Friday, October 31, 2008

I Voted Yesterday

Yes, I voted yesterday, 30 OCT 08, using a vote-by mail-ballot. To be exact, I marked that ballot, but didn't actually mail it in; instead, I'll hand it in on Tues, 04 NOV 08, here where I live (Valley Village, 310 apts) which has 2 precinct polling places. If that sounds odd, it really isn't here in Northern CA; just about anywhere can be a polling place & so many are. On the actual voting day, I'll 1st go to the hospital (not a polling place as far as I know, but might be), then drop off my sealed mail-in ballot back here at Valley Village, then ride the Caltrain up to S.F. where a friend's house is a local polling place.

So, you can vote at so many places from 8am to 8pm (as well as by mail) that you really have no excuse for not voting unless you're too unwell to mark the ballot, but even then you can get someone to help you who must co-sign that they did: "Due to illness or disability, I am unable to return my ballot in person and hereby authorize the following (circle one) spouse, child, parent, grandparent, grandchild, brother, sister or a person residing in my household." (also in Spanish).

Worku Negash, VP of Mission College,Santa Clara, an Ethiopian by birth, is greatly impressed by the efforts of the U.S.A. to make it possible to vote, compared to many African countries. Abuses, however, abound & the Democratic Party is busily documenting them: e.g., flyers telling Republicans to vote on 04 NOV, but Democrats to vote on 05 NOV, etc. are being circulated by Republican Party operatives who have previously stolen blank ballots, or dumped marked ballots in bodies of water in FL in 2004. Sheer desperation drove them then & still does now.

Last nite on Bill Moyers' Journal (PBS, Sat. eves.) he showed some of the flyers that GOPeratives are currently circulating against Obama: one showed Obama with a piebald (brown & white = bi-racial) pig's head, with a caption about lipstick on a pig (alleging he used that against Sarah Palin) thereby using any excuse to make Obama into an obscene animal, exceeding anything I've alleged in my poems, e.g. my imaginary flyer with a man-sized bunch of over-ripe brown bananas with a naked Obama next to them. I'm obviously too far removed from the target zones to really know what plays among crackuhs. (My reportorial poem "Bubba Redneck" is historically retro.) Apparently cross-breeding 'niggers with pigs' is leading-edge inter-species racial-biotechnology for today's crackuhs.

Appropriately enuf then, I'll be stealthily dressed all in black as a beret-wearing beatnik (with silvered sun-glasses) stalking malfeasing Republicans at a Halloween party here at Valley Village tonite. [PS] Norcal is 70/30 Democrat.

Sunday, October 26, 2008

One Less Lie

(a round for Maya)

One less lie,
& we move ahead,

One less lie,
& we move along,
one less lie,
& we move along,

one less lie,
& we grow strong,

One less lie,
& we move along,
one less lie,
& we move along,

one less lie,
& the wall falls down.

One less lie,
& we move along,
one less lie,
& we move along,

(ad lib.)


(26 OCT 08, Santa Clara CA)v1

Friday, October 24, 2008

Political Dolls

“Share the Wealth, Comrades!”
shouts the Obama political doll
in a red jump-suit;

“Country First!, Country First!”
shouts the McCain political doll,
in a white USN uniform,

“Much less tax, much less tax!”
shouts the Bob Barr political doll
in a shiny sharkskin suit,

sold by GOPolitical-hucksters
to gawking suckers on corners.
Now they’ve seen their colors,

who’ll buy which doll to carry
home to bemuse the family?
[Ans. is color-coded.]

(24 OCT 08, Santa Clara CA)6

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Tourette-Banker

“Make it worth, make it worth my, make
it worth my while,” stammers a Banker
suffering from Tourette’s Syndrome.
No one around the table reacts badly:
regulators, accustomed to his behavior,
know no Banker tips his best/worst hand
while drawing the next card when he
fears there’s no Luck of the Draw.
The Banker sits on his shrinking assets,
lubed w/Preparation H, his barking
regulated down to Tourette’s palilalia.
Regulators know how much to tolerate
the whine of a badly failed fiduciary.
“Ow, ow, hurts” he whines, “Go easy
easy easy!” (“We haven’t even begun.”)

