Of comments, communists, and commixture

For some reason, since I returned belatedly from my sojourn in ports foreign, I seem to be encountering difficulty with commenting on some blogs that I know I was able to comment on before.

Apparently, my google account does not have permission to post comments - but only on some blogs. Is this a new security feature? Something I should know about Google? Something I can fix?

In other news, I've been following the Occupy Wall Street protests with some interest recently. It's interesting to compare with the other significant popular political movement of recent times, both as a phenomenon in itself and as an artifact of media reportage - in the Information Age, of course, the two are inextricably intertwined.

The T.E.A. party coalesced around a single simple (perhaps simplistic) theme - that Americans are Taxed Enough Already, and that government must be spending too much if taxes can't cover spending. Its members by and large supported Republican candidates, on the basis that the Republican party is nominally the party of low taxation. Energizing the Republican base, it claimed responsibility for the 2010 election "shellacking" of President Obama's party.

OWS also takes a single simple (perhaps simplistic) theme - that the richest 1% are prospering in a time of economic trouble at the expense of the 99% that make up the rest of us. The difficulty for protestors here is that their message, while resonant and popular, does not clearly translate into a program of action. The organizers of the original OWS protest were keenly aware of this problem, seeking to identify a specific demand to which protestors could address themselves. Various proposals were made, by various groups, all of which can be seen represented among the crowd at what was once Liberty Plaza Park. Anarchists advocating the dismantling of government join drum circles with communists advocating its enlargement. Campaigners for racial equality share space with neo-Nazis and anti-Semites. Tea Partiers swap billboards with their former detractors. In one sense, there is something wonderfully democratic about the OWS protest - those who derided the T.E.A. party as an "astroturf" rather than a "grassroots" movement would struggle to level the same charge against the chaotic organism that is OWS. In another sense, the protest is dismayingly jejune - and, despite its longevity, it remains representative of a much smaller percentage of the population than it might wish. Neither has the clear rallying cry yet emerged - the general anti-globalist anti-capitalist themes persist, as they have for decades, without translating into the ballot-box power of the T.E.A. party.

Democrats clearly hope that OWS can do for them what the Tea Party did for Republicans, but there are several reasons for believing this will not be the case - not least of which is the significant cohort of OWS protestors who consider Democrats to be part of the problem, and not part of the solution. From a sociological standpoint, the movement remains fascinating; but until a coherent political or economic message emerges, it is unlikely to advance beyond a mere curiosity.

Sleeper

There is a legend told of a certain king, who with his knights betook himself unto a cave high among the mountains; and there he gathered around him his knights, and there they fell into a long sleep, for they were weary with fighting. Yet they slept, and did not die, for they knew that the day would dawn when their country would once again have need of them.

And long years passed. And at the end of many years, came there unto the cavemouth a shepherd, seeking after a lost sheep. And he saw within the cave the king, and around him arrayed in a circle his knights; and swords were in their hands, and shields before them; and their raiment shone bright in the light of the shepherd's torch.

Then saw the shepherd a gilt horn, set high upon one wall of the cave, and beneath this horn were written the words: "To Awaken The Sleepers." And the shepherd was sore afraid, yet his curiosity was as great even as his fear; and he stretched out his hand, and he took up the horn, and he blew upon it.

And there was a great sound throughout the cave, and then a great silence.

And in that silence came a voice, that was deep and strong and yet oddly cadenced, for it was the voice of the King, and the King's dialect was not the dialect of modern men. And the King asked: "who blows upon the horn that waketh the sleepers?" Then stood forth the shepherd, those his knees trembled, and spake, though his voice trembled likewise, saying: "It is I who blew the horn."

And the eyes of the King opened, and there was in them a terrible lambent fire, and the shepherd fell to the ground.

"Rise," said the King, and the shepherd did as he was bidden. "Tell me," the King continued, while around him his knights continued in their long slumber, "do the ravens yet circle over this hilltop?" And the shepherd, who knew the hills well, said that this was so. Then waxed wrothful the King, saying, "Thou fool! Thou hast wakened us before the appointed time! While yet the ravens remain above, so must we remain below. Begone, fool, and do not return!"

