If Only They Would Dress Like Simon

Those of you who know me already know that I don't sleep particularly well at night, if at all, and thanks to the Los Angeles Times, now I won't be able to sleep on airplanes either. It seems that an inordinate number of passengers are "outing" federal air marshals by announcing their presence loudly to other passengers. How, you might ask, can an untrained civilian passenger instantly identify an undercover federal agent on a plane? Simple: They look too good.

Federal regulations require air marshals to wear suits and ties, have no facial hair, and have smartly polished lace-up dress shoes. Passengers boarding through the first-class section can't help but notice them since they look about as discreet as drag queens in a monastery—and eliminating the unlikely possibility that they are Mormon missionaries traveling with upgrades, passengers make the quick and logical assumption: These are federal air marshals.

Now, common sense might dictate a simple solution: have the air marshals dress like ordinary passengers. But remember, this is the federal government, so common sense is a rare commodity. The federales tell us that the target-on-your-chest outfits are necessary because "professional demeanor, attire and attitude gain respect." But what's more important—being respected by the guy next to you flying to a conference in Chicago, or keeping your cover so that Akbar doesn't take you out like a shooting gallery duck in the first two seconds of a terrorist attack? As one air marshal paints his nightmare scenario:

"This is what I foresee," said one marshal, a two-year veteran. "Two of us get on the plane and we've been under surveillance the whole time. There's a minimum of four bad guys…. My partner goes to the bathroom and they come after me with a sharp pen, stab me in the neck or in the brain and take my weapon," he continued. "When my partner comes out, they shoot him. Then they've got 80 rounds of ammunition and two weapons."

Seems eerily simple, doesn't it? So what's Uncle Sam's brilliant solution? Prosecute passengers who point out the air marshals to other passengers. Yes, you read that right—rather than simply allowing the marshals to dress to protect their cover, we're just going to arrest people who point them out. It's already happened to numerous observant and overly chatty passengers.

So my advice to you is this. If you're at the airport, and you see a passenger exhibiting any or all of the following behaviors:

• showing the ticket agent a large, leather-bound credential case with a holographic photo
• entering the security area through the exit door rather than through the metal detector
• wearing a suit and tie when everyone else is in Wal-Mart Bermuda shorts
• boarding the plane before everyone else, even the wheelchair passengers

. . . just remember the first rule of air travel in the new century: Keep your fucking mouth shut. Oh, and don't dress too well yourself, either—you don't want to be the guy they stab in the neck with a pen.

Friday Frivolity

Well, so far nothing has pissed me off too much today. So in the spirit of the holiday weekend, I offer you . . .

The World's Smallest Pac Man Game



Enjoy.

Officer, Is That Your Night Stick?

Only in San Francisco could two law-enforcement officers star in a porn film and not lose their jobs. You can say what you want about that place; it still rocks. The two officers took a star turn in "Bus Stop Whores," an adult film circulating on the Internet that I suspect probably didn't conform to the official guidelines for police department film production in San Fran. Quoth the San Francisco Chronicle:

In one scene, the 29-year-old [Officer Kelly] Francisco -- who goes by the name Mira in the video -- solicits a sex act for $500. She and [Officer Daryl] Watts, 27, then vigorously proceed to demonstrate a variety of full cavity search techniques not found in the standard police manual.

Jessica Cutler, if that book deal falls through, go here: SFPD Recruitment Drive.

Because Clown College Was Easier Than the Seminary, That's Why

News sources reported today that a man working under the professional name "Spanky the Clown" was arrested Friday on charges related to a child pornography investigation (insert your own joke here). It seems that Mr. Clown (or Thomas Allen Riccio, according to his arrest report) was allegedly foolish enough to use his credit card to purchase kiddie porn. Poor Spanky. Didn't he know that in Mr. Ashcroft's America, it doesn't take much for the government to find out what you're buying on the Internet? (I shouldn't limit my rant to the U.S., of course—just ask rocker-turned-pedophilia-researcher Pete Townshend.)

