Nelson DeMille

I recently finished Wild Fire, the latest novel by Nelson DeMille. He is a spectacular author; almost every book of his turns out to be a page-turner. Cops, international terrorism, and Vietnam tend to be his frequent subjects. He himself was a Vietnam veteran, so he has some background experience to draw upon.

Two of them feature a character, Paul Brenner, who seems to be an alter-ego to DeMille himself.

Up Country. Features Paul Brenner. This is my favorite. Brenner goes back to Vietnam to investigate a murder which allegedly occurred in Hue in 1968, amidst the Tet Offensive. This involved a US captain – now a prominent US politician pursuing a higher office – who shot a US LT in Hue, an act witnessed by an NVA soldier. Brenner is sent to Vietnam to find out what this NVA soldier – if he’s still alive (?) - knows. He starts off in Saigon, then travels up to Nha Trang, Hue, Hanoi, then the interior of North Vietnam, accompanied by a beautiful American CIA officer, Susan Weber (go figure, with all the women in Vietnam, the love interest is nguoi my!). MUCH better than The General’s Daughter. I learned a few nuggets of Vietnamese to help me at my former law practice: “co dep” (beautiful girl) and “SAT CONG!” (Kill communists!). I already knew “khong biet” (“I don’t know”), “dung lai” (later), “ong luat su” (Mr Lawyer), “troi oi” (OMG!!), “toi yeu em” (I love you), “hon mong toi” (kiss my ass), “an cut” (eat shit) and other useful fragments.

The General’s Daughter. Paul Brenner is back. This was made into a movie with John Travolta as Brenner. Brenner investigates a murder at a US military base involving a US officer, a beautiful West Point graduate, the daughter of a prominent general. It turns out the daughter had some bad things happen to her at West Point, and was into some kinky stuff at the base. As with so many of DeMille’s books, all is not what it seems.
Another popular character is former NYPD cop John Corey, who does NOT appear to be a Vietnam veteran, just a major smartass whose stories are written in the first person.

Wild Fire. Corey, assisted by his beautiful wife, FBI Agent Kate Mayfield, investigates a wealthy right-wing radical, Bain Madox, who built an ELF transmitter in upstate New York and is plotting to wipe out the Middle East, by detonating 4 suitcase nukes in L.A. and San Francisco, which will precipitate “Wild Fire”, an obscure US mutually-assured-destruction plan which dictates that the Islamic world (except Mecca and the oil fields) will be nuked by US strategic nuclear forces if any nuclear device detonates in a US city.

Plum Island. John Corey is involved in something dealing with a top secret US installation on way eastern Long Island. Clearly one of the more forgettable ones.

The Lion’s Game. John Corey is on the tail of a terrorist whose aim is to track down every USAF pilot involved in Reagan’s 1986 bombing of Libya.

Night Fall. John Corey and Kate Mayfield are convinced that Flight 800 (the TWA flight which mysteriously blew up off the coast of Long Island in 1996) was NOT an accident – that a missile was involved, somehow. But the powers that be don’t want them to look into this issue, and have a vested interest – why??? – in shooting down the missile theory, despite many eyewitnesses who saw what appeared to be a missile. Somewhat of a paranoia trip, with the pair having to figure out who they can trust, and what is really going on.

The rest of the stories involve characters who just show up for that particular story.
By The Rivers of Babylon. Two El Al Concordes are brought down by a terrorist attack. The crew and passengers of one survive, only to be assaulted by successive waves of PLO terrorists very close to the ruins of Babylon in the Iraqi desert. We have corroboration in here, as noted in Red Horizons and Seven Pillars of Wisdom (both of those non-fiction) that Arab terrorists are notorious homosexuals and lousy soldiers. Remarkably, the Israelis hook up with a remote, isolated group of Jews who had been left behind in Babylon thousands of years ago (obviously these are their descendants…!)

