1/31/05

It hasn't been a real great time for protest in general, last decade or so. The Velvet Revolution in Europe was contrasted by the Iron Counterrevolution of Tiananmen Square, and from there it just went from Rwanda to Bosnia to Palestine to 9/11 to those ever-so-effective world wide demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq and on into the Second George Regency. This past Coronation Day I drove uptown in Seattle and passed by the mandatory crowd of Ernest Liberals with their colorful native signs sending a stern, rain-soaked message about the non-transfer of power to a few media vultures and their immediate friends and families, which message they could have gotten out equally effectively by going into their bathrooms at home and shouting themselves hoarse.

Back when, there was a time in the world, and even in America the Freedom-Fried, when bunches of people with signs gathering in public and hollering actually made a difference. This month we celebrate the birthday of one of the captains and major architects of The Art Of Resistance, Dr. Martin Luther "Da Man" King, and it's a time to look back at his genuine achievements in the field of leaning on the powers that be with the aid of moral rectitude and warm bodies. Unquestionably, the good doctor combined a number of admirable leadership traits, from soul-inspiring orator to bad-ass politician, with a simple, pure and unstoppably righteous vision of what American societal relations could and should be, and his career reflected a steady growth in scope and visibility right up to his untimely demise and after. King's influence is rightly associated with dozens of victories great and small in the civil rights arena, a glowing tribute to the effect one soul can have on those around him.

Still, looking around today, it's easy to wonder if anything's really changed. Certainly there are laws in place to prevent overt coercive racism (and its equally reptilian siblings sexism and culturism), but the ethnic fabric of our country is still replete with nasty little pulls and tears, from faux gangstas to crypto klansmen, and a goodly percentage of any minority in America has reason to fear, distrust and dislike White Folks Central, no matter how many commemorative banquets get thrown.

There is one example, though, of King and his associates at work that stands as a very sharp indicator of how successful a little undignified acting out can be, both for what it achieved and how it achieved it, and that's the Montgomery bus boycott.

It's customary to frame the civil rights movement in vague bosomy terms of Freedom and Justice and various and sundry ism's marching shoulder to shoulder into a rosy pink future. But in the beginning, there wasn't much propaganda or flowery sentiment. What there was was segregation, and a lot of genuinely good people being stomped by it. To be trapped in a system where the law in its majesty restricts such a picayune feature of life as where on the public-transportation-subsidized- by-the-taxpayers-yes-that-includes-you bus you're permitted to sit is to necessitate a choice between becoming a philosophical outlaw in your own home town and getting up off your knees and fighting for legitimacy.

There wasn't anything highly original about the tactic -- laborers skilled and otherwise had been striking for higher pay and better working conditions for hundreds of years. The gritty glory of the event accrued from its lack of abstraction, its persistence in demanding a single objective rational reasonable goal, to receive equal value for equal cost. Despite every effort of the racist whites opposing them, from threats to spurious court actions to bombings and torchlight processions, the walkout put sufficient pressure on the local powers that were to bring them to the negotiating table.

Gandhi's framing of the principles of nonviolent resistance are commendable, but flawed. They posit a sort of Achilles' heel in the target authority of adherence to basic principles of decency. Clearly, it is a laudable philosophy to cede your enemy the virtue of a common ethos to your own -- it aids in preventing atrocities on both sides and keeps the doors of communication open. Equally clearly, though, it can become a liability when dealing with entrenched hatred and prejudice. It was the particular and peculiar success of the instigators of the boycott that they were able to bring the fight to that enemy's real vulnerability, their wallets, not their hearts, through entirely legal nonviolent action with no abstract overtones whatever, unless you count the high flown notion that sitting down on the bus is not a privilege.

In the current climate of Delphi-style consensus via intimidation and leaders with delusions of limitless autonomy, the peaceful resistance model is coming on lean days. It's no use appealing to the better natures of those in power if the last ten appeals only encouraged them to mutate into calculating Vogons with leaden hammers for souls. It may well be time for the MoveOn's of the world to start calculating more practical methods of leverage.

