April | 2009 | Bluejacky: Existential Aspie

Month: April 2009

Sikes and the Alien Nation

Since I'm feeling grosser than Matt when he wrote the Grand Wizard review for x-entertainment.com (I swear, that is the funniest thing I've ever had tears rolling down my cheeks laughing out of my chair over), please excuse me when I challenge Tim Geitner and Friends to successfully navigate a full season of fantasy baseball before they keep telling us all how to run our businesses and health care. I may be caught in the middle of the current stomach bug ravaging through (yeah, the one that had David Buckner fainting on Glenn Beck), and have a sinus infection to boot (keeping my car between the lines going to the doctor today got a little challenging), and now we're doing the C3-C4 thing to test for active lupus because my fever hasn't come down for 5 days (I haven't been able to make fevers for years, no matter how sick I get), but if I can still pull this off without any typos (I'm manic), then we're cool.

If you are new to this blog, hello, I enjoy writing End of the World posts. Kind of a hobby. I grew up with a self educated (after graduating the 8th grade) Mennonite father teaching me how to grow my own food, butcher my own meat, stand up to many a political debate, and checkmate you in a delightful charade of cat and mouse making you think you really could take me down with a queen and all her army when all I had left was a knight and a bishop.

I didn't stop there, of course, had to annoy a lot more people all through college and beyond, sort of a blood sport, I guess. I've lost that edge, have started feeling a little more empathetic nowadays for people who don't get it, but I still don't apologize. Freud is dead, and if you can't get off that, see ya. If you can't handle the nitty gritty of social psychology, go back to your texting, gaming, and soft drinks. You're just a big sale to the people at the top, and if you're an easy sale, your mind is blank enough to brainwash with a 30 second commercial to 'go green'. Take a few geology and cosmology courses if you wanna think you're smart.

By the way, any of you know what a BLATO is? Bacon lettuce avocado tomato and a little bit of onion, and I put in on french bread. ~heavenly~ Yeah, floating on the vicodin and antibiotic. Good times. Nice to be able to actually eat something.

So this whole Fox News thing taking over the ratings lately has been kinda cool. I'm not a big news fan, tend to lean toward hermit in the cave stuff (with chickens, yes), but since the Big O has taken charge, *everything* I ever predicted in a work-related break room over the last ten years has started coming true. I thought my dad was looney tunes going on about the Illuminati and the New World Order and the Secret Society, and for decades since I was a child I've had to listen to every conspiracy theory out there, plus the prophecies and numerology he got into. The man was avid, excited, ecstatic-- we would see the End Times. Are you NUTS? He had me *terrified*. Six months ago he tried telling me that soon the government would even want to keep track of my chickens, my 5 little pet chickens. Ok, that's going a little far... chickens in my back yard?! Until, whadayaknow, here comes the Food Modernization Safety Act of 2009. Egads... When I can't hand an egg to a neighbor without risking my backyard being deemed a biohazard site and a health violation, and I know some of you are shaking your heads that I'm being too over reactive here, but let's just start asking what's next. Rabbits? Guinea pigs? Cats? Plenty of feral cats in this world. Dogs? They are the most common privately owned and overabused animal on the planet. So of course, my chickens hosted a little tea party this month to protest men in black suits coming to take them away.

That got wildly off my point. I used to hang around break rooms at work discussing political problems and agendas with my coworkers, and it blew me away how many of us agreed that the United States canNOT keep up this pace of expecting 4th quarter sales to keep the nation afloat, especially being based around a very commercialized religious holiday. Can you just imagine God telling Jesus his stock market numbers are down? I've retailed around, spent nearly 5 years with a retail giant (no, not Walmart), and then some time in a year-round touristy 'Christmas village' of shops that catered amazing numbers on very pricey collections, and my first reaction to ALL that was how badly I was consistently treated by the very customers who held up the economy in that holy time of year. If there is a God, surely this isn't how it was all supposed to turn out...

But I do believe in the free market system. We don't grow avocados around here, and I ~need~ them. I'm sick. I don't want anyone screwing that up for me. But when you work long enough in the private sector, you start noticing how things fall apart if you don't keep up your ETHICS. You want customers to come back? Then you treat them well, you keep a clean place, you pass health and safety inspections, and you keep smiling because that is your bread and butter. You serve, not because you have to, but because you choose to, and your service is either a boon to those around you, or it's dragging everyone else down. To serve means to *work*, by the way.

That is ~not~ a hard concept. Well, for a bunch of people, it actually is...

