Shock the monkey at your own peril my friends... Theirs is an ideology of hate and they are now emboldened by success...

My lovely wife has become Queen of the Torrents and if I can find a suitable tiara I will present it to her and further officiate the title in hopes she wears it while at the computer. She knows all the good sites and has become most proficient with all the troubleshooting required by this crooked, user-based emergent enterprise. She’s become so good that I’ve felt little impetus to learn the ins and outs myself and thus I’ve become digitally lazy. I salve my sense of guilt by convincing myself I do equal work in sussing out and bringing home all the best video games. Marriage seems to float on these day-to-day accommodations, these partitioning of tasks, with the end result being we become specialized creatures when it comes to running our own lives. My grandfather stopped eating salad after my grandmother died because he didn’t know how to make it and he couldn’t recognize the ingredients in their whole form at the supermarket. We’ve come a long way but the essence of our ignorance stemming from convenient and comfortable co-habitation still remains.

We have stolen Dora and Diego episodes for our two year old and in case you can’t gauge my mood on this I relish the misdemeanour. Fuck these two Latino overachievers who engage our youngsters with wholesome messages all while seeking to bombard them with toy and cereal advertisements. It is a grievous misuse of trust, like if you become friends with an Avon Lady and the bitch won’t keep her pink suitcase at home. With great pride I mention that thanks to piracy and the odd DVD purchase my children will never be forced to sit through a commercial. I am counting on this exclusion to result in the formation of an evolved human off-shoot, a super-being who will tear down the billboards of our forefathers and create free head space so that we may once again daydream spontaneously without having to Head On: Apply Directly to the Forehead. I would shit directly into the mouth of any person involved in those commercials before shipping them off to Nuremburg to answer for Crimes Against Humanity.

We finished watching the first season of Dexter which was perversely pleasant enough to lure me back to the cop-thriller, a genre of programming that I swore off fifteen years ago. The titular character is played by Micheal C. Hall. He carries the show easily and entertains throughout, which allows the cliché-ridden support cast to simply phone it in without thankfully breaking my concentration. They could all die and hopefully they will once they start whining for a bigger paycheque. All of them except for Masuka; Dexter’s Asian lab assistant anyway. Any guy in a shiny shirt, drink in hand, who yells out “She is going to fuck me SILLY!” is bound to appeal to the lug nuts that anchor my soul to its earthly frame. Bad-Assed African American Sergeant Doakes is worth mentioning because he’s the worst of the bunch, so bad he’s good. His constant, rapid intonation of the word ‘motherfucker’ is the antithesis of Samuel Jackson’s cool and iconic use of the explicative. Plus he flashes the Black Steel like a muscle-bound fairy; the result of Zoolander and Mr. T. having a butt-baby. My wife has taken to mock him through imitation, much to my amusement.

Okay, okay… I can’t stretch out the mediocrity of my home-bound life any longer. Here’s what I’ve been reading the past few days…

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/us/24calif.html?th&emc=th

The fires in California are out of control and half a million people have evacuated their homes. The smoke is blotting out the sun in that part of the world. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (still sounds weird) has been all over this and seeing as there are a lot of white people involved President Bush looks to be preparing a proper emergency response. In some far-away, solar-powered bank vault, naked but for his Nobel Prize, a dollar-drenched and cum-stained Al Gore (doesn’t sound weird) is laughing his ass off. Good for him I say! He’s been preaching this stuff for twenty years while the tranquil Santa Ana has transformed into Trogdor the Burninator.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/21/AR2007102100172.html?wpisrc=newsletter

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/world/middleeast/23kurds.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

The world is officially on crazy-pills when the Kurds are making front page news for days running. Mountain-dwelling Kurdish guerrillas are raiding both Turkey and Iran in their bid for independence. Sadly their would-be nation is utterly landlocked and they are deeply resented by those who would lose ground in the process. All of this has happened before and the Kurds wind up getting their cracks kicked every time so this might not end well.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n20/holt01_.html

This article is one of those “Iraq is about the oil” arguments but it comes with compelling numbers, as in the estimated oil reserves are worth about 30 trillion dollars! So what’s trillion here or there to get it, right? The author also goes over the enduring bases being built for long-term American troops. It makes sense to me. The Green Zone is a huge target and once the oil deals are done they don’t need to pretend to centralize the government anymore. Iraq will remain shattered and reeling for years and the U.S. need only to respond to resource-based threats from their far-off strongholds. The Deputy Minister of Iraq gave a public and absolute answer of ‘NO’ when it came to the question of permanent American bases but these guys couldn’t even get Blackwater out of their own country so I don’t think they’re going to have much better luck with the U.S. Army.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7055625.stm

Monkeys are responsible for killing the Deputy Mayor of Delhi! They attacked him in force and he fell one story, later dying from his head injuries. The monkey terrorists are thought to be Hindu radicals who are calling for a return to the worship and obeisance of Hanuman; the vanaran hero of Ramayana who came to the aide of Rama by rescuing the goddess Sita and battling the Rakshasa king Ravana. (I’m not making this stuff up, some ancient priest already did!) Hanuman teaches that feces, not cricket balls should be hurled by the faithful and that simian actors get their own trailers and top billing in Bollywood. The last sighting of Hanuman was made by Guru Sathya Sai Baba back in the 1940’s so we’re about due. If you’re interested in the good guru then I’ll put up his Wikipedia link. The man’s biography reads like my 19th Level Cleric/Rogue character from a Dungeons & Dragons game I played a couple years back.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Sathya_Sai_Baba