Brother, can you spare a clue?

From the president to a mate, a wake-up call. Plus: Requiem for an iPod.

Published September 24, 2004 5:03PM (EDT)

White House

The magic number

LetterMan - 12:26 am Pacific Time - Sep 20, 2004 - #6 of 12

The magic number is 1.

That is the number of casualties that will hit the Bush cultists where it hurts: in their hearts and homes because that is the number of their son, daughter, father, brother, uncle, husband, nephew, or other loved one who died in Bush's insane war.

That number has already arrived at the doorsteps over over 1,000 American homes to date and that number will continue to arrive until we stop this madness.

More than a thousand families have lost a son, a brother, a husband, a daughter, to this war.

More than a thousand mothers will never again see their sons or their daughters because of George Walker Bush.

More than a thousand families will now have a hole in their hearts where once there lived a human being who loved, laughed, and lived with them and made their lives whole.

The magic number is 1, multiplied across our country until it cannot be denied or hushed up.

That magic number is coming like a freight train, headed right for George Walker Bush and his criminal cabal.

Those families will not be silenced and they will speak out against him and his criminal war.

They will not be stopped and they will not stop because for many of them, they have now seen the truth and it hurts.

Their loved ones died for no good reason and the man responsible for their deaths must be made to pay for it.

May God have mercy upon him, for those families will not.

Technology and the Net

iPod Lovefest

sarai - 12:20 pm Pacific Time - Sep 22, 2004 - #156 of 159

A moment of silence please, for Larry the iPod. He was a 2nd gen 20GB, and now he has gone on to the great beyond. His last words were a folder with an exclamation point, and a failed hard drive test. Resuscitation attempts were intense, but Larry could not mount so that he might be revived by the software updater. His hard drive simply gave up. He was too good to live. He is survived by his car charger. Funeral arrangements will be made by auctioning him for parts on eBay, with the proceeds going toward the Larry Memorial Mini iPod Foundation. A green mini iPod will be erected in his honor.

Mothers Who Think

DUH: Don't Go There, Honey!

kit - 11:25 am Pacific Time - Sep 22, 2004 - #6492 of 6525

Dearest:

You have outDUHn yourself. Last night, after our picnic dinner at the Hollywood Bowl, you brought the leftover food home in a paper bag -- leftover chicken, cheese, crackers, pasta, etc. You got out of the car with that paper bag in hand, came into the house from the garage, and this is the interesting part -- dropped it on the floor in the front hallway. Knowing as you do that we tend to get swarms of ants in that area, that was pretty dumb. But it wasn't ants.

Some of us might have put that bag in the kitchen, and might even have put the leftovers in the fridge. Knowing as you do that we have had problems with rats in the past, that might have been a sensible option.

But it wasn't rats, either.

And, considering the fact that we're having blistering dry heat conditions here in SoCal, we do leave doors open a crack at night. So yes, occasionally a stray dog or cat has peeked in the house. I could have dealt with that.

But it wasn't a stray dog. And it wasn't a stray cat.

So when I woke in the middle of the night in an absolute panic, hearing that paper-bag-rattling noise, when you think about it -- if you actually think these days, which is questionable -- it could have been a lot of things. Maybe a squirrel? Because that's happened before, and usually they panic and scramble right back out the way they came in.

But it wasn't a squirrel.

Or maybe it could have been a new visitor. One we haven't seen before. A coyote? A raccoon? They've been known to root through garbage at night. All we'd have to do is make a big racket and chase them right back out the way they got in.

It wasn't a coyote. It wasn't a raccoon.

So when I got up and tried to wake you, and you grunted because it was interrupting your sleep, it would have been helpful if you'd have gotten up and dealt with -- it. Seeing as how you're the asshole who left that bag out there. Instead of just complaining that you wanted to go back to sleep. Because I think the person who dealt with -- it -- should have been the same person who left that bag there in the first place.

Because after I fumbled around and found my glasses, and stumbled out and switched on the light, and came face-to-face with mother nature's very own living breathing Perfect Clue Delivery System, it occurred to me that I was not the one who needed to heed the message.

But of course, at that point there was no question of any noisemaking or chasing around the room or anything like that. I went back to bed -- not to sleep, of course, but to bed -- and pulled the covers over my head.

For the life of me, I do not know how to encourage a skunk to vacate the house.

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