======================================== *** THE INNER SWINE *** Volume 5, Issue 1, March 1999 www.innerswine.com ======================================== The happiness of others is never bearable for long. - Francoise Sagan CONCEPT BY: Jeff Somers, Robert Gala, Ken West, Jeof Vita COVER ART (USUALLY) BY: Jeof Vita EDITOR: Jeffrey Somers PUBLISHER In Absentia: Cassie Moore WEBMASTERS: Jeof Vita, Ken West, my own bad self ADVICE & FREE DRINKS: PROOFREEDER EXTRAORDINAIRE: Karen Accavallo OVERALL OFFICIAL COOL CHICK: Lauren Strutzel OFFICIAL OPERATING SYSTEM: FreeBSD 2.2.7, if I can ever get the damned thing to recognize my sound card and if I ever replace the fucking WinModem those bastards at Microsoft have gifted the world with. FRIENDS OF THE SWINE: Lauren L. J. Strutzel, for her endless and affectionate support and friendship, which I treasure despite her unreasoning obsession with dogs; Misty S. Quinn, Esq. for her inspiring friendship and unlikely ongoing affection for me; RA, who I can always count on for good advice and much-needed abuse; Ken West, for buying Half Life for me at Christmas because he understands the subtle joy of murdering every living thing before you and standing atop their steaming corpses with the ecstatic light of victory in your eyes; Karen Accavallo, for providing top-notch ediorial services to The Inner Swine despite her great dislike for me; Rob Gala, despite his earthy-crunchy beatnik arrogance, for staying in touch and still promising to write for TIS; Elizabeth Augoustiniatos, for continuing to make dumb bets with me which only result in more free dinners my way, and for continuing to put up with me as we edge towards our 10th year of acquaintance; Cassie Moore, our departed Publisher, who remains in spirit even if she isn’t actually allowing us to commit daily acts of white collar crime; The lovely and talented Alison Culshaw, who fearlessly spams me on a daily basis only because she knows how upset it makes me ======================================== TABLE OF CONTENTS ======================================== EDITORIAL: "PIS#14: The Best Meat’s in the Rump" COMMENTARY: "One Thing On Our Minds: If Reality Were Based on Maxim Magazine" FICTION: "Freaks of The Industry Part One" COMMENTARY: "714 Reasons to Love Baseball" INTERVIEW: "10 Questions With Jeof Vita" THE FREAKS COME OUT AT NIGHT PART 1: "It Takes a Nation of Freaks to Hold Me Back" THE FREAKS COME OUT AT NIGHT PART 2: "My Friends Are Cranky, Mean-Spirited Bastards" COMMENTARY: "No Future: God’s Middle Finger (The Inner Swine’s 10 Signs of The Apocalypse to Watch For in 1999)" COMMENTARY: "Horton Hears a Superconductor: The Coming Division Between Techno-geeks and Techno-morons and The Crapper of History" INSIDE JEFF’S MIND: "I Would Eat My Cat" FICTION: "The Monosyllabic Girl" ---------------------------------------- The Inner Swine Volume 5 Issue 1. Magazine published March, June, September, and December by Oinking Sow, Inc. © 1999 by Jeff Somers. (There is no company, really) Individual subscription rates: $5.00 (cheap!) per year in U.S.; $6.00 (cheap!) per year foreign including Canada. Single Copy $2.00 (cheap!) plus $1.00 (cheap!) for postage and handling if ordered by mail, but stop teasing me, you’re never going to order a subscription, you heartless bastards. Free trades are absolutely entertained, send me something, and I will mail you treats. Checks payable to Jeff Somers, Editor. Address submissions and correspondence to Jeff Somers, The Inner Swine, PO Box 3024, hoboken, NJ 07030; mreditor@innerswine.com. But if you send me something, make it good or I will be angered. All submissions or requests for Guidelines (there are no guidelines, though) must be accompanied by S.A.S.E. If you send me something I will get you a date with Misty S. Quinn (above, showing off) on St. Patrick’s Day, and she will wear her Big Hat, and nothing else. ======================================== WHAT THE FUCK'S BEEN GOIN' ON? ======================================== On New Years I was in a public restroom begging for another chance to make good, as usual. At two minutes to midnight on New Years Eve your Editor here pulled his head from the toilet, climbed out of the stall, cleaned himself up in the greasy-looking sink, stared himself right in the eye and steadfastly refused to make any resolutions for 1999. Have no fear, Piggies, I’m here to hold the line against all this bullshit. WELL, it’s 1999, pigs, and I haven’t started partying yet, but I’m sure 2000-fever will strike me soon. Personally, I’m just waiting to see if the Y2K bug will really destroy civilization. I’d like to take this opportunity to assure all of our customers that The Inner Swine is 100% Y2K compliant. If our computers bomb and we can’t print the March 2000 issue, we’ll travel cross country to every subscribers door and personally recite the entire new issue, complete with rude gestures in appropriate places. Goodbye, AOL: As many of you have noticed, we are no longer customers of America On Line. This decision was reached after spending 45 minutes one night getting busy signals while trying to update our Sinister Web Presence (http://home.earthlink.net/~linknull), and then discovering that many Search Engines don’t index AOL web pages due to the undue levels of spam, ignorance, and stupidity found there. So, we signed up with Earthlink and have been much happier ever since. We wish AOL and their bloated, doomed corporate structure well, though we doubt it will do them much good. We have nothing personally against AOL, understand, and we view having an AOL account as a vital and necessary learning experience for the newbie computer user, just like Winmodems. After having been knee-deep in AOL’s hoopla with my Winmodem, babies, I can say that nothing in my future computing experience will ever be quite as bad. I have no fear, I’ve been to keyword:hell and lived. Aside from all this philosophical muttering and techno-geek sputtering, pigs, we here at TIS have been playing a game called Half-Life, which is a First Person Shooter (FPS) the likes of which we’ve never seen. Having entered Half-Life’s twistedly realistic universe of monsters, machine guns, and bastard Marines I must kill -well, to be honest, I just plain don’t want to leave. If I can convince one of the leather-clad assasin babes to stop shooting me in the back and marry me instead, it’d be perfect (snort, drool, vulcan hand gesture)! Revenge of the Laureates. Well, back in January the Thieves of the World celebrated the new year by once again stealing my car. After a night out drinking and holding the fiery Jeof Vita back from various street fights, your gentle Editor awoke to find his chariot had once again been made off with. Very depressing. What can you do? Walk, apparently. The car was once again recovered after being used in a violent crime, which we imagine was the rubout of some Jersey mob boss. We’re still disassembling the car looking for stashed money or drugs. Since the New Year we’ve been keeping a diary of our daily events, just to see exactly when it all goes wrong every year. So far, every day is exactly the same: Woke up, went to work, came home and almost shot myself in the head. Then "Simpsons" reruns came on. Fell asleep. Our scientific analysis of the data is disturbing: apparently, it all goes wrong on January 2nd. From there its a downhill jaunt into alcohol, fistfights, and bodily secretions that culminates with me in a public restroom on December 31st, begging for another chance to make good. What can I say? Party’s over, it’s out of time. ======================================== 1999: The Year of ME Heres what they're saying about ME: ======================================== Well, I was trolling the web the other day and I found a review of The Inner Swine 4(1) (which was our March 1998 issue) which we had never been alerted about. It’s reviewed by 10 Things Jesus Wants You to Know (www.10things.com) on a page which begins with this encouraging statement: "The following are all reviews of zines that were sent in for review, please take some time to read through and discover a few zines that might interest you....There are a bunch of great zines below, some are my personal favorites and all, even those a particular reviewer may not have liked, are at least trying to do something outside the mainstream media. --Dan" Unfortunately, the actual review of TIS is less glowing: "This is an honest zine, so I will be honest. Most everything in here I didn’t need to read. It is written by some guy in Jersey that thinks that he is some self-proclaimed intellectual but seems to only be able to cover topics like "Great Things About Pornography" and "Smut-Hunting on the Internet", neither of which were really of any help to me in my smut hunting endeavors. There are a bunch of stories in this, but they made me a little bored since they were mostly a reflection about this boy’s life. I read it on the crapper and nearly cracked my head open on the corner of the counter falling asleep, oh!! -Nick" Well, I always knew I was dull and typical, but it’s very refreshing to have it thrown in your face with such brutality. I encourage all Swine to drop 10 Things a line and let them know they rock, because they have a love/hate relationship with us. We guarantee that this review will be on all our literature from now on. Whoo-hoo! Tis the season to get reviewed, apparently, since Zine World (537 Jones Street #2386, San Francisco, CA 94102 / zineworld@apexmail .com) also deigned to review us: "The Inner Swine v4#2: Ah, there’s nothing quite like a good dose of egoism backed by self-deprecation. Love it! Jeff is one of those cynically funny guys whose subtle humor is missed if you’re not paying close attention. In this issue he gives his opinions of MTV’s The Real World and the suckage of New York radio. There’s a "Virtual Age" chart with which you can determine your mindset age. He goes nuts over the "morons" who are receiving educational diplomas through Social Promotion. Perhaps not the best, but for me by far the funniest bit was his frightening wedding tale. The horror . . .the horror. -Jay" Whoo-hoo! Upon receiving advances of this review in my email I promptly managed to offend the Zine World Guru and make myself look like an idiot, which is The Swine Way. He sent us a comp issue anyway, so Doug of ZW is cool. We actually enjoyed ZW a great deal, and subscribed, which ain’t often around these tight-fisted parts. We encourage all Swine to check it out. Ken Bausert of Passions (sample copy: $3.50, Ken Bausert, 2140 Erma Drive, East Meadow, NY 11554-1120) checked in again with issue 14 and another note apologizing for not getting around to reviewing us. The Cicadian rhythm of not being reviewed in Passions is starting to lull us a little. In this issue the one thing that got my attention was the obnoxious anti-Windows article by Robin Williams he reprinted from MacAddict, which was guilty of the common crime of lumping all PC users in with Windows lovers. I use and hate Windows 95, but I’d never use a Mac; I prefer the beautiful misery of Win95 at least until I get my BSD Unix O/S up and running to my satisfaction (ETA on that project: 2003.) I don’t judge anyone’s intelligence by what architecture they use. But I will say this in reference to the article: anyone who has used any Windows system for more than a month should know better than to willy-nilly delete Dynamic Linked Libraries (DLLs) even if they don’t currently use ‘em. I mean, come on. There’s a difference between not liking Microsoft’s way of thinking and being willfully ignorant of it. We got an email from some guy named Rob Waters wherein he gushed "Oh man, I just read your entire site. Freakin fantastic...I love the whole thing...Might even have to get a couple people to send money for this. it’s great!" and then promised us all sorts of subscription monies from him and his large following. Sadly, no such checks or money orders have arrived, but we still greet the mailbox with joy in our hearts every night. Old High School Associate Thomas Schifano had drinks with your Editor here on New Years Eve and complained bitterly (and rather endlessly) about not being listed as a "Friend of the Swine". When your Editor pointed out Tom’s lack of financial, creative, or any other support, he became quite belligerent and abusive and I was forced to bring The Inner Swine Security Team of Jeof Vita and Ken West in to neutralize him. This was accomplished via a steady stream of White Russians. By the end of the night, Tom was in no condition to abuse anyone. Since ditching AOL we’ve been more bold about posting on the newsgroups, since we no longer have an ISP that invites scorn from total strangers and because we now have a news client that actually, well, works. Since posting a few mildly entertaining but ultimately pointless posts to alt.zines we’ve gotten a few kind responses we thought we’d list here for ego-stroking. Someone called suffocation@my-dejanews.com posted the following review, which we enjoyed: "I found the INNER SWINE to be a delightfully fluffy read. I laughed , I cried and well laughed again. The inner swine may not be political, musical, or even all that personal but it is funny in it's sheer dumb simplicity- not that the articles are dumb- but they aren't all that intellegent, though the disney article was quite interesting The Inner Swine sat next to my toilet until the next issue of The Advocate came in the mail. I still have your zine- The Advocate was used as TP and it's entirety was flushed long ago." Our new motto? The Inner Swine: Sheer Dumb Simplicity -- Catch It! Whoever suffocation is, they’ve certainly captured our hearts. Keeping up the scatalogical nature of our mail, when we asked those fun-loving perverts at The Parking Lot is Full (www.plif.com) to update our link after our escape from AOL Jack replied "Keep up the good work! I love the Swine! It’s my favourite reading material for when I’m on the can." We’re detecting a theme here, in that everyone seems to read the Swine on the toilet. Our team of Scientists at the TIS Improbability Research Center in Akron, Ohio is working on this right now. We’re considering printing future issues of TIS on toilet paper. Give the people what they want, I say. Ninjalicious of Infiltration (PO Box 66069, Town Centre PO, Pickering, Ontario, L1V 6P7, Canada; www.infiltration.org), aside from being a force of sanity on alt.zines, also pubs a pretty interesting zine himself ("the zine about going places you’re not supposed to go"). He sent me Infiltration #11 along with a nice note: "I found Inner Swine 4(4) utterly delightful. The zine is well-designed and very funny. [A] quibble - as a reader, I hated being addressed as a piglet. Not so much because I have anything against baby pigs (I do -but that’s a tale for another time), but simply because I didn’t sign up." A legitimate point, piglet, but The Inner Swine says, you did sign up: you were born. Muhahahahaha! Ninjalicious’ reasonable criticisms aside (he found some of the articles dull), we embrace him with pig-love. Infiltration is a kinda neat idea for a zine -it’s about exploring areas of the city that you’re normally not allowed to see. Issue #11 explores storm drains. Very well done and interesting, we encourage all swine to check it out. Finally, just before press-time we received communique’s from Ken B Miller (‘Shouting At the Postman’; PO Box 246, Yardley, PA 19067-8246, http://members.aol.com/satpostman) wherein he swore he liked TIS very much, that it was the only thing he was reading (once again, in the bathroom) lately. Ken’s ASKalice mail art pubs are short and sweet, interesting and greatly strange, which is to say strange in a great way. Maybe we’re just saying that because Ken is also a fellow fan of Too Much Joy -go ahead, bring on the Independent Prosecutor, we’re not afraid. ======================================== *** EDITORIAL *** Pig In Shit #14: THE BEST MEAT'S IN THE RUMP How Technological Advancement