The End

There's more to this story, but there won't be anyone around to tell it. The events of the last month have been chaotic, but I'll try and get down as much as I can before the bus leaves and I go beyond the last of the Wi-Fi into the electronic wasteland created by the march of the biometric robocops to document the culture that has sprung up in the absence of technology in South America. Yes, that sentence is correct. I'm going to go see what 1910 looked like, if it had IKEA furniture and Adidas tee's. I'm literally racing progress right now, as shipping containers full of iPhones and routers are en route from China as fast as football field sized boats can go, and they will wipe out a rare sociological phenomena when they get here. This needs to be documented. Are South Americans staring at the ground and kicking trash when they have a spare second, or are they staging impromptu participatory vaudeville scenes while they're waiting at bus stops? Has the widespread ability to make content led to a larger creative class? Or has a thing that twiddles every time new content is beamed into a person's pocket expanded the consumer segment of the culture? Is it both? How would I tell if it was both? Fuck, I need answers! Where's my bus?

I don't have a clue where Ovaltine Goose-Shredder is, and I don't know if I care anymore. Him being gone, me not being distracted by his artillery bombardment of maniac energy anymore, it's given me a second to think, and I can finally accept that he was usually fucking insane. The Great Lakes are still an unprecedented ecological disaster, and gunning down the half-dead critters that are trying to crawl out of the water is costing Canada a mammoth amount of resources that we still don't have a structure in place to produce. And then he admitted to creating the biometric robocops responsible for turning South America into the land technology abandoned. Jettisoning the military supply train by making the biorobos run on sunlight and tough as trees was a stroke of terrible, terrible geniusity. Goose-Shredder stopped sending me emails shortly after he admitted he was much further beyond the lunatic of a loose-cannon that everyone thought he was. His creative impulses never made a distinction between constructive and destructive consequences, and when you indulge and enable the destructive don't be surprised if no one wants you around anymore. He ran, he hid, but he will never stop himself from popping up to grab attention. In all likelyhood the American Military have tracked him down and now he's chained to a lab bench buried under the dark spot on the map that replaced the recently outed Area 51, shouting a half-absurd hypothesis at some stone-faced soldier guarding the door with an M16. Goose-Shredder's combination of intense creativity and flat amorality make him very valuable to the military establishment. Fuck, he has a slightly flawed self-sustaining biometric weapon on his resume, the only question is whether he's been kidnapped by the public or private sector. Neither option is good for us.

The Firestone acolytes 2000 mile walk was halted by the Preacher Firestone in Panama. 2.5 million dusty and ragged and damn tired followers lugged bags of Miracle Grow across a continent to gather where the isthmus of Panama is about 50km's wide, making the acolytes a human barrier about 50 \people deep stretched from one ocean to the other. The acolytes held position for three days before the first of the biorobos began appearing through the forest, at which point they tore into their Miracle Grow and dumped it in a 50 meter wide swath before retreating to the North American side to watch a bunch of plant-based biometric weapons presumably walk right through the plant food and then push them down and take their smartphones. On paper the acolytes counteraction was at best a minor hindrance before the biorobos continued on their way to sending North America back to the dark ages, but the most dire predictions had the fertilizer enhancement ending the biorobos pacifist streak by inducing a steroid-rage that would cause a red tide and subsequent algae bloom on each of Panama's coasts in the ensuing bloodbath. Honestly now, a fertilizer barrier for plants? I know it worked and it still sounds ridiculous.

Google has admitted that their dissection of a captive biometric robocop did yield some useful information. The biorobos physiology is known to selectively prevent transmission of substances through the bark, providing a barrier for toxins and allowing the absorption of nutrients or water through small flat shoots that grow through the bark like lime green blisters. After absorption the shoot hardens back into bark and the barrier is re-sealed. When the biorobos are absorbing concentrated nutrients like Miracle Grow the shoots go into hyper-growth and effectively root the biorobos to the ground, rendering them as mobile as a common tree. North America is now divided from South America by a forest of broccoli headed tree-people who will flail their arms at you if you take an internet-enabled device near them.

At this point the Firestone acolytes celebrated with awkward fist-pumps and the Preacher Firestone walked toward the newly created Forest of the Biometric Robocops and the rooted biorobos frustrated howls rammed eardrums in a wide radius. Everyone said there was something special about him, and they were right because the Preacher Firestone was the most realistic human analogue ever created by a multinational corporation. He was concentrated Google, designed to blend into our lives and influence us in ways only the jerks among us have a defence against. Google used the Preacher Firestone to convince 2.5 million people to act out a plan in their defence, and the acolytes were aghast as they watched their leader walking into the howling biorobo horde with the serene facial expression he had wordlessly covered the previous thousands of miles with. In the midst of the horde, the Preacher Firestone was shredded into a shower of diodes and sparks by their treefingers.

