Friction and Harmony

I’m curious – does anyone else have a regular ‘dreamscape’ of their own? I’ve never heard of anyone else mention the likes of it, so I thought I would ask.

Let me explain…

For the past several years, I’ve realized that most of my ‘location’ dreams are related. One night I might dream I’m in a church, for instance. As I realize I’m dreaming, I also realize that this is the same ‘church’ that appeared in another dream some weeks ago. As I become aware that I’m dreaming, I can often recall many of the details of my previous locale-related dream… And if I were to go down the street and around the corner in my dream-scape, I know I’d find the house that was the setting for what I was dreaming a few nights ago. The parking garage I’m in the next night is a quick sprint away from the city-square, which is halfway between where I am and the high-rise buildings where I rode the elevators all night long last month. Then there’s the airport and the parking garage there… And the nearby industrial park.

Weird. It’s like I have my own version of MapQuest in my head – which is, of course, in all likelihood more accurate than the real MapQuest.

I really could almost, almost draw a map. It’s a large-ish city that resembles Asheville, North Carolina in its scenery and topology… I was struck by that when I went through there for the first time in my life with Mrs. Who some time ago. It was kind of eerie. As we drove around Asheville, however, I quickly realized that it definitely was not the real-life backdrop for my dreams.

I’ve also dreamed in black-and-white (at least lucidly) only a few times in my life… With these rare exceptions, all my dreams are color. I know this because I was struck by the fact that my black-and-white dreams seemed so… wrong.

I used to feel self-conscious and seldom spoke in accurate detail about my dreams, because at least when I was growing up, it was common belief that “everybody dreams only in black and white”. I felt like a freakshow because I never dreamed in black and white. I still remember a nightmare I had when I was a toddler – and it was in full technicolor. Naturally it featured demented Disney characters and a bright yellow chattering cartoon skull that was chasing me through the halls of my house and out onto the front porch, where I found my multi-colored Matchbox cars on the side-steps to the driveway – and I knew my Dad would be furious if he found them there.

Heh. Analyze that…

I realize that much of the relational-details of my recent dreamscape can be explained by the the dynamic nature of dreams, and in particular, lucid dreaming. But does anyone else seem to have built and maintained such a comprehensive relational dream topology?

So… Anyone?

The new ‘scope is great… 4-Element, rotating-binocular head with 10x and 16x eyepieces, oil-immersion 100x element that’s clear as a sunny day, full mechanical stage and iris-controlled condenser with filter cage. Just awesome.

So it was bound to happen. You know… The inevitable “test” for any… urm… male scientist. The obligatory ‘motility check.’ C’mon, I can see as well as any lab technician, and I’d rather… ahem… take care of it in the privacy of my own quite empty house, if you don’t mind! It was at question a few years ago – now it’s not. Still, having topped 4 decades, I can’t help but be curious.  You know…  From a genuinely medical/scientific perspective…  Really.

Stop looking at me that way! Dammit Jim, I’m a scientist, not a freak!

Anyway, I’m happy to report absolutely NO problems. Well almost none. While the very-abundant little swimmers who could were busy trying to lift the cover slip and throw it aside, I did notice a few… not so normal little guys. I’m pretty sure I never saw anything resembling the likes of them when I was a teenager studying BHA&P (yes, even in a Catholic school, we did the…um… “specimen,” purely for scientific purposes. Subsequent Reconciliation was optional.)

It seems that twenty-odd years plays havoc with more than the color of your hair and the addition of a few lines on your face. I learned I have my own microscopic freak show going on. Had I possessed a CCD camera (and thank God I don’t), I probably would have been compelled to introduce you to a little sideshow character I affectionately dubbed Toby the Three-Headed Gamete.

Amazing. And I’m betting Mrs. Who will have me crated and off to the “vet” once she reads this.

I lost several posts in our hosting SQL crash – as did Mrs. Who. She managed to revive more actual posts, but of course all the comments are toast. Damn shame, too, since comment-love is half the fun!

For anyone wondering or caring (especially you, Kitten) – I will get around to fixing Mrs. Who’s theme for her. She’s quite uncomfortable in that stark gray and white frump… Okay, okay – the psychedelic dice will be gone soon too!

