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Wednesday, April 21, 2004
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Sire! What rains become? Foul weather?
Be calmed now. Tis nothing boy, but the pleasant sound of distant thunder.
Right. This might be among the last blogs for awhile. I'm going to Mexico , or Cuba, I forget. But I am taking my daughter who's never been on a plane or even a big bus before. I'm going to ride horses with Leslie. We'll snorkle, and I will finish two novels while she goes about the business of a 20-yr old cute white girl with no understanding of Spanish.
Be gone about a month if it sucks and I won't come back at all if I like it. Readers of this blog are entitled to a free copy of Ferocious Hosts--One Day on the Life of the Accidental Newfoundlander. But only if you email before the plane leaves: 6:30 NST Thursday April 22, 2004.
Right.
12:08:40 PM 
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Tuesday, April 13, 2004
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Breakfast with Hunter. If you are a fan of the Good Docktor (and if you're not you're probably too stupid to help) you MUST get this dvd:
http://www.breakfastwithhunter.com/thedvd.asp?adid=10
Dispel the myths! Learn the Shocking Truth! Lot's of fun. Watch Hunter skin a moron producer. Much fun. Much history. yah.
P.S. Oh, yeah, Johnny Depp does a reading of the famous last graphs of Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas including the defining "...and with the right klind of eyes..." speech. Awesome.
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11:33:12 AM
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Unbelievable. What's wrong with people? Why is this still news? What kind of morons find this shit important or interesting? Have they no jobs? Have these people no internet porn? I mean jaysus it's not like she's got impressive girls or anything. Certainly not by California standards...
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9:32:41 AM
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Monday, April 12, 2004
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It's coming.
Be patient.
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10:35:57 PM
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That is Exxoneration, by Chief Major General Richard Rhomer of the US Army...this is as close to a knighthood as 'murricans get.
I would love to be smart enough to make this shit up...
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12:26:12 PM
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So the last Concord was cut up in pieces like the last Arrow and then they put it on a train and moved it to...the Louvre? The British Aerospace Museum? I forget.
Does anyone believe that the most sophisticated commercial plane ever built blew up and killed all those rich people because a bolt fell off and bounced into an engine? Or whatever they said?
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11:21:46 AM
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Little short story:
I used to go down to Mount Baker to ski. It's an active volcano in the same chain as Mt. St. Helens in Washington state. We skiied a part of it called the Shucksan Arm. On a clear day you can see it from the Burrard St. Bridge in Vancouver Canada. And when that one goes, you will be able to see the three hundred foot tsunami run right up the channel. But that day is still in the future, and it was obviously more in the future then than it is now.
There was a crowd of about twelve of us who, year after year, rented some cabins down in Glacier Washington. And we'd get up in the morning and drive 5,000 feet straight up the mountain in the Beemer to go skiing an hour before dawn.
There are many stories, but this is not the time for them.
Now there is only time for the point. We Don't do that any more, though none of us are tired of skiing or spending money in Washington nightclubs. What happened is they started treating us like Mexicans at the border crossing.
RIght, Jack. No more postcards of Smokey the Bear shaking hands with Dudley Doright of the Canadian Mounties across the "world's longest undefended border" (wish I still had one of those archaic postcards--a fortune on e-bay if you have one). The fucker is defended now, all right. They TOOK MY CAR APART and then they wouldn't even lend me the tools to put it back together when they found nothing "actionable".
And that was the start, and folks, it was WAY before what they love to call 9/11. They should including the year, because it's getting old.
So now I ski in Canada. Eh? Better runs, better snow, and they don't take my car apart. Same car. Same people. Same distance from my home. But you know what? There are WAY more 'murrican ski bunnies and top shelf execs I could kill in Banff and Whistler Village than I could have dreamed of killing in a shitty backwater town on a glacier in the Baker mountain chain with the same equipment. On any given Saturday in any given winter.
Except now. All 'merricans are a bit afraid of travelling, except the very rich and the very poor. What has changed?
This has changed:
I went down to Seattle on business not too long ago and once they let me across the border... and the car was working again... and, just for nostalgia, I said to my friend "Hey. Know those cabins I used to rave about? Well they're just only about fifty miles from here, let's drop in and say hello."
