27 September 2015

how to brew ale at home

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speakers ON

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Follow instructions precisely.

16 September 2015

bite me Madam Ambassador / and Hungary too / Charlie Hebdo's migrant crisis cartoons / the remarkable people of Darmstadt

Charlie Hebdo

weekly satire/news magazine

Paris

Click to enlarge

Cliquez fiche pour le plus grande

... wish my French was good enough
I'd tell you so much more ...

......-- "Darling, je vous aime beaucoups"

The cartoons were posted to Tayyab's blog. Clearly Vleeptron Dude and Tayyab perceive Charlie Hebdo's publication of these cartoons in very different perspectives. Tayyab and most of his commenters post in English. The post and comments give an excellent peek at how the migrant crisis is painfully ripping scabs willy-nilly around the world.

The historic flight of refugees is also unexpectedly and unintentionally showing that the human race is filled with Ordinary People who spontaneously, often at sacrifice and risk, do wonderful things.

Within the last day or two, Lord Mayor Jochen Partsch of Darmstadt, Germany hosted a big downtown public party for the town's sudden influx of Middle East refugees, with volunteer townspeople feeding, clothing and entertaining the newcomers and distributing stuffed animals to the migrant children.

"Darmstadt" seemed a familiar echo. Then I remembered. When not welcoming desperate refugees, many Darmstadters work for the European Space Agency's successful Rosetta/Philae mission to land Earth's first robot probe on a comet.

This is a very interesting community: top-flight rocket scientists who welcome desperate war refugees.

This is the First Contact Vleeptron or Vleeptron Dude has ever had with Twitter. Twitter is a communications platform for a world whose deepest and most complex ideas can be compressed into 140 or fewer ASCII characters. Then you tweet your compressed meme.

My nephew *A* explained to me that Facebook was a Time Suck.

* * * * * * *

Robert Merkin
Chesterfield, Massachusetts USA

Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary H.E. Réka Szemerkényi
Embassy of Hungary
Washington DC USA

16 September 2015

Madam Ambassador:

In my parents' and grandparents' day, the government of Hungary chose to ally itself with the Nazi Third Reich, and partner in its mass murder of Hungary's Jews and Roma people.

Today Hungary's government is using riot police, military force and razor wire to block and deport refugees fleeing wars in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other Asian and African nations.

While I recognize that hostility and brutality toward ethnic minorities, different religions, and foreign children, women and men are historic and well-known elements of Hungarian culture and society, now is the time for Hungary, by its government's clear actions, to erase its historic shame and evil, and make Hungary renowned among nations for its humanity and hospitality to the world's most desperate, imperiled and neediest.

I travel throughout Europe, and have long wanted to visit Hungary.

My desire to visit Hungary has vanished this month.

Its return depends entirely on the actions and policies of the Hungarian government, and, through its leadership, the political behavior of the Hungarian people.

I urge your government promptly to reverse its intolerable and inhumane policies.

Sincerely,

Robert Merkin

PizzaQ! Wiggle the 3D thing! Make it dance!

after you

click here

use screen cursor to wiggle the 3D thing.

Also right click puts up a nifty menu to change lots of stuff and make it dance weirdly.

if you are or are not Amy and know what the 3D thing is, Leave a Comment.

1 Large Endive & Brussels Sprout Pizza.

Extra Garlic: Where can you get lots of this stuff, and what might it do to you or for you?

28 August 2015

The Cowboy and the Dutch Tulip Girl / the Free æsthetic Environment of the All-Nite Copy Shop / Roderick Neal Hotham

my town had an open-all-nite copy shop, and I would sleaze in there at 02:00 and spend hours making this stuff. (The copy shop liberally supplied paste and scissors and paper slicers and double-side sticky tape and White-Out. The staff had Other Things To Do and paid no attention to me whatever. I could have made kidnapping ransom notes in the nude for all they cared, I could have cranked out US paper currency as long as I paid for my copies. This all-night copy shop was a Free Environment like us Artists like.)