Word of Honor. Ben Tyson, a US officer in Hue in 1968, is brought up on charges of murder in the battle in that city. He has to defend himself, yet ultimately the truth unfolds. This was made into a made-for-TV movie with Don Johnson as Tyson.

Gold Coast. Something on Long Island involving wealthy WASPs and Mafia types. Vaguely reminiscent of The Great Gatsby.

Charm School. This was the first one I read. It’s about a “charm school” – a finishing school in the USSR for the KGB. It’s complete with a 7-11, a McDonald’s, etc., and designed to give KGB agents the ability to speak and act like Americans, not merely fluent English with Russian accent. It even features a third generation (82-92) Trans Am.

Spencerville. Keith Landry returns to small town Ohio after years abroad in the CIA killing exotic people in exotic places. There he finds his high school sweetheart has married the local corrupt, brutal police chief. Although he hasn’t made any overtures at the woman, “this town is only big enough for one of us”, and the jealous chief starts making trouble for him immediately. You can pretty much figure out where this goes. His ex-CIA buddy reminds him: “BUCHAREST.” Like I need to be reminded.

Talbot Odyssey. Another Cold War relic; this one involves a Soviet plot to induce EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) by detonating a nuclear device at high altitude above the US. The Soviet consulate at Glen Cove, Long Island, is the focal point of this one. It also turns out that a high ranking CIA officer is a Soviet mole (no, it wasn’t Ames). One of the bad characters is… a Romanian woman. Clearly not completely fiction.

Mayday. This one was co-written with Thomas Block. A new-fangled high-altitude airliner fucks up somehow, leaving everyone except one Ted Striker guy either dead or permanently brain damaged. Ted has to land the plane himself (with no inflatable automatic pilot), but comes across resistance: the airline has cynically determined that its liability will be less if the plane crashes completely, killing everyone on board (including Ted) than it would be if Ted successfully landed a plane of brain-dead zombies the airline will be legally obligated to support for the rest of their lives. So quite apart from landing the damn thing (hard enough in and of itself) he has to deal with the bullshit from the airlines (sounds like something from “South Park”).

Cathedral. A bunch of IRA terrorists capture St. Patrick’s Cathedral in NYC on the eve of the St Patrick’s Day parade. They take the Bishop (not Terry Jones) hostage. An NYC cop of Irish descent, don’t you know, turns out to be better for the cops than the actual hostage negotiator.

As I noted above, they’re all worth reading, and though I preferred some over others, none were of substandard quality. Unlike Tom Clancy, though, DeMille doesn’t get bogged down in military technology, though there is more than enough of that in several of the books to keep the fans of that stuff satisfied. Of course, there’s also sex….which is always good.

Joyeux Noel

The true story of the “Christmas truce” of 1914 in WWI. On Christmas Eve, somewhere on the trench lines where a Scottish unit was stationed next to a French unit, peace broke out between the two sides. A German opera singer and his fiance (also an opera singer) sang for both sides; the troops came out and shared stories, alcoholic beverages, and pictures; and on Christmas Day they buried their dead and played some football. They could walk around No Man’s Land without worrying about shooting each other. Needless to say, the top brass considered all this “treason” and forbid this from ever happening again. Sure enough, it was GOOD for morale and BAD for the war. How can you shoot at men you’ve talked to in person just hours before? How can you go on when you can see how stupid the war is? When you see you have more in common with the poor soldiers on the other side than with the idiots running the war on your own? And imagine if this “truce” had occurred all the way up and down the trench line, from Switzerland to the English Channel. The war would have been over immediately; they would have faced a wholesale mutiny on all sides, German, French and British. It doesn’t take too much to imagine the soldiers telling the officers, “fuck you, if you and the top brass want a war, you can fight it yourselves!”

