seriously

i've given up on doing 'work'. now all i want to do is answer peanut guy questions.

more SOTU

oh yeah remember that whole "the u.s. is addicted to oil" part of the state of the union address? just kididng

SOTU play by play

oh isn't that sweet? it's brand new justice ammy alito! he looks so happy walking in! poor breyer inbetween him and clarence thomas! somebody feed him a dramamine!

condi steps out. good gravy she's looking foxy tonight. there's attorney general gonzalez! i'm fucking starstruck just sitting on my couch - how can those a-hole members of congress contain themselves?

oh great jolly rumsfeld! how spirited you laugh on national television before the speaker's podium!

oh fuck yes! chertoff is in the house. try not to piss yourselves, congressmen!

three words: norman. fucking. mineta. secretary of transportation doesn't give a fuck: he'll privatize him some amtrak and then he'll take a shit and he won't care. the man is a prince. prince of the cabinet. most princely of secretaries is he.


bill livingood belts it out - that man still has his man-testes. he's yelling at the press: "move back, bitches!" bill livingood will beat that photographer in his stupid face. the president's coming through, poopstains! grovel before him!

bush kisses condoleeza. bush hesitates to kiss alito. bush shakes the hand of the joint chiefs. he doesn't kiss them either. then he skips up on the podium like a dandy and chuckles like a wee scottish lad in his highland knickers. what would happen now if the teleprompter broke like it did on clinton? answer: everyone would poop themselves.

oh how sweet, he's leading off with a coretta scott king memorial, and how touching of NBC to flash up their own coretta scott memorial graphic!. then he wastes no time reminding everyone about 9/11. his ears are especially elfin tonight. and like a prick, he subtly accuses all of his opponents of being cruel.

pursue the enemies of freedom!
warns against isolation and protectionism! who the fuck is advocating that?
we seek the end of tyranny! (good job so far!)

ah, so it's weapons of mass murder now? where have i been?

"the terrorists have chosen the weapon of fear" - i think my first clue was when they earned the name "terror-ist". does "fear" count as a "weapon of mass murder?"

cheney takes a sip from his water like a palsied ogre.

how exactly would the united states "retreat from the world?" is such a move possible? let's talk more about this.

cut to lynne cheney with some little girl - how sweet! the girl hates evildoers. she loves freedom and nick lachey.

"i am confident in the will of the iraqi people" - you are also a crazy bastard.

"there is a difference between responsible criticism...and defeatism!... second guessing is not a strategy!" : 1) responsible criticism is criticism that comes from republicans. 2) holy shit, john murtha and his democratic henchmen want to put bin laden and zarqawi in charge of iraq! hide the kids!

[pause for brief jingoistic exploitation of military death]

holy crap, andy card looks like a pedophile!

isolationism mentioned again. who advocates this...? ah, i see! so isolationism = against the war! you isolationist savages wear your hemp and flash your peace signs while the kids in zambia die of the river blindness!

others want to centralize more power in washington by raising taxes!!!! you democrat fucks! thank you president bush for stopping their insidious power grab!

promises to save 14 billion by cutting social programs while saying it's also important to renew the tax cuts (that cost $880 billion!

actually lies outright on the amount of money it will take to save social security. bush wags finger at democrats who embarrass him.

you democrats with your partisanship! a-holes!

mentions immigration, amnesty. conservatives fart audibly in protest.

ah, 'making use of electronic records' will help me pay my $1000 hospital bill from last month! thank you president!

and once again we repeat the outright lie that lawsuits and lawyers cost consumers more than insurance bitches.

the future of american energy?: coal and nuclear power.

hey dick: the research is done on alternative fuels. we know how they work. federal funding needs to go into infrastructure. oh shit, that's socialism!

time to talk about education: flash back to lynne cheney and the kid. how cute.

math and science education though: probably the first part of the speech that makes sense. we're going to get donged on this. we're already being donged.

secretary of education margaret spellings? fox.

no child left behind act? donkey poop.

"our greatness is measured in who we are and how we treat one another" -- fuck yeah, torture!