A statement from the Google corporation that birthed His Androidness explained that the Preacher Firestone had been instructed to walk into the midst of the biorobos because he was a defective unit that no longer served his purpose for the company. “Google recognizes that our Firestone Unit was immensely popular, but the Firestone Unit was deteriorating at a steady rate. For instance, the Firestone Unit's speech functions were scaled back from non-stop-talk to only necessary commands during the migration because of a malfunction in it's vocal processor. There was no way to fix the malfunction without compromising the mission, and once the Firestone Unit accomplished it's mission there was no need to fix the unit. Explosive de-comissioning was the easiest option.”

The murmur that started in the acolytes at the point of the Android Firestone's demise spread out to each coast, touched each ocean and lapped back to the center of the isthmus in a cascading chorus of “It's crazy, right?” Local Outragee Sandra's voice rose out of the murmur and she wailed her way to the spot of the Android Firestone's demise, distressed over feeling she had been defrauded by an imposter messiah. “I was supposed to do something good for once! I was supposed to redeem my career choice! I was supposed to be part of a miracle! Not some PR stunt! Not some lie! He didn't eat! He didn't sleep! He just talked! It was so obvious!” Local Outragee Sandra doesn't cry like a normal person, she just screams for a while with dry eyes and stops when she runs out of sorrow. It's a common feeling amongst the acolytes, that the value of the journey was nullified when their good intentions were commandeered by Google, but while the android Firestone may have pied-pipered two million people across a continent, they still undertook a long journey and stood up to a dangerous foe. That's a significant thing, maybe even the high-water mark in their lives. The stories to tell, the smartphones saved, the acolytes banded together and did something powerful. Granted, we should always beware of corporately piloted animatronic humanoids trying to convince us to act in certain ways, but while we're on the topic we also shouldn't write them off just based on what they are. As the technology matures we have to make sure that there are no stigmas attached to Artificial Intelligence to not let another form of bigotry get off the ground. If we truly replicate human intelligence in a robot they're going to be as scared and confused as we are. We need to respect that. Yeah, we're all distressed that millions of people got duped by a corporate avatar, and that android technology will probably be weaponized in the next 10 minutes, but almost everyone is stoked that the acolytes stopped the biorobos. Seriously, acolytes, don't worry about the why on this one. You helped people. The world thanks you.

Someone made a recording of Axel Hjalmar's response to Firestone's victory against the biometric robocop horde and posted it to youtube, and that's delicious because the anti-Google resistance leader would vomit if he saw his likeness next to that logo, provided he wasn't distracted by the view count. Hjalmar addresses Google's foray into horizontal influence like he responds to everything Google does, by laying out how he thinks it will ruin humanity. “The bane of the advertiser is that words on a screen can be clicked away without a thought, but they know you will listen to a telemarketer's entire pitch because even though you want to cut them off you aren't rude enough to interrupt them, and if an advertisement can stare you straight in the eyes it will be asking you not to break it's heart with a gaze. The next frontier of advertising seeks to exploit our social conscience, and the only way to combat it is to have none.” Hjalmar believes that widespread use of androids for subtle face to face advertising will quickly turn us all into assholes, marking the beginning of a closing off of human social relations, and cautioned that humanity must “be vigilant in the face of such machinations.”

As the man who conceived and facilitated the creation of the biometric robocops, Hjalmar had just watched his life's work destroyed by the hands of a sworn rival who turned out to be “a tentacle grown from the root of all evil” and his response escalated to an uncharacteristically pissed level to match his disappointment. “I fucking knew it! I mean, I didn't know it, but I'm pissed I didn't guess it! Oh the Google. Oh the Google! They are not merely content to document all of human existence but are now infiltrating humanity with their disguised hardware and using it to subtly influence human behaviour. They are creating their own version of humanity because the one that exists does not fulfil their corporate mandate sufficiently. They will bend us to their will, they intend on it! And there is nothing to stop [Google] anymore! How could anyone be so irresponsible as to hinder the [biometric robocops]? How could they hinder the saviours of independence! You! You... you. Perhaps you deserve your chains. You embrace them. How plainly can an usurpation of privacy occur in front of your face? How can you allow your independence to be surrendered to an entity that has no concept of the individual? Then you have chosen, and I find myself fighting for an entity that is content to destroy itself. We're I to win you your freedom, would you simply turn and begin sleepwalking into the next disaster?”