(23 OCT 08, Santa Clara CA)v1

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Taped to a liner's Keel

“Where’s that OH Plumber I know so well?”
asks McCain, laughing as he mounts the steps
of the stage in Dayton, OH “Where are you, Joe?”
Joe cowers somewhere out of camera, fearing
the OH Dept. of Taxation will subpoena him.
“Jeez!” Joe whispers to his best friend, Jim
who works for the RNC in OH, who whispers:
“Chill out, Joe; this is during campaign-time,
they don’t dare serve you. You’re protected.”
Protected’s the word Joe was waiting to hear,
& now that he’s heard it, he can finally relax.
As long as he stays near McCain, he’s safe.
Nobody he knows is anywhere as connected;
or has taken such a beating & still keeps ticking,
like a TIMEX watch, taped to a liner's keel.

(22 OCT 08, Santa Clara CA)v2

Monday, October 20, 2008

Cheney's covered

Ivo worries about Cheney’s need
for medical coverage post-Nov. 4th.
“Who will carry him after that? Will
he be covered until Jan 20th? Or the
anniversary of his 1st-day of work?”
Ivo’s more worried for Cheney than he
is for Ivo's having Parkinson’s disease.
I don't even try to tell Ivo that Cheney
may COBRA coverage pre-covered by
his many pensions: Halliburton CEO;
congressman, SECDEF, VP. Ivo asks:
“Will he retire to Abu Dhabi where he
moved Halliburton's HQ?” "Hardly; its
back to WY (where he grew up.)"

(20 OCT 08, Santa Clara CA)v6

Sunday, October 19, 2008

"Carousel" (class-analyzed)

For the 1st-time, at 66 (2008) I've seen Rodgers & Hammerstein's musical "Carousel" (Broadway 1945; Cinemascope film, 1956, principals: Gordon Macrae, Shirley Jones.) on DVD here at Valley Village as a Fri nite free movie shown in the central Social Center.

I really only went for the story, adapted from a 'dark' 1909 Hungarian play by Ferenc Molnar (Neumann), "Liliom" (Hood/thug)" http://www.litweb.net/biography/92/Ferenc_Molnar.html - that R & H reset in coastal ME sometime pre-automobile. Apart from its songs & dances, it's a study in social class & one outsider's failure.

Billy Baxter (Liliom) is a carousel-barker who tries to go ME-mainstream (girl, wife, child due), but desperate for money, is persuaded by local thug, Jigger (cited as having done time in prison in Bangor) to try to rob a member of the local upper-middle class (his wife's employer), fails, falls on his borrowed knife, dies. Post-death, he bargains with the heavenly station-master for one day to come back to see his daughter, now 14, does, finally whispers to her to go mainstream Mainiac. She listens, & presumably does. Ends with the nobly uplifting chorale sung by all at her h.s. graduation - "Walk On, Walk On" - & his over-the-shoulder glance of final redemption as he walks back uphill to heaven. (The only visible transportation is on foot or by boat.)

What struck me (coming from MA Bay's near North Shore) was the easily discernible class & caste differentiaton between characters - Billy, as just a seasonal circus carousel-barker, the carousel-owner as his middle-aged mistress & employer, the girl he falls for, a quasi-cloistered shopgirl whose aunt owns a fish-restaurant on the dock; a herring fisherman named Snow who owns his own boat & becomes prosperously middle-class (presumably as Snow's canned Clam Chowder), the father of 9, etc. - as well as its easily visible local class-hierarchy.

The film was re-sited as a variation on Mt. Monadnock-area NH-sited Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" (1938.) Barker Billy, laking any real commercial "trade or skill" (as his young wife explains to people) fails because he fears to seek a righteous path to substance as the small coastal-cove ME town defines it. Seduced by a crafty ex-con thug who illustrates his class-situation (if caught attempting this robbery, he will only go before a police-court, not the supreme-court), now unemployed, Billy does, fails, falls on his borrowed knife & dies (implausibly) quietly, unbloodily. Neither waked, eulogized, nor seen buried, his face is touched gently after he dies by his widow-wife, then his ex-mistress.