Granted, such governmental vigilance might be a good idea if what you're buying is a case of plastique, or a magazine from Belarus called "Super Pedomania," but gets a little more troubling when you just want to buy a nice dildo from the fine folks at Adam and Eve. Is that something that Mr. Ashcroft really needs to know about? It's people like him—and Spanky—who really give clowns a bad name.

Abu Guh Boo Boo

Those who know me are aware that I’ve never had particularly high expectations of the current administration, but just when I thought Mr. Bush could sink no lower, he somehow succeeded in letting just a bit more water out of the pool. I’m referring to last night’s rather uninteresting speech at the Army War College in which Mr. Bush attempted to convince a skeptical U.S. and an even more skeptical Iraq that he did, in fact, have something resembling a plan for getting U.S. troops out of there before the next millennium.

I’ll leave discussion of the finer points of the speech to the political pundits, but I can’t help but comment on Mr. Bush’s almost comical attempts to pronounce the name of the prison at the center of the recent abuse scandals: Abu Ghraib. As any social anthropologist will tell you, one of the hallmarks of a society that views itself as superior to everyone else is its complete lack of interest in attempting to pronounce foreign words and names in any manner remotely approaching the “native” pronunciation. Certainly this strategy was exploited to great effect by the colonial Brits during their empire-building phase, who to this day still make no attempt to pronounce French (or any other language) properly.

Now, I would have thought that if there were any single phrase in the Monday speech that Mr. Bush would have attempted to get right, it would be “Abu Ghraib,” if only to demonstrate that he was more than passingly familiar with the notorious prison. I wasn’t expecting him to pronounce it as an Arabic speaker would (where the second word would come out something like a very guttural “GHRebb”); I was fully prepared to settle, albeit wincingly, for the sanitized Newspeak version (“Abu GRABE”) that one commonly hears on television and radio.

But instead, the first time Mr. Bush came across the name, the best he could squeak out was an embarrassingly halting “Abooguh . . . rape.” Not to worry—he had two more chances coming up. The second time, Mr. Bush more bravely gave us “Abooguh-RONE.” Well, better—but still not quite. On his last attempt, Mr. Bush almost got there with “Abu Guh-RAH.” (Rah, indeed!)

The more important point is that Mr. Bush looked very much like a man who’d never seen this name before. I’m sure that’s not the case, but it would have certainly helped our standing in the Arab world if he’d looked more like someone who knew what was going on, and less like a detached, uninterested mouthpiece vomiting out a speech he didn’t even understand.

An Apology

Portable Soup wishes to apologize unreservedly for its recent comparison of Capitol Hill slut-turned-media-darling Jessica Cutler to Sarah, Plain and Tall. She does not appear to be tall after all. Portable Soup regrets the error. Just not quite as much as we regret living in a culture where someone can snag a six-figure book deal by getting paid to take it up the ass.

Latka? Are You In There?

A couple of weeks ago, a few full-page newspaper ads appeared inviting "the believers" to a "return celebration" for comedian Andy Kaufman. Kaufman, as you may remember (or have learned from the Milos Forman film Man On the Moon), died 20 years ago this month, but not without promising to return on the 20th anniversary of his death—the greatest performance-art stunt of all time.

Well, friends, it appears that Andy is—at least in the dimensionless ether of the Internet blog format—back.

Now, before you get too excited, it is prudent to remember that Kaufman ally, fellow comedian, and writer Bob Zmuda frequently portrayed Kaufman's lounge-lizard alter ego Tony Clifton in performances before Kaufman's death (the joke being that Kaufman always claimed not to be Tony Clifton, and having Zmuda on stage as Clifton when Andy would do a walk-on was "proof" that they weren't the same person). Score one for the possibility that the mystery blogger is Zmuda.

