siberia

I found this on The Straight Dope boards, and I'm reposting it here in its entirety so that it can be preserved for the ages. It's exactly how the convo between Luke and Ben should have went if any of the events in the prequels had actually happened ...

Sampiro
Charter Member

Join Date: Aug 2002
Posts: 12,960
Location: al-Obama
LUKE
Obi-Wan! Why didn't you tell me?

The ghost of Ben Kenobi approaches him through the swamp.

LUKE
You told me Vader betrayed and murdered my
father.

BEN
You father was seduced by the dark side of
the Force. He ceased to be Anakin Skywalker
and became Darth Vader. When that happened,
the good man who was your father was
destroyed. So what I have told you was
true... from a certain point of view.

LUKE (turning away, derisive)
A certain point of view!

BEN
Luke, you're going to find that many of the
truths we cling to depend greatly on our own
point of view.

LUKE
It's not just that he was my father and you never told me... it's that... later stuff.

BEN
What later stuff?

LUKE
Okay, my dad is changed, or dead, whatever your 'point of view' is, right? So you take me and my sister.

BEN
I sure did that thing, babe.

LUKE
Okay, you decide you have to keep us safe from my dad. So you give my sister to the royal family of a world that has no connection to my father. Okay, that I understand, that was smart.

BEN
Thank you.

LUKE
And then there's me. Okay, so there's thousands of inhabited star systems in the Galactic Empire and tens maybe hundreds of thousands of worlds, right? You've got Wookie planets and ice planets and all kinds of weird ass reptile planets and that planet of the digitally animated cloning people and the E.T. planet and I'm assuming all of these probably have human inhabitants as well...

BEN
By now, probably. All species get around.

LUKE
Okay, so you hide me... by looking up Anakin Skywalker's next of freaking kin and letting me grow up with some rube moisture farmer and his wife? I mean, they were nice people and all, but Ben! I grew up like 10 miles away from Vader's birthplace!

BEN
That's the beauty of it. Hiding you in open view and all.

LUKE
And not even like with a Tatooine royal family or crimelord who could protect me but a moisture farmer? What were they supposed to do if Vader found out where I was?

BEN
Well, moisture farmers are scrappy. And...

LUKE
Oh yeah! You saw how scrappy they were when the stormtroopers came by! Did you not see the charred skeletons?

BEN
Did it ever occur to you Luke that it was a murder suicide? Your Uncle Lars and Aunt Beru had been having some problems...

LUKE
Bullshit! The stormtroopers did them in without the force or anything! Just blasters...

BEN
That's a theory.

LUKE
And okay, there's Leia, going to the best of schools, growing up a frigging princess... a princess Ben! Involved with the revolution since she could walk, and I can't even ride into town until I've sponge bathed a droid... and oh, by town, I mean WHERE MY FATHER GREW UP! If he ever wanted to look for me it'd be the most obvious place in the universe!

BEN
Which is precisely why he'd never think to look there!

LUKE
He's a master of dark and forbidden wisdom! He could have done it!

BEN
He'd never have found you even if...

LUKE
His mom's buried in my back yard of where I grew up! What if he'd come to pay his respects at some point?

BEN
Too traumatic. He wouldn't have...

LUKE
He killed whole star systems! I think he could have braved the emotions! And if he'd come there...

BEN
I would have protected you...

LUKE
You live 20 miles away, don't have a landspeeder, and let's face it, last time you fought you didn't do too well...

BEN
I'd have blocked his mind with the force... He'd never have found you.

LUKE
No, he never would have, UNLESS HE'D CALLED TATTOOINE INFORMATION AND SAID 'HEY, GOT ANY LISTINGS NEAR MOS EISLEY FOR LAST NAME 'SKYWALKER'?' You didn't even change my name Ben! I was the only Skywalker in the galaxy and you didn't think he was going to notice that the guy who blew up the Death Star is a boy from Tattooine named Skywalker? "Gee, I wonder if he's one of the Tattooine Skywalkers that I knew? You know, I've got a kid about his age somewhere. His name would be Skywalker too... but he wouldn't be on Tattooine BECAUSE NOBODY'S FRIGGING STUPID ENOUGH TO HIDE THE ONLY SKYWALKER IN THE GALAXY WHERE HIS DAD GREW UP!"

BEN
Alright. I'm sorry. Everything is my fault. EVERYTHING! The Whoooooooooooooole rebellion and end of the Jedi and everything else is all just my fault! Excuse the hell out of me!

LUKE
It is your fault Ben!

YODA
A point the young Skywalker has.

BEN
You're dead!

YODA
So are you. I'm back.

BEN
Stay dead you lizardling fart.

YODA
At least from this side more damage do you cannot.

BEN
"La la la la la la... I'm sorry Yoda, did you say something? I was busy ignoring you.

YODA
I said, sometimes dead is bettah.

LUKE
And you never even told me I had a sister, not even when we were going to rescue her.

BEN
I wanted it to be a surprise.

LUKE
And...

BEN
Luke, your true issues are with your father! That he never was there for you, that he never paid support, that he never took an interest in your life...

