Goat's Heart Soup for your Soul (where the Wild Things Aren't)

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm really looking forward to the Spike Jonze take on Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. Now that its almost upon us, I'm taken back again to my youth when books really captured my imagination.

To be sure, I still love to read; however, nowhere near as much as I did when I first became aware of seemingly unending world of adventures to be found on the written page. And it was picture books like Where the Wild Things Are that led me to that world.

There's a good write up this morning on the LA Times page, not so much on the movie as on Sendak's groundbreaking work (it's not exactly "family friendly," which was scandalous for a children's book circa 1963).

I certainly dig the visuals I've seen of the flick - they're arresting but still quite faithful to the originals in the book. I'll be lining up to revisit that world come next weekend, for sure.

Speaking of reading, last night I got through a couple chapters of The Men Who Stare at Goats and it's a page turner. Man, have we got some batshit crazy programs - and people - cooking away in the DOD. I guess I knew that, having worked first in the DOD proper as a member of Navy Intelligence and then 14 years thereafter for a company that suckled on its lucrative teet (I know, I know - I'm a hypocrite, but one who's made peace with that now for the most part).

Still, most of the wacky things I was exposed to were generally comprehensible idiocy. The shit in Goats is simply baffling madness, with generals believing people can learn to walk through walls and numerous long running programs training intelligence operatives to be psychic just two of the perhaps more reasonable examples.

I guess none of this is, in the end, all that surprising. But it still shocks the sensibilities and raises my ire when I put the taxpayer hat on. We can invest millions (and indeed over the years, billions) into this sort of thing but public healthcare scares people!?!?!!?

Apparently the "Goat Lab" is still in operation down at Fort Bragg, in a seemingly deserted building filled with de-bleated Billy the Kids (loose lips sink ships or more accurately, 'if a goat bleats word'll leak to the streets'). These goats are then brought into a special room where they are placed in front of men who stare back at them intently, attempting to stop their hearts with the power of thought and the evil eye.

Goats! Huh! What are they good for!?! Absolutely nothing. Good God, y'all!

If successful, these brave operatives will be humanity's only hope come the inevitable war with our goat overlords. We wouldn't want Moses cursing our lack of foresight in some distant future: "You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you all to hell! Baaaahhhh!"

I'd much prefer: "Get your stinking hooves off me, you damn dirty goat! Or I'll stop your heart with my stink eye!"

You think this merely fantasy?

Google has this year introduced upwards of one hundred goats to its 'payroll.' They're now grazing the property of their Mountain View corporate headquarters, officially as a greener alternative to lawnmowers.

Yeah, right.

Google controls access to the world's information and now is itself controlled by these crafty four-legged devils. They chew and Sergey, Larry and Eric jump. The kids are calling the shots these days and I don't mean the younger generation. Bleating will overtake Tweeting as the Social Media craze with the Google name behind it.

Perhaps the "Goat Lab" budget is money well spent after all. You just need to look at things from the (far) right angle.

Maybe the boys at the Pentagon should form a task force to befriend the Wild Things. Bring them into the fold as part of the 'coalition of the imaginary' against this growing petting zoo axis of evil. A couple hundred million to research the idea ought to start things off on the right foot.

No? Baaahhh!

Of Norse Gods and Giants and Amercian Goats and Shit

My Norwegian compadres on the Nobel committee did nether the US or Obama any favors by awarding the Peace Prize to our neophyte President, however noble their intentions (bad pun unfortunately intended).

True, he's made the world more amenable toward peace simply by not being George W. Bush and he's pretty good at it. I personally think he's mostly making the right moves, though at a much more leisurely pace than I would have liked.  Oh sure, there are a bunch of little things that bother me about what Obama's done or not done on one issue or another. There always will be until someone elects me president.  Even then, I'd find a way to find fault with some of my decisions immediately upon making them (perhaps especially then).   All in all, though, Obama's doing okay.

But the Nobel Peace Prize?

