“tense unrelenting fear and dread. . .”

Light posting from me lately, as my personal time has been taken up with work, a funeral, weddings, medical procedures and lots of visits to see loved ones in hospital.

It’s hard to know what to make of all this “real life” stuff. I feel like I have great wisdom to impart to y’all, but cannot seem to formulate much of any of it into actual human language. Like Gene Hackman’s character in the movie Heist, I’m reduced to muttering, “It’s a hell of a thing. A hell of a thing.” In general, however, I do recommend weddings over funerals, and health over sickness.

On my ear-goggles this morning, as frequently, I’m listening to the late risers’ club on MIT radio, WMBR. And I just heard a recursive promotion for its own self, saying how this same show was a cure for “tense unrelenting fear and dread.” I certainly hope so.

Well, almost. I don’t want a complete cure for my tense unrelenting fear and dread, which is the essence of my persona here, for there would go the whole of my contribution to Wetmachine. But some relief would be welcome, you know what I’m say’n’?

Anyway, just for yucks & to lighten your day, here’s an article from the BBC about the dollar scale of the criminal war profiteering engineered by Cheney et al, and abetted by the USian people and their chickenshit congress, and here’s a BBC article about one teensy-tiny bit of the human cost–but one that is at least a little hopeful. We can’t all be melancholic all the time, now can we.

Getting back to our paranoid rootz: The Palfrey “suicide”

My original vision for Wetmachine was that it would be kind of an anti-Boing-Boing: a technology-themed site full of fear and dread, skeptical of the notion of “progress” and paranoid about machines from nanoscopic brain-rearrangers to the DNA-sniffing, face-recognizing satellites in the sky– the Overmind emergent. Then of course 9/11 changed everything.

I’m sorry, that was a joke.

Or no, actually it wasn’t. For what’s the point of a half-joking technoparanoia site when Dick Cheney is in the White House? What I’m trying to say is, do you think the “D.C. Madam” killed herself, or do you think she was suicided?

By the way, that’s a link to the site “Infowars.com”, where the motto is, “Because there is a war on for your mind”. That site, like its sister site Prison Planet, represent the deepest fears of my fellow Wetmechiners about what Sundman may turn our little site into if he ever sets free his technoparanoiac demons. I guess with Infowars and Prison Planet out there, there’s no need for me to go nutz on Wetmachine. (But Harold, Greg, Howard: Watch out! The first danger sign is when he starts to talk about himself in the third person!).

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Footnote to Howl

In an earlier couple of posts, I copped to a certain amount of schadenfreude over the howling in distress of Boston sports talk radio hosts and rabid Patriots fans about the compound insult to their manly self-images from (a) the loss in the SuperDuper Bowl(tm), and (b) dread Prirate Roberts Senator Spectre Specter’s meddling in the spygate affair. As I said before, I’m a Pats fan myself, but all the apotheoses of Brady, Bellichick and Kraft over the last few months and years were really getting on my nerves. Now, today, it gets better: Robert Kraft and the Patriots are being sued for a hunnert million buckaroos by some dude on the Rams who claims his rightful place on a SuperDuperBowl team was stolen from him by the nefarious cheating Patriots. I wonder how Saint Kraft will come out of this one?

Anyway, mostly I wanted to pass along a link to this essay by Yahoo columnist MJD, entitled “Why I’m OK with Arlen Specter’s involvement in Spygate.” It’s funny and it’s good. I agree with him.

P.S. Yes, you literary types correctly detected an allusion to Allen Ginsberg! Footnote to Howl is a sublime poem. But be sure to read it after reading Howl itself. That’s the way the footnote achieves its full poetic power.

Congratulations Senator-Elect Webb! Congratulations Senator-Elect Tester

Congratulations to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid! Great day in the Morning! Hallelujah!

Congrats of course to winners everywhere (most especially to those in the mainstream, majoritarian party, the Democratic Party). A Democratic-led House of Representatives! Speaker Nancy Pelosi! A Democratic majority in the Senate! Hoo-boy. Some hope, at last, that we may pull back from the brink.

In Virginia the Republican candidate for the Senate is the racist thug brownshirt liar George Felix Allen, and in Montana the Republican candidate for Senate is the corrupt firefighter-hating Abramoff flunky Conrad Burns. They’re backed by the full force of the Repubiican Bush/Cheney/Rove crime family, er, national party who rightly fear marginalization if not impeachment, trial and conviction if two more Democratic senators are seated, so don’t expect them to go down without a fight — a nasty, dirty, dishonest fight. But Tester and Webb and Reid are no patsies, and a fair count will prevail.

It will be easier to concentrate on my day job today. Somehow the dread is much, much less oppressive this morning.