SF Gate Morning Fix

One of my favorite sites is SF Gate Morning Fix. If you enjoy edgy humor you will love this newsletter. Some samples of the author's irreverant witt follow as he leads us to various new articles in the San Francisco Chronicle - BumbleBeeBoogie

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2003/03/26/notes032603.DTL

== THE MEDIA SKEW ==
Fertile weeds from the savage garden of the sfgate.com newswires

== Hard Wet Drunken Nipples Of Patriotism ==
Even as war raged in Iraq, spring break life took its alcohol-fueled course in Cancun, where the party trail sometimes stretches from all-night discos to jail cells. Most college students were on the beach or at the bar instead of glued to hotel TVs to watch the war's early developments, because, you know, they're college students, mostly chest-thumping frat boys and brain-spasming sorority girls, which we can safely translate to mean they haven't opened a newspaper in their entire bong-hit Coors-soaked drunk-sex lives, except for maybe in Communications class, but only because they, like, had to, and all the little words made them all like, dizzy and stuff, and like oh my god dude I am so wasted, why does it hurt when I pee, does this dumb giggle make my ass look fat. While some expressed concern for the war (read: belching "The Star-Spangled Banner" before passing out), U.S. bombs falling on Baghdad didn't prompt the cancellation of any wet T-shirt contests or force all-you-can drink night clubs to close their doors. "I really am worried about the war but that doesn't mean I can't have a good time with my friends," said University of Louisville sophomore Becca Vierling, actually employing a complete sentence for like, the third time in her life, who was floating in the Caribbean with an empty, red-plastic glass in her hand, and who's real name is, yes, Becca, and who we can right now imagine is exactly the type of adorably vacuous nightmare of faux-sex and misassembled brain parts we all imagine her to be.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2003/03/25/international0431EST0475.DTL&nl=fix
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== Oh Dear God Please No #75 ==
Celine Dion headed to the stage Tuesday night at Caesars Palace in Vegas to debut her show, "A New Day," a multimillion dollar extravaganza that figures to test the French-Canadian superstar's staying power. The world's best-selling and most terrifyingly obnoxious and cloyingly vacuous female vocalist in the known universe will begin a demanding and soul-curdling three-year run at a newly built $95 million theater, the 4,100-seat Colosseum. She'll be crooning and dancing five nights a week to Belgian director Franco Dragone's latest creation, actively working to eviscerate every sort of warm-hearted funky positive energy we all work so hard to cultivate in our daily lives. The $30 million production includes 48 very miserable dancers and the world's largest LED screen that serves as a backdrop. Dion will sing more than 20 songs each night -- likely a 90-minute performance to a soul-numbed mostly drunk audience somehow cajoled into forking over $87.50 to $200 per ticket because they long ago lost anything resembling decent musical taste and because Celine has now taken her rightful place in the pantheon of uber-tackiness, right alongside Engelbert Humperdinck and the odious wooden creepily homoerotic heavily shellacked visages of the walking corpses known as Siegfried and Roy. "It really is a whole New Day!" squealed Dion, from somewhere deep in a pile of fluffy pink pillows, as small cute birds nearby found no more reason to sing, ever.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2003/03/25/state2011EST0133.DTL&nl=fix
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== Sorry About All The Toxic Cancerous Lakes Ha Ha Snicker ==
Flabby mostly white mostly Republican mostly rich mostly sneering mostly phlegm-hacking mostly soul-dead Senators rejected an amendment Tuesday that would have reinstated a tax on major corporate polluters to help pay for cleaning up the Superfund toxic waste sites, just so you know, just in case there was any doubt, in case you were perhaps thinking that maybe, just maybe, the current powers that be are not, in
fact, sucking at the black oozing teat of corporate cronyism as viciously as you imagined, not actively decimating the planet at every turn in favor of petroleum and industrial stock portfolio boosts and huge secret tax breaks and new baby seal seat covers for the trophy wife's new Escalade. By a vote of 56-43, sniveling back-slapping Republican senators shot down a Democratic move to revive the tax. Since then the special trust fund created from the taxes on chemical and petroleum companies has dwindled from a high of $3.6 billion to a projected $28 million by the end of this year. Oh well.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2003/03/25/national1854EST0816.DTL&nl=fix
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== Next On QVC, Connie Chung's Thimble Mania ==
CNN abruptly dropped one of its best-known and most surreally annoying
anchors, Connie Chung, who had been hired only last spring as the
centerpiece of a star-driven prime-time lineup but who even ratings-mad
CNN quickly realized was this oddly freakish automaton of quasi-reporting who most people on the planet can't watch without feeling this odd uncomfortable twinge deep in their colon. "Connie Chung Tonight" had been criticized in some circles for its emphasis on crime and personality stories but had drawn strong ratings in a nondescript time slot. It will be replaced by a program featuring ten elephant seals sitting in a circle tossing a beach ball to each other's noses while Lynne Cheney sits on a small painful metal spike in the middle and talks about why she so adores the taste of crusty shriveled power-mad white men who smell like old cheese.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2003/03/26/financial0758EST0021.DTL&nl=fix
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Then the author got serious (at least for him):

We think we know so damn much.

