So the first e-mail I got the other morning was from our Anne Northrup whom I guess is possibly related to congresswoman Anne Northup and she’s talking about how exciting the world of the Internet is and how so much information can be communicated electronically and how she’d love to correspond with me now and again passing along positions that are important to her campaign but what I’m wondering is how the hell she got my personal e-mail address which is pretty scary if not altogether surprising in this age of superhackerdom then I saw that I could unsubscribe from her future communiques even though I never subscribed in the first place so I clicked the link and it took me to a page that says Not Found The URL/doc/LzIvMjk2Ni8xMjI3LjIvMTAxMzE1L2thcGxhbkBjdWx0dXJlbWF2ZW4uY29tLnhtbAAA
was not found on this server so I guess I’ve now got a worm on my computer and/or Anne and I are destined to become cybergalactic buddies whether one of us wants it or not then surfing that very same World Wide Web that Anne may have discovered as a tool to try to maintain her incumbency I run across a report that gasoline is very quickly headed back down to the $2 a gallon range which is a most surprising development because that pipeline in Alaska isn’t working right since the oil company in charge couldn’t find some spare change in its hundreds of billions in profits to properly maintain it so domestic oil production and supplies are way down and even though there are two maybe three wars going on in the oil-laden Middle East which those oil cartel countries don’t like so they’re expressing their displeasure by toying with our dependence on petroleum products all of which would seem to make the cost of oil continue to go up instead of down or so that guy Samuelson wrote in the textbook we used when we took economics in college and silly paranoid me I’m thinking maybe there’s some kind of conspiracy going on among those Big Oil conglomerates which simply adore the obscene profits they are making while the Anne Northups of the country are in charge of the government and since those politicians are somewhat beleaguered among the voting populace for all the decisions they’ve made favoring Big Oil over John and Jane Q Public the former might be lowering the price of gas so John and Jane will be duped into thinking all is well in advance of this autumn’s congressional and senatorial elections as if there’s any question of inefficiency and chicanery in government when they were an air controller short the other day in Lexington and the sole guy on duty with only a couple hours sleep didn’t pay much attention when some pilots tried to start the wrong plane then when they headed to the wrong runway in the right plane with the wrong software the controller guy was working on his administrative duties probably filling out some forms while that plane was about to make the good folk of the bluegrass even bluer none of which can be designated a comedy of errors because there’s no humor at all to a situation where so many people with responsibilities were not negligent but malfeasant and the word guillotine comes to mind as just punishment as well as for those responsible as New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are being left to rot all of which abysmal scenarios emphasize the need for some respite like maybe a Rolling Stones concert or something like that but tickets are priced only for the rich and famous which wouldn’t be so bad if those Brits were something other than an overpriced oldies act which they aren’t besides the fact that Alice Cooper is opening the show which might be OK for the State Fair but not when other towns on the tour are getting Van Morrison or Kanye West as the lead-in which would have been consistent with years past when Mick and Keith always had boffo soul inspired opening acts and it seems what that proves is that some things do change at the whim of the powerful like say oh the price of oil and that life is fraught with twists and turns which is not to mention that we now must question every single thing we learned in the fourth grade because some scientists on their high horse now tell us after but a couple of weeks of dialog that since Pluto’s orbit around the sun overlaps that of Neptune it means that all of a sudden out of the cosmic void Pluto isn’t even a planet anymore.
Contact the writer at
cdk@culturemaven.com
This article appears in September 1, 2006.