Still, there does exist a fairly compelling discussion of the various theories about Andy's death, or lack thereof, as well as a rather creepy site maintained by a Hollywood animation professional on behalf of a man he does not know and has never met in person named "Enrique P." Enrique writes in a question-and-answer format that is notable for his lack of any attempt to provide "evidence" that Kaufman faked his death, as you might expect your average conspiracy-theorist lunatic to do on a Web site. Indeed, the more you read Enrique's disquietingly philosophical musings, the more you think that Enrique might actually be Kaufman himself.

But back to "Blogger Andy." Certainly he could just be Zmuda horsing around, or someone else entirely trying to capitalize on the 20th anniversary of Kaufman's death. But in any case, you should check it out; it's either proof of the greatest stunt in history, or the dangerous ramblings of an insane mind—or possibly both.

Butt Sex in the Unemployment Line

Unlike the estimable Cardinal Fang, I've tried to steer largely clear of the Washingtonienne controversy, but I will admit being more than passingly curious as to what this modern-day Christine Keeler might actually look like. Well, color me disappointed.

For those not in the know, "Washingtonienne" is the nom de plume of a Capitol Hill staff assistant who blogged her anal-sex-for-cash proclivities into Congressional superstardom and a sphincter-colored termination slip over the past few weeks. Speculation as to her identity has been all the buzz on the Hill of late, but she has at last been outed, complete with picture, as Syracuse University alumna Jessica Cutler.

The jury is still out as to whether she is the smartest or dumbest person ever to work on Capitol Hill (that will depend on the value of the book deal, personal appearance contracts, celebrity butt-plug endorsements, etc., that are sure to follow), but I must say how disappointed I am. I guess after reading her oh-so-juicy postings, I was just expecting something, I dunno, a little more Legally Blonde and a little less Sarah, Plain and Tall. Can you blame me?

Please, Sir, May I Have Another (Verbal Bitch-Slap)?

Just when I think that I can't possibly be any more appalled by the comments that come out of this President's mouth, he manages yet again to surprise me. This week's stupidity was courtesy of his incredibly patronizing, condescending remarks made to Congressional leaders regarding the impending handoff of power in Iraq at the end of June:

"He talked about 'time to take the training wheels off,'" said Rep. Deborah Pryce, R-Ohio. "The Iraqi people have been in training, and now it's time for them to take the bike and go forward."

"Take the training wheels off"? How incredibly fucking insensitive can a person be? Here we are, supposedly waging a campaign to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, and all our President can do is toss off remarks that make it abjectly clear to Iraqis that the highest levels of our government view them as mewling, puking toddlers who can barely wipe their own asses? If that's how we're going to "win them over," then let me suggest a list of additional metaphors to which the President is welcome to refer whenever he wants to further flatter our Iraqi friends:

• "trade in their Pampers for Pull-Ups"
• "lose their sippy cups"
• "switch from Barney to Nickelodeon"
• "straighten out their Krazy Straws"
• "cut the feet out of their Dr. Denton's"
• "put away the Candy Land and buy a G.I. fuckin' Joe"

I'm not sure if Sally Hemm..., er, I mean, Condi Rice reads Portable Soup every day, but if she does, maybe this list will get put to some good use.

Don't Mention the War . . . Especially During the FA Cup Final

You have to hand it to those Brits. When planning an "Emergency Demonstration" for this Saturday in London, the fine folks at the Stop the War Coalition had the foresight to realize, "Oy, mate—but inn't that the same time as the Cup Final then?" Yes, nothing is more important than stopping the war in Iraq—unless of course it's watching Manchester United and Millwall fight to the bitter end in Cardiff. Protest organizers graciously altered the time of the London demonstration to ensure that all anti-war protesters would be able to make it back to the local pub in time for the match.

"We realise that the Cup Final is a major event," Stop the War Coalition organizer Andrew Burgin told a news conference. "We expect the rally to be finished by three o'clock so people can get back to watch the match." It's nice to know that in a world filled with chaos, some people still have their priorities straight. Now we just need to hope the match isn't decided on penalty kicks . . .

