Libertarians who are also Magickians may find this useful. Just plug in terms and names as appropriate and go for it:

NEW MAGICKS FOR A NEW AGE

Volume I: A New Order of the Ages

Book 3: Applications

Part 5: Magickal Ritual Applications, Chapter 2 – The Conjuration of Liberty

ABSTRACT

The following is a description of a ritual to be used for attainment of liberty from any kind of injust restriction and for combating enemies of Liberty, Justice, and Thelema of all kinds, together with a brief recapitulation of a particular instance of its use and some interesting physical phenomena that took place thereafter.( Read more... )

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124726489588925407.html

In other words: Go ahead and wish for a nuclear-free world, but pray that you don't get what you wish for. A world without nukes would be even more dangerous than a world with them, Mr. Schlesinger argues.

Just out of curiosity to see what sort of answer I'd get if I did, I asked the question "Will the USA retain its nuclear arsenal?" Here's what I got:

The card not shown but at the center of the cross, represents the atmosphere surrounding the central issue. Ace of Wands: The seed of a new venture - perhaps as yet unseen. An opportunity to be met with boldness, vigor, and enthusiasm. The herald of birth, invention, or entrepreneurship. An innate and primal force released. May suggest a surge of vitality, creativity, or fertility that can set things in motion.

The card visible at the center of the cross represents the obstacle that stands in your way - it may even be something that sounds good but is not actually to your benefit. Death: A major change or transformation, possibly traumatic and unexpected. Freedom from the shackles of the past. A new beginning. Death coupled with rebirth, usually related to consciousness and lifestyle.

The card at the top of the cross represents your goal, or the best you can achieve without a dramatic change of priorities. Nine of Wands (Strength): A pause in the current struggle to ready oneself. Preparation to meet the final conclusive onslaught. Forces assembled in anticipation of trials and tribulations. The steeling of the will to stand or fall. A line drawn in the sand.

The card at the bottom of the cross represents the foundation on which the situation is based. The Fool: Fearlessness, imagination, open-mindedness, and an adventurous spirit. Freedom from cares and worries. Ideas, thoughts, and impulses coming from a completely unexpected place. Nonchalance at the threshold of gaining all or losing all. Extravagance and intoxication with life. The pure and undifferentiated power of creation itself, where ultimate knowledge and oblivion are unified.

The card at the left of the cross represents a passing influence or something to be released. Seven of Pentacles (Assessment): A pause to check on the progress of your labors. Making difficult financial decisions. Exercising patience and perseverance. Evaluating the status of your work and your options for the future.

The card at the right of the cross represents an approaching influence or something to be embraced. Queen of Cups: The essence of water, such as a deep and placid lake: Spirituality, maturity, and grace. A natural counselor and healer, One whose relaxed presence seems to embody deep love and spirituality. A tranquil poet who reflects the nature of the observer. The embrace of all things dreamlike and receptive, such as perfect and unconditional love.

The card at the base of the staff represents your role or attitude. The Emperor, when reversed: Weakness in character leading to tyranny and abuse of worldly power. Loss of confidence and ambition, coupled with the cold execution of the unthinkable. The inability to carry out plans or command respect. Being unreasonable and prone to fits of rage. A deceiver or demagogue.

The card second from the bottom of the staff represents your environment and the people you are interacting with. King of Swords, when reversed: The dark essence of air, such as a gray sky: A mature leader of unyielding ethics and absolute authority. An incorruptible judge, whose devotion to the letter of the law cannot be swayed by emotion, mercy, or exigent circumstances. Perfect clarity of thought, excessive use of force, and mastery of language as a tool for deception. One who, like a great tyrant, inspires not love or devotion, but fear, respect, and obedience.

The card second from the top of the staff represents your hopes, fears, or an unexpected element that will come into play. Judgement, when reversed: Procrastination and indecision. Disillusionment and the inability bring a matter to conclusion.

The card at the top of the staff represents the ultimate outcome should you continue on this course. Five of Pentacles (Worry): Hard times brought on by addiction, wasteful spending, ill health, or an outside event. Rejection, loneliness, and the need for comfort. May suggest unemployment, a catastrophe in personal finance, or a turn for the worse in business.

Anybody want to interpret this?

BTW, for the gentleman who complained so bitterly about my discussing astrology on my blog with another blogger some time ago, putting the occasional Tarot reading results on a blog post also acts as a jerk filter. I.e., if you don't like my blog, don't read it!

The bat
Fell in the teapot,
But if you’ll just
Wait a moment, here,
I’ll get a glass
Of unicorn wine
And a plate of griffin cakes
For you,
And after I bathe the bat
And change his rompers,
We’ll see about
A bowl of Moonbeam soup
And maybe a cutlet of dandelion . . .