I’m still holding my breath… I can’t help but wonder if our WordPress 2.1 upgrades – along with all the fiddling with the templates and such – had something to do with the crash. I’m hoping we don’t lose another week’s worth of posts and comments again.

That reminds me… Backup the databases. Again.

Better yet, I need to set a chron to do that for me so I won’t get suckered by my own procrastination. I’ll make sure to take care of that chron first thing… tomorrow.

Normally, I don’t care too much, because at this level kids mostly want to do something… you know… Boring.

I like science. No, I love science. But what passes as ‘science’ in these science fairs is often something else, like… oh, I dunno… maybe statistics?

Seriously, one of the proposed science fair projects involves analyzing the ratio of blue M&Ms in one bag and projecting that ratio over multiple bags to see if they’re consistent.

Uh, hello? What the hell is that? Save that shit for the ‘math olympiad’ later in the year, Einstein! And I’m serious – you eat ONE damn M&M you VOID your whole damned experiment… I catch you sneaking them under the table, you’re outta here! You got that?!

Then there’s the usual grade school textbook experiments – the baking soda and vinegar ‘volcano’ and the inevitable ‘tornado in a bottle’. Okay, the geometric bubbles are kinda interesting if you dig the whole polymers thing, but really… All the kids see in that is funny-shaped bubbles. Yawn!

I tried to get PrincessNO interested in something a little more challenging last go-round, but she didn’t want anything to do with my ideas. They were icky. Of course, science isn’t PrincessNO’s thing… (or so she likes to believe.) But now it’s Buck’s turn. So I said, “Yo, Buck! What about looking for something we don’t already know – like the way real scientists work. Something that we can see and test for ourselves… How about we try to kill stuff! You know how Aunt Bonnie (my aunt) and Grandma are always going on about that silver-water? They say it’s supposed to kill germs. Wanna do some kind of experiment to see if it’s really true? We can grow stuff and try to kill it, maybe even see if we can prevent it from growing at all.”

“Sure,” he says… without any marked enthusiasm. And I’m practically dancing – YES!!

Now all the other kids are jealous; “You didn’t do all that for me…” and “That looks way cooler than what you let me do…”

Hey I tried to get them – believe me. But the damn ‘tornado-in-a-bottle’ won ’cause it was one of the cool experiments the teacher talked about… But this time I have consent and therefore I’ve gone hog-wild – dragging a fifth grader through what is probably an eighth-grade or high school level science project. They’ve never seen so much stuff show up on the dining room table. All-hail eBay and damn the expenses! I’m having the time of my life!

How I ended up in IT is a long story, but science was what I loved most in high school – I couldn’t get enough. Microbiology was my favorite, but I loved dissections, too. I did every extra-credit dissection I could, including a requested ‘sheep brain’ that I had to order from the science department’s Carolina Biological Supply catalog and pay for outta my own pocket because the science department was strapped. (The effing varsity football team got all the money! Of course we did take State two of my four years there…) I ended up graduating with every possible science class under my belt that I could fit-in, and when there weren’t any more, I literally begged for them to create way for me to fit into my schedule to work as a lab assistant for the school’s two biology teachers. I enjoyed helping out with freshman and sophomore biology, AP biology, and ‘Human Anatomy & Physiology.’ Chemistry and ‘earth sciences’ were interesting (physics was way too much math and not enough lab work for me to consider ‘fun’), but my true love is still biology.

So we’re going to blow the doors off the school for this science fair project. Our thesis is “Colloidal Silver as an Effective Anti-Microbial.” I’ve got petri dishes, sterile swabs, a microscope and an array of accessories for conducting a safe, interesting and hopefully effective experiment. Of course we’re going to document everything photographically, since we’re not going to allow live cultures to be handled at the fair. Buck is going to learn scientific method and safe laboratory technique. He’s excited – almost as excited as I am to be sharing one of my true loves. Of course working with a microscope again is – for me – like running into a high-school ‘flame’ and realizing that the spark is not only still alive – it’s as hot as it ever was!

(Note: The ‘old flame’ reference was obligatory – Mrs. Who has already declared herself a ‘microscope widow’…)

Heh.