Clearly, soldiers who took enemy trenches could see that their foes lived in as much misery and filth as they did. Watching your own soldiers get wiped out by “friendly fire” drove home how much damage they were doing to each other. For the life of them, the soldiers could not grasp what the war was all about. Even had they been astute enough to have some idea of the assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo, that still wouldn’t explain why Germans, French and British were slaughtering each other in France. Why not just let the Austrians and Serbs murder each other – assuming the Archduke’s life was worth even that?

In “All Quiet on the Western Front”, the German soldiers casually speculate on the reason for the war. Although (with a few exceptions) they’re fairly bright soldiers, they still come up with blanks. Even the dull soldier has the common sense to realize, “I’ve never even MET an Englishman until I fought them in the trenches, and I dare say many of them would say the same about us.” Time and time again the soldiers realize, “I have no particular beef, gripe, complaint, or grudge against the opposing side, either as an aggregate country or against enemy soldiers in particular.” How can they? They’ve never even met each other.

WWII was a bit different. There, suddenly, they had ideology to motivate them – ideological motivations which were mostly absent during WWI. The Germans were motivated by regular nationalism (most Wehrmacht personnel), National Socialism (Waffen SS), and anti-bolshevism (all of them); add to this the remarkable multi-national nature of the Waffen SS, somehow able to recruit French, Belgians, Dutch, Danes, Norwegians, etc. (former enemies!) to fight against the Russians – hell, they got RUSSIANS to fight the Russians. Again, testimony to how brutal and unpopular Stalin and the Soviet government was that there was no shortage of not only Ukrainians and other ethnic groups, but even Russians, willing to fight for the Nazis against the Red Army. For their part, the Russians were motivated by their own nationalism (for most soldiers of the Red Army) and communism (for the minority). The Allies were motivated by abstract notions of freedom and liberty; and the moral indignation became even fiercer once US troops began liberating concentration camps and discovering what the Germans were really up to all this time. The Japanese sincerely believed in their own country’s destiny to rule Asia and defeat the caucasian US/European powers. Of course, WWII was also a dynamic war, with no stalemates on any front. Men died, but in the course of attacking and defending, not this business of thousands dead for a few inches of strategically inconsequential mud. The front moved too fast for soldiers to worry too much about how their enemies were dealing with it.

And in Iraq today there is no connection between the US troops and the insurgents they fight against. The insurgents don’t see us as normal human beings trying to make Iraq a better place, we’re just occupiers. And our troops aren’t inclined to view the insurgents as normal human beings trying to liberate their own country, they’re just a bunch of sick fucks (which they are). The cultural and religious differences are too much between the sides to permit the kind of fraternization which occurred in No Man’s Land on Christmas Day in 1914, to occur in Iraq today.

Consider this, too: in the US, we have Protestants, Catholics, Jews, etc. all living together peacefully without killing each other (Northern Ireland is a different story). Yet in Iraq there is civil war beween Sunnis and Shi’ites – sects of the SAME RELIGION! If Sunnis and Shi’ites can’t get along with each other, how can Muslims possibly relate to, much less peacefully coexist with, other religions? More directly, how can the Muslim insurgents ever relate to the US soldiers? We’re talking about fanatics by their nature. But at least us Americans and Europeans can enjoy our own peace and Christmas.

Deep Purple 1984-Present

[Originally posted 12/13/07.  Edited 6/30/2020.]

This could be called “Deep Purple Marks II, V, VI, and VII”. I love those Roman numerals.

Background. Deep Purple, as most people know it, is best known in its Mark II lineup: Ian Paice (drums), Jon Lord (keyboards), Ritchie Blackmore (guitar), Roger Glover (bass), and Ian Gillan (vocals). It originally disbanded in 1976 with the so-called Mark IV lineup: Ian Paice (drums), Jon Lord (keyboards), David Coverdale (vocals), Glenn Hughes (bass), and American guitarist Tommy Bolin. Their sole album, Come Taste The Band, wasn’t bad, but live the band started off OK but descended into mediocrity when they toured overseas and Bolin couldn't sustain his heroin habit.