I had to chuckle when I read that a Stradivarius cello valued at $3.5 million was nearly made into a CD rack this week in Los Angeles. Seems the absent-minded player from the Los Angeles Philharmonic who had custody of the symphony-owned instrument forgot it near his car on the porch when he got home from rehearsal, and in the wee hours of the morning an enterprising boy on a bicycle nicked it and drove it a few blocks before heaving it into a dumpster. A young nurse found it the next day and decided it would make a bitchin' CD rack, so she gave it to her boyfriend to work on. Fortunately the man was not highly motivated in the DIY project department, and so the cello, one of only 60 ever made and the only surviving example with the original label still intact, sat in their back bedroom for more than a month before they saw a news report that tipped them off to the fact that this Stradivari fellow who had his name in the cello might be somebody important. It's not their fault, I suppose; I'm sure they tried calling every "Antonio Stradivari" in the phone book . . .

Wag the, Umm, Head

I will admit that I had no intention of ever watching the online video of Nick Berg's decapitation in Iraq that was all the rage among depraved Internet cognoscenti of late, but after the conspiracy theory buzz hit a fever pitch last week, I decided that I would have to look at a few frames to see for myself if these amateur Oliver Stones were on the right track.

The verdict? Realizing in advance that I am risking a severe ass-thrashing from my good friend Cardlnal Fang for encouraging this behavior, I can say with some certainty that if you do choose to watch said video, you are by no means watching the decapitation of a live individual—and I have some serious doubts that you are watching a real decapitation at all. In either case, you are certainly not watching Muslim extremists: these "executioners" are most clearly American.

I will spare you the frame-by-frame analysis in this forum, since many other bloggers and writers have already advanced their own exhaustive theories, but if you are the least bit curious (and you should be), I suggest starting here, here and here. I will, however, highlight what I felt were some of the more compelling arguments:

• In the opening frames, Nick Berg is seated in a white plastic chair that is identical to one in which Army PFC Lynddie England is shown seated in a photo from the notorious Abu Ghraib prison—where Berg himself is known to have done some work on a communications antenna in recent months. The wall against which Berg is filmed is also the same color and texture as the walls in Abu Ghraib.



• Berg is wearing the same U.S.-issue orange prison jumpsuit that can be seen crumpled on the floor in the background of many of the photos showing naked Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib. It would surprise me greatly if Al Qaeda extremists routinely clothed their hostages in U.S.-made orange prison garb.



• The "executioners" are highly problematic. The one on the far left appears, from movement and body language, to be a woman—and from looking at their hands, they are certainly the "whitest" Arabs I've ever seen. One is wearing white athletic shoes that look suspiciously like those seen in an image of a U.S. soldier at Abu Ghraib. All of the men sport U.S.-style bulletproof vests of the type worn almost obsessively by U.S. troops, but rarely (if ever) worn by Al Qaeda. And, let's face it—these guys are, if not fat, certainly far more healthy and rotund than we would expect Muslim insurgents to be after months in hiding.



• Two of the men touch their nose and face with their left hands—something that an Arab and devout Muslim would never do, as the left hand is of course the "sanitary hand" one uses for cleaning one's backside.



• The terrorist identified "conclusively" by the CIA as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the one who allegedly beheads Berg in the video, clearly does not sport the three green dots that al-Zarqawi is known to have tattooed on the back of his left hand. He also appears quite nimble for a man who is known to have an "ill-fitting" prosthetic leg that renders him "almost incapable of walking, except with a very pronounced limp."



• Near the end of the video, for about 10 frames (or one-third of a second), the back of the head of an individual pops into the lower right corner of the frame: a white-skinned, Western head, sporting a very short military haircut, and a brown U.S. Army style t-shirt.



