Headache. Don’t expect good things.

The good news, if it can be called that, is that I’m in the perfect frame of mind...though that may be the wrong direct object...to factor out a few more symptoms of the disease in the novel. I think I’d forgotten the fun aspect of migraine, probably reflected in the zombiebug, of inhaling too fast and yarfing by pure reaction. Which should make for a lovely children’s book, I think. Or something. Still working on making sense here.

I did, it turns out, get the reactions about right for London. My reference at the time was little more than the historical and probably embellished tactful counterpoint to terroristic [to backdate the term] issues during the second world war. We now know that, even in the twenty-first century, where England is making every effort to become McAmerica, Britons have yet to evolve into the panicking animals along the three-thousand-mile gametrail across the pond. Which is not to say that the Underground [the arguable irony is that a different underground was a point of sanctuary sixty years ago] was ever quite as iconoclastic a target as the trade centre. But it does remain a more important landmark to the whole of the country than the twin towers were to most of America. America having more cities than just Manhattan. England, for better or worse, is pretty much London and NotLondon.

I can’t quite guess whether the reactions would have been less graceful if it had been the clocktower [Big Ben, to those who confuse the bell with the structure containing it]. I’m inclined to think that it would have mattered less, really, the rest of the country in general having gone pretty well digital. Landmarks and history may be more important to those who haven’t actually got a lot of either.

I have to admit that I’m thrilled with the date. I’m still waiting for the twin towers to get a better designation than 9/11, since most of the world view that as 9th November. 7/7, apart from looking like a fractional representation of One, simply works. So: drink Seagram’s and Seven-up; otherwise, the terrorists win.

Yup. You’ve caught me. It happened to London this time, and I still don’t give a damn. Granted, it’s tragic that neither Will Farrell nor Alec Baldwin were in the Tube at the time; but that serves more as disproof of benevolent deities controlling the universe than anything else. Otherwise, it’s of little importance in the larger scheme. Things break; important things get repaired or rebuilt. That’s how the real world works. The real world very solidly being that place outside the United Cellulite of Duhmerica, where reactions tend to be slightly more constructive than three hundred million imbeciles buying Hasbro parachutes and installing spycams in their closets to watch for incoming terrorist planes approaching through the airducts.

What totally fails to surprise me much is that, while no one in the UK much cares about this, the US took nearly ninety minutes to molest this into a conspiracy theory in which the binLaden variable, being any given known terrorist organisation, having waited until after the fact to take credit on a website [anyone else out there starting to wonder why in the living hell it’s so apparently difficult to WhoIs the domain of, like, AllahHasUsDestroyingShit.org and working out who these people actually are?], were therefore lying, proving that it was in fact the republican party who made this happen. Seriously: it took a matter of seconds for gop_caused_london_bombings@yahoo.com [http://profiles.yahoo.com/gop_caused_london_bombings to be registered and appear in the chatrooms. Naturally, apart from the assertion inherent in the lusername, no further information or justification was available. Except for my own hypothesis, of course.

It’s been said, badly, that everyone has faith in something. Speaking personally as a nullifidian [etymology: nullus none + fide faith], I can easily call bullshit on that. If only in the sense that I don’t believe it for a second, having no faith in anything. However, I have concluded, somewhat precipitously, that the US are made up generally of christworshippers and clintonworshippers. If you can’t pretend that Jeezuz exists, you’re apparently required to pretend that every bad thing on the planet is somehow the fault and plan of President Junior. Which, again, I can’t personally believe, Junior being less than intelligent enough to carry off this dastardly plan. I have doubts that Lex Luthor could do it. With Doctor Doom’s help. I’m now waiting to get over my headache before fucking around with Photoshop and designing my new line of Clinton Was Impeached for Your Sins bumperstickers. Which would probably make me about a trillion dollars overnight, if my target market weren’t too busy being activists to afford the $4.99 plus shipping.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not in any functional sense a republican. I’m just in less sense a democrat. I’m pretty much just a realist: you’re both fucked. Thanks for advertising that fact at me on a daily basis.

Ugh. Headache. Must kill puppies.

Okay. That’s about enough for the moment. Reserving the right to return later when I can actually see the damned screen well enough to edit in a couple of other murky ideas and finishing my hovindesque dissertation in progress.

Offtopic Update: I peeked over at SomethingAwful.com, where an upcoming Photoshop Phriday involves fucked up billboards. This is probably well outside the scope, but it seemed funny when I thought it up. So it exists now.

More later....
--Gremlin

Forgot to add tags for this stupid entry.