This legend, in its various forms, has existed since early historic times - indeed, the prototypical story concerns the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus (Washington Irving was later to borrow from the same theme for his tale of Rip van Winkle), whose miraculous slumber and subsequent awakening is recounted in the Qu'ran, where its telling mirrors early Christian accounts from such writers as Gregory of Tours.

The Seven Sleepers, I should add, have no relationship to the Seven Sisters - unless, perhaps, you're a fan of Gematria.

A more modern Sleeper emerged in the 1990s in the UK, building on a partnership begun in a philosophy lecture between Louise Wener and Jon Stewart. Although they were subsequently joined by Diid Osman and Andy Maclure, making the band a four-piece, the Britpop outfit are remembered for Wener's androgynous, breathy, and confrontational presence - to the extent that the term "Sleeperbloke" was coined as the band rose to prominence, and denotes unremarkable persons making up the numbers in an operation. The original "Sleeperblokes" took this epithet in stride, cheerfully donning interchangeable "Sleeperbloke" T-shirts for live performances, one of which your chronicler caught while the band was on their It Girl tour. The album of the same name, released in 1996, was a Sleeper hit but hardly a sleeper hit, eventually going platinum.

Among the quirky tracks on offer on the 45-minute album was on entitled "Good Luck Mr. Gorsky." Here it is:

The unusual title recalls a legend involving the astronaut Neil Armstrong, who apparently uttered the cryptic eponym when he landed on the Moon. Since I'm not R-rating this blog, I'll be somewhat delicate in recounting it; the gist has a young Neil Armstrong losing a ball over a neighbor's fence and, in going to retrieve it, overhearing that gentleman - a Mister Gorsky - in a heated argument with his wife over a certain recreational activity for which his appetite is markedly greater than hers. As the story goes, the young Armstrong arrives just in time to hear the defiant Mrs. Gorsky aver that she will perform this particular service "when that little boy next door walks on the moon."

Although 20 July, 1969, must have been a sleepless night for Mission Control and the astronauts' families, not to mention excited viewers all over the world, Mr. Gorsky at least may be expected to have slept very well indeed...

* * *
The story is apocryphal, of course. Those killjoys at snopes.com confirm that no such words were uttered by Armstrong - although John Grunsfeld, a repairman on a Colombia mission to fix the Hubble space telescope, did call out "Good luck, Mr. Hubble!" in reference to this tale. Neil Armstrong was the first of just twelve men to have walked upon the Moon's surface - the last being Eugene Cernan in December 1972, almost forty years ago. At least, that's the official story...

Drops of Jupiter

And did you miss me while you were looking for yourself out there?

~ Train, Drops of Jupiter

Yes. Yes, I did. Hello, folks. I'm not proud to admit that I hadn't taken a hiatus from writing, or even from writing online; I'd merely gravitated to writing for other audiences. However, this seems more appropriate, even if my inner Diddakoi chafes at the prospect of sitting in one place and putting together a solid body of back-to-back bloggage.

I love that I remembered the word Diddakoi. It refers to a Romani of mixed blood, a gypsy even to gypsies; I encountered it, as I have so much else, through one remove - this dimly-remembered fragment of my childhood was itself a dimly-remembered fragment of my father's when he recounted it to me, himself having been friendly with a group of Diddakoi as a youth. I think my lifelong love both of words and of secrets stem from the snatches of Romany patois he bestowed upon me - Pogadi Chib, more properly, although I didn't learn about that until much later, and for example not until long after I detected the Romani influence on the Polari of Round the Horne's "Julian and Sandy" - recurring characters on a legendary and groundbreaking 1960s radio show who conversed, like the gypsies, like the medieval guilds and priests and peddlars, like the modern-day moneylenders and politicians, in a secretive language, a cant, designed to conceal as much to inform. Julian and Sandy were hilarious; but they were also important to my education.