They could do a lot worse than looking to the example of Montgomery -- as far as I know, to this day blacks still ride the buses there in any seat they danged well please.

1/24/05

1/17/05

Our dinner at the quaint local Quaint Local Joint was a moderate affair -- light cuisine, quiet talk, jukebox blaring cheesy 70's music. I rhapsodized over my Boho Nouveau lifestyle in service to the twin muses of Art and Romance, he related tales of comfortable retirement, studying art and serving on alumni committees. Various mutual acquaintances were inquired after. We clucked in unison over the madness of contemporary politics.

Just before the conversation ended, we touched briefly in our omniscience on a central issue of modern technology. I commented that personal computers are an entirely unsatisfactory consumer product and unsuited for general use. He agreed.

So. Here's a ex-Knight of the Semiconductor, a middle-level management type no less, in company with a mad-dog end user rich in brand-spanking used Macintoshes. Two more stolid footsoldiers of the PC Revolution would be easy to come by, but we'll do in pinch. And we're dismissing the utility of the very technology we both stake our lives and sacred wallets on, without so much as a footnote of leavening praise for the Thoroughly Modern Computer.

Well, duh. Just in case the news hasn't drifted into your corner of the cosmos, Thoroughly Modern Computers are teh suxx0r, d00d. Anybody with any perspective at all knows that, "anybody" being your grandma, cousin Mort and neighbor Andy who all depend on you for volunteer systems support when their Windoze or McMac house'o'cards comes crappity-crashing down on whatever vital and irreplaceable project they had the bad judgement and/or lack of proper advice to entrust to it. Without backups, and backups of backups, without service packs and antivirus potions and firewalls and a spare hard drive or ten, or even with them, personal computers are beige werewolves squatting on or under your desk, just waiting for the first ray of moonlight to transform into hairy slobbering beasts.

Worse, even when they aren't growing fangs and howling, PC's aren't the most, uh, cooperative of appliances. Despite attempts to decrease the brain-surgery element in operating info appliances, dealing with a word processor or spreadsheet still resembles wrassling alligators instead of draining the swamp when compared with the low-tech expedience of pen and paper. Gaudy baroque contraptions like typewriters are less fraught with worm-packed cans straining to vent themselves all over your work flow. Even the geekiest of geeksters are starting to revert to olden ways: just google "hipster PDA" and see what I mean.

So WTF happened here? How did so much science and engineering expertise divert itself to the construction of such unstable, awkward, misguided objects of devotion? As it happens, I have an answer to that one right here. It's called evolution, bucko. And it ain't pretty.

Way back in the dawn of time when the moon was twice as big and volcanoes erupted on every corner, computers were regarded as heavy industrial equipment, like milling machines or a harvester assembly line, subject to capital investment tax and harnessed in the service of Lord Commerce. Costing in the gazillions and requiring the services of a highly-trained priesthood of technicians and handlers, the Big Iron of yore did its ferrite-core best to live up to that classification.

Only with the advent of integrated circuits and the CPU-on-a-chip did any alternative paradigm begin to breed. The new "microcomputers" attracted an entirely different breed of acolyte, one more associated with propeller-beanies than sacred vestments, quick to pick up on both the inner workings and the potentials of cheap infomills. If the elder mainframes inspired the Church of God the Air-Conditioned, these new kids on the block were storefront preachers and jack Mormons with agendas and interpretations of the Holy Writ of data-processing all their own. They were the rotgut jet fuel that blasted the personal computer from basement gadget to the desktop business tool and lifestyle accessory we know today.