LUKE
Oh right! That's it! It's daddy issues, not the fact that an old man hides me in the first place that an insane guy would look for his kid if he even is insane! How do you know he wouldn't have made a wonderful dad!

BEN
Do you know, Luke, not once have you asked me who your mother is? Or even if she's alive or dead?

[pause]

LUKE
Who was my mother? And is she alive or is she dead?

BEN
[bitchily]
I don't remember.

LUKE
Who was my mother Ben? WHO WAS SHE!?

BEN
[as brother boy]
My mind's a blank.

LUKE
Tell me now old man!

BEN
Oops. My ectoplasm is run out.
{Ben vanishes}

LUKE
Yoda! Who was my mother!? Tell me everything you know about her?

YODA
Yoda, my name is. And you are?

LUKE
Shit! Even dead he's still senile. Artoo let's get the hell out of here.

YODA
Pichnochle?

LUKE
Okay fine. One game. I want to miss the interstellar rush anyway.

The squareback arrived. Mechanically, it's in good shape. Electrically, it was rewired once by a competent EM but also three times by hydrocephalic chimpanzees.

Am spending a lot of time getting the electrical system into a state that vaguely resembles the official schematic. Various links to resources/vendors that I am using:

Flat Four has a bunch of reproduction parts. Mostly engine, but also rubber seals and knobs and so forth.

VW ISP West looks to be a sort of mail-order Grasser's. Good source for window lifters and other bits not available through Flat Four.

Glass Action makes good-quality speaker kick panels, replacement dashboards, and other bits/bobs needed to make the car wife-friendly.

... and then, there's my VW vendor blacklist:

JBugs don't ship outside the continental US. They claim to take foreign orders via postal money order, but don't bother to reply to email. Avoid.

GAMA Japan is the guy that sold us the car. I wouldn't buy from him again -- he waited until the last minute to tell us that the car would be delivered a week late due to a screwup with the replacement windshield seals, did a half-assed job of replacing the headliner, did not certify critical electrical components for correct operation (the turn signal blinker wires were only making tenuous contact with the relay, the light switch needed a rebuild, the high beam switch was fried), and so forth. Decent mechanic, but lousy quality control. The rear license plate illumination bulb fell off during the delivery inspection; he actually asked me for a soldering iron and electrical tape to patch it up. Unfortunately, the filiment had broken due to deceleration trauma ...

Non-Japanese documentation that they're going to ask you for when you apply for citizenship:

Your birth certificate,

Birth certificates for any siblings,

Parents' marriage certificate,

Death certificates for the above (if applicable),

Statement from mother confirming that the kids are indeed hers,

Transcript from educational institution of highest grade completed.

... at least, that's what I had to supply. As always, the required paperwork is up to the examiner, so they might ask for more stuff. Some of it is negotiable (there's no way that I'd be able to get a factual statement in a timely manner from my mother, so the examiner said that a note explaining the situation would suffice).

Washington State has an open-records policy, so the various birth certificates were easy. The marriage certificate was more difficult, as there's a year's worth of backlog at the state records bureau. Took a bit of digging to find the right country (ceremony was performed in San Berdoo, but the record was filed in LA) but, again, not insurmountable.

If you've had any moving violations or other minor transgressions, they're not going to let you naturalize. Lucky for me that I never found the time to get licensed here.

Now I wait. Sometime in the next ninety days I'll be called in to give an oral autobiography. Maybe six months after that it will be over, one way or the other.

I'm cautiously optimistic.

Various quotes that have stuck with me for one reason or another:

"Son, you look like a spastic monkey trying to fuck a football." -- GMGC(SW) Douglas Frame

"You know, they'll never accept you over there, because you aren't one of them." -- My mother, about my desire to be an exchange student. She'd never travelled outside the west coast, but had once seen a special about Japan on PBS.

"I kept my pet snake in my hair." -- Marty Pauley (paraphrased)

"Does anyone here know what the American national anthem is?" -- ENS Forgettable, high priest of HTFF, thinking that all MMs are rocks.

"Yes, sir! It's Margaritaville!" -- MM3 Wiseass, by way of response, still upset that he became a knuckledragger just because his last name started with a letter between "M" and "Z".

"Those guys just use you, man. Get away from them." -- Ryan Higgins, about Rolin and Doug. He was right.

"He's your SON! How can you be such a dick? (pause, two minutes) Fine, sir. Goodbye. (hangs up phone) You can stay with us as long as you need." -- Deston, in a phone conversation with my father after my final departure. I owe Deston a lot.

"One-ply is icky! Two-ply is gross! What we need is three-ply!" -- Julie Davis, in a mock advertising presentation about toilet paper.

"Fuckin' pots-and-pans, man." -- MMFN Wiseass, sometime in MM A-School, answering an asinine question about aux steam usage.

"We're going to let you finish the semester, but you're not going to graduate and I'm going to write letters to colleges around here letting them know what a terrible person you are." -- Jim Bumgarner, shortly before he learned that my infraction was actually a setup for a term paper about school-system justice arranged with the approval of the principal. Jim resigned at the end of the year.

