from many friends who’re passing this viral image along online…
Tag Archives: story
Laserline News
In a shock that has reverberated across all socioeconomic classes in Canada, word spread that the Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, often tagged the “Anti-Environmentalist” and the “Pipeline Piper of Oilands,” has been caught in a personal relationship with a moose.
When reached for comment, Harper’s spokesperson adamantly denied the prime minister would interact with anything remotely resembling nature.
Over the past two days, Clath Colkarch, a famous moose whisperer, has spent time with me to translate some of what the moose has finally decided to confess.
LN: So, Clath, tell us more.
CC: Is your name really LN?
LN: No, but our publication refuses to let journalists use their real names or initials for posted interviews. The editors feel, and are backed up by the publisher, that putting the journalist into the picture distracts from the main event.
CC: Oh, well, then, what do you want to know?
LN: How do you first discover this relationship?
CC: Well, “LN,” I was working with the US branch of the IMWAUVAAA — that’s the International Moose Whisperers Association of Unemployed Veterinarian Assistants’ Associates, Amalgamated — which, when pronounced correctly, sounds like the call of the Albertan Pinstriped Moose.
As you may have heard, the heavy snows in the north this year have caused quite a few moose to go starving. Well, I tagged along with a group of Fellows who wanted to feed moose that were in the public eye…you know, to build a lot of goodwill. But mainly, they were wanting to find moose who weren’t too emaciated but were on the edge of death so they could put them out of their misery and take the meat back home.
In this economy, even the Fellows, life members of the Fellowship of Professed, Confirmed Fellows of the Vegan Dinner Table are resorting to eating meat, preferably from the carcass of a beast that has died naturally.
Well, we was hunting…I mean, we was assisting moose in weather-related recovery efforts not far from the PM’s place in Calgary when I felt a presence.
LN: A presence? Do you mean something spiritual?
CC: Oh no. There was definitely a large female moose stepping my right foot. It felt quite painful, that presence.
LN: I suppose as a moose whisperer you must experience these kinds of feelings often, this close presence with moose?
CC: Not really. The job of a moose whisperer is actually quite lonely. Ain’t much call for moose whispering. But it’s a duty I’ve sworn to uphold, at least until my wife gets tired of me sleeping late at home, when I’m home, that is, and not wandering the woods to shirk my household maintenance chores.
LN: I see. Let’s return to the story. Was this female moose the one in question?
CC: No. She was a beauty, though. Had my eye on her for quite some time so I was pleased she made the first move. I can tell you most female moose expect the male to be aggressive but I ain’t like that.
LN: Uh-huh. Before you continue, let me remind you this is a family-oriented publication and we may choose to edit out any questionable content.
CC: Oh, no problem. Wasn’t like the lady and I took our relationship much further than a few nudges and feet stomping. Besides, she was the one who told me about Harper’s mistress.
LN: Go on.
CC: I introduced the lady to the Fellows…
LN: Does the lady moose have a name?
CC: Yes, but she prefers to remain anonymous.
LN: Anony-moose, did you say?
CC: Ha-ha. That’s a good one. Well, the Fellows, they got one look at her, how healthy she was, and wanted to know if there were any more like her around. She being the trusting beast that she is, she led us to a harem out behind Harper’s country estate. Hidden, it was, in plain sight.
LN: Our readers will certainly be interested in that revealing tidbit.
CC: As soon as I walked up to the lady’s friends, they started talking to me the way moose do, knowing me and hearing about my reputation ahead of time, mostly.
LN: I bet you heard some good tales.
CC: Actually, the tails don’t talk. It’s from the mouth and from body language where I carry on the conversation.
LN: Yes, good point. About Harper’s mistress?
CC: Oh, she was shy to begin with. She was afraid she’d be ostracised by our species if the word got out. I explained to her that I’d keep her secret as long as she wanted. After feeding her a few snack treats that my wife has perfected for just these tender moments, the moose just opened up and told me everything. Everything!
LN: I bet you were shocked.
CC: It’s not every day that you get to hear all the gossip that a harem of locked-up moose has been sharing and re-sharing until they’re about to burst.
LN: I’m sure the readers would like to hear one or two tales…err, I mean stories the moose told you.
CC: Apparently Harper, tired of moose, has been eying a panda.
LN: You don’t say.
CC: Yeah, and he’s willing to risk his relationship with the United States to get his hands on a panda. The moose say that Harper and his wife want to make a threesome this time.
LN: A threesome? Now THAT is news! Anything else?
CC: The lead moose in the harem, Harper’s main squeeze, so to speak, says that rolling in the hay with Harper is not as great as you’d think it would be. All Harper wants to do is talk about which politician he has it in for next. Takes away from the romantic mood.