Wish I hadn't. Some background here. The old fella (a shock of red hair, two axe handles across at the shoulders) that owned the place won the land in a gambling game, just a whack of trees in Washington. As a young man he slowly logged the place, by himself, until he had a cleared lot and a roadway and built himself a cabin. He then went into town and found himself a wife. He then went on to clear bits of his land. He cut the trees with his own hands. He sold some so they could eat. He sold some to buy equipment. He used some to build more cabins. He started renting the cabins to Canadians so they could ski in the winter and walk around in the forest in summer. He was dead.
"The life went out of him" the widow said, as we stood there like idiots in the pouring West coast rain. She was blind. "The business just died. There used to be some Canadians used to come down here every winter and it paid the bills. But when he couldn't keep cutting the wood, when he got old like, well there was nothing else."
"I heard he was a fine man", I said.
"Yes." she said, "Yes he was."
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10:52:11 AM
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But...What if they had three hundred? I was going to suggest three thousand, but let's keep it to something imaginable. If there is anyone reading this who thinks it would be "impossible" to grab three hundred hostages at once... well they are not paying attention. It could EASILY happen.
SO, what, when, and "when" is the word not "if", someone grabs three hundred (military or civilian) hostages and starts immolating them alive one at a time, one per day on live television...
Yeah buddy. It is one thing to destroy and hack up a couple of "mercs" or even teenage Jap do-gooders, quite another when they start setting fire to live 'murrican nuns and white children, but exactly what will you do about it? Fire cruise missiles from a nuclear submarine? And what is the morality? How many innocents must they kill one at a time to reach the death toll the 'murricans brought?
YES, they are mostly glad to be rid of Saddam. Did you HAVE to set up business in his palace and start imprisoning and killing even more people than HE did?
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10:13:35 AM
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Sunday, April 11, 2004
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We* are winning this one...
All the international blogs cannot be beaten or legislated forever like all the local stupid people. Particularly when we don't need 'murrican servers. Thermonuclear class deterrence only makes sense when the other guy has a thermonuclear threat.
Well it has come home to roost. It is a measure of the stupid, and I mean dumbass misread by people with no translators of the local conditions. The MAP is not the TERRAIN. This is a lesson as old as Alexander the Great.
Their own generals told them it was impossible with less than 200-400 thousand well armed trained soldiers, but "stratgerisists" in their midst, who had never seen a day of war, collectively knew better. They told the 'murrican people that 60 year old survivors of war as combatants who had risen to the top ranks of the mightiest armed force in the history of conflict knew nothing of combat. No. They were old and stupid, they said. Our army and administrators would be greeted with strung flowers, yeah.
Where do these stupid motherfuckers get these ideas?
Did they think they were invading Canada?
NEXT: The invasion of Canada
For background read Exxoneration by Richard Rhomer, 1972, I think.
* "We" being the people who thought that global arrogance was a bad foreign policy, even for an unequiciocaly superior military force...
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11:04:05 PM
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Friday, April 9, 2004
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She is sawing logs.
I figuredededed it out: If your lover is snoring, then you done good. Good food you made or good love you made or just a safe nice place to fall asleep and snor you made.
I hope all of my friends are snoring tonight.
Yes, what an incredible sound.
It would be the most beautiful sound in the world.
/
1:51:02 AM
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Wednesday, April 7, 2004
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RIght. Makeup. Think about it. This is paint women put on their faces, often heavy paint, and if you ask them what it is for, 99 times out of a hundred they will lie to you. I'm serious b'ys. Try it on your wife. She will make up some shit the children wouildn't believe, or she will say nothing at all. HINT, it's not for YOU, pal....
Here's your sign.
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12:00:52 PM
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Come back Open Doc. All is forgiven...
,
4:26:06 AM
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C Stevens asks:
Does the "Iraq Body Count - Civilian Casualties" on your web site include those who were NOT killed by the Coalition forces? e.g. the suicide bombers, those Iraqis killed by Iraqi soldiers when they tried to leave the cities or surrender, those appraently forced to drive fast into an American checkpoint (soon after a suicide bombing that had killed 4 US military personnel) and those killed by Iraqi anti-aircraft fire when the shells etc. fall back to earth. Other civilian casualties include the news reporters killed by Iraqi suicide bomber, and gunfire, and accidents. No Kuwaiti civilian casualties from Iraqi missile fired wildly, hitting a CIVILIAN shopping mall?
C Stevens [apple] 4/5/03; 10:41:08 AM
No C, it does not.