This is Art -- probably the first Visual Art I ever made. (I had been prohibited from ever again trying to make visual art by my public school art teachers, who believed I was Visually and Chromatically and Æsthetically Deranged. My vision tested fine, but all my art teachers believed there was Something Wrong after the images of the world I saw passed into my Brain. I remember being screamed at for painting a goat purple.)

These links must all be dead by now, and I don't know if they ever caught Roderick Neal Hotham. When I first posted this on "Elmer Elevator's Discount Prep," a very angry lady wrote me an e-mail. She cursed me for defaming a wonderful and completely innocent man.

If you want to curse me, or if you know what happened to Roderick Neal Hotham, Leave A Comment.

If you think my Visual Art sucks, stand in line behind all my Art Teachers, who by now are eternally burning in the fires of Hell.

The Cowboy and the Dutch Tulip Girl

A Cowboy from Niagara Falls is highly popular and admired but lonely. At the same time, a Dutch Tulip-Seller Girl, so recently arrived in St. Louis, Missouri that she has not yet had time to acquire local clothes or shoes, is lonely. Each decides to take a vacation and fly to Paris. Paris, city of innocent gaiety and mirth, where half-clad women dance, show their derrieres to tourists, leapfrog over Japanese businessmen, and lounge around in their lingerie smoking and occasionally thinking about Abraham Lincoln. There the Cowboy and the Tulip Girl meet and fall in love.

Meanwhile, fugitive embezzler Roderick Neal Hotham has also fled to Paris, where he is hatching an evil new scheme involving the unwitting young lovers. He spies on them through the window of a restaurant where they are dining with another cleancut American couple. Because they are in Paris and think it's the local custom, they all commence une menage a quatre. Across town, two young nude women who live with kangaroos practice boxing and calisthenics in their atelier.

September 1995 / from Dover Clip Art ("Naughty French Illustrations," "Travel") and the Post Office wall.

Copyright © 2015 by Robert B. Merkin, All Rights Reserved

26 August 2015

we worship cats, the cats forced us to / Bastet and her Cartouche / predate like an Egyptian / the Song of the Cuckoo

Click to enlarge

It's more than possible that we may be embracing a new -- well, a very old -- religion.

But not because of any sudden revelation, like Saul/Paul had on the road to Damascus. Ours sort of snuck up on us over the last 15 years.

Cat worship.

We had 1 when we married, Elmer Elevator the Maine Coon kitten, a wedding gift we got ourselves. (And the only cat I ever paid money for.)

Now we got 6 cats.

(The most recent is just a temp, Yoda's owner claims she will take him back momentarily. We've had him for 2 or 3 years now. Watch This Space.)

The current lineup:

* Yoda
looks like the Scottish Wildcat

* Benedict Spinoza Cat
classic grey alley cat
now 1-eyed, also called Seerauberbenny

* Stewart Wallace Darnley Cat
chubby marmalade polydactyl
(seen walking away, also called Mister Golf Pants)

* Mimi
all-white ill-tempered shelter rescue

the rescued littermate kittens:

* William (the original Scaredy-Cat)

* Spike
(geboren Daisy Mae, until vet found testicles) ... so we renamed him Spike, so he wouldn't grow up with gender ambiguity issues, like A Boy Named Sue.

I ain't saying we got no mice. But they are very few, and they are very nervous.

So this random unintended accumulation of housecats has inevitably pushed us toward Cat Worship. I'm sure there've been other Cat Religions besides Ancient Egypt, but the Egyptians really went super-freaky about cat worship and the mummification and ritual burial of tens of thousands of departed housecats. When I finally get to Egypt, the huge Cat Cemetery is big on my list.

For the Rationalists, who reject all purely spiritual and magical answers, there's a Big Reason the Egyptians worshipped their housecats. Cats are superspectacular predators of the vermin -- rats, mice -- who eat (and poop and pee in) grain. Cats protected the Egyptians' graineries, staved off famine (and, as a side bonus, rat-borne plague), and allowed Egyptian civilization to flourish for millennia.

