Well so, late this afternoon, after days and weeks of my pounding this poor keyboard til I had to tape half the consonants back on, and scraping the mouse thing around til it wore a damn hole, all the while blessing and cursing by turns the I'm guessing real nice but for sure accident-prone programmers at Movable Type, I heard this kachug kachug kaCHUG bwaaaAAAAAAAA sound coming out of my PC, and then from behind my monitors come a flood of grayish weapons-grade smoke, pouring in a layer out across my whole desk and down off the edges like off some hippy's porch with the front door left open—and when I dared open my eyes, damn if this blog didn't just pop up and stab my eyes out, just like you see it here. Yeah.

Worst part is, now the deed is done, and there's no help for it, no hope of turning back. We're all in. Awfulgood.com lives.

Sorry.

Dear Whomever,

Here's betting that yellow sticky note's real important—birthday, overdue bill, some lady's phone number—but this morning I couldn't read it. No matter I wrote it by my own hand. It won't read.

And not just by me. My grown boy T-Bert broke out laughing (a sorry sight), he cellphoto'd it to his probably-married wench of the week and she couldn't read it, whereupon at her doctor's she produced it out of sin knows where, and it was no use to him either. By the way, I don't care for it back. Still, T-Bert was impressed his old man had written what even a doctor couldn't understand. In the end, the damn thing was passed around and handed back with a shrug by more people even than this blog..

For the life of me I cannot remember what the note was about, not even in my dreams. And before you start, no, it's not my memory gone. Whatever I wrote down, the whole point was to not have to remember it.

Kids have it even worse than older folks. From times before purple dinosaurs, at least we theoretically had this artifact called education from which we could still Merlin up training if our cursive writing got too bad. Whereas a kid goes all carpal thumb on us, he may as well speak Lithuanian, not to mean ill of Lithuanians. But what happens when kids need to write something down by hand to remember it? I'll tell you what—they just forget. Early and often. Mostly when it's convenient to.

But there's a bigger question, why all this illegible writing now but not in years past? I used to be able to read my own handwriting, and now often enough I can't. Friends I ask, young and old, say yeah me too. So it's something affecting all of us these days, in the water, or in the air.

My bet's on air.

Meaning airwaves. Nowadays it's all airwaves. Or what the cellphone pushers call "Wireless" which, now, strikes me as one puredee backasswards way of defining something—in terms of some one thing it is not. I mean, radio is not a whole lot of things. I'll grant it uses no wire (except the system does), but it's also not telegraph, not tin-can-and-string, semaphore flags, or smoke-and-blankets. So which of the gazillion things it's not do you define it against? Any old one you like? All right then, brother, that tears it. From now on I'm referring to people as "unzebras."

Yours Unfalsely,
Carter Furay, uninvertebrate nonfourbarrelcarburetor

Now, according to this airlines gotta say they're at the "Persian Gulf" when they approach Iran. No more "Arabian Gulf" or other such, though seems to me the water washes up on both countries the same.

From now on, Cancun's on the "Gulf of Alabama".

For the record, we recite the résumé of sad, crazy little Sarah, who...

• hides/shows off her sweaty palm as a third-grader's pretend-teleprompter.
• uses her solemn oath to serve Alaska, sworn on a bible, as toilet paper.
• trowels on make-up as a fascist magnet and plays dress-up with other people's money.
• expounds her fathomless stupidities as trophies.
• trots out her kids as comedy props, and
• understands full well that ever-blooming psychosis is her only qualification—and that, the GOP being what it is, it is the best qualification she could have.

Now we behold Quitter Spice as paid mascot of the Tea Party, oddly named since no Tea Party member would dare go so homo sapiens on us as to actually (gasp) Sip Tea or Party.

Sip virgin's blood, maybe—except for virgin shortages from all their Abstinence-Only brats getting knocked up.

To list Mrs. Palin's record is to list Americas' wrong directions. How things have gone so wrong is a modern American mystery. So perhaps we just need some authentic, original American mystery and magic to set things aright. Why stop at the founding fathers? Perhaps some of that Hopi changey stuff.

One problem: in ear-candling Ms Palin, the candle would drop through unimpeded.
yes, yes, we know ear-candling isn't all that Hopi.

Side note to "liberal" corporate media: We get that your ratings require endless replays of Sarah finger-painting the Constitution with her own fascist feces, but afterwards...must you really show that little nobody grinning up and licking her fingers?