"a revolution of conscience!" the kiddies are going conservative, bitches!

it's feelgood time!: "everyone, republican and democrat, has a right to be proud of our record"

i know! let's equate jack abramoff and gay marriage!

laura bush has creepy blue fake contact lenses, like some kind of fremin robotress.

ah, katrina talk! hey, it's not my fault, it's the locals! hey you fucks! the schools sucked and that's why you're homeless now!

someone's nokia cell phone goes off during AIDS talk

finale: "every great victory in history comes to a point in choosing"

...and so has every great failure.

"just pizza" pt. 2

like sunburned moseses we held back the tides of madness with the flimsy veil of hope that we might one day discover some heavenly portal to deliver us back from whence we came. for days we slogged onward in the freakish humidity that snarled our hair and summoned cascades of sweat from our tortured pores. our soiled "clothes" baked and crisped off our bodies within hours. and at length we shunned our civilized past and went primal once more, our bones protruding from flesh worn thin by lack of nourishment.

for despite the intoxicating aroma of our terrible new home, we found to sign of food. no game to hunt, no fronds on which to nibble, not even insect pests to collect and suck free of life. our frenzied attempts at rehydration slowed our pace significantly, for the only palatable water source appeared to be scattered dimples of paltry moisture in the rubbery soil from which we frantically sucked the very sweat of the earth. we called it "sweat diving."

it was nicorette who, lost in the primal impetus of a lustful sweat dive, discovered the delectability of the earth itself.

there, crouched like a filthy cro-magnon centerfold, hair lionized by the freakish humidity, lips frothing with crude streaks of hot drool, face stained by luscious morsels of piping-hot earth, nicorette bent her haunted eyes skyward and bellowed the clarion call: "just! pizza!"

and like beasts, we ate. and ate. and ate.

mandatory end-of-year business

let's face it folks, 2k5 was a year of misery saved only by album-after-album of booty-shaking pumped religiously through decimated ipod earphones. so here we go, it's the cold cowboy's top ten albums of 2005, whose slogan in time immemorial shall inevitably be "well, at least we got some good songs out of it.":

10. caribou – the milk of human kindness

well-crafted but weird crap for the most part, which is reason enough for me. first line on first song ('yeti'): "his greasy fingers strung together and stretching cross the sky..." like some kind of modern day shakespeare!

9. calexico/iron & wine - in the reins

8. bright eyes – i’m wide awake it’s morning

in the past i mostly couldn't stand conor oberst's wimpy-but-clever ramblings but i hold no grudges. naturally it has its far-too-emo moments... but she's a keeper.

7. new pornographers - twin cinema

it still pales in comparison to front dude a.c. newman's solo album of last year (the slow wonder'), but with some notable exceptions (see 'bones of an idol') this is even better than their first album. i think neko case is the weak link but on the albums i hesitate to admit that i like the dude from 'destroyer', arguably one of the most terrible bands i've ever seen live.

6. stephen malkmus - face the truth

speaking of terrible shows: pavement's "last show ever" at bogart's in cincinnati ranks right up there. dudes were drunk and sloppy and the "second drummer" stopped playing towards the beginning of the set in order to scream out of key, submerging malkmus's equally slurred lyrics in a sea of poop-slop. i don't know what happened, but somehow malkmus put out an album that totally rules after several that royally blow.

5. sufjan stevens - illinois

4. clap your hands say yeah - s/t

some slightly irritating a-hole mimicks david byrne with sexy results. it'd be a lot more awesome if it didn't have all the hipster buzz. but it's still awesome. you have to dance.

3. go team! – thunder lightning strike

in a year of booty-shaking, this takes the big ass cake. how can you not groove to this shit? there are only two ways: 1. you are having a stroke, 2. you are 200 years old. even zombies have to party when this record starts playing in the graveyard.

2.wolf parade - apologies to the queen mary

as mayor of rockachussetts, i hereby declare this record to be... awesome.

1. animal collective – feels

can't. stop. listening.