"If you lose your virginity to HER, I'm going to be very upset." -- Julie, to me, about Kris Rolfe. She needn't have worried.

"There's nothing you can do about a broken nose." -- Dad

"Hi! How are you guys!" -- Minh (the proprieter of "The Emerald" in Pullman). Sounds best when imagined with a heavy Vietnamese accent.

More later, maybe. I'm tired -- the second round of the naturalization process was today. I passed. Next will be the in-depth background interrogation, scheduled for late April.

Updates: I has them.

My skis are optimized for speed, not maneuverability. Took the family skiing in Hokkaido; first run on day two of the three-day trip, I crashed and busted up both knees. Toughed it out until we got back to Tokyo, then hit the hospital on the way back home where the doc exsanguinated my right knee and put me on painkillers and crutches. So much for my fine plan of cleaning up the house during the break.

... which reminds me -- whatever happened to those Hexcel skis that I carried around throughout the nineties? Are they still in Bear's basement?

Put another PIX-515E into the house infra. Unfortunately can't do failover with a PPPOE-over-ADSL uplink (hell, I can think of three ways to do it seamlessly ... why can't you, Cisco?) so I've rigged it as a VPN concentrator. House infra is now damned near equal to what we had at WestLB circa 2003, right down to the gear model numbers.

Bought a Scottish-fold kitten for my parents-in-law. The little bastard decided that I was encroaching on his turf and bit through the nail on my left ring finger. Thank God I keep antibiotics around for emergencies.

First step of the citizenship (naturalization) process is next Friday. I'm apprehensive, but with proper preparation I should do okay. Paranoia is a healthy thing.

Executive summary: while the idea behind the CatGenie is clever, the product has several design flaws that render it useless. The CatGenie support staff are unresponsive to email support requests. The unit requires proprietary litter and inkjet-printer-like cleaning solution that will be unavailable when CatGenie inevitably goes out of business.

During my last trip to NYC, I obtained a CatGenie self-cleaning litter box for our cats. The concept is pretty neat: at a predetermined time, the CatGenie will scoop out cat feces, flush them through a drain hose to the toilet, then rinse and air-dry the litter. The cats would be happy with constantly-clean litter, we'd be happy about the self-cleaning nature. A good thing all around.

However, anything that seems too good to be true usually is. The CatGenie is no different.

Here is a link to the operation guide. Page eight gives an exploded view of the unit. The theory of operation is simple:


[*] scoop descends into the rotating bowl and collects feces. After several rotations, the scoop lifts and the feces tumble into the hopper. This sequence repeats several times.
[*] bowl fills with water and begins rotating. Scoop again descends to agitate the immersed litter. Impeller kicks in, draining the bowl and liquifying the feces which are then expelled through the drain hose.
[*] above step is repeated as a final rinse.
[*] hot air is blown at the litter. The scoop descends into the rotating bowl to facilitate even drying.


My observations over the course of the past month have led me to the following conclusions regarding this product:


[*] the litter must be absolutely dry at the beginning of the cycle. Any moisture whatsoever will cause the scoop to drop large clumps of litter into the hopper. By "moisture", I mean not only dampness from the previous cleaning cycle but also fresh feces and urine.
[*] the impeller is incapable of clearing clogs caused by litter. Although the rotation speed appears adequate, the blades need to be roughly 50% larger (with a corresponding increase in exhaust port size). Tolerance between blades and impeller housing is too large, allowing litter to accumulate in the unit.
[*] the bowl motor drive gear makes inadequate contact with the bowl rim. Bowl rotation will be intermittently arrested, requiring manual intervention to resume. I found that lifting the front of the brim about half an inch upward would cause the motor to re-engage the bowl rim.


So, putting the above bullet points together, here's what happens:


[*] litter is dropped into the impeller unit and is not expelled,
[*] the litter still in the bowl is not adequately dried due to lack of bowl rotation,
[*] subsequent cycles will drop still more litter into the impeller, which soon is completely unable to drain waste water,
[*] end user is forced to dismantle and clean unit, which is a major irritation after the third or fourth repetition.


I attempted to contact their support hotline via email to discuss these issues. My initial query, which naturally was very technical in nature, went unanswered.

Several days later, I sent a second message stating that I was taking the CatGenie offline permanently and would be writing a negative review for my weblog. Several hours after that, I received a response from them that I paraphrase here:


[*] CatGenie is unwarrantied ex-US,
[*] the voltage converter may be fried,
[*] it's not fair to post adverse reviews of a product used outside of its designated operating environment.


... which does not address the observed problem. The response was non-technical and had a distinct defensive tone which was both unhelpful and off-putting. I have included my response at the end of this post for those who may be curious about the voltage converter issue.

So, that's it. The CatGenie didn't work for us and I'm pretty sure that it's due to defects in design. CatGenie support was inadequate. I cannot in good conscience recommend it to anyone due to my negative experience.

(response to CatGenie follows)

Hello (elided),

There's no dispute that the unit is malfunctioning. However, Japan is 110VAC (plus or minus seven depending on grid load), same as the US. The problem is not voltage conversion.

