IMAGE OF THE WEEK
Cluster-ballooning.
No need to comment, really, except to note that sometimes my own set of hobbies seems a bit, well, lame.
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ATTACK OF THE PRESIDENTS, part two….
INTERIOR: The Great Throne Room, Rigel IX.
Enter HSUB EROG, Emperor of the Nine Stars, and WEHTTAM SENOJ, his Grand Councilor. EROG is very annoyed.
EROG: I can’t believe you let that happen.
SENOJ: I told you the microphone was on, Sire.
EROG: Who let that reporter in, anyway? Haven’t I said repeatedly that I don’t like him?
SENOJ: Yes, Sire, but I confess I did not think that you would refer to him as a “posterioric aperture” while the microphone was on.
EROG: Well, I’ll wear the darker-colored robes in public for a while. They look more casual; that should calm everyone down.
SENOJ: I’m sure….(but he rolls all eight of his eyes)
EROG: So where were we?
SENOJ: Well, your Campaign Minister—
EROG: Not that. The Presidents of the United States, Earth.
SENOJ: Oh. Well, I think we left off with Presidents Mitchell and Nance.
EROG: Yes. Who came after them?
SENOJ: After them came President James Marshall. His administration was notable at first for having the nation’s first female Vice President, a woman named Kathryn Bennett. But then the President took a diplomatic trip to another Earth nation, called “Russia”. There he announced a broad-sweeping shift in policy toward terrorists.
EROG: To give in to their every demand?
SENOJ: No, that’s your policy.
EROG: Yes….I’ve been meaning to rethink that; it doesn’t seem to be working….
SENOJ: Uh-huh. The strange thing is that President Marshall’s aircraft was actually highjacked by terrorists while he was on his way back to the United States.
EROG: Oh, no!
SENOJ: Oh, yes.
EROG: Did he get to his escape pod in time?
SENOJ: Yes, but he didn’t take it.
EROG: What?
SENOJ: He stayed on board the aircraft to fight the terrorists.
EROG: You’re joking.
SENOJ: No.
EROG: Amazing. That’s the kind of thing we need here!
SENOJ: You don’t have to tell me…
EROG: What?
SENOJ: Nothing.
EROG: So did his military send other aircraft to blow up the President’s plane, since such a vital piece of technology should not be allowed into enemy hands?
SENOJ: Fighters were dispatched, but they didn’t shoot down the plane. Strange.
EROG: Very. Did the Vice President at least seize power, as the President was under extreme forms of duress?
SENOJ: Strangely, no. Despite the fact that a Defense Minister pressured her to do just that, nothing of the sort was done.
EROG: That seems reckless, doesn’t it?
SENOJ: Well, no more reckless than your attendance of that nightclub last week—
EROG: I told you not to bring that up again.
SENOJ: Yes, sire.
EROG: So, what happened to Marshall? Did the terrorists kill him?
SENOJ: No, they failed to do so – despite the fact that they killed a whole bunch of people on that plane. Very bloodthirsty, and yet when they had the President in their grasp, they talked and babbled until he was able to free himself and kill them.
EROG: You’re joking.
SENOJ: Not at all. The President actually threw some of them out the plane’s back door. Very impressive performance, almost as if he had acted in what the Earthers call “action movies”.
EROG: I imagine the Americans would like that in the President.
SENOJ: (under his breath) Wouldn’t hurt here, either—
EROG: What?
SENOJ: Nothing. After Marshall got the terrorists off the plane, it turned out the plane was mortally damaged, so a mid-air rescue was attempted. But that’s when a traitorous security agent tried to kill the President one last time, but the President managed to get off the plane at the last possible instant, leaving the traitor aboard to die when the plane went down into the water. Strangely, the plane’s crash was caught on film, but it looks very fake. Some think it was actually a visual effect, and not a very good one.
EROG: Interesting. So what happened to the President? I imagine he was re-elected in a landslide. A President who killed terrorists with his own hands? He’d win for sure!
SENOJ: He was actually defeated, sire.
EROG: NO!
SENOJ: Yes….it was a very close election, but President Marshall was undone by three scandals. The first one came when he spoke before a meeting of what the Earthers call “The United Nations” – it seems he wanted to go to war against some country, no one else wanted to, and he said at one point, “I’ll kill them the way I killed the terrorists on my airplane! I’ll kill anyone who gets in my way!”
EROG: The Americans didn’t care for that kind of political rhetoric?
