One of David Mamet’s most striking contributions to the theory of drama is his concept of the “Death Of My Kitten Speech.” He introduces this concept in his book Three Uses of the Knife.

A curious point comes in most plays and movies about seven-tenths the way through: all of a sudden the action stops, and the hero, weary to the bone, about to embark on the final chapter of his quest, a quest that will either show him successful or utterly ruined, starts talking to the gods.

The more amateurish attempts very often mention the death of a beloved family pet. “When I was young I had a kitten… it died.” The hero, forced to undergo a journey he didn’t choose and for which he is ill-prepared, grieves to the gods, and remembers the first moment he began to understand death.

Mamet’s point is that we, as dramatists and as storytellers, should be aware of this weakness and cut it ruthlessly from our work. That which is not relevant to the story does not belong in the story. He also speculates on the origins of this peculiar phenomenon — perhaps it is the vestigial remnant of an earlier stage of the evolution of the human mind and its capacity for following a story. Greek drama was originally a religious festival, and direct address to the gods was originally an important, even central, part of the festivity.

I wish to contribute only this observation: that the Seventh Inning Stretch is also a Death Of My Kitten Speech. In the middle of the seventh inning, we, the crowd, in one voice, rise to our feet, and confess our Love Uh Da Game. (more…)

Excellent analysis of the rapid commoditization of operating systems.

Time to start looking at Linux, I reckon.

So I’m walking down the street the other day on the way back from the supermarket, and I see this guy leaning on a short wall in the driveway in front of a small apartment building. He has his right leg perfectly straight, and the left leg is bent to support his weight against the wall.

Then I do a double take. Mid-thigh on his right leg is the unmistakeable hand grip of an M-16. He has the gun draped down his leg, so that the black of the gun blends into the dark blue of his jeans. He’s got his hand on the trigger, but the gun is rotated out and down against the outside of his thigh.

He notes me doing my double take, but never makes eye contact or turns his head. I’m a gringo in shorts with two big grocery bags: I am correctly assessed as Not A Threat. He watches me out of the corner of his eye as I walk past and turn the corner to my house, just a few blocks away.

It is generally not a good idea to linger for long when you encounter a professional bodyguard in Colombia. Bodyguards are there to protect someone from attack; you don’t want to be in the accidental crossfire. Locals will make a point of crossing the street and walking fast if they see a professional bodyguard.

I finally have my bright ‘n’ shiny new Ubuntu Linux desktop all set up, plus a new DSL connection, and with the extra bandwidth and the superior operating system the question of old comes to mind: is it finally time to install and use TOR?

TOR (aka The Onion Router) is the best legal way for an ordinary user to achieve nearly complete anonymity on the net. All your http requests are encrypted and then routed through several random servers (”nodes”) around the world. This makes it impossible for your ISP to know what web pages you are viewing, and, more importantly, prevents the nasty intrusive privacy-loathing US government from knowing what you’re looking at.

(In case you were wondering, the illegal way to get even better anonymity is to buy into a bot-net or steal someone’s identity. But this essay deals with protecting your civil liberties, not engaging in computer-based organized crime.)

So it worth it to use TOR? Well, the only userland problem with TOR is its speed — even on a DSL link things can really growl along at a snail’s pace. And in order for TOR to be truly effective, you need to use it ALL the time — no exceptions, no fits of peak when you turn it off to view a particular website, it needs to be on, always. Which means unless you have a very important secret to keep — maybe you’re a dissident in a repressive regime, like Burma, North Korea, or the United States of America — it may not be worth the extra time you’ll be spending waiting for your web pages to load.

Remember, if you use a web-based email service like fastmail.fm or gmail, every email you send includes the IP address of the computer you sent it from. Unless you use TOR, anyone can look up that IP address and know exactly what chair you were sitting in at the moment you sent that email.

Another thought also comes to mind when pondering TOR. In this age of self-revelatory blogs, myspace, and other venues of the “self-confessional”, I have to wonder if the privacy-ending nature our technology is actually the collective will of our culture, the Destiny of the people of the West.

After all, what’s the point in anonymizing all your web traffic so no one knows where you are, when your blog details your exact movements, such that anyone with half a wit could trace your whereabouts?

That said, TOR is still a beautiful thing. It’s a big fat *pbthh* up the nose of people like George Bush and that fucking spic of an Attorney General who’d rape your grandmother to falsely convict Noam Chomsky of terrorism.

TOR is easy to install and configure, and is available for all major operating systems. Obviously you should know by now that Firefox is the better web browser, and you can install Torbutton, which will allow you to turn TOR off and on easily.

If you value your freedom, then you need to start paying attention to how the technology you use takes that freedom away from you. If you value your privacy — if you don’t want the government, your ISP, and large corporations knowing what you read, who you talk to, and what music you download — then you need to seriously consider downloading and using TOR.

Here’s the web banner advertising my new play, Thy Fearful Symmetry.