If the CatGenie were designed for 220VAC and the motor was AC driven by a step-down transformer hooked directly into the line current, then the motor would be unable to properly drive the impeller and rotate the bowl.

However, since the Tokyo power grid runs with the same voltage as the US, this cannot be the case. Further, as the motor reverses without the use of intermediate linkage or gears, I believe that (like the rest of the unit) it runs on DC and would not be affected by power grid frequency differences (50Hz Japan versus 60Hz US).

I was not, and am not, seeking warranty replacement. When I ordered the unit, the nice fellow on the phone explained the lack of warranty for non-US users -- but stated that CatGenie would be immediately responsive to email queries. (We also briefly discussed the need for ~110VAC, but quickly concluded that would not be an issue)

My original message was a report of our experience with the unit, my assessment of the probable cause, and a request for options that did not require cross-shipping parts between Japan and the US. It was intended to be a technical conversation.

I did not receive your response because you did not send it. Here are the results of a quick search of our mail server logs (slightly re-ordered for readability):

[09:40:21] mail:$ grep -i catgenie maillog*
maillog.1:Dec 5 21:13:03 mail postfix/smtp[19737]: certificate verification failed for catgenie.com.s7a1.psmtp.com: num=19:self signed certificate in certificate chain
maillog.1:Dec 5 21:13:05 mail postfix/smtp[19737]: 0B6D7175CB: to=, relay=catgenie.com.s7a1.psmtp.com[64.18.6.14]:25, delay=4.7, delays=0.33/0.05/2.9/1.5, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 Thanks)
maillog:Dec 7 20:14:50 mail postfix/smtp[16144]: certificate verification failed for catgenie.com.s7a1.psmtp.com:num=19:selfsigned certificate in certificate chain
maillog:Dec 7 20:14:51 mail postfix/smtp[16144]: 8C811175CB: to=,relay=catgenie.com.s7a1.psmtp.com[64.18.6.14]:25, delay=4.2, delays=0.31/0.03/2.6/1.3, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 Thanks)
maillog:Dec 8 05:41:04 mail postfix/smtpd[21688]: warning: 72.32.198.51: address not listed for hostname dedicated.catgenie.com
maillog:Dec 8 05:41:08 mail postfix/cleanup[20406]: C0BF9175CB: message-id=<4759AFE4.2090008@catgenie.com>
maillog:Dec 8 05:41:08 mail postfix/qmgr[356]: C0BF9175CB: from=, size=4920, nrcpt=1 (queue active)

The first entry (05 December) is my initial request. The second (07 December) is the letter that you responded to. The third is your response.

Your response consists of this:

[*] CatGenie is unwarrantied ex-US,
[*] the voltage converter may be fried,
[*] it's not fair to post adverse reviews of a product used outside of its designated operating environment.

Nowhere in your message is any attempt at a technical explanation for the behavior of our unit. "The motor operates on AC fed through a step-down transformer, which could be causing your difficulties" is a useful response. "Your voltage convertor could have malfunctioned or caused a malfuntion" is not.

Stating that you stand behind your product, but then not providing information essential for correct diagnosis and remediation of the product, is somewhat contradictory.

Absent evidence to the contrary, I find that I must stand by my technical assessment of the CatGenie, as well as my opinion of the quality of end-user support.

-- Chris

Don't open an account with them if you can possibly avoid it. They're less competent than a troop of spastic monkeys failing to fuck footballs. Details available upon request.

It turns out that NFS automounts are much easier to work with under Leopard than AppleShare mounts. Open the Directory Utility, add a NFS mount, apply the changes, add "nfs.client.mount.options = intr,locallocks,rdirplus,resvport" to /etc/nfs.conf, done.

Except, of course, Apple likes to start user accounts off at numeric UID 501. That causes problems when wiring the shiny new Mac box into a legacy UNIX NFS environment.

Leopard has deprecated the netinfo manager. Here's the procedure for renumbering ${UID} for ${USER}:

Determine ${UID} on NFS server

sudo dscl . -create /Users/${USER} UniqueID ${UID}

cd /Users

sudo chown -R ${USER} ${USER}

All of the currently running processes will be in a weird state, as their UID is now bogus. Bounce the box and all will be good.

I gave up on getting my Neo1973 to work reliably here. I picked up a Nokia 6120 at Mobile City a few blocks from my hotel. The staff swear up and down that it will work in Japan (dual GSM/3G unit). We'll see. It's a Symbian phone, so I rigged it to check my personal email as a desperate attempt to stay awake during yet another pointless meeting.

The WiFi at the Soho Grand hotel is flakey at best. I won't stay here again; I'll go somewhere that has wired connectivity.

Can use corporate ID as a ferry pass, but only after 0930.

Whatever is coming out of the tap at the Brazilian all-you-can-eat beef restaurant in TriBeCa, it isn't Sam Adams and is probably not even beer. My stomach isn't happy with me right now, even though I only had one mouthful (and spat most of that out immediately).