At the end of the day, Obama's the commander in chief responsible for two wars of our own making and it doesn't really matter that he inherited them. He's clearly accelerating the Afghan campaign and to my eyes not made nearly enough progress in getting us out of the muck that is Iraq.   And nothing else he's accomplished besides not being Bush has had time to bear fruit yet.  Perhaps they need a Nobel Not-Bush Prize.  Barack totally deserves that one.

And of course there are the downsides to winning a Nobel Prize for nebulous reasons: The right wing fear mongers now have more fodder for monging ("it's a vast worldwide leftist conspiracy!").  These are the people that cheered the news that we didn't get the 2016 Olympics because Obama lobbied to get it.  I imagine they'd cheer firebombing of orphanages if Obama came out against the idea.

But enough of this political claptrap - let's talk about important things, like Marge Simpson at long last making the cover of Playboy Magazine.  Alas, no Jessica Rabbit style centerfold to go along with it, but it shows that cartoon cougars can be bad too (well, not bad; just drawn that way).

I'm sitting here watching Discovery Health (naturally; what's an old fogy going to do on a Friday night?) and on comes yet another commercial by a company whose advertisements seem isolated to this channel: Home Delivery Incontinent Supplies (HDIS).   I've never seen so much as a reference to them anywhere else.  Know thy demographic.  And so they do, but I hope I won't need their services for a good long time.

I've mentioned HDIS in a prior posting, but it bears repeating for those who missed it: this company caters solely to those whose bladders and bowels are so out of control that they can't make it through the checkout line at the supermarket without leaving a trail of piss and shit in their wake.  Or maybe to those who are simply embarrassed to roll up to the "15 items or less" aisle and get yelled at by the gum popping teenager working the register for having 15 packs of Depends and a large block of cheese ("that's 16 items shit-for-brains!").   Who wants that?  Let HDIS ship your bowel and bladder control needs right to the front door!  Another bushel of butt plugs for the Petersons!

On that bright note I catch a glance at the clock: 11:20pm, time for bed.  Gotta get caught up on my reading: The Men who Stare at Goats has been teed up on my nightstand for a while and I've only gotten a few pages into it.

Goats, Shit, Piss and the Nobel Peace Prize.  Who could ask for anything more?

Don't get my Goat

The Men who Stare at Goats. I can't believe I missed this book when it first came out and it took the making of a movie to clue me in. All the wacky things the good old military industrial complex does in the name of national security. (The title refers to the men undergoing paranormal training of intelligence operatives. They worked at stopping a goat's heart with the evil eye, presumably to make the world free for god and country. Sayonara, Comrade Billy.)



I'll put this on the bookshelf next to The Pentagon Wars, filed under Government Waste. Almost makes me start thinking like a 'no government' Republican. I am a libertarian (small 'l') and a social activist liberal, so there's a constant inner tension between these two sides of my nature. And this complete waste of tax dollars rattles my riddle as much as it would any fiscal conservative. But then I come to my senses and realize much of this wackiness is perpetrated by private contractors on the government teet and that the sector of government this invariably crawls out from is the one department my friends on the right don't want to trim down (in fact they consider it untouchable for the most part, unless it's being expanded and fattened).

You won't find the National Endowment for the Arts funding goat-staring contests or spending months gathering "sheep specs" from the Office of Ruminant Procurement just to test the safety of a troop transport vehicle under live fire ("Do we put long haired sheep in the vehicle, short haired sheep? We have to do extensive research on this!") And those are just the stories that have leaked out - god knows the craziness kept under wraps.



And meanwhile our country is up in arms about a government healthcare option?!? At least that's fairly straightforward stuff. Out in the open.



The sky's the limit in this regard. I mean, if we can elect a perennially underachieving frat boy with delusions of an immanent end-of-days to two terms as president, knowing the only thing standing between this dim wit and the apocalypse he believed in his heart was inevitable was a rag-tag band of evil fixers, henchmen and fellow true-believer loons - well, then I guess anything's possible. The land of hope and dreams, for sure.

As a 'wise' man once said, "Is it Safe?"



Ask the gang at the DoD petting zoo next time you visit, I imagine they'll have quite a discomforting answer for you.