Venezuelan women are supposed to be famous for their beauty. More Venezuelans than any other nationality have won the Miss Universe pageant. And yeah, there are some serious hotties about the place, especially in Mérida.

But what I noticed most was the camel toe. Tight stretch lycra pants in the Caribbean heat? You betcha. Even old fat women in jeans I found myself staring — how can one nation have so much camel toe? Do Venezuelans simply have larger pudenda than other people?

Thinking about it now, that could be the case. Venezuelans are also bigger cunts than normal.

Take El Presidente, Sr. Chavez. Definitely a big cunt. The longer I spent in Venezuela, the more I realized that he is the perfect embodiment of Venezuela — rude, fat, and ugly.

A lot of Western liberals idealize Chavez, more out of desperation at the brokenness of the American capitalist system than anything else. (Actually going to Venezuela will, by the way, rapidly cure you of any lingering fantasies you have about Chavez.)

Chavez says he is a socialist or a communist or some such rot. If only he were. Chavez is just as bad as the long string of dictators who have ruled Venezuela for the last fifty years. The only difference is that instead of being an American puppet, he has gained wild popularity by sticking his finger in George Bush’s eye.

Now, like most people, I enjoy watching him stick a finger in George Bush’s eye, and even think George Bush deserves having a finger poked in his eye, but that does not make what Chavez is doing to the people of Venezuela a good or noble thing, and it definitely doesn’t make it socialism.

Let me tell you what I saw when I was in Venezuela. I was there in November 2006, just before Chavez was “re-elected”. Do you know how these elections work? Voting in Venezuela under Chavez is not anonymous. If you don’t vote for Chavez, and you work for the government, you are going to lose your job. Your children won’t go to a good school. Maybe your property will be “re-distributed” and taken away from you.

I personally met several nurses and teachers who were fired from their government jobs because they signed the referendum against Chavez. Little old ladies in hushed tones would reach a hand across the aisle on a long bus journey, touch my elbow and whisper earnestly in bad English (so that no one else could understand) how much they hate Chavez, how he is destroying their country, how they all want to get out.

Why is Chavez such a big cunt? Why is Venezuela a country of camel toe? I think it’s the oil. The combination of that lazy Latin-Caribbean lifestyle and the insta-riches of Texas Tea has completely gone to these people’s heads, and they are ga-ga corrupted with the power oil brings.

Maybe the petroleum beneath the surface of the earth increases the gravitational pull within the borders of Venezuela, causing pudenda to sag and bloat. Or perhaps the petroleum has entered the food chain, causing an enlargement of the entire country’s female genitalia.

Whatever it is, just remember: the United States gave Venezuela baseball, the word “full”, and taught them how to be assholes. If you don’t like them the way they are now, you can only ask yourself who they learned it from.

Update:

Is it any coincidence that the most common word in Venezuela is “cuño” (”cunt”)?

Ingredients:

• one washing machine
• one pair of leather falconing gloves
• one unspayed male cat
• one unspayed female cat on heat
• three or four slabs of beer
• a dozen or so blokes

Invite your mates over and consume at least half of the beer. Do this rapidly. Catch the female cat and put it in the washing machine. Add male cat. Close lid.

Set the water level to extra low and the wash cycle to extra dirty cottons, something hot and steamy. When you begin to hear the sounds of kitty sex, start the wash cycle.

Drink more beer, and sing along with the cats as they go on the ride of their lives. If the washer becomes unbalanced during the spin cycles, stop the machine, put on the falconing gloves, and rearrange the kitties so that they are balanced again. Restart the machine.

Should your female cat still become pregnant, this is also an excellent way of inducing a kitty abortion without having to pay for a veterinarian.

Friday night in Cali, Colombia, and I’m having a quiet one with a few
beers and some cable TV. I live just a few blocks away from La Sexta,
the strip of dance clubs that’s ground zero for nightlife here in the
“World Capital of Salsa”.

It’s 11:30 at night, just as the clubs are starting to pack ‘em in,
when suddenly:

BOOM.

Louder than thunder, coming from just those few blocks away. The lights
go out. The TV flickers and dies. I’m left with half a beer in a totally
dark room and suddenly, growing in the distance, the sounds of sirens
approaching.

They’ve finally done it, I thought. The bloody FARC just blew up a
nightclub. There’s bodies strewn all over the street, bottles of
aguardiente and rum suddenly forgotten in the stampede to get out in the
open before another one blows.

I suck on my beer. Now’s my chance, I thought. Maybe this is the story
that will finally get me that foreign correspondent gig, something in
the pages of the Guardian or CNN or a byline with AP or Reuters. It
might even get air time — I could see myself now with that little
microphone attached to my shirt collar, trying to sound grave and
sufficiently baritone for an international news audience. All I had to
do was get up, put on some shoes (there would no doubt be broken glass,
and I was wearing flip flops), walk about 500 meters with a camera and
notebook and start collecting anguish-infused quotes from people with
limbs blown off.

