Upon entering the world of corporate America there is only a single piece of advice I feel every initiate should be given and take as a grail.

Get yourself a micro-cassette recorder and tape record every conversation you have with your manager.

It is simply amazing how fast memories and communications improve when confronted with proof of the veiled threats, badgering sighs, insinuated chauvinism, and menacing tones that look so very innocuous on the written page of a legal document.

One more astronaut in
Black skin of universe
One more traveling man with
Heavy tired eyes, feeling cold
Feeling cold

Thinking around the clock of
Drinking on the job
Of the powdered food and piss bags
Never having sex, growing old
Growing old

CHORUS:
Headspace, alive and painless
Weightless and almost sane, I
Close my eyes, I
Become the sky, yeah
Headspace, alone and shameless
Can’t wait to find the faces
Left behind
In a troubled time back home
Back home, back home, back home

It gets so lonely you know
Weeks and months alone
Chasing sleep and space junk
And the dying stars I’ve known and loved
Known and loved
Through true decline of the
5 billion minds or so
Through mud slides and earthquakes
Blue one hold and rolls along
Rolls along, rolls along

[CHORUS]

One more astronaut in endless old universe with
One more second chance and
Wondering why he’s here at all

[CHORUS]

Bold are the ones who
Come over the line to fall over
The horizon
Never ones to fade away

And then it hit me
This cosmic pull and energy
It kind of makes me wonder
If I’ll ever make it
Back home

—I Mother Earth, Scenery and Fish, “One More Astronaut”

If one thing is wrong, this does not make its apparent opposite right. There are no linear scales in the physical world past mean old Daddy Time. They are convenient for us to draw graphs but they don’t happen in nature. Circles do. When you apply a supposed linear scale to a circle the opposites are the same point. Now, strictly speaking this is not the logic I want to use but I think you get the picture.

If someone puts a cup of piss and a cup of vomit before you and says:

The vomit tastes awful but it’s fairly nutritious after all. The piss is easier to swallow, and it’s cleaner from the ammonia in it anyway. Which would you like to drink?

And you say:

“Yuck! no way.”

And the reply comes:

“You have to pick one, that’s all there is.”

Well, don’t miss the point this time. Just because one is wrong doesn’t make another right. Just because there’s no obvious alternative does not mean there are no alternatives.

I cannot possibly imagine a more uninteresting subject. I simply must stop letting the hired help put suggestions in the topic jar.

Cocksucker is an insult that was terribly popular when I was very young. I remember how much I hated to hear the kids in the older grades say it and words like it. It was years before I would willingly use expletives. I hated to hear them so much, I think, because they are potent and have the undeniable gutter poetry that makes them difficult to shake off. They have fallen out of favor in recent years. I would like to help one of them make a come back.

I am going to attempt this end with an open letter.

To every foreign national who is screaming “racism” b/c you are now required to be photographed and fingerprinted to stay in the US:

You have never heard me bitch once about getting photographed and fingerprinted in Seoul b/c I was a foreign national living in Korea. I watched them let all the Canadians go through without having the same treatment but fair is fair. I know that Americans are more likely to do something bad in Korea than a Canadian is, so I never will bitch about it even though I didn’t like it. It’s time for you cocksucker Pakistanis, Arabians, North Koreans, and Moroccans to quit acting like little girls and admit the same thing.

Someone in North Korea recently made a poster that wasn’t very nice. It showed missiles destroying the Capitol. We were talking about being nice the other day and how maybe it’s important after all. I think this could be another one of those cases.

Here’s another Korean lesson for you. PDRK stands for People’s Democratic Republic of Korea. ROK is for the plain old Republic of Korea. Americans just call them North and South because that is a pair of adjectives we have been obsessed with since the 1860s.

Something that I think many foreigners are surprised by is that the freedom in this country means Americans are free to be profane. Or perhaps that’s why “they” “hate” “us.” We don’t beat around the bush, so to speak. We go straight for the mother joke.

It’s a shame they are such psychopaths in the PDRK. They have one of the nicest flags in the world. It’s simple, clean, and sharp looking. They felt the need to copy the US in the color scheme but what the hey! I believe we stole that from France after all.