Coverdale went off to form Whitesnake, Blackmore had already formed Rainbow, and the other members frequently jumped from one to the other. In 1980 Mark I & Captain Beyond vocalist Rod Evans was lured into a shady promoter’s scheme to resurrect “Deep Purple” (for which Evans was the only person with any connection to the band – Mark I bassist Nick Simper wisely refused to take the bait) which backfired badly.

By 1984 the various Mark II members were ready for a reunion, and came out with a new album, Perfect Strangers. When I first saw the album in the stores, I ignored it, assuming it was another compilation album. I got it for Christmas in 1984, and was pleasantly surprised to learn it was a reunion album for the Mark II lineup. We saw them at the Palais Omnisports Bercy the following summer, opened by Mountain (Leslie West forgot the words when singing).

They followed this up with House of Blue Light (which I listened to exactly ONCE), and then a live album, Nobody’s Perfect, featuring “Hush” brought back into the set.

Mark V. Thanks to Ritchie Blackmore, Ian Gillan was fired and Joe Lynn Turner (Rainbow) was brought in for Slaves & Masters, another remarkably mediocre album. I suppose you could call this lineup (Turner in place of Gillan) as Mark V.

Mark II returns. For 1993, this was the 25^th anniversary, so the rest of the band felt Gillan should come back. They recorded The Battle Rages On, and went on a remarkable tour before Blackmore quit in the middle of the tour. This time Tommy Bolin was not available to take his place.  Famous guitarist Joe Satriani filled in for the remainder of the tour but declined to join the band permanently.

Note:  some people are classifying the Satriani touring lineup, 12/2/93 Nagoya through 7/6/94 Bayreuth, as "Mark VI".  Others are classifying the reunited Mark II lineups for Perfect Strangers/House of Blue Light and The Battle Rages On as separate marks.  Both are, of course, utter nonsense.  Satriani's lineup simply finished the Battle Rages On tour and did not record any new material, not even releasing a live album from that leg of the tour.  And the same five members who gave us Machine Head also recorded Perfect Strangers and The Battle Rages On.  Enjoy the band, but don't be stupid.  Please.  

Mark VI. With Satriani refusing to join the band, they brought in Steve Morse, an American from the Dixie Dregs (a band I’ve listened to none of) to take over, and he’s been in ever since. This should be referred to as Mark VI. They released Purpendicular and Abandon, both produced by Roger Glover, the bassist.

Mark VII. Eventually Jon Lord decided it was time to retire, and Don Airey took over on keyboards, resulting in DP Mark VII. This lineup recorded Bananas and Rapture of the Deep, produced by Michael Bradford, followed by Now What ?! and Infinite, produced by Bob Ezrin, with another album due out in August 2020, Whoosh!. With Lord gone, this means that Ian Paice is the only DP member in all seven lineups.  

Quality. I suppose many bands like Deep Purple could rest on their laurels and cynically release regurgitated crap year after year, assuming the fans will buy whatever they put out. But Deep Purple make a sincere effort at making quality material. I can’t say it compares favorably to In Rock, Fireball or Machine Head (the classic three original Mark II albums) but it certainly doesn’t suck.

Of the post 1984 material, I'd say Now What ?! and Infinite are the strongest.  The key is producer Bob Ezrin, veteran of Alice Cooper, KISS and Pink Floyd.  

Live. This is up and down. On one hand, Marks VI and VII play a lot of the lesser known (but no less quality) Mark II tracks such as “Pictures of Home”, “Maybe I’m a Leo”, “Woman From Tokyo”, “No One Came”, “Bloodsucker”, etc. Part of the problem with bands which have been around for some time is that get into a fixed pattern of certain classics which MUST be played. Iron Maiden did a recent tour in which they claimed to only play songs from the first 4 albums (which must have kept Janick Gers busy) yet such was the setlist that the only song we hadn’t heard in some time was “Phantom of the Opera”. Blue Oyster Cult seem to have ONE slot (song) per set which is some random variable, with the rest of the set being pretty much what we heard on the last tour. Granted, we know Purple will play “Smoke on the Water” – in the encore – but these other songs really make a difference.