Harper’s mistress says that she misses the days of the strong, silent types that most male moose have become, even though at the time she thought she wanted more conversation and less competition amongst the guys about who has the largest set of antlers. Now that she has a male who’s more conversation than antler, it’s less thrilling.
Besides, she fears he’s left her for a panda. And that’s about as low an insult as a moose can take. I’m afraid she’s going to try to starve herself to death to get down to the size of a panda. I tried explaining to her that pandas are big-bellied and never shave but she won’t listen. She just repeats the height and weight comparison between female moose and female pandas.
I think the straw that broke the back on this one was when the mistress overheard Harper referring to her at “that cow” on a mobile phone. At that point, she lost it and put the word out to find me.
LN: Thrilling! Absolutely thrilling! Now, one more question. I know your reputation is gold but do you have any solid evidence that backs up what this ‘mistress’ of Harper’s has told you?
CC: Of course. We set up several webcams.
LN: Webcams? That’s marvelous.
CC: But the video is rather explicit. We have images of Harper brushing his mistress’ coat, feeding her by hand, and…
LN: Is that it?
CC: You did say this was a family publication, didn’t you?
LN: Yes.
CC: Well, the rest of the video has been edited for your readers. If you want more, you’ll have to buy a copy of “Moose on the Loose: the untold story of Stephen Harper and his harem of ‘female cows,'” available for sale next week.
LN: I know our readers are anxiously awaiting the release of that book.
CC: The profit from the book goes to repatriating Harper’s harem to their natural surroundings.
LN: Great idea. Thank you, Clath, for taking the time to talk with us.
CC: My pleasure. Is my mike still on? No? Good, ’cause I’ve got a case of itches from these moose fleas that’d make a bear cry.
LN: Next week, we interview Chun Li, world-famous panda whisperer, about allegations of a ménage à trois taking place at the highest rank of political office here in Canada.
Until next time, keep those rumours pouring in and we’ll investigate the ones that increase our readership the most, which, in turn, make me a very rich person who wouldn’t dare consort with any of you readers unless you, too, ride in limousines and take baths in champagne.
Check our website for videos of today’s interview as well as in-depth analysis of the shocking sight of Harper intimately interacting with his moose mistress!
Does your government put a price on life?
Do sets of states of energy have an equivalent value in a labour/investment credit system?
This paragraph implies as much:
The Obama administration says insurers can provide birth control for free because contraception reduces costs for them overall by preventing expensive-to-cover pregnancies, as well as reducing the risk of ovarian cancer.
“It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.” — H.L. Mencken
“The price of freedom of religion, or of speech, or of the press, is that we must put up with a good deal of rubbish.” — Robert Jackson
“The word ‘good’ has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.” — G.K. Chesterton
“The art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of citizen to give to the other.” — Voltaire
“If you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many, it’s research.” — Wilson Mizner
“I don’t care what is written about me so long as it isn’t true.” — Dorothy Parker
Canadian Mist-ery
Blue sets the mood for today — a happy colour.
Guest Post by Ashleigh Brilliant
received via email:
Feb 9 2012
Dear Friends,
Although my background is Jewish, I am, as you may have gathered, not at all religious. But I have always said that, if I were a Christian, I would be a Quaker. This goes back to my days as a Conscientious Objector, when I became aware of the exemplary work Quakers do, not only in resisting war, but in giving truly practical help to suffering people all over the world.
Once or twice, back then, I attended a Quaker “Meeting” — but I found it awkward, and rather boring, just to sit in silence, which is what most of the Meeting consisted of.
Recently, however, I discovered that there is a Quaker meeting-place here in Santa Barbara, very near my usual walking route between home and office. Quakers also call themselves “Friends” — and it occurred to me that this might be a good place for me to make some new local friends, of whom I seem to have run sadly short lately. — But I was worried about those tedious long silent sessions.
Anyway, I decided to give it a try, and for about the last five Sundays I have put in an appearance, and sat through the entire proceedings. The result has been in one way a very pleasant surprise. What I found was that the hour of silence which I had dreaded was not tedious at all, and in fact passed incredibly quickly. Sitting there with eyes closed and just letting my mind roam, I can never believe that a whole hour has gone by.
The only trouble was that the silence was not unbroken. At a Quaker meeting, anybody can stand up and speak — and I find myself regretting that we can’t just have a wholly quiet hour.
As a further irony, I must also tell you that although the people have indeed been friendly, so far I haven’t actually made any friends.