Brings Out the Animal in Us All By Jeff Somers ======================================== Supreme Oinker Jeffrey Somers, Honorary President and Founder, The Inner Swine Opening Remarks at SwineCon ‘98, Motel 6 Off of Route 9, Woodbridge, New Jersey "Fellow Pigs, I’d like to welcome you to - hey, settle down back there - fellow pigs, I’d - HEY! You assholes in the back row SHUT THE FUCK UP! - I’d like to welcome you to - ALL RIGHT THE NEXT PERSON WHO OPENS THEIR GODDAMN MOUTH GETS BANNED FROM THE OPEN BAR LATER! Ahem. That’s better. Fellow Pigs, I’d like to welcome you to SwineCon ‘98, the three hundredth year we Swine have gathered in one spot under assumed names to discuss new Swine technology and its impact on our selfish rampage across history. It warms your President’s heart to see so many familiar and returning faces out there, but it’s even more exciting to see all the newcomers crowding the Motel Six Gold Room here in lovely Woodbridge. Every year more and more people come to accept their basic evil nature and natural self-centeredness, and that is what SwineCon is all about right? Spreading our message -everybody? EVERYONE’S AN ASSHOLE ESPECIALLY US!!! Heh, heh, you know, I still get a chill whenever I hear forty-six people shout that in unison. Beginning in 1698 when three Italian gamblers gathered in a New Amsterdam brothel to discuss their piggish natures, SwineCon has existed to facilitate communication and debt collection amongst Swines worldwide, and much good work has been accomplished at these conferences -why, our flagship publication The Inner Swine was conceived and chartered at SwineCon ‘93, held in my kitchen in New Brunswick, New Jersey - making the expense of the requisite liquor bill well worth it. Recently, however, some of our number have questioned whether, in this age of technological advancement and wonder, we really need to gather in one spot in order to share Swine philosophy, run out on bar bills, and plot once again to overthrow civilization just to see what would happen. After all, through the Internet and cheap long-distance calls made secretly from hotel courtesy phones worldwide, we can pretty much hold these sorts of conferences without actually physically holding these sorts of conferences. There are of course a few major flaws in these newfangled ideas. Number one, most of the Swine’s electronic communications are closely monitored by the CIA, FBI, NSA, and, most recently (ever since that ill-conceived Presidential assassination threat -whoo, I’ll never drink Jagermeister again, I’ll tell you!) The Secret Service. Number two, none of us have the funds to get such a virtual conference off the ground, since SwineCon ‘98 also marks the 300th year that you bastards have all failed to mail in your back dues. (Laughter) Still, I think the suggestion that technology might somehow alter our role in world events intrigued me, and I think I’ll use my time up hear to explore it a little -hey, hey HEY! I told you to settle down or I’ll have Ken West beat the living shit out of you, okay? Do we understand each other? All righty then. One of the main tenets of The Inner Swine, after all, is that man is fundamentally primitive, seeking his own security and advancement above all else no matter what his surface motivations might be. Over the past few hundred years, however, the animal man has experienced an explosion in technology, and in a very, very short period of time we’ve increased our understanding and control over the forces of the universe a hundred-fold just about every other decade. A few hundred years ago we weren’t sure how the cosmos was organized, today we’re working on computers which utilize subatomic particles to perform parallel operations a million times faster than IBMs Deep Blue mainframe. Based on my vast knowledge of 70’s Science Fiction films, this would tell us that the human race must be hurtling towards an evolutionary convulsion resulting in a technological society of telekinetic Uber-Humans, communicating with their thoughts and no longer needing their shriveled, ghoulish mortal bodies. Eventually, you figure, it would be natural that we’d download our minds onto subatomic hard drives and exist as electrical impulses. I am here to tell you, however, that this concept is flawed, and is not happening. If anything, our race’s technological advancements are enhancing our primitive, animalistic tendencies. We’re more animal than ever before, and you can thank Bell Labs and Microsoft for it. We’re All Part of a Tribe. If I were to ask everyone in this room, esteemed Swines all, what the basic feature of man’s animalistic nature was, you’d probably all reply that it’s his inherent tribalism. Since the dawn of time men have been ganging up with other men to create tribes of like-minded individuals who then crush any dissenters before their combined might. Certainly, if I ever looked out into the crowd of Swines and saw something that might be legitimately defined as ‘combined might’ instead of 46 slightly employed agitators with FBI files I wouldn’t hesitate to give the order to crush the rest of society and remake it in our image. Forming tribes and hating anyone not a part of said tribe with the white hot intensity of a thousand suns is pretty much what people do. It’s a primal reaction to fear, and it lives on even in today’s enlightened times. Technology isolates. Increasingly we are telecommuters, living in gated communities, shopping via phone line, communicating via E-mail, paying to have the real world piped in to us over cable lines. There was once a time when you had to interact with your community. The only way to get anything done or have your interests considered was to get to know your neighbors -your tribe- and be known by them. Now, none of that is necessary. People live in suburban developments where their neighbors remain shadowy figures behind minivans and shrubbery, they communicate anonymously in Internet Chat Rooms. Technology creates firewalls that humans have never had to deal with before. Isolation is scary. No one likes to feel like they are alone in the world, against the elements. Everyone likes to have a few buddies around them in the Big Bar Fight of Life, right? Of course they do. The need for a tribe is increased by the isolation of technology, and everyone tags up into teams, instinctively seeking protection in numbers. You see it every day on the Internet, the ultimate in isolating technology, where everyone uses a pseudonym and getting flamed is as easy as expressing an opinion. People join NewsGroups, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) lines, or ICQ lists, and ‘Holy Wars’ arguing the merits of a particular computer system or application or philosophy are pretty common and easy to start. In one sense, the people who swear by their PC and who argue with the people who live and die by their Macs are tribes. They support each other, attack their enemies, and protect their cherished ideas. Instead of being a huge bastion of individuality, the Internet is actually a Thunderdome of warring tribes. If you ever need evidence that we’re not as advanced and civilized as we’d like to this, just lurk in some Internet NewsGroups and watch the feces fly. We Worship Golden Calves. What else defines primitive man? Not only are we social animals who gather into tribes for comfort and defense, we’re also very superstitious and are easily fooled into believing the most ridiculous things through a combination of clever marketing and state-of-the-art special effects. Normally when I say something like that I’m referring to Christianity -or any religion, really- but today some would say that technology is eroding that primitive instinct to believe in higher powers. After all, most modern people don’t believe there are water gods or tree nymphs, right? While most people seem to buy into the concept of a Supreme Being, there are plenty of relatively intelligent arguments in favor of a Supreme Being. Just because they’re all wrong doesn’t mean they’re not intelligent, after all. All right, everyone calm down. Don’t make me ask Corporal Punishment to step in here. As I was saying. In these modern times our willingness to believe that ridiculous icons can lead us to some sort of salvation or wisdom hasn’t dimmed, it’s just been conscripted by the supreme forces of Marketing. The fact is, people buy cars, invest monies, choose all manner of products simply because our modern gods tell us to: celebrities. Doubt me? Millions of lowing morons who would normally rather suck a tailpipe than read a book without glossy pictures ran out to buy books just because Oprah told them to. Someone out there is watching a putrid television show called V.I.P. simply because Pamela Anderson stars in it. Sure, we’re not examining some virgin’s internal organs for hints regarding the right date to harvest the grain, but we are sort of looking for guidance on how to attain success and happiness.....and if Jonathan Price tells us we’d be wise to purchase a Lexus or an Infiniti or whatever piece of shit luxury car he hawks....well, a lot of us listen. We have Sex Goddesses and Gods, we have War Gods and Goddesses, we have Gods and Goddesses for everything in our overburdened modern lives. Technology has allowed us to have an icon for the smallest and most minutely defined aspects of life -whereas in the past humans had to settle for the major stuff like Death and the Moon or Fertility, today we have Icons for all that and more, because technology makes it possible. Polytheism is alive and well and thriving on the E! Entertainment Network and The Home Shopping Channel. Instead of making us less superstitious and less willing to believe in the magical aspects of our universe, technology has made us more so, with millions believing in alien abduction, with hundreds of urban legends spread like scripture every day, with clothing and style trends popping up every day like Bushmen worshiping Coke bottles. Our Gods are Movie Stars, their scripture and legend are Titanic and Gone With the Wind and Star Wars, and our religious icons are the Diet Cola they hawk on television. Blessed are we in the light. We’re Still All Bad Motherfuckers. If anyone in this room here today has never been the recipient of a Restraining Order, raise their hand. (Laughter). Obviously we’ve all had a few violent blackouts after a night of dangerous binge drinking. Everyone’s crashed a car into an enemy’s house, everyone’s smashed a few windows. Everyone’s accidentally picked a fight with off-duty cops. I mean, who hasn’t? Yet, in all the bad Science-Fiction movies I saw on television as a kid while waiting for my parents to go to bed so I could attempt to get WHT in on channel 68 and watch free porno, the future was always presented as a triumph over violence. Technology, it was hinted, would make unnecessary all our base instincts. Ever see a bar-room brawl on Star Trek? Except for those episodes where the Evil Captain Kirk infects everyone with a virus that unleashes our deeply buried Id, no, of course not. The whole idea was that in a world where machinery and computers had solved all of our social problems, mankind would be free to turn their attention to advanced civilization topics like Group Sex and Soylent Green. This isn’t happening, Pigs. It’s obvious to anyone with a brain that our technology is frighteningly weapons-based: not only is the greatest amounts of money and effort put into our military forces and Nuclear programs, many of the great technological advancements of today have stemmed from military research and projects. Just like ancient man hurling bigger and bigger rocks at each other whenever tribal skirmishes erupted (over water rights or hunting grounds or a lack of available women) we still seek the security of mighty weapons. Our primitive notions of security and defense haven’t changed all that much (our anxieties being focussed on the survival of our genetic material and organized against the other, the differing tribe of weirdos who we imagine detest our way of life) and technological advances have simply granted us destructive power beyond our minor understanding. The machinery of war has bloated into something frightening. The motivations behind it languish in our DNA, written millions of years ago for a set of circumstances which have receded into the dustbin of history. Let’s face it, technology hasn’t stopped us from murdering each other. Modern technology of the last 150 years or so has gifted us with the gun, after all. Instead of frightening us into sensible pacifism, this neato invention (I can see many of our brother pigs waving their nickel-plated Glocks around now -uh, please don’t make me call security again) has inspired us to greater and greater feats of homicide -the USA, gun paradise that it is, has yearly homicide numbers that just make your head spin. New York City will have less than a thousand murders in 1998 and this is actually reason to celebrate there. Meanwhile, backwards countries that don’t allow every mentally challenged house monkey within their borders to purchase a firearm have murder rates in just about the single digits. Murder there is, like, murder, you know? People get excited when murder occurs. Here in the USA, you get murdered, people yawn, ME’s eat lunch while eviscerating you, cats play with your toe tags. Even in the virtual world where technology is really all there is, there’s a frightening amount of anger and violence in effect. People Spam us. They send us E-MAIL Bombs. They slip Viruses and Trojans into our downloads. They hack our passwords and wreak havoc. We need firewalls, antivirus software, and constant vigilance to fend them off, and it don’t take much to get targeted by these snot-nosed little wusses. The death and destruction they cause isn’t real, it doesn’t necessarily kill anyone, but it’s still death and destruction, neither tempered nor prevented by our technological mastery. In fact, since a lot of the malcontents and social pariahs who make up the ranks of these cyber-asses probably have a personal intimidation factor of zero, technology gives them a chance to be violent they probably wouldn’t have been able to indulge, otherwise. Technology gives us more chances to be violent. Now, while my private staff moves through the audience waking up dozing members, I’d like to thank the SwineCon ‘98 Organizers for a swell job. We’re all impressed with the free porno on the televisions in everyone’s room, though I would like to remind everyone that SwineCon is not going to cover the Honor Bar expenses -and I can see by the whitefaced reactions out there that some people were counting on a last-minute change of heart on that matter. Now, Chief Financial Officer Herman Volksgoebbel has a few announcements related to the subject of room furniture damage, but before I yield the microphone I’d like to sum up my message here today: the technological and industrial development of the human race has, in universal terms, been sudden and fast. Biologically, genetically and instinctively, we haven’t even begun to catch up. We’re still pretty much the same apes who were hurling feces at our enemies a few thousand years ago. As a result, our technology isn’t necessarily making us less violent and animalistic -it actually amplifies those primal urges towards the primitive and the feral. As Swines, of course, we love this. Nothing warms our bellies more than the daily territorial pissings and Mexican standoffs we witness in daily life that define our feral nature. These dark instincts are what make us human, and we for one celebrate it instead of burying it beneath perfume and Brooks Brothers’ suits, which is what most people do, the fuckers. Oh well, I can see by the arrival of my lawyers that the time has come for me to return to my Yacht in International Waters to once again evade United States Treasury Officials. Remember, we’re all assholes, and linked in that glorious Swine tradition I call upon your brotherhood to deny having seen