The irrational Egyptians were just rational enough to understand this. So one of their Big Deities was Bastet, the Cat Goddess.

There are a gazillion Egyptian silver nouveau cartouche pendants for sale. But it took me more than a year to find an actual Bastet cartouche. Hieroglyphs are a phonetic system, so if you want a pendant that says Freddy or Billie-Jean or Bee-Bob-aloola, you can crank one out.

Somewhere buried in a movers box is my Budge, the standard reference to Egyptian hieroglyphs.

“Who the hell translated this? It’s completely wrong. They must have used Budge; I don’t know why they keep reprinting his books!” – Daniel Jackson, from movie “Stargate”

But this is the way Egypt depicted Bastet / Bast, and this is her authentic Cartouche. Budge shows you that, top glyph to bottom, the cartouche speaks: Bastet.

I've never been able to pin this down, but S.W.M,B.O. says The Code of Hammurabi forbids imprisoning cats in houses; cats must always be free to roam where they like. The Babylonians were hip to the central role cats played in civilization. (They also seem to have invented Beer, and sang an allegorical hymn to the Beer Goddess Ninkasi.)

I would like to take this opportunity to stick my middle finger in the face of the National Audubon Society, which for years has been urging the mass castration or felinicide of housecats, because housecats kill songbirds.

Okay, guilty as charged.

But the damn things can fly, for god's sake, and if a winged creature is too dumb to avoid being killed by a non-flying housepet, well, it's a Darwin/Russell thing, the songbird was Too Dumb To Live and Breed. Darwin and Russell don't care how pretty it sings.

My fave songbird is the cuckoo, also I think mockingbird, which sings any song or sound which catches its fancy. I once searched for my ringing cell phone for 10 minutes before I looked up and saw a cuckoo on the phone line impersonating my ringtone. Another bird like that in New Zealand loves to sing the Song of the Gasoline Chain Saw which is chopping down its environment and dooming it to extinction. It's already a rara avis.

Cuckoos are pretty safe, they save lots of energy by putting their eggs in some other bird's nest and letting Mrs. Not-Cuckoo feed and raise the hatchling cuckoo. I think UKers call it a shrike.

Aunt Nathalie, who finally got to see The Comet her siblings always told her came at her birth (1910), had a fancy Swiss cuckoo clock on a landing, and that crazy thing mesmerized me, I wanted to spend the rest of my life sitting and waiting for that crazy bird to pop out and sing. Hey Pat, in CH are there people with cuckoo-clock-related psychiatric disorders, is it a common Swiss thing?

From the first websites I've read regarding the Worship of Bastet, we will be required to feed Bastet constantly with her favorite tastes, warm her in bed on cold nights, and sacrifice our breakables for her to break. Bastet likes it when I step in Bastet's hairball puke in my bare feet. She likes the noise I make.

22 August 2015

puffins! / & our new barfing cornucopia of all digital media ever recorded v archived / feline thyroid troubles? / free link to Videodrome (4 pervs only)

Click the Atlantic Puffin.

S.W.M.B.O. & Vleeptron Dude have returned from our wonderful Adventure to see Atlantic Puffins around their island rookery, and eat Maine Coast seafood.

A few weeks ago, we decided we needed a fancy New TV more than I needed a kidney transplant, S.W.M.B.O. found The Mother Of All Bargains, set up the thing, got this extra dingus called a Roku, and suddenly this Digital Cornucopia of Stuff started barfing out of the screen.

With 3 button presses, I can be watching Haiti TV Publique en Creole. (TLM is smiling for the camera in Port au Prince, but I sense all is not Really Happy -- especially now that the Dominican Republic is forceably deporting everybody they suspect of having Haitian DNA.)

Life on Hispaniola, both ends of it, has always been tres dificil, muy loco y violent. One end is the wonderful land of Porfirio Rubirosa (alleged to have had the biggest penis on Earth) and the former capital Ciudad Trujillo -- for which Ciudad Vleeptron was named.) Both ends have hated one another since forever, or at least since the slaves overthrew Napoleon's French colonials -- first ever Slave Victory over the Euro enslavers, & Independence!

