My New Fragrance

I've decided on the composition of my new fragrance:

part old books,
part dead silverfish,
and a tang of ozone from a sputtering fan trying to cool off an aging MacBook.

It's called "Bookworm."

If Amiri Baraka Can Do It...

At a party, we challenged each other to come up with the most outre name for a rock band. I won with "Kafkaesque Vaginas." But I think I just ruined any chance I had to become poet laureate.

Christmas Card to a Billionaire

Right about now, Steve Jobs is writing this Christmas card to Bill Gates:

Bill, thanks for once again marketing such a shoddy product! Thanks to you, Apple's products don't have to be good. They just have to be better than yours!

Snow on the Wasteland

I spent most of yesterday working in a suburban library. (It's not the closest one or the largest one - I go there because it's under-utilized, and I can always find a table to myself.)

This library is in a new housing development. Hundreds of townhouses, the proverbial "little boxes made of ticky tacky." I worked until closing, long after sunset. As I left, I saw the Christmas lights that the townhouse builder had put up in the tiny park in a futile attempt to make the place look festive.

Across the street are a few acres of land not yet bulldozed for housing. The trees on that land - now bare of leaves - had snow plastered to their trunks and branches on the windward side.

Those snow-covered trees on wasteland are far more beautiful than anything that builder had managed to achieve. Or ever will.

Pay Cuts will Cause Top Executives to Become James Bond Villains

The media reports that cutting the salaries of the highest-paid US executives will cause a "brain drain," forcing executives to leave for greener pastures. But where will they go? Not to a foreign country. They're foreign over there, and the wretched refuse doesn't speak English. These are American executives we're talking about: they only speak American, god dammit!

I've figured out where they're going to end up.

You know the saying: When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns? Well, when highly-paid executives are outlawed, only outlaws will have highly-paid executives.

I'm not talking about religion-based terrorist organizations. Can you imagine Jack Welch running al Qaeda? No, our best and brightest are going to the secular terrorist organizations, like SPECTRE, THRUSH, HYDRA, HIVE, and AIM!

At this very moment, SPECTRE (The Special Executive for Extortion, Counterespionage, Terrorism, Revenge, and, uh, more Extortion) needs new CEO. (The old one, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, has been killed at least three times. HMOs now consider that a pre-existing condition.) How about Enron's Jeffrey Skilling for SPECTRE CEO? A few weeks after the US Supreme Court laughs at his appeal, Jeffrey will be sitting in a secret lair, stroking a white pussy cat and giving Rosa Klebb orders to assassinate a lot of federal prosecutors.

And the mad scientists at AIM (that's Advanced Idea Mechanics, not The American Indian Movement), need someone to lead them. Right now, all they have is a Frankenstein's monster named MODOK, who looks like a floating Mr. Potato Head. AIM needs new leadership. They need Carly Floriana! (Assuming she loses her bid for governor of California, of course.) If Carly can handle Hewlett Packard, she can handle a bunch of lab-bound nerds who haven't even seen a girl in years.

Best of all, THRUSH (The Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity) can bust Bernie Madoff out of prison and put him in charge! THRUSH needs an infusion of cash; they've been broke ever since The Man from UNCLE went off the air. If there's anyone who can generate big bucks through nefarious means, it's Bernie.

(Maybe Bernie can also get the THRUSH minions to stop carrying those stupid walking sticks that shoot sleep gas and bullets. When you're busy Subjugating Humanity, you don't want to get stopped at the metal detector. Of course, if THRUSH is still using the same thugs they had when The Man from UNCLE exited, they probably need canes by now.)

If this scenario doesn't look good to you, call your Congressman and tell him NOT to allow executive pay cuts. After all, when the USSR fell apart, we used US tax dollars to fund Soviet nuclear scientists. We paid them to stay out of trouble, preempting bribes from Lybia and Iran and other wannabe members of the nuke club. Why shouldn't we do the same thing with our homegrown brainiacs?

And if we don't? Well, when armies of radioactive cyber-zombies march down Main Street, you'll know who to blame.

Full Disclosure: Helena Bonham Carter

Earlier this week, the FCC issued new guidelines for bloggers. Yes, the government is reading our blogs (even if no one else is)!

So, to keep me out of Guantanamo, let me give full disclosure: my negative review of the latest Terminator movie was entirely due to the fact that Helena Bonham Carter refuses to sleep with me.

That's right. Terminator: Salvation is the best movie since Citizen Kane. But Helena Bonham Carter has a small role in it, and I couldn't control my jealousy. I've wanted her ever since I heard her orgasmic noises in Fight Club!

So I've come clean. Now go rent Terminator: Salvation. I swear, when Stanley Kubrick died, he left all his talent to McG.

And if you don't hear from me, it's because you can't blog from Guantanamo.

Happy 80th Birthday, Da!

Even though he doesn't read this blog, I want to wish my father a Happy 80th Birthday.

Of course, "happy" may not be the right word. My mother has Alzheimer's, and my father takes care of her every day. I help out, so I know what a tough job that is. I spent just 5 hours tending to her yesterday, and I was exhausted by it.

So I hope he has as good a birthday as humanly possible, under the circumstances.