I’ve already done a little preliminary work with the new ‘scope tonight – identifying microbes in the fish bowl and laying a smack-down on them with a few drops of silver colloid. Works like a charm… (Of course now the ‘OCD’ in me makes me want to flush the fish and sterilize the bowl after seeing what awful stuff lurks there!)

I’ve never been one to throw a game of ‘catch’ or play hoops. I’ll watch the kids’ games, but aside from high school and college level attendance sports, I could care less about any sports – especially on TV. (Minor and very occasional exception – golf – go figure.) I play paintball with Goob – and that’s a blast. I’ve invested plenty into that money-sucking sport… But I’m especially looking forward to this. There really is something fascinating – captivating - about peering into the microscopic world to find something living staring back at you. Watching protozoa ingest and move and react. Showing a kid his own cheek cells or the structure and organized form of plant cells… Or demonstrating ‘forensic’ hair and fiber analysis… I may very well be a certifiable geek, but let me tell you, THAT’S how I like to have fun!

I really am looking forward to locating and culturing our bacteria, and then laying-down a serious microbial butt-kicking with my Marine-hopeful son. Bring on the petri-dishes and the pond-water nasties!

Oooh-Rah!

I just read this and almost fell out of my chair.

Julie Amero, a 40-year-old substitute teacher from Connecticut is facing up to 40 years in prison for exposing her seventh grade class to a cascade of pornographic imagery. Amero maintains that she is a victim of a malicious software infestation that caused her computer to spawn porn uncontrollably.

…

On the morning of Oct. 19, 2004, Julie Amero’s life changed forever when pornographic ads flooded her web browser during a class. According to the prosecuting attorney, David Smith, Amero’s computer began displaying images of naked men and women, couples performing sexual acts, and “bodily fluids.”

IT forensics is among the things I do for a living, folks. I’ve never served as an ‘expert witness’ in a trial – but as an IT consultant to several health care firms, I have been responsible for both condemnation and vindication of employees accused of computer misuse in the workplace. I’ve seen several terminations based on the evidence at-hand, and I can tell you that I always, always err on the side of the employee having been ‘railroaded’ by malware. I’ve never sent anyone up the river without being certain that they were the cause of the misuse and that said cause was evidenced to be an intentional violation of corporate ‘business machine use’ policy. (e.g., finding a ‘transaction receipt’ page on a shopping website in the logs confirms intent because they had to use a credit card to complete a transaction – online shopping is forbidden in the employee handbook.) Anything less than such solid evidence earns a stern warning and close monitoring of their network activity culminating in a ‘three-strikes’ ruling for the thick-headed.

The level of caution we must use in a termination situation has everything to do with the elusiveness and rapidly-evolving nature of today’s malware. We can employ every effort we know to prevent attack, yet despite all our efforts, human error is what screws us every time… “Social engineering” is a frequently-used buzzword for the newest (or the oldest) and most lucrative game on the block. I often tell my clients in deadpan semi-seriousness, “Pop-ups are the tools of Satan,” since temptation is what they’re all about. They devote untold hours to developing a colorful, chripy or innocuous something that appears on your screen…

And you think to yourself, “that looks fun, or harmless, or even necessary.

Just one peek…

It won’t hurt.

If it looks scary, I’ll quick-shut the window… “

Oops, too late. Even before the page has loaded, you’ve infected your firewalled, anti-virus-protected PC with something that was written only a few hours ago – a full two days since your last anti-virus update. Right away, it goes to work disabling your AV program, opening ports and establishing communication with it’s ‘Evil Host,’ downloading and activating more programs to monitor and report your keystrokes, the websites you visit, and the passwords you enter. Your browser is redirected through anonymous servers as your HOSTS file is modified to route your network requests… Your PC becomes a ‘zombie’ – mindlessly doing another’s bidding… Launching denial of service attacks and flooding the Internet with SPAM – and trying to propagate it’s denizen-bots to other machines on your network through port scans and emails generated through a hidden SMTP engine that has already read and assimilated your contact list… That’s it. You’re screwed.