Problem is, those gearhead guys had a real hip-pocket philosophy of development going. Most of the time they knew more about what the machine was doing than it did. Cryptic commands, circuitous workarounds and tinkertoy documentation fell like feathers before their invincible nerd-fu. Emboldened by early successes and the runaway growth of the PC market, both snide professional and hairy amateur hackers pushed the hard and soft into ever more varied modes of behavior, modes that nobody down in Design had ever anticipated or intended, and easy-sleazy control implementations and spaghetti code were the roaches in the Steinway along for the ride.

As long as 640K was enough for anybody, this wasn't a big issue -- if your word processor crashed, it took ten seconds to reboot. But now we've got sleek high-concept stratocruisers with all the safety and reliability of Junior Flameout's cherrybomb hotrod after the last three demolition derbies, and the strain is starting to show. When one of those juggernauts goes over the high side, a quick visit to the ER won't patch it up. We're trafficking in warez bent all out of appropriate usage in the service of everything from audio recording to teledildonics, a zillion crazy subspecies of cyberspecialty, and we're paying way more in frustration and lost time and work than we deserve. Hey -- these are machines. They're supposed to work.

Like it or lump it, though, this monster-truck rally is here to stay. And it has a happier subtext: none of this would be happening if the li'l silicon beauties weren't so danged useful. Personal computers are as much a victim of their own success as they are beneficiaries. Like we say in show biz, they've suffered for their art. Now it's your turn.

1/10/05

* * *

Sitting around, day after Christmas, just staring at the TV -- some movie we've seen before. Mid-morning, post-breakfast stupor controlling Karin and me. The power flickers and we moan. We'll have to get up and do something? Then we hear some yelling outside. I look out the front door, still puffed up with pride about our new house, just 400 feet back from the beach. People are running up our street yelling. It looks like a fire at the large two story resort that effectively blocks our view of the beach. Smoke and dust coming up and all these people. Then a small line of really brown water comes rolling towards us. That's weird. But I reckon it must be some strange full moon high tide. So we go upstairs so we don't get wet.

I look out the window and try and take some pictures. There is a quiet rumble to it, like those white noise generators that are supposed to help you sleep. The water is getting higher and higher and then it destroys our friends cement bungalow! Then our front door caves in, and then water is coming up the stairs! HOLY SHIT. This was the last point my brain worked for a long time.

We try and throw a mattress out the window to float on, but the water is rising too fast, and out the window we climb. It's all going so fast. It's faster than conscious thought and by the time we are on our second story roof, the water is coming out the window. We jump. Karin doesn't jump at the same time or did I jump too early? We're separated. I scream her name, but the crashing roiling water mutes me. I can't hear her. I scream and scream until I get hit by something and pulled under. I can't swim to the top, I pull myself through trash and wood to the surface and off I go.

Ahead are trees wrapped in flotsam and as I look a Thai guy is struggling to get free of it, as I pass by at 30 MPH I realize he is impaled on a piece of wood and can't even scream.

My brain shut down when Karin disappeared, and now all I can do is survive. Something triggers and I swim. I swim to avoid the trees which will trap me, possibly kill me. It seems that I am atop the crest of the tsunami, which is less like a wave than a flood.

From on high I can see the water hit buildings, then rise, then watch the buildings collapse into piles of concrete and rebar. I swim to avoid these. Left and right I paddle, looking ahead the whole time trying to figure the hazards. None of this is conscious, this isn't me thinking it out, it's some recessed part of the brain coming out and taking control. I was busy seeing the weird things, like massive diesel trucks being rolled end over end. Or the car launched through the 2nd story wall of a former luggage shop. Or the person high up in a standing tree in a lurid orange thong. Or the older foreigner that got stuck in the wood and steel wrapped around a tree, and then his body torn off while his head remained. I couldn't scream.