"just pizza" pt. 1

we woke at dawn. no clothes, no beds. no streets. no house, no telephones. just the three of us screaming at the molten sky above where a burnt orange canopy had settled and through which pierced only sparse bellicose rays which dotted the sloppy, scarlet landscape below. the unspeakable heat parched our throats and bore through our tender eyelids. we cursed the heavens, damning whatever cruel creator stole us from our precious earth and led us to this snakebit place until there was naught to do but lift ourselves from the spongy ground and carry on.

the three of us: carlos de los gatos, nicorette lewis, and i, vigo van der lapp, rose to our feet and scooped the warm, red soil beneath us to cover such body parts as made us comfortable, for we were hardly friends. we had met the night before at that strange party at dave's house. something there had gone so horribly wrong, but what...?

i fashioned a toga from the soil and carlos adorned some crude, chunky briefs. nicorette crafted a makeshift bikini. the madness of this place and the heat so tortured our being that each of us cried out in pain as we trudged frantically towards what destination we knew not.

it was hot, so hot. jets of steam burst suddenly through unseen bedrock holes at random intervals, searing our already sun-charred flesh, clearly not intended for climates so treacherous. the yellow-orange ozone above us, while blocking out direct rays, seemed only to magnify the sun's heat. great, foreign crags of such radiant colors - emerald greens, deep browns, bright reds and dark mahoganies - towered above us like violent, twisted everests, jutting through the caustic atmosphere above.

only this: it smelled delicious.

[to be continued!]

January 2, Y2K.

it's Y2K and we're at the rondezvous point awaiting the sentinels who
bear the flask of the millennium from which all must drink the blood
of the oxen. Our clothes have vanished and been replaced by togas made of donkey-cloth. This truly is the apolcalypse.

Earlier tonight in this den of beasts a goat approached me and
declared himself sovereign ruler of my soul. I am afraid. The insane
jugglers have arrived, preaching their dark prophecies and spinning
looms of the deepest blue. I fear a long winter.

In the night, three pipers passed our wayside camp, piping solemn,
greasy melodies that chilled our skin and made us hungry for blood.
The eyes of my compatriots now scream for my flesh-- but I shall not
be the first to dance to the rhythm of the twilight monks who erect
their monoliths in cryptic patterns about our camp.

DC: where innocence goes to die

in more ways than one.

Does your mayor crowdsurf?

if you answered "yes", congratulations! you live in minneapolis.

congress: who killed tupac?

H.R. 4210: "To provide for the expeditious disclosure of records relevant to the life and death of Tupac Amaru Shakur." a bill introduced in the house sponsored by rep. cynthia mckinney (D-GA).

update: at 22 pages long, this bill is a marvel you must behold for yourself:

Sense of Congress- It is the sense of the Congress that--

(1) the Attorney General should assist the Archivist in good faith to unseal any records that the Archivist determines to be relevant and held under seal by a court or under the injunction of secrecy of a grand jury;

(2) the Secretary of State should contact any other foreign government that may hold information relevant to the life and death of Tupac Amaru Shakur to seek the disclosure of such information, and report on progress on these matters to the Archivist in a timely fashion; and

(3) all Executive agencies should cooperate in full with the Archivist to seek the disclosure of all information relevant to the life and death of Tupac Amaru Shakur, consistent with the public interest.

call your congressman!

is my office director a four-year-old in a forty-five year-old's body a la tom hanks in big?

today we examine that pressing metaphysical question on everyone's mind: is my office director a four-year-old in a forty-five-year-old's body a la Tom Hanks in 20th Century Fox's 1988 classic, "Big" ?

let us begin with a disclaimer. i have no evidence to suggest that she has a) ever lived in or around new york's five boroughs, b) visited coney island amusement park*, or c) inserted the necessary exact change into the correct slot of Zoltar's wish-granting machine and stated her wish accordingly, thereby prompting the granting of her wish within a 12 hour period to be decided by Zoltar alone. in her defense, she was born in alabama, far from new york city, and now resides in the district of columbia. best i can tell, her idea of fun is two-fold, neither of which involves amusement parks or genie-bots: 1. leaving work daily for two hours for the express purpose of watching her 2:00pm soap opera, and 2. making my job as bone-crunchingly maddening as humanly possible --though to her credit, she executes both of these with the finesse of a well-oiled serengeti gazelle. further proof that she has not received favors from Zoltar is evidenced by her technological comprehension, which is roughly akin to that of australopithecus robustus. having said that, is my office director a four-year-old in a forty-five-year-old's body a la Tom Hanks in 20th Century Fox's 1988 classic, "Big" ? Let the grand jury convene--i present the following evidence:

1. Do four-year-olds engage in baby talk?:
Yes, on occasion.

Do forty-year-olds engage in baby talk?:
No, except perhaps during intercourse or when mocking a enemy.

