homage a Donald Evans / 1st Day Issue: Architettura di Vleeptron: Costruzione di elefante / Self-Medication / the Czar is not addicted

What did we decide? The thing at the bottom is in Thai? Well, you can verify this with the telephone Country Code at the bottom. And buy a DVD and talk to the nice ppl in Thailand. There must be places in Thailand that aren't in Bangkok but ask the nice person on the phone if he/she's in Bangkok. And how's the weather? And has everything calmed down since the coup? Do the tourists still keep bumping into friendly soldiers with loaded M16s?

TECH NOTE: The HTML of the Thai language text seems to be clogging up the blog, slowing it down, making it sick. It was fun while it lasted. E-mail moi if you want the original Thai e-mail offer for DVDs.

Vleeptron wishes to remind everyone before they send the bat via PayPal to buy the Thai DVDs that we have a standing order from our Man-on-the-Ground in All the Russias, StereoBalls, to buy .mp3_s of Eurovision Contest Songs. Sup, Vladimir? What's happenin' in Moscow?

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BOB'S RULES FOR DESPOTS

1. Don't leave your country to go on a holiday, even if Tweena and Vivika just called on the cell phone and say they're waiting for you in the hot tub of your villa on the Cote d'Azur.

1a. You can have your own jet plane. Just don't use it.

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Do you have any other Rules for Despots? Leave A Comment. Leave A Comment about Anything. (No Anonymous Drivebys!)

I'm mildly bummed, and I have learned from the last 2+ years that whenever I'm bummed and someone Leaves A Comment, I get HAPPY again! Isn't that stupid? Yeah, well, I know people who when they're bummed, they shoot heroin or smoke crack. One woman I knew (note Past Tense of verb "to know") mixed liquid Diazepam (Valium) with her heroin.

It's called Self-Medication. Receiving an unanticipated Comment, shooting opiates or cocaine (Sherlock Holmes shot a 7 percent solution of cocaine intraveinously), or smoking crack -- in Thailand the Stuff du Jour is Shabu, I think that's their local word for methamphetamines which they suspect are manufactured and smuggled in from the Socialist Workers Military Junta Paradise across their northern border -- are all morally and ethically equivalent means of Turning That Frown Upside Down.

Just Say No -- but considering about 100,000,000 human beings all over the surface of the Earth at any given moment Just Said Yes, one must ponder the Usefulness or Meaning of condemning 100,000,000 of our sisters and brothers because they're using whatever means is available and affordable to Turn That Frown Upside Down.

Professional Supermoralist William Bennett, one of America's first Drug Czars, ceaselessly says that drug addiction is the voluntary loss of the Human Soul, and thus a modern (it's not) kind of Slavery Nouveau.

When William Bennett is Frowning, he likes to Turn It Upside Down by throwing millions of his own and his family's U$ dollars down a large colorful noisy electronic toilet and repeatedly flushing for hours at a stretch, alone in a dark corner of a legal casino.

The odds of Winning at big payout casino slot machines are mathematically indistinguishable from throwing money down the toilet and flushing, it is the Worst Sucker Game in the casino. When outed by a journalist with a sense of humor, whimsy and irony, Bennett snarled that it was his own goddam money and what he did with it was nobody's goddam business but his own and it didn't negatively effect his family, he didn't have a problem with obsessive casino slot-machine playing, he could quit whenever he wanted to. He continues to appear regularly on television programs and publishes books of Moral Advice to Youth about Taking Personal Responsibility, and getting help if they need help by turning themselves and their relatives and neighbors in to the Police.

I think it's rather charming that one of the most violent, ferocious and toxic of all USA government policies, the War on Drugs (circa 1974) -- which has promptly turned the Land Of The Free into the World's Number 1 Gulag -- is fundamentally and historically based on the state's compelling interest to Save the Human Soul, an entity whose very existence has been debated for centuries, if not for millennia. Also featured at such debates is the related question: Can something which cannot be empirically verified be said to Exist?

And down the hall they are asking if Essence precedes Existence, or contrariwise? Coffee and pastries in the Great Hall from 1:30 to 5.

But momentarily speaking for the Affirmative -- Given that each of us has a Soul (and also either cats, dogs and chipmunks have Souls, or else cats, dogs and chipmunks do not have Souls), how best should the State use force, violence and mass incarceration to prevent us from Giving It Away, Selling It or Losing It? (Once I lost mine in Amsterdam, but the Hotel Ambassade called -- I'd left it in the shower -- and sent it back to me.) How should an Enlightened State Bureaucracy save All Our Souls? How, exactly, will Society be better off than we are now when the State has effectively and with violent coersion crammed all our Souls into our Bodies and kept them there at gunpoint?

Best Essay on these important topics wins a White (no tomato sauce) Square (no circles) Pizza from the spectacular Florentina's, which is run by a family of Turkish immigrants and was originally Atilla's. If it's really good, smart or interesting, I throw in free Spanikopita and Baklava.

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ATTENTION JEWS and NON-JEWS: It's Sukkot. Happy Sukkot. It's an Autumn (northern hemisphere) Harvest thing, I think it centers around the Book of Ruth.

Make a temporary yurt-like or teepee-like dwelling out of sticks and leaves, and you and the family sleep outside for a few nights. The dwellings are like the dwellings ancient Hebrew farmers made and lived in while they harvested the crops.

The Stop & Shop superhypermarket has a sign on its front window:

We Sell Kosher and Non-Kosher Food

for decades I have wanted to sneak there in the middle of the night (they never close) and razor the sign so it says

We Sell ...... ... ... ...... Food

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Also happy Columbus Day (bank holiday in USA). On the first day he set foot on dry land in the New World, according to his ship's log, Columbus (Cristobol Colon) asked:

1. Where is the gold?

2. Would these people make good slaves?

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ALSO IN THAILAND is the wonderful crazy verkakte ELEPHANT BUILDING which Vleeptron has often displayed, first in a post about how Homelamp Security, with scant hours to avert Disaster, forced down a westbound airliner from Heathrow when they learned Cat Stevens / Yusef Islam and his daughter were aboard. HS has since released warrantless secret e-mail and telephone wiretaps which prove the superannuated hippie folksinger had been planning to sing "Peace Train" on an acoustic guitar in Chicago, and thus destroy all of American society just like he did in the 60s, because we were fools and let him get away with it.

So like who was the first to answer "Bangkok"? RevJJ? Was that you? Anyway, if it was you, I might really have to pony up the pizza, you live near and sometimes you Buzz Northampton.

The first time we displayed the marvelous Elephant Building we attributed the design to the late American architect Phillip Johnson, and said it was his last commission. More recently we credited I.M. Pei with the design, and patwholooks@thefrozenmusic correctly pointed out that Pei designed that verkakte pyramid subway station under whose floor is buried the corpse of Mary Magdalene, as everyone knows by now. Magdalene is (by UKians) pronounced: Maudlin. If you have a funny way to pronounce it, Leave A Comment and

:-(
Turn Bob's Frown
Upside Down
:-)

TECH NOTE: The HTML of the Thai language text seems to be clogging up the blog, slowing it down, making it sick. It was fun while it lasted. E-mail moi if you want the original Thai e-mail offer for DVDs.