is too slimey.

Of course, most folks like to say that Sean Connery was the best James Bond. Certainly, he was a close ringer to the Bond of Ian Fleming, but oh golly! Was that guy a male chauvinist or what? Pussy Galore, Plenty O Toole....slapping asses, tossed salad, spanking, swanking....no wonder most men seem to prefer Sean Connery. He taps into mens' latent caveman instincts...sort of a throw back to simpler times.


Roger Moore. This guy gets the back of every hand quite unfairly. He had bad luck to be James Bond during the dark days of the Bond Years (which never end. Somewhere out in the world, the first red-headed Bond, or the first Mongolian Bond, is taking his or her first steps.) "Moonraker" is not exactly the crowning achievement in the pantheon of Bondage, and Moore unfortunately will be remembered by most as being tagged to that. I contend, however, that Roger Moore was the greatest Bond. He could bring charm, panache, and ferocity (a la Fleming) to the character and most importantly, he slapped fewer asses than Sean Connery, so he also gets the feminist endorsement as well.

Timothy Dalton: whatever.

So...I shall reserve my judgement of Mr. Craig until the curtain goes down on "Casino Royale" later this year. Of course, I just checked out the trailer for the movie and it looks like some kind of "Mission Impossible" rip-off. Don't sit too close to screen, Bond fans. You might get a headache.

Petey's Back!

....but not in one piece. This has been an absolutely wacky/zany week...filled with highs, lows, ebbs, and.......FOG! What the hell is going on anyway??? Straight from winter into summer. That is hardly fair!

In the meantime, I need a little help from all two of my readers (anyone else may assist me as well). I think it's high time I started learning Flash animation. My first learning project is to be called "Google Brain." It will feature Google's new top-secret program which allows you to type someone's name into the little box. When you press , the real fun starts when you actually zoom into someone's head to see what is or is not going on inside. I thought perhaps I might include my dog Sputnik as well as Barbara Bush. What I need from at least two readers are other personalities I should include on the list.

The possibilities are endless...come on, let's have some fun with this. For now, I should probably get back to work.

Ciao