On the other hand, they hardly tour nearly as much as they used to – especially here in the US.  When I originally wrote this blog, I hadn't seen them since the Bercy show in Paris in 1985.  Since then I've seen them at Bergen PAC (8/25/14) (Englewood, NJ), NYCB Westbury (7/26/15) (Long Island, NY), and the Warner Theater in DC (10/2/19).  They seem to release live material fairly often.

Roger Glover. My favorite member has to be Glover, who only missed out at the very beginning, and has been the band’s most consistent bassist. He’s eternally optimistic, a great source of information on all the liner notes, and the helpful re-producer of all the remastered Mark II material – and the source, through a nightmare, of the title to their anthem, “Smoke on the Water.”

Summer of '88

As the snow falls early this year, I’m reminded of…summer. Particularly, another special summer, 1988.


Background. I had finished sophomore year at University of Maryland, and was taking 4 summer classes in order to get into the business school in fall. This meant staying on campus over the summer instead of returning home to Paris. Fortunately my best friend Phil was around, and one of my top friends at UMCP, Baron, was also taking summer classes, even staying in the apartment next door.


Classes. I took Accounting I, Accounting II, Calculus and Statistics. The accounting I professor was a Chinese woman with an impenetrable accent. Calculus was an easy A, as it was less challenging than the calculus class I’d already taken in high school. Statistics was dull, but it was a night class. Although the summer schedule meant classes 5 days a week, they were at noon or 2 p.m. so I could sleep late every day. I had no idea summer school was this laid back.


Apartment. I was in an on-campus apartment with Dave – a Diamondback photographer – and Jeff, a Texan from Houston studying urban studies. In July my brother came down from NYC, and then my Dad came down, and we all went up to NYC when my summer session ended.


Car. I had been saving up for a late 70’s Trans Am, but just as I was about to buy one, my parents bought me an ’84 Chevrolet Cavalier. Excellent gas mileage, if not particularly reliable, but it had A/C, automatic transmission, 4 doors, and a tape deck; and it could fit the 4 cubic foot fridge I was using.
I had gotten my drivers’ license in summer ’86 as a 17 year old, but without a car to drive consistently, my skills were almost nonexistent. The MVA test was “parallel park behind the MVA building”, not a very good indication of highway driving. I knew I’d have to teach myself how to drive.
Fortunately, UMCP has a small “city” worth of roads, and during summer the campus is virtually deserted, allowing me to drive around and teach myself. From there I ventured forth into traffic on Route 1, then brief trips along the Beltway. When I first drove all the way around the Beltway to Fairfax, to visit my friend Phil, it was like crossing the ocean. From there I learned to drive at night, a completely different experience. I even had my first accident: a minor scrape with a UMCP utility pickup truck. The crew said not to worry about it, they wouldn’t even file their own claim.


Music. The big deal was that (A) I got a CD player (er…borrowed my brother’s over the summer) and (B) got into early Scorpions, mainly Fly to the Rainbow and Lonesome Crow. I managed to jam with my friend Ken in Columbia.


Concerts. This was a great year for concerts.

1. Pink Floyd at RFK, the Momentary Lapse of Reason tour. Baron and his buddy Rob sold Floyd pictures Baron had taken at the Philadelphia show. I guarded the stash while reading Ayn Rand books. Our seats were in section 300,000 something.
2. Van Halen’s Monsters of Rock. Also at RFK, this time with Phil. Kingdom Come, Metallica, Dokken, Scorpions, and Van Halen (with Sammy Hagar) on the OU812 Tour. The fans set fire to the seats during VH’s set, forcing them to turn on the house lights. Sammy Hagar wasn’t sure whether to be impressed or amused.
3. Iron Maiden, at the Cap Center, with my brother. This was the Seventh Son tour. I got great tickets at the Stamp Union, “camping out” with minimal competition. A great show!
4. Judas Priest, at the Cap Center, with my brother. This was the Ram it Down Tour. More awesome seats! Not quite “Heavy Metal Parking Lot”, but close. This was the first time I’d ever seen Priest in concert.
5. AC/DC at Madison Square Garden, with my brother. I scored 5^th row seats buying them at the box office a week before the show. White Lion opened. Another great show, even if the album they were touring, Blow Up Your Video, totally sucked.
   