All the best,
Ashleigh Brilliant
P.S. If you are still planning to look at my 1946 diary, which I sent you on Dec. 24, may I suggest that you do so soon, because 1947 is almost ready to go, and 1948 (when I was 14) is in the works. I think I can promise you that each succeeding year will be a little more readable.
A Confession To Make
I have a confession to make.
For several months now, my wife and I have been listening to the Harry Potter book series on audio CD while we’ve ridden together in my wife’s Toyota Camry.
Tonight, we finished the last CD of the last book, coincidentally in the first full week of release of a film starring Daniel Radcliffe.
No more ‘arry Potter voice impersonations by Jim Dale, a great reader and probably the best parent a kid could have read a book at bedtime.
Now I can get back to writing the life of seven billion without having a mental comparison of my writing against that of the children’s book author, J.K. Rowling.
Of course, my wife and I will ride in unusual silence when together in her car.
Time to return to the story where my contacts around the world feed me their autobiographical snippets that often involve us common folk and sometimes the lives of those who claim to be our leaders.
Together, we can tell it like it really is, no matter how messy, uninspiring or truly coincidental, and not how others would have us rewrite the narrative of our lives into so-called biographical/purposeful history.
All while leaving space for us to have hope and plan for a better future.
My job here’s not to be popular or well-liked.
In fact, it’s not a job at all.
It’s who I am.
Who I say I’m meant to be.
Just like the other seven billion of us, eh?
BTW, I went to the doctor’s office earlier this week to see about a viral infection called bronchitis and was prescribed an antibiotic. If nothing else, I guess I’m “curing” my GI tract.
The Gilded Ageless Ones
She sighed.
Month after month, she and her mother arranged, managed and attended about four weddings a weekend, on average.
Herethy looked at the current mess.
A drunk bride and groom.
A conservative Baptist church and an even more conservative pastor.
But most importantly, cans of beers everywhere, hidden in nooks and crannies, out of sight of the pastor and the church elders.
Herethy’s mother could see the look of concern in the pastor’s eyes as he performed the marriage ritual.
After the wedding, she pulled the pastor aside before he walked downstairs to the reception about to take place in the basement fellowship hall.
“Pastor, we have a problem.”
“I’ll say. What’s gotten into those kids? I’ve never seen such wild looks in eyes of two newlyweds. Of course, I consider that a good thing. Most likely means they’re still pure and are really looking forward to their honeymoon.”
“Well, sir, that could be the issue. But I think the real problem is something else.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes, sir. You see, Pastor, the wedding party has brought cases of beer into the church…”
“Alcohol?! In the house of the Lord?! Never!”
“Yes, sir, I agree.”
“Did you put them up to this?”
“No, sir. I neither condone nor provide alcohol for any of the hundreds of weddings over which I’ve presided.”
“Then how do you know…?”
“It’s my daughter, Pastor. She went downstairs to prepare the punch and saw cases of beer under the kitchen counter. Now, I know and you know that alcohol is forbidden so when my daughter told me, I…well, I knew I needed your help. Is there someone you can trust to help me without the wedding guests finding out?”
“Someone I can trust?”
“Yes, sir.”
“To do what?”
“Well, to get rid of the beer.”
“Hmm…let me see. This sort of gossip will spread like a hot syrup over my wife’s good pancakes. I suppose William, one of the senior deacons, will keep this under his belt.”
“Shall I go and fetch him?”
“No, let me.”
Minutes later, while Herethy kept her hand on the fellowship hall door under the pretense of keeping the guests out until the food was ready and the post-wedding photographs had been finished, the pastor, senior deacon and Herethy’s mother filled trash bags with empty cans, full cans and cases of beer, hauling them to Herethy’s mother’s van for later disposal.
After the reception, the pastor thanked Herethy for being a good Christian girl. He also scolded the bride and groom privately, telling them he hoped they had a child like Herethy one day who would keep someone else’s wedding from becoming a disaster, and sent them on their way.
The marriage lasted three months, less time than the beer had to spoil while packed under garbage in the landfill outside Knoxville.
Herethy says most other weddings were not as memorable, although she remembers a few times when brides, grooms or members of the wedding party would lock their knees and pass out.
The life of a wedding planner’s daughter, although busy, was not all bad in retrospect. A child like that grows up quickly, learning the secrets of other people’s lives in a hurry and knowing how to keep those family secrets from seeing the light of day.
Important traits and habits for an adult corporate leader, mother, and future politician like Herethy.
Wouldn’t you like to know who she is?
The Recruit
The song ended.
Shirts clinging to their warm bodies, the dancers stepped off the floor, Reid giving a couple of hard smacks of his black-and-white spectator shoes before plopping down onto a plastic chair.