I'm digressing. This is, of course, what happens when you set out to write with no set plan but a great many words pent-up within you; and I venture to hope that somewhere along the way I touch on something of interest to somebody (even if I don't, I invariably find things that are fascinating to me, and I have a belief that nothing is done well that is not done first and foremost for oneself). This may or may not constitute a much-belated answer to a question Heather posed a while back, one which she must by now have given up hope of ever seeing answered...

But getting back to Jupiter - it features tonight in one of those myriad coincidences that make astronomy such a rewarding pursuit, in this case a close pairing with our own moon and the distant star cluster known as the Pleiades - more poetically, the Seven Sisters; rather less so, Messier object 45 - that is both beautiful and a wonderful excuse to explore some mythological associations. The Pleiades, being a very highly visible star cluster, feature in the mythos of almost all cultures, although I will overlook almost all of these to mention briefly before closing what may be their most recent contribution to memetics.

Billy Meier - his given name is Eduard, which may allow for inferences to be drawn about his choice of nom de guerre - was a Swiss farmer whose adventures included a spell in the French foreign legion and a marriage to a Greek woman named Kalliope (named, of course, for one of the Muses, a group of nine sisters in Greek legend; the muses, as you may already know, were credited with inspiring works of art and inventive fancy). His travels took him around Europe, into Turkey - where he lost an arm - and, by his own somewhat unbelievable account, to the Pleiades.

This famous image, which adorned Spooky Mulder's wall for several seasons of The X-Files, was originally shot by Billy Meier. It is one of many that he took showing a remarkable array of spacecraft, or as he calls them "beamships," by which Nordic aliens traveled the light years between Earth and the Seven Sisters - and by which on at least one occasion he claims to have traveled with them. Among his several Pleiadean (or Plejaren) contacts was a female named Semjase, after whom Meier later named a building where his non-profit ufological organization is headquartered.

Meier is widely regarded as a fraudster. There are numerous discrepancies in his photographs, and "Semjase," like several other obliging aliens who agreed to pose for him, strongly resembles humans of his acquaintance - indeed a dancer, Michelle DellaFave, has alleged that Meier deliberately misrepresented pictures of her in support of his contactee allegations. Perhaps most damning is this image, taken from a scorched negative that Meier clearly attempted to destroy:

This seems to show a model spacecraft on a tabletop, of the sort a hoaxer would need in order to produce lo-tech fraudulent images. Meier weakly claims that he constructed the model, and others like it, having been inspired by his own repeated sightings of UFOs.

Despite the apparent shakiness of his evidence, Meier does have supporters in the ufological field, and the idea of human-like "Pleiadean" aliens is almost as canonical now as that of humanoid "Grays." This support helps him bear the considerable skepticism that greets his claims - beside travels with aliens, he also claims to have gone back in time to meet with "Jmmanuel," whom Meier asserts was the real Jesus Christ, and, most recently, to have foreknowledge of an impending Third World War. This, according to Meier, is expected to commence in November 2011. Before you start hoarding tinned goods and making peace with your God, I should point out that it was also expected to commence in November 2006, 2008, and 2010; perhaps Meier is just another voice craving an audience...

And sometimes you take a swim/Found your writing on my wall...

~ Tori Amos, Hey Jupiter

Project: Blue Beam

Having just recently launched AgencyWatch, this seems a propitious time to turn attention to one of the more preposterous conspiracy theories to have emerged during the Twentieth Century: Project Blue Beam, an alleged global (indeed, supraglobal) conspiracy by the Masonic "6.6.6" group, involving their traditional puppet organizations, NATO and the UN, and amounting to nothing more nor less than a faked Rapture to bring about a New World Order. Craziness of this sort is so far-fetched, so utterly removed from anything in reality, that it naturally takes hold and develops a following in the fertile soil of the Internet - small wonder its progenitor, the late Serge Monast, published it online in 1994.

Loyal readers may have detected a certain willingness in this author to entertain perspectives that are... unorthodox. This goes with the territory when you set yourself up as a critical irrealist, but it's still important to draw the line somewhere. When an alleged multinational conspiracy has no shred of evidence for it, and moreover makes no sense intrinsically, it's worth taking a leaf from James Randi's approach and asking some sensible questions about it.