* * *

It’s been a busy day!
I’m glad you came –
It gives me a good excuse
To sit down and rest.
I tell you, if the spiders
Track in mud
Just once more,
I swear I’ll scream! I will.
– Oh, watch out for the pansies:
They bite.

* * *

– Have some more wine.
Aren’t those cakes good?
They should be –
I paid enough for them!
A daydream a dozen,
Can you believe it?!
I don’t know what
The economy’s coming to –
They used to be
One muse for six,
A reverie a dozen.
If this inflation
Doesn’t stop soon,
You can bet
That Ariel
Won’t be re-elected
(But then, of course,
He’s certainly better than
That other chap,
What’s-His-Name –
Oh, yes, Caliban!)

* * *

– How do you like that soup?
Good, isn’t it?
I put in just a pinch –
Down, Faustus! Yes,
You’re a good basilisk.
Go play, now,
There’s a good boy.– Pets.
– Anyway, if you want the recipe,
I have it right here . . .

* * *

Him? Oh,
His name’s “Maxfield.”
He’s in art –
Spends all his free time
Painting.
Honestly, I don’t know what
He finds so interesting
About this place,
But he paints,
Paints, paints it
Until it must run
Out of his ears!
– His last name?
Oh, one of those awful
Foreign things –
Uh, Parrish.
That’s it.
A nice boy . . .

* * *

Listen, come over later.
The kids are just about
To come home from school
– Yeah, ain’t that New Magick
Terrible?
– Yeah, I do most of my kids’
Homework, too. Boy,
In my day, it was
The good old Three R’s:
Remembrance, Runes,
And Rhabdomancy,
And none of this fancy,
Newfangled business,
No sir!
– Anyway, I wanted to tell you
The most –
Down, Faustus! Bless it,
Will you go and play?
They’ll be home soon,
That’s a boy! –
The most scandalous story!
Seems that that new Spenser chap
Has been in and out of the Palace
A most curious amount of time,
And they say the Queen –
Uh-oh, here they come!
And would you believe
More mud?
As if the spiders
Weren’t bad enough . . .
It’s absolute hell
Getting that blue-and-pink glop
Off my nice, clean floors –
And you should see those prints
All over my pretty slip-covers!
– Yeah, ain’t it the truth!

– Well, ’bye, Daphne,
See you tonight
At the Butterflies’ Ball!

Some years ago, I purchased a hand-held Optical Character Reader from DAK Industries at the time, I was too cheap/broke to get a flatbed scanner). I needed it to help me transfer data from manuscripts on hard copy to disk, to save me endless hours of entering the text by hand.

Well, that’s all very well and good. But – maybe it’s because I’m a Magickian, so that my manuscripts are often about Magick, and maybe therefore full of it – I found out, rather quickly, that there seemed to be a spirit incarnated in that OCR, a Hermetic spirit that gave me a great deal of trouble until I figured out what it wanted, which was to teach me the Magick Words of Power that were the object of its guardianship. Once I’d humbly buckled down to learn these, the spirit thereafter gave me no problem.

A very interesting vocabulary it was, too! I’m sure that all of you, being my colleagues, will find this new lexicon of Magickal Power-Words of great interest and usefulness, and so I am herewith sharing them with you, along with their meanings, as follows:

Word or phrase Meaning

Wagiclral: Referring to the Art & Science of causing change in conformity with Will.

Elermetic: Referring to disciplines such as astrology, alchemy, and other metaphysical studies and practices

‘Iiernetic: Of the occult and mystical Arts and Sciences.

T’ernetic: Obscure. May be Rom for “esoteric Arts & Sciences.” On the other hand, may have been a Nat. Geog. misprint of something else entirely.

TLernetic: A fancy-pants term for “the occult.”

He’petic: An esoteric discipline involving nasty things done with (or possibly to) somebody’s liver.

Pleaballah: The mystical Art and Science of arguing the case for a plea-bargain.

Portratt: A graphic likeness of someone, done as a drawing, painting, or photograph.

Nalalype the Younger: Author of Principia Normalis, Holy Book of the anti-”Bob.”

Principia Oisrurjia: Bacterian translation of Principia Normalis.

The Great Vorn of Chsas: The evil Pink twin of the Erisian spirit Choronzon.

Yisdo: Wisdom, sagacity – also, “Do it!” (“Yes – do!”)

Unipurse, univenie: The cosmos, reality, where it’s at.

Iiwptian: Early Slobbovian term for residents of Lower Nile.