Enter Neil Cavuto, April 1st, 2009, interviewing one of my fave guys from Alien Nation, Gary Graham.

Now, on both Alien Nation and Star Trek Enterprise, Graham plays characters who struggle with political agendas going on. Do you know how many of us go to conventions ~*believing*~ we will someday have a utopian Federation based on human rights and freedoms as set forth in the U.S. Constitution? We take that so for granted that we ASSUME we will naturally progress from there on to a peaceful global unity that will finally solve all our problems and make humanity a force to be reckoned with among the stars. According to the TV Guide, the scifi audience makes a pretty big dent in the population, and anyone familiar with conventions, gaming, collectibles, and anything remotely technoweenie knows that it means big money, just like sports. And why? Because these concepts aren't just cute, like Barbie dolls and Hot Wheels. These are stories with belief systems, they ~mean~ something. In every scifi, fantasy fiction, or cartoon hero legend, there is a line drawn between right and wrong, freedom and tyranny, justice and the perversion of power. Challenge is risen to with valid reasoning and the courage to fight. Our lives are inundated with movies, games, books, artwork, and music that compel us to look at our humanity and decide who we are. But, sadly, that's all 'make believe' now. None of it really matters once we put the book down, leave the theater, or turn off the game, and return to our lives of cars and cell phones and assuming that quid pro quo goes on just fine without us.

You didn't see me totally space out for about an hour in the middle of that last paragraph. I don't normally drink more than half a cup of coffee a day, but I'm kinda floating in a sea of surrealism that had a point in there somewhere. For the uninitiated, I created GrandFortuna's League of 20,000 Planets during a long period of illness, and it's one of those deals where you're not sure if that's the last thing you'll get to have a say about on this planet. I guarantee, the brightest minds I've ever met are teens who are born terminal, and they know they have only a few short years left. When you take the world for granted, you stop *thinking*. I look around me, and I see a nation of dullards holding ipods and cell phones and watching American Idol. Very few of them appreciate the minds behind the technology that went into all these things, and how quickly we can lose our toys if something goes wrong. You know why we watched that North Korean missile launch so closely? Nuclear electromagnetic pulse (EMP) - Imminent danger to the US # 1 I believe a scifi show was created around this concept, let's see what was it... oh, yeah, Dark Angel.

"Several months after her escape, terrorists detonated an electromagnetic pulse in the atmosphere over the U.S., on June 1, 2009. This destroyed the vast majority of electrical systems, not only knocking out all the vital electrical systems but also wiping clean all the electronic data, "turning all those ones, and zeros into just plain old zeros" throwing the United States into chaos. This made it a third world country overnight, which let corruption and crime flourish and eventually leading to a stricter martial control of the population."

You know it would be so weird if something like that really did happen this year, kinda like the Twin Towers being hit so soon after that Lone Gunmen episode about the Twin Towers nearly being hit by a plane.

The Strange Pop Culture Coincidences of 11 September 2001

Ok, hang on. Reeling a little bit. Fever, coffee, what the heck, let's throw in a little software glitch that just sucked a couple of paragraphs into another universe. I once aced an essay style final exam by writing it out the night before and memorizing the whole thing to rewrite in class, no notes. I believe the class was some kind of linguistics nightmare with Juris Zarins- I was surrounded by students immersing themselves in dead languages and such. I don't know which is harder, sitting in calculus without a clue, or trying to translate a paragraph in Navajo with no prior experience. I really liked Dr. Zarins though. In one of my first classes with him I made him laugh so hard he couldn't talk for nearly five minutes. He asked the class why humans have armpit hair but animals don't. My hand shot up so quick, I'd thought about this one as a child and had already figured it out-- to reduce friction. omg. It was so worth being an idiot to see that man nearly fall to his knees in seizures like that. Oh, and if by any chance he's still teaching, if you sit on the front row, bring kleenex. He's a very animated speaker, you kinda feel it sometimes.

I have wandered around the house in a little fever haze a few times in the middle of this, but I think I was about to reconstruct something important. We were talking about belief systems. Yeah.

"Habeas Corpus is a legal action, or writ, through which a person can seek relief from the unlawful detention of him or herself, or of another person. It protects the individual from harming him or herself, or from being harmed by the judicial system. The writ of habeas corpus has historically been an important instrument for the safeguarding of individual freedom against arbitrary state action."

The United States is not the only country to use habeas corpus, but I think we are the only country in the world that has extended it to the personal levels we have regarding our rights and freedoms as guaranteed under the Constitution. However, Transnationalism is coming wickedly close to taking that guarantee away.