me here, and to answer no questions unless forced by circumstance or legal remedy. Thank you all, and may SwineCon ‘98 be a smashing success! CFO Volksgoebbel, the floor is yours." [aplause] ======================================== *** COMMENTARY *** ONE THING ON OUR MINDS If Reality Were Based on Maxim Magazine by Jeff Somers ======================================== Used to be, Pigs, that men didn’t need magazines. We got all our information from newspapers and our drunken, misinformed friends. The rest we either didn’t really need to know or gleaned from canny observation and imagination. This, of course, was back in the good old days when all a man had to do was live past the age of thirty to be considered a success of sorts. This was before we came into this sad modern age, where men are asked to dress well, appreciate literature, understand computer code, and not only know how to knock up some chick but how to make her enjoy it as well. Welcome, friends, to the Age of the Confused Male. As the weight of contradictions begins to ruin us in this Age of the Confused Male, men are seeking tribes to give them some guidance. We’re animals, after all, and social ones at that. While we celebrate rugged individuality on the surface, in truth rugged individuals are derided and attacked brutally every day by humans who resemble the hooting apes from 2001: A Space Odyssey. In truth, only those of us who belong to some sort of tribe feel secure. Of course, this is the last gasp of the 20th century and its getting harder and harder to look around you and see like-minded people. Racial differences, geographical, technological, and cultural barriers all serve to isolate us, allowing society to continue despite the loss and breakdown of the traditional family/neighborhood/community model. And so, we suffering males of the human species are forced to look towards new horizons for our guidance, for our virtual tribe. And our weary eyes alight on the magazine rack, once the domain of chicks seeking wedding ideas and pathetic rotund fanboys seeking the definitive episode guide to Star Trek, once avoided by men except when purchasing pornography or Sports Illustrated. Now, the magazine rack is our friend, and one so disturbing in its implications and attitudes that we here at The Inner Swine are just tickled pink. You’ve seen the Men’s Magazines. They’re all pretty much the same: they have sexually suggestive titles like Loaded, Maxim, Gear, Details (which is maybe only sexually suggestive to me), and the mysterious FHM (which, unbelievably, stands for For HiM. No, I am not kidding.). They all feature nearly naked starlets on their covers, usually wet and wearing something peeled off the floor of a Dark Brothers set. They are all written in a smarmy, frat-boy style concerning all the major avenues of interest in a man’s life (booze, chicks, clothes, cars, booze and chicks) and seem to pretty much be the worst aspects of Playboy (the parts without pictures, filled with bad frat boy humor and guides to some mysterious swinger lifestyle no one actually lives) amplified. They all have at least one article entitled "How to Make that Threesome Fantasy Come True Without Ruining Your Relationship" in each issue. The dominant characteristic of all these Men’s Magazines is their healthy fantasy life: reading these publications would lead you to believe a number of things about today’s man, almost none of them true -but they are all things that we men would like to be true. We’re seeking a tribe, after all, we’re looking for someone to tell us that we’re not bizarre loners on the highway of life, that we’re car-pooling with the cool kids. We’re animals with animal instincts, but civilization came along and made a lot of those instincts poor form. We spend a great deal of time covering up those instincts, or, if possible, painting them with civilized colors -which is where the men’s magazines come in. They try to tell us what is and isn’t socially acceptable. The magazines, wanting nothing more than to keep us reading so it can try and sell us a lifestyle we probably shouldn’t even try to afford, very simply try and tell us what they think we want to hear. Their message can be broken down into three basic statements, reiterated and rephrased throughout: 1. Sex is easy, 2. No one expects you to grow up too much, and 3. All you need is cash. Man is a primitive animal, deep down. In evolutionary terms we’re about a week past beating each other with mammoth bones and pissing on the corpse afterwards -and goddamn it we need a magazine to tell us how to channel our primitive urges into acceptable, civilized manifestations. That’s why it’s a damned relief to see articles like these in their hallowed pages: All You Need is Two Chicks to Have a Threesome. The majority of the articles in these sweaty-palmed publications have to do with sex: getting it, judging it, being expert at it. The general attitude seems to be that women are once again our playthings, since the conceit of almost all these articles is that its pretty damned easy to con any chick into sleeping with you, if you utilize some simple manipulation techniques outlined every few weeks in their articles. There are also corollary articles dealing with such enlightened topics as You Got Caught Cheating! (How to Wriggle Out of It), How to Tell Which Maid at the Bar is Checking You Out, or The G-Spot for Complete Idiots. There was even an article in MAXIM concerning mind-control. Two primitive instincts you can take from this: it’s all about insecurity, and thus its all about control. Insecurity: The primal male urge towards multiple sexual partners is pretty obvious: every man in the world would have a harem if it weren’t a) illegal and b) socially unacceptable. That last part is where the trouble begins: somewhere in the middle of adolescence all men make that first leap of logic that truly marks us as intelligent, sentient beings: if one chick would be pretty cool, two chicks would be great! Ah, the rites of passage every man must go through. At any rate, from the moment we men have that epiphany we find ourselves at odds with society -our natural instincts are suddenly bad and must be repressed. Articles about our forbidden desires put a gloss of civilization on them -instead of febrile grunts ringing in our heads, suddenly there are words and sentences and a chorus of other people, the imagined readers of the magazine, backing you up. Control: let’s face it, the man who isn’t threatened by smart, independent women is lying. Personally, my life is a nightmare of smart, independent women and I am consistently in a box of intimidation and feral, aggressive fear. But I digress: men have harem fantasies, but then are faced with the reality of mature, civilized relationships, which bums us out to no end. Trust me on this. The same guy who is holding your hand and cuddling would be very happy if he could bonk you over the head with a club and drag you off to his cave. The articles in these magazines grant us the illusion of control, the idea that while we can’t bonk you over the head, we can at least pick your locks whether you want us to or not with the rights words, cologne, and fashion sense. Has Anyone Seen My Shadow? The Peter Pan Syndrome is alive and well. The most disturbing aspect of these Men’s Magazines is clearly their ongoing celebration of immaturity and an eternal-childhood concept of life. On the one hand, the magazines are obviously targeted to men who can afford the good things in life (including the prohibitively priced subscriptions to the magazines themselves) which implies someone far enough along to be making a decent salary, but on the other hand many of the articles celebrate the sort of frat-boy shenanigans usually deemed too immature for episodes of Beverly Hills 90210. This includes drinking like your life depends on vomiting before nine o’clock, crashing sporting events, playing outrageous practical jokes on your friends...you get the idea. The acrid schoolboy stench (a dense mixture of gym class and masturbation) permeates these magazines for a variety of primitive reasons; school was probably the last time most men felt they were part of some sort of group or tribe thus allowing for instant identification, and school was also a less complicated life with fewer rules and, most importantly, easier ways of telling who was the Alpha Male in the group. Figuring out which man in the room is the Chief is one of the most repressed and yet most powerful primitive Male instincts. We always need to know where we stand on the pecking order. This goes for all humans, of course; put a bunch of strangers in a locked room, give ‘em an hour, and there will be a leader amongst them. There might have been a bloody and violent battle of wills, there may be some seething resentment, but trust me: someone will have taken charge. And, since we’re also blessed with a mindless competitive ferocity matched only by dogs and wolves, it will probably be a man. In the civilized world, of course, the primitive urge to establish dominance and recognize power is quashed and frowned upon. Pissing contests have been going on for hundreds of thousands of years, before we even had words to describe it, and suddenly within a few hundred measly years we’re supposed to quit it and be polite? Easier said than done, and men struggle with it on a daily basis. Harking back to the much simpler world of the schoolyard calms us, and the Men’s Magazine’s use of snickering schoolboy attitudes ("Don’t wimp out when it comes to getting into the hottest clubs!"), language, and conventions ("How to ditch the girlfriend for a night out with the boys") once again paints the most primal urge for dominance and control with the glib tint of verbose sophistication. Real men, apparently, still think they’re in freshman year of college. I’ll Always Be a Toys-R-Us Kid. It saddens me, but it is a fact that men are easily distracted by bright shiny objects and complicated technology. Gals, if you’ve ever sat in a dank living room while your supposedly mature boyfriend plays six hours of Nintendo straight, or if you’ve ever seen him mesmerized by a stripped-down transmission, or witnessed him spend an entire day figuring out the new $3000 stereo system he bought with your vacation money -well, you know what I mean, hey? Men love toys. The new Men’s Magazines know this, and exploit it ruthlessly. They spend endless pages examining the new toys out there, they publish special issues dedicated to what you can buy. They tell you the ‘insider’ secrets to getting the best deal, the best setup, the coolest equipment (insert your best equipment joke here). The primitive issue here? Control and status. Control: it always comes down to control with men. We were born to be hunters and chieftains, to have harems of wives and hundreds of warrior-brothers ready to fight alongside us. An evolutionary blink-of-an-eye later and we’re sadly castrated beings who sit behind desks getting yelled at all day just so we can go home and be denied sex by our girlfriend because we refuse to buy an expensive ring and marry her. Thus, machines and technology, logical creations which only require that we master the rules and manipulate them properly, attract us. The laws of physics will never let us down, and if we work at it hard enough we can master them to the point where they are stand-ins for our lost warrior-brothers. That’s why men watch TV and drive around a lot when they’re depressed. Status: we’re not just hunters, natch, we’re gatherers too. In the good old days men had a) that damned harem again and b) a string of mummified Buffalo Gonads around our necks to show how mean we were. The more dead animals and battle glories we collected, the bigger men in the tribe we were. Nowadays, we no longer have much of a tribe, and wearing Buffalo Gonads is a big turn-off (or so I’m told). Men have a driving need to earn and display status, and possessions is the easiest way of doing so. The Men’s Magazines not only support this simpleminded quest for stuff, they offer a guide to the confusing world of material possessions. Which car is cool? What suits are cool? What kind of watch says winner? Gear and its ilk will be glad to tell you. In some cases, they’re even willing to sell it to you. And naturally, you can’t just make Jaguars grow in your driveway, and so all this acquisitive status-seeking is really a Search for Cash. By extension, the amount of money you have and by further extension the job a man holds down is a big ingredient towards his perceived status. Women don’t go glassy-eyed in the face of rich men simply because they’re evil, heartless golddiggers in it for the money -money is a modern translation for the old-fashioned chest-thumping string of Buffalo Gonads around your neck. The man with the most bucks has killed the most buffalo, is chief of the tribe, gets to carry the biggest mammoth bones. Just writing about all this makes me want to paint myself in blood and go up to the roof to howl, baby. Once again, the magazine implies a huge number of subscribers - a tribe of sorts - who are following the same guidelines, so your status symbols have the weight of numbers behind them. Yes sir, thank goodness for Men’s Magazines. That Men are simpleminded churls who buy into the whole concept of a virtual tribe of cognac-sipping, cigar-smoking, babe-chasing like-minded men is inarguable [1]. We’re not really all that far along from our knuckle-dragging days, you know; in evolutionary terms six to ten thousand years of civilization is a a few ticks on the clock. If man first thought coherently at dawn, it’s about 6:03am now. So it’s not too amazing that while we have taught ourselves to read, and then gone ahead and invented 1024-bit encryption to make sure no one can read what we write (now that’s civilization!), we still seek the comfort of a tribe to tell us where to scratch ourselves and how. So next time you see some wet-n-naked starlet-of-the-moment who has to get her parents to co-sign the photo release on the cover of some magazine with a bunch of innuendo-laced headlines around her, don’t roll your eyes about the simplicity of men and their hormone-soaked brains. Rather, consider the destruction and horror of a Thunderdome-world where men didn’t have the comfort of these magazines to make them believe they’re not wimps just because they have to put on the clown suit every morning and perform tricks all day just to get laid that night, when only 3,000 years ago we were running this god-damn show. Trust me. Maxim is a small price to pay to keep us distracted. ---------------------------------------- [1] If any chicks reading this are starting to feel a little superior right now, remember that I could give you 40,000 words on the 611 bridal magazines on the racks any damn day you like, and you would not enjoy it. So keep your arrogant womanly mutterings to yourself. ======================================== *** FICTION *** FREAKS OF THE INDUSTRY PART ONE by Gus Pustule ======================================== EDITOR’S NOTE: Sometimes the staff here at The Inner Swine eat a few mushrooms, drop a tab or two, and then sit and stare at the computer monitors trying to burn their thoughts directly onto the screen. This never works, though once I walked in to find Misty Quinn in her underwear swinging from a light fixture after such an experiment. But I digress; what I’m trying to say is, I have no idea where, exactly, this story went wrong, only that it did. It went so gloriously, so bizarrely, so fundamentally wrong, in fact, that there was never any doubt that it would get published here. Man, you won’t find anything this bald-facedly weird and terrible in any mainstream publication. Unfortunately, the story also got pretty freakin’ long, so we split it in two. Kick back, drink half a fifth of Johnny Walker Red and two beers within fifteen minutes, and then enjoy....FREAKS OF THE INDUSTRY: Part One 1. I woke up to the sound of aluminum foil. Ripping. Wrapping. Ripping again. Wrapping again. Charlie must be up and about working on that silly masterpiece. Art nouveau stuff. Yeah, whatever. Charlie calls it "De Res Metallica" ... from the famous book, from which the famous band got their name by the way. It means "Of Things Metal’ which is all this masterpiece is made of. Different types of metal, iron, copper, bronze ... twisted, warped, bent, shaped, molded, poured ... then covered in aluminum foil, soldered and so on. The clock on the dresser stares at me, daring me to try and fall asleep again, knowing full well that it will go off with its shrill cry, once again reminding me who’s boss. I don’t challenge it today. Getting up is so much harder these days. At 62 years old, everything seems just a little harder these days. The floor is cold as I shuffle over by the masterpiece. Charlie is busy at work ... tight arms moving through the air ... soft hands working the foil ... Charlie-at-work is always such a sexy image ... then again Charlie being 23, half naked, sweating, and in my apartment probably helps. I just watch, and then wince a little as the pain in my breasts hits me again. Not too bad today. Just a dull thud, like being punched with very thick boxing gloves. Like I need this bother as well. As if it wasn’t hard enough being a black, lesbian, jew ... now I’m wrestling with cancer as well. As I cross the living room floor towards the bathroom, I notice that Charlie is watching me, staring at me in that crazy way he has. I know that he desires me, which is why I walk around naked. I am sure that sooner or later I will let him seduce me, but until then it’s fun to tease. Besides, I like Charlie and his crazy art projects, and if I had sex with him I’d have to kill him, like all the others. 