Xa Bich: Mayan term. May mean “Magick” – or possibly a term used at moments of great dissatisfaction and frustration, directed at objects of same.

Xa Sic: Variant of “Xa Bich” used in a suburb of Machu Pichu.

Iystirai: Mystery.

Iystirai Pabdla: Title of a work by Dion Fortune on the esoteric Art & Science of Pabdlaian analysis of people, places, things, and how’s your mom, ed.

Glarious: Magnificent; also means “please wear sunglasses – reflected sunlight may lead to eyestrain.”

Syncbronous: At the same time, in the groove with.

Dildo Baran: A bright Star in the Constellation Taurus, now at about 9° 45’ of the Constellation Gumdrop, marking the Bullpat’s South or Left Flop. Prominently featured in Tantrum rituals and the practices of Sex-Magickians, it was named after a favorite Magickal Weapon of a famous astrologer of Persia, circa 3000 BC, who was nicknamed “Baran,” = The Follower, for his practice of preparing for important Tantric rituals by following nubile young ladies and handsome young boys around town for several hours until in the proper state for successful Tantric Magick, at which point he would go home, get out his dildo, and have at it.

Didlbaran: A misspelling of Dildo Baran found in Ptolemy’s Perverts and Pederasts: The Astrology of Deviance. Unfortunately accepted as standard spelling of the name of this Royal Star because of the high authority of the author, it has become entrenched as such in the literature.

Courforpable: Cooperative, willing to go along with other’s customs.

Dard: Adamant, unyielding.

Nundaoe: Quotidian.

Tundane: Ordinary, unremarkable.

Urface: Outside of something, its skin.

Imouledge: Your guess is as good as mine.

Granaatic nodals: Of Reality. Granny’s North Nodal gets you on her good side – but beware of her South Nodal!!!

Drabwyla: Okay, spirit, spell my name right or I’ll sue!

The spirit also transmitted to me a list of names for some of the Sephirah of the Tree of Life of the Holy Qaballah used by adepts of the Ninth Realm of Nintendo the Numbnuts. They are as follows:

Sephirah Name used by adepts, etc.

1. Kether Geldur

2. Chokmah

3. Binah Broad

0 or 11. Da’ath

4. Chesed C4’sed

5. Geburah Poner

6. Tiphareth B’Bauty

7. Netzach

8. Hod

9. Yesod

10. Malkuth

23, Discordia IIingdo

The five of us were sharing a table and a pitcher at Petrocelli’s Pizza one rainy Saturday autumn night after the jocks had thinned out somewhat. Our eclectic little group included my erstwhile college classmate and sometimes good buddy Charles Old; my cousin and roommate, Jodi Weiss; my cousin on the other side, who also lived about three streets down from us, John van Morgenstern the Nine-Hundred and Thirtieth or so (to hear him tell it -- among others, one of his major hobbies included creative genealogy); me; and Tom Warner, a deputy sheriff.

Tom, who lived about an hour’s bicycle-ride away on the outskirts of the city of Santa Real itself, was attached to the Foot Patrol here in Monte Vista, the little town next to the University of California at Santa Real, where the rest of us five.

“I guess it’s my turn to spring for a pizza,” Tom offered. With perks, Tom makes more than any two of the rest of us together, so we didn’t object. However, since Tom also makes -- perks and all -- rather less than a comfortable living, he scowled at our collective lack of protest -- but, being a good sport, he shrugged good-naturedly and ordered a Large pizza for us all, anyway.

When he finally returned from the counter with the pizza, Jodi said to him, “Tom, all the rest of us have told a story or two about ourselves. Now it’s your turn. What’s the most interesting thing you’ve ever run into?”

Tom set the pizza down, sat down on the bench next to Charles and took a wedge of pizza for himself. While we likewise helped ourselves to the pizza, he considered awhile as he thoughtfully masticated his own piece of pizza. Finally, swallowing a mouthful of crust, he said, “Well, I don’t know ... I’ve seen some weird cases, all right, but they’re all Department business and I really shouldn’t talk about them. Hmm . . .”

“Okay,” he said, finally deciding, “l’ll tell you one -- did you ever hear about the Eagle-Girl of Valle Grosse?”

We all looked blank -- except for Charles, our Resident Skeptick, who was busily tucking in his psychic bib in contented anticipation of a long, pleasant feed off Tom’s ego.

Tom went on: “It happened a couple of years ago, when the rains were so bad -- remember? It’s so weird that no one would really believe it happened, except for those of us who were directly involved in it, so we closed the file with ‘Death by Misadventure,’ though we really meant ‘Death by Act of God’ which would have been a lot closer to the mark ...”

“Oh, dear -- did the Great Thunderbird off a wino?” Charles asked unctuously.