Bought an iPod touch at the Soho Apple store. This script converts from .ogg to .mp3 with decent quality, preserving ID3 tags:

#! /bin/sh

ARTIST="`ogginfo $1 | grep ARTIST | cut -f 2- -d '='`"
ALBUM="`ogginfo $1 | grep ALBUM | cut -f 2- -d '='`"
TITLE="`ogginfo $1 | grep TITLE | cut -f 2- -d '='`"
DATE="`ogginfo $1 | grep DATE | cut -f 2- -d '='`"
GENRE="`ogginfo $1 | grep GENRE | cut -f 2- -d '='`"
TRACKNUMBER="`ogginfo $1 | grep TRACKNUMBER | cut -f 2- -d '='`"
CDDB="`ogginfo $1 | grep CDDB | cut -f 2- -d '='`"

TARGET="`echo $1 | sed 's,ogg$,mp3,g'`"

echo Transcoding $1 into $TARGET ...

oggdec -o - $1 | lame -b 128 --vbr-new -V 3 -m j \
--tt "$TITLE" --ta "$ARTIST" --tl "$ALBUM" --ty "$DATE" --tn "$TRACKNUMBER" \
- $TARGET

I upgraded my aluminum PowerBook G4 to Leopard right before I left for NYC. My hotel has wireless network connectivity on all floors, and it worked okay with my old Linux laptop the last time I was here.

With the PowerBook, however, I was unable to obtain a DHCP lease. Running tcpdump on en1 indicated that I could receive traffic, but packet transmission apparently wasn't happening. I walked around the floor and found that things started working about five meters from my room.

To make a long story short, there's a wireless driver from 10.4 that isn't removed by the 10.5 upgrader. Blow away /System/Library/Extensions/AppleAirPort2.kext and things go back to normal.

Grabbed my Family Pack copy at Shinjuku Bic Camera at 1800 today. Cleared the register at 1803, went straight home and started installing on our boxes. It's possible that we're the first in Tokyo to have operational Leopard boxes.

It absolutely goddamned rocks. I'm flying to NYC tomorrow, and it's going to be hard to tear myself away from the boxes tonight to get a decent night's sleep.

If you have a Mac with a G4 or better, immediately run out and buy a copy. Really. It's that good.

I'm jotting down a few random bits of technical information, mostly so that I don't have to re-derive them later.

OpenWRT Kamikaze (7.0.x) doesn't ship with a useful web interface. X-Wrt's webif2 works fine, but the installation instructions are incorrect for Kamikaze. This procedure works:

flash the .trx

telnet into the router (192.168.1.1, not 192.168.11.1 as it was for WhiteRussian)

passwd root

fix /etc/resolv.conf and give the router a default gateway

"ipkg update"

"ipkg install http://downloads.x-wrt.org/xwrt/kamikaze/7.09/brcm-2.4/webif_latest.ipk"

The Amiga 3000 PSU can easily be replaced with a standard ATX PSU. The best way to accomplish this is to cut the P8/P9 bits off an ATX-to-AT converter cable and solder it to the A3000 PSU connector, neatly sidestepping the soft-power switch issue. +5V on pins one through four, pin five is N/C (even though the original PSU supplied +5V to it), six through ten are ground, 11 is -5V, 12 is also +5V, 13 is N/C, 14 is -12V, 15 is +12V.

Cisco PoE injectors (CP-PWR-INJ) speak 802.3af as well as Cisco's proprietary (and deprecated) protocol, so they can be used with standard off-the-shelf PoE-aware gear.

The ISITO 32-inch LCD monitor doesn't provide the right timings via DDC -- it claims that it's 1024x768 and doesn't advertise physical display size (698x393). This modeline works:

Modeline "1360x768" 80.00 1360 1384 1640 1724 768 784 791 819

Asterisk G729-to-G711 transcoding doesn't work properly when the PSTN termination is ISDN G711 u-law. This causes one-way audio (for inbound calls) and clicking audio (for outbound calls). Set all codecs to g711u everywhere and the problem goes away.

To use Japanese ISDN with Asterisk, obtain an Eicon DIVA Server card (I use a BRI-2M). An NTT-supplied DSU is required. Don't bother with the melware driver; the stock driver supplied with the 2.6 kernel provides all the functionality required. Grab and install the grand unified ISDN firmware tarball from http://www.isdn4linux.de (or emerge net-dialup/isdn-firmware if using gentoo). Add "/sbin/divactrl load -c 1 -f JAPAN 1>/dev/null 2>&1" to the appropriate rc script immediately before Asterisk is started. Obtain a chan_capi snapshot from http://www.chan-capi.org, compile, install.

Late-model linux 2.6 kernels have issues speaking NFSv2 to NetBSD NFS servers. Recompile kernel with NFSv3 support. If the client is using NFS root, add "nolock" to options field in /etc/fstab. (yes, that's "nolock", not "nolocks" ... the locking error message is itself in error)

I'm reposting this in its entirety. I just found the unredacted article online at an Australian university website, and I'm mirroring it so that it is preserved freely for posterity. It's the best damned analysis of Nixon that I've ever read.