"Carousel"'s building pathos depends upon a constantly plucked thread of class & caste, which I'd certainly never expected. Fluff, it (actually) wasn't.

Friday, October 17, 2008

Chaos Makes a Comeback

MARKETBEAT
Market Insight From WSJ.com
--------------------------------------
from the floor of the NYSE
Wed 15 OCT 2008

[newspoem]

Chaos Makes a Comeback on Floor
Brokers Throw Body Checks,
Traders Jostle for Position:
Action at the NYSE
Has Even Market Vets Amazed

by Rob Curran
...
Brokers charged around shoulder-first &
jostled one another in front of specialist posts.
About a dozen floor brokers
scrummed around the post for Wachovia,
refereed by one of the specialist managers.
This was nothing, however, compared with last wk.
Massive client losses, shocking volatility
& boisterous trading had a draining effect,
floor brokers at the NYSE said.

Even Art Cashin, the head of floor operations
for UBS Financial Services at NYSE & a market sage
who finds precedent for every event, said he saw
2 of the craziest market moves of his career last wk
-- the swings in the last 45min. of trade Fri.
& the plunge in the last hr.Thurs.

“prices & morale were sinking rapidly,
& it felt as if something was going to happen
with the [entire] financial system. Then, on Fri.,
the market spastically jumped one way & the other.”

"[On Black Mon.,
[In 1987],
you didn't wake up
& wonder,
is there going 2B
a Merrill Lynch,
is there going 2B
Lehman Brothers?
You didn't think,
who is next?

I’m a mountain climber;
I climbed (Mt.) Everest”
said Alan Valdes, a floor-
broker with Hilliard Lyons.
“Climbing the ice fields
of (Mt.) Everest, I felt
safer & slept better.”

Joe the Plumber

Joe the Plumber

“Joe the Plumber won!” gloats McCain
at a rally, promoting a straw-man
journeyman plumber who Obama’s
high fed. biz.-taxes would screw:
Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, not really
a lic. plumber; deep into Ohio for
$1,182.98 in personal income tax,
w/an active lien on his property:
"I don't have a lot of pull. It's not like
I'm Matt Damon; I just hope I'm not
making too much of a fool of myself."
Well, Sam Joe, it really needn't be so:
you're just McCain's tax-scarecrow
while your straw’s burning slow.


(16 OCT 08, Santa Clara CA)v7

Thursday, October 16, 2008

D-bait 2 (2)

“I suffered 5 yrs in the Hanoi Hilton”
raves McCain, “Obama oughta do a
hard 5 in Camp Delta JTF Guantanamo
2make this, mano a mano, a fair fight.”
Obama rope-a-dopes, calmly & cooly,
in no hurry2vacate his wooden stool;
not a survivor of Hanoi, Chicago, not
a grad of USN, Columbia & Harvard.
McCain, in an expensive pair of shoes,
walksabout lost, doing himself no good,
struggling to fight this out his own way:
beat-up, knot-headed, raging, infuriated,
limping around the ring, lost in blue,
badly over-lit, ill-composed.

(16 OCT 08, Santa Clara CA)v5

Cash only, please!

CASH ONLY, PLEASE!

(concept & practice proposed by Ivo Adam, 16 OCT 08)

Here we all are, passively awaiting the media-reported financial tsunami that will engulf the world, being told a recession is almost upon us, but definitely not a Great Depression. No, they say (so far) that it’s just a credit crunch; credit is hard to get: banks won’t lend to each other, so people & companies can’t get necessary credit from any bank. Credit is just drying-up.

What can we personally do about it? Get a little saner, quickly. Stop using such tight credit beginning with one day a week. The amount of credit available will increase that one day's worth, while the bank consortia that are behind American Express, MasterCard, and VISA, etc. will suffer the loss of that one day’s carrying charges. If you roll that one-day-per-week from Monday to Sunday & back, it will strike rolling terror into the consortias' fiscal hearts as their constant cash-flow income becomes less & less predictable.