At this point in the video Hjalmar stops trying to burn your conscience with his eyes and looks off camera for the first time in his life. “My boat is a shithole.” I can confirm that yes, his boat is a shithole. It reeks of rust and crayfish. The recently gutted Hjalmar concluded what I'm betting won't be his last transmission to the world by announcing that he was getting a new hobby and that he hoped humanity would be all right without him. “I have a boat that requires attention. You all have fun, I hope what you're doing is fun for you.” Many of the GASP faithful have pledged to continue fighting Google's influence on the world despite Hjalmar vacating his leadership position.

Early Thursday in San Francisco a representative of Google commented on the neutralization of the biometric robocop horde, saying “You're welcome, everyone.” before turning to the floor for questions. A journalist mentioning possible criminal charges being brought against Google by the ICC for creating human clones and killing human clones made the Google representative visibly uncomfortable, with the representative choosing to bolt from the room. Experts in International Law agree that the Google representative could have left the room at a slow walk, given that it will take decades to figure out who has jurisdiction to prosecute, let alone how property rights apply to people born to corporate guardians. If he were around right now, Ovaltine Goose-Shredder would say something like “The law waits for precedents, it's clumsy and lagging behind our human evolution, so it's not like we can expect it to perform well.” He probably would also be strapping a homeless man to a prototype of a combination lie-detector/electric chair that speeds up the justice process by eliminating criminals at the speed of thought. He'd call it a necessary cost for the justice of science. I wish Goosie was around now, but only so I could make sure he couldn't hurt anyone. Karen was the only person he trusted enough to temper himself for. Google is expected to re-base their entire enterprise to Antarctica to duck criminal persecution. San Francisco cheered at the prospect of going back to it's old, ungentrified self.

There's news on the TV in the corner of the bus station. You'd think we would be too wrapped in ecstasy over being plucked from the screaming mass of non-existence to bother fighting, but here we are, and there we go again. I'm traipsing on into the technologically barren South America to test a theory, a hope, and it hinges on how the people of South America behave in the absence of their smartphone devices. I hope the impulse to create and share is still there in the absence of the technology that removed barriers to content production and distribution, and I hope that impulse stays strong. There are only two things to do on this planet, and they're create and destroy. I'm hoping that our destructive impulses end up getting dummied by our creative plans as a dissolution of barriers and easy to find niche audiences make creative validation the easiest endorphin to trigger. That we will be so wrapped up in creating and sharing that we start forgetting to hate things. And if our every movement has a wind-up that started in our ancestors and continues through us, with that weight of human history that has gone into creating us and what we do creating the circumstances for those to come, it would do us well to not let them down by allowing our destructive and violent impulses to swing about and cause their damage.

Oh man, last call. My bus is leaving. It's been fun, but I don't know when I'll be back. Hell, I'm not the same person I was when I started this blog, 4 years ago? Jesus. I'm probably not the same person who took off across North America to follow the Firestone migration either, and I won't be the person who comes back from South America. No more PAJ after this, is what I'm saying. I'm not the guy that can put it together anymore. I've always felt like I got more out of naive wandering anyways. It's time to hit the wilds again.

Send my regards to that Editor I fired last year, and Love always,

James Betty

P.S. Hjalmar just posted a ship refurbishing tutorial on youtube. He hits his finger with a hammer and just shuts his eyes until the pain is gone. It's one of the more impressive things I've seen on the internet. Lashing out in anger was always such an easy option, but now I have to be stoic in the face of immense pain or Hjalmar will be better than me at something. I'm not happy about this, but it's the way it has to be because damnit, I'm not letting some radical Miss Manners have one over on me.

On a Run Down Through Mexico

Eyes on the ground are imperative when you are walking a road cut through the jungle. In Southwestern Ontario only ticks will try and climb into your pants and there's nothing else to worry about. In Honduras everything has fangs, everything has poison and everything jumps onto the cuffs of your pants when your foot lands near it. These are aggressive critters, and you need to be vigilant or you end up screaming like so many other Firestone acolytes. 2.5 million people with their pants tucked into their socks are coming up on the Guatemalan/Honduran border, on their way to confront a horde of biometric organisms that have set South American technology back to the 1930's. Millions of biorobos are scattered through the south of Columbia and Venezuela, grabbing anything with internet capabilities and tossing it into the nearest lake, slowly making their way north as they send each successive region back to the dark ages where storytelling was the only way to entertain. An enterprising bard could probably make a bit of coin down there now. I'll have to remember that for later.