• It is the opinion of a number of medical doctors who have viewed the video that there is simply no way that the decapitation of a live person is being depicted. When the carotid arteries of a living person are cut with a knife, blood spurts out with such force that it routinely sprays six to eight feet or more. A careful review of the video shows no spurting blood, no blood on the hands of the "executioner," no blood on the floor, and no blood dripping from the severed head when it is held up on display. To assert that it is possible to sever the head of a living person with a rather short-bladed knife and not get a drop of blood on one's hands is, to say the least, fanciful.



• There are many assertions that the Berg video is "heavily edited" because the visible timecode "jumps around" a lot. This appears to be because there are simply two video cameras in use at the same time with differing timecodes, and these two tapes were later edited together. Still, if one were to want to show the "live" beheading of someone and leave the viewer with absolutely no doubt as to what they had seen, it would seem to me that the singularly most important moment to show with complete clarity would be the actual moment in which the head is severed from the torso. I believe it is no accident that this moment is the only one in the entire video in which there is a one-minute-plus gap in the timecode from a single camera. The so-called executioner spends about 30 seconds miming violent cutting motions (throughout which there is no visible evidence that any tissue is actually being cut), and then there is a quick edit to the head already about four inches away from the torso and being lifted up away from the body. It seems silly to me that in a video that's already more than eight minutes long, it would seem necessary to edit out the crucial, single minute in which the head was actually severed from the body.

I could go on and on, but you're free to read the other inconsistencies for yourself. I don't pretend to know why this video was faked, or by whom, but I do know that I certainly have more questions than answers. We can only hope that some tenacious journalist will work hard to ferret out the truth behind all this, but in the meantime if you want to watch the video, I say, "Watch away." It's no more real than a Friday the 13th movie, and almost as well acted.

The Best Part of Waking Up

Kudos to the enterprising high school student in Chamblee, Georgia, who switched the daily morning news videotape produced by Chamblee High news class students and instead treated classrooms of bleary-eyed, half-awake students to hard-core pornography. It seems that in the 20 or so seconds that the media specialist left the A/V room unattended to turn on the video feed to the rest of the school, a clever wag made the switch-and voilà, good morning, Ron Jeremy!

Now if that won't get you off (no pun intended) to an interesting start, I don't know what will. Wait, perhaps I do: in the absence of early-morning porn, there's nothing like being lectured by your toilet in a stern, Germanic voice. Just one more step in the continued emasculation of the male gender.

The Sarin Wrap

Hoo boy, I can just picture the conversation in the Bush bedroom this morning:

"Mr. President? Mr. President? Bushie?"

"Hrmm? Whazzat?"

"It's me, Mr. President, Karl. It's Karl."

"Oh, hey K-man. Mornin'. Aww crap . . . is it raining outside?"

"No, Mr. President, they're just washing the windows."

"Well, that's damn fine. You tell those boys they do a damn fine job on those windows. I damn near walked right through that French door last week it was so clean."

"Yes, Mr. President . . . but actually, I have very good news. I came to tell you: They found it."

"Don't fuck with a man who just woke up, Karl, don't fuck with him. Are you fucking with me?"

"No, sir. The tests came back positive this morning. It was sarin, no doubt about it."

"HOOOOO yah! We got that bearded sumbitch now! HOOOOO YAH! Get Tony on the phone and tell him his job's safe: We got them motherfuckin' Dubya Em Dees!"

Yes, it looks like ol' Dubya was right after all: Saddam did have banned chemical weapons. Of course I should have known this all along. Lots of people doubted the President when he made the rather silly claim that Iraq was awash in banned weapons, since if they existed they must have been better concealed than Bush's own National Guard records. But we should have known better, we should have trusted. After all, this is a man who has a track record of being able to personally sniff out illegal chemicals anywhere in his vicinity (and then ingest them). When a man has that much experience, you ought to give him the benefit of the doubt.