My office director speaks in baby talk several times daily, often in meetings with business and industry representatives, and with an upper register heretofore achieved by mariah carey only.

2. Do forty-year-olds drop all pending business when olfactory nerves sense the nearby presence of edible sustinence?:
Only starving ones, or ones training for competitive eating competitions.

Do four-year-olds drop all pending business when olfactory nerves sense the nearby presence of edible sustinence?:
"Mommy. Ice cream! Now!"

My office director once cancelled a meeting because she smelled a coworker's hot porkchop lunch. she is convincingly overweight and is clearly in no immediate risk of starvation. Though i would fully endorse such a career change, to my knowledge she does not eat competitively in any organized way.

3. Do four-year-olds have a defined sense of shame?
I once saw a smiling four-year-old kid run screaming naked from the girl's restroom, dirty diaper in hand, and plunge into the country club pool in clear and immediate view of hundreds of innocent bystanders. Shameless.

Do forty-year-olds have sense of shame?
Except for Michael Jackson, yes.

My office director has no sense of shame whatsoever. Every conscious thought is public knowledge. In a staff meeting following the departure of our ex-boss, she announced to us all "I don't care what you do. I want that TITLE and I want that MONEY!" At least twice daily, almost always during meetings, she emits the most bone-chilling, phlegm-encrusted, snort/hack heard by man, producing without fail nausea of varying degrees in all who have the terrible luck to hear. This is followed by a baby-talk "'scuse me!" and accompanying giggle. She eats with both hands. She eats everything. All things.

more news as it develops.

*last known whereabouts of Zoltar

on DeLay

the republicans are buried so far inside shit mountain they're cock-deep in the hemorrhoidal lava. the problem, as always, is that democrats are led by a bumbling junior-corps of invertibrate dongs-on-the-take.

despite all the hew-hawing about how similar the two parties are, we have a fundamental difference between the party strucutres - the republicans spent forty years building a massive power base of robust fundraisers, lobbyists, think tanks, and a giant echo chamber starring their very own news network, like one big-ass pyramid full of obsese, rich shit-wads.

during the same time, the democrats let theirs disintegrate and relied on the charisma and wit of whomever happened to be the man of the hour - thus gore and kerry were utterly worthless, even if bill clinton made it work (even the blind sow finds an acorn every once in a while). so the democrats are like one smaller, upside-down pyramid balanced on the backs of whining pricks. it is this frailty that allows for easy application of the 'flip-flopping' charicature. without your fundamental values outlined and backed up by think tank publications and persuasive-if-full-of-shit pundits, what have you got? your pyramid is upside down. you are the whining prick.

thus, whereas a scandal of DeLay's caliber would devastate democrats for a decade, thomas himself is really more of a figurehead that can be replaced. roy blount, his 'temporary' successor, reportedly already holds the reins to the lobbying juggernaut DeLay built. Tom's real contribution was the work he already did laying those myriad machine cogs. if and when he falls, someone else can and will take over. it will certainly hurt them but if they play their cards right, it will have a negligible effect in the long-term.

that is of course unless we can find a democrat with both proverbial testicles firmly connected to a strapping, disease-free vas deferens... still looking!

the good part is it's cascading down upon all of us with all this other shit like some colossal wave of stinking chum - the cronyism that mike brown and harriet miers have exposed, the herculean failure of that bullshit social security plan, the ever more obvious kowtowing to the rich, etc. because sooner or later, even the deaf, dumb and olfactory-deprived get pissed off about sitting in chum all day.