We think we know cause and effect. We think we know basic systems and
human nature and the arc of time, what sort of hellish road we are paving right this minute, all those big colorful maps and arrows and diagrams and missile trajectories on CNN, all the clusters of little green plastic army men pushed around a giant map table by embittered generals.

We think we know what will happen to the collective unconscious, to the soul of the population at large when the scowling GOP war hawks issued the order to rain 3,000 multimillion-dollar warheads down on a bedraggled piss-poor food-starved nation in a single day.

Or when we massacre tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians and lay waste to an entire culture and landscape and history, as a 20-mile-long procession of U.S. troops rumble into Baghdad to kill anything with a turban and an Islamic faith and a dusty 1983 U.S.-Iraq chemical-weapons sales receipt, and call it patriotism.

We think we know all about body counts and nation building, and we think we have some sort of sanctimonious monopoly on the idea of what type of freedom everyone should have, what sort of force-fed democracy
everyone really needs, whose self-righteous angry SUV-driving god has
the right to bitch-slap which self-righteous angry Koran-reading god, and call it Christian largesse.

We don't know anything.

I unplugged recently. I was off the snarling media grid, briefly, strangely, beautifully. It was surreal and amazing and jarring. This is when I realized.

There I was on vacation just last week, watching the pods, the families, the processions of humpback whales just off the Hawaii coastline, huge 60-ton male escorts and enormous 40-ton females and their 10-ton newborn calves, every day, whale after whale, pod after pod, a glorious and breathtaking thing, like a gift, a reminder, a slap in the face to the warmongering bilious timbre of now, of Shrub's cadre of hissing war hawks, of what we think we know.

And they were all spouting and rolling and breaching and slapping the water with their huge dorsal fins, all about birth and mating and migration and jesus goddamn wow they're big, and humbling, and shocking, as you like to think you're all plugged in and world wise and media savvy and you might think you know what the planet is really doing at any given moment, deep down, in the meat of it, and of course, you see something like this and you realize, sure enough, you don't know anything.

But the hawks and fearmongers, they want you to believe you do. They
want you to think we are, with this vile needless war, attaining progress, reaching for some sort of truth, bringing the world closer into alignment with what Bush's sneering Christian god along with Uncle Dick's economic advisory team deems right and just and lucrative, never mind all the burned bodies and dead children and the massacred thousands and the billions in economy-gutting expenditures. We are making the world better, they actually claim. How sweet. Nothing like 100,000 full body bags to really make the soul glow.

We bought a book on humpback whales to try and understand, to see what those behaviors mean, to see what it was, exactly, we were watching
every day, and we read and read and said wow and hmm and isn't that
interesting and we tried to find out why they breached, or why they
slapped the waves like that, or why they sang or what the songs might
mean. You know, the basics.

Here is what we found out: We read all the science and all the study and all the modern B.S., all our technology and all our sensors and all our collected data, and we closed the book and looked at each other and shook our heads and laughed -- sure enough, no one knows.

Modern science has no clue. Whale songs. Breaching. Slapping the waves
with their enormous tail fins, over and over, like a ritual, a call, a play. Some of the biggest most ancient creatures on the planet, timeless and stunning and awe inspiring and once slaughtered nearly to extinction and each and every one karmically and ethically impervious to white angry men puling about war and still we have no idea. We don't know why they breach, or slap or sing. We don't even know how long whales live.

And then we have the gall. We have the nerve to think we know how the
world works, what the planet needs, how culture operates. We trot out the Constitution when it suits us and point to the Second Amendment as kids shoot each other in schools, and we think we understand how the U.S. was founded on the idea that the life of an Iraqi peasant is as valuable as that of a U.S. Marine, or Shrub daughter, or shuttle astronaut. Ha.

Monarch butterflies haul tiny insect ass 3,000 miles from Canada to Mexico (and back) every year, through storms and wind and across mountains and deserts, through conditions most major aircraft would whimper at, landing on the exact same trees every single year to mate,
generation after generation. We have no idea how the hell they do it. No idea how they survive the journey, the exact path they take, how they know the exact tree every time, or why, or what it might mean. Just another example. Pure mystery. One of thousands.

Yet we think we are just so damn sure. We are just so sure that we rule the whole planet, that we are the uberspecies, that we have the right to slaughter whomever and whatever we like whenever we like because someone might dare stand in the way of our alleged progress, or our oil interests, or our profits. How did all our oil get under their sand? we ask, not at all jokingly.

I know what the whale-tail slaps are.

They are a reminder. No matter how much we think we know, no matter
how many die as a result of Shrub's vicious war, no matter what sort of self-righteous good we think we're ramming down everyone's throat, we are, quite simply, raging deeper into ignorance. We know nothing. And the worst part is, we seem to be learning less with every warhead, every Rummy press conference, every dust-choked reporter and dead soldier. The whales know this. Maybe they're just waving goodbye.