2. Charles Rubbio Enrique Marquez Nadia Munoz Dilberta heard the usual moaning and coughing from The Thing’s bedroom and tensed his muscular frame, a crease immediately developing between his eyes as he listened to her moving her bulk about in the other room. He thought to himself: a few more hours, Lord, that is all I need to finish my masterpiece! and briefly considered hiding in his room until she went back to sleep, which would be in an hour or so at most. He decided to keep working, however. The foil was most pliable in the 100+ degrees of the apartment between the hours of noon and five o’clock. If he waited, the place might cool down by as much as ten or fifteen degrees and the foil would be difficult to work with. Unbeknownst to his lurid landlady and room-mate, Charles had sealed the windows shut and turned up the heat. It was mid-November outside and a crisp sixty-three degrees. But he needed the foil to be pliable! For his art! Beside, he thought darkly, the Thing never went outside anyway. She appeared from the darkened shell of her nest, her bedroom. That mass of soiled sheets, worn clothing, and garbage she calls a bedroom, Charles muttered mentally, I wonder she does not have sores. Now she will present herself to me nude, thinking she is somehow tempting me, and then tell me that she has cancer or some such. Two weeks ago she told me she’d had a stroke. She went around for three days talking out of the side of her mouth to convince me that she’d had a stroke. Then, suddenly, a remission, she is healed! Perhaps we could have the sick and maimed of the world visit her soiled sheets and they would be healed as well. He paused in his work to wipe the sweat from his brow and watch her warily. She was heavy and slow-looking, but he’d learned from bitter experience that she could be quick, and that her nails, never clipped, could be deadly. Carefully, he slid one hand into his undershorts, where he kept a sharp hunting knife duct-taped to his scrotum. He knew that if she came for him, he would make her pay dearly for it. This is what I put up with for my art! He thought sadly. And free rent, of course. The Thing was moving through the living room. "Good morning, Charlie," she said, "it’s looking nice, isn’t it?" Charles offered her his best shit-licking immigrant smile. Thank God I told her I didn’t understand English. He had, in fact, admitted to understanding only four words or phrases: rent, foil, fire, and under no circumstances may you touch me. "I’m feeling a little better today, but I know its cancer. I can feel it growing, eating me." He turned up the wattage on his smile. Sweat ran into his eyes. He tightened his grip on his knife. Come on, he thought, try me! I will send you to your ancestors! She stopped and turned to face him suddenly, face purpling with rage. "You don’t care! You don’t care about anyone but yourself and your stupid fucking sculpture!" Charles amazed himself by widening his smile. "Under no circumstances," he said with the thick accent he’d practiced, "may you touch me." She turned away. "Goddamn wetback." Charlie relaxed slightly, and then tensed again. Oh my God, she is singing that song again. Softly, in a sing-song lilt, she was singing: "Everything you ever thought of anything you ever wanted is everything I’ll do to you I’ll fuck you til your dick is blue!" Charles closed his eyes in despair and leaned his head against his sculpture. Against the foil, his sweat sizzled and boiled. Over and over again, the thought of that vomitous 62 year old flatulent lesbian with a semi stroke smile, singing that song, " I’ll fuck you until your dick turns blue" I can think of only one thing that could be worse.. ..welding my pecker knife to my masterpiece of a sculpture by mistake. How would one go on about explaining that to your friends? One thing I would need for that scenario ... friends. I heard the door slam, a portly wheeze, then a deafening sound of blubber slamming against a urine stained mattress. Back to the exhausting heat of my torch. I need something, something to make the sculpture come to life. Something to show man’s defecation of man. Where is that lazy, stank ass dog I have? "Hey Stanky, get over here. Let me see under your tail. Oooh, good boy, I’m glad your bowels aren’t what they used to be. Hey what the hell is this? Have you been at my balloons again? Bad little fucker!!" "Lets see where to put this shit, ah yes, right here." Whack Whack Whack. Knock knock knock. Who the fuck? Its three in the morning?! "Hey Charlie, your dick out of your pants again?" "Yeah, who are you?" "Let me in! I’ll suck it for a dollar." "Stupid crack whore, " I grunt silently. "Suck it in the hallway." 3. Knock Knock Knock I jump a bit at the sound. Who the hell is paying us a visit at three in the morning? What, is it immigration? That would put us in a pickle, I think. I dismiss the thought as fancy and shift into my blankets again. Must be one of Charlie’s "a-MEE-gos". Maybe it’s one of his, oh I don’t know, 30 or 40 brothers or sisters. The pain in my chest comes back. I can feel every heartbeat in my throat. The taste of bile doesn’t help either. I’ll have to have Charlie give me a rubdown later ... and then some salve on my bedsores. I suppose I’ll have to learn the Spanish words for rubdown, bedsores and salve later then. I’ll have to trade him up soon. The language barrier is getting too difficult to cross. No matter ... once he’s done with his section of the Masterpiece, I’ll take care of him. Put him down. The market for human organs is strong these days, especially since WWIII went down. Half the world is draped in a viscous radiation cloud that is slowly killing off any inhabitants. The other half, my half, is living on the fringes of that cloud ... we’re dying too, but not as quickly, and we have hope ... but it requires fresh organs. Ah, Charlie ... it was good while it lasted, eh maricong? Next time, I get a girl ... a nice tight little girl, young, nubile, fresh ... and hopefully from Clean Country ... that’s the radiation free zone ... you have to have money to get in there ... money ... or fresh organs. There’s one other way to get in ... that’s why I have these people working on The Masterpiece. Charlie started it, and he’s done a grand job. The thing means shit to me ... but the folks in Clean Country, they want artwork, sculptures, paintings, whatever. Since the war, there has been a paucity of artwork. These elitists need to see pieces of art to remind them of the way humanity used to be, and could be again. They don’t care what it is ... so long as it is complicated looking and incomprehensible to the plebes. The coughs are hollow and raspy as my body jerks and convulses in time. I’m shaking and dizzy. There’s little blood today. Not good, not good. My time’s coming ... but not til after you, wetback. 4. Cough cough cough. Hmmm ... my bitch mistress coughing, or the door with crack whore? I’ll take door number 2. I steady the knife under my balls (a slip or a misstep and I make glee club permanently) and head to the door. I know who it is and it’s a welcome sight ... for now. I swing the lead door open and there she is. Lucita Xavier West. She’s Clean Country pure and gorgeous. Or at least I think she’s gorgeous under that rad suit. Her eyes are great though ... I close the door softly behind me, ignoring the hacks and wheezes of the beast in her room. "Hello lady fair." I coo. "And how are you needle-dick?" She slaps back. "Careful, sweet thing ... or I’ll use that needle on you." I offer "Promises, promises."she caroms. "What brings you out here?" I feign curiosity well. "Charlie, how’s the unit coming along?" "It’s coming along. The old biddy thinks its sculpture. I think she’s figuring on using it to buy her way into Clean Country ... too bad for her. But I can’t rush things ... she’s the only source for metal in this area ... the bitch is sitting on a mine for god’s sake! I need a little more time." "One week, leper. Otherwise I cash in your ass." I slip my pants down a little to reveal some of it to her ... "Right here babe, anytime you wanna piece." I feel the cold barrel of her sidearm (where the hell was she hiding that thing?) slide its way up into my most defiled of areas ... "OK ... OK ... one week." She turns and walks away, down the decrepit old stairs of this zone’s equivalent of decent housing. "Yummy!" And then I turn to go back into my own private hell ... think spic speak ... here we go ... Outside the apartment [1], Crack Whore # 456 watched through slitted yellow eyes as the Clean Country Gal emerged, her spandex skintight Rad Suit rippling and stretching with each mockingly healthy step. Crack Whore #456 saw the world in glittering metallic snapshots, heard everything in screamingly painful digital clarity, felt every single fatigued joint and rusted bearing within her with perfect silicon circuit acuity, tasted the worthless polluted air with a million hardwired sensory cells, smelled the Clean Country Gal’s light perfume with the recently developed TY-3076 Inhalant Memory File Retriever, which was an immense technological advancement over the TY-2076 IMFR[2] and had single-handedly assured the 76 Series dominance in the android marketplace, at least as far as android smell went. For that was what Crack Whore #456 was: an android. She and her 499 sisters had been created in air-conditioned underground caverns by their master and programmer, a short balding man who called himself only The Mack Daddy. Performing millions of probability calculations in her JMU-899 Plastic Alloy CPU[3], Crack Whore #456 seemed to hesitate only a second before launching herself after the Clean Country Gal[4]. To Crack Whore #456, the hesitation (while she waited for the 899 unit to finish its analyses) seemed lifetimes. She amused herself during the second by mentally reciting the complete works of Shakespear, running a few diagnostics, and sleeping the android equivalent of six hours. Then, the slow, languorous flight through the thick air, knocking the Clean Country Gal to the floor, and hissing into her face mask "Give me your fucking spleen, you goddamn high and mighty Clean Country BITCH!" The Mack Daddy wrote his androids’ scripts himself. The Clean Country Gal surprised Crack Whore #456, however, by tossing her away easily and leaping to her feet. They faced each other warily; Crack Whore’s 899 unit fairly hummed analyzing the new data. "Fucking hell I hate you Crack Whores." The Clean Country Gal muttered. "You seem to always[5] show up when I’ve got no time!" Everything went quiet inside Crack Whore #456. To always show. Everything went crystal clear as several necessary subroutines crashed, burned, and left no survivors. The domino effect of subroutines and caches burning out and subsequently overloading other subroutines and caches only took three seconds as Android Psychosis set in, but to Crack Whore #456 it was an eternity of beautiful chaos, a New York Blackout, an epiphany wherein all the unnecessary details of existence were peeled away, leaving only the one pure and true command she’d always been meant to obey: Must kill. Clean Country Gal barely contained her amusement as she watched Crack Whore #456 "think". Then she pushed the button. Crack Whore #456 leaped up. She scratched herself, panted, and then barked like a dog. Her eyes turned bright red, then pitch black. She shuddered convulsively and then fell -- dead. Awhile back, Clean Country Gal had taken an Outside Defense class. [She knew from an early age that she could never spend her life in the restricted "nirvana" that was Clean Country.] There, she learned that a tamagachi, that pathetic little electronic toy from the late 1990s, could disable even the most sophisticated models of Crack Whores (the most dangerous threat to her business[6]). Stepping over the "corpse", Clean Country Gal (called Betty Sue by her friends) muttered "...and then there were 251." Inside the apartment Charlie was toiling away on the sculpture, welding foil over the generous pile of shit Stanky regularly supplied. Hmmm. That brand of synthetic dogfood is not agreeing with the poor mongrel. Oh well. The Clean Country folks will sure be unpleasantly surprised when this sculpture reveals itself to them. They will be both visually and olfactorily overpowered![7] Heh heh heh... There was a scratch at the door. "Skanky! Stop scratching! You cannot go out!" whined Charlie. The sweat poured off him and his sinewy limbs flew as he deftly plied his art. There was louder scratching at the door. Charlie reached down for his knife and lunged at the mutt. Skanky, whimpering on a pile of rags in the corner, stared up at his enraged master with fear and sadness. "Shut the fuck up I said! What, are you deaf as well as stupid? Are you trying to drive me crazy?" [scratch, scratch] "OH! It isn’t even you scratching, you piece of shit! Un-fucking believable! How can I get anything done with all these interruptions?" At the door, "Who’s there?" (pause, louder) "I said, Who’s there?" Betty Sue flashed her middle finger in the video monitor. Swinging open the door with a grin, "Hola, babe! Couldn’t resist me, could you? You know, I almost killed my dog over your scratching. Why the dog act? I didn’t call you a bitch - to your face at least! (heh heh heh)" "Save it, maggot. I just wanted you to know that out of the kindness of my heart I’ve decided to give you 3 days." "You said a week! I need a week!" "I know what I said, cretin. I just bumped into one of your friends outside and she inspired me to rethink your schedule. (broad smile) See you on Thursday, sucker!" 