I sat on the sofa and slowly, meditatively drained my beer. I listened
in the darkness. The sirens were getting louder. What if another bomb
were to go off? Do I really want shrapnel implanting itself in my fine,
northern european features? How badly do I really want to see blown up
bodies, anyway?

I put the empty beer bottle on the floor next to the couch, got up off
my duff, and trundled off to bed.

The next morning the power was still off. Over breakfast one of my
roommates exclaimed, “Bloody incompetent morons. Did that f—ing
transformer blow again?”

I was reading this afternoon when the cat jumped up on my lap. Not long passed before I let loose with a ripper of a fart, a sure leftover of my bean-filled lunch. But the cat seemed unaffected. I could sure smell it. But the cat just sat there on my lap, contentedly licking away at its private parts.

Could it be that cats only smell certain flavors of farts, the way dogs can only hear certain pitches of sound? Perhaps my fart simply wasn´t on the cat’s wavelength. I perceive a money-making opportunity here — just as dog whistles are made to annoy our canine companions with a ridiculously high-pitched shriek, so too it must be possible to create an artificial fart smell that only affects cats.

The Pied Piper of Hamlin had it all wrong. If he had simply isolated the correct smell of fart most objectionable to rats, he could have rid the town of rats (and cats) by simply eating the correct combination of foodstuffs for lunch.

Oh my god, oh my god, this is sound candy, this is an orgasmn in your brain. You have got to listen to this:

Bach Toccata and Fugue in D minor - on Steel Drums and Mega Moog.

Won’t someone out there take pity on this poor, tight-fisted bastard and buy this track for me?

You can check out the whole range of tracks for sale here. By the way, the mp3 above is a free sample, so don’t go DMCA whomping on me.

What is it about travel writers’ strange urge to piss in hotel sinks? First I read Notes From a Small Island, and within the first couple of pages Bill Bryson tries to shock our grandmothers with his casual sink pissing ways.

Now I pick up a far more excellent book, Moritz Thomsen’s The Saddest Pleasure (now sadly out of print), who waits a chapter or two to get from Ecuador to Brazil before he starts pissing in sinks too.

I mean come on. Everyone knows guys piss in sinks. We all do it, we just make sure no one is watching when we do. Cuz you know, we get sick of lifting that fucking lid for you ladies — so much easier to lay the ol’ trouser snake out all nice and comfy on top of the sink brim and let go with a refreshing stream. You just have to make sure to run the tap afterwards, or else the sink starts to smell like a urinal.

From the website of the inimitable John Gilmore.

It’s hot here in Cali. Really, really bloody hot. And finally the unthinkable, the undoable, the unmentionable crossed my mind — to trim my armpit hair.

I know, I know. How unmanly could it be to not have that straggling serpent-like mass of curly black madness reaching out at passers-by, trying to pick their pockets, cop a feel, or attract nesting birds?

The heat, the heat… finally I could stand it no more. Standing in front of the bathroom mirror with a pair of scissors, I snipped, snipped, snipped my way to my now drastically-reduced, almost hair-free ‘pits.

Let’s be clear now. I didn’t shave my armpits. That’s a line I’ll not soon cross. I merely trimmed them, a whole world of difference.

It feels weird. Sticky. Like the hair was some sort of lubricant when I walked, now the arm skin sticks to the torso skin, like the inside of your knees if somehow your legs were attached with your thighs inside your chest and your calves jutting out where your arms are.

I was worried that the lack of that instant black flash of hirsute masculine goodness would be immediately obvious to the casual observer when, for instance, I might sit back with my hands on the back of my head when talking to someone. But no, much to my surprise there is still a distinct patch of black fuzz, like a month of five o’clock shadow.

Arise men, at least ye dwellers in unseasonably warmish climes, and throw off these unspoken fetters. Trim I say, and you too shall know the joy of a cooling breeze where once you could only make fart noises with your hand.

Through scissors lie comfort and destiny — for when they write the books of hairy history they shall remember our names and this day — for we did trim our ‘pits!

If you would be free,
then you must leave America.

If you would flee from injustice and economic servitude,
then you must flee America.

If you value your soul more than the contents of your pocketbook,
then you must leave America.

If you are tired of the guns and the hatred and the looking over your shoulder,
then you must leave America.

If you would draw breath as a free man, seeing before you the truth of what you are and what America has made you do and has made you be,
then you must leave America.

If you are a man and would be a man and not an economic automaton, floundering genderless in a cubicle sea, watching your testicles slowly dissolve in debt,
then you must escape America.

If you are a woman and would be a woman, a mother and a wife, and not a bitter barren old maid with no offspring to show but a burgeoning 401(k), if you value the mystery of your womb and would embrace the truth of what you are and what you should be,
then you must escape America.

If you would know the truth and live the truth and speak the truth and have it fall on friendly ears and not a lynch mob of lawyers,
then you must escape America.

If you value all the principles upon which America was founded, liberty, freedom of speech, the press, religion, and if you value above all humanity and an inviolate belief in decency and common sense,
then flee, flee, flee while you can, for you are destined to be crushed on the factory floor –

Escape now from America!