“Well, why don’t you listen for yourself and then judge, Charles ol’ bean?

“It started,” Tom said, while Charles scowled at Tom’s lack of appreciation of his scintillant wit, “with an investigation of possible child-abuse in one of those big, ritzy homes in Valle Grosso. A psychiatrist’s daughter, who went to Don Alejandro Camarillo Junior High School in Valle Grosse, began coming to school more and more frightened and withdrawn every day from the first day of seventh grade on. She’d had an outstanding academic record up through sixth grade, in spite of great shyness and a tendency to be somewhat withdrawn, but her marks suddenly dropped to straight F’s by November of her first semester In seventh grade. So her teachers felt that something had to be very wrong at home, even though the girl was never bruised or otherwise physically injured.

“So the school authorities called Child Welfare, but rather timidly, since there was no physical evidence of abuse. They asked that agency to investigate the situation and find out just what was really going on. So Child Welfare sent out a team -- which never got inside the house. The doctor -- the girl’s father -- threatened to have all the investigators run in far harassment and violation of his constitutional rights, blah-blah-etcetera, and sue the school in the bargain. Well, since there was no evidence of physical abuse, it would have been impossible to get a warrant, as it was. And since one of the doctor’s close friends -- who also just happened to be his own personal attorney -- was the head of the local chapter of the ACLU at that time, nobody wanted to risk pushing it any farther.

“But then the school psychologist called Child Welfare. She told them that while the girl was obviously intermittently, uh, delusional, she’d told her (that is, the school shrink) that her father had killed her pets and had made her watch while he did it -- a punishment for what he called ‘silliness’... which was the psychosis or whatever which the school psychologist diagnosed the girl as having.

“The school shrink felt that the girl was under tremendous strain at home, and was undergoing a breakdown, and that her father was punishing her for it by killing her pets.”

“‘Pets’?” asked Jodi.

“Hawks. And owls. And an eagle.”

We all stared at him. “She was an ostringer?” John asked in delight -- all his life, he had loved anything and everything having to do with birds. He himself had had a pair of ravens, and later, a bluejay, and one of his life’s fondest dreams was to have a mews full of hawks and gear for training and flying them.

Tom grinned. “Yeah. The school psychologist wasn’t sure whether to believe it or not, at first -- she thought it might be one of the girl’s delusions or hallucinations or whatever. But just in case, she reported it to Child Welfare.

“Well, when Child Welfare checked it out, they found out that the family really did keep such birds. In fact, as they learned, the girl had competed with some of those birds and had won some hefty awards for it. -- The family’s neighbors, though, weren’t at all fond of the birds. Seems the eagle had gotten loose a time or two, terrorizing some small children in the area, leaving big smelly piles of, er, feces on roofs and lawns, and ripping off neighborhood livestock, like, somebody’s Pekinese, somebody else’s budgies right out of the cage next to an open window, like that. And the shrink’s back yard, where they were kept -- well, you sure wouldn’t need a road-map to find it!”

“All that birdshit?” asked Charles.

“Right!” John laughed. “Raptors such as eagles are carnivores, you know. Their feces are full of ammonia -- and unlike cats, they don’t bury it. Fehhh!” Grinning, he made a face, holding his nose for emphasis.

“Ugh -- Peke bones all over the yard!” I muttered.

“So that’s what happened to Professor Braintree’s poodle?” Jodi mused.

“Yeah, well, from what you’ve told me about that mutt, the neighbors wouldn’t given a hoot in hell about it -- shit, they’d have given the bird a Good Housekeeping Award or something for ridding the neighborhood of an aggravated disaster!” I reminded her.

“Well, go on -- what happened? John urged Tom.

“Well, so Child Welfare found out that the birds no longer were in evidence, either in the air or on the shrink’s property or anywhere else, as far as anyone knew. So the school authorities called the SPCA, who called us. --- We could have called in the Environmental Protection Agency, too, because some of the neighbors swore on a stack of bibles they were keeping Goddamn’ condors in there! But that was just a bit too wild -- bringing in the Feds on mere hearsay would have been suicidal, career-wise. So ol’ Boss John -- my boss -- said Screw It.

“But we did go in with a search-warrant and an SPCA investigation team, and we found that the birds were indeed missing -- and that, just coincidentally, ground for a small garden had just been prepared a couple of days before. With great big lumps in it.

“Over the shrink’s yells, shrieks of rage, curses and threats, we dug it all up again and found some rather suspicious birdy remains. “His daughter, who stood by silently, watching us dig up the ‘garden,’ began to cry when she saw the bodies of the birds that we unearthed that night. Her father yelled at her to get the hell into the house.