It's incredible how much easier it is to cross from Mexico to Guatemala than it is America to Mexico. It's literally the difference between having your belongings torn apart by a Mexican border guard and just showing a Guatemalan that you have a passport. It doesn't have to be your passport, because they don't get out of their chair to look at it in Guatemala, but they at least want to know you have someone's documentation. Most of the Firestone migration made it through without incident. There are rumours of one smart-ass acolyte sarcastically applauding how thorough the Guatemalan guards were, and now he won't talk about what happened in the windowless room he got dragged into. The Constant Law of Comeuppance, the karmic physics equation that seems to underpin the balance of space-time by carving chunks out of people who test fate for the fuck of it, it works, and it will be in physics textbooks one day. That smart-ass acolyte who got the Level 2 search could prove it, if he would put up his hand in a crowd of 2.5 million so we could find him. C'est la vie, eh?

The Ontario election broke me, broke everything I tried to do. There was too much, the history, the platforms, the talking points, the mudslinging, there were so many valid ways in, picking one over another defied logic because there was always something sitting right beside it that seemed like a better angle. Stutter to article length with that tactic and by the end you have something that will never hold together because stretching a thought into a paragraph is useless when everything you need to say can be covered easily in a single sentence. The PC's didn't have a leader or a platform, Liberals = Gas Plants, and you want another Bob Rae? And why can't the Libertarian and Freedom Parties get along? They should have so much in common. Then the None of the Above Party showed up just in time to present an option to people who wanted an elected representative that didn't have a fucking clue. So I got on a plane to Mexico to dodge the confusion and ennui machine and left my absentee ballot at the gate on my way to join up with the Firestone migration. For now the white noise of election season has faded, so hopefully I'll be back in time to cover London's mayoral election, which should be fun because all you have to do is fill out a single page of paperwork to run for Mayor of London. No primaries, no leadership elections, no oversight at all. That's why crazy people can run for Mayor, and that's why paying attention to municipal elections can be tolerable. I'm looking forward to it.

For now I'm amongst the Firestone migration, coming up on the Honduran border, constantly checking that my pants are still tucked into my socks lest a living nightmare start burrowing into my skin. Sleep is a form of torture along this road. There are thousands of people all around you, all in their own tents, but you are alone in yours and questioning it's integrity while your face is next to the ground where the insects walk, constantly thinking that there's no way a single layer of nylon could keep out something with tiny knives on it's face. The sleeping conditions have the acolytes as bleary eyed and short tempered as I usually am. It doesn't make for pleasant day travel, but at least we are fairly well fed. The Catholic populations of Latin America have a lot of room in their hearts for pilgrims on a pilgrimage, and they're trying their best to keep the acolytes travelling toward their goal, which most experts speculate is their own annihilation at the hands of a clearly superior biometric weapon. Reports out of London said Sandra was travelling with the migration. I'm keeping an ear out for her as I make my way. More next week from the crowded jungle roads of Honduras.

Update from the Firestone Migration; Goose-Shredder says What he Wants

With my chief expert on the lam and only commenting on the things he's most interested in, I've had to go over his head and contact Ovaltine Goose-Shredder's sociologist colleagues myself for news on the Firestone migration. According to eyewitness scientists, the leading edge of the massive human migration is currently 400 km north of Mexico City in the province of San Luis Potosi. The mass crossed the Mexican/American border over the last week of April and had shockingly few hiccups going through the process of 2 million bag checks and questionings. The scientists did observe one couple from Maine who were dismayed to find they had forgotten their passports and had to turn back. They'll probably snap out of their passive-aggressive monotone conversation around Tennessee.

The bottle-neck created by the border crossing has broken the migration into towns, each consisting of a couple thousand people. Breaking up the migration into smaller chunks of humanity is putting less strain on local amenities like restaurants and truck stops, and is generally making the travel more enjoyable for those involved. Further divisions beyond the towns are noted, as there are neighbourhoods of people sharing resources and utensils, but the neighbourhood divisions are harder to pinpoint and tend to shift from hour to hour. When you start tracing the associations through individuals, it's hard to say where one neighbourhood starts and another ends, as all borders drawn are borders crossed.

Along the roadsides, makeshift vendors and soup kitchens are set up by folks in front of the Firestone migration who want to help the acolytes but don't want to fight a broccoli-headed bio-weapon themselves. The soup kitchens will set up and begin doling out food to as many people as they can until they run out, often causing the family providing to go hungry for a few days. It's the kind of goodwill among humans only a common enemy can bring about. The sociologists think this is why there are so few issues throughout the Firestone migration. Pack together 2 million people in a stressful situation without a common goal and things will get dicey in a hurry. But if at the end of their journey they will have to rely on the stranger beside them in potential life or death combat, they'll make sure they don't offend them on the way to the battlefield.

