Vorak of Kolnap Chapter 1 Part 10

“You’re slug meat, Vorak,” snarled Makan.

“What do you mean?” Vorak’s voice was shaking.

“You’re going down, roach. No one horfs me over in Calc class like that.”

“You should know the equations.”

“Cut the marp. You know the code. You’re slug meat.”

Makan stalked off. Once more, Vorak noted bitterly, his antennae and abdomen were in perfect alignment. The horfing Cadet Code—never horf another Cadet. Well, they horfed him every horfing day. It wasn’t his fault if Makan didn’t know a differential from a doorstop.

Boreas II was half way to apogee when the cadets filed out of the classroom building and assembled for Boreas Retreat. The broad, red disk of Boreas I had not yet appeared over the horizon, but the light was already oppressive. Vorak dropped the darkened visor of his flight helmet and stared upward at the distant, blue-white sphere, the beacon of his planet, the Cockroach Star. How he had dreamed of rising to her height, making himself worthy of her—dreams he had dared speak of only to Avram! And now it was all for nought. He was riding the mollusc-mung express to larvaville, and the exponent of his acceleration rate was infinity.

Continue reading Vorak of Kolnap Chapter 1 Part 10

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To the guy who gave me the finger at Tyson’s Corners last week

Yeah, it was my fault. I got in the wrong lane and refused to move. So, you were right to honk. Rather than lose ten minutes from my busy schedule I made you lose thirty seconds from your busy schedule.

But why did you start honking when the light changed and the cars in the lane ahead of me didn’t move? Did you think it was my fault that they weren’t moving? So that’s why I laughed when you gave me the finger. Mean-spirited, I know, but there it is. So I hope I ruined your day. Because you certainly made mine.

American Women: Poor and Oppressed, or Smart and Rich?

It’s tough bein’ a sister, livin’ in the USA. As the New York Times tells it, “Across the country, women in their prime earning years, struggling with an unfriendly economy, are retreating from the work force, either permanently or for long stretches.” In an “above the fold” July 22 story, “Women Are Now Equal as Victims of Poor Economy” reporter Louis Uchitelle quotes from a conveniently leaked report from the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, telling a tale of woe, how the percentage of women in the workforce, which has risen for the past 50 years, has actually declined from its April 2000 peak of 74.9% to 72.7% in June 2007, despite the recent economic recovery. For the first time, the percentage didn’t climb to a new high following a recovery.

As Uchitelle explains “After moving into virtually every occupation, women are being afflicted on a large scale by the same troubles as men: downturns, layoffs, outsourcing, stagnant wages or the discouraging prospect of an outright pay cut. And they are responding as men have, by dropping out or disappearing for a while.”

An accompanying graphic shows us that the workforce participation rate for men stood at 86.4% in June 2008, 14 points higher than the rate for women, but almost 10 points lower than the all-time high of 96% way back in March 1953. “Labor market woes have chipped away for years at the presence of men at work, and now that is happening to women.”

Uchitelle’s unstated assumption is that the higher the labor force participation rate, the better. But the 96% participation rate for men back in 1953 was the product of the Korean War “boom” and the draft, two things that not many people feel nostalgic for. And I don’t think that the decline to 86% in the present day is the result of “labor market woes,” since the average household income back in 1953 was $27,365 (median, stated in 2006 dollars), less than half of the 2006 median of $58,407.*

The three case histories Uchitelle presents (not, obviously, a representative sample of the more than two million “afflicted” women he claims to be profiling) aren’t terribly convincing. Lisa Craig, a welfare mother with three children, hasn’t worked much since 1993. Back in 2000 she had a $10 an hour job in Chicago, but she quit after less than a year to move in with her sister in Milwaukee. Since then she hasn’t worked much. An economic victim? Well, maybe.

How about Tootie Samson of Baxter, Iowa? She was earning $20 an hour working on an assembly line but then she got laid off. She doesn’t like the $9 an hour jobs she sees, and doesn’t think she can find another $20 an hour job soon. So she’s collecting unemployment and going to college while her husband works.

And then there’s Joyce Call of Howell, Michigan who quit her $25,000 a year job because of a paltry pay raise (28 cents an hour) and a zero Christmas bonus. That’s right, zero! Fortunately, her husband makes about seventy grand a year as a plumber, so Joycie isn’t in a lot of trouble.

Shockingly, one gets the impression that for a lot of women working full time isn’t very exciting. They’ve got other things they’d rather do, and they’ve got the financial resources that allow them to do them. So is this affliction or affluence? I ask you!

*Furthermore, you get a lot more for your money these days. In 1953 a 21-inch black and white TV cost $2500, adjusted for inflation. Plus, you only got two channels. Oh, and try living in the average home circa 1954—a spacious 1,000 square feet, with no air conditioning, a coal furnace, and maybe a clothes washer (but no dryer or dishwasher).

Richard Cohen has no penis

It’s official. In his latest column, Richard Cohen, who made his bones at the Wash Post by helping take down Spiro Agnew, treats the fad for tattoos among the young as a sign of the general fuckedupedness of modern America, addresses young women as “sweeties” and makes smart remarks about their “tummies,” bemoans the fact that the average American family owes more than they make (that is, they have mortgages), complains about the failure of society to adequately fund Social Security (gee, I wonder who’s planning to retire), and generally does everything except insist that Miley Cyrus can’t hold a candle to Annette Funicello. You know, Dick, I’m almost as old as you are. You’re giving me a lot to look forward to.