I was pulled under, my pants caught on something, I decided that this was neither the place nor time for me to die, and ripped my pants off. I surfaced into a hunk of wood which cut my forehead. A 5 gallon water bottle sped by, and I wrapped myself around it like a horny German Shepard on a Chihuahua. I was passing people with bleeding faces and caked in refuse. Some people reached out to me, and I back, but the water was too fast and erratic. Some people screamed for help and I told them to swim. Some people just stared with empty eyes, watching what happened, but seeing nothing. Some were just floating bodies. At some point, I passed a guy, cut on his cheek, holding onto big piece of foam. We just made eye contact and shrugged apathetically at each other. Then I turned ahead to watch fate. When I looked back he was gone. Trees were pulled down, and their flotsam added to the flow. I was hit by a refrigerator and pushed towards a building that was collapsing. I swam and swam and swam and swam and still was pushed right towards a huge clump of jagged sticks and metal. I was pulled under, kicked towards the mass, cut my feet and kicked again. I popped up on the other side, spun around and pulled under again.

Down there, I knew it was not the time, and I pulled my way up through the floating rubbish of my former town. I pulled and pulled and my lungs ached for air. I flashed on Star Wars, the trash compactor scene, and had some big grin in the back of head as I popped up. Sucking shitty water and air deep in my lungs.

This went on for weeks. Time simply left the area alone. I grabbed the edge of a mattress and floated. Breathing, just breathing. Awareness brought back by the sound and look of a water fall. Trying to push up onto the mattress more and more, and it took my weight less and less. Tumbling over the edge, sucked under again, and out I shot, swirled into a coconut grove, where the water seemed to have stopped. There was even a dyke like wall around the grove.

The water spun and churned, but went no where, and got no higher. It wasn't swimming, or climbing, but something in between. I made my way to the land. Every step had to be careful with broken glass everywhere, and sheet metal poking out. It was a long slow struggle. The low rumble had stopped, and now is the occasional creak of wood on wood and metal scraping. Moans came across the new brown lake. A small boy was in a tree crying, asking for his parents in Norwegian. I climbed up onto the dyke and looked around. I screamed out for Karin, only getting responses in Thai. I stood there, panting, trying to find a thought, anything. As I came back to earth I needed to pee. The first thing I did after surviving the tsunami was piss! Along limps an older Thai guy, finds me, naked atop a dyke amid the destruction, covered in mud and filth -- pissing. He didn't even smile...nor did I. I spent the next minutes running from high point to high point screaming out for Karin. If I made it, she could too. There was no response from her. I found plenty of other people, and helped who I could, but always looking across this vast area of new lakes for her head. Through the trees was a PT boat, a large steel police cruiser. The boat and I had been brought more than a kilometer (2/3 mile) inland. I was standing near a tree, hoping for a clue, anything to say she was out there somewhere. A small boy in a tree whimpered, and I pulled him down. We went inland. There were houses, still standing, a whole neighborhood atop a rise that was untouched. Just feet away were cars wrapped around trees. I handed them the boy.

I had finished my medic training exactly one month before, so I went to work. Pulling people out of mud, from under houses. One car, upright against the trunk of a tree still had the driver. He was dead. It went on. Before this I had only seen a dead body once or twice. That was remedied very quickly. I pulled people out of the water, only to have them choke and die right there. I would take someone's pulse, scream for help, then find that they had died before we could do anything. It was beyond any nightmare or fear I have ever had.

An older Thai woman came up to me with a pair of shorts and averted eyes. She was ashamed that I was totally naked. I smirked and slipped them on. She smiled and scurried away. Was it the bright white ass or the fear shriveled cock that had embarrassed her?

Roaming the former streets looking for foreigners to send to the higher ground, a place where we could all meet and tend to wounds. After an hour the Thais came screaming out of the mud saying there was another wave coming , and flying into the hills. We were left alone. Those that could walk did, the rest were carried. We made a new base, higher and safer. And the same thing happened again. And again.

Eventually we ended up in the jungle at a park, where there was water and high ground. It was messy. Eventually there were about 300 foreigners, about 120 of whom were injured pretty severely with broken limbs and ribs, near-drownings, everyone had gashes of some kind, severed fingers or toes and shock everywhere.