If you don’t believe me about North Korea being psychopathic, you’ll have to buy a history book. If you don’t believe me about their flag, well, take a look:

This is a flag that I am putting on display for them instead:

If you speak any Korean you might recognize this second flag is both subtle and profane. A combination the French invented but the Americans took away by force some years ago. Just like their flag colors… say, no wonder the French don’t like us. The Brits also had the talent at one time but they became so subtle that the profanity went inoffensive. It’s another sad thing. That there’s a point where subtlety snaps to insipidity.

If you do not want to go the clever route, here’s another flag. It’s the same joke but just plain profane.

Please do not show it to your friends in the ROK. While their northern kin are maniacal baby-eating fascists, South Koreans are really quite nice, if you’re not black or dating one of their daughters anyway.

I’m going to say something a lot of you may have thought but wouldn’t admit it or didn’t know what the feeling really was. I really enjoyed September 12^th, 2001 through the end of that year. People were SO nice to each other. I can’t remember a time when more people held the door for me or said, “excuse me,” and, “thank you,” when it mattered. It was the only time I was full-on proud to be American since I was a kid.

Last night in the QFC I was buying a lot of things. What I was buying was none-o-yer-beeswax. There are a few places you can still read about how to turn a supermarket into a weapons factory (I feel so sorry for the poor CIA and FBI flunkies assigned to catch me crossing the actionable line — today’s not the day, boys). You won’t learn about the proper ratio of ____________ to ________ here, though. Damn Google for bringing you here!

In the market, I thought I told ya’, oh, Jenny, you silly millionaire. Anyway! Back in the market, I had a cart full of ____________. I already had ________ at home.

An average looking young man with a goaté walked up right behind me to the only open checkout in the market. He had exactly two items while I had approximately two score, if you will. His items were some irises and a bottle of wine. How could I possibly stand in the way of a poet getting laid!

I did the right thing. I waved him ahead. I don’t think my upbringing taught me to do it. I just think I learned it can pay to be nice. I had proof immediately. He smiled and said thank you.

It turns out the lady behind me was also short on items, one this time, and it was her birthday. I gave her cuts. She said thank you and we had a nice talk as you must have guessed or else how could I have known it was her birthday. I’m only psychic about your insecurities, and the future of the European Union. Not much else.

It turns out the next guy behind me was only there to buy enough beer to make it to Wednesday and talk about the band name he has been saving: “Flaming Star.”

I didn’t tell him it was a stupid name. I was nice! I gave him cuts and we talked about his Black Sabbath shirt and the lady’s birthday and the Kidney Thieves instead. It was great. We were all friends for 6 minutes and the checkout lady liked me for being nice.

It was not hard to do the right thing and give them cuts. Why does it seem to be so difficult for people to do the right thing when it’s so easy?

See, two nights ago I was late to get home and my car battery was dead. These two good looking young white men walked up to get in a Honda Accord near my car just as I got out my jumper cables to look for help. I asked them if they weren’t in a hurry to get somewhere would they please help me out. They said no to this 3 minute favor. I eventually got help but it took an hour of running around and cost money and made me even later to get home and take care of some important things.

The reason I really wish people would be nice is I wrote down those white boys’ license. I tried to stop myself so I could just let it go. Now I’m going to have to look them up and do the right thing. And this time I think it’s going to take longer than 6 minutes.

I’m not doing it for some purple dinosaur in the sky or some bearded peacenik Nazarene.

I’m doing it because it makes life better. More valuable.

This is something we have needed to straighten out for a long time and I think New Year is the perfect time.

You’re not a bad person if you’re not as pretty as the people on television. If you don’t drive a Lexus or even understand why someone would buy anything but a house if they had 60 thousand dollars, you’re not a bad person. You’re not even a bad person because you like things the Pastor or Priest said you shouldn’t like or that you want more than you have.

You are a bad person because you cheated on an exam. You are a bad person because you said you’d taken care of something when you hadn’t. You are a despicable piece of trash because you took credit for something someone else did. The world is worse. The entire world is worse for your lies or your slight. Maybe you weren’t lucky enough to make it to Kenneth Lay or George W heights, maybe you were. You made the world worse if you’re a telemarketer. You made the world worse if you’re a Senator.

And you smirk because you think, “No,” or, “So what?”