Good question though. Actually, C, that number, which is maintained and explained in full by the friendly folks at Iraq Body Count Net very specifically and very conservatively only counts direct non-combatant deaths directly attributable to coalition force. It only counts what can be verified by independant news sources inclucing the Red Cresent etc. This ain't no shit man. And no, it does not count the belly bomb boys, nor does it count all the children who died of neglect or malnutrition or septicaemia from all the guts, brains and caked blood splattered on the walls of what passes for a hospital in Baghdad, or Tekrit or Kabul...
It also in fact does not count the suicides (Iraqian or 'murrican) and it makes no specific note of the fact that 'murrican soldiers are killing journalists. General Tommy Franks said "We don't do body counts."
Well, C, I guess you don't either. That's why we have a link to someone who does.
Cela.
/
4:09:36 AM
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Tuesday, April 6, 2004
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The Unborn Victims of Violence Act protects zygotes, but not women...
So what's new? Say. If a woman is born with all the eggs she will ever have (which is the common wisdom), then when a woman is a zygote, she must already be full of all the "egg stuff" or molecular machinery to produce all the eggs she will ever have by the time she is born, so shouldn't the Unborn Victims of Violence Act cover acts against all the egg potential inherent in that next generation, plus all of the unfertilized eggs' potentials?
Just curious.
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12:07:29 PM
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Monday, April 5, 2004
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For an alternative to Rush Limbaugh, try Al Franken at Air America, now live on the net.
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12:44:02 PM
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So far, in the "war on terror" initiated since 9-11, the USA and its allies have been responsible for over 13,000 civilian deaths, not only the 10,000+ in Iraq, but also 3,000+ civilian deaths in Afghanistan, another death toll that continues to rise long after the world's attention has moved on.
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12:40:43 PM
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Sunday, March 28, 2004
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Did anyone catch Rummy today? I saw him on CNN. He went on at length about how much Condi wants to testify under oath and in public, how much everyone at the White House wants Condi to testify. She's chomping at the bit etc., but alas--Rummy makes a see-saw motion with his hands, draws his face back sadly--it would "break that 'balance' if we made a habit of this".
A habit of what? Telling the truth? Yes I suppose that would indeed upset their "balance". Jaysus. What a performance. It's not the advisor they're protecting, it's the office of the Advisor.
Richard Nixon would be proud.
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7:44:19 PM
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It was nice again today. I was just watching my favourite channel and it will be dark all night again tonight and overcast tomorrow, but Tuesday should be mostly cloudy to start with but then be in a condition of cloudy periods with a 60% chance of some cloud later on with scattered clouds through the evening. Or not. They didn't sound very confident. No. They sounded worried.
Which pisses me off. SO what if none of it is true? Do I tune in the Weather Channel for guesses and sheepish doublespeak? I do not. I demand confidence and bold assertions. I want to feel I KNOW every bump in the weather for the next 72 hours. I want to feel I have been TOLD the truth. These gutless weasels should all be fired if they can't stand up on their hind pins and bark out the news like it had just been emailed in from God that very second. Wimps! Toads! Let them go work for Fox for a couple of years and come back when they can lie with a straight face.
Where was I? Ah, curse these hallucinations. Anyway, I have a great Idea. I was deciding that these hopeless weather people were too wracked with christian guilt to ever be useful. Two decades on the Fox National Affairs desk probably wouldn't help. The only thing open to people unable to lie would be some sort of job announcing nothing but cold hard facts...but what is there today that...and then it hit me. The Obituary Channel. They can use their sour looks and mouldy shuffling demeanour to read death notices on cable TV "And that's it for a look at the national death scene, your local deaths are next, brought to you by Manulife Insurance.". We'll make a fortune.
But wait! Why stop there? Why not the Death Channel? So much more exciting. Features, videos, all different kinds of gory tragic death and...oh, right. That's CNN. Never mind. Stick with the Obituary Channel. I'm not greedy. One fortune will do.
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3:57:02 AM
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Friday, March 26, 2004
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Here is the little house in Elliston we went to look at.
Here is Mercedes opening the back door with a "Bonnvista passkey".
Here is the view of the bird island on a miserable day.
And here's me mailbox.
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8:07:22 AM
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Jaysus. Turns out there's a six AM now. Yeah, Jack. That's what time Mercedes' plane left Torbay field this morning, bound for Halifax and Liam's first tournament. Which is cool, and Liam will not only be thrilled, he'll get a day off school.