And evidently, if an officer of the law walks up and uses an alleged ‘IT-forensic program’ called ComputerCOP Pro, you may as well have one last look in the mirror to remember what you looked like without the orange jumpsuit and prison tats:

…the prosecution’s expert witness has little formal IT training. Detective Lounsbury has completed two two-week FBI training seminars on computer security and other continuing education programs. He is also a certified user of the computer monitoring software ComputerCOP Pro.

Allison Whitney, ComputerCOP’s director of communications, explained how her company certifies police officers to use the software:

“They get a full hour of training, and then they’re tested,” Whitney said. “A lot of these people don’t have any kind of training. Their [superior] officers may give them some kind of low-level training. Most of the time we do the training over the phone.”

Seriously, it ought to be against the law to be so stupid. Four weeks of group training?? Provided to someone who basically knows how to open and save a Word document and copy a file in Windows?! Sorry. IMHO, this level of ‘training’ does not an IT-Forensics Expert make. And what does this “user friendly” forensics program do? Let’s see…

ComputerCOP scans the hard drive and reports on when each file was created or modified. Lounsbury says he is satisfied that Amero intentionally viewed porn in class because the logs show that her computer accessed various inappropriate sites while she was sitting at the computer.

That’s it?! It reads the timestamps of the files on the hard drive? That’s all?!

I sure as hell hope the FBI is more modernized than a glorified edition of Windows search function! Yes, yes, I’m sure they are. But they sure as hell didn’t prove it in this case. Whatever the FBI attempted to teach this guy (and I’m going on the assumption that there was more to a four-week course than looking at timestamps), I don’t think it’s sunk-in.

What’s obvious to me of this case is that the substitute teacher was the scapegoat for a local School Administration that was almost certainly negligent, what with the expired firewall license leaving “the whole system unguarded” and such. But criminally so? Hard to say, but the obvious civil liability from the potential lawsuits of angered parents would have added up in a hurry. They had to point the finger at somebody, and quick! This pretty much sums the case up:

The adults at Kelly Middle School, however, were shocked and scandalized. The next week, the school sent home a notice telling parents why Amero would never teach in the district again. She was arrested shortly thereafter and charged with multiple felonies.

Pretty clear-cut case of scapegoating to me… That she was railroaded by such idiots into a conviction, however… That’s the real travesty.

I only hope that when this is all over, she finds a nice beach house with a relaxing view – and maybe a ski-chalet too, if she’s into that. There is absolutely no waythat conviction should be allowed to stand. Then I hope she sues every board member and administrator personally after she’s done with the school district. The IT staff? Forget it – although they’re going to be the ones that ultimately get burned, I’ll wager. I guarantee you that if someone digs deeply enough they’ll find a memo denying the request to renew the license, stating that such expense “isn’t in the budget.“

I meander on with some technical ramblings below the fold for those further interested…