To begin with, let's look at the original thesis, and its author.

Serge Monast was a Quebecois, a journalist, a poet, and a beard-wearing loon, in no particular order. He founded the International Free Press Agency (L'Agence Internationale de Presse Libre, or AIPL), which proved more obliging in publishing his screeds than most mainstream outlets - these included such gems as Le gouvernement mondial de l'Antéchrist, The United Nations concentration camps program in America, Le Protocole de Toronto (6.6.6.), and, of course, Project Blue Beam (NASA).

As with most conspiracy theories, the Blue Beam argument is accreted around grains of truth - transnational organizations do exist that attempt to shape the global economy and establish a global currency; that operate as international police and international military organizations with supranational authority; and that seek to establish certain moral and ethical norms worldwide. The uncontroversial existence of these organizations bespeaks a globalist trend in sociopolitics, and there are certainly legitimate concerns of all kinds that can be raised against such a post-national paradigm. But Monast eschewed these relatively mundane concerns over sovereignty, self-determination, equality, and accountability, going instead for the deep-end paranoia of ascribing a specifically anti-Christian agenda to these trends. This agenda he identified with the Masonic/Satanic 6.6.6. group, which he believed had been stealthily concentrating power for decades (if the words 'Bilderberg Group' wandered through your mind there, we'll be getting round to them in a future blog). He described in some detail how 're-education camps' would be established for those Christians who clung to their beliefs and rejected the 'Luciferian' indoctrination into the New World Order. Prisoners here would be color-coded on a rainbow scheme, according to their nature and ultimate fate. Details of this, sadly, were not available when Monast published his magnum opus - it may be noted in passing that if this were all the product of a kind of demented genius, an especial genius attaches to the careful omission of readily-conjured details such as this, thereby lending a spurious air of authenticity to the revelations.

By contrast, the four-step plan of 6.6.6. to bring about Armageddon - to immanentize the Eschaton, to quote Robert Anton Wilson in his magnum opus - was very clearly elaborated by Monast. First, all archaeological evidence of existing world religions would be eradicated in a carefully-orchestrated series of earthquakes. Second, a hologrammatic 'God', mediated by satellites and black technology, would appear unto the peoples of the Earth to preach the New World Religion. In tandem with this, step three would initiate telepathic mind-control of the converted. The fourth and culminating step would be a horrorshow of "electronic and supernatural" illusions, designed to compel obedience or induce madness, or both. This "Night of the Thousand Stars" will see the Antichrist enter into his power, and fulfil sundry ancient prophecies.

Monast mentions Star Trek, directly and obliquely, at various points in this narrative, which is quite appropriate since all the elements he describes occur in various forms throughout the work of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry - himself implicated with the shadowy cryptocultic Council of Nine. Whether Monast was freely adapting science-fiction material to clothe his paranoiac fantasies, or whether he was acting as an unwitting agent of a genuine conspiracy with motives of its own, is a question debated by today's conspiracy theorists without resolution.

Serge Monast died in 1996 of a heart attack. He was 51 years old, and had spent the previous night in jail; he had complained increasingly of persecution by the authorities since the publication of Project Blue Beam. His followers conted he was killed by the kind of "psychotronic beam weapons" he describes in his literature; there is no more evidence for this than for anything else contained therein.

But then, there wouldn't be, would there?

Mojo's Mailbox #5

Events in the real world have complicated my schedule, which was already battling the headwinds of my considerable inertia and less than laserlike focus, but I do want to try to maintain something here on a fairly stable basis, so it behooves me to thank the various contributors who give me reason to. Since the last mailbox, I have been inexcusably indolent, but still several of you found reason to drop me comments and thereby earn honorable mentions here. I'm going to try to resurrect this as a weekly feature, which of course requires having something to intersperse mailboxes with. Fortunately, I left myself a laundry list of items in progress last time out, so I at least have the material - it's just a matter of spinning it out...