(my father voted for Nixon twice, according to my mother)

MEMO FROM THE NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK
DATE: MAY 1, 1994
FROM: DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON
SUBJECT: THE DEATH OF RICHARD NIXON:

NOTES ON THE PASSING OF AN AMERICAN MONSTER....HE WAS A LIAR ND A QUITTER, AND HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN BURIED AT SEA. ...BUT HE WAS, AFTER ALL, THE PRESIDENT.

"And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is becoming the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit and a cage of
every unclean and hateful bird."--REVELATION 18:2

Richard Nixon is gone now and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing--a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that "I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon."

I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it. Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.

Nixon laughed when I told him this. "Don't worry," he said. "I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you."

It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he's gone, I feel lonely. He was a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was politically alive--and he was, all theway to the end--we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instincts of a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it by the head with all four claws.

That was Nixon's style--and if you forgot, he would kill you as a lesson to the others. Badgers don't fight fair, bubba. That's why God made dachshunds.

Nixon was a navy man, and he should have been buried at sea. Many of his friends were seagoing people: Bebe Rebozo, Robert Vesco, William F. Buckley Jr., and some of them wanted a full naval burial.

These come in at least two styles, however, and Nixon's immediate family strongly opposed both of them. In the traditionalist style, the dead president's body would be wrapped and sewn loosely in canvas sailcloth and dumped off the stern of a frigate at least 100 miles off the coast and at least 1,000 miles south of San Diego, so the corpse could never wash up on American soil in any recognizable form.

The family opted for cremation until they were advised of the potentially onerous implications of a strictly private, unwitnessed burning of the body of the man who was, after all the President of the United States. Awkward questions might be raised, dark allusions to Hitler and Rasputin. People would be filing lawsuits to get their hands on the dental charts. Long court battles would be inevitable--some with liberal cranks bitching about corpus delicti and habeas corpus and others with giant insurance companies trying not to pay off on his death benefits. Either way, an orgy of greed and duplicity was sure to follow any public hint that Nixon might have somehow faked his own death or been cryogenically transferred to fascist Chinese interests on the Central Asian Mainland.

It would also play into the hands of those millions of self-stigmatized patriots like me who believe these things already.

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern--but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.

Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man--evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him--except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.

It is fitting that Richard Nixon's final gesture to the American people was a clearly illegal series of 21 105-mm howitzer blasts that shattered the peace of a residential neighborhood and permanently disturbed many children. Neighbors also complained about another unsanctioned burial in the yard at the old Nixon place, which was brazenly illegal. "It makes the whole neighborhood like a graveyard," said one. "And it fucks up my children's sense of values."

Many were incensed about the howitzers--but they knew there was nothing they could do about it--not with the current president sitting about 50 yards away and laughing at the roar of the cannons. It was Nixon's last war, and he won.

The funeral was a dreary affair, finely staged for TV and shrewdly dominated by ambitious politicians and revisionist historians. The Rev. Billy Graham, still agile and eloquent at the age of 136, was billed as the main speaker, but he was quickly upstaged by two 1996 GOP presidential candidates: Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas and Gov. Pete Wilson of California, who formally hosted the event and saw his poll numbers crippled when he got blown off the stage by Dole, who somehow seized the No. 3 slot on the roster and uttered such a shameless, self-serving eulogy that even he burst into tears at the end of it.

Dole's stock went up like a rocket and cast him as the early GOP front-runner for '96. Wilson, speaking next, sounded like an Engelbert Humperdinck impersonator and probably won't even be re-elected as governor of California in November.

The historians were strongly represented by the No. 2 speaker, Henry Kissinger, Nixon's secretary of state and himself a zealous revisionist with many axes to grind. He set the tone for the day with a maudlin and spectacularly self-serving portrait of Nixon as even more saintly than his mother and as a president of many godlike accomplishments--most of them put together in secret by Kissinger, who came to California as part of a huge publicity tour for his new book on diplomacy, genius, Stalin, H.P. Lovecraft and other great minds of our time, including himself and Richard Nixon.

Kissinger was only one of the many historians who suddenly came to see Nixon as more than the sum of his many squalid parts. He seemed to be saying that History will not have to absolve Nixon, because he has already done it himself in a massive act of will and crazed arrogance that already ranks him supreme, along with other Nietzschean supermen like Hitler, Jesus, Bismarck and the Emperor Hirohito. These revisionists have catapulted Nixon to the status of an American Caesar, claiming that when the definitive history of the 20th century is written, no other president will come close to Nixon in stature. "He will dwarf FDR and Truman," according to one scholar from Duke University.

It was all gibberish, of course. Nixon was no more a Saint than he was a Great President. He was more like Sammy Glick than Winston Churchill. He was a cheap crook and a merciless war criminal who bombed more people to death in Laos and Cambodia than the U.S. Army lost in all of World War II, and he denied it to the day of his death. When students at Kent State University, in Ohio, protested the bombing, he connived to have them attacked and slain by troops from the National Guard.

Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism--which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

Nixon's meteoric rise from the unemployment line to the vice presidency in six quick years would never have happened if TV had come along 10 years earlier. He got away with his sleazy "my dog Checkers" speech in 1952 because most voters heard it on the radio or read about it in the headlines of their local, Republican newspapers. When Nixon finally had to face the TV cameras for real in the 1960 presidential campaign debates, he got whipped like a red-headed mule. Even die-hard Republican voters were shocked by his cruel and incompetent persona. Interestingly, most people who heard those debates on the radio thought Nixon had won. But the mushrooming TV audience saw him as a truthless used-car salesman, and they voted accordingly. It was the first time in 14 years that Nixon lost an election.

When he arrived in the White House as VP at the age of 40, he was a smart young man on the rise--a hubris-crazed monster from the bowels of the American dream with a heart full of hate and an overweening lust to be President. He had won every office he'd run for and stomped like a Nazi on all of his enemies and even some of his friends.

Nixon had no friends except George Will and J. Edgar Hoover (and they both deserted him). It was Hoover's shameless death in 1972 that led directly to Nixon's downfall. He felt helpless and alone with Hoover gone. He no longer had access to either the Director or the Director's ghastly bank of Personal Files on almost everybody in Washington.

Hoover was Nixon's right flank, and when he croaked, Nixon knew how Lee felt when Stonewall Jackson got killed at Chancellorsville. It permanently exposed Lee's flank and led to the disaster at Gettysburg.

For Nixon, the loss of Hoover led inevitably to the disaster of Watergate. It meant hiring a New Director--who turned out to be an unfortunate toady named L. Patrick Gray, who squealed like a pig in hot oil the first time Nixon leaned on him. Gray panicked and fingered White House Counsel John Dean, who refused to take the rap and rolled over, instead, on Nixon, who was trapped like a rat by Dean's relentless, vengeful testimony and went all to pieces right in front of our eyes on TV.

That is Watergate, in a nut, for people with seriously diminished attention spans. The real story is a lot longer and reads like a textbook on human treachery. They were all scum, but only Nixon walked free and lived to clear his name. Or at least that's what Bill Clinton says--and he is, after all, the President of the United States.

Nixon liked to remind people of that. He believed it, and that was why he went down. He was not only a crook but a fool. Two years after he quit, he told a TV journalist that "if the president does it, it can't be illegal."

Shit. Not even Spiro Agnew was that dumb. he was a flat-out, knee-crawling thug with the morals of a weasel on speed. But he was Nixon's vice president for five years, and he only resigned when he was caught red-handed taking cash bribes across his desk in the White House.

Unlike Nixon, Agnew didn't argue. He quit his job and fled in the night to Baltimore, where he appeared the next morning in U.S. District Court, which allowed him to stay out of prison for bribery and extortion in exchange for a guilty (no contest) plea on income-tax evasion. After that he became a major celebrity and played golf and tried to get a Coors distributorship. He never spoke to Nixon again and was an unwelcome guest at the funeral. They called him Rude, but he went anyway. It was one of those Biological Imperatives, like salmon swimming up waterfalls to spawn before they die. He knew he was scum, but it didn't bother him.

Agnew was the Joey Buttafuoco of the Nixon administration, and Hoover was its Caligula. They were brutal, brain-damaged degenerates worse than any hit man out of The Godfather, yet they were the men Richard Nixon trusted most. Together they defined his Presidency.

It would be easy to forget and forgive Henry Kissinger of his crimes, just as he forgave Nixon. Yes, we could do that--but it would be wrong. Kissinger is a slippery little devil, a world-class hustler with a thick German accent and a very keen eye for weak spots at the top of the power structure, Nixon was one of these, and Super K exploited him mercilessly, all the way to the end.

Kissinger made the Gang of Four complete: Agnew, Hoover, Kissinger and Nixon. A group photo of these perverts would say all we need to know about the Age of Nixon.

Nixon's spirit will be with us for the rest of our lives--whether you're me or Bill Clinton or you or Kurt Cobain or Bishop Tutu or Keith Richards or Amy Fisher or Boris Yeltsin's daughter or your fiancee's 16-year-old beer-drunk brother with his braided goatee and his whole life like a thundercloud out in front of him. This is not a generational thing. You don't even have to know who Richard Nixon was to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit.

He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.

KICKING NIXON WHILE HE WAS UP

It is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise. Our Barbie-doll president, with his Barbie-doll wife and his boxful of Barbie-doll children is also America's answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the Werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string warts, on nights when the moon comes too close....

At the stroke of midnight in Washington, a drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and head of a giant hyena crawls out of its bedroom window in the South Wing of the White House and leaps 50 feet down to the lawn ... pauses briefly to strangle the chow watchdog, then races off into the darkness...toward the Watergate, snarling with lust, loping through the alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue and trying desperately to remember which one of those 400 iron balconies is the one outside Martha Mitchell's apartment.

Ah...nightmares, nightmares. But I was only kidding. The President of the United States would never act that weird. At least not during football season. But how would the voters react if they knew the President of the United States was, according to a New York Times editorial on Oct. 12, presiding over "a complex, far-reaching and sinister operation on the part of White House aides and the Nixon campaign organization ... involving sabotage, forgery, theft of confidential files, surveillance of Democratic candidates and their families and persistent efforts to lay the basis for possible blackmail and intimidation?"