“Whew! Whatta number, huh?”
His wife nodded, taking a large sip of water. “You bet. I’m going outside to cool off.”
“You do that.” He twirled his matted, moussed blond hair into a double ducktail curl, then pulled his goatee down to a point.
He turned to Lee, sitting a couple of chairs over. “So, Lee, you been to the site yet?”
“Huh?”
“interpunk.com. You know… I can see you don’t remember. So you can find some patches to sew on your denim jacket!”
“Yeah. I mean, no.”
“But dude…”
“The site’s ‘hot.'”
“No way.”
“Way. After you mentioned the site, I called a few friends who set up an IP trace. I can’t go near it, there’re so many eyes on it, it’s like it’s on a big stage with lots of spotlights. I’d be caught in a few nanoseconds.”
“Tough, dude, tough.”
“Yeah.”
“You gonna modify your jacket anyway?”
“And ruin my good looks?”
“Your ‘good looks’? Right…”
Lee ran his right hand through his carrot-red hair, shaking out beads of sweat. He looked around and no one seemed to be in earshot. “Did the message get through?”
Reid gave him a comical ‘Are you kidding?’ look — scrunched-up face, raised eyebrows, pursed lips and slight smile.
“Good. When’s the drop?”
Reid’s wife, May, walked back in. “It’s cold out there! Must be close to freezing.”
Reid nodded. “Uh-huh. And?”
May threw a glove in his face. “And… you can sleep outside in the car tonight!”
They laughed and May turned to grab a friend, Joe, to dance a Lindy Hop while Reid and Lee continued talking.
Reid wiggled his eyebrows. “Well, there are some complications.”
“I don’t care. Are you or are you not going to make the drop?”
“When was the last time you delivered something via dark matter conversion?”
“Never. But that’s not my problem.”
“Maybe not but I thought your people were going to help me. I detailed the whole thing in a product description for you on the website. Can’t you spoof an IP address or something? Isn’t that your specialty?”
“Normally, yes. But they’ve put an electromagnetic spectrum sensor array around me so that any way I try to get a signal through, they know it.”
“No kidding?”
“Yeah. Why do you think I’m using voice right now?”
“I don’t know. I thought you wanted to revert to old-fashioned ways, kinda in line with the ragtime dance show theme tonight.”
“I’d much rather we use our wireless head implants. You know that. Much more secure and less easy to detect visually. But the sensor array is sensitive enough to pick up those wavelengths.”
“Funny, isn’t it, that they can detect all these fancy ways you’ve created to communicate with us but they can’t follow a simple conversation?”
“They don’t believe I’d risk the effort.”
“Crazy. Hey, I think your wife is nodding at you to hit the dance floor.”
“Yeah. Look, just make the drop. For appearances, if nothing else.”
“No problem.”
“And make sure the new kid goes along. The attrition’s getting so bad that we gotta keep fresh blood on the fast track training cycle.”
“Man, chill. It’s taken care of.”
Lee nodded, stood up and walked over to where his wife was chatting with some girlfriends of hers.
“You ready?”
She held out her hand.
Lee spun Karen into his arms and out to a walking Charleston move until they found an open spot on the dance floor, where he absentmindedly thought about a painting titled “Hearing Damage” by a friend of his.
You are the change you want to see in your pocket…
…so you have money to buy a snack and feed your next change.
Some friends and family like seeing themselves here.
Some don’t.
For instance, let me give you the background information on a character currently under construction:
She is an aerospace engineering student specializing in propulsion with a minor in fluid dynamics, she’s told me (specifically, according to her online CV, working on obtaining her Graduate Degree from the local university; studying in the subject of propulsion with the intention of investigating this subject further in pursuing her PhD). She has worked on projects involving vibrational analysis, voltammetry, and rocket engine development. In addition, she has experience with diesel engine mechanics and worked in manufacturing prototype engineering. She has moved new product down the assembly line and retooled the stations as needed.
On top of all that, she can dance. In fact, she’s good enough to teach others the basics of many dance styles such as waltz, tango and foxtrot.
She has her shortcomings, including a lack of strong computer programming skills.
This is a strong character and deserves a prominent place in the ongoing story of our parallel universe in this blog that so closely matches the “real” universe in which you live and read this blog, that you should find it difficult to tell the two apart.
However, in your universe, people can divine their futures by reading horoscopes, tarot cards, tea leaves, premonitions, palms, crystal balls, signs from omniscient beings and other magical means of determining the precise condition of their states of energy in another point in spacetime, all while taking everything else into consideration a little fuzzily.