I begin with the Mindbender, at which Heather gamely attempted an answer, which I can now confirm was incorrect. A future post will discuss the correct solution and pose a new Mindbender for the cryptically inclined to cogitate upon. Heather has been an encouraging presence on this baby-stepping blog, and I'll be speaking more of her later.

Karen was nice enough to thank me for my fortune-cookie-lite offering on her blog, which I find very perceptive and thought-provoking, so really if anybody should be thanking anybody it ought to be the other way around. I encourage anybody reading this to imbibe some wisdom from her if your other commitments so permit.

The "Project" Project - which, like many a Project to be discussed therein, is on official hiatus right now, although persistent rumors suggest it may yet emerge like a B-movie serial killer in the last reel - kicked off with a review of one of James Randi's sting operations, and brought a truly wonderful aphoristic response from Laurie about the scope of "the natural" - Laurie's blog deals with holistic themes that blur the boundary between the scientific and the mystical, and is another I'd highly recommend. Heather, for whose comments I can't express sufficient gratitude - Pirandello wrote about characters in search of an author, and I think many bloggers are characters in search of an audience - spoke eloquently to another aspect of magic: the wonder of it. I agree with her that we can get preoccupied looking for the man behind the curtain, and take the fun out of having our senses beguiled and deceived for a time. I have a few ideas for future blogs that arise out of this comment, and I appreciate the stimulus.

Although I don't get out and about around the blogosphere nearly enough, and I'm going to have to figure out a way to discipline myself into doing that because there are so many talented and interesting writers out there, I still doubt I'll find a title that delights me more than Fabulosity Nouveau. Wendy's blog weaves personal and global narratives and always has something, well, fabulous and nouveau to peruse. We are now clearly engaged in a war of compliments, since she said very nice things about my blog back when I was still writing it - although actually the nicest for me was that she intended to go look something up because I'd mentioned it. The idea that I can serve as a doorway onto something new for a reader is very satisfying for me, and it's certainly true that everybody who's commented on these pages has done as much for me in turn.

Lee, whose multifaceted creativity is partly responsible for what you see here, anticipated one of my blogs-in-progress in referencing 1984; Orwell's examination of the relationship between thought, language, and political action is very pertinent in today's media-saturated environment. I've got a couple more Agencywatch pieces lined up for days when I'm feeling political, and hopefully I'll be able to address the point Lee made in his comment without getting fitted for a tinfoil hat.

And so to the Round-up, which, I was pleased to observe, earned itself a thumbs up from Bryce that I'm happy to return: as a fellow alter-ego, I'm always gratified to see a creative talent married to a personable voice, just like what I'd like to be when I'm growed up. Bryce is the latest in an already uncountably vast sea of gifts from the generous and artistic Heather, with whom this mailbox fittingly ends as it started. She tagged me with questions, which I shall herewith attempt to answer.

1. What's the first thing you do in the morning? This is appallingly soppy, but the first thing I do in the morning, which is also the last thing I do at night, is tell my wife I love her. Sometimes I use those words, sometimes I use others, but that's always what I'm saying (and what she says back, unaccountably). A Cambridge professor found - for such men are always finding such things, presumably in lieu of such other things as fashionable haircuts or matching socks - that we can read words, even if the letters are scrambled, as long as the beginnings and endings are where they should be. I find I can live through days on the same basis.

2. How old do you feel? Ageless, I guess. One of the factoids I like to drop in the path of conversations - much as vandals drop breezeblocks in the path of oncoming trains - is that I was born a blue baby; strangulated by the umbilical cord, and revived only after some time in the infamous blue light by a dedicated team of doctors to whom I am on most days profoundly grateful. This is too convenient a scapegoat to pin all of my oddities on, but prolonged reflection upon the circumstance has left me with an outlook that has elements of the fatalistic acceptance of the very old and the perennial wonderment of the very young. I am remarkably blessed by this, and one of the several side-effects of it as a condition, if it's reasonable to refer to it as such, is that I generally feel myself to be the approximate age of whoever I'm dealing with, although they invariably feel I'm either younger or older than is actually the case. Very occasionally, I'll meet someone who doesn't know Germany was once divided, or that the Challenger was a shuttle that exploded in the sky over Florida, or that music was once recorded on cassettes (I no longer even expect anybody to remember vinyl), and be reminded of my provenance in the linear-time stream; but for the most part I live either in the moment or outside it, and in neither wise am I much troubled by concerns over my age, or lack of it.