And now on to the things Ovaltine Goose-Shredder is most interested in, namely people calling his colleague Neil deGrasse Tyson a philistine. The backlash against Tyson is because he said people should avoid pondering “deep” questions with no answers on the Nerdist podcast, and a bunch of philosophers stopped pondering questions with no answers long enough to get riled up about it. The following is Ovaltine Goose-Shredder's e-mail. I've changed a few pronouns so he addresses the wider public, instead of just me.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is taking entirely too much shit from philosophers. It's shitty to watch someone with such stellar answers taking flak for the questions he didn't ask. He still ended up a scientist and a humanist. Leave Neil alone. He's doing fine. He just told other people how they could do fine like him. See? Everything's fine.

No matter what, curiosity is the evolutionary feature that keeps all species exploring and chasing ideas. To say that a person could not ponder deep questions without answers is impossible, we can't avoid it. We're relentless ponderers. Why a scientist and a philosopher can't see that this is a useless argument, that curiosity will go on spinning us out beyond the fringes of our answers regardless of anyone's opinion of it's merits, is kind of perplexing. You're both equally valid. Just chill and operate as you will. Neil can do fine not philosophizing, and other people can do whatever the fuck with their philosophizings.

As Massimo Pigliucci noted, this isn't the first time Neil has talked some smack about the Philosophy of Science. What Neil mentioned previously, and what is probably his main reason for derisively mentioning the philosophy of science, is that the field has not made a measurable contribution to physics since the 1920's, and no one has a rebuttal for that. If you're interested in results, Neil kind of has a point. If you want everyone off your back while you think the thoughts you want to think, I'll shut up now.

With love,

OGS

James Betty Seizes Editorial Control; Declares Everything Awesomer

In a stunning turn of events, James Betty has stormed the PAJ mainframe and cut the editorial staff out of “their property” and his first decree as Lord of PAJ is that I can stop writing everything like a god damn news brief. Can't I just tell a story like a person would, instead of hammering facts into a standardized format that conveys beautiful experiences through the stammering of an informative robot? Oh jesus, it took me two sentences to start sounding like a righteous wad. Ditching the sober second thought might be one of the worst ideas I've ever had. I'd love to make a crack about what happens when you turn off the autopilot here, but it's too soon. It's also a bad sign that I'm not even through the first paragraph and I'm already parroting the voice of the old master to subdue myself. Sarte was right about this freedom thing. It's going to take some courage to stick with this change, and it's more than just shouting down my own doubt. Those quotes up there are real. “Their property.” Lawyers said that. I'm countering a fairly legal letter with two crossed fingers and hoping the PAJ editors will realize spending money on lawyers to regain something that makes them zero dollars isn't a good investment. That letter they sent probably cost $300. Hopefully that's all they're willing to lose.

Working in journalism will gain you a few contacts in high places, and those contacts are especially handy when they have known about Heartbleed for years. Caligula Goonsquad and I are not especially friendly, in fact the extent of our relationship is him reading my e-mails and me not trusting him, but when I mentioned to Ovaltine Goose-Shredder via e-mail that I wanted to stage a coup d'etat at PAJ, Caligula gave me the username and password of the blog almost instantly. At the risk of ratting on Caligula after he did me a huge favour [not his real name, btw], I want to go on record saying I have someone doing favours for me inside the NSA. Hopefully the prospect of running into someone who is above the law will scare those lawyers away. They'll have better luck putting a t-shirt on a fish than sticking some consequences to an NSA agent. And I probably don't need to mention this, but I will anyway: Caligula Goonsquad has a malleable relation to morality. They're clay. They're molded into whatever his country needs. He's a good bureaucrat in that respect. Sometimes he molds them himself, but nothing's ever set in stone, and that makes him unpredictable and dangerous. And don't take me exposing him as a guarantee that he will turn against me, you don't know what that man is capable of.

Over the years there have been a few things the editors of PAJ and I have clashed over, but the fact is they've been pretty good about giving me leeway in the format when I asked for it. They've been good to me, and I don't forget that, but when they decided they wouldn't let me post a eulogy for Karen by telling me PAJ doesn't have an obit section, I knew I was done working with them. The format of the blog can be whatever we want it to be, so don't tell me you won't post an obituary, that's obviously not the reason. The only question left was what to do about striking out on my own, but before I could quit writing for PAJ Caligula handed down an answer from on high. Even though I despise everything about him and what he does, keeping the continuity with my past body of work was too big a plus to ignore. So I stole a website. Hear me out before you judge, or just don't judge.