But it was something of an experiment to attempt to get up at 4:00, an hour previously reserved for going to bed. Yes, it was slightly unthinkable. It was a puzzle until the afternoon when Mercedes found the alarm clock embedded in a chunk of ice as she chopped a stairway up the frozen hill to reach the clothesline. She had just been wondering how in hell it would be possible to wake up at 4 in the morning, even if by some miracle it would be possible to get to bed *before* 4 in the morning. A pretty problem, particularly since the alarm clock had been thrown with vigour out the window into the giant snowbank in the back yard several months ago because it had offended. Perhaps that had been hasty. Perhaps it might have proved useful on an occasion such as this. And but lo! Look now luh! Seek and ye shall Find. There it sat ticking away like a Timex ad. She brought it in and we nursed it back to health. We tested it, passing the time over some fine sirloin and a bottle of burgundy. It worked fine, but the feeble beep it emitted wouldn't wake anybody, much less us. I changed the battery and the volume of the peep improved, perhaps it might wake one of us. I set it very carefully.
And then twas off to sleepy land with we, and it would have worked fine if only Kent had remembered to turn the alarm to the "on" position.
Never mind. Jiffy cab has a wake-up service. They will call you, and they will be there...right away.
And so I am awake and it is a glorious morning. I do love this time of day on a clear cold spring day...it makes me want to deliver newspapers. But that is, of course, another story.
Carpe diem.
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7:40:49 AM
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Wednesday, March 24, 2004
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The Girl Blog From Iraq reflects on the anniversary of the US invasion, and she is not happy:
We're watching sardonically as an Iranian cleric in the south turns a once secular country into America's worst nightmare- a carbon copy of Iran. We're watching as the lies unravel slowly in front of the world- the WMD farce and the Al-Qaeda mockery.
And where are we now? Well, our governmental facilities have been burned to the ground by a combination of 'liberators' and 'Free Iraqi Fighters'; 50% of the working population is jobless and hungry; summer is looming close and our electrical situation is a joke; the streets are dirty and overflowing with sewage; our jails are fuller than ever with thousands of innocent people; we've seen more explosions, tanks, fighter planes and troops in the last year than almost a decade of war with Iran brought; our homes are being raided and our cars are stopped in the streets for inspections...journalists are being killed 'accidentally' and the seeds of a civil war are being sown by those who find it most useful; the hospitals overflow with patients but are short on just about everything else- medical supplies, medicine and doctors; and all the while, the oil is flowing...
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7:11:36 PM
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The Docktor is back and in fine form, cursing the "cowardly quacks who call themselves "doctors of medicine" in this country" and calling for disembowlments, etc. Good piece
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1:52:52 PM
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Monday, March 22, 2004
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Trinity is fucked.
It looks like a movie set. It's worse than the Battery, and of course you cannot move there in the summer for the tourists. Nope, I want a place a little harder to get to, or a place with no "tourist" appeal, whatever that may be now. The 'Murricans are buying up the outports, but the Joke is on them when the Euro forces arrive. Remember when the cdn $ was higher than the greenback? You ain't seen nothin' yet.
The Newfoundland Anti-Hotel Movement
It was about five minutes to seven when we pulled into the parking lot of the Seaport Hotel. We were tired, we were hungry, we were sick of driving. "Perfect" I said as we pulled into a pace directly in front of the restaurant window. "Or, maybe not." I added as the lights went out, exactly at the same time our car headlights went out, like they had been on the same switch.
It wasn't a good sign, but we went in anyway. They were "Just about to clean up" so they couldn't make us a meal. You couldn't smell food. The place was deserted. There were no cars in the parking lot. We were tired and hungry we explained and we wanted to rent a suite and have a meal. They suggested we go to Catelina to eat, at a horrible place a mere 30 minutes away. We declined, and went back to the Bonnavista Inn, where the cooked us what we wanted, gave us some free wine and comped our breakfasts in the morning.
When travelling up the Bonnavista peninsula, stay at the Bonnavista Happy Site Inn.
The Newfoundland Anti-Vended Snack Movement.
It was around 11:00 P.M. when my upset stomach began to complain and whine for something other than wine. SO I wandered down to the lobby and started feeding coins into the machine. Except it wouldn't accept twonies (which have only been in circulation for oh, six, eight years?) and it won't accept quarters made after 1998 when Her Majesties' Mint changed the nickel content of the alloy.