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1. I’m a terrible procrastinator – I’ve been meaning to sit-down and do this list for more than a month. So here goes…
2. My earliest verifiable memory was when I was only 9 months old: I remember seeing sky and a strange man through a hole in the ceiling of our home. We were having a “swamp-cooler” installed. That was August, 1966.
3. I was adopted.
4. In November, 1994, I became a Reunited Adoptee.
5. My birthmother is my best friend – I see or at least talk to her every day.
6. I call her MamaBear.
7. I’m her Cub – and I’m proud of that title.
8. I resent the guilt people place on me for “leaving” my adoptive family.
9. I didn’t leave them – I expanded my family.
10. I was my MamaBear’s only child – she wasn’t supposed to be able to have children, but someow I sneaked-in.
11. I have five (known) half-siblings.
12. I’ve met only three of them – and I keep-up with none of them since my birthfather died.
13. Three of my four parents have passed away – all within a span of 19 months.
14. I waited until it was nearly too late to get to know my birthfather.
15. He and I grew very, very close in the last few months of his life.
16. When we first met, I called him by his first name – by the time he died, he was my “Pop”.
17. Among the few things he left me was a Ruger Redhawk single-action .357 Magnum revolver. It was the same .357 Mag that he used to save MamaBear from a near ‘carjacking’ decades earlier.
18. I’m proud to own that gun, though I haven’t even fired it yet.
19. My adoptive family was… kind of scary.
20. Except for my brother, Bob – he was the ‘normal’ one.
21. Bob has Downs Syndrome.
22. He’s thirteen years older than me, but I’m still his “big brother”.
23. I’m proud of that title too.
24. I was named after my adoptive sister’s first two boyfriends.
25. I’ve hated my name all my life because of that.
26. My ‘official’ IQ is supposedly 134, but I feel stupid as a rock most of the time.
27. I’m extremely self-conscious of the fact that I never finished college.
28. But I haven’t yet decided what I want to be when I grow up. Oops – too late!
29. I wanted to go into medicine – until my sister married a doctor and I lived for a while with them.
30. He was a miserable sonofabitch – and made me second-guess the whole med-school thing.
31. My adoptive father went to prison in my senior year of high school.
32. That blew my hopes of going to college at the time.
33. My dad’s “business associates” once gave me a “gift” – some very expensive camera equipment.
34. Later, some of the same “business associates” held a gun to my head and told me to deliver a “message” to my dad – he had been cooperating with investigators while in prison.
35. When I went to the police about it, they said “they sound like bad people – try to stay away from them, but call us if anything happens.”
36. That’s when I knew I couldn’t count on the police for help in an immediate life-threatening situation.
37. That’s one of the reasons why I carry a gun.
38. I also carry because it’s my right as an American Citizen as granted under the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America.
39. I don’t believe the words, “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed” has anything at all to do with the National Guard or the BATFE. It is the original establishment of Homeland Security.
40. I’ve used a gun to protect myself or my family on several occasions – as recently as two weeks before I wrote this.
41. I name everything, especially my guns, my vehicles, and personal and major appliances.
42. My truck’s name is Mojo – he’s from New Orleans.
43. Mojo has over 22o,ooo miles, but he runs well and I don’t want to give him up – and even though I don’t feel like he’s reliable enough to leave town any more, he’s hands-down the best vehicle I have ever owned. Mojo is a 1997 Ford F-150 with a V-6 and standard transmission.
44. I was conceived in New Orleans, but born in Los Angeles.
45. I don’t consider myself a California native!
46. When I was adopted, I was taken to live in Utah.
47. I hate, hate, HATE Utah.
48. I’m Roman Catholic – which is just one of the things that made growing up in Utah such a pain in the ass.
49. We were the only Catholic family in the neighborhood – everyone else was Mormon.
50. In the summer months, the religious tension was offset by the fact that we had the only swimming pool in the neighborhood.
51. Even then, there were kids in the neighborhood I couldn’t play with because I was “*spit* Catholic *spit*”
52. The local Mormon “Bishop” lived three doors down from us – he molested my sister when she was only thirteen or fourteen.
53. His daughters – around my age – liked to “play doctor” with me in the pool dressing rooms.
54. Knowing what I know now about sexual abuse, I have no doubt he was molesting them too.
55. Did I mention I hate Utah and the Mormon church?
56. My neighborhood was immediately adjacent to that of a 5-house polygamist family.
57. One of my friends was the child of said polygamist – he had over 28 siblings by five “mothers”.
58. I witnessed what the Mormon Church says does not exist.
59. My adoptive mother was a convert to Catholicism from the Mormon church. She became a convert because it was my then anonymous MamaBear’s wishes that I be raised Catholic. That wasn’t a ‘binding’ condition of my adoption – she did it out of love.