Ovaltine Goose-Shredder introduced me to Karen seven years ago. We were quick friends and I loved her like I love anything that makes the world feel like a balanced place. Goosie I've known since high school. I didn't know there was a force on this planet that could bring his manic energy onto an even keel. The peace that followed Karen around almost made Goose-Shredder practical. Almost. I'm glad I saw the effect she had on the world around her. I'm glad I know her example. It gives me hope that I will see more of her likeness in the world in my later years. As the world's first human to be brought back from a lengthy death, Karen faced challenges both existential and personable that those of us without mechanical two stage pumps for a heart couldn't even imagine, and she stood up to these challenges with the grace she carried everywhere in her life. She will be missed, for real and forever this time.

PAJ will be back to reporting next week, only from now on it will be Awesomer. Welcome to the new shape of the news.

James Betty Finds Easter Full of Fear, Trembling

Alright, I've tried to come at this story from a few angles and they've all failed. This one centres so much around myself that it makes trying to write it with any sort of objective distance seem like a bad joke. In that vein, for today I'm just going to call myself an archivist to prevent any violation of the journalistic integrity of this publication. But Jeez-Louise does this story have me freaked out.

Earlier this week I thought I would start recording my life 24 hours a day, because last week I decided I was going to start living my life like a work of art and it needed to be documented. I attended my family's Easter celebration on a warm Sunday afternoon with my digital audio recorder in my shirt pocket to put the Betty clan's 25^th annual Easter Egg Battle Royale on record. It's kind of like the Hunger Games, except we destroy food instead of people. Each of the around 40 participants decorate a hard boiled egg and gather on the front lawn, and with everyone standing in a circle all the eggs are flung into the centre repeatedly until only one is left. That one is the winner. It wasn't mine. I finished second. I always finish second. In fact I'm getting a little sick of always being second place. That's how seriously we take this. There's a sash where your name joins the annals of family history. Anything with annals is serious.

But this isn't about me playing second fiddle to someone who should probably have an asterisk next to her win, because my Aunt's a pharmacist so of course she's got some form of doping going on. This is about the conversation I recorded with my Grandmother Muriel before the egg toss, where I realized that it's a pity no one was recording my Grandmother's life, because her knowing there was a witness around might have saved a few lives over the years. There's only one way to tell this story, and it's in Muriel's own words. The following is a transcript of the conversation I had Sunday afternoon with my Grandma Muriel on a sunny lawn.

James Betty: “These eggs would feed a lot of starving people in central Africa, you know.”

Muriel Betty: “They would go bad before they got there if we mailed them, dearie.”

JB: “I know that, it's just the principle of the thing.”

MB: “Just enjoy the game with your family. Don't attach too much to it. The important part is that we're all here, and we're happy there's another spring. It's a rebirth for all of us.”

[long pause]

MB: “Are you going to take issue with the blessing before the meal too?”

JB: “No, the blessing is nice. It's nice to hear someone voice their best wishes.”

MB: “Then why are you being a brat about the game we play?”

JB: “Because it's just a game, and I don't really have much else to say.”

MB: “Oh dearie, you can tell me anything.”

JB: “No I can't.”

MB: “Did I ever tell you about the conscientious objector I killed in 1940?”

JB: “What?”

MB: “He was assigned to be a firefighter in my hometown. One day when he came by my father's farm to buy some eggs I asked him why he hadn't gone to fight with all the other boys in town. He said he wouldn't raise a hand in violence against his fellow man. Now I don't know why the hell he thought Jerry didn't deserve a good whipping, and I asked him how a no good coward could still go showing his face around town. He said some gibberish about 'being the flesh the evils of the world make themselves known against' and it didn't make a lick of sense because Jerry was just awful, so I raised my pistol at him and said Mister, am I going to shoot you or are you going to stop me? Well he must have thought I was joking because he just laughed, and that didn't scare me one bit so I shot that coward down. From there I went running straight to the Judge who ran the General Store and told him what I did. He gave me a butterscotch candy for being such an imaginative girl. Never did say what he thought of the murder, though.”

JB: “No.... no no no...”

MB: “Around 1980 I finally started to understand what he had said, about being the flesh the evils of the world make themselves known against. I had to regret it first, but I had to get far enough from the person I was back then to do that. Then I understood. That man gave me his life to teach me that lesson.”

JB: “Lessons can be taught by talking too...”

MB: “Try to go your whole life without killing anyone, James.”

JB: “... Okay Grandma.”

MB: “Have a cookie, dearie.”

JB: “Is that a threat?”

MB: “You might have missed the point.”

Woah! Right? I still don't know how to process this, but the phrase “grandfathered in” makes so much sense now. Does she still have a handgun? Do senior citizens just have piles of illegal shit lying around their houses? What's in my Grandmother's attic? Whatever questions remain, the important lessons are clear: Grandma has a gun and she's not afraid to use it. Happy Easter everybody!

If We'd Just Stranded Putin on the Moon 2 Years Ago Like I Fucking Said...