"Internationalism refers to global co-operation between nation states, and points to the affairs between nation-state governments, while transnationalism refers to global co-operation between people, and points to activities, which transcends national boundaries and in which nation-state governments do not play the most important or even a significant role.
Furthermore transnationalism often entails a vision of the obliteration of nation states to make way for a unified world government. Transnationalism is closely related to cosmopolitanism. If transnationalism describes the individual experience, cosmopolitanism is the philosophy behind it."
You guys might not have thought of this, but once we lose our constitutional freedom of speech, no more good scifi, eh?
Thought that might get your attention.

Because once they pull the goodies we take for granted out from under us, you think they're going to let us openly dream about them? If what we dream disrupts the new order, we will be hushed. The first step is to mock those of us who are afraid of losing our freedoms, to call us crazy conspiracists, extremists, even racists because our President happens to be black. But I have to wonder-- if conspiracy is the crazy few, how come there seem to be so many of us? Why are they trying so hard to ignore us, like we're just dumb little kids or something. Rednecks, I believe one reporter called us. I'm a very educated 'redneck', thank you very much. My ancestry is 400 years of pure Mennonite on my father's side, and I believe we saved the world from starvation by creating 'bread baskets', and you're quite welcome. My ancestry on my mom's side goes back to John Bankes, who owned Corfe Castle during the English Civil War.
"The castle was bought by Sir John Bankes, Attorney General to Charles I, in 1635. During the English Civil War, the castle twice came under siege by Parliamentarian forces. Sir John Bankes was away from his estate attending to Charles I so defence of the castle was led by his wife Lady Mary Bankes — "Brave Dame Mary" as she became known."
Oh, and btw, my family history says Mary was pregnant with my ever-so-great grandfather during the siege, wherein she rallied the servants to defend their home.
I guess the 'doth protest' stuff is in my blood, both sides. My father's side migrated around the world avoiding wars, my mother's side wound up being in the middle of wars. Sometimes I think about all the people before me who survived so many things, and if even one of them had been missing, I wouldn't be here. And the reason I am here is because they ~believed~ in things. And those are just examples. I'm a pureblooded Heinz 57, also representing two Native American tribes, so I feel I'm a fair representative of a world citizen.
So when I see an article like Bilderbergers excite conspiracists and notice how many familiar names meet to discuss 'world affairs', and suddenly we have a globe-trotting President making buddies with everybody while he bankrupts our country and new legislation pops up every day like candy out of a vending machine and the word 'global currency' is being tossed glibly around, I'm sitting back thinking I'd better stock up on vanilla and cocoa before Chavez ruins our relations with Columbia...
If you don't think this stuff is going to affect your daily life, you might wanna plug a new light bulb into the ol' noggin. Use one of those new 'green' ones with mercury in it...
Unlike Matt from x-entertainment, I didn't urp my way through this, but I can attest to the intensity one feels writing an article in a feverish state. I don't have a scary Tim Curry music video to leave you with, but I did find a little ditty on youtube...

Visit Gary Graham to read his essays. My fave is One Pissed-Off Dude.
And kudos to Fox News for all those runaway ratings. Choosing to watch a network, if I remember my economics correctly, is a 'vote' for that product or service... Looks like America is voting.
- 6:10 pm
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100 things- (egads...)

I'd like to preface this survey with the admission that, yes, I know this one is incredibly stupid, but, dang it, I feel too rotten to sleep and I'm tired of everything else. This will probably take a whole month to finish.