(disclaimer: this entry included excerpts from a letter to candycane sampson)

hait

you know you've had a good week when three of your best friends in the office leave, your favorite bar burns to the ground and your $300 suit gets covered in some asshole's neon green chewing gum...which reminds me,

the phrase "i hate..." has become regrettably abundant among the youths of today, of which i dare count myself a member. while i too am guilty of using it flippantly, like the bulk of my peers i feel it important to differentiate between the definitions of hatred. when used in the aforementioned parlance it might be defined as 'extreme dislike', or a 'feeling of animosity'. even in the most capricious uses of the word, these definitions generally fit. on the other hand, there is the more serious essence of "hatred," for which the english language lacks a fitting definition. one of the better ones i've seen was "a feeling of hostility so strong that it demands action" but obviously that falls far short of satisfactory.

it's easy to hate things in this latter way (pork rinds, the scent of fresh vomit, the ebola virus) but i'm more concerned here with that hate as it pertains to dudes and by that of course i mean people of both genders and any inbetween. this rare and perilous form of hatred is a delicious lotus fruit of unknown destructive power. it is one don succumbed to many years ago and through which i believe his downfall was paved. and though i may have certainly felt extraordinarily strong lesser-hatred in the past, the blossoms of hatred-major have for the first time ever begun to peek from the cold cowboy's carefully-fertilized hate-buds in recent months. though thus far i have managed to keep its cruel pollen-enrusted stamen from view, the subject of this ire, my coworker "wendy", now perennially tests my hitherto steely resolve.

in the interest of clarity, i propose we differentiate between these "two hates" by renaming the latter, more forceful one "hait" after the legendary dead vulture scum song of the same name.

and so lies the queston: to hait or not to hait?

the saga of dashing don part IX: in come the coppers

yes, yes, i know. for too long have i lain in atrophy while the sands of time pile up below like a great mound of teeming, soul-hungry fireants. but recess has descended and the glimmer of hope that i may have a day or two not spent in the throes of damage control has once again returned. thus:

...don, you see, is not an un-smart man. just a crazy, maniacal one who speaks fluent spanish. he knows, for dale has surely told him, that he is on the ropes in the office. he may also know that we no longer send calls to his voicemail, we take messages. me might further suspect, as is the case, that my coworker sven has been given the task of overriding his voicemail privileges. other than a few items of critical importance to the district, sven won't speak about what he finds and when i stop to think for a moment i realize i don't want to know anyway. the catch is: to fire somebody you have to be able to say you told them so. don will not answer his phones; he surely has call waiting. don will not respond to his personal email account. the boss calls don's parents, who must be over 70 years old. they say something along the lines of "welp, sounds like don!"

the minor bit about the thousands in merchandise on the office account is really not cool, 'specially since it's all public record. so we call the good ol' coppers who admit they can do nothing until we fire the dude. we know he will open no certified mail from the office address so we send it from a coworker's zipcode in maryland. three days later we receive confirmation that it was delivered. the letter says something along the lines of "dear don: here are the items you illegally charged to the offic account...(list)/please return them by the end of the week along with your ID, blackberry and office cell phone so we won't have to bring in the coppers! xoxo, thy now-former boss". well, t'was a bit more formal. i'm lazy.

the next week she gets a giant, unadorned package in the mail from you-know-who with the three laptops, the blackberry, the cell phones, no id, no printer, no fucking $800 worth of ipod + accessories. so we call law enforcement and now it's out of our hands.

what is in our hands is the largest sack of backlog ever wrought. and we spend the next two months sifting through and deconstructing piece-by-piece his monolith of crazy. the man saved everything. i mean this not in any loose or casual sense; he quite literally saved all things. and we quite literally threw out two dumpsters of worthless paper and trinkets and miscellaneous garbage such as mousetraps and an old bottle of rancid vodka stored somewhere underneath government-vouchered taxi cab receipts reading "3am saturday, august 24, 2003" in his desk bowels.

and oh how we danced.

until the new menace emerged; one truly as vile as the first.

and to his credit, don recognized her savagery early on.

from the beginning in fact.

her name:

wendy.

the saga of dashing don part VIII: i swear

so where were we...?

ah, yes. don is in china; the cowboy is the new sys admin and has cracked his emails and shut off his access to the system; an official audit of the system unturns copious abuses of security breaches; don remains unreachable in china.

this actually makes things quite easy on the cowboy and friends during the coup. we need not worry that he will rear his creepy face about the office as we have received confirmation from the hosts of the china delegation that the group will return in two days. during that time complete power is overturned to the cowboy and the new tech contractor juan, who helps the cowboy in meticulously dismantling don's fortress of digital power.