Vladimir Putin could be ineffectually kicking moon dust and drinking a beige Russian knock-off of Tang through a zero-gravity crazy straw right now, but he isn't because a plan for Putin to live out the rest of his years in voluntary exile on the moon was passed over by the international community two years ago. As an idea, Putin getting off the Earth was very popular, but the costs involved in setting up a self-sufficient habitation on the moon proved prohibitive and the idea was dismissed as fun to think about but not a pragmatic use of resources, at least not until earlier this week when having Putin around started costing people their countries.

What began with the annexation of the Crimean province of southern Ukraine has led to Russian backed groups of armed rebels storming government and police buildings in parts of eastern Ukraine. With this, Russia has stationed a large military force on their Ukrainian border and vowed to invade if any ethnic Russians are attacked by Ukrainian forces, essentially daring Ukraine to raise a hand against the people tearing their country apart. International Relations expert Ovaltine Goose-Shredder says the situation is a case of entrapment on an international scale. “Russia are really being dicks here,” he said in a text message early Thursday, “sending [Russian] operatives in to stir up shit [in Ukraine] so they can have an excuse to invade? This is the kind of reprehensible trash only Russia could pull.”

The international community, while widely condemning Russia's actions, has reaffirmed that they made the correct decision in not sending Putin to the moon because the dismantling of Ukraine is looking more like a Russia problem than simply a Putin one. “What we're dealing with here is a country that feels they have the right to annex property to bring about their fated return to former glory as the Soviet Republic,” an unnamed source inside the United Nations said. The source was quick to point out that Russia was not bringing communism back, but that they were after the landmass, resources and international prestige the country enjoyed during the Soviet era. “Putin being gone would make no difference, Russia historically has had a giant head and they're looking to swell it some more. It would happen with any leader [in Russia].” The source also noted that Russia's use of extortion and entrapment for gaining wealth fit with their current post-Soviet economic model.

Russia's actions as of late have put the general public on edge, as the accumulating threats and incidents point towards a re-emergence of a Cold War mentality. What worries the public most is the precedent that Russia's annexation set. If Russia feels they have the right to take control of any piece of territory where people speak Russian, they could conceivably pull the move on the entire former Soviet bloc, as well as certain neighbourhoods in London and New York. Stopped for comment on Richmond late Thursday, Citizen Danny expressed doubt in Russia's competence as an actor on the international stage. “Didn't [Russia] give a bunch of women two years in the gulag for being objectively awesome? And then their whole gay thing? [Russia] is too clueless to be a country.” Experts agree that Russia's right to be a country seems to be based more on the fact that they've always been a country, and not on any qualitative judgement of the worth of their actions. Citizen Danny hopes Russia will “chill out with the invasions” soon.

Ovaltine Goose-Shredder Chased to Countryside After Copping to Gross Negligance

Revelations of Ovaltine Goose-Shredder being the architect of the biorobo genome that exploded out of Google's Antarctic cloning facility in a technology destroying fury have shaken the already tepid public perception of the world's foremost mad scientist, leading Goose-Shredder to duck from the public eye and conduct his press conference in a largely deserted restaurant south of Mount Forest, Ontario. Showing a rare sign of humility, Goose-Shredder allowed his prepared statement to be interrupted and indulged the overwhelming question of how he could do this to us. Goose-Shredder began by insisting that he did not believe the technology to bring the biorobo genetic code to life existed, and that he only created the code out of the barest necessity. “Look, I needed a job,” he said early Thursday, “and I needed a place to sleep because I accidentally blew up my house, and I needed a distraction because my wife Karen had her first death in that explosion, and trust me, the first time your spouse dies is by far the hardest one to deal with.” In summation, Goose-Shredder needed to get out of town, and an avenue that popped up happened to be a Swedish national offering a bunk on a boat to anyone who knew how to code a genome. Even though Goose-Shredder didn't know how to code a genome, he says he didn't let that stop him from taking the position.