Getz and Coltrane play Monk

Believe it! From 1960 in Dusseldorf. The tape takes a while to get cookin’, but once the band is assembled, Stan and John do Thelonious proud. The tune is “Hackensack” (as in New Jersey).

At Last! My take on that New Yorker cover

Well, it is the law, you know. I dodged them as long as I could, but when the Thought Police caught up with me and gave me the choice of sixty days in the hole or posting a comment, I buckled, so here it is: The New Yorker’s Obama cover was smart-alecky, pretentious, and condescending, exactly why I stopped subscribing five or six years ago.

When my first novel was published the New Yorker very sportingly sent me an offer for a special “author’s rate.” Well, I’m sorry, but getting the New Yorker at the “author’s rate” made me feel cool, so I bit. Just about every issue of the New Yorker has something worth reading, and I recall one issue that I read cover to cover with complete satisfaction. But gradually the eternal moral smugness of the mag, the overwhelming Upper West Sidedness of it all, drove me over the edge, and I’m proud to say that I turned down the author’s rate, which is a damned good deal.

Of course, the fact that most of each issue is available on the web made it easy to be virtuous, but what’s wrong with a little easy virtue? Anyway, I occasionally buy an issue, to prove that I’m not a total cheapskate. And when the New Yorker does something cheesy like the Obama cover, I feel virtuous all over again. Virtue that’s free and easy! Hey, you can’t complain!

Emails on my mind

I kind of miss the good old days of spam—just a little. It was like all America was one big, happy trailer park: Bigger breasts! Bigger penis! Cleaner septic tank! That’s what everyone wants, right? The under-the-counter drug ads were an additional delight: Get your meds from Mexico! Hey, hey! Excellent Zanax! Okay, getting twenty or thirty of those a day wasn’t fun, but five or ten gave you something to look forward to.

These days my emails are a lot more serious. The myriad excesses of the Bush Administration have made me a card-carrying member of the ACLU. I don’t mind the “message from the president” letters I get from the union, though I don’t always do want they want me to, and I don’t really mind that the ACLU apparently sold my name to EMILY, the women’s political group, who send me emails as well. I’ve been giving money to the Democratic National Committee for some time, and naturally they’re in touch with me on a daily basis. Back in the primary season Obama said something that irritated me enough to complain to his website, so now we’re old buddies and they write me every day too.

If you think that I’m a damn secular humanist from my mail box, well, you’d be right, but lately I’ve been branching out a little. I saw an ad from Newt Gingrich offering a free newsletter and I couldn’t resist getting the weekly word from Newt. Well, I don’t think I’ve gotten a newsletter yet from Newt—he is a busy man, after all—but the good folks at Human Events (naturally, Newt and HE are very tight) have been taking up the slack and now I’ve gotten an email from none other than Ann Coulter herself, telling me why I’ve been losing money hand over fist in the stock market. Wall Street securities and investment firms are crawling with Democrats! Believe it, dude! Let Ann herself tell it as only Ann can:

“If you've been wondering why the financial industry has been in meltdown—and taking your 401(k) or investment portfolio down with it—now you know.

Let's face it: The former frat boys who populate Wall Street today understand economics about as well as the pinko professors whose courses they snored through.

That's why betting their entire industry on “subprime” loans to people with no jobs and no collateral made sense to them[1]—and why betting the entire U.S. economy on the likes of Hillary and Obama makes sense to them now.

These jokers don't even know what's in their own self-interest, much less yours. Trusting them with your money is like trusting Bill Clinton to babysit your underage niece.”

So what’s a smart boy to do? Well, Ann can help. She knows this guy, well, again, why don’t I shut up and let Ann tell it: “His name is Dr. Mark Skousen—that's ‘Dr.’ as in ‘Ph.D. in Economics and Monetary History,’ something you don't get by playing Beer Pong with your frat buddies.”[2]

Yes, Dr. Mark has this fabulous newsletter that you can subscribe to for only $99.95 a year, a newsletter chock full of advice based on “the real laws of economics—not the warmed-over Marxism that today’s Wall Street frat boys imbibed with their warmed-over beer on the morning of their Econ 101 finals.” And, just to put the icing on the cake, the good doctor has just revealed his 7 “secret” strategies to make you 50% richer in the next two years. How cool is that?

I’m sure that Ann isn’t getting a kick back from this. I mean, surely she’s acting out of the pure generosity of her own heart, which kind of makes me embarrassed that I implied she’d given Bill Clinton a blow-job in Politics Is Murder.[3] But not a whole lot.

Ann Coulter: shrill and a shill.

[1] Yeah, this is total bullshit. Hey, it’s Ann talking.
[2] Well, what about those “pinko professors”? Didn’t they have Ph.D.s? Hey, it’s Ann talking. You shut up.
[3] It’s at the very, very end, so don’t start reading with the assumption that you’re going to get something hot and nasty up front.