In any case, I'm sure that by tomorrow we'll see a Bush photo-op featuring the President in front of thousands of cheering, smiling troops, backed by an enormous banner the size of Honduras proclaiming, "WMDs Found!" Most mindless newswatchers will probably assume from all the hype that some secret underground cavern, chock full of enough nuclear warheads and anthrax and ricin and sarin and aerosol cheese to destroy the world five times over, was found by tenacious GIs who never gave up the hunt, even in the face of diminishing odds.

Not entirely the case, I'm afraid. What was "found"? One lousy, measly rocket shell, vintage 1980s, probably dating from the Iran-Iraq war, and probably manufactured by Iraq's erstwhile ally, the good ol' U. S. of A., filled with two chemicals that, when detonated, combine to form the deadly sarin nerve agent.

That is to say, they would combine to form sarin--were it not for the fact that said chemicals were further past their expiration date than Apu's Quickie Mart hot dogs. It would be hard to criticize Iraq for not destroying something that was already so old it was no longer a threat, and indeed this particular shell most probably came from a cache of nerve-agent-filled ordinance already identified by the U.N. and marked for destruction in the early 1990s.

And how did our tenacious troops "find" this devastatingly dangerous Weapon (singular) of Mass Destruction? It was tossed at them, of course. The poor fuckers who found it and decided to try to use it to blow up a passing U.S. convoy most likely had no idea that it potentially contained sarin, an assumption that is bolstered by the fact that they also had neither the knowledge nor the equipment to fire the shell, instead making it into a makeshift bomb by wrapping it in Primacord and lighting it.

I'm sure the White House spin on this one will be something to the effect that if there's one, then there must be millions more. I'm sure that thought will re-engergize flagging support for the war in some circles, and certainly breathe new life into the all-but-abandoned search for WMDs. For my part, I would sleep a lot better at night if the President would take every soldier, inspector, and Army Ranger at his disposal and instead order them to secure the dozens of Iraqi nuclear facilities currently left unguarded as a consequence of our brilliantly executed security plan in Iraq.

In today's busy world, a person only has time to worry about so much. And given the choice between worrying about WMDs that might not be there, and nuclear materials that clearly are there--and being stolen by God knows whom--I think I'll choose the known threat over the theoretical one. What I just can't fathom is why the President isn't out telling anyone who'll listen about this frightening nuclear threat. Of course, it's probably because that nuclear threat is of his own making.

Or maybe it's just because he can't pronounce it.

Giving In

Like Bart Simpson at the blackboard, my mantra of late has been quite simple:

I will not blog.
I will not blog.
I will not blog.

My theory has always been that bloggers are simply people with both too much time on their hands as well as a sadistic desire to torture friends and complete strangers by making them succumb to the reading of their mindless ramblings. (This characterization, of course, does not include such worthwhile bloggers as my dear friend Cardinal Fang.)

But every so often, something so revolting, so distasteful, so singularly disturbing occurs that one cannot help but pray for a forum in which to vent. Today that something happened.

Apple.

Not Apple the computer, Apple the person. Apple the baby. Apple Blythe Alison Martin. Yes, friends, the progeny of the not-welcome-in-Australia Coldplay whiner Chris Martin and the unremarkable Gwyneth Paltrow has burst forth from her uterine Spandau and onto the world stage. What might otherwise be a blessed event is rather marred by the poor child being given what can only be described as the fruitiest prénom since Tiny Tim.

When I was first told this news, I naturally assumed that it was merely an error in the press due to sloppy reportage. Surely no self-respecting individual would name a child "Apple." One is supposed to love one's children, not ruin their lives forever with ridiculous names (Dweezil Zappa excepted). Who on earth, except perhaps Steve Jobs, would name a child "Apple"? One can only assume that poor Apple's publicity-grubbing parents selected the name just to grab a bit more media attention for themselves. Fuck them both for using a defenseless child for their sick, self-absorbed reasons. I'm surprised they didn't harvest the placenta for collagen injections.

The upshot of the whole story came when I read that Apple's birthweight was nine and a half pounds. Apple my ass. She should have named the fucking thing Watermelon.