“Oh, no,” the lieutenant said, “she may be a material witness. Dear, would you come down to the station with us and tell us how those birds got there?”

“She started to say something -- and then was riveted to the spot, dumb as a post, by a snake-cold ‘I’ll kill you if you do’ glare from her old man. She shook her head ‘No’ without looking at any of us, then, tears running down her cheeks in rivers, and walked slowly to the house.

“-- And sunuvabitch if it didn’t turn out that the warrant hadn’t been properly made out, so the cruelty-to-animals charge was thrown out and we and the SPCA ended up being sued by the shrink for harassment and false arrest -- and he collected, too, damn him.”

“So what about the girl’s -- you know, her psychosis, anyway?” asked Charles. “You still haven’t said much about it.”

The look Tom turned on him was a study in equal measures of irritation, self-control, and amusement. “Gee, I guess I didn’t, did I, now, Charley? Tell you what, without too much trouble, you could have been in that backyard, yourself ... You have the strangest resemblance to some of those little old ladies who love to gloat over everybody else’s troubles in the National Enquirer, you know?”

“Oh, never mind him,” I said, before Charles could explode. “Please go on with your story!”

Tom Looked at me and grinned. “Well, for you, beautiful, I will.

“Okay,” he continued, "the school psychologist told us that the girl was proclaiming that she was a ‘bird priestess,’ a reincarnated Native American medicine-woman who had, in her last life, been the human, uh, avatar? -- yeah, avatar of the Spirit of All Eagles. She claimed she was doing Bird Magic to take her to the Kingdom of the Eagles to get help to destroy the Bark Priest of Poisons, her father.”

“Er,” said Charles, grinning.

“Oh boy!” laughed John. “Yeah, I guess she really wasn’t playing with a full deck, there, was she?”

Tom grinned. “Sure, yeah, she was nuts,” he said, biting into another wedge of pizza.

“Well, I’ve got one for you --” Charles began.

“Wait, son,” said Tom, cutting him off. “I promised you a weirdie, a weirdie you shall get. I’m not done yet, so shut up and let me finish, will you?

“-- To go back to the point at which I was so rudely interrupted,” he continued as Charles glared and muttered something under his breath, “the shrink apparently hated his daughter because she was far, far brighter than he’d ever dreamed of being, not to mention the fact that she didn’t share his own view of people and life, which basically came down to Screw or Be Screwed. Then, of course, she’d been a daughter, rather than the son he’d wanted. And ... oh, who the hell knows why?

“Then, when she reached puberty, of course things became complicated by what you might call the, er, Humbert Humbert syndrome. -- No, come to think of it, ol’ HH only liked the ones with no hair on their ... er. Ahem.” He cleared his throat in embarrassment, trying not to look at me or Jodi.

“Yes? Go on,” Jodi urged ingenuously.

“Damn, Tom, we’re not exactly dithering mimosas, you know?” I snapped at him. “For heaven’s sake, will you go on! -- Jeez, man, you’re red as Lenin on May Day!”

“Ladies -- which you aren’t -- you ought to be ashamed of yourselves!” he told Jodi and me darkly. “Scandalous, you are. Corrupt my morals ...

“Anyway,” he continued, “some sex thing seemed to have gotten mixed up with his original dislike of his daughter, and he started putting heat on her -- calling her names all the time, ranging from psychiatric to dumb to just plain filthy; using any excuse at all, even making up excuses out of thin air to punish her, usually by destroying or otherwise taking something she loved or wanted away from her.

“But the fucker was of course clever about it. He never hit her. Never laid a hand on her. He coerced his wife into covering up for him . . .

“Now her, his wife, he beat up all the time. Unlike the girl, you see, who by law had to go to school every day, her mother had no strong reason requiring her to go out at all, since they could have groceries trucked in and she didn’t have any friends or relatives in town or anyone else who might become concerned when she didn’t appear in public, and he could keep her in the house while the bruises and broken bones healed, and who cares about wife-beating, anyway? Oh, Jesus! -- You know, I really hope Women’s Liberation succeeds, because I’m getting awfully fucking sick and tired of coming out to bust up the ten-millionth ‘fight’ between Mr. and Ms. Whoozis, and she goes into the hospital, and some fancy lawyer comes down and gets the son of a bitch she’s married to bailed out right when we’re booking him and he never goes to jail at all, and then ten-million-and-first time she dies, and nobody cares, man, and I ... Well, that’s neither here nor there, is it?” Hawking harshly, Tom spat onto the floor by way of punctuation. One of the student busboys, sighing as he walked up to clean up the floor where Tom had spat, glared at him reproachfully. Ignoring him, Tom went right on with his tale. “Sorry for the digression.