There was no medicine, no tools, no scissors, no bandages. Nothing but well water (of questionable cleanliness) and some sticks and clothes. I tried to find anyone medically trained. It was only the diving instructors who all had basic first aid. So we cleaned with the water, we broke sticks and set bones and talked people into a relatively calm place. If someone was severely cut, we used their own clothing to mend the wounds. It was a horror story. The floor was covered in blood, people were moaning, or vomiting or asking us to help them. And more arrived with every new wave of cars and trucks fleeing the "next wave".

After hours of this, we got news of helicopters evacuating the injured. So everyone rushed towards the trucks. I had to scream and push and pull people out of the way. The ones who needed the evac the most were the ones who couldn't get to the trucks. After twenty minutes of sorting through the priorities, and feeling like we had a handle on it, someone brought me to a girl who was bleeding severely out of her thigh and was in shock. No one had brought her to our little clinic area, they had left her in the back of truck.

Finally, after a few helicopters had pulled out the worst, I headed back down.

Through rubber tree plantations, and coconut groves we drove. It seemed quiet and relaxed. At the last corner it was devastation. The road was clear and dry up to a certain point and then it was a horizon of rubble. I shuddered.

Someone on a scooter came up and asked for a doctor. Everyone looked at me! I jumped on and they took me up roads I never knew existed, and over bridges that were barely standing until I was brought to five foreigners in the middle of nowhere. One of them was a good friend and diving instructor. It was the first person I had seen that I knew. It was a total joy. He was banged up pretty bad, but he got out and sent off to the hospital. Then the Thais came roaring up the hill, saying there was another wave. We had to carry four more people with broken bones (including a broken hip) up a hill. There was no wave. There never was.

I stumbled back down, wandering through the town looking for people to help. I found only bodies. I found one with a tattoo like Karin's on a scooter under some rubble. I pulled her out, and it was a Thai woman. Still griping her scooter, mouth agape.

Eventually I made my way back to the dive shop I worked at. We had always whinged about how it was too far off the main road, but it survived. It was a center for the survivors. I walked up to find friends alive and things clean and organized.

I had been able to keep on, doing what I could to help people, to close out my mind to what was around me and look only at what I was doing, to not see the dead people, to not worry about where Karin was. I had held together so well.

When I found out Karin was alive it all fell apart. I could smell the destruction, the horror I had just walked through, just lived through, that she had lived through. My body shouted out all the bruises and cuts I had ignored. It all struck me and threw me to the ground. It was too much -- I could no longer accept this.

We hugged and ate and slept. My feet were cut up, I had small cuts all over my body, and a sinus infection from all the bad water. Karin had gotten hold of a coconut tree, wrapped herself around it and never let go. She had a few bruises and small cuts and a black eye. I was ecstatic to see her like that. First time I've been happy to see a woman with a black eye.

Most of the rest of our friends had come through. They had set up first aid stations and help stations, organized food and created a center for people to meet. The diving community came together and became our support, our medical care, our food - they did everything they could to help and then some.

I can't help but give massive appreciation and even a bit of awe to several people. Whether you know them or not, these are the true heroes. Keith -- he was tireless - for days, running around, getting medicine, doing first aid, cooking food, getting clothes, talking to the forlorn, coordinating doing everything he could. His energy was endless and bright. Jim and Andrea opened the doors of their shop, and clothed and housed everyone they could. Joakim ran about grabbing people, helping wherever he could, evacuating people to the next town, the whole while wondering about the safety of his own family. And the two DMT's that helped me out -- two guys who had just taken a first aid class and then had to deal with massive trauma, death and chaos. And all the others -- this was not the work of just one or two people.

Of course the diving community at large shined like a beacon over the madness. When there was no one else, they all stepped forward. I can't help but swell with pride to count myself among them.