What does this do for you? If you are living too much on credit, you now have taken one credit-day off a week to try to come to your fiscal senses & spend cash or spend nothing at all, one day when you say to the spending world “(I) Pay in Cash Only, Please!” (as some Chinese restaurants in San Francisco’s Chinatown say every day.) Just after WW2 cash (or a valid personal check) was really the only acceptable medium of exchange; credit cards did not yet exist. People were very selective, super-cautious about what they bought, continuing a wartime habit of making things last longer: they darned their sox, rather than discarded them, etc. Ask your mom or grandmom who will (no doubt) remember.

Celebrate this truly liberating Credit-Off, Cash-Only Day totally alone, or with your friends, or in small Cash-Only clubs. Your reward is saving everyone all carrying charges. Savings should gradually begin to increase. Our sense of being out of fiscal control should begin to end as we shed excess-debt weight. We will begin to feel we're in fiscal trim - again.

To respond to this idea, please e-mail: cashonly099@gmail.com

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

GoldStd Dentistry

“Capitalism's an extraction process,”
explains Dr. Gold, GoldStd dentist,
solar-powered drill in his R-hand,
“It relentlessly removes all decay
crumbling into dust in a system. It
removes dross, replacing it w/gold
whose purity is self-protecting,
an agreed upon standard of purity
that fills the vaults of the world’s
banks until sufficiently golded-up,
(I like to say), or backed by gold.
Those that aren’t just get eaten by
countries that are; some countries’
treasuries stockpile pure platinum,
of absolutely no use, dentally.”


(15 OCT 08, Santa Clara CA)v6

Monday, October 13, 2008

he@rt-stone

Walking with Ivo,

I find a road-scuffed heart-shaped
stone with a shallow oval dent
like my heart’s fibrillating atrium*,

& as I hold it in my open palm,
my other hand grips my cane &
my breathing slowly slows down.


* a/k/a afib; 1st cardioversion 17 SEP.

(13 OCT 08, Santa Clara CA)v7

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Obviously,

Q: What really interests you?

A: The Obvious.

Q: Really?

A: Obviously.

Q: What do you mean?

A: Things that are so obvious that they come to mind immediately.

Example: Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) wondered why cord-wood was not sold by weight, rather than by the cubic volume. By thinking of the wood's weight as significantly contributing to its transportable labor-cost, he was simply making the labor-energy cost-chain obvious & continuous.

To extend that, the convertible value of the firewood resides in the potential heat that it can produce, measured in BTUs (British Thermal Units) or joules, not in wood-feet. Pricing wood by the potential BTU/joule is beyond woodcutters, but thanks to computers, it’s not beyond major gardening chain-stores, who could easily sell varieties of wood specifically priced by their potential BTUs. So why don’t they – do the obvious? Because the traditional system works well enuf - for simple, undifferentiated firewood.

Examples: All user-interfaces.

McCain's eelnest Dream

MCCAIN'S EELNEST DREAM

McCain dreams he’s in an eelnest,
some albino, some red, some blue,
writhing all around him as he speaks:
“Obama's a decent family man, a
family man & a citizen, who I have
a political disagreement with.” But
by not saying Obamas “not an Arab”
he doesn't save Obama’s bacon,
& thinks: “Does Obama eat bacon?"
sliding in2the eels’slippery mind-set,
“Of course he eats bacon, but if he
doesn’t, maybe he’s a vegan, maybe
vegetarian! Worse than an Arab! No
red-meat Republican’s a vegetarian!”


(12 OCT 08, Santa Clara CA)v11

Friday, October 10, 2008

Dollar-talk

Lemme loanya a dollah. (No, don’t!)
Ya gadda be kiddin! S’only a dollah!
(What interest are you going 2 charge?)
No innerest! Nothin! U kno me, none.
(I can’t just afford this tippy transaction.)
I don unnerstan’ya! What’s so tippy heah?
(It tips my calculation about indebtedness.)
Ya can’t affordta pay me backa dollah?
(It really depends on when I pay it back.)
Take as longasya like. Take forevah.
(I just can’t carry this as a debt forever.)
I mean don’evah pay me back, OK?
(I wish I could do that, but I just can’t.)
I don' unnestan’ ya. Nevah is nevah.
(No, never is just far, far, far away.)
OK, then pay me fah, fah, fah away
(Loan me the dollar notso far away.)
[A lost dollar blows by in the wind.]