The experience of working on the boat was a trying one for Goose-Shredder, who said Hjalmar would get in his grill every day about “'Google is evil' this and 'technology will only destroy us' that.” Despite avoiding him as much as possible, Goose-Shredder got to know Hjalmar well enough to realize that the GASP leader has a much deeper investment beyond what he sees as his noble crusade in the defence of human agency and creativity. “Now me, in the time I worked with [Hjalmar], I didn't ever believe Google had a secret cloning base, and I made sure [Hjalmar] knew that.” Goose-Shredder said, explaining that his discussions with Hjalmar would get heated to the point where the scientist would end up throwing Erlenmeyer flasks at him, something Hjalmar tolerated because he didn't know Goose-Shredder didn't know anything about coding DNA. Goose-Shredder spent 6 months on Hjalmar's boat putting together the biorobo genome, but it only took a few weeks for him to begin noticing patterns in the way Hjalmar conducted himself. “It started with the salt and pepper shakers always having to be touching each other. If I separated them even a little bit, a centimetre even, he would push them together so they were touching. He couldn't leave the room until he'd done that.” From there, Goose-Shredder began watching the way Hjalmar washed dishes, and noticed that every individual cup, plate and utensil had a pre-staged place on the counter, a place in the drying rack and a place in the cupboard, and the process was the exact same every day. Once Goose-Shredder began looking for them, the habits became very easy to spot, and he realized that Hjalmar had a catalogue of everything he interacts with over the day and he has to line everything back up with a picture that's been burned into his thoughts before he goes to bed. Goose-Shredder says that Hjalmar didn't just start GASP for the benefit of humanity, but because Hjalmar is worried about Google becoming so pervasive that it becomes a prerequisite for interacting with people. “Hjalmar is worried about something he doesn't trust fixing itself between him and the people he loves. That changing the way we relate might change the relationship.” If this is true, Hjalmar would be trying to get rid of Google because the company doesn't line up in his head as part of the path to his relationships. However, what Goose-Shredder thinks Hjalmar might have overlooked in his marine based defence of his personal relationships, is that no one wants you around when you stink like crayfish all the time.

Goose-Shredder continued to insist that at no point has he ever wanted to disrupt Google's activities, saying that at all times coding the biorobo genome “was simply a project, and not something that [he] ever thought would be brought into the world.” Asked why he didn't go work for Google when he had no allegiance to Hjalmar's cause, Goose-Shredder says that working for Google was never an option. “I said I wasn't very good at genetics when I answered Hjalmar's ad, and the truth is I'm still not, even though I've coded a successful genome,” he explained. Goose-Shredder feels that compared to Google's geneticists he is “still the wimpy kid on the playground,” but insists that is only metaphorically speaking because he “still has more swagger than Google's entire science division put together.” To back up this assertion, Goose-Shredder pointed out that he frequently “drinks scotch until awesome things happen,” but also noted that he is a long way away from Google's geneticists in terms of things like ability and understanding. “Google's geneticists could have put [the biorobo genome] together in 1/20^th the time it took me, and then they would still have the copyright on the technique for bringing it to life. I don't have a damn clue how to do that. My idea for bringing something to life was putting a two stage pump where a sea lion's heart used to be.”

While he lags behind Google's genetics department in skill and knowledge, Goose-Shredder did find some solace in being on the scientific fringe. “A tech firm never would have thought to put together a technology destroying organism, in fact they probably would have just put together something altogether more helpful for humanity.” After proving himself inept, Goose-Shredder floundered for an ego boost. “I mean, it's interesting, right? [The biorobos] are something that could only have come about from a crazy person putting out an ad for a bent mind. We did something that no one else could have done, because they deemed it outside the scope of their necessity, but Hjalmar and I were crazy enough to need [the biorobos].” Goose-Shredder then remembered his need to distance himself from Hjalmar, saying “Wait, I hate [Hjalmar]. He's a dick. I threw Erlenmeyer flasks at him and I bet some of them hurt. You're welcome, World.”

Stopped for comment on Goose-Shredder's appeal for thanks outside the Covent Garden Market late Thursday, Citizen Danny expressed outrage over the forced resignation of the technology he's bought over the years. “Thanks Goosie, thanks for all the bullshit. I mean, I know I tend to accidentally throw my phone at the ground all the time, and occasionally use it as a coaster, but those are my choices, or my fault at least. Now some giant plant is going to push me down and steal my phone? Fuck! Are you kidding? I just bought this one, it's not even broken yet!”

While the mood of the general public is keeping him out of populated areas for now, Ovaltine Goose-Shredder's long term fate will depend on what the authorities make of his involvement in the biorobo genome project. After insisting several times during the press conference that he had no intention of letting loose the biometric robocop horde upon the world, Goose-Shredder made an impassioned plea to distance himself from his creation, saying“It was just a project for me, you know? I just coded the genome, I didn't know Hjalmar knew how to bring it to life.” Goose-Shredder then added what amounted to a Napster Defence, saying “Are we going to start punishing people for spreading ideas now?” Goose-Shredder was informed that yes, when the idea is bad enough, a person can be punished for it. “Oh right, racism. Well,” Goose-Shredder said as he edged away from the podium, “well maybe you might not see me for a long time or a while. It's been fun, I'll try to keep in touch. Maybe...” Goose-Shredder concluded the press conference by disappearing out the back door of the establishment.