60. My adoptive maternal grandfather was one of over 20 children.
61. He was the only Grandpa I had known.
62. He died when I was only four – although we had been very close in those few short years.
63. One of my most vivid memories of him was when he doubled-over in laughter while talking at the telephone. It was the police. My father had just hit a moving train while driving drunk in my sister’s new 1969 Camaro SS. He survived. The car didn’t.
64. I saw my Grandpa standing in the cemetary at his funeral – when I tried to get Mom’s attention to show her, he was gone.
65. Spooky things like that used to happen to me all the time when I was young.
66. So I developed an interest in the Occult in my early teens – mostly for ‘shock value’, but partly to find an explanation of what or why these things were happening around me.
67. As a result, I no longer doubt the real presence of evil in our world.
68. Ironically, it made me want to be a better Catholic.
69. By no means do I consider myself a good Catholic – I wish I had a much better grasp of my faith.
70. To date a girl, I once conceded to allow Mormon missionaries to ‘instruct’ me in their faith.
71. I got one of them expelled for continually touching his crotch while staring at my girlfriend’s chest during our ‘lessons’ – mine evidently was not the only complaint about him.
72. Ultimately, I ended up in my girlfriend’s living room with two pair of missionaries, their mission ‘president’ and their ward bishop all trying to convince me that my ‘notion’ of a Triune God was not scriptural, defended their doctrines of Mary as being one of God’s wives, and then there was that whole Planet Kolob thing…
73. After continually telling me to just read the Book of Mormon and pray… pray about the “truth they were revealing to me,” they acted offended when I asked them in return to pray about the validity of what I was sharing with them of my faith. It was like I had asked them to stick their heads in a pot of boiling oil.
74. Oh, did I forget to say I hate Utah and the Mormon Church?
75. I’d like to study more about Catholic Apologetics.
76. Sometimes I think I cogitate too much.
77. I think ‘cogitating’ only sounds dirty – unless you’re doing it right.
78. Okay so I have a weird sense of humor, too.
79. I don’t show my emotions readily – people tell me I’m remarkably calm and collected when I’m actually screaming inside.
80. Unless the emotion is anger and I want people to see it. Then it’s difficult to mistake.
81. I can make most people wither with a glance – and have been told I can be “scary without saying a word”.
82. I like being able to do that – it’s a timesaver.
83. This list has been a lot easier to write than I had thought… Even though it’s much darker than I thought it would be.
84. I thought it would be about things like the fact I commonly ice my milk.
85. Instead, I can say things like, “I’m not afraid of death because I’ve already experienced it.”
86. Which I have – I drowned when I was 11.
87. My father had tied me up and thrown me in the swimming pool.
88. He wasn’t trying to kill me – he was trying to teach me a survival technique he once demonstrated in a World’s Fair exhibition – but he was too drunk to notice that I had failed the lesson.
89. My neighbor resuscitated me.
90. I didn’t remember much of that event until many years later.
91. After the initial panic, I remember that it was… peaceful.
92. For all I’ve gone through, I’m amazed I’m not a drug-addict or alcoholic.
93. In fact, though I do drink, I simply can’t drink in excess.
94. Beer and wine give me an almost instant splitting headache, though I love an occasional ice-cold Corona with lime – especially with Mexican food.
95. My alcoholic beverages of choice are: Sazerac cocktail, Stinger cocktail, Crown, Maker’s Mark, or Gentleman Jack whiskey on the rocks, Wild Turkey Rye – chilled and served neat, and for a F**k-the-World moment: a shot or two of some top-shelf tequila – salt and lime optional but hardly necessary.
96. I’ve never had an interest in drugs, but I did unwittingly take an “acid-trip” once.
97. LSD was slipped to me in some food at a drive-in theater. (remember those?)
98. I remember seeing nothing but colors – light flares and ‘tracers’ as I drove my car home after the movie. That and the sensation that ice-cold air from the air-conditioning vent was making frost form on my arm…
99. My car didn’t have air conditioning – and it was July. In the desert climate of Utah.
100. I decided ‘acid’ was a cheap substitute for retrofitting a 1971 Pontiac GT-37 with air conditioning in the summer heat – but I thought best and never tried it again.
101. I had one ‘flashback’ experience while driving some months later. As I was waiting in a left-turn lane, I pulled into the middle of a busy intersection when I “saw GREEN“ – even though the light wasn’t – and I nearly got creamed by a truck.
102. I’m starting to feel a little self-conscious about releasing my “100-Things” list.
103. I mean, it’s pretty weird – all of it. Don’t you think?
104. So, how about: My favorite color is violet. No! Wait! I mean it’s… [*sproing*]
105. Oingo Boingo and Talking Heads are my two favorite bands – and have been since about 1980.
106. That’s 27 years.
107. Damn, I’m feeling old.
108. Wow. I blew-by my 100 Things List – and then some – in one-sitting. Heh.