But you know it. Nothing can take it away because it doesn’t matter how many people you can cheat or lie to or fool. You’ll always know, whether they ever do or not. You know even if you’re only that out of work writer or that movie star. You know that you only got that far out of luck because you don’t know a damn thing about the world whirling past you. It’s where that little tickle in your gut comes from. It’s where the lack of satisfaction lies even when you’ve acquired something you long thought you’d wanted.

You know it. And maybe you can escape admitting it today. Give it some time. It’s not going anywhere.

I’ve never seen anything quite as sad and depressing as that. As seeing some young soldier on TV yelling, “Hi, mom!” Jesus, I thought I was gonna cry or maybe just skip to killing myself. What a sad world.

His parents must be so sad too. And ashamed. That he has no one better to say hi to the one time he is on national TV than his mother.

I mean how do we all manage to go on…?

On an unrelated note, my friend CM has something for you for the holidays: For the Twelve Days of Christmas: Twelve Additional Definitions of the Word LOVE.

Anti-semitism means anti-arab too. I wish to lowercase-g-god that you would spend just an hour a week with a dictionary or a science text.

From Merriam-Webster.

I embarrassed myself recently by posting a little thing which had nothing to do with anything that matters. It was neither absurd, nor terribly interesting to anyone but me and a few Capital-Darwinists. Inside jokes are intimidating at parties but foolish in print. I’m embarrassed again! for being foolish.

Someone made me embarrass myself further the self-same day. It must be karma. Life is finally getting even with me for shrugging the yoke of shame for so many years. I suppose I’ll have to accept justice in this case.

A fan wrote to me to ask a very important question. Though I receive dozens of pieces of fan mail a day it’s not often that it is so thoughtful or socially important to address. The question was:

“What are you, some kind of fag?”

Finally a chance to explore this fascinating topic. But where to begin?!

I started by checking the sender’s email address. I saw that it was from Canada. It’s important to know the context of any intelligent discourse before beginning so you can make sure you agree on definitions — what exactly, for instance, constitutes a “fag” — as well as boundaries for the discussion.

Knowing now where to begin I replied:

“not just any kind — i’m canadian!”

Goddamnit, I’ve gone and embarrassed myself again. I wonder if I’ll be able to sleep.

I have a friend who is a senior consultant at Microsoft. We swap corporate gossip because I’m a current nobody at… not gonna do it. Oh, hell. Amazon.com. There, you happy? He’s happy to be there. I’m happy to be home tonight.

We made some oral NDAs and were talking shop recently — sorry, no trade secrets are to be found here. I was impressed with some of the efforts Microsoft is making to improve their products before they’re caught out again with how sucky some of them are. This is unusual for Microsoft. They usually won’t address problems until they are widely publicized by third parties. It’s expensive to fix problems. It’s also unnecessary from a business standpoint. It’s not a significant problem till it hits the news and what are users going to do anyway? Go to Linux and learn how to install packages without a GUI?

In the middle of the conversation I had the insight I’ve been looking for for several years. I’ve been pounding my head trying to understand how a company which makes second-rate products at first-rate prices can continue to thrive?

In every category of software which Microsoft has released products, better products exist. They are usually cheaper too. No widely used OS is less stable or slower than almost every single version of Windows. I can’t believe any business ever put up with computers that crash on a daily basis.

More importantly in the age of networks, extranets, and every box with an IP: no current OS has more dangerous or more constant security problems. How the hell hard is it to check your strings are 255 bytes or shorter for the love of Steve Wozniak!? Can’t anyone in Redmond count that high?

Back to my insight: Microsoft always wins because that’s what, exactly what, they set out to do. Their plan, their purpose, their only goal is to win. Not much of an insight, you say?

Winning doesn’t take the best software. It takes the bare minimum that functions and can get to market in a hurry and be impossible to reverse engineer. Winning doesn’t take low prices. It takes leverage to force hardware vendors to bundle your products so that you can charge customers anything you want. Winning doesn’t take innovation. Innovation is expensive and time consuming. Winning takes patience to see innovation around you and then steal it once you see which parts the market is really going to go for. Winning just takes being the first to market, initially.