“So anyway, the girl began ‘being silly,’ as her father put it. -- That is, she began to act just like someone who is undergoing a nervous breakdown. As a psychiatrist, her old man had to have known exactly what was wrong with her. But of course he himself was the reason for it, and didn’t seem at all inclined to quit being the reason any time soon, as long as he had any say in it. As you might expect under the circumstances, he dismissed her obvious breakdown in terms of something like a juvenile prank or simple childishness, and did nothing to get her into real therapy for it. Why were none of us surprised?”

“So what happened?”

“Well, January came along, and with it came the rains. And then, one stormy late afternoon in mid-January, the bastard calls us in a towering rage, saying that his daughter had ‘run off,’ leaving a note for him that ‘read nonsense,’ saying she was going up on the mountains back of Santa Real to call up Grandfather Eagle to give him what he deserved, and would we ‘run the bitch in?’ Wherever it was she was actually headed, she hadn’t taken a car. Apparently she was going to hitch-hike, or at least take the bus -- she was too young to have a driver’s license, and had never learned to drive, anyway. And because her father had strictly supervised her activities and severely restricted her social life, she had no friends who might have given her a ride. So she was on foot, unless, of course, she could hitch a ride from someone or took a bus.

“On top of this, just before he called, we got another call, this one from a very concerned woman who lived just off East Camina Cima -- that road that runs up to the TV station off Highway 150 -- who told us that just a little earlier that evening she’d seen someone climbing San Miguel Peak, which was very near her home. She saw whoever it was in the glare from a lightning flash, though not very well, and it made her curious. So she got out a pair of binoculars her late husband had brought back from his hitch in the Korean War and, in the next flash of lightning, she could just make out that the climber was a girl, a young girl who was dressed far too skimpily for such cold, rainy weather. But then the girl climbed down into a ravine or canyon, so our caller couldn’t see her any longer. It was raining far too hard for her to go check it out herself at first hand, since she’d recently come down with the ‘flu recently and still hadn’t completely recovered. But she really thought the girl might be in danger, so she called us in case a rescue was needed.

“Well, putting two and two together, we got a crew together as fast as we could and went out to find the girl, cussing all the way. It was too wet to have much chance of finding her, not to mention driving up there on those Goddamn’ slick roads this late in the day, but it wasn’t quite wet or dark enough to justify postponing a search until after the rain stopped.

“When we got up there, we found we’d been preceded by the girl’s father, who’d decided to make sure we Did Our Duty. Fucker’d borrowed a jeep from a neighbor of his, and had arrived at the foot of the peak just before we did. We couldn’t stop him --- he was ten or twenty feet ahead of us all the way, even though the rocks were so slick from the rain that they might as well have been soaped. So with him leading, and us chasing him as much as her, we worked our way up that deep, treacherous ravine that makes a seam up the back of the hill to this ledge that overlooks several deep canyons running behind that range of hills.

“-- Hills, hell -- they were fucking mountains! Johnny, remember that book Inferno by Niven and Pournelle you wanted me to read? Well, I finally did get the time to read it. (You were right, it was one hell of a read!) Remember that place just below the First Circle, where Benito and Allen Carpenter look down into Hell before descending into it? It looked something like they’d have seen there -- or even like the original might have looked to Dante and Virgil: A thousand-foot fall, since the range behind the hills to our north is part of a table-land that gradually descends to the cold-desert region east of here; a sky the color of squid-ink where it wasn’t jet-black -- or a weird, ionized electric purple like a defective black-light or A-bomb green from lightning! The jaws of Hell, man, that’s what it was! And it had fangs to go with it, down there at the bottom of the canyon -- spires and pillars and jumbles of solid rock, up to twenty feet high, with no ground cover on them at all!

“Then we saw the girl. She was sitting on a spur of rock ten feet above this narrow, rain-flooded, muddy ledge and a hundred yards to our right.

“She was in a sort of -- a kind of ecstasy, an exalted trance, and you couldn’t tell just what the source of that exaltation was: Joy, hate, fear, fury, despair, grief, love -- none of those and all of those and something ‘way beyond any of those were all part of it. The rain ran off her face in great, shining sheets and filled her long, unbound, dark hair so that it shone silver-green under the lightning, and her face shone livid blue and green and even gold in the lightning-flashes. All she was wearing was this a little, white, thin, peasant blouse embroidered around the yoke and the hems with little blue and yellow flowers, khaki shorts, some feathers in her hair, and a turquoise-and-silver bracelet. That was all, man, not even sandals or tennis shoes to protect her feet.