Basics.
1. Real name- I am the Grand Poobah of the chicken world. Ye need not know more.
2. Nickname- Don't fall for this trick.
3. Status- pan-dimensional.
5. Male or female - Wo, 4 and 6-9 are missing! Basics-- if you don't notice a bunch more numbers missing, you're not very bright.
10. Hair color- The real question is why all those numbers are missing. Did someone get angry and remove them? Sloppy? (Don't drink and type!!!) Or is this a test put here by the survey maker? Or, even scarier, was this survey created in an alt universe where those numbers don't exist and somehow quantumly showed up here by accident? It's driving me crazy, wondering what questions I don't get to answer!
11. Long or short- We can't tell from the inside whether our universe is bottlenecking through another cluster of universes, but somehow we all feel like some days last forever, and some days just fly by. Perhaps 24 hours isn't always necessarily 24 hours.
15. Are you a health freak- I like okra grown by Amish people. The health thing is just a side effect. Yes, I know, we seem to have lost 12-14.
16. Height- Everyone knows that the 4-foot chicken was a myth.
17. Do you have a crush on someone- Scott had me buzz his hair, and he's so cute now I can hardly stand it.
18. Do you like yourself- I like the pain that spikes through every cell in my body and every twinge of conscience in my soul. There's just something about feeling ~alive~. I've seriously asked God not to ever do this to me again, even if I chose it before I came here.
19. Piercings- I suddenly played Hell of Knives Falling yesterday and one of them hit my foot. Dishwashing + klutziness = danger.
20. Tattoos- Why is the buzz word 'tat'? Why not 'too'? "Hey, got any toos?" I think that would sound cooler.
21. Righty or lefty- My left eye is the most blind, my left ear is the most deaf, and for some reason that I can't fathom, I always turn my left side to whatever I'm trying to focus on or hear when I don't get something. I know the left pathways go to my right brain, so I'm wondering if the right brain is the one trying to do all the processing. That would kinda make sense if the cranial nerve damage on the left side also had something to do with the temporary loss of ability to count change back and type in credit card numbers a few years ago. Right Brain vs. Left Brain

Firsts.
22. First surgery- Do wisdom teeth count? My only other one was SVT radio ablation on my heart. I'm always confused how to answer this one. I think it should be reworded into 'most impressive surgery'.
23. First piercing- I tried to count the scars on my hands, and it's impossible. I also have some interesting scars scattered from head to toe. Piercings? ~Constantly~. How many staples have *you* had?
24. First best friend- I think I've mentioned that we ate my bunny, Freckles, when I was only 5 or 6.
26. First sport you joined - Red Rover. I was especially good at flipping kids. Yes, of course I got in trouble... Wonder what 25 asked me.
27. First pet- The first human outside of my family that I ever took seriously was a little boy that I used to chase around on the playground.
28. First vacation- Dad dragged us around old unmarked Indian sites for hours without any food or water, and once I even bounced out of the back of the pickup and had to run to keep up and jump back on. Stuff like that makes better memories than a 'vacation'.
30. First crush- Dang, now we're missing 29. That really bothers me. Ok, back to first crush. Being rather asexual, my 'crushes' tended more to be urgent longings to be able to fly like the eagles around where I grew up, to be able to leave my body and go see everything, like the way a camera pans up a river or over the mountains. I eventually realized the only way I could ever chase this feeling was to beg God to promise me I could do this after this life is over. I'm looking forward to a surge of joy when the time comes.

Currently
49. Eating- We jumped from 30 to 49...?! Sorta takes the oomph out of '100 things' in the title. I just ate a potato, a pomme de terre, as it were.
50. Drinking- Filtered water. You missed the imported jasmine green tea by about 45 minutes.
51. Favorite color- Blue Color Meaning- Colors That Go with Blue and The Meaning of the Color Blue
52. I'm about to- notice that no numbers are missing from this group.
53. Mood- Is it possible to be moodless? Why do I have to figure out what mood I'm in? I think one aspie hallmark of mine is that it sometimes takes me several days to figure out what kind of mood I was in several days previously. I believe I could get all kinds of affirmation on that one.
54. In school- More like duking it out with my school loan people.
55. Fast typer- Yeah, and it bothers the crap outa the ant that lives in the keyboard. I have a suspicion that ants are the real despots behind the conficker worm.
56. Favorite food- I thought this was the 'current' group, not the 'favorite' group. So I am currently eating salt-free organic blue corn chips.
57. Car- I'm not currently in my car. It is currently being rained on.
58. Want kids- I'm enjoying my space. Other people walking around like they owned the place (one in particular) got really old. I really don't want to go through another 20 years of more kids.
59. Want to get married- No one ever asks if I want to get divorced. But I don't.
60. Careers in mind- I just hope I'm not a Walmart greeter in another ten or twenty years.