10:16:55 PM
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Sunday, March 21, 2004
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Save Hubble
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11858-2004Mar20.html
Hell, I'd go on the repair mission if I KNEW the shuttle was going to explode on the way home. Well I would if I was sick. Healthy, I'd go with a 10% chance to survive. Seems a reasonable investment for a ride like that and the opportunity to contribute to astronomy, exploration and all that stuff. Who wouldn't? George Bush?
Whoops! Speaking of outer space, I got to go. We're off 'round the bay. Going to look at a nice house for sale in Elliston. Pics at 11:00
Cheers,
-K
12:34:01 PM
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Friday, January 23, 2004
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Hey Kids and Squids,
and a special hello to my down under wonder Jax
I know I bin quiet. There are reasons. Never mind what they are.
We appreciate your feedback, but Please, if ye are going to send me a message, please include an active email so I can answer you questions, should I choose to. It's not going to wind up on a web page and I promise I won't try to sell you a larger penis or something.
Anyway, here's a new entry. Has nothjing to do with Iraq.
Ummmmm, much better. You think the fucking doctor would do better for severe back pain than a sack over-the-counter headache remedies. Are you insane doctor? I have quart bottles of it the pantry (sale at Walmart) doctor, and your prescription of one pill three times a day with food, doctor, is half what the manufacturers recommend dosage for a sinus headache when you have a cold is, so if you are seriously suggesting to me that your medical opinion that adequate pain relief for a crippling twisted spine condition is, and therefore your prescription would be: three asprins a day; then doctor I'm afraid I'm just going to have to see some credentials, because doctor, if doctor you are, that, doctor, that is insane.
He said "You have a sore back. You probably deserve it. Take one ASPRIN. Go home.".
And I am not kidding. The doctor said "Put you clothes back on and wait here, this is good stuff. I have some samples so you won't have to pay."
I got dressed. I was being hustled out. I waited forty minutes. The doctore returned with a brown paper lunch bag. It rattled when he handed it to me. I went to open it and he said "NO! Don't open it here. Wait till you get home."
And of course I got ripped with a paper bag full of asprin and the old "don't-open-it-here" play. Jaysus.
And they ask me why I don't go to doctors. Thank god I can self-medicate with a little help from my friends. Jaysus. I ain't going to him if anything serious should happen. Thank god for the internet, that's all I can say. And that's high praise for an atheist who worships Bob. Well as Bob would say "That's what you get for going to a pink doctor. That will be sixty bucks for the advice."
That's what he did say in fact, and I had better pay up. Yes, Bob could crush me like a bug, but so what? What ultimate deity could not? Nope, with Bob Protection doesn't cost it pays. And I like a deity I can trust all the way to the bank. Can you say that about your deity? Thought not.
That's what I tell people when they ask my religion. They leave me alone after that.
Although more than once I was asked for a brochure...
But enough of the mighty Dobbs. He made enough money this month when I paid him to get my stuff to me.
I am flipped back in now. I was flipped out about all my STUFF. (the stuff in question is almost all of Kent's writing and negatives)
Jaysus, what timing. My patience had finally snapped and I was less than 24 hours from actually calling the fucking cops, the real fucking cops, and all that could imply. Yes it was all that that would imply involving telephone numbers, bills of lading customs declarations stated destinations devices in all the above...well, you know bureaucracy. Anyway that's about when the NamelessAsshole telephoned me (sounding a bit out of breath) and said "Are you the Kent Barrett who is having some boxes shipped out from Vancouver?"
I grabbed the cell phone, dialled 911 and hovered my thumb over the send button and then said to him "Yes. Yes I am."
Oh well he was so *glad*, oh he couldn't *find* me (can't read I guess, as there's only one Kent Barrett in the phone book, not sure which other ones he had me confused with. The one in Arkansas maybe). And perhaps my tart email explaining same to a mutual contact out west had nothing to do with it. Never mind.
It's all here. The total remaining record and it seems to be most of it. Combined with what Manbuck saved for me and many other sources---wow! Thank you everyone, even the NamelessAsshole and mutual friend back west, who held this stuff and/or resulted in it all getting back to me intact. I can't say enough. The brandy must be making me maudlin, so I'll stop for a moment.
FEEL the Love,
-Kent
11:36:04 PM
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© Copyright 2004 Kent Barrett.
Last update: 4/21/04; 12:08:51 PM.
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