Playing to win is important. Playing only to win is the behavior of a troglodyte. Playing only to win means you can never be the best. Playing to win may be good tactics but it is putrid strategy. Never being the best, while simultaneously being the biggest, is going against natural selection. Going against natural selection is a short ended game. A few generations in it at best.

So I finally know Microsoft won’t be here much longer. Not as it is, in any case. But Gates can’t lead forever and I don’t think the corporation will find another benevolent dictator to match him. How much longer will it stand? How about 15 years. That seems long but they have the capital to stay in the game as losers for even longer.

You think it’s just a theory. But there’s recent evidence that playing to win isn’t even good tactics anymore. If your main goal is brutish, your corporate culture will follow. If your employees are brutes in the high tech game — well, all the mass marketing CDs the USPS can carry won’t save you then.

The Japanese like OS X. This is Apple’s new operating system. It’s not that new. It’s mostly BSD underneath. This is the stepchild of UNIX. BSD is free. BSD (and its close kin, the *nixes) has thousands of very smart kids who hack on it because it’s free, it’s fun, and it’s rewarding to make things. Free developers who love their work. I wonder what the average salary in Redmond is. I don’t think it’s that low. I wonder how happy the average perma-temp developer at Microsoft is. I think it is that low. I think that’s why they have a hard time bothering to count to 16 squared.

The Japanese also play video games. Largely those made by the Japanese because they have been doing it quite well for awhile. Microsoft decided that because Redmond was full of restless Nintendo employees they would also make video games. They decided to win.

To do this, they paid off a few developers to take their wares to Xbox-only. They put money into a proprietary hardware system with more computing power than the competition. They did the marketing and they tried hard to only miss a couple launch dates. They used all their usual winning tactics.

How are they doing? You already know. They’re getting creamed. It’s by a factor of somewhere between 20:1 and 10:1 depending on which sales figures you go by. While a single game like “Grand Theft Auto III” for PS2 sells 6 million copies, there aren’t even 6 million Xboxes out there.

They’re getting creamed because their tactics only work when they’re already in charge. Sony is in charge of the console market. When you are not in charge and you make mistakes — like shipping controls to Japan which are too big for the average Japanese player’s hands and sensibilities — the market punishes you. When you’re not the only game in town, the market will punish you quickly and severely. The Xbox is so far a very expensive mistake. Microsoft loses money on every console and isn’t making it back with the games.

The PC OS market isn’t a one pony show the way it used to be. With Linux’s rising availability of GUIs and support and Apple’s return to sanity with OS X, the game isn’t what it was 2 years ago.

Here’s something from our friend Google. I just did a search, in Japanese only, for Windows XP and OS X.

Looks like the Japanese are using Macs a lot.

You think that’s the punchline. It’s not. This is. I did the same search in plain old vanilla English.

You don’t have to sell your MSFT yet. But you might consider it during the first big rally of next year.

Nigeria is the cradle of black African civilization. At the same time the Picts and Brits were buggering each other in the name of Pendragon, the Nok were creating the art that would fuel rip-off artists like Picasso throughout the post-modern art revolution; which was more ultra-pre-modern than post-modern after all. If you see early African art next to Picasso’s work and also note that his radical style change came just after major African art exhibits debuted in Paris… well, let’s say the Art of Noise may not have called Picasso an asshole but I will. We don’t know much about the culture of the Nok but we know their art was superlative and peaceful.

I know this because my last two art history classes were Asian and African art history. I know what a fan ding is too. Do you finally see the value of a college education?

Amina Lawal of modern Nigeria had a baby out of wedlock. Her distant heritage is Nok just as my distant heritage is a bunch of stone stacking sister bangers. Amina is sentenced to be stoned to death by Muslim law. Not some vague provincial unheard of branch of Muslim law but really quite common Muslim law.

To every black person in the world who thinks Islam is the proper religion of black people, I ask, “What about the Nok? Are you fucking mad?” I guess that’s rhetorical. A good portion of Nigeria seems to be quite mad and not just because of Amina. There’s Agbani and Mohammed too.

The Miss World pageant was supposed to happen in Nigeria on Pearl Harbor Day. This was a coup for a nation only even remembered as a country by the rest of the world because of its famous Internet bank scam.

Nigeria won the right to host the pageant by having its contestant Agbani Darego win the previous. Nigeria could have been known for having the most beautiful women in Africa. You don’t believe me? Check it out:

That honor is going back to Ethiopia where it belongs because of what happened yesterday.