The next day I went back to where my house had been and surveyed the damage. One bungalow nearby had been lifted up and dropped on top of another. The whole beach was visible, meaning all of the two or three story hotels that had lined it were gone. There was a jet ski just near our house. The bottom floor of our house was gone, the upper floor was missing a couple of walls. The only thing left, was a plastic Jesus doll I had bought as a joke.

So I was left with nothing in the world except my own plastic Jesus. The level of destruction is virtually impossible to describe. On our beach we had approx. 2500 hotel rooms. It looked to me, that maybe 50 could still be called hotel rooms. The week between Christmas and New Year's is the busiest of the week. Without warning, without an evacuation plan the survival rates were minimal. The wave at our house was about 7 meters high (20 feet) and in some places it was 10 meters (30 feet) high. It wiped out the third floor of most resorts. The number of dead is astronomical, several thousand on my beach alone. By the second day you could smell it, and in the short walk to my former house, we passed about 10 bodies just strewn about. Our final glance of the town was a cattle truck stacked full of wrapped up corpses. We wanted to go home.

In Bangkok most people got help pretty quick. The Swedes, Germans and English had charted flights for their citizens to get home. The Thai government gave free hotel rooms to survivors and there were lists of places to get food.

EXCEPT the Americans. I went in to find out what help I could get -- I was able to get a replacement passport, a toothbrush and a paperback book. They said it was not their policy to arrange flights home. I was cut up, still covered in a pretty good layer of mud, I had no home, no money, no clothing (except some borrowed off Keith) nothing at all, and they could do nothing to help.

They did offer to let me borrow money, but they would have to find three people in America who would vouch for me, and that process should take less than a week. In the mean time I was fucked. I was destitute and rejected by the embassy. Karin was with me (she's Swedish) and said that I could still try and emigrate to Sweden. I was VERY tempted. In these last days, watching politicians go on about helping and giving aide, but they won't even take care of their own citizens? I am very, very angry. All the other nations of the world were taking care of their own citizens! Eventually I got a flight home with JAL -- that would be JAPAN airlines -- not even an American company, but a JAPANESE company helped me get home.

I am still listed as neither found nor alive. Before I left I had spoken to the embassy twice on the phone, giving my name so I would be listed as alive so my family would not worry. I went to the embassy twice, once to get a passport to replace the one lost in the tsunami, and they never listed me as alive or found. I flew out of the country using said passport and am still not found. I went to the hospital three times, and, as of yesterday I am now listed as injured (having been in the states three days already). My family is now waiting to see how long it will take before they are notified about my status. So am I.

It does raise a good question -- if I am missing or dead, do I have to pay taxes?

While spiteful about the embassy, I am grateful to be alive, and that those I care about are still alive. I still look around and am in awe at what just happened. I really feel like someone has slipped me some roofies and I woke up in America.

No real moral to this story... yet.

My story is just one, there and 100,000's more far worse off -- I had somewhere to fly to. Donations should be sent to good charities, ones that truly help. Doctors Without borders [http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org,] and the Thailand Red Cross [http://www.redcross.or.th/english/home/index.php4] were both there fast and helping out immensely. I can't speak, or even dream of what it must be like in Sri Lanka and Indonesia.

Breathe...

1/3/05

What's so good about it?

Uh, it's New Year's. A little off our feed, are we?

You're about fifty years too young to be asking me that. Oy, what a head! I guess I was a teensy bit indulgent last night -- when you know what's behind Door Number Two Thousand Five, you do what you can to cope, you know what I mean?

I hope not. I always take the optimistic view, that a new year is a clean slate, a chance to start over.

It's an arbitrary duration delimiter and don't you forget it, sweetie. Gawd knows I don't. Oooooh...

You seem like you need to lie down. Perhaps we should take this up some other time...

No, no, let's get this over with. No time like the present. No time in the present, come to think of it. Oh no, there I went thinking again. Stop the room, I wanna get off...

Madam Zuzu, from what I understand, you've had some very specific insights into what's coming in 2005, and in light of your impressive predictions of the past, we'd be very interested in hearing them.

