This was the sun at four in the afternoon. I thought it was the moon. Except that the larvae throughout the neighbourhood were running about, screaming about something incomprehensible.
Anyway: it turns out that it's not Krakatoa again. There are something like five unrelated forest fires all burning at once, and the wind blows east from the mountains. So everything looks like this.
Between the smoke in the air and the pollen in general, about the only way to avoid carcinogens in Denver right now is to inhale nothing but Camel Wide Filtres. Someone remind the surgeon general of that.
A filler story on the news--between jiggly shots of Cecil B. the local epileptic cameraman--mentioned that Colorado--where 'Colorado' is any part of the state other than Denver, which can be identified by small groups of five to ten people per square parsec, who haven't bought new clothes since Brisco County Junior rode through here--was a rainforest thirty-five million years ago. That concerns me.
How many homosapiens were living in rural Colorado in the middle of the Cenozoic? Any? There must have been: everyone knows that rainforests can only stop being rainforests when homosapiens cut them down to build factories and things. Are we supposed to envision a bunch of mastadons bulldozing to expand the tarpits, or something? How could a prehistoric rainforest have disappeared without being destroyed by homosapiens?
Unless, maybe--just maybe--it's all kinda cyclic and things go extinct without mankind's help. Maybe the everglades evolved into swamps from a desert ten thousand years ago without any help from people. Maybe the inland sea went away at the end of the Maastrichtian all by itself [although the Yucatan Impact is still considered a suspect there]. Maybe people aren't quite as important to terran ecology as they pretend to be.
Maybe people are retarded.
That's my favourite theory on the matter. And it leads nicely into today's little announcement.
After nearly a year of silence, Radio Free Grempire is returning.
Kinda.
There will be a few changes to it. For one thing, we're not doing it in a recording studio anymore. It just doesn't work. Sitting down and preparing to 'do a show' is a good way to forget what you're going to say. So we're returning to our natural habitat for this.
We're going rogue. We're taking the MiniDiscRecorder along and recording the show at various restaurants throughout Denver. For now. Tomorrow: the world.
But Denver for now.
My biggest concern with doing the show this way was the factor of uncontrolled backgroud noise. But I tried it out, and A) the background noise isn't really that intrusive--it actually kinda lends to the motif; B) it tends to generate evidence of exactly the idiocy RFG is designed to expose: morons plagiarising various comedians and films, inventing keys outside [and inside] the generally-accepted eighty-eight notes of a piano in which to croon out little bits of really bad country songs [it's redundant; I know] over and over until someone kills them, and so on. Detracting from the show as that should really be, it works out nicely in the end.
Anyway: we're planning to have shows broadcasting by next Sunday [if nothing else goes wrong]; watch for details on that.
Also: RFG is returning to its original purpose: exposing idiocy without borders. We got a bit typecast when the show dealt with nothing much other than atheism; and all that can really be said about atheism is that it's a lack of deital beliefs, based on a lack of evidence for the existence of deities; otherwise, we're just pointing out the problems with actual religions, which should lead directly into the problems with the world in general; except that, when we tried to do that, we got a bunch of EMail assuring us that flagburning had zilch to do with theology and that we should cut it out.
The easy solution, instead of exposing patriotism in any form as just another belief system in which something which can't be proved to exist as described is worshipped for no good reason, is to branch back out into general idiocy. People are morons: RFG is here to point that out.
Or, it will be. Probably within a week.
More later....
--Gremlin