SENOJ: Well, it made him look a bit unstable. The second scandal came when it was revealed that before becoming President, Marshall had had an affair with an Amish woman named Rachel. Marshall denied it, but Rachel had pictures of herself with a man who looked very much like a younger President Marshall.
EROG: Wait. The Amish took pictures? I thought—
SENOJ: She painted them, actually. Very talented woman.
EROG: I see….and the last scandal?
SENOJ: Ah, that involved Vice President Bennett. Six months before the election, she decided to legally change her name to Alex Forrest. All this allowed Marshall’s opponent, a kindly widower from the enclave known as “Wisconsin”, to win the election.
EROG: These Earthers are very strange.
SENOJ: Yes. Do you want to hear about Marshall’s successor?
EROG: Tomorrow. Right now I have to go meet with our Minister of Linguistics. It seems that an amphibious subspecies on Deneb III is using verbal constructions like “Mesa okeyday” and “Ex-squeeze me.” We may have to dispatch the fleet to bomb them, if they don’t knock it off.
SENOJ: You wear a heavy crown, Sire.
EROG: Very heavy….
To Be Continued….
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I have perhaps discovered something that Syracuse has that Buffalo does not (besides a decent college men’s basketball program): a Chinese restaurant that serves dim sum. Of course, being a small town, this place only serves dim sum for three hours on Sundays; and of course, it could very well be lousy. I’ll find out sometime in the next few weeks. (While in Buffalo, we had to travel to Toronto’s Chinatown for our dim sum needs.)
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A couple of writing-related notes are on tap for today.
:: I discovered a blog about writing, Write This Way!, a little while ago. It looks potentially interesting, though I haven’t dug much into it yet. Of course, it seems that I’ll have plenty of time to do so because apparently the author — a writer named Karen Hall, with whom I am unfamiliar — has given up blogging for Lent. (One of these days I’ll have to learn what that means. I know it has something to do with the impending Easter….)
:: I finished typing in the second draft of The Promised King, Book One: The Welcomer a couple of days ago, and I am now doing what I plan to be the final round of edits before I start sending it to publishers. This process should take a couple of weeks. I am also editing a new short story, “To Weep When I Am Glad”, that I also hope to have ready for submission somewhere in a week or so. (As usual, my latest attempt at writing a true “short story” — under 7500 words — resulted in yet another “novelette”, with a rough draft of 16,500 words. I am almost incapable of writing short.)
:: I finally got back to working on “The Baseball Gods” (provisional title), a first draft of a story about, well, the Baseball Gods.
:: Now that Matt has a blog, you can all go bug him about how he’s coming on a little writing project of his own. Heh heh heh….
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Courtesy MeFi: Author Michael Chabon, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his wonderful The Amazing Adventures and Kavalier and Klay (which I reviewed in this space), has a pretty neat looking website. I haven’t delved much into it yet, but I just love his main navigation page: the Web meets the phrenological head.
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Well, I think SDB won. It’s hard to tell, under the weight of 5600 words.
Lordy….I think SDB is more in the right than D-Squared, but yeesh….and that’s not all, he went to the trouble of setting up a mirror site to document the entire thing!
Someone needs to watch some more DragonballZ, I think….
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INTERIOR: The Great Throne Room, Rigel IX.
Sitting on his throne, looking bored while reading reports on the state of his empire, is HSUB EROG, Emperor of the Nine Stars. He looks up as his Grand Councilor, WETTHAM SENOJ, enters, holding a sheaf of papers.
EROG: What is it, Senoj?
SENOJ: New reports from the team on Earth, sire. It seems they have collected information on the last seven Presidents of the political unit dubbed, “The United States of America”.
EROG: Oooh, more Presidents! Wonderful. Tell me about them.
EROG leans back in his chair, getting ready to hear about his favorite subject. For some reason he’s fascinated with Presidents of this tiny country on this puny planet.
SENOJ: Keep in mind, sire, that the humans’ calendar still defies our best efforts at translation. We cannot determine with precision the dates that these men served as President.
EROG: Fine, fine. Get on with it.
SENOJ: Yes, Majesty. (He holds up the first piece of paper and starts reading.) First is President Bill Mitchell. He was a fairly nondescript leader of his nation, following what was called a “conservative” agenda.
EROG: Conservative?
SENOJ: Yes, Majesty. It’s rather like when you bombed Altair IV without asking the Milky Way Governance Council’s position.
EROG: (shaking fist) Stupid galactic peace advocates, I hate them so much….