(10 OCT 08, Santa Clara CA)v2

Thursday, October 9, 2008

Bubba Redneck

“O’bama, Hussein, Hussein O’bama” chants
a redneck cracker sheriff in black uniform*
working the stage at a Sarah Palin R-rally.

Keep your eye on him: the man of the hour
that’s gone midnite in the middle of the day.
His next move'll B2 get out the rope & ladder.

Nothing less can end the insult that Obama is,
& the degree of insult depends on how high,
just how high he can be strung up & hanged.

Now y'all jest try tell'n us this all B funnin’
Who’s a-havin’ all this fun, Bubba Crackuh?
Y, U Bubba Redneck, a-holdin’ that coil!

*Lee County FL Sheriff Mike Scott.

(08 OCT 08, Santa Clara CA)v5

October Surprise!

Osama bin Laden surrenders to John McCain in person on Oct. 31st (Hallowe'en), proving McCain exercises presidential magic. Palin says: "Obama's a would-be terrorist, so he should just surrender himself - to John; Osama & Obama will get along just fine in prison, don-tchya-think?!" Obama smartly surrenders to Biden.

The Polish Kerouac

I've just finished speed-reading the last pages of Stuart Dybek's book of Chicago-based short stories & sketches, "The Coast of Chicago" (Knopf, 1990) because I had my public library deliver it to me a month ago via their shut-in service & they'll be picking it up sometime today. I had a total L-knee replacement (in late July) & can't quite ride my bike to the library yet (by early Oct.), so they brought the book to me (in early Sept.)

My Polish-speaking psychotherapist (from Chicago) suggested I read it because I'm half-Polish (my Polish-speaking mother was even a postulant of the Polish-speaking order of nuns of St. Felix, the Felicians.)

Reading Dybek was frightening & disturbing for me because the obsessive Polish Roman Catholic experiences & images he writes about were once mine, too, & are still all too easily relived many decades later; Dybek & I are the same age (b.1942) I, however, grew up in a small GE factory city, Lynn MA, so Dybek's vast, gloomy Chicago neighborhoods just remind me of some of the grimmest neighborhoods of Boston (11 mi. south of Lynn.) His brilliant multi-part fantasia extrapolating from Edward Hopper's painting "Nighthawks" (1941; a scene of NYC, Greenwich Village, Greenwich Ave.) is not specifically Chicagoan.

In my late teens & early 20s, I'd thought Jack Kerouac wrote for all working-class Roman Catholics, but I now know Dybek writes for Polish Roman Catholics, & is thus the Polish Kerouac. I really do hope he continues to write a lot more stories & also tries writing novels.

Trembellation!

“Trembellation, Battmann!” says Robbin, afraid,
“The world, as we know it, is getting very scary!
Those wonderful brokerages & banks are gone!”
Battmann listens wisely & counsels his charge:
“They did what they had2do2bring us2our senses:
they showed us the more you derive something,
the closer you get2nothing much more.That’s
a law of the diminishment in the Fiscal Universe.
Karl Mark put it very simply: “Capital is finite.”
Robbin listens. “But, I thought, Albert Einstein
said that, Batmann!” “Silly boy,” says Battmann,
“It was Marx; Einstein had no interest in capital.”
“Are you really quite sure of that? “ asks Robbin;
“I am, I’m infinitey rich & infinitely intelligent.
Things like this I never make a mistake about.”
“Well, where do you keep your infinite money?”
asks Robbin. “In The Wayne Bank, Robbin,
America’s strongest bank, of course, all deposits
backed by pure gold & I’m the only depositor.
I trust myself to cover myself & nobody else.”
"Where's the gold?" asks Robbin. "Silly boy,"
says Battmann: "You're sitting on it, Robbin."

