Dope

We at Limitedinc, in a vain attempt to become the Yuppie we used to despise (ah, and now we think, if only I had that much disposable income! And the insurance! And the SUV!), run � we run around Town Lake. This has become a necessary adjunct of thinking � we have an article to write, or a totally unremunerative post to post here, and we think it out while running.

So perhaps our mind is a little too vigilant, a little too quick to catch hints, but for the last five months, ever since the pedestrian bridge was thrown across the lake, we have been bugged by an architectural faux pas. The bridge is really a pretty structure, with scoriated cement arches footing it in the lake. It loads onto the South shore footpath from the North Shore. The north shore has a spiral entrance, which carries the pedestrian or bicycler about two stories up to the bridge proper. Or you can take the stairs, which also goes up to the bridge. There�s are two arms for the two entrances, which then come together to form the main bridge thru-way.

What is bugging Limited inc in this arrangement, which shows a maximum appreciation for us athletic Austin citizens? The entrances on the North Shore, as I said, go up about two stories, so the last supporting pair of arches on the shore face the spiral entrance. These arches have capstones. And --- here it is � the capstones are at different angles. In other words, the capstone front sides, which are marked by the symbol of Texas, the Lone Star, are wall eyed to each other. It looks disgraceful.

Now you are saying, perhaps the architect intended that asymmetry, and the angle between the capstones, which is some jagged number, 153 degrees or something, is subtly multiplied by some feature of the South shore landing. Well, short answer is no. We�ve gone over and over this bridge, and it turns out that Gaudi isn�t working for the department of highways and bridges of Texas. The capstone angle is a mistake.

How did this happen? Here�s what we speculate. Originally, the capstones were supposed to front the north shore in traditional alignment, one with the other. Then the entrances were added, or changed, in some way. And when the entrances were changed, they were speced according to some formula for bearing a load, and they discovered that the last supporting arches were somehow misplaced. So they moved the arches, and then they made room, in the more cramped space between the arches and the spiral entrance, by wall-eyeing the capstones.

Taking that scenario as true, for a moment, I imagine a further mistake was made. I imagine they specced the bridge with a weight per unit figure reflecting cars and trucks, not pedestrians. And if that is true, and here Limited Inc has become the paranoid he so dreaded becoming, perhaps THIS ISN�T A MISTAKE. In other words, the bridge was built so it could be converted to cars and trucks. And how would this happen? It would happen if the city, in its infinite wisdom, decided that the Lamar Boulevard bridge wasn�t big enough. In other words, they would decide they needed yet one more road to carry traffic through the city, north to south and vice versa. Now I think they wouldn�t dare do that right now, but it is easy to imagine a scenario. There�s a five car pile up on Lamar, for instance, and talk of how crowded it is, and how expensive to expand. And then covetous eyes are cast upon our pedestrian bridge.

So I say: change the capstones! The people, united, want symmetry or will fight, yeah! � we want them chanting that in the streets.

Remora

We love stories like this one. We love them because the people who accord them respect are the same kind of people who scoff at wild Kennedy assassination conspiracies; yes, people, like George Will, who accused Delillo of being treasonous for having written a novel, Libra, that implies the CIA bumped old JFK; or the people from the commentariat of the nyt who decry (oh, decry me a river, as Tallulah Bankhead once said) Oliver Stone's JFK for its fictions and hyperbole. But even Oliver Stone at least tried to make a convincing link. Here's the first two grafs of an AP story:

"Former CIA Director James Woolsey says Iraq likely was involved in the attacks of Sept. 11 and that the United States will probably confront President Saddam Hussein as part of its ongoing campaign against terrorism.

``There are too many things, too many examples of stolen identities, of cleverly-crafted documentation, of coordination across continents and between states ... to stray very far from the conclusion that a state, and a very well-run intelligence service is involved here,'' he told the national convention of the American Jewish Congress on Monday."

Here's Georgie Will on Libra:

"DeLillo says he is just filling in "some of the blank spaces in the known record." But there is no blank space large enough to accommodate, and not a particle of evidence for, DeLillo's lunatic conspiracy theory. In the book's weaselly afterword, he says he has made "no attempt to furnish factual answers."