In the universe of this blog, the future is not divined. Here, the future is calculated with a certainty measured by error rates and levels of confidence.
You exist in both universes simultaneously. In fact, one is a subset of the other (you’re never quite sure which, of course).
Your behaviour is identical across the universes.
The difference is a matter of interpretation only.
In this universe/blog, we have already figured out the consequence of the United States being independent of Middle East oil reserves by 2030. We know what will happen when China, India and Japan compete for external sources of energy while Russia, Brazil and the United States don’t.
In your universe, the outcome is not as predictable. There are always those long tails, black swans, outliers and other terms that loosely describe the indescribable.
Here, we’ve analysed every one of the creditors who hold Greek debt and broken down the effect of Greece defaulting at the individual debtor/creditor level, basically turning imaginary entities such as bonds into other imaginary entities such as REITs, giving pieces of what used to be Greece to creditors for their personal enjoyment and/or profitmaking schemes, turning some debtors into virtual slaves for life.
You will probably do much the same, creating economic zones that cut across geographical regions and put people in touch with their feelings as they become integrated with the creditors who own their livelihoods and have direct control of their emotional states from now on.
Let us return to the character under development. She needs a name, one that has no specific meaning in any language you’ve heard so I can’t represent her name or label using the symbol set of the language in current use.
In fact, I can’t use anything in the visible spectrum of electromagnetic radiation that allows those with working eye-to-optic-nerve-to brain connections to see the symbols in front of you and understand them as words, phrases and sentences that you see as ideas forming a storyline.
So we have a quandary now, don’t we? The storyline has moved outside the boundaries set by this blog.
Therefore, we must look at the story from a new perspective, one that will stretch beyond your imaginative powers, possibly, and take us to a medium that does not yet exist as a readily-available format on the World Wide Web.
If I thought 2011 was not going to be easy, 2012 is downright next to impossible, very close to incredible in the true sense of the word.
All because we have a lot of catching up to do to reach an important milestone 13967 days from now on our way to the year 3011 (which, as you know, is not really the year 3011 but we can use that conventional correlation for the time being).
Are you ready to move into the realm of understanding that eliminates the slow communication method of light and sound?
Not all of you, I see.
Well, for those of you who aren’t ready, we can proceed with this blog. I had already anticipated this moment and prepared a network of pathways that keep all seven billion of us moving in the right direction even if some of us look like we’re moving at the speed of light, barely discernible as we bounce across the local parts of either universe.
For those of you who are ready, I’ll prepare a list of the items you’ll need to keep up and apologize to you ahead of time that we’ll need to communicate at a speed where normal speech seems unnecessarily slow and uncomfortably interrupts us when we have to deal with the old day-to-day activities that others require of us occasionally.
Now is the time that we split into subsets.
I’ll show up here every once in a while to keep most of you updated while the others accelerate on ahead, a virtual form of time travel.
From this point forward, this blog tells the tale of the intersection of two subsets. Two separate blogs — one in a spacetime contortion that goes beyond concepts like Internet2, and one similar to this one’s past entries — will tell the tales of the subsets individually.
Talk to you soon.
Self vs. Others
While designing a simulation of our global network of members of one species interconnected with the rest of the solar ecosystem, I am, at the same time, a member of that species, a node in the simulation and an inside/outside observer of the simulation/ecosystem.
Sometimes, I forget my position.
Am I stationary?
Am I a moving target?
Am I influencing more than I think I am influencing? Or less?
Do I see myself from any one of the neutral observer positions that others take more easily than I?
Do I exist?
Well, that last one, I know the answer to. I do not exist.
However, as a participant in local representative government, I have a voice, do I not?
Can I not ask the same questions as these two, this one, or this?
What about this, instead?
Maybe I should crowdsource all my thoughts, including in other languages?
A cog in a machine am I, happiness just another feature, data point or attribute in an E-A-V model database.
- Over 6000 applications for the next U.S. astronaut slots…
- A person climbing 37 km for the highest balloon flight and freefall…
- The Muslim Brotherhood promising not to “Islamicise” Egypt…
- Iran pressuring India to commit to gas field production/sales…
- Eye-tracking biometrics the latest consumer commodity addition…
- A man chopping his two sons with a hand-axe before burning him and his children in a gas explosion at home…
- A kid choking another kid to death just to see what killing someone else feels like…
And many people working at retail establishments to thank…
All of these, and more, to fit into a 1000-year projection looking back at us from an unemotional viewpoint, not asking why, because all the changes in states of energy led to that precise moment of observation 1000 years later.
treetrunkdings 