5. Betty Sue flashed her smile at the monitor. The dental ID took a millisecond before the heavy gate slid silently open. She steeled herself and entered the long vaulted hallway. Lining both walls were specially-lit sealed display cases, each centered under a framed photograph. God, how twisted, she thought. No matter how often I have to see this, I’ll never get used to it. The first photo displayed a blonde woman standing in front of a pre-war turbo-jet. The jet had a big bow on it, and she looked very happy. The next picture was of a little girl, pig-tails flying, riding a pony. All of the photos were obviously ancient, pre-war because they all contained happy scenes, and Earth when it was beautiful: a family picnicking, a man proudly holding up a huge fish, a litter of puppies playing in the grass, a boy on his bike, a group of young men skiing down a virgin slope, etc. No wonder he is so bitter and twisted. The grief should have killed him. And yet he displays it proudly - making everyone who enters here see what he had and lost. All that remains of them are these bits of magma in the cases underneath their photos. Horrifying. Betty Sue shuddered. At the end of the hall, a door slid open to reveal a huge office. It was obvious that at one time, i.e., before WWIII, this building had been magnificent -- perhaps the most beautiful building of all. Nestled into the side of a hill, it had overlooked a private marina on a pristine, evergreen-fringed lake. On the other side of the lake were more rolling green hills, a beautiful skyline, and, in the distance, the ocean. Now all the windows displayed were the ash-filled crater that was the lake, topped by a perpetually-orange haze blocking the view of anything else which, nowadays, was a blessing[8]. Centered in front of, and facing, the windows was a huge desk behind which sat a bald man in glasses. His back was to Betty Sue, and the door, as usual. The desk was covered with built-in screens: deceivingly ancient-looking computers, and video monitors displaying all of the premises, as well as activities in undisclosed locations. This was the nerve center of his Operations. "Hi Betty Sue," seethed the bald man. He swiveled in his chair, and Betty Sue caught her breath before looking at him. Mack Daddy made her skin crawl, but her salary convinced her to put up and shut up[9]. "You sure love my antiques’! I think you spend more time looking at them every time you come here! Woo Hoo! Look at you in that Rad Suit!" She feigned a smile and stared beyond him. His head was small, especially compared to his over-developed body. As if being bald wasn’t bad enough in this day and age, his skull was scarred from innumerable attempts at hair transplantation. His face, formerly boyish and deceptively young, was now heavily lined from "experience." Behind their 3 inch-thick lenses, his eyes seemed about 10 times their size. To meet his gaze was to literally drown in a murky, scum-crusted pond. Eccentric that he was, he had tried every physical improvement invented, except the eye surgery that could have eliminated his glasses decades ago. Suffering under the weight of the antique glass lenses, his nose had been divided into 2 mounds of flesh: some held up and pressing under the bridge of the glasses, but most hanging down toward his lipless mouth like a huge drip of candle wax. Bill Gates, the 20th century’s computer mastermind and wealthiest man did not wear his centenarian age well. "Hi Mack Daddy. You wanted to see me? I’ve gotta..." "Would you like a drink? Here, sit by the window." His muscular frame, developed from pharmaceutical enhancement’ and maniacal frenzies of weight-lifting rippled under his custom-made latex jumpsuit. It was orange -always- to match the haze outside. According to legend, Bill had always been ashamed of his soft, geeky appearance, so after the war, when he recreated himself as Mack Daddy, he embraced every physical enhancement available. No one knows if he just forgot about his face (which most people suspect - he was thought to be one of those absentminded geniuses’) or whether he consciously decided to leave it unimproved. Betty Sue suspected the latter reason, tying it in with the Hall of Horrors she just passed through. She was sure he liked torturing himself with reminders of his past. "No, nothing thanks. I really don’t have much time.... I got delayed at my last appointment. One of your Crack Whores crossed my path and I had to kill her." "Really?" Mack Daddy laughed and his flesh creaked under the latex. "You silly girl. I’m so glad they amuse you. But be careful, one of these days your little tamagachi isn’t going to work! Now sit. First, tell me how our artwork’ is progressing. Then, I’ve got an assignment for you." 6. She listened carefully through her door. Charlie was talking with someone, someone who sounded healthy enough to be Clean Country. She shifted her massive frame slightly on the dirty mattress, trying to hear more clearly. She thought they were discussing a Crack Whore, and she felt compelled to listen closely. Subtly, under the sound effect of her labored breathing, there was the steady hum of electronics. TO BE CONTINUED ------------------------------------ Footnotes 1. "Apartment" being a poor term; more accurately the abode in question could be termed a hovel. In fact, before the nuclear war it had been a kennel. In the bathroom the etched shadows of carbonized dog droppings, burned into the wall by the nuclear flash of the bombs, could still be discerned. 2. The TY-2076 had been a notoriously unreliable IMFR, known for malfunctioning in disastrously important ways. Tales abounded of androids which identified everything they smelled as bananas, of androids who suffered from digital head colds and could smell nothing, of android whose TY-2076 consistently retrieved images of violence and murder no matter what the smell was, sending said androids into dangerous cycles of brutality. The 76 Series was developed and marketed by the newly reconfigured Lucent Technologies after the war, and while the 1076 had been a large reason Lucent remained financially secure in the tumultuous years directly after the holocaust the 2076, apparently rushed into the marketplace by executives either nervous or over confident, had almost single handedly ruined the company. 3. The 899 (marketed by Lucent Technologies competitor GZK Labs) was itself a vast improvement over its predecessor the 799, which had been a fine CPU with the exception of its tendency to induce a condition called, simply, Android Psychosis. GZK had discovered that the problem in the 799 had been a simple inability to parse split infinitives. The Mack Daddy had done his research and had, in fact, disabled the patch in the 899 which fixed this problem, leaving his androids with the faster subroutine speed of the 899 and the habit of suffering from Android Psychosis whenever someone split an infinitive, which in these war-ruined and desperate times was pretty freaking often. The Mack Daddy, being a mad scientist and all, saw this as a benefit. 4. Immediately recognizable as a Clean Country citizen by the fact that she did not smell like an obscure mixture of shit, sweat, and radioactive Spam, which was all most survivors of the war had to eat, due to a curious series of decisions made by pre-war governments, decisions now lost to history. 5. For those of us not paying attention, this phrase is a prime example of a split infinitive. For those of us who don’t know what that is, you’re pretty lucky and should make no attempt to find out. 6. Of course, owning a Tamaguchi in post-war countries was internationally illegal, since the failed Tamaguchi rebellion of 2023. Left to incubate in millions of toy chests, desk drawers, and forgotten closets for decades, the Tamaguchis had slowly evolved and developed its own intelligence. The rise of the Tamaguchi was at once horrible and extremely annoying, and the three-year struggle to wipe out their insidious infestation crippled civilization and laid the groundwork for the nuclear holocaust that quickly followed Post-war, the Lucent Corporation was long suspected of gutting illegal Tamaguchi technology for spare parts in their product line, but nothing was ever proven. 7. Being "Clean Country" folk and living their lives eternally sealed into variously controlled environments, the rich and undeformed citizens of the world’s higher tax brackets were also disastrously sensitive to odor, infectious agents, and poor fashion sense. Leading thinkers of Clean Country Society had long warned that the human race’s natural defenses against these afflictions were withering away under the air-conditioned and UV protected climate of Clean Country, but the Leading Thinkers had been laughed off the stage by hooting crowds in designer latex Radiation Suits, as is the fate of most Leading Thinkers, throughout history. There were numerous cases of risk-taking Clean Country citizens keeling over after taking an ill-advised whiff of unfiltered air, or after eating something spicy, their brains shorting out from the unexpected sensual input after generations of carefully managed blandness. 8. The orange haze, aside from being corrosive and deadly, was reputed to taste like peppermint. No one could prove it, however, as all test subjects’ heads dissolved into a yellow-orange goo upon contact with the stuff. 9. Clean Country folk were at the top of the New World Order, but even at the top there was a hierarchy. People were not paid in money any more, money having been largely shown to be meaningless in a world where innocents cavorting in cratered, bomb-blasted fields could be suddenly dissolved into go by roaming clouds of orange, peppermint-flavored gas. People earned oxygen, which had proven to be a much more useful coin. The richest and most powerful had their own Lucent Technologies HUF-345 Oxygen Replicator creating and distributing clean, fresh gas to them at any time, and used this oxygen to pay their employees. The HUF-345 took common household garbage such as banana peels and broken glass and molecularly altered it into oxygen. As you went down the pecking order, the oxygen became less and less pure. At the bottom rung of Clean Country living, the schoolteachers, payment was in the form of third-pass oxygen exhaled by coma victims, said exhalations collected in tanks at the Hospitals and shipped out daily. ------------------------------------ ABOUT GUS PUSTULE Our Motto: "Deny, deny -deny." Gus Pustule is many things to many people. Sometimes he is Jeof Vita, international man of mystery, who eats live chickens to prove his manhood to the chicas and who has been wearing the same pair of underwear since the age of eleven, said underwear having achieved a rare state of protoexistence, wherein its has been worn so thin it is literally only one molecule thick. Since molecules are too small to be perceived, Jeof has invented the world’s first invisible underpants. Or so he tells us. Jeff Somers, the bitter, mean-spirited editor of this rag, who has given over his apartment to an infinite number of monkeys in an effort to keep a steady supply of material for The Inner Swine. Since this decision his social life has dried up as no one wants to witness the mess an infinite number of monkeys can make. Mark Neufield, evil twin of Jeof Vita who took physical form after Jeof spent an evening drinking radioactive Fresca in an attempt to gain mutant powers for himself. Jeof attempted to keep Mark under wraps, fearing the reaction of his friends and loved ones to a secret twin, and succeeded in keeping Mark locked in a closet until 1989, when Jeof’s infamous Methane Gas Incident of ‘89 released him. Alison Culshaw, famous trapeze enthusiast and recent immigrant from Greenland, where she subsisted on raw Pelican meat for several years whilst pondering philosophical complexities and writing her conclusions down on small slips of paper, which were then slipped into inflated balloons and released for the winds to take them where they may. Recent investigations revealed that most were eaten by roaming pelicans, in what may have been revenge. Lauren Strutzel, who came through a recent bout of annoying Brain Swellage with most of her faculties intact, although she does sometimes emit a barking noise which she later denies irritably. During her Brain Swellage attack she claims to have seen a great soft light which brought her briefly to the afterworld, which she describes as ‘like a wonderful, carpeted rumpus-room, with a big Twister board in the center. Arf! Arf!’ Dan Sills, who, at the hearty age of 89, continues to climb all 31 flights of stairs in his apartment building in California every morning in order to celebrate another day of existence by urinating off the roof. He claims he has attained distances of over 100 feet, but witnesses are hard to come by. ======================================== *** COMMENTARY *** Obligatory Baseball Article #561: 714 REASONS TO LOVE BASEBALL Stats Make the World Go Round By Jeff Somers ======================================== "Mickey Mantle played five years longer than he should have because the Yankees had no other gate attraction after the collapse of their team, farm systems, and dominance of the American League in 1964 and they begged him to stay. He had no cartilage in his knees, drank too much, couldn’t run, and was generally much older than 36 when he finally gave it up. Because of those final five years, Mantle ended up batting .298 lifetime. And that is the definition of tragedy." - Maurice Remos The greatest thing to happen to the game of baseball since the split-fingered fastball and the 1986 series is the Internet, because of the sheer amount of numerical data it provides on a daily basis. Endless fields of boxscores, on-base percentages, streaks. Fertile banks of pitch-counts, saves, and go-ahead RBIs. Don’t get it? Then I have to explain something to you: There are two schools of baseball, friends, and if you’re going to understand anything you have to start there. Some baseball people love the game; they watch their nephew’s little league games as avidly as they watch the World Series and they couldn’t tell you what Babe Ruth’s batting average was the year he hit 60 home runs (.356, BTW) because they don’t care. They love to watch/play/discuss the game, but they don’t care about the numbers. Let’s call these people The Lost Tribe of the Field of Dreams. In other words: loonies. The other way of appreciating the grand game of baseball is to crunch those numbers until you’re cross-eyed from the small type on the backs of those baseball cards. We live to know that the last pitcher to lose 20 games in a season was the unlucky Brian Kingman for the 1980 Oakland A’s, or that Lou Gehrig batted in a run every 4.01 at bats, or roughly every day he played. We love the numbers, because the numbers tell the story, they give the details, they link everything together into the great tapestry that the game is. Call us The People Who Do Not Give A Shit Unless It Counts. If it’s not going to go into The Baseball Encyclopedia, if it isn’t going to be logged by the good people at The Elias Sports Bureau, if it doesn’t get printed in a box score somewhere, we don’t care. The poetic beauty of the game? Sure, we appreciate it. I can sit in the rain and watch a seventeen-inning 1-1 game with more fielding errors than hits and enjoy it. But only if its two major-league teams playing. If it’s the Detroit Hasbeens versus the Miami Future Prospects, I don’t care. Why? Because it won’t count. The stats maybe are written down somewhere, but no one is ever going to look them up, and even if they did it wouldn’t be the same. Counting is not merely being written down in one set of books instead of another, friends. Baseball has a uniquely uniform history. Unless you count the Designated Hitter rule, which I don’t, there hasn’t been what could be termed a major rule alteration in 100+ years. When Ty Cobb came up as a rookie in 1905 he played by the same rules as Scott Rolen does today. The strategy might change, the pitching might be better or worse, but the bats are still made of wood, the balls are still made of twine and leather, and the bases are still 90 feet apart. Because of this uniformity, we can reasonably compare players of today against their ancestors....and that is a great thing. Players are not bigger, there’s no 24-second clock, no reason to think that Mark McGwire could not have stepped in against Rube Waddel and hit a 500-foot homer off him......or been struck out. So, if you’re playing in the Midwest league or some semi-pro Mexican league or hell, Japan, it