Weaselly, huh? It's weaselly to say, I wrote a novel, not a history book? Hmm, well, wonder what George thinks of the phrase, "...stray very far from the conclusion that a state, and a very well-run intelligence service is involved here." Let's see, stolen identities, check for Oswald; cleverly crafted documentation, ditto; coordinated between continents, well, that is what you call petitio principii, begging the question, no? Still, I would like Woolsey to tell us who he thinks was at the crossroads in Dallas, 1963. But we know his answer: Saddam Hussein!

Dope
Limited Inc tossed and turned last night. In fact, we sleep so poorly lately that Insomnia has become our least favorite devil, and we are at a loss as to how to make terms with it. Benadryll doesn't help any more. Warm milk, not a chance; walking to and fro, exhaustion, lying still, lying under the sheet, pretending to be dead, turning on the light and deciding to read, turning off the light and trying to think of nothing, then trying to think of one thing, then trying not to let the mind get carried away by the thing that has to be done tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. All those nice, luscious stories about incubi and succubi are nothing compared to Beelzebub, Lord not only of the flies but of all buzzing night thoughts. The thought that we could open our eyes at any point last night was itself enough to drive us crazy.

Well, so we go to the National Sleep Foundation, my fave charity, and see what is up. We are greated with one of the great headlines of our time:


NATIONAL SLEEP FOUNDATION WELCOMES NEW FINDINGS SHOWING MINNEAPOLIS TEENS SLEEPING MORE DUE TO LATER SCHOOL START TIMES.

Where were these people when I was a punk?
Here's the kind of graf that makes teenage wasteland seem not so bad.

"Sleep studies indicate adolescents need between 8.5 and 9.25 hours of sleep each night. NSF surveys show that during the school week, only 15 percent sleep 8.5 hours or more, and more than one-quarter sleep less than seven hours. Because of their physiological changes, adolescents tend to fall asleep and awaken later, which can find their body clocks in conflict with school clocks if classes begin at a time when teens want to be sleeping. The result is that too many teens come to school too sleepy to learn. "

Well, the greatest non-sleeper in history is Macbeth. But Freud points out that Macbeth was not exactly the sleepless one:

"One is so unwilling to dismiss a problem like that of Macbeth as insoluble that I will venture to bring up a fresh point, which may offer another way out of the difficulty. Ludwig Jekels, in a recent Shakespearean study, thinks [Endnote 5] he has discovered a particular technique of the poet's, and this might apply to Macbeth. He believes that Shakespeare often splits a character up into two personages, which, taken separately, are not completely understandable and do not become so until they are brought together once more into a unity. This might be so with Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. In that case it would of course be pointless to regard her as an independent character and seek to discover the motives for her change, without considering the Macbeth who completes her. I shall not follow this clue any further, but I should, nevertheless, like to point out something which strikingly confirms this view: the germs of fear which break out in Macbeth on the night of the murder do not develop further in him but in her. It is he who has the hallucination of the dagger before the crime; but it is she who afterwards falls ill of a mental disorder. It is he who after the murder hears the cry in the house: "Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep ..." and so "Macbeth shall sleep no more"; but we never hear that he slept no more, while the Queen, as we see, rises from her bed and, talking in her sleep, betrays her guilt. It is he who stands helpless with bloody hands, lamenting that "all great Neptune's ocean" will not wash them clean, while she comforts him: "A little water clears us of this deed"; but later it is she who washes her hands for a quarter of an hour and cannot get rid of the bloodstains: "All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand." Thus what he feared in his pangs of conscience is fulfilled in her; she becomes all remorse and he all defiance. Together they exhaust the possibilities of reaction to the crime, like two disunited parts of a single psychical individuality, and it may be that they are both copied from the same prototype."

Distributed insomnia. Well, whoever lost his insomnia, I found it. Call immediately. It answers to the name of Warmed Over Death.

none. skip.