3. What's your sign and does the description match your personality? I'm a great believer in the parasimplicity principle - not least for the egotistical reason that I formulated it myself. The parasimplicity principle is itself parasimplistic, by which I mean that it can be expressed in myriad ways all of which mean the same thing in different paradigms: one of the simplest is one adopted, long before my strangulation and subsequent birth, by Oscar Wilde - "nothing is itself alone." There is a neat symmetry in the fact that one of the more difficult expressions of parasimplicity is the reciprocal of Wilde's dictum: that "everything is other than itself." This seemingly irrelevant prolegomena leads to an observation about the descriptions appended to the various zodiacal signs, which are in my experience sufficiently lengthy and wide-ranging that it would be remarkable if I didn't identify with them. That said, I am both a textbook Pisces and a textbook Dragon, to a remarkable degree in both cases. Whether this is an application of the parasimplicity principle, or merely another example of it, I'm not sure; and, happily, neither frame alters the convenience of fit.

4) How do you like your caffeine? I very rarely drink coffee - by 'very rarely,' to qualify, I've drunk perhaps half a dozen cups this millennium - although I drink tea, both in the quaint English hot-with-milk-and-two-sugars and the adopted Southern iced-and-sweet varieties, much more frequently. Almost all of my caffeine, however, comes from Pepsi products. I drink far too many soft drinks, but everybody has to have a vice.

5) Favorite cartoon character? This question made me laugh, because another of those train-wreck factoids of mine concerns my youthful fondness for certain anthropomorphic female cartoon characters (Jessica Rabbit wasn't my style; oddly, Brittany Chipmunk was). But, in a more - shall we say - cerebral sense, my favorite is probably the Pink Panther.

I now need to find some victims to tag in turn with these same questions... and that concludes today's mailbox. Please don't attempt to unbuckle your seats until the ride comes to a complete halt. Thank you.

Mojo's Round-Up #1

Herewith a brief culling from recent news items ...

Sports ~ Wimbledon seed Bethanie Mattek-Sands has something of a reputation as an avant-garde fashionista and, despite Wimbledon's famously restrictive on-court dress code, she turned heads at the Wimbledon player's pre-party in this little number:



The dress, designed by Alex Noble - famous for his associations with Lady Gaga and her, shall we say, eclectic wardrobe - certainly got attention. Whether her play on the courts - Bethanie is seeded 30th for the All-England Championships scheduled to start Monday, rain permitting - proves equally eyecatching remains to be seen.

Politics ~ Sticking with a sporting flavor, two heavyweights of the American political scene met this weekend for a long-awaited summit - on the golf course. President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner teamed up on the links against Vice-President Joe Biden and Republican Ohio Governor John Kasich. In an outcome that seems increasingly unlikely to be played out in Congress, Obama and Boehner both won - although victory wasn't assured for either until the eighteenth hole, which may well mirror the protracted contests in the corridors of power over the deficit, engagement in Libya, the lawsuit against Boeing, and a host of other issues great and small. Still, at least the Speaker and the President pocketed $2 each from their five-hour golfathon.

Animal Planet ~ To Montana now, and a macabre task for Northwestern Energy in East Missoula, where a power outage was traced to the unwelcome influence of a deer fawn... resting on a high-voltage power cable thirty feet in the air.

Tasteless college prank? Dry run by Santa Claus?

Apparently not, according to East Missoula resident Lee Bridges, who claimed a bald eagle she had seen around the same time the outage was reported was responsible.