you may recall that every technical contract our office had up until these developments was with one friend or another of don's. our office website is no exception. going back through the records we see that they have been charging us an obscene amount for what is an unnecessarily complicated process of getting anything up on it. i call don's friend dale, who i know from personal experience is crotchbat royalty, (duke or earl?), and ask for a meeting to discuss the contract, etc. we invite juan to take part in the meeting.

were a human face to appear next to every noun in the dictionary, dale's would accompany "slime". i explain the situation - that i am the new sys admin and that juan will be assisting us with maintaining the website, ask about what we really pay dale for. dale is smug as a bastard. the first thing he asks me is "ok, now who are you?" then he asks me my title. after the meeting, during which he insults juan repeatedly with laughable tech-knowledge pissing contests, dale pulls me aside, "can i talk to you?" "yes." "what's happening? is don fired?" "you know i can't discuss that" "don is my friend you know." "yes, i know that. i can't discuss it."

dale leaves in a huff. poor dale! poor, poor dale! may he shed a tear for dear old nepotism!

the boss calls the cowboy. he is asked to please change the locks on the office doors. but of course, therein lies a problem: don is still an employee. we have no way of confirming that don has received any notice of being fired even if we had given him one, which we are unable to do at the present time. i explain that we can't exactly change the locks on someone without having fired them first and that the new contractor cohort juan assures me that the lengths we have taken in the preceeding days will make it unfathomably improbable that don will be able to get back into the system. so long as we all log out of our computers at the end of the night he won't be able to do much other than brute vandalism if he wants to fuck with our shit.

several days pass and we know don is back in the country but have seen neither sign nor scent of him. one morning two days after the homecoming, nadia notices her computer is on. she swears she had shut it off the night before. i call juan who comes in to investigate. juan apologizes; how could i have been so stupid! he seems to say. for don had a back up plan. not only had he given himself network access on all computers, he had also installed himself as a user on each individual computer! logging in as such requires a minor step generally overlooked by the average user, does result in reduced access to network files, but nonetheless can lead him to some. don it seems had come in the night to see what he could do about rectifying the damage done. some things are missing from his desk area, ostensibly belonging to him anyway. some files may have gone missing, ostensibly belonging to the office. juan and i delete the last vestige of his access.

then we set about trying to fire him. not as easy as it seems...

the rise and fall and rise of the cold cowboy

just when you think you've hit rock bottom your boss turns around and gives you an over 50% raise.

this place is truly crazy.

drinks are on the cowboy.

the rise and fall of the cold cowboy

friends,

it is truly a yank crime that i haven't been updating this record more often. over the past weeks my job environment has gone from mere comical ridiculousness to pure, vile insanity constituting a diarrheal elephantine shit-dump on three thousand years of human logic.

sadly, it seems cruelty of this magnitude has raised apathy rather than creativity in our hero. though to his credit he has managed to continue a long and flawless streak of nonsmoking, i am pleased to report that his use of alcohol is on the up-and-up!

brief hiatus...

it's appropriations time here on capitol hill and things are most unbodacious. inbetween vitriolic anti-stem cell research floor speeches by congressmen-cum-preachers, the cold cowboy has been hard at work trying not to murder himself and once and for all stop the pain.

thus: the continuing saga of our pal don will have to resume next week, when recess is in full bloom and the cherubs of apathy shall descend like pubescent testes into the generously roomy scrotums of government.

the saga of dashing don part VII: when all else fails it's china tyme

yes, after a week of don's absence, during appropriations time no less, we deduce that he has left the country on a delegation to china sponsored by what appears to be a chinese business government relations firm. we have a week until he returns.

yes, the due date for fiscal year 2006 appropriations has come and gone and only don and jesus (allegedly) know what (if any) projects we've submitted. the phones are ringing off the hook, i might add, from city and state government officials, other lobbyists and so on who had lobbied our newest ex-pat with funding requests.