Remora
We at Limited Inc are a little nostalgic for the blood sports of yesteryear -- the homicides that use to fill our tv time before the 9/11 6,000. Remember when all of America was obsessed with whether an aging ex-football player slaughtered his ex-wife and her boyfriend? Remember how this was considered (God knows why) some kind of naked encounter between black and white skin (Limited Inc must confess that we were less than enthralled by the OJ Simpson case and its ultimate meaning. That millionaires commonly get off of homicide raps was not news to people who have lived in Texas for more than a couple of months -- surely you could throw a good sized party with just the unconvicted Sugar Daddies of Fort Worth, not to mention Dallas. The revelation, to us, was not racial, but the house guest situation in Brentwood. That it was possible to roll in the lap of luxury, swilling liquor and eating hors d'oeuvres, without paying rent - and that the only job requirements were good grooming and availability for any late night hints from your host that his hands and teeth were dripping blood and gore for a secret reason -- that this job actually existed was was a crushing blow. We wanted to be Kato Kaelin! If you out there, reading us, are a homicidally inclined rich person in need of a house guest, please, we'd be more than happy. Just keep the fridge stocked, and we will bear infinite witness for you.)

Luckily, there will always be a Texas. The Washington Post has an amazing story this Sunday by Paul Duggan. It profiles the only full time pseudo hitman in the nation. And of course he works for the Houston police. The story begins with a typical day in his life -- there he is, sitting in a hotel room, listening to a wife's emotional plea that he take her money and eliminate her husband, so that she can find true love in the arms of another -- paid for, of course, by her husband's estate.

These two grafs are for those of you out there who don't believe me:

"Playing the part of the hit man was a 54-year-old undercover cop named Gary Johnson. Investigating murder solicitation plots and posing as a killer for hire is his full-time job, a busy specialty in Harris County, population 3.4 million. His beat is rife with big-money schemers and low-rent dreamers, many of whom, to their regret, have made the hit man's acquaintance.

In the last dozen years, working for the Harris County district attorney's office, Johnson has posed as a contract killer in about 100 meetings like the one with Lynn Kilroy. About 55 of those meetings led to murder solicitation charges against more than 60 people -- housewives, barflies, business owners, burger flippers, pencil pushers, an Elvis impersonator, even a church pianist who wanted the choir director dead."

And, okay, I can't resist one ghoulish note, though I usually try not to quote this much of an article. Here's my fave:
"Once he was offered a $22,000 speedboat, but normally his fees run in the low four figures. In 1993, a high school computer whiz named Shawn Quinn told Johnson he wanted a romantic rival slain, and he gave the hit man three $1 bills and seven Atari video games for the job.

"You want a $3 killing?" said the hit man, nonplused.

Quinn handed him a fistful of coins, making it a $5.30 killing, and said to look at the bright side.

"If you drive back on the toll road, you won't need to get change."

Apparently the neighborhood hit man is as much in demand as a good dentist. You see, you never know when your going to get tired of your loved ones in Houston.

Remora
Having an ancien regime taste for irony here at Limited Inc, we found this story somehow, well --- ticklish.
Vietnam Calls O.C. Group Terrorists

It appears that President Thieu's successors are alive and well and living in LA. Where else? An organization named Free Vietnam, which claims to be the true government of Vietnam (an obvious falsehood, since Limited Inc is the true and duly elected government of Vietnam), has been tending to its cred -- by which it earns "loans" from nostalgic Vietnamese businessmen -- by supplying available young and unemployed men with machine guns or bombs and turning them loose in Thailand. The Thais aren't amused. Two grafs:

"Vietnam has asked the United States to bring terrorism charges against the group's leader, former civil engineer Chanh Huu Nguyen, 52.

"Many times [group members] have organized bombings in Vietnam and against its agencies abroad," said Thuy Thanh Phan, spokeswoman for the Vietnamese Department of Foreign Affairs. "Vietnam has asked the U.S. to stop harboring, tolerating or supporting that group. It should punish those who commit terrorist acts on Vietnam . . . like Nguyen and his group."

Remora

Well, news isn't good on the free speech front. The latest assault on our collective intelligence (we collected it from the clothes-line last night -- you can find it in your sock drawer) is the Labor bill which unctuously defines religious 'hate speech' and bans it, visiting its practitioners with a maximum penalty of seven years in stir. That will show them that God's in his heaven, damn them all.

