Sensible | Sensate

A belated happy 267th to the Marquis de Sade; let's everyone go make sense:

IF the plant leaks once in a while,
THEN almost no one dies of it,
SO it happens once in a while,
SO it is news,
BUT it is not important.

IF the plant leaks every day,
THEN many die of it,
SO that is important,
BUT it is continuous and we cannot sort out which individuals die because of the plant,
SO that is not news
AND no one wants to know.

C'est logique, non? -- what we use whenever a thing does not make sense at all. And what's a few roentgens between consenting amis?

The majority of the scientists at Los Alamos signed a petition that bomb that landed on Hiroshima be detonated at an unpopulated site in Japan, to demonstrate it. With all the times I've heard people discuss Truman's decision to drop the bomb, the option has never been mentioned.

Rudy's planning his class action suit. He called to say first that he spoke to some lawyers, then that he's planning to. I sent him the email addresses, let him go. If he thrashes enough, maybe he'll kick up someone I can hand this stack of papers off to. But I'm not running interference -- have to work, I say.

"How are you going to take care of yourself while you're doing all this?"

"Oh, my old man's got a house he needs painted. I'll just live in it while I paint it and fix it up. I'll have to bring some birds across, too."

Birds?

"Tropical birds. They don't cost anything down there cause they flit through the trees. People pay big money. Pet stores and them."

I mention the little legal issue; he's not dissuaded.

"They're easier than people. A little tequila, they keep their mouths shut all the way across."

"The birds are mum."

"Yeah. I'ts great; you can't let them get too much, though. Then pull them out of the socks soon as you get good across."

"Socks?"

"I visit my cousins, then stop off in Rosarita on the way back. I sit on the beach with the birds and the laundry and give the birds a little tequila. When they fall over, I pop them in a sock, one by one."

"Yeah. That's a few thousand dollars in that basket if they're all still good. "

When I was a kid, our parakeet always looked a little glassy-eyed.

Class Inaction

If LISA offered to hire me on permanent, what would I do? I need to exit somehow. It's like Fabienne talking about her attempted lawsuit. The way she put it herself,

"I tried a class action suit. I thought it would work, you know, many people die, no one cares. I had been a small role in a movie. I am young enough men will feel sorry for me.

"But I spoke to a lawyer, no? He said my chance of leukemia was a few percentage points higher for the background radiation of the plant. There might be some chance, perhaps, a class action suit. Who wants to live in court with cameras?"

Sometimes I even wish LISA would catch me, just so the fear would end. That scares me. Maybe Carl's take makes more sense. Stealing from LISA is like the drunkard's walk. (You may know this. The drunkard walks north with a street at his right and a wall at his left? There's a 50% chance he stumbles left, 50% chance he stumbles right. Where does he end up?

Answer: He always ends at the wall, of course. In my case, that means I leave without being caught or when LISA catches me. The hour basketball game may be just the thing. It's more a gesture anyway, best because it's pointless, as though we had no idea whom we were flipping off. Which I suppose I don't.

Orwell Rockin in the Free World ~or~ A Little Bit of Hairy in the Night.

Pity Orwell in his grave. Someone's going to have to dig him up and install a rotisserie spit.

LISA caught Jim today, assuming he's guilty or that his guilt matches their accusations. Something in his responses said Westinghouse, so SuitMan the PR Pro didst regale us, trailing a litany of consequentia. Suit:

"When you know something, it's hard to hide."

If you don't know squat but you're trying to think, maybe that's easier: they haven't caught me, so far as I know. They'd bust immediately were they certain. Why wait until after a leak?

On the other hand, one person might lead to another.

I worked with Jim for a couple months w/o camaradery -- dumb luck, or a strategy of his. I took him for stupid -- a misstep that starts to look like a pattern. Now I want to know what he had for breakfast.

I can draw his face back. A bit. He sat, so, hung his face so: Muuaoouuw

-- I turn from the keyboard to practice the gesture. He stroked his thin whiskers, stared frontwards during training

-- hopelessly corporeal meatpuppet with the rest of us caught in the geometric tines of LISA's will.

Mostly his mouth would go slack.

Pray he's guilty; maybe he'll get off. At least Westinghouse might spring for a lawyer with claws, something more feral than the Rex Todd thing that David Keogh got in Britain.

You may not know: The NY Times put Keogh and O'Connor's story wa-a-ay down on A-12 today. Had Bettina not double-folded the paper in front of that white blouse at break I might have missed it: "British Court Convicts 2 of Leaking Secret Memo on Bush-Blair Conversation." Seems George II spoke to Blair about blowing up Al Jazeera News in Qatar. Of course, the prosecutor's paid to play Pilate:

Diplomacy is a delicate and sensitive act, and it cannot properly be carried out in our interest when what one government says to another cannot be kept secret or confidential.

Even the attorney for the defense characterized the defendent's action as "misguided" and done "in a way that was likely to cause damage." The defendent had pleaded innocent, BTW.

Why, do turn your pretty blue eyes, Scarlett. How one does blush to see the delicate diplomacy of a Patriot missile exposed!

First the Il Deuce-style crotch-shot on the aircraft carrier, now this. Bush's handlers must miss their jobs at the Washington Zoo.

Maybe I could grant delicacy to the diplomacy behind MSNBC's decision to can top-rated Donahue -- delicacy in an Alberto Gonzalez kind of way: they had the sagacity to lie about it. Their sagacity makes me wish I'd watched the program, but I guess we won't get reruns right away. But no, a Patriot Missile right across the desk of the Late Edition. That's escalating discourse.