At least 100 people are dead because of the Miss World pageant and because a journalist at a newspaper called ThisDay published an op-ed piece about women in swimsuits that opined: “What would Muhammad think? In all honesty, he would probably have chosen a wife from among them.”

When he wrote that, it sparked riots. Lots of people were burned and hacked to death in the best West and Central African idiom. And you thought American journalists were dangerous.

A hundred people died and hundreds more were injured or maimed for a beauty contest. They only wear one-piece suits for Godsakes! All this death and pain for what? For a misunderstanding over lost cultures that the Prophet Mohammed has any business even being known in Africa at all. All over a simple opinion and a misunderstanding. It’s amazing.

I mean! If more than 100 human lives can be lost for someone suggesting that the Prophet Mohammed might have married a beauty queen just imagine how many lives might be lost if some careless individual were to suggest that the Prophet Mohammed took it in the ass.

By “spectacular” I don’t mean fantastic, clean, gorgeous or well-oiled. I mean it literally. A spectacle. A car wreck. An international caliber circus freakshow. Can’t take your eyes off of a single stitch of the thing.

Don’t get me wrong, again! I love what she writes most of the time. She has the Gift and her politics line up with mine 2 out of 3 falls. That’s a solid D+! I mean, Liberals are deceptive morons who somehow seem ignorant of the facts from the last couple generations:

Communism: 50 million killed [Ed: this is incorrect, it is closer to 100 million; democide figures per R. J. Rummel] or starved to death; Stalin, Lenin, Mao and all their freaked out kith have murdered or starved to death, at the very least, this many human lives since my grandparents were born. Economics doesn’t starve people to death, politics does. North Korea and South Korea have identical resources, cultural make up, and histories until 50 years ago when the North said, “Let’s give Mao a go.” The South is rich, the North is starving. The only difference at all between the two places is ideology.

Socialism: 25 million or so dead; ah, but you forgot! Nazi is short for National Socialist in German. Isn’t that funny?

Capitalism: well, peacetime citizens shoot each other a little more often outside Totalitarian police states [Ed: this is incorrect, the US is currently 23^rd in national murder rates] but the government, in general has only killed a few thousand citizens in 200 years, a couple hundred thousand aborigines and perhaps a few million foreign soldiers, mostly Commies and Nazis, oddly enough — let’s say less than 75 million killed, anyway. All in all, the easy winner. Wow! Who would have guessed?

Those numbers are unfamiliar to, maybe, most Liberals. If you’re of that bent, the comments probably burn a bit.

And that’s why I love reading Ann’s Stuff now and again. She burns them. She’s a raging case of chlamydia for the left-leaning. And it’s great to see. The Left has a lot of really strong propagandists and poets. It’s nice to see the Right come back swinging with such eloquent venom. She’s part Oscar Wilde, part Joe McCarthy on her best days. And she’s pretty! What a coup! The Democrats really need to re-learn this lesson. It won them 1960 Presidency and it has lost them a few since.

Then I realize, her vapid nonsense is pretty much as devoid of fact or contextually meaningful information as the reduced-price tripe of congenital liars like Chomsky. Then every so often you get the whiff of Peggy Noonan’s bad hygiene: God. The ultimate in fact-free journalism. And you remember, oh, Quail, Quaale, or Quayle or something, Reagan, CIA selling coke, Bush doing coke, Nancy mad-dogging coke, Nixon, Keating, and, Christ, the list could go on for many some paragraphs.

The point is, Ann has a gift for prose and zingers and the occasional insight, I suspect she’s being fed, but she’s not that bright; thriving on veiled declarations of mass murder being the answer to our woes and any other piece of sensationalist guerrilla-crap she learned immersed in her Liberal complements while growing up in the 70s.

Now, say what you want about my dead friend Ayn Rand, but don’t say she was a Conservative or Right-wing. She loathed them. She would have instantly recognized Ann Coulter as a wolf in expensive hooker’s clothing.

Ayn viewed the Left as basically impotent, like the villains of her books, only given any power, steam, cash, or license to kill through the acquiescence of others. She said the Conservatives were the only ones with the power to destroy this country. Smart old bird.