The Observer's editorialist approaches this issue in a gingerly fashion:


"A couple of months ago Nick Griffin, the leader of the BNP, was on on television commenting on the riots in Bradford and Oldham. He said that these towns did not have an 'Asian problem' but a 'Muslim problem'. He demonstrated clearly how racists now use religion as a proxy for race in cultivating hatred for those they despise. The attack on the World Trade Centre, and the wave of Islamophobia it has generated, has only increased the vulnerability of many British citizens to this kind of racist attack.
In his speech to the Labour Party conference, David Blunkett announced the government's response.
He promised 'to toughen up our incitement laws to ensure that attention-seekers and extremists cannot abuse our rights of free speech to stir up tensions in our cities...' Laws against incitement to racial hatred are to be complemented by laws against incitement to religious hatred.

It is not clear exactly what is being proposed here. Few civil libertarians have a problem with a law that restricts speech that, given its immediate context, is likely to result directly in violence. John Stuart Mill gives the example of someone distributing leaflets which say 'Corn dealers are starvers of the poor' to an excited mob gathering outside a corn dealer's house. But it is not clear why we need a law that specifically targets religiously oriented speech that has this effect, rather than a general law against incitement."

A more vigorous defense of free speech is being made by comedian Rowan Atkinson, who pointed out, in a letter to the Times, that the Labor proposal could be used to ban satiric portrayals of religion. The government's purring reply was (get the claws back in the sheathes) that OF COURSE, you can trust us to do what is best.

So, for guidance on the religious issue, we at Limited Inc turned, of course, to Milton's Areopagitica. Milton, when he gets wound up, sounds like a giant chewing rocks. I imagine a murkish, Goya like figure. It's daunting, Milton's prose. After reviewing the history of censorship, with particular reference to the part played by various councils of the Whore of Babylon, ie The Church of Rome, he gives us this wonderful passage:

"And thus ye have the Inventors and the originall of Book-licencing ript up and drawn as lineally as any pedigree. We have it not, that can be heard of, from any ancient State, or politie, or Church, nor by any Statute left us by our Ancestors elder or later; nor from the moderne custom of any reformed Citty, or Church abroad; but from the most Antichristian Councel and the most tyrannous Inquisition that ever inquir'd. Till then Books were ever as freely admitted into the World as any other birth; the issue of the brain was no then the issue of the womb: no envious Juno sate cros-leg'd over the nativity of any man's intellectuall off spring; but if it prov'd a Monster, who denies, but that it was justly burnt, or sunk into the Sea. But that a Book in wors condition then a peccant soul, should be to stand before a Jury ere it be borne to the World, and undergo yet in darknesse the judgment of Radamanth and his Collegues, ere it can pass the ferry backward into light, was never heard before, till that mysterious iniquity, provokt and troubl'd at the first entrance of Reformation, sought out new limbo's and new hells wherein they might include our Books also within the number of their damned."

Among the new limbos, of course, is being fired for your views, which happened to Ann Coulter at the National Review. No need to mince words -- Ann Coulter is a bigot. But really, firing her from the National Review as if she'd just revealed her scarlet letter is unworthy of William Buckley's mag. Anyway, here's the start of a perfectly delicious column which, fortunately, we can read due to the lack, so far, of any hate speech legislation protecting liberals.

"LIBERALS ARE up to their old tricks again. Twenty years of treason haven't slowed them down.

Earlier prescient advice from the anti-American crowd has included: dismantling government intelligence agencies "brick by brick"; toppling the Shah of Iran and giving Islamic fundamentalism its first real foothold in the Mideast; turning the U.S. armed forces into a feminist consciousness-raising session; demanding continued dependence on Arab oil in order to preserve mud flats in Alaska; indignantly opposing a missile defense shield; promoting endless due process rights for aliens who are illegal, diseased or criminal; disarming the public; and purging the nation of insidious references to God."

This stuff is too good to be unbottled. It makes me a little giddy to think that I, a mere peon of the left, have secretly connived at such wonderful treasons. But I do wonder how she tracked us down -- I thought we removed those bricks at night? I was assured nobody was around. But you just can't trust the good people of Reston, VA, can ya? They must have figured something was up the next morning, when we had that huge brick sale to pay for the treasonous opposition to the missile defense plan. Treasonous opposition nowadays costs a packet. For one thing, there are all the black capes you have to buy for the meetings. But Coulter was on the spot. Drat!