by now the four office cell phones purchased for office staff so that they can communicate without funds coming out of their own shallow pockets have gone missing. they have been missing for months in fact: for during my tenure at the front desk don had gradually acquired them all, giving me and only me the knowledge of which he was using that day so that no one could contact him. by the time the crazy train derailed he answered none of them, nor emails sent to his blackberry.

add to all this the timbuktu fiasco, the rampant missing of scheduled meetings, and general creepiness, and we are finally able to convince the MC to take action. her first order? that the cold cowboy become the new systems administrator and cancel all of his access to the server. meanwhile my coworker nadia is to cancel all cell phones, blackberry, and access to the office credit card account.

nadia and i schedule a secret meeting with outside contractors in the cafeteria during business hours, not yet having realized don was weekending in the orient. we strike a deal with them for computer and web site support and cancel our contract with don's pals at war profiteerz, inc. in the middle of the night we bring them into the office and crack his access, giving them administrator status before eliminating don's own access. they spend three hours wading through boobytrap after boobytrap he has planted in the event of such a coup, but are successful. don, of course, does not show up. he is in shanghai. now that i am systems admin, i request an audit of our server. the result is an abyssmal failure of nearly every security and ethical standard measured by the audit. one of the first things we do is change our password - setting it ourselves this time. we also change don's password so he can't login through the VPN client from his laptop(s) or tablet computer(s) at home and/or in china.

and ha-ha-ha, nadia's audit of our finances uncovers the following items purchased on the office account that are unaccounted for: four (4) laptops, one (1) tablet computer, one (1) ipod purchased in 2001 including accessories totalling $800 in value, one (1) industrial office printer valued at well over $1000. in all, several several thousands in hot, steamy merchandise. all hanging out at don's bungalo and/or flying with him in the Middle Kingdom.

meanwhile i have discovered the following: on every workstation, the inbox and sent folders, calendars and contacts in each staff member's outlook has had don added as an owner. this means of course that don has read each letter received and each sent by each staff member for shit-knows-how-long. his own account features everyone's mailbox alongside his own so that he might read them at will. our first clue-in to this trick was the discovery in the fax machine of an already-faxed sheet of paper printed out from outlook with don's mailbox name at the top. the email itself was written from the boss to a staffer in the district office who happens to be one of the most irritating people i have ever met..we'll call him lionel. the text of the email is, generally, as follows:

Lionel-

Three people - Three - came up to me seperately yesterday complaining about your BODY ODOR at the event yesterday. Please, please, please, Lionel. For God's sake take a shower.

-"MC"

don, in his madness, had forgotten to remove the evidence from the fax machine. who really knows to whom he was sending this unauthorized (albeit highly entertaining) document.

i am given access to don's email and network harddrive. there i discover: 1) recent crudely written cover letters and embellished resumes for chief of staff jobs. missing of course is any mention of a reference from the office he works in currently. we all hate this man. 2) a concealed list of all included approps requests, which i immediately distribute to the office. we discover that he has added a paltry number of requested projects and has left out the most important projects at least on issues of concern to the cold cowboy. i am to this day meeting with city officials to apologize for their previous relationship with mister mcnuts.. and for not getting them those millions that would have been a piece of cake had some jackass bothered to fax them over to committee instead of faxing emails about lionel's stinky pits to the FBI or whoeverthefuck. 3) a solitary small-and-creepy black-and-white jpeg of a grimacing, spread-eagle topless woman with comically fake breasts and a black leather garment that could only loosely be considered "underwear" that succeeds only minimally in hiding her pubis from view.

ok, there's more and more. to be continued.

the saga of dashing don part VI: don's marbles go missing

in january of 2005, the cold cowboy is finally promoted to leg. assistant and vacates his front office post for a spot in the back. no more smiley cowboy greeting visitors. no more screaming cowboy shooing away irate larouche youth with lean and hungry looks in their crazy brainwashed eyes. now the slumpin' can begin.

in my new role i am responsible for advising the MC on certain (undisclosed) legislative issues, meetings, writing policy letters and press releases and talking points and speeches and working with the city, state and other groups to secure fed funding.