Back when I was a kid, one of the many sorts of punishments for my various supposed misdeeds was weeding and gardening. I would spend hours out in the dirt in front of the house pulling weeds and levelling the dirt bed. It was mind-numbingly boring, and I quickly learned to disengage my brain and zone out until I'd reached the end of the dirt bed.

When I emigrated to Tokyo, I figured that I'd never need to weed or even get involved with lawn care ever again. Tokyo is mostly concrete, after all, and people live in apartments or condominiums. Space being at a premium, the buildings occupy 100% of the available space on the lot. No room for gardens or lawns, anyway.

Then we built a house in Koganei and I discovered that there was an ordinance restricting construction to 60% of the lot. Not only did that make the house smaller than I had originally envisioned, but it also meant that we'd have space for a garden or lawn.

There's a patch of front lawn that's currently filled with small pebbles. The one-meter strip around the sides and back of the house, however, were left alone and were just dirt. Ao planted sunflowers a few weeks after we moved in. Knowing how sunflowers behaved, I mentioned to her that perhaps that wasn't the best idea, but didn't push the issue and let it be a learning experience.

Fast-forward to late September. The sunflowers were roughly two meters tall, with stalks roughly as big as my forearms. The rest of the space was taken by wild grass and other weeds. From the back, the house looked as if it had been abandoned for years if one were to judge based on the flora.

Yesterday afternoon I was watching a movie that I hadn't seen since 1990. Hardware wasn't a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm one of the few that saw it during its very brief theatrical run. Saw it at the Fashion Square AMC just outside the gate of NTC Orlando with a couple of classmates from nuke school, and recently grabbed a copy from Amazon.

Saya watched it with me for a few minutes, then declared that she'd rather clean up the "garden behind the house" because watching that movie was killing her brain cells. An hour later I came to the same conclusion and joined her.

She had chopped the sunflowers down, but wasn't making much progress on the wild grass. We went to the local do-it-yourself store (J-Mart) and purchased large and small rakes and grass seed.

This morning we attacked the "garden" armed with our rakes and other implements of destruction. Around 1100 we'd cleared the wild grass out. I could see the soil, and I wasn't pleased with what I saw. The construction firm dumped the concrete chunks and largish rocks left over from the excavation there, rather than carting it out as one would reasonably expect.

We broke for lunch and I mulled the options. I decided to push on, removing as many large rocks and chunks to create a rudimentary wall against the chain-link fence separating our lot from the parking lot. This took another couple of hours; at the end, I raked in topsoil and fertilizer, then scattered in grass seed.

We'll see how it goes. Whatever it turns out to be, it has to be better than the jungle that was there before.

I've been re-watching "The Sopranos" with Saya. I kept finding other things to do when scenes involving Tony's mother came on-screen.

I can't stand the character of Livia Soprano-- I despise her inability to take personal responsibility for her own actions, the hysterical insistence that she is being persecuted by those who should love her for her fictitious personal sacrifices, and her constant belittling of anyone who tries to be nice (or at least tolerant) of her.

And then, about twenty minutes ago, it finally hit me: that's exactly how my mother operates. Livia isn't portrayed as a bipolar alcoholic prone to suicidal gestures ... apart from that, though, the resemblance is eerie.

I understand Dad's behavior a lot more now. I've been told that I resemble him greatly, both in manner and demeanor. If that is true, then I theorize that a great deal of the violence that he dealt to us during our formative years was a direct result of the stress from attempting to reconcile the impossibility of caring for a genuinely borderline spouse with the necessity of staying with said spouse.

I don't condone what he did, but I can understand it. The difference is this: when the situation between my former spouse and myself became irreconcilable, I left so that my child would not be damaged by the fallout -- and I ensured that I remained on good terms with my ex, with the understanding that the emotional well-being of our child was of paramount concern.

Dad wouldn't do that. I don't know why, and I don't have enough data to even venture a guess. I believe that he made the wrong decision by staying with her, and I believe that I have learned from his mistake.

I learned the hard way that the only way to deal with someone as broken as my mother is to stay very far away from them. Delusions can be contagious -- I know this from hard experience, as I truly believed that I was the bad guy in that family dynamic well into my late twenties. It was only after I severed all ties with them, studied psychology, and evaluated memories with a more critical eye, that I began to appreciate how hellish that environment was.

I'm angry with them, and to a certain extent I always will be. There can be no excuse for scapegoating, favoritism, and emotional abuse. A heartfelt apology would be nice, but apologies mean nothing without genuine contrition. Based on replies to these weblog entries that I have received from my mother, I sincerely doubt that any such apology will be forthcoming. She truly does not understand the effects of her actions.

This will be my last weblog entry on this particular subject. I have said all that I needed to say; I've vented, it's out, and I have achieved a measure of catharsis thereby. I feel much better for having done this.

I do not intend to contact my parents or my sisters ever again. I hope that they will extend the same courtesy to me and my daughter.