Entertainment ~ They tried to make her go to rehab ... but for Amy Winehouse, whose career held so much promise when she stormed the Grammies in 2008, her very public travails with drink and drugs continued last night in Belgrade, where a shambolic and incoherent performance saw her booed off stage after what the Blic daily newspaper slammed as "the worst [concert] in the history of Belgrade." At this rate, the talented singer seems doomed to become another rock 'n' roll "What Might Have Been" - while successor artists like Adele go from strength to strength in her wake. Winehouse is the subject of an infamous New York sculpture entitled "The Only Good Rock Star Is A Dead Rock Star;" let us hope this doesn't prove prophetic.

Hero of the Day ~ David Lundberg plies his trade in a profession often associated with fairly unsavory activities and pursuits. But even a private eye can rise above the tawdry fare of photographing illicit trysts, and so it was when Lundberg successfully completed a two-month quest to track down a homeless man in Salt Lake City. Max Melitzer had been living rough for years and had drifted out of contact with his family - so, when his brother died of cancer, leaving Max a significant sum in his will, the family hired Lundberg to locate him and give him the news. Although Lundberg has respected the family's wishes for privacy and has not disclosed the amount of Melitzer's inheritance, he did tell the AP: "He'll be able to have a normal life, and be able to have a home, provide for himself, and purchase clothing, food and health care."

Officialdom of the Day ~ Meanwhile, in Montgomery County, Maryland, hosting this year's US Open Tournament, Jennifer Hughes of the county's Department of Permitting Services was acting to restore the karmic balance. Mindful of her duty - "protecting communities and protecting the safety of people" in her own words - she acted swiftly when she saw a threat outside the Congressional Country Club where the world's best golfers are gathered, and issued a $500 ticket to... a lemonade stand.

The six children running the lemonade stand - the oldest was 13 - were dismayed and confused. After a local cameraman spotted the confrontation, the county wisely elected to rescind the ticket. And what will the kids be doing with their ill-gotten gains?

Donating them to charity.

Today is ... ~ Father's Day, of course! The celebrations aren't confined to the United States; Pakistan is one of several countries that dedicates this day to fathers, although apparently the honors don't extend to fathers-in-law. In Chowkazam, Pakistan, an ugly scandal brewed as a cleric accused his son-in-law of tying him up and shaving his beard, a mortal offense in his religion. The son-in-law, Muhammad Imran, had borrowed a fridge from Maulvi Muhammad Hanif; when Hanif asked for it back on Friday, Imran flew into a rage. He said he would get the fridge - it later transpired he had already sold it - and then assaulted his father-in-law, tying him up and shaving off his beard. Hanif was treated for his injuries at a local hospital, but was more concerned about his beardless condition: "I am a cleric, how am I supposed to show my face in society any more?"

Imran is being sought by authorities; he should probably hope they catch up with him before Maulvi Hanif's fellow clerics, who are up in arms over the incident.

And Finally ~ The emergence of swarms of 13-year cicadas inspired Sparky's Homemade Ice Cream in Columbia, MO, to produce an innovative recipe that has attracted the attention of the health department: they boiled the bugs, coated them in chocolate and served them up to customers - apparently, they taste like nuts, which is quite appropriate since you'd have to be nuts to want to eat that stuff.

Whatever next? Steak made from poop?

Is this thing on ...?

Oops. I knew there was something I was supposed to be doing... I hadn't realized just how useful the A to Z Challenge was for keeping my nose to the grindstone, so to speak. There are actually a few bits and pieces I've been working on during my long hiatus away from this blog: if I were sensible, I'd parcel them out over the next couple of weeks to give myself opportunity to get back into the swing of things.

I am not sensible.

Accordingly, I'll be posting up in relatively short order a prototype for a new "Round Up"-format blog; an observation on Weinergate, which came and went while I was away but deserves comment; a second "Project" blog; and a lengthy counterblast against a Time article allegedly identifying five myths about our economic recovery. Plus, we're long overdue a Mojo Monthly Mindbender, and indeed the solution to the one posed previously; and there's a Mailbox to craft.

Hopefully, you'll still be around to read this; even more hopefully, you'll gain something from the experience.