by now don has clearly lost it. even his love for the pain of others seems to have cruelly subsided. he no longer speaks to his staff, even when spoken to. he arrives in the office around 11 if at all, leaving by 3. he takes all meetings out of the office, to avoid 'eavesdropping' presumably. he has not spoken to the MC in months.
no longer does he even ask for money. this is generally regarded as a good thing by the cowboy and his ilk, since dislike of don has reached previously unheard of levels and willingness to take part in his greedy carnival of crazy has reached an all-time low.

paranoia appears to be the most obvious feature of don's psychosis - the eavesdropping fears have driven him to seclude even the most mundane of lobbyist meetings from the insidious ear of the cheerful new front desk girl (who knows what cruel plan she may have for the trade secrets to be offered don, like a trophy of platinum-and-gold, by the nervous-and-stuttering-lower-east-side-new-york-jewish washington representative of 'americans for acupuncture'?!) the cave of terror grows ever thick and creepy.

in my new role i have allowed myself the luxury of avoiding don's madness. i have quite a bit of work after all - immediately upon taking the new position i am charged with securing federal funding for local district projects matthew lesko-style. this takes up several weeks, meeting and calling with folks in the city to make sure everything adds up and is germane to the bill. finally i'm done and i've talked to the MC and we've set the priorities and allotted the funding appropriately. but when i submit it on the due date i get an immediate call back. why, they ask, have we submitted two requests? and why, they ask, did we simply ignore over $20 million in available funding the first time around?

the answer, of course, is that don secretly sent in his own jolly request for his buddies back in the district, leaving out those projects that might go to those he knows not! and who could conceivably be plotting his doom and are most likely in cahoots with "the fat one", after all, whose feculent lard is by all available calculations some kind of brain wave receptor channeling don-thought to the underground soviet army which even now approaches don's suburban villa in upper marlboro, maryland...

he even went so far as to intercept calls destined for me and tell lies to the committee staff. which leaves the cold cowboy to make up equal and opposite lies to mask the fact that he works with a certifiable lunatic crazy man who nearly cost the city, once all calculations are complete, $22.5 million in project funds. after the cold cowboy saves the day the MC has raked in by far the most funding in the state and is the envy of her peers. one can smell the boggy stench of seethe pumping in billows from the looney cave.

i know i'm a wanted man by now. nevermind that his pals still got their funding (albeit in slightly smaller amounts): nobody treads on don! never more did a word leave don's mouth in my general direction. for the first time i become concerned in a corporeal sense. would don's hysteria stop before physical pain was wrought at the cowboy's expense? i decide some sleuthing is in order.

and timbuktu comes to mind. timbuktu is a program that allows a user on one computer to remotely connect to the desktop of another with full control of the cursor and full access to all files therein. since our systems support contractor (a giant arms manufacturer) operates out of virginia, this allows them to manually fix most problems without coming across the river. every workstation in the office is equipped with timbuktu for this purpose. in case of a problem, tech guy asks for your ip address, you give it to him, a window pops up asking if you'd like to grant them access, and all of a sudden they can control your mouse too. you see what they're doing and when they're done they log off or you kick them off and everything's back to normal.

not knowing the program well, i open 'er up and do some sniffing around. there's an activity log. many of the entries are years old. they aren't in chronological order. i arrange them thusly. i see five entries attributed to the computer named "don". they are marked "control", meaning he did not merely observe my computer, but gained the use of my mouse as well. from the cave, don was snooping around on my harddrive. i further discover that he has set himself as a permanent user to be accepted at his own whim at any given moment in time, without the obligatory accept-or-deny option granted to us when dealing with the war-profiteer tech guys. the latest entry was from the day before at 3:30pm. i was in the office but had gone with the MC for votes on the bill containing our projects. she was in her wheelchair following that accident and i had to accompany her... remember the "you go, girl!" run-in with my former MC? same time.

so i discover how to delete this capability and alert the rest of the staff to his plot - of course he has set himself up on every station in the place -- including the MC's -- and we go through one-by-one to delete them. upon completion we remember that he knows everyone's password anyway, having given them to us upon hiring and denied us the ability to change it, which naturally violates house ethics codes.

and within two days i know that don knows that i know about his little secret and therefore that everyone else knows about the secret including the MC, who as you can imagine is ready to bust some genitals. that's when don disappears for a few days...

...and turns up in china...