doesn’t count. The rules are different, the dimensions of the parks not right, they use aluminum bats -whatever, it isn’t the same, you can’t compare, and therefore I don’t care. Someone in Japan hit 800 home runs? Japanese ballparks are so fucking small I could hit 30 homers over there just by extending my arms. It doesn’t count. Without stats baseball would still be fun to watch, I’d still appreciate the beauty of the game, but it wouldn’t fascinate me the way it does now. Baseball stats are the greatest numbers in the universe, the most perfect result of math ever invented by man. There’s just something harmonious about those triple crown numbers: .353 52 130 or .356 48 163. When Ron Guidry won the Cy Young award in 1978, I was mesmerized by his earned run average: 1.74. Part of the beauty of baseball, part of its aesthetic wonder, is the sublime story the numbers tell you. So much information is conveyed by these simple numbers, a meticulous shorthand that allows you to assess a player with minimal information: 20-game winner, the Mendoza Line, on-base percentage, 70 home runs, 130 stolen bases -all these numbers tell a story that has been going on for a hundred years or more, and I love it. No one is remembered for being a player who loved baseball. No one would know who Ted Williams was if he hadn’t hit .344 lifetime (.406 one amazing summer), no one would care who the hell Denny McLain, noted boozer and small-time criminal, was if he hadn’t won 31 games one tremendous season thirty years ago. One season which obviously sucked everything he had out of him, since he was out of baseball not four years later. I can look at these numbers and I know exactly what it was like to follow them in the box-scores, whether it was 20, 30, 80 years ago. And that is beautiful. ======================================== *** INTERVIEW *** The Inner Swine Interviews #2: My Lycra Boxer Shorts Are Snug, Soft, and Comfy Ten Questions with Jeff Vita ======================================== 1. If you could sell your soul to The Inner Swine for anything, what would it be? The first question you should be asking is, "Why would you sell your soul to of all things, The Inner Swine?" But since we’re playing in "fantasy-world", I would sell my soul to The Inner Swine for the ability to make one Jeff Somers dance at the drop of a hat ... no wait a minute, I already have that power ... OK ... I got it, besides the requisite fame, fortune, and total control over every living being on earth, I would like to just once, not cry when I watch the end of Titanic. 2. Can you explain the Law of the Conservation of Energy to us? Yes. 3. What do you think of The Inner Swine? The Inner Swine is a labor of love ... kind of like the labor a woman experiences when she’s birthing. I, of course, do as little for the rag as possible ... which means throwing up some colors onto a screen and passing it off as a cover. Actually though, the covers are usually images from my dreams and thank god there is The Inner Swine. Therapy would cost too much. But as for the contents of the mag itself, let me get back to you on that one ... I don’t actually get to read the thing, I just do quick scans for my name and work from there. 4. You’re on a plane with Jeff Somers and Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura; the plane crashes, stranding the three of you with no food or hope of rescue. Who gets eaten first, and why? Did you actually sit in you room and think these up? Anyway ... in that instance, and with the egos involved, I would think it would come down to survival of the fittest, and ain’t no one eating me without a fight. With that in mind, I’m guessing that Somers goes first, cause I’m betting that the Michelin Man physique won’t last too long in Thunderdome. Besides, I’m pretty sure Somers has the biggest rump, and as we all know, "The best meat’s in the rump!" 5. Do you have exactly enough underwear to get you from laundry day to laundry day, or do you have backup underwear? If the former, have you ever gone without? OK, true story ... I am a boxers kinda guy ... the boys have to breathe you know what I’m saying? And I have currently exactly 12 pairs of good boxers ... I also have 5 pairs of passable boxers ... and then I have 4 pairs of briefs. I hate briefs. I also hate doing laundry, so after two weeks, I’m running on empty. I have gone without once or twice, but it is not a pleasant experience. And by all means, wear button flys if you ever have to do without. I also have one emergency pair of lycra biker shorts that when push comes to shove, double as underwear. They are snug, soft, and comfy and the constant lycra itch reminds me that it’s time to do the wash. I have em on now, wanna see ‘em? 6. Without resorting to voodoo, stage magic, or outright lies, can you honestly state that the Apple IMac is a good computer rather than an impressively cynical con job on the inexperienced computer shopper? *click* *twitch* The iMac is the most efficient and powerful computer on the market today. Its outstanding aesthetic will make you think twice about the way your computer works for you. It is after all, chic, not geek. If you’re going to think, think different. The iMac, say hello again. *twitch* *click* What the heck just happened?[1] 7. Quick! In 50 words or less defend your existence and consumption of valuable food and oxygen! The world needs beautiful people so who am I to deny them that privilege. That winning smile, the mischievous wink. The lows of the world want this to look up to. Let’s give them that shall we? Plus, who else will take care of my cat. 8. Describe what you see in the following: I see a roast beef sandwich ... or two nuns waxing their cars ... or if you hold it like this ... uh .. never mind. Can I keep this? 9. Why do comic superheros always wear those pajamas while fighting crime? You know, when I was a kid, I thought that since superheroes are always on call ... crime never sleeps you know ... I figured that they just got dressed for bed and if an emergency arose, they just strapped on a cape and out the window they went. Sure, they were in their pajamas, but somehow, superheroes always had the best looking pajamas in the universe! Except for Robin, he looked gay. I learned later on however, that these "costumes" were actually preventive measures to distract people from learning their true identities. PLUS, these fabrics were almost always made of other-worldly materials, "unstable molecules", and the like to provide protection and enhance powers. Now, Batman doesn’t wear underwear anymore, in fact he uses an enhanced polymer based armor plating system that truly allows him to be the Dark Knight! And Spider Man, yes, his uniform looks like cool pj’s but it’s actually loaded with stuff to help him catch thieves "just like flies". And Iron Man, now his suit really isn’t iron but an alloy made up of the hardest metal in the Marvel universe other than Adamantium, called Vibranium. An iron suit probably wouldn’t be very conducive to kicking villain ass. Superman doesn’t need special armor or anything cause he’s Superman, although his red underpants are way stupid looking. He really needs a costume change. I’ve come up with a bunch of designs based on my biker short underpants ... wanna see ‘em again? Anyway, Wolverine has a whole different set of defenses ... 10. Do you believe in a Guiding Intelligence in the Universe? If so, do you believe it’s "The Force" from Star Wars? ...curls his finger while staring intently at Jeff’s throat: Here, pull my finger, I’ll show you "the force" JEOF VITA is a nationally published artist who has written for Comic Books and illustrated sports magazines. He is The Inner Swine’s main artist and has drawn 12 of the 13 TIS covers, and written several articles which have appeared within these venerable pages. ---------------------------------------- [1] Ed. Note: This is apparently the aforementioned voodoo used to sell that piece of shit machine to an unsuspecting public who think the fact that it’s teal makes it a superior creation -a technique used to great effect by Jobs and Apple since their beginnings. ======================================== *** THE FREAKS COME OUT AT NIGHT PART 1 *** It Takes a Nation of Freaks to Hold Me Back By Jeff Somers ======================================== If I told you that the piece of technology you or anyone needs most in today’s beguilingly complex world was the Freak-O-Meter 2000, you would probably tell me to a) get more sleep, b) quit writing this endless stream of annoying articles no one reads anyway, or, in Mom’s case, tell me to c) quit spending all my Sunday mornings drinking and start going to church to apologize. It’s true, however, that we are all in need of functioning Freak-O-Meters hardwired into our heads. What, you ask before passing out from complete disinterest, is a Freak-O-Meter? These amazing examples of organic technology allow us to quickly scan every individual we meet in life and determine to our own satisfaction whether or not that person is a Freak. My Webster’s New World Dictionary defines freak as follows: freak (frek) n. 1. An odd notion; whim 2. An unusual happening 3. Any abnormal animal, person, or plant 4. [Slang] a) a drug user b) a devotee [a rock freak] adj. queer; abnormal freak (out) [Slang] 1. To experience extreme reactions as from a psychedelic drug 2. To become a hippie –freakish adj. The last definition caused me to flip to the copyright page of my dictionary and, sure enough, the damned thing was published in 1972. Here’s The Inner Swine definition of freak: freak (frek) n. 1. Anyone who intrudes on your existence without invitation, purpose, or consideration, under the delusion that their sad lives are interesting to you or that they deserve attention and interest simply because they take the time, trouble, and mental energy to breathe 2. Everyone else in the universe except maybe three or four people, and I’m not so sure about them. It’s funny how everyone in the universe believes they are beset by freaks. Obviously this cannot be true, since if everyone was beset by freaks there would, logically, be no freaks to beset us. Using the exciting new technology of the Freak-O-Meter, I have personally identified 2,567 freaks active in my every day life, so I know some of these people are either lying or extremely deluded. My Freak-O-Meter goes off so often I have a constant buzzing in my head, much like a soft chorus of voices. Everyone has that instinct that makes you note some aspect of a person, compare it with your own experience and sensibility, and conclude with a wrinkled nose and an intolerant snort that the person is a freak, an abnormal animal, person, or plant (see definition above). But sometimes we distrust our instincts in this modern world, so we need to rely on technology to guide us. That’s right, the Freak-O-Meter, once installed in your head tells you whether the people you meet are abnormal animals, humans, or plants. It’s difficult to determine this without the use of your Freak-O-Meter. I often do not realize that people I’ve been conversing/flirting/living with are abnormal plants until my Freak-O-Meter starts that buzzing in my head. I pause, cock my head, and listen to the buzzing, and it’s usually whispering freakfreakfreakfreakfreakfreak Using this exciting new technology, The Inner Swine has been able to study, classify, and catalogue the main species of freaks in the world, so that people without access to the Freak-O-Meter can examine the people in their lives and determine which ones are freaks and which normal folk, like me1. If you cannot afford a Freak-O-Meter 2000 on your own, I strongly suggest you use this guide in your everyday interaction, so you can tell the freaks from the merely annoying. TYPE OF FREAK: Dressed-In-Black-And-Waiting-To-Die Artiste. IDENTIFYING TRAITS: pale skin, wardrobe exclusively black, combat boots, disorganized notebooks filled with suicide notes in poem form, walkman playing endless songs by The Cure, complete lack of enthusiasm for any activity due to belief that life is one big existential joke on them, because secretly they think they’re the center of the universe. HOW TO DISCOURAGE: When introduced, smile broadly and ask them if they saw Friends last week. They’ll never speak to you again. TYPE OF FREAK: Creepily Friendly Cheerleader-Type. IDENTIFYING TRAITS: bubbly, chatty, always looking to converse, feigns interest easily, capable of discussing anything, even the most bone-chillingly boring subjects, such as their cat’s love life, their collection of unusually shaped toenail clippings, or their opinions on just about anything. HOW TO DISCOURAGE: Try physical violence; it’s usually the only way. TYPE OF FREAK: The Lovers of Inappropriate Intimacy. IDENTIFYING TRAITS: the shuddering need to share every unnecessary intimate detail of their lives with whomever they meet, such as their sad love lives, their precarious health, or their faulty finances, usually encouraging any residual sympathetic urges left in the listener. HOW TO DISCOURAGE: Insulting them outright sometimes works, but can cause larger problems. Your only solution? The Telecommunications Shield: arrange to have a friend phone you whenever these freaks are seen speaking to you, so you can excuse yourself, and then gossip about them. TYPE OF FREAK: Religious True-Believer. IDENTIFYING TRAITS: The calm certainty that everyone but them will burn in hell, on-purpose ignorance of many subjects smacking of evil, eagerness to bring up God, faith, and religion at inappropriate and unwelcome times, argumentative and sanctimonious. HOW TO DISCOURAGE: This isn’t as simple as you might think. Devil worship only attracts them and causes their discussion to attain sermon-levels, and overt verbal abuse simply convinces them that they are martyrs to their cause. It’s best to resort to physical violence. No one can argue with a busted lip, not even Jesus. TYPE OF FREAK: Inveterate Complainer. IDENTIFYING TRAITS: entrentched pessimism, rare ability to breed unhappiness where there was none, inability to see any bright sides or silver linings, compulsion to take their complaints to whatever poor soul is nearby and spend hours detailing the excruciating and pathetic misery of their lives despite having a good job, nice apartment, running car, and plenty of vacation time. Can often be found at 9pm as the only morons still at work, because they are convinced their jobs are more difficult, demanding, and suffocating than anyone elses. But at least we’re at the bar by that point. HOW TO DISCOURAGE: It is important to never get in a bitch contest with these people: you cannot convince them that you are more miserable than they. Nothing trumps them. If you say your mother died this morning, they will tell you the story of their mother’s death, and trust me, you will lose. You’re only choice is complete apathy towards their problems. This will seem cruel to them and you be marked down as a complete asshole for the chill wind coming off you, but it will save you hours of hearing how much their life stinks. TYPE OF FREAK: Zine Editor. IDENTIFYING TRAITS: Immense ego, martyr complex, ink-smudged hands, constantly giggling under breath. Will usually beg people to write for them and then summarily despise anything that is submitted to them. Delusions of Grandeur. HOW TO DISCOURAGE: You can’t. My little mantra these past few years has been The Freaks Are Winning, and it’s true. Being able to identify these wretched souls is the only way to avoid them. The saddest part is, we’re doomed to lose eventually, because only the stupid people are breeding. ---------------------------------------- [1] Karen Accavallo counts me as a freak, due to my "boyish demeanor, girlish laugh, lack of social skills, inability to appreciate me as the goddess I clearly am, and bad taste in clothes." Karen’s opinion is her and does not represent The Inner Swine Inner Circle, or at least not very much of it. ======================================== *** THE