SENOJ: Umm…yes. Anyhow, in the third year of Mitchell’s Presidency, something strange happened: he began to exhibit signs of what the Earthers call “liberalism”.
EROG: Liberalism?
SENOJ: Yes, Majesty. Something like the time you raised the taxes on all members of the Royal Class in the Nine Stars and cut funding to the Starfleet so you could pay for all those schools and finance your decree that all citizens shall have equal access, without cost, to our Medical Dispensation Units.
EROG: Oh, yes…(smiles, remembering)That really made Duke L’mbaw angry, didn’t it?
SENOJ: He’s still not speaking to you.
EROG: (waves hand, dismissively) Go on.
SENOJ: Yes. President Mitchell’s first sign of “liberalism” came when he suddenly discarded the agenda of a meeting of his top advisers and began cutting funding from obscure government programs to preserve funding to a program for children that he had visited the day before. Then, he announced an initiative in which any citizen of the United States who wanted a job could get one.
EROG: Oh, yes, I remember that! When he announced it, didn’t that woman news agent roll her eyes?
SENOJ: Hmmmm? (checks the report) Oh, yes, Helen Thomas. She rolls her eyes at everything. No one on earth pays it any mind.
EROG: Very good. Go on.
SENOJ: President Mitchell’s chief-of-staff had a disagreement with the President and resigned, but he later announced his own bid for the party’s nomination and, in so doing, provided the Earth press with information on a number of illegal activities perpetrated by the Mitchell Administration.
EROG: Did Mitchell have him executed?
SENOJ: No, Earthers don’t do that, except for in the Earth enclave called “Texas”.
EROG: Remind me not to visit that enclave.
SENOJ: You would die there, Sire. Their average ambient temperature would kill you.
EROG: So what happened to Mitchell?
SENOJ: Interestingly, Mitchell provided evidence before a grand conference of the United States Legislature – “Congress”, actually – that implicated the chief-of-staff. And then, President Mitchell suffered some sort of medical emergency while speaking.
EROG: Like the one I faked last week?
SENOJ: (scowling) His was real.
EROG: Ah, yes……
SENOJ: In any event, President Mitchell lapsed into a coma and later died. His Vice President, a man named Nance, took office and completed Mitchell’s work.
EROG: Hmmmm. Anything else?
SENOJ: Well, this is curious. A year later, Mitchell’s wife – now free to marry another – joined a man who bore a very striking resemblance to the deceased President, and she eventually became his wife. And this too is odd: a filmmaker named Oliver Stone speculated publicly that for some time before his death, President Mitchell had been “substituted” by someone of like appearance.
EROG: Like the time my twin brother and I—
SENOJ: (getting annoyed) Yes, just like that. Stone’s theories were judged so laughable that Stone himself was forced out of the entertainment-centered city called “Hollywood”. He later moved to a place called “Europe”, where he made a film called “Any Given Sunday”, about a game the Earthers call “football” – except for the citizens of the United States, where the word “Football” refers to a completely different game. “Any Given Sunday” became the most successful film in Earth history, and yet when it played in the United States, it strangely did very little business.
EROG: Strange people, these Earthers.
SENOJ: Indeed. President Nance, by the way, served out Mitchell’s term and decided not to run for re-election.
EROG: He gave up power? What a fool!
SENOJ: It happens.
EROG: Not here, it doesn’t. Well, we will finish this later. I have that new Star Carrier to dedicate. Biggest ship we’ve ever built, and it’s guaranteed not to be lost in interstellar space. We’re calling it the Titanistic.
SENOJ: A fine name, sire. Later, then.
To Be Continued….
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OK, maybe this explains the difficulty that they’ve had in getting a script ready for the fourth Indiana Jones movie…and maybe it’s behind the somewhat mixed critical reception that AI received….hmmmmmm….
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A Coffee-All-Over-the-Monitor Moment, courtesy AICN.
In the AICN Talkbacks, some people have taken to referring to 24 as the “Jack Bauer Power Hour”, which struck me as pretty clever wordplay. (By AICN Talkback standards, that’s quite a thing.)
So, in the Talkback for the recent announcement that the show has been renewed for a third season (although Keifer Sutherland’s participation was neither confirmed nor denied, preserving the possibility that Agent Bauer might kick the bucket this season), someone suggested this possibility for next year’s version of 24:
(wait for it)
The Kim Bauer Power Shower.
I wish I’d have thought of that myself….
