After September

October approaches as inevitably as the march of time itself. However I prefer to think of the month as Rocktober.

Wicked Good Names for Stuff

Fiction writing abounds with characters whose names give the readers some insight into that character’s character. A religion talking bird named Moses may seem to lack subtlety in some works, but I’ve stumbled across recent examples from real life that may make Moses the religious bird appear realistic if contrived.

The first being the giant HMO known as Kaiser Permanente. To translate it from both German and Spanish it would mean roughly, the Permanent Emperor—an odd choice for a Health Maintenance Organization that claims to have no ambitions of world domination.

The second, and this one is not very interesting and more just pathetic, is a ghetto housing project near Johns Hopkins Hospital called “The Target”.

The third (and finest I believe) is an organic food company recently at the center of an E. coli in spinach outbreak. It is a company that through its sloppiness and incompetence allowed E. coli to sicken many and kill a few. It's a company whose Chief Operating Officer is named Charles Sweat. And it's a company that allowed those with some resistance to this bacterium to live on and reproduce another day, thus increasing the frequency of their genes in the population. This company is of course Natural Selection Foods.

If you're reading this, you have to check out this thing with the cardboard cars from 2 posts ago. I can't get enough of those things.

Fuckery

The pro football team in Baltimore is called the Ravens alluding to Poe’s classic work “The Raven”. Fitting, in a city where the residents seem to have a certain gift with the artful turn of phrase. For instance, my mechanic described the speed with which he could get out of city phone numbers from 411 as “faster than a cat like his own ass.” The Smoked Salmon overheard a group of transit workers discussing a boss. “He used to me alright till he gave up drinkin. Now he’s written people up and shit. There’s some real fuckery going on around here” Indeed!

Cool cars

With many apologies to my e-fan base I submit this entry: http://youtube.com/watch?v=AXc71a2OKqM. A friend of mine did this. Godspeed car men.

District of Commuting

Bluefish Canoe has relocated/transitioned-to the bedroom communities of the most powerful men and women on earth. I now study at the fine city of Baltimore, MD and the smoked salmon is finishing her schooling (pun intendito, mofo) in DC. We tried to settle b/w Baltimore and DC but although the two cities are fairly close this is not an easy proposition. Public transport as I know it frequents these suburbs irregularly and the men and women of power tend commute via high speed automobile. If anyone feels these men and women of power are just regular folk like you and I, then I beg to differ. If you believe that the leadership of this country is simply faced with tough decisions in a cruel and terror filled world, and that’s why their actions appear like wild warmongering, then you have never commuted with said men and women of power. If you think that the leaders of this nation are any different from savage rulers of antiquity such as the men who invented soccer while kicking around the heads of their vanquished enemies, then you have never tried to merge onto a four lane mega-“beltway” after 6:00 AM. I will estimate that at least half of the people commuting in and around Washington DC are homicidal maniacs bent domination at any cost whilst driven mad by the sent of the blood of the weak and wounded. Just listen to a traffic report. It’s litany of carnage spoken by a chipper Midwestern woman. This morning I heard one that went not unlike this, “Hi, Mike. Things are smooth coming up from Virginia now that a motorist was allowed to blow up the Wilson Bridge. However, we do have a wreck on 495 northbound coming up on the Pine Branch Road exit [my route]. It’ll be another 22 minutes before the scavenger crew pulls all the useable scrap metal off the highway to sell to the Chinese. There have been some reports of some slippage on the blood of the drivers in the wreck, but I just hit a kidney and then a pituitary gland at about 85 mphs and I barely heard a bump. Back to you Mike.” Mike, "Thanks Staci. Another twist in the Ramsey case..."