“There she sat, cross-legged, Indian-style, her hands uplifted to the sky, her eyes rolled back in her head so only the whites showed. And she was chanting.

“The storm robbed most of her chant of whatever sense it had, but every once in a while she’d yell out a part of it -- and odd thing, every time she did, a bolt of lightning cracked down the sky, like punctuation.”

“Aw, Tom ...” said Charles impatiently.

“No shit, man!” Tom snapped. ‘That’s what we noticed -- but I will give you this: those lightning bolts came so often, anyway, and the storm was so loud, that we probably missed the times she yelled and nothing happened.

“-- Anyway, her dad, who’s ahead of us all the way, immediately makes for the rocky spur where the girl’s sitting. He’s cussin’ a blue streak, screaming things at her even we’d never heard before -- and man, you can bet your last dollar we hear everything in our line of work! The sumbitch’s so loud we can hear him clearly above the storm! In spite of the fact that he’s fifty pounds overweight and thirty years out of condition -- I guess even the rich assholes at the Monte Vallejo Heights Tennis Club finally had it with him, and yanked his court privileges or something -- this turkey hauls himself up to where his daughter was, almost one-handed. Then he begins slapping her and trying to pull her down off the rock-spur.

“Finally she turns, and looks straight at him. The whites of her eyes aren’t showing like did before, but she’s staring at him like a horse gone mad on locoweed, wearing an expression the likes of which I’ve only seen on days-old stiffs before the morticians get to them: like, a smile straight out of the Pit. Hate is far, far too weak a word for what she must have felt for him -- not that I blame her!

“Her eyes look like burning sulfur in the lightning-flashes. It finally begins to get through even to him, for just a second or two; he drew back -- we’re just finally getting up to where the two of them are, ourselves, and can see them both fairly clearly.

“And now the bastard recovers himself. Rearing back, he howls ‘Slut! You fucking little whore!’ at her and aims a round-house punch at her.

“It never connects. Just as he tenses to make his punch, her mouth opens in this sunken-in gape as she throws back her head, eyes closed, flings up her hands and moans, ‘Kee-OWW-ohaauww ...’“

I could feel the hair rising on the back of my neck as he did his imitation of her cry. Everyone else at the table flinched, even Charles, who wasn’t quite able to cover it, even with his best effort to do so.

“His punch never connects,” Tom went on. “Sheet-lightning suddenly covers the sky, high up. By its light, for just an instant, we see these three black, winged shapes diving straight down at the girl and her old man. We’re, like, paralyzed by the sight of them, unable to move when, moments later, they strike.

“Or rather, the middle one does, sinking what I swear to Jesus Christ and all the saints are four-inch talons full-length into the shrink’s back. Screaming, the shrink pitches off the rock he’s been standing on, down onto the ledge where we were, by the momentum of the attack, which carries carried him over the edge, down to the rocks below. The bird that attacked him shoots back up into the sky, wailing like a banshee, joining its two huge companions, which in the meantime were turning circles in the sky above the girl.

“-- And then, the three birds ... vanished.

“That is,” he said, looking over at Charles, “there was another blast of sheet-lightning, then a regular bolt of the stuff, and we were so dazzled by the sky-pyrotechnics that we could barely see anything, as it was. Somewhere in there, the birds disappeared, maybe while we were still rubbing the fireballs out of our eyes.

“Also, right about then the girl pitched off the rock where she’d been sitting, unconscious and exhausted, and we had to scramble to catch her. We were too busy to be watching for anything else. Either way, we didn’t see the birds go.

“Well, we got the girl down off the rock safely, and took her to St. Mary’s Hospital back down in Santa Real, where she was treated for exposure and shock. -- She subsequently completely recovered, by the way, and is now on the Dean’s list at a very good girl’s school beck East.

“Anyway, as soon as we could, we went back for her father -- after the rain stopped and we could get back up in there to reach him. By that time, of course, the dude was very dead -- he’d fallen hundreds of feet onto the rocks, and there was no way he could have survived.

“It took us a week to decide just how to write it all up so we wouldn’t all get hauled away to that nice, warm place where the nuts hunt the squirrels once our superiors reviewed it. We finally closed the case as ‘death due to misadventure,’ like I said, and that was that.”

“But those birds -- what about them?” John reminded him.

“Oh, yeah, the birds.” Reaching into his pants’-pocket, Tom said, “Oh ... I dunno. What would you say wore feathers like these? -- I’ve been keeping these as a good-luck charm,” he explained, a little sheepishly. Also,” he went on, glaring at Charles, “sometimes I sort of take them out and look at them . . . to remind myself that I don’t know everything, and never will .... Here.” So saying, he pulled an envelope out of his pocket, and took out several feathers, heavy and long, an oily greenish-black in color, and some shorter, golden-tan, all rubber-banded together. Dark, gluey soil, almost tarry in color and consistency, was still embedded in them.