(09 OCT 08, Santa Clara CA)v3

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

D-bait 2 (1)

Obama tries to approach McCain,
but as he does, McCain looks down
at his Ferragamo shoes & snarls:
“Shine? Don’t need no shine, boy!”
Obama answers: ”Yassuh, Mr. Boss,
Don’t mean no harm, Mr. Boss!”
They both break out into a cold sweat:
“We can do this ourselves,” they say,
as the stage director of Sat. Nite Live
moves off camera-left silently as
the band of the night breaks into
“Chattanooga Choo-Choo” as set-up.
“Mr. Boss, you be needin’ a shine?”
“Damn right I do, Boy, dark black.”
A tite brite spot hits McCain’s face.

(07OCT 08, Santa Clara CA)v1

Kiss My Ass!

(A surfer’s sermon)

“Kiss my Ass!” is a commandment that Jesus
never gave us, so anyone writing that on a wall
had better get themselves behind Satan’s red ass
& kiss it, for I say Jesus was not interested in it.
Jesus was a stand-up guy, a carpenter all his life
in a hot, sunny, dry climate like Arizona, maybe,
where a steady sweat kept a man way-buffed-up.
That’s the, like total key to who Jesus really was,
if you look at him cleanly with both of your eyes,
you won’t miss what Jesus was then & is now:
a way-clean, buff, tanned-up dude, hard as rock..
He didn’t need any gym-time or gym-equipment!
He went to work every day, did his daily work.
If that isn’t a life to live by, I ask you, what is?

(07 OCT 08, Santa Clara CA)v1

Monday, October 6, 2008

Bratty is as

“Bratty is as bratty does, “ muses
the poet, writing a neoapothegm
applicable to AK Gov Sarah Palin’s
chatty-cathyism delighting some,
infuriating others, visibly depressing
Sen Joe Biden (D-Del.) who slowly
tells his sorrow as a single parent,
widower, & survivor. Sarah’s bubbly
bratitude brushes him aside as just
yesterday’s history, she’s tomorrow’s:
“There you go, looking baack at the paast.”
The only past worth remembering is hers,
because it’s...ah...like yours, America!

(06 OCT 2008, Santa Clara CA)v5

Sunday, October 5, 2008

Where's Cheney?

bill,

All these scenarios seem to come out of a D-horror movie; even if these numbers are arithmetically correct, the reality brings us to a real-life scenario, (i.e.) the economy is in shambles, so the question is, "Who wants the Presidency?" or "Who is crazy enough to want the Presidency?" The answer is clear to anyone that cares to look: IT'S DICK CHENEY, STUPID!!! [P.S.] I bet you he has been working on it for quite a while; that is why he has been extremely silent...

ivo

My reply:

I don't believe Cheney's ever wanted it for himself, just for another puppet he can secretly pseudo-serve/manipulate like he has Dubya Bush. Under the present chaotic conditions, Cheney may get what he wants by crumble-down default. Possible puppets: 1) Joe Lieberman, who's obviously opportunistic enuf to do Cheney's bidding, but would have to have been McCain's VP to succeed to the self-sacrificial ram, 2) McCain, who's apparently not proven all that manipulable & might dump Cheney in a 'maverick' gesture, leaving us with a 'maverick' ex-military regime; McCain may have now finally made a deal with Cheney to 'save the Republic' by gladly playing its national-savior - if he somehow wins.

About @ Maverick

“The thing about a maverick,” McCain explains
to a last-month herd of GOP campaign operatives,
“Is what you call out to it depends on which way
it’s heading: towards you or away from you, &
whether it’s heading to the far-left or far-right.”

“For example, if a maverick’s heading away
to the far right, you call out: ‘Turn left!’
but if it’s heading to the far left: ‘Turn right’
but I s’pose you all already knew this, right?”
(The Goperatives shuffle their well-shod feet)

“But if it’s heading towards you, you call out:
‘You’re late for supper, you dumbass dogie!’
I learned that from President Bush himself.”
(The Goperatives begin to stomp their feet.)

“Now let’s see if you got what I told you:
Everybody stand up & head towards me.”
(The Goperatives all do just as he says.)

McCain goes red-in-the face & shouts-out:
“You dumbass dogies! 2-late for supper!”
(The Goperatives sit down again, afraid.)