Maybe I can get HabanaVision now!

I wonder if this thing can get Videodrome. I've always wanted to see a little Videodrome. This could be my chance.

(It CLAIMS it's 3D too. I'll let you know when I see the 3rd D, but meanwhile in anticipation of this new development, we stole 2 pair of 3D glasses when we went to the Multi-Odeon Quad-18 Polyplex Cinema to see "Minions." Cahiers du Vleeptron will review this film in an upcoming edition, also we're pledged to do an issue on Luc Besson, Jean Reno and Le Grand Bleu.)

*********************

Hiya welcome home, I'm in pretty good shape, let me know if there's Physical Labor you need me to do. (Not relocating the cord of firewood -- but offer to help with the litter boxes still stands. Not happily, but the offer still stands.)

Now that you have secured an e-portal to All Digital Media Ever Recorded / Archived, could you hunt for the movie

"The Hot Rock"

with George Segal, Robert Redford, Zero Mostel?

I can say no more, except that we shall watch it together, and it will be Gorilla Glue or Loc-Tite for our Love Bond.

(Or I can watch it at 3 am alone.)

One of the Geiger Counter loonies (actually GEO, the Founding Grand Krigat of GC Loonies) just posted a list of regional feline thyroid clinics, interested in info on our nearest feline thyroid clinic?

I guess "feline" implies we could also take our jaguar, all manner of our Big Cats if we suspect a thyroid issue. But not fisher cats, they're Weasels. We need a different specialist if our fisher cat gets thyroid trouble.

08 August 2015

worst family summer camping trip ever / Do Not Feed Wild Rodents / Do Not Play With Rodent Corpses / call Ranger Death at park office

Child who visited Yosemite National Park

comes down with the plague

Posted 9:56 pm, August 6, 2015, by CNNwire

CALIFORNIA -- Every year, picturesque Yosemite National Park gets about 4 million visitors. But one arrival this summer is definitely not welcome: the plague.

California’s Department of Public Health and the national park announced Thursday that a child who visited nearby Stanislaus National Forest and camped at Yosemite’s Crane Flat Campground in mid-July had contracted the plague.

That child is recovering, and no other members of the camping party have reported any related symptoms.

Still, authorities are monitoring them as well as warning others to be on guard against the flea-transmitted disease. These extra steps include putting up caution signs at Crane Flat and other campgrounds and urging people to take precautions such as:

• Not feeding squirrels, chipmunks or other rodents or touching sick or dead ones

• Avoiding hiking or camping near rodent burrows

• Putting on long pants tucked into socks or boots with the hope they’ll provide a barrier to fleas

• Spraying insect repellent with DEET on socks and pant cuffs — again, to fend off fleas
• Keeping wild rodents away from homes, trailers and buildings, not to mention pets

2 deadly plague cases this year in Colorado

Contagious and potentially deadly viruses are not new for Yosemite, where throngs of people flock annually to enjoy breathtaking rocky cliffs, refreshing river waters and dense forests.

In 2012, for instance, three park visitors died after contracting hantavirus.

Yet plague cases are rare not just in Yosemite, but across the United States.

The disease killed millions centuries ago, and — while it can be treated with modern medicine such as antibiotics and antimicrobial — it’s never gone away.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that the United States has about seven annual cases, over 80% of which have been in the bubonic form.

There have been three cases reported so far in 2015, which is in line with those numbers. The other two happened in Colorado and both resulted in deaths, one being a teenager in Larimer County and the other an adult in Pueblo County, as announced Wednesday by the local health department.

The Yosemite case is California’s first instance of human plague since 2006, according to state health officer Dr. Karen Smith, when there were three cases in Mono, Los Angeles and Kern counties. There have been 42 such cases in the state since 1970, of which nine proved fatal.

“Although this is a rare disease, people should protect themselves from infection by avoiding any contact with wild rodents,” Smith said.