“Condors --” breathed John, inspecting them. “And that’s ... yes, they are. Those are the tail-feathers of a Harpy Eagle! You -- you say you found these at the site?”

“Uh, no, not exactly” said Tom. He now pulled a second, rubber-banded bundle of feathers out of the envelope. ‘Now these did come from the site. Take a look -- compare these to that first bunch of feathers, people.”

We did, passing them among ourselves, They were identical, point for point, right down to the bits of tarry, gluey dirt caught in them.

“I can’t tell any difference between them -- and this dirt?” asked John.

“That’s right,” said Tom. “Even the soil-types of that muck stuck in the feathers is identical.

“But the thing is, in neither case is it soil from the area In which the shrink was killed. You see, those feathers in that second bunch, they drifted down into a branch of a bush next to the rock where the girl had perched, and I took them out of that bush and ran them through a forensic analysis myself.”

“Don’t tell me,” snorted Charles. ‘The first bundle’s from the La Brea Tar Pits.”

“Close, Charley -- but you don’t win no cee-gar.” Tom wore a grin like a skull. His eyes were invisible behind the Polaroid glare of the lenses of his glasses, which had been turned into molten silver by the overheads. “They were from some of the bird carcasses we found in that ‘garden’ we dug up at the shrink’s place in Valle Grosse.”

. . . especially the ones that don't make much sense and are therefore extremely hard to refute (ever try to nail a custard pie to the wall?), try this:

Instead of responding with a reasoned, thoughtful comment or just the written equivalent of an inarticulate, outraged scream, return-serve with any or a combination of the following:

I had one grunch, but the eggplant over there.

It's crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide.

Furshlugginner.

Farshimelt.

Potrzbie.

No, it is three o'clock.

williammgaines

wallywood

harveykurtzman

frankkellyfreas

alfeldstein

normanmingo

jackdavis

Alfred E. Neuman

What, me worry?

donmartin

joeorlando

gloriaorlando

Furshlugginner potrzbie axolotol, fu belalugosi Lucrezia tuffluk boobooday Sodere iseenunu hyme potrzbie opie Howsyourmomed fu moxiecowznofski donmartin basenji cocopuffs; dis yipeetiyi schlemiel fu beevis; fu ax yeecch daisychain siesta fu salakadula harvykurtzman fabian. Cheechwizard hyme vigorish dis oxidol jerrydefuccia al Joeorlando leonardbrenner arthur al melbrooks fu frankjacobs micasasucasa manzanita luiluwah dis aljaffee, onion jackdavis humorinajugularvein alfeldstein micasasucasa enema. Ol’ furshlugginner yacketyyack donttalkback maybebaby myob oyveh jamesthurber jackbenny meshugginer. Ohno! ohno! Notmebabe! Ohno! Cucamunga! Williamgaines schlemazl u soupysales gesundheit Wallywood! NUNU! gloriaorlando farqhuard denada!

etc. etc. etc.

Then sit back and eat popcorn while you watch your antagonist go nuts trying to respond . . . or get wise enough never to bother you again.

And if we all do this -- if we start a movement of people all doing this -- well, who knows where it'll go from there? ;-)

Videos linked after the cut:( Read more... )

Yeah. Dead people.

I just received an email from dr.laibow@gmail.com, the text of which is reproduced below. I think these people are well-intentioned. I also think that there is a possibility that there's real paranoia involved in this, the kind that comes from seeing a boogeyman in every closet and two spectres in every garage. Anybody know what's going on with this?

The email:

News, alerts, and other information related to your health freedom.
Action Items You Can Take Now

Natural Solutions Foundation
Health Freedom Action eAlert

July 11, 2009

Vaccines and Sardines:
Are We, In Our Millions, Just Prey?( Read more... )

I swear he's part Siamese -- it's the only thing that would explain it. (Siamese are wonderful creatures, and they have powerful minds and tremendous imaginations, and that's where the trouble starts.)

His latest peculiarity is that in addition to banging his head against the tank of water in his water-dispenser to make the water come down (which isn't needed; it comes down all by itself), he ends up pushing it away from the bathtub, which is where I usually park it, toward the center of the bathroom. Now, why?

I don't think he's neurotic. I think cats that act this way require a brand-new term just for them to describe this sort of weirdity. Please submit your ideas for such a term in the comments to this blog entry. I don't know about prizes to be awarded, but I'll sure be grateful if I get something appropriate to call such behavior in cats.