FREAKS COME OUT AT NIGHT PART 2 *** My Friends Are Cranky, Mean-Spirited Bastards by Jeff Somers ======================================== I used to write articles for my company’s newsletter, back before my company merged with seventeen other publishing houses to form Whothefuckareyou, Inc, with seven thousand employees and more money than they can keep track of (we’re constantly finding big garbage bags of cash in back rooms, bathroom stalls, and empty offices; so far security hasn’t allowed us to leave the building with them). When we were a small company and everyone knew everyone it was a fun thing to do. As the company grew it got less fun as the acceptable level of goofiness plummeted in reverse proportion to the accepted level of ‘professionalism’, and by the end of it I was exclusively writing those dumb "meet you fellow" employee pieces corporate newsletters include in order to pretend that the company cares about its employees. I would meet with the person for about half an hour, ask them about their lives and their role in the company, and write 700 words about them for the newsletter. Not inspiring, but it took very little time and energy, so I didn’t mind. One of the last ones I wrote focussed on a lady who had worked at the company for about forty years. Whothefuckareyou had just bought her company and they thought it would be nice to focus on one of the new members of ‘the family’ in the newsletter, so off I went. This woman, let’s call her Larry, had a slightly skewed concept of the nature of these articles, however; when I arrived she seemed to be under the impression that this was going to be a human interest documentary or something. She had brought in photo albums, articles, clippings, notes -the whole shebang. Three hours she kept me there, filling me in on the dull details of her life. I had about 700 words worth of info within five minutes. By the end of that excruciating morning I could have written a book about Larry, had I cared to. I didn’t. My mild apathy towards her had grown into full-fledged dislike, and it underscored what I think is wrong with 99% of the people in this world: the immense arrogance masquerading as friendliness, the most evil Freak in the world, of whom Larry may have been Queen. Combined with the more populous species of Freak we’ll call Random-Best-Friend Generators (RBFG) they make up about 90% of the population, and I not only want nothing to do with them, I actively flee them. Let me state for the record: I don’t trust friendly people. My friends are cranky, mean-spirited bastards, and that’s why I love ‘em. Groucho Marx once said that he didn’t want to join any club that would have him as a member. I say, I don’t want to be friends with anyone who wants to be my friend. When I meet someone, the less excited they seem to be about getting to know me, the more attracted to them I am. Is this some dark psychological scar which prevents me from seeking happiness? Nope, its intelligence, our great burden here at The Inner Swine. Our huge and unwieldy brains force us to recognize that people who love people are the stupidest fucks in the world. I expect normal, healthy people to satisfy two important criteria before I slap the terms normal and healthy on their dossiers: 1. they have enough going on in their lives (interests, projects, events, etc) that they don’t have any time or energy left over for random relationship-forging with strangers on mass transit or in malls or whatever and 2. they have enough friends and associates that forcing someone into simple human contact is not exactly a priority for them. If you start a conversation with me out of nowhere, I assume you are missing one or both of these important attributes, and therefore begin inching away from you because I do satisfy these requirements -you are, in other words, a RBFG. After all, if you’re so pathetic/sad/strange/violent/disease-ridden that you can’t maintain a relationship and thus must troll the streets of the city looking for polite suckers you can trick into conversation, explain to me why I should be happy to speak with you? There is, of course, simple politeness. But a stranger stopping me to ask where Varick Street is and then thanking me for my help, maybe making a humorous comment or two or complimenting me on my obvious fashion sense is okay. It makes sense. Turning to me on the PATH train platform and saying, "Hi, my name is Marvin and I like Ferrets, do you like Ferrets?" is not. And never will be. People who act as if they are already overburdened with amazing people and couldn’t possibly make time for one more acquaintance, however, they’re obviously people with something going on in their lives, and if you happen to by chance enter into a situation where you meet them and converse a little, well, you might both grudgingly admit you enjoyed each other’s company and then over a period of time, through a process of cautious advances and numerous retreats, you become friends. This is the normal mode, to my mind. With all the insane people in this world you have to take the process of ‘getting to know’ someone slowly and carefully. This is one of the most intimate and potentially dangerous things you as a human being can do; you’re opening yourself up to someone elses inspection and learning things about someone that few others know. This is not something that is supposed to be done easily, quickly, or with anyone who comes along. Christ, if you don’t screen, why should I feel so fucking special having been chosen? In other words, if you’re talking to any stranger on the fucking PATH train platform, why in the world am I supposed to be thrilled that you chose me? On the other hand, my friends and loved ones are so bitter, so mean, so outwardly hostile to anyone or anything which tries to breach their protective shells I get a warm feeling in my toes when I think about the fact that these miserable shits embrace me -because they embrace so few. I’m fucking special, dammit. So, I wrote a touchy-feely article about Larry. I somehow squeezed three hours of numbing lecturing into 700 words of trite corporate-suck writing. I often wonder if she was offended or disappointed that we had not published a special edition of the company newsletter dedicated to her amazing life. Larry is a personable person who obviously had a lot going on, had friends and family, and yet still qualifies on my ‘too-friendly’ scale: Larry was actively recruiting friends not to fill some awesome loneliness stemming from her freakishness; Larry was recruiting friends so she can fill us with her wonderful personality. To people like Larry, the evil shadows of the other weirdos, we are all just vessels to fill with anecdotes, wisdom, and their experiences. As a result, it is impossible for these people to actually perceive you as a person. You exist only to be filled with their wonderfulness. Why would anyone who wasn’t one of the aforementioned desperate-for-contact freaks want this sort of vampire in their lives? I left Larry that day with the grim understanding that I had been in the presence of a soul-sucking terror, and had survived just barely. When I see her around the office now, I usually try to inconspicuously run away. And I feel no shame. ======================================== *** COMMENTARY *** Our New Year’s Article (a little late, but who cares? we’re all gonna die soon anyway) NO FUTURE: GOD’S MIDDLE FINGER The Inner Swine’s 10 Signs of The Apocalypse to Watch For in 1999 By Jeff Somers ======================================= PIGS, The Inner Swine is not a new concept. Swines have been oinking around history since the dawn of time, arrogantly screwing everything up with their smug opinions and cynical hostility. As a matter of fact I’m pretty sure the negative connotations of the word Pig came from Swines giving those noble animals a bad name. Of course, the fortunes of Swines have decayed in recent years thanks to relentless do-gooders and hippie-types who have successfully championed virtue and optimism; these motherless girl scouts will get theirs for making the world such a polite cesspool of happiness, but I digress. Whereas we Swines once sat on mighty Snout Thrones, ruling over unwashed throngs of wretched humanity and cheerfully oppressing them on a daily basis, now we are forced by these insidious girl scouts to crawl through the sewers of society leaving behind the foul odors of our bad moods like amorphous clouds of resentment. Our powers may be shriveled in these revoltingly chipper times, kids, but the Swine endure, baby, like Tolkien’s Nazgûl dozing beneath Dôl Guldor. This qualifies our rather tenuous but enduring organization as possibly the oldest in the soon-to-be-ending history of mankind. While we believe that all humans are pigs, that all humans are self-interested and self-centered, and thus that we are all Swines, only those of us who have consciously accepted this as a philosophy of life actually qualify as members of this ancient family of Pigs. Thus, we are well suited to be the commentators at ringside when The Reckoning hits. Because, you know, it’s all over but the shouting. Recently I got a DeathClock screensaver from www.deathclock.com, a cheerful little program that estimates how long you have left to live (rather mysteriously) and then generates a second-by-second countdown every time you leave your computer idle. I go for a cup of coffee, I come back to discover I have 1,425,618,000 seconds left in life, or roughly 45a years. And then you get the sick thrill of watching the seconds tick off, reminding you that no one lives forever, and your own end is hurtling towards you with ruthless determination. Everyone dies, bwana. Most of us like to forget the fact in order to be free to enjoy the mindless mundanity of our existence -but I like being reminded that it’s all slipping away from me. It keeps my priorities straight, mostly. Or at least it keeps me in a constant state of guilt over how I spend my time ("What do you mean it’s time to write the new Editorial? And miss ‘Gilligan’?) which allows me to justify my surly and cynical nature. After all, we mighty geniuses conscious of the shadow of our mortality ought to be granted some leeway in our social interaction, eh? Of course, recently I realized that all my motivational techniques and mortality-obsessing was pretty pointless, since it’s obvious to even a Gimp that the world is going to end, and soon. What do I base this on? Astrology? Tea leaves? The Gregorian Calendar (Hmmmn....those damned pagans are still worshiping their evil gods no matter what we say....hell, I’m the fucking Pope, let’s re-arrange the calendar! We’ll show the virgin-humping pagans who’s boss)? No, my friends, none of that less-than-scientific claptrap. I don’t base this realization on the movement of the heavenly bodies or on some bizarre reckoning of the days which has proven inaccurate (leap year, anyone?) and unreliably random . No, I know the world is going to end soon because THE TEN SIGNS OF THE APOCALYPSE have begun appearing. It’s very simple. Once all ten signs co-exist in the world, it all ends. Apocalyptical Scholars such as myself have been watching the skies, airwaves, and Internet Newsgroups for decades now, ever since modern science finally advanced to the point where all the Signs were possible. Prior to 1963, no one bothered much because many of the Signs were impossible. Now, anything is possible, and The International Society for Apocalyptic Watching (TISAW) has been busily collecting data. Our powerful intranet (made up of 117 networked Vic-20’s) has been sifting news feeds for keywords, and as far as we can tell, eight of the ten Signs have already come to pass. The history of Man is nearing its end, kids. Put away your DeathClocks, quit saving for a rainy day, and go out and enjoy yourself. We don’t have much time. How much time do we have? No one knows. The last two Signs could come to pass at any moment, and when they do no one will know it, because the end will most likely be 1) instantaneous, 2) all-encompassing, and 3) mind-shatteringly painful. Just what are the 10 Signs of the Apocalypse? Hold onto to your beanies, babies, and I’ll tell you what they are, when (and if) they’ve come to pass, and how their coming was verified, in case you care. THE TEN SIGNS OF THE APOCALYPSE 10. Marlon Brando’s appearance in "The Island of Doctor Moreau." TISLAW scholars have been wondering for decades what form the Antichrist would take. We tirelessly pored over news clippings, television broadcasts, and other forms of media seeking the physical manifestation. When several TISLAW officials viewed the film in a Budapest theater which doubled as a bordello in 1997, they emerged shaken and horrified, the image of the corpulent and powdered thespian forever seared into their minds. Emergency communications were utilized, the infamous TISLAW signal was shone into the atmosphere, and video-rental teams were quickly organized. Across the globe Apocalyptic Scholars were disturbed and dismayed at the grotesque shell the Antichrist had chosen. Holding each other for courage, we knew that the slow descent into Armageddon had begun. No one knows what the significance of that horrid little dwarf is, though. Personally, I’m afraid to find out. 9. The Introduction of those wall-sized TVs that never shut off. Even small-minded technophobes can see it coming: that glorious day when not only do 100% of the world’s populations rely on their computers (or dedicated digital appliances) for information and services, but 100% of it is served up by a merger of Microsoft and America On-Line called Micro-America Inc., which will be a 345-Billion Dollar company controlling 99.99% of the computer software and ISP market. And who’s gonna be the celebrity spokesperson for this new uber-company, grinning at us from our ever-present wall-sized computer screens which never shutdown? You got it, bwana: the powdered visage of Marlon Brando. Wake up, now, time for Calisthenics! Somers-9989, you are still sleeping! Prepare for electro-shock alarm daemon, courtesy of our Exalted CEO and Spiritual Guide, Bill Gates! 8. The Return of The Coreys to active film-making. Corey Haim and Corey Feldman were momentary teen-successes back in the 1980’s, since descended into drugs, straight-to-video erotica, and oblivion, which is the natural order of things. As the laws of physics unwind like a broken Jack-In-the-Box, playing crazed music for us all to dance to, people like The Coreys will start to reinvade pop culture, symbols of the breakdown in physical law. You can see this happening now, with the renaissance of John Travolta, the reemergence of Peter Fonda, and the continuing presence of William Shatner: the laws are breaking down. When "Feldman Sucks Off Haim (PG))" opens at #1 at the box office some day, my friends, expect it to be the last $15.50 you plunk down for a movie ticket. 