AIOU (INTERPLANETARY)

[for F. Pohl & C. Kornbluth]

AIG's is now insuring everything
on our Earth + Moon; ditto, Mars,

changing its name to AIOU Holdings,
(Interplanet@ry) & its slogan to: No
stone unturned, no rock un-insured;

so when you lift one, better bend
your knees: it's heavily insured.

(20 MAR 09, Santa Clara CA)v9

Big Blue may soon eat Sun

Big Blue (IBM, fund. 1894 ) was once big; then it shrank; now it will grow again if it eats Sun Microsystems, (fund. 1982) This matters here in 'Silicon Valley' CA, because Sun’s an offshoot of Stanford University in Palo Alto (fund. 1885.) In 1975, Carolin & I met while working for Light Blue (Digital Equipment Corporation a/k/a DEC, fund.1957) Does any of this matter to you? If all you know about computers is what Microsoft (fund. 1975) sells you, none of this may matter to you, but it should, because many other companies & countries & people got us to where we are right now, on the internet where you're now reading what I’ve written here for you to read. Think (IBM's slogan) of what this really means. Maybe only those of us brought up on sci-fi mags & novels really can; I was & do. (flashback:) Reading Frederik Pohl & Cyril Kornbluth’s radical sci-fi novel "The Space Merchants" (1953) changed my early adolescent mind & life thereafter. Kingsley Amis wrote (in 1960) it “has many claims to being the best science-fiction novel so far." [Ex.] It previewed the contraceptive Pill (1956) as Preg-Not; so did Arthur C. Clarke's "Childhood's End" (1953.)

AIG - Interplanetary?

Noise about corporate bailouts being ‘socialist’ has dwindled as rage against AIG (American International Group) retention incentive bonuses has peaked with U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) suggesting that AIG executives go wholly Japanese. "Obviously, maybe they ought to be removed. But I would suggest the first thing that would make me feel a little bit better toward them if they'd follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say, I'm sorry, and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide." (by seppuku) What’s next? AIG relocate its corporate HQ to the moon & rename itself Interplanetary? (Not while the U.S.gov(ernment) owns 80% of it!)

My Paddy Day

On St Paddy's Day, I spent from 6pm to past midnite in a nearby HMO-hospital ER where I had blood tests, an EKG, & 2 CT-scans, just to get 3 stitches put into my eyebrow so that I can now see easily out of my R eye. They asked me why I came in so many hours after my unusual accident around noon: tripping on my cat's tie-out rope, falling & slamming my face into a green wooden park-bench; my excuse was a St. Paddy's Day dinner I had to go to first. They (my Chinese docs) were bemused, once I told them I was from (incurably Irish) Boston.

My Green-Eyed Dagh

As a child, growing up just 11 miles north of Boston, when I dressed for early morning mass on St Patrick’s Day, my Polish-speaking mother would straighten a flimsy little wire & thread shamrock on my lapel as I went off. As I got older, I liked wearing it less, finally protesting “Look, my eyes are green, aren’t they enough?” (Hers were green, too, but she was wholly Polish.) But no exemptions from overt Irishness were to be had in 'greater' Boston. My father, born in Glasgow, was (perhaps) partly Irish, his father being named Francis and an R.C. but I never pled to being Boston-Irish & won’t start now on the West Coast; San Francisco does Paddy-up, nowhere equal to Boston, New York or Chicago, with their large Irish-American communities. Here's an infra-NYC joke: "What's 5 miles long & has an asshole at both ends?" (The St. Paddy's Day parade!)

Focus: Money

The economy grinds to a halt;
the halt grinds a powder;
the powder grinds a lens;
the lens focuses on money;
whose? Even yours, now.

(13 MAR 09, Santa Clara CA)

RUSHing

RUSH sniffs the tips of his manicured fingers, stealthily reinserting them deep into the well of his inspiration, craving a bubbly high-colonic to purify his thinking: “My load’s much greater than the masses know,” he whispers, afraid it might be heard beyond the neo-hard castle of EIB (Excellence in Broadcasting) where {{reson@nce}} validates all. Caught by a wide-angle lens, expanding full-width in fascistic black, faking hipoidal pump-action, he is pitifully, transparently condemned 2B a radiobe@st.