Opposite Sex, Which Is Better.
68. Lips or eyes- I'm getting really tired of this number skipping thing. Seven questions, *poof*, gone. I kinda tend to notice foreheads. Kiefer Sutherland has a nice forehead.
69. Hugs or kisses- I've never seen a chocolate hug. I kinda like old peeps, when they get a little crusty and you get to crunch the sugar between your teeth.
70. Older or younger- I think the whole point to this linear thing is gathering intel, i.e. a sort of assignment wherein we learn via direct experience what certain concepts mean. Oh, this was an opposite sex question. Sorry, I get caught up in time questions.
72. Romantic or spontaneous- 71 spontaneously combusted, apparently. I don't have a romantic bone in my body, but Scott is spontaneous enough for several people. I'm so used to it I don't even blink any more.
73. Nice stomach or nice arms- Scott's tummy is furry and soft. I never thought I'd like that, but I guess getting older has special perks.
74. Sensitive or outgoing- One of Scott's key survival strategies is not having a clue what sensitivity is. He just simply freezes up like a rabbit in the headlights and hopes the car either screeches the brakes in time or flies around him. It's worked for 19 years so far. I actually find it endearing. I think men are savaged far too often by insensitive women.
75. Hook-up or relationship- Chickens have really interesting socio-psychological relationships. I think humans can learn a lot from chickens.
76. Black or white? I have one of each, a black chicken and a white chicken.
77. Troublemaker or hesitant? The white chicken is the troublemaker, the black chicken is the boss.

Have you ever.
78. Kissed a stranger- I'm a germ phobe. It's all I can do to go through a food bar touching ladles that hundreds of other people touch before me.
79. Drank bubbles- You know, we used to dare each other to drink soap bubbles as kids...
80. Lost glasses/contacts- I donate my old glasses to mission programs who recycle them to third world countries. I think we should all do that.
81. Ran away from home- I don't get very far.
84. Broken someone’s heart- Left and right, I'm sure. Parents, siblings, kids, friends, they all eventually get caught in one of my insensitive blunt rants that I have no idea hurts them personally. It's the aspie way. Yes, 82 and 83 are missing. Not my fault.
85. Been in trouble with the cops- I've been warned a number of times that driving on muscle relaxers and pain killers is akin to drunk driving. The only reason I got pulled over was because I was doing 40 on a highway. Yeah, preferable to slow down with a migraine or severe pain. I got a ride home once from an officer, so I've ridden in the front seat of a police vehicle. I know a woman who wears an opium patch and gets around on a motorcycle.
86. Turned someone down- Sometimes I'm just not in the mood to make a pie, so live with it. Buy a candy bar or something.
87. Cried when someone died- Sometimes I laugh. The Darwin Awards 2009 - Can anyone be so stupid? If you die like an idiot, I'm not gonna cry.
88. Liked a friend- I'm seriously doubting the sobriety of the survey maker at this point.

Believe In.
89. Yourself- Some might see me as an egomaniac. This is one of several blogs wherein I assume my importance on this earth is key to your survival, or at least your entertainment.
90. Miracles- They never stop. If I'm still alive, it's because God wants me here. My will certainly isn't strong enough on its own.
91. Love at first sight- Chickies in hardware stores are very hard for me to walk away from.
92. Heaven- I can't imagine a challenge beyond what I'm already living as a human, but if heaven isn't challenging, I'll be *bored*.
93. Santa Claus- Imagine living a couple hundred years ago, waiting for some old guy to put a few nuts in a shoe you put outside your door.
94. Sex on the first date- We're probably the only species that argues about this.
95. Kiss on the first date- Scott and I bumped hands in the popcorn at the movie on the first date and were just mortified. 19 years later...
96. Angels- I think angels are overused to make money in a number of products, and I think that's wrong. If angels are real, then so is idolatry.
97. Is there one person you want to be with right now? There is a person on this earth I haven't seen in 20 years. For some reason, that person has popped into my head all year long. I'm not sure why, but it feels important somehow to let this person know everything's ok, and I wish I knew *he* is ok. Oh, and I still want a copy of that picture of me in the Planet of the Apes mask. You know how you regret things in life? I deeply regret that was the only copy of that picture. Seriously.
98. More than one BF/GF at a time? Scott and I both agree we need more Scotts around here.

99. Do you make the first move? I'm a tad aggressive. I blame the Asperger's. Romance takes too long.
100. Repost as 100 truths- This is not something I 'believe in'. I believe this should be reposted as per the actual number of numbers listed, but since that would take away from the surprise of finding some of them missing, I'll just leave it like it is. Well, the person before me used 'things' instead of 'truths' in the subject line, so there is no telling how mangled this survey is by now. Maybe I should go through and start changing questions on the next one.
- 3:55 pm
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bluejacky

I've started transferring my survey posts over to Surveypalooza so people coming in from search engines on mobile devices will be able to see the surveys.

Apologies for the missing vids, another upgrade during the server migration swept through like a scan sweeping through the Enterprise. I'll fix those later, kinda busy...