Last night, the Full Moon was hazed somewhat, though not as heavily as it had been on the night of the 4th. Clouds began to gather, especially over and in front of the Cascades. Now, this morning, we're socked in here, it's actually cold (Yaaayyyyyyyyyyy! I hate high heat, especially when it's also muggy, the way it was for the past few days), there's a wind up, and AOL weather is predicting "some chances of rain." That "some chances" may be meant for downtown Seattle -- there's enough bite in the air now that the likelihood of rain must be significantly higher here than there.

So much cordite from fireworks explosions was in the air the night of the 4th that clouds began to form wherever those drifting streaks of cordite were -- and that meant low clouds, because the cordite trails couldn't have been more than a thousand feet up, if that. Now those clouds are much thicker, and there's actually a cold front bearing down on us. :-)

The Onion - America's Finest News Source

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/nation_about_due_for_big_cult

You know, some would say this is in bad taste. However, it could be life-saving. I.e., after reading this, any such group who were thinking of committing a mass suicide would give it up as a bad day and go home. Thanks to The Onion, it would look just too stupid if they did carry out such a plan.

Hell, I couldn't remember that to save my butt! It was years ago.

Psilocybin mushrooms - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"The writer Carmen Hillier speculated that hallucinogenic mushrooms may have a history that dates back as far as 1 million years ago, originating in East Africa. He suggests that early hominids such as Homo africanus, Homo boisei, and the omnivorous Homo habilis expanded their original diets of fruit and small animals to include underground roots, tubers, and corns. Terence McKenna claims that at this particular time, early hominids gathered Psilocybin mushrooms off the African grasslands and ate them as part of their diet. He suggests that the Psilocybin-containing mushrooms that were thought to have grown on the grasslands at that time were the Panaeolus species and Stropharia cubensis, also called Psilocybe cubensis, which is a famous 'Magic Mushroom' widely distributed today. . . ." More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psilocybin_mushrooms

Well, now we know. Only a stonehead -- or a teenager having problems sorting out the big head from the little head -- would be stupid enough to play with the stuff.

What do you get when you cross Luis Royo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Royo) with Gary Larson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Larson)? -- Ans.: I don't want to know, and neither do you.

-- Hey, I just thought of something: throw in Lewis Carroll and "Yakety Sax" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnHmskwqCCQ), and you've got Washington, DC.

Dragon Drive

Volume 3: The Drive

Book 1: To Socorro

Part 1: Dr. Zhivago

Chapter 7: The Balance

“Lieutenant, what’s that over there? Is that where the Swamplands are?” I asked, pointing out the window.

McGill, who had been about to tell Monty something about seemingly slight but ecologically important differences between some of the fauna in and around the old San Carlos Reservation from their analogs in Sonora, glanced out the window to see what I was talking about, then turned his full attention that way. “Oh, my.”

“What is it?” Monty asked him.

“I think we’re going to have some dirty weather, folks,” he said. “Better strap in tight. We’re going to have to go over that after our refueling stop in Tucson, don’t have enough time or fuel to go around, and we’re behind schedule now as it is. So we’ll land in Tucson, top off the tanks, and take off as quickly as we can, then head straight out across the Swamplands to Lordsburg, through rifts in those clouds. It’ll be rough,” he said, turning to check his own safety-harness.

Most of the way from Yuma to Tucson, we had noticed increasing numbers of vast, dirty veils, curtains, and scarves of sand drifting across the desert, twisting and rippling and dancing slow arabesques, thrown up by the ever-present winds. Though most of them never came up as far as our altitude at any time, they did frequently obscure the view of the ground, and created problems for the pilot due to the static they generated and its interference with the chopper’s instrumentation. Bile-green and baby-poop yellow and numerous other toxic hues in color, bolts of static electricity of sizes ranging from spark-sized to thousands of feet long darting among them and jumping between them and the ground, they looked demonic, alive with the frantic, febrile energy of a rabid coyote.( Read more... )

Come to think of it, the Swamplands are rather like that.

For all those who have ever lost a loved one.

This evening, for no apparent reason, software I've had on my computer for over a year suddenly didn't work. I got error messages saying "Error accessing registry" when I tried (my platform is Windows Vista, which is at least as bad as Windows for giving you error messages that tell you nothing useful). So I tried reinstalling it. I got the same error messages. I tried uninstalling the copy on my computer and reinstalling. Same deal. I used RegistryFix and CCleaner to clean up the registry and the disk, then rebooted, then tried reinstalling again. Same thing. I have no idea why.

But I can feel the same damned thing that is always there when anything bad happens to me sniggering away at the back of my mind over this latest bullshit. It's turned up every single time anything bad has ever happened to me, from the death of my fiance in an auto accident in 1963 to the time I was raped by a gynecologist at juvenile hall when I was 14, to, well, just about anything you could name. "Snigger-snigger-snigger." In other words, whatever it is has been responsible for all of it. Or might as well have been.

What I need is a way to haul the damned thing out in the open where I can beat it and beat it and beat it with something like a 9-iron or a crowbar, starting with crushing its kidneys and going on to wreck its skull, spine, guts, and everything else. Since it's "all in my mind" (we don't want to admit to the idea that there are such things as nasty disembodied spirits, now, do we?), that means I own it, it's part of me, and it doesn't exist anyway, which means I can do any damned thing I want to to it and can't be touched legally at all for doing so. It started in on me when I was an infant, and hasn't let up since. And won't let up until I beat it to mush, then burn the mush and throw the ashes into the sea. There has got to be some what to manifest it for that purpose, and not just psychodrama.