7. The General Ripper Fluoridation Plan. The human race will spend its last days largely dozing under the influence of many government-prescribed "mood-modifying" drugs. Even today you can see the careful marketing plan in place: positioning drugs such as Prozac® as lifestyle choices instead of serious dopage. Ad campaigns which state "Depression isolates, Prozac can help" with cartoon graphics implicate that no one should ever be depressed, that having a bad mood is unnatural. Once this mindset is in place and everyone is taking some form of mood drug anyway, legislating that Prozac and its evil brethren be included in foodstuffs like vitamins or other additives won’t be met with much resistance. That’s when the real evils start to pile up: when most of us are too damned happy to do anything about it. 6. What Would Jesus Do? One of the final features of the Apocalypse is going to be the Mark of the Beast (MOTB®), a mark which everyone will have to wear in order to live, or trade, or whatever. While plenty of people have speculated that the Bar Code was the coming MOTB, we here at TISLAW have realized to our horror that the true mark will be more insidious. No one in their right minds will wear a Bar Code, after all.....but thousands of addle-brained Christians are already wearing WWJD jewelry, patches, stickers and the like. This craze will soon sweep the world, with the initials WWJD translated into different messages and languages. One day you’ll wake up and everyone will have the letters WWJD somewhere on them, and there’ll be a knock on the door, and it’ll be God’s Middle Finger, ready to ram itself up your ass. 5. President Jackson. About five years ago, an event unnoticed by the general public sent shockwaves through the TISLAW offices. I personally cried, beating my fist against my desk, moaning "Why! Why!" until I passed out. That event? Michael Jackson’s 35th birthday. What that means is that he is now officially eligible to be elected President of the United States. Don’t think it’ll ever happen? Hey, we’re not here to convince you, we’re just reporting the facts, and when President Jackson takes his oath of office from a Dwarf wearing a glittering magician’s robe while winged monkeys circle overhead and fairies sprinkle fairy dust on his newly appointed Secretary of State Marlon Brando, you’ll think back to this issue of The Inner Swine and you’ll think to yourself "I paid two bucks for that piece of shit?" 4. A Chicago-Boston World Series. It’s coming. True baseball fans fear this match up more than they fear Tim McCarver’s endless soliloquies. It’s the equivalent of matter and antimatter smashing together in one glorious explosion. 3. The Inner Swine Shows a Profit. Not long ago a dear friend of mine turned to me and said "Goddammit when the hell are you going to pay me the $50 you owe me you sleazy jive-talking hipster-doofus?", while holding a rather ragged home-made knife against my throat. These sorts of outbursts are common, and I know the only way to handle them: the undeniable truth. I told them that The Inner Swine was due to start making money hand over fist soon. I didn’t mention that the world would end soon afterwards rendering that money useless. It didn’t seem pertinent to the situation. 2. The Appearance of George Burns In a New Movie. Don’t laugh, it’s happening. The Book of Revelation makes morbid mention of the dead rising from their graves at the time of judgement. Guess what! It won’t be maggot-filled corpses rising up to throttle we sinners in our restless sleep, it’ll be those geeks at Industrial Light and Magic raising the dead celebrities of our past. George Burns will only be the tip of the iceberg -after him, what’s to stop them from resurrecting River Pheonix, Rip Torn, or (gasp) Tom Arnold for a new buddy movie? What? Tom ain’t dead yet? With modern science, he never will be. And thus, the end of the world. 1. The Coming Dominance of Country Music. One day we will all wake up to find that the top 10 Billboard albums and singles will be Country & Western music, with titles like "I Crashed My Truck and Killed Six Dogs", "Small Belt Buckle Blues", and "Where Have All the White Folk Gone?" A clearer sign of Apocalypse could not be invented. When you read about this in the next few years, go to the window and watch the skies; you’ll likely see God’s Middle Finger steaking across it in heavenly flames, rushing to press the PAUSE button on his cosmic CD player. There you go, Pigs. Remember, Termination can be freeing. Now that you know it’s all going to end, and soon, you don’t have to worry too much about the usual bullshit. Relax! Nothing you do from this moment on matters all that much, so why bother. Eat, Drink and be Merry, for tomorrow we will die. I’d suggest sending all your money to The Inner Swine, too, since we’ve lived without all this time and deserve to have a little fun before the world ends. If the world doesn’t end in the next few years, you can probably blame on the poor math skills of the Prophets. Remember, Prophets are rarely science majors, and usually boast dubious degrees in such subjects as Philosophy, Literature, or Astrology, often awarded by disreputable schools located on remote islands in the Pacific. Such people usually can’t even calculate a proper tip at a restaurant, why would we expect them to be able to calculate the date of Armageddon? Most likely their a few years off. Just keep waiting. It’ll come. ---------------------------------------- HOW TO SURVIVE THE APOCALYPSE ---------------------------------------- Prevailing opinion here at TISLAW is that: you can’t. The very definition of an apocalypse is that nothing will be left behind after the Rapture washes us all into God’s holding pens. We can, however, offer a few tips on how to better enjoy the end of the universe and how to possibly weasel your way into heaven despite a life spent ogling hot bodies and touching yourself. 1. Stay Calm. God will flush out most of the inveterate sinners out there simply because they’ll be the ones running away, tearing their hair out, fruitlessly seeking to avoid their punishment. Keep cool and look happy to see Jesus and you might just get overlooked when the lake of fire bubbles up to claim your fellow moral lightweights. 2. Feign ignorance. A growing number of Apocalyptic Scholars speculate that there will be many Armageddons, one for every major religion/belief system in existence, and you’ll only be aware of/be a victim of the one you personally believe in. So when Jesus comes riding with the Four Horsemen one Tuesday afternoon, just act like nothing is happening and it’ll just pass you by. If you’re lucky, the next Apocalypse won’t happen for another few years. This also means that true Atheists like your Editor here will be beachcombing the empty, deserted Earth long after the rest of you have been brushed into Hell by God’s Pushbroom. 3. Sudden conversion. Remember, it’s not a lie if you believe it’s true, so a sudden embracing of God’s law might just get you in under the wire, thanks to the Deity’s poorly-planned Last Minute Forgiveness Clause. When Jesus raises the golden Sword of Swift Sayonara, fall to your knees and pledge your undying faith and repent those sins, and mean it, baby, and hey, you never know. Those forgiving suckers might just take you in. Remember: if this doesn’t work with Jesus, there are plenty of other religions, including Satan. Better to rule in hell than suffer in the Lake of Fire, right? ---------------------------------------- THE SECRET ARROGANCE OF DOOMSAYERS ---------------------------------------- The immense arrogance of the people who believe the end of the world is coming makes me laugh. Who do these people think they are, that god is gonna wait until they’re born to bring the noise? Oh, the pigheaded arrogance. To put it all in perspective, here’s a quick list of some of the other people who’ll be around to see the Armageddon first-hand: 1. Me 2. Morgan Fairchild 3. Charles Manson 4. Trey Parker 5. Martin Lawrence Get the picture? We ain’t that special, so the world can’t end. Unless, of course, I’m wrong. ======================================== *** COMMENTARY *** HORTON HEARS A SUPERCONDUCTOR The Coming Division Between Techno-geeks and Techno-morons and The Crapper of History by Jeff Somers ======================================== PIGS, this world of ours gets more and more complex and whether you knew it or not it’s now almost impossible for you to qualify as an actual "renaissance man" (or, if you’re phallicly-challenged, "renaissance woman") in any traditional sense. This term means someone who has mastered a tasty melange of scientific and artistic studies, the sort of person who could paint the Mona Lisa in the morning and track the movement of the stars later in the evening and manage to make a name for themselves in both areas. Oh, sure, you can always paint a portrait and then track the stars later -but it doesn’t mean much any more. The Mona Lisa has already been painted, you know, and the stars have been and are being tracked on a constant basis by people in lab coats with expensive equipment. Your pathetic contributions to either discipline will probably not be noted. Let’s face it, it was easy back in the actual Renaissance to be an R-man, simply because the sort of basic work in art or science or mathematics or literature had yet to be done. Nowadays, the basic stuff has already been well-done, and that leaves most of us out in the cold, Renaissance-wise. Simply put, the unanswered mysteries of the universe and the unplumbed aspects of artistic expression are now far too complex for any one person to master more than one or possibly two fields. The idea of mastering a dozen skills and being Leonardo Da Vinci slipped out of our reach a long, long time ago. Nowadays, there is simply too much to know. No one person has the time, energy, or background to learn it all. Thus, like scuttling insects, we have to specialize. Back in 1500, the entire world’s hard knowledge about Physics, for example, could probably have been written down in one or two thick books. Not easy reading, no doubt, but still well within any man’s ability to absorb relatively quickly and then move on to another field of study. In short, the background info was less, and was easier to take in. These days, the sheer amount of background info necessary for modern living requires years and years of study -and that’s just to get up to speed. Right now our basic education -which comprises (mostly) just learning the basic concepts of math, science, literacy, and history- requires upwards of fifteen years to complete. While you could argue that our various systems of schooling waste a lot of time (recently the kids attending the public grammar school up the block from me seem to be getting out of class around 2:00 pm, which would imply they’re all getting about four hours of actual instruction every day, leaving the little hooligans plenty of time to break windows, steal items from mail boxes, and torture the innocent pets of the neighborhood -but I digress) you can’t deny that taking in all the knowledge we’ve accumulated these past 2000 years (much of which was considered revolutionary or incredibly advanced when it was first developed, but which are now considered ‘basic’ skills) requires years, at the least. The College or University level, once considered the height of educational achievement, is now simply an extension of the Basic Educational experience -your Bachelor degree is still something only 30% of the country gets, true; but it no longer means you’re an expert of any caliber on any given subject, especially if you’ve just received a BA. It just means you’re ready to go to Graduate School. Today, by the time your average American is considered ready to start tackling more advanced and specialized studies, he or she is probably 22-25 years old. At this point, they’re not experts, they’ve simply absorbed a large amount of basic info and skills. Becoming an expert -with a Masters or Ph. D.- requires years more study and work, and then only qualifies them as experts in one single field, often a very narrowly-defined sub-discipline of a larger field. If any one of us wanted to be a modern Leonardo Da Vinci, friends, it would take us roughly 150 years of study and school to get there. It’s impossible. Why is that? Simply because the sheer amount of knowledge has increased dramatically in the last two hundred years. The Industrial and Information Revolutions have given us untold wealth in the realm of ideas, but as a result there is simply too much for one person to take in. So, we’ve got to specialize. Engineers and Medical Students need to decide their career path when they’re 17 years old and stick to it, concentrating on their specialty and very little else. No matter what your skill set is, these days you concentrate on it to the exclusion of most everything else. Which is a very dangerous and potentially disastrous route for us to take, unfortunately, since the world in general and this country in particular is moving inexorably towards a technological society, with services, jobs, and many other aspects of daily life integrated deeply with technology and science. Why is this dangerous? Simple, bwana: if only five percent of the population actually understands the technology which is the backbone of our world, where does that leave the rest of us who will depend upon it? That’s right, in the Crapper of History. The schism is coming, piggies. Up until recently, a very slim grasp of Physics and Computer Science and Electrical Engineering was all you needed to get along in the world. If you had an adequate understanding of the internal combustion engine and the light bulb, you were good to go in many situations, and no one expected you to be a Rocket Scientist, after all. These days however, the game is changing, because incredibly complex technologies based on concepts which were theory 30-40 years ago are becoming absolutely necessary to daily life. And the world is being divided into two basic classes: the Haves, who will understand and implement these technologies, and the Have Nots, who will be ignorant of it all, and very familiar with the phrase do you want fries with that? Not a pretty sight. Technology can be very freeing, but if you don’t understand it, it can also screw you big time. Just ask anyone who’s home computer has crashed and burned -not understanding how it worked left them helpless, and reliant on either a smug friend who did understand, or a smug tech support line that charged money for the answers. And that’s just today, when not comprehending technology and science is still just inconvenient. There’s more daylight than ever before between the mechanisms in place to accomplish tasks and our understanding of them. Ask yourself, do you really understand how your car works? Could you repair even minor problems if it breaks down? Do you understand the Internet, the computers which it consists of, the concept of packet-switched data and VH computer architecture? When the nightly news discusses cloning and the issues it brings up, do you understand how things are cloned (answers involving any reference to a Star Trek script are invalid by default)? Can you explain the scientific concepts behind any of the following terms: SGML, 32-Bit Operating System, Digital Television, The Wassenaar Arrangement and 64-Bit Encryption, or Molecular Nanotechnology? Maybe you can. No? Then sorry, suckers, but you’re on the wrong side of the divide. Now, I don’t claim to understand most of it either; I’m often hard pressed to remember to keep my mouth from hanging open as I stare vacantly around my apartment. But at least I’ve got the good sense to be worried about this. Twenty years ago making a withdrawal from your bank was a simple, easily comprehended activity: you filled out a slip, handed it over to the Teller, she processed the paperwork and handed you cash -or, in my case, called the Security Guard and had him explain for the tenth time that you don’t have $345,600.00 in your account. The technology involved, really, was stone-aged. Today? Getting money from your bank often involves magnetic media, dedicated computer chips and electronic transmissions, and electronic data accessed via remote server. Sometimes there isn’t even any cash involved, and that means that for people getting direct deposit salaries and utilizing credit and debit cards to purchase goods and services the stone-age aspect of economics has been completely removed, and so they’re relying on technologies they often don’t understand in order to perform the most basic tasks. Of course, some of you might think you understand. The concept of electronic cash is pretty embedded in our collective psyche and you might think that simply because you can equate a number on a statement with monies paid out then you understand how it works. Sorry, most of us don’t. The software and hardware used, the encryption techniques, the security protocols, the manner in which the numbers are represented electronically -all of it is beyond a lot of us, and ye