Sure about that? Y'know what they say in the sideshow -- a moment to see, a lifetime to forget.

Still, they say the truth will set you free.

The truth? Well, that's one opinion. Tell you what. Seeing as I'm in a mood here, and the times being how they are and all, I'm gonna get all medieval on your tuchus and do this one Nostradamus style.

You mean you're going to create a series of four-line rhyming stanzas with symbolic and metaphorical content, gathered in groups of 100 called Centuries?

Naw, I'll just do a lotta incomprehensible crap. Easiest thing in the world. And forget that quatrain stuff -- that's so 1599.

[cue badass beat]

Being Madam Zuzu ain't like it used to be
everything I get's a sure bet jujube
just like Zoroaster I prophesy disaster
chump prognosticators can bring it to the master
You want the future I ain't no moocher
cut you to the quick then apply a little suture
Lined up signed up I can mess your mind up
Punch out your cortex without a bit of windup

A hundred drunk savages singing like cabbages
cuttin up the water into inside passages
sunk in the gutter slicker than butter
marking up the pages of an east-end nutter
cyclone sisters with burned out resistors
never tell secrets to the shorteyed misters
the plains and the flames and the claims explain the names
but all you lame brains do is blame and shame...

[badass beat abruptly skidded off]

Madam Zuzu, is this what we're paying you for?

What, you got a problem? Okay, okay, so a little less incomprehensible.

[resume beat]

Zuzu's back baby, doncha think maybe
you oughta give a listen before you get rabies?
You want it all clear I got it all here
serve it up hot like I got it at the mall, dear

Red and blue numbers cause a lotta blunders
dying in the fields like frozen cucumbers
president's tanking ditto with the banking
getting to the facts only acts like a spanking
foxes in the henhouse, cops in the penthouse,
roses can't cover up the smell of a dead mouse
Times getting later better get a gater
dress him up pretty like a city terminator...

[cut beat]

Madam, please. We're very impressed with your flow, but what we really need is something specific.

Specific? Sure, I do specific. You don't pay me, imagine how specific I can be.

Just something about 2005, Madam.

Okay, fine. First off, you got the animal clothes. All the animals on tv start wearing clothes. Pretty soon it's a trend. Pet couture, the latest thing. Revitalizes the whole garment industry, compensates for those trade barriers coming down, y'know? And nanobots. This is the year for nanobots, honey, they're gonna be big. Really really small, but big.

Is there any truth to those internet rumors about inflation and the price of gold?

Gold. Hmm. Gold's gonna do the sooper looper thing, rollercoaster here to the moon and back. You pick the right time to get on, it's a swell ride. Choose wrong, well, you end up whooping your hotdog and sodapop on the downhill swing. Thing is, everyone thinks there's something called value, but really there's just price. You don't like cleaning Pepsi off your gabardines, I'd give it a miss. But that's small squid. You know what you should be asking me about?

No, what?

See, that's why I'm the one getting paid here. Ha! Little joke. You need to ask me about the next election.

There isn't any election scheduled for this year.

See what I mean? Ah, never mind, why should I do your job? You got enough on the meter for one more question.

Well, madam, I'm sure we could hear all about the horrible events to come, but what do you see that's hopeful for this year?

Hopeful? This year? Well, apart from the free brain phones and the cure for herpes and the solar-powered space shuttle and Universal Food and that immortality pill and the recovery and the new power source and all that, not much really. Sorry.

Really?

Actually, I just made that up. Psych!

[cue beat]

Zuzu's the moniker, prediction's the profession
you got the question I got intercession
truth is horrible, trouble's just adorable
I tell it like I smell it cause I'm incorrigible

infrastructure rumbling, I can feel it crumbling
get away fast you won't last fumbling
Apocalypse fever's the latest wide receiver
pedal to the metal love the earth and leave her...

Madam Zuzu?

Yeah?

Shut up.

Suits me. I get paid either way.