*UPDATE on #104: It’s an evidently too-oblique reference to Monty Python and the Holy Grail for chrissakes! Sheesh!

Why is it you can’t swing an IR photon-stream at your TV without hitting a former Star Trek franchise actor?

Boston Legal was ‘cute’ until they deep-ended the show into a cesspool of weekly Liberal rants. I thought it amusing to find Odo, Quark, Neelix and of course, Captain James Tiberius Kirk all in one episode. That’s four Star Trek ‘regulars’ from three different series (DS9, Voyager and ST:TOS) in one wacky hour of prime time.

Now we’ve got Dr. Julian Bashir (DS9) and Tom Paris (Voyager) as Terrorist and FBI Agent (evidently good-guy, bad-guy) respectively, on this season’s 24. I do hope they never appear in a scene together… Typecasting being what it is, I’d be waiting for them to wind-up in a bar somewhere with Morn sitting glassy-eyed in a corner while they shoot the bull and take turns trying to hit on a trans-gendered symbiont… Only to find said symbiont dead at Jack’s feet 15 minutes later of course. And probably missing a bloody chunk of ‘neck-meat.’

Mmmmmm…. neck-meat.

So if we already have the ST ‘crew’ on-board at 24, and since CAIR and the Arab-American Whiny-Ass Closet Terrorist League won’t let us have what most closely resembles – *ahem* – real terrorists in the series, how ’bout we bring out, say… The Cardassians.

Gul Dukat vs. Jack Bauer.

Hmmm… Maybe. But not badass enough. He’d front some attitude, but Jack would inevitably hand him his ass in a soupbowl.

Klingons? Gowron vs. Jack.

Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. He’s bug-eyed and creepy enough. And he’s got a cool bat’leth to easily part a crowd at the local mall. But bat’leth vs. Sig .357 Auto? Maybe if the Klingon closes the gap quickly… Nah. Not interesting enough to be worth my while.

I think that hands-down, the most workable nasties would have to be the Duras sisters, Lursa and B’Etor. They already have one bona fide Klingon Civil War under their belts after all… Those girls know how to party.

Yup, the Chinese may not have broken him in all of nineteen months – but I have no doubt the Duras sisters would make Jack cry like a little girl no later than the fourteenth hour.

I guess I just found a reason to watch this season of 24.

(Hat-tip: LGF)

Engy Abdelkader, a member of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee from Howell, N.J., launched a campaign Wednesday to encourage Muslims offended by the program to complain to Fox.

“I found the portrayal of American Muslims to be pretty horrendous,” she said. “It was denigrating from beginning to end. This is one of the most popular programs on television today. It’s pretty distressing.”

Hmmm… I guess when the AAADC, CAIR and other so-called “Moderate-Muslims” come out and vehemently condemn the violence that is being committed around the globe in the name of Allah, I might, might consider such portrayals as inaccurate and complain to Fox myself. But as I recall, it wasn’t four Navajo, a Scott, two Scandinavians, three Germans, an Hispanic lesbian, three Jamaicans, two Inuits, a Japanese gay couple and an Irish midget that flew four aircraft to the destruction of nearly three thousand innocent Americans on Tuesday, September 11, 2001.

But at least they have someone on their side. [*spit*] Traitor.

Does anybody else think that watching a puma chase Kim was more plausible than the $#!T they’re wanting us to buy this season?

Jack is a pussy. The President (not to mention his brother David Palmer) got elected despite the liability of having a sister who as a one-woman act makes the entire ACLU look like a Young Republicans convention. Jack is a pussy. The President and his entire staff didn’t learn from one failed capitulation not to negotiate with terrorists, so they set-loose an army of terrorists in a second act – only to be ‘surprised’ again. Jack is a pussy. Mr. Do-Good thwarts a couple of Rampaging Rednecks only to side ‘unwillingly’ with the terrorists himself, THEN refuses to call the police while he’s roaming free, THEN he murders someone for the alleged sake of his family members who are toast anyway… Oh, and when Jack finally does grow a pair, he kills CURTIS!!

WTF was THAT?!!

The only line I liked from the ‘previews’ is General Nutjob saying, “If these people want to live in the stone-age, I say we should accommodate them!”

I agree.

This season of 24 sucks camel nuggets. Oh, and Jack is a still a pussy. Let me know if it gets better – maybe I’ll catch-up when it’s released on DVD. I’ll be watching Heroes next week!

So I’m back from Texas…

With a new vehicle!*