(05 OCT 98,Santa Clara CA)v2

1-balled, wonder!

“What people don’t yet appreciate,"
whispers McCain's hot running mate,
Sarah, “is maybe you do have just-1
ball, but what a humongous ball it is,
as big as a ruby-red Texas grapefruit,
I can barely hold it in both my hands!”
McCain smiles widely in semi-dark,
his one big ball rumbling with delight.
“I lost the other in Vietnam, but once
back home, I vowed I’d resuscitate,
& I quickly became a 1-balled wonder!
Those who know me well know why.
You know me pretty well, maverika.
Just handle my ball again, willya?”

(05 OCT 08, Santa Clara CA)v4

Friday, October 3, 2008

BeWare, Aliens!

Jim Boulet, dir. of English First, fears
illegal aliens may be getting bailed-out
of bad mortgages by the government:
“Now we don’t know who’s legal
& who’s illegal...they won’t tell us!”
Easy. Ask them en Espagnol, amigo.

But what about those icky space-aliens
who offer us crazy-easy credit terms?
Do we care if they’re legal or illegal?
Do we worry if their money's bogus?
Do we know the penalty for default
in alien-outer-space? Alien-ation?
What’s alien-ation to space-aliens?
Exile to our failing Planet Earth?
Exile to our only, airless Moon?

(03 OCT 08, Santa Clara CA)v7

on their be-haves

Now the government's financial 'rescue' (re-regulatory) plan's process re-begins: The Newest (USD$700B) Deal has finaly been passed by the U.S. Congress (Senate: 74-25; House: 263-171); then Nancy Pelosi & Dubya Bush signed the ensuing bill into law.

Early on in this financial & political imbroglio, current Treasury Sect'y Paulson said: "Normally, I don't like to regulate things." (He did; I heard him.) Imagine, then, how 3 continuous decades of Republican freemarketers infesting the government & its appointed bureaucracy must feel doing this - why, it's almost like engaging in the bogus 'class-war' they always accuse anybody favoring regulation - of!

But now it's about to be their daily-duty (as a reasonably well-paid job); for decades they've let their own buddy-bankers run free while making them a bundle & wrecking the banking system; but now they get to slowly tie them up again in necessary regulatory knots. How tightly? How closely are you watching? Many slip-knots have been made on their be-haves.

Of course, they'll get to (temporarily) keep the result of all those miss-B-gotten, fantastic derivatives & cry on each other's Hong Kong (methode francaise ou italien) pin-stripe-suited shoulders, that they got taken for a dime on the dollar. They'll still get to keep their bespoke suits in which they will someday be all-too-decently buried.

(I won't, even tho I, too, have these same silk/wool Hong Kong-made pin-striped suits, bought at Building 19, a MA salvaged-lots store-chain back in the peak-'80s, when I worked in high-tech marketing communications.)

- Bill Costley (03 OCT 08 Santa Clara CA)

Thursday, October 2, 2008

VP Debate Day

“A woman with a skinning-knife…”
slowly muses AK Gov. Sarah Palin,
“can cut the heart out of any man
in a pin-striped suit & I will again;
I'll truss-up & skin that Sen.*"
Alaskans agree, half a million
hands on their skinning-knives.

(02 OCT 08, Santa Clara CA)v9

* Joe Biden (D-Del.), in a plain blue suit.

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

In nowhere IA

“I don’t have to take this g.d. Shit!” snaps McCain
at each question the Iowa editorial board asks him.
“Who the fUk do you all think you are? Lawyers?
You’re just a highbrow board of liberal newspaper
editors & writers in practically nowhere Iowa. It’s
wrong for me to be here at all, my people tell me;
Obama’s got Iowa all wrapped up, a lock for him.
I tell you what, maybe I’ll send in my maverika
to chew your no-good wise-asses off. OK w/that?
OK, so I see your eyes popping-wide now, scared
she’ll bite your nuts (sorry, ladies) in your pants?
You’re goddamn right she will & you’ll deserve it!”
McCain takes a breather, pulls on a Cuban cigar.

(O1 OCT 08, Santa Clara CA)v3