NYC. Every other year we went back to the US for home leave in summer. In ’88, my parents decided to swap places again, but unlike ’84, when we got Bag End, this time we scored a huge apartment on 5^th Avenue & 96^th Street in Manhattan. We went to the Empire State Building, the World Trade Center, the guitar stores, the subway, Central Park, the library, and even walked all the way from 34^th Street back to 96^th. The AC/DC concert I mentioned above. Finally, we rode the Cyclone at Coney Island.

In 1998 I visited our relatives in Glens Falls, New York, only vaguely aware that France won the World Cup (“o que aconteceu????"). I have to wonder what summer 2008 has in store for us.

Stupid is as Stupid Does

"Stupid is as stupid does" - I noticed many movies or TV shows feature ridiculously stupid people, but the show itself is actually pretty smart.  In a sense it’s wisdom cleverly hidden amidst idiocy.

The Simpsons is one of the best examples.  Although Homer himself is almost completely clueless, the rest of the cast are considerably smarter.  And Groening’s humor has yet to peak.  There are so many inside jokes, left and right, it’s like an animated version of Dennis Miller without being nearly as obscure or pretentious.  You can count on this whenever Sideshow Bob (Kelsey Grammer) makes another attempt to kill Bart (“’Vendetta’ in English is…vendetta!” and Sideshow Bob correcting the Italian villager’s pronunciation of “bon giorno”).  Futurama could be labelled the same way: despite Fry being such an idiot, the humor and plots are fairly clever.  Homer and Fry each have a sort of endearing charm despite their mental deficiencies.  I’m convinced that Groening is one of the most creative and intelligent minds in the entertainment business, in the same rank and class as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.

Family Guy.  I mentioned this earlier in my comparison with “Peanuts”, “Snoopy vs. Brian”.  This show tries to be a little too clever, especially Stewie.  Peter’s stupidity has NEVER reached the point where I find it entertaining, unlike Homer and Fry.  But still worth watching.  Although South Park is clearly very intelligent, I can’t include it here because none of the main characters – even Cartman – are stupid.

Forrest Gump.  I have to put this one in here because of how stupid Forrest was, but I’m ambivalent about this movie.  On one hand, the story is amazing – including his trip to Vietnam.  On the other hand, he seems to triumph not through his own virtue or bravery but due to sheer dumb luck, as if we’re supposed to imagine some virtue in dumb luck itself, personified by Forrest.  Uhh, so what is the point?

Idiocracy: the whole point was that the world 500 years from now was incredibly stupid, thanks to something like 2000 generations of incessant breeding among the idiots who can’t conceive of, much less successfully manage, birth control or zero population growth, whereas the all-too-valuable intelligent fraction of the population has perfected it all too well.  But it is a good film.  Incidentally, it makes a fairly strong argument for the otherwise discredited doctrine of eugenics, whereby – “YOU!  OUT OF THE GENE POOL!!!” – the lesser among us are forcibly sterilized (possibly through execution) so that our inferior genes can be weeded out and humans selectively bred for superior traits.  This was brought to its logical conclusion, much to everyone’s horror, by the Nazis.  Before they slaughtered Jews by the train load, their initial targets for death were the old, crippled, and mentally retarded in a euthanasia program expressly designed to eliminate undesirable traits from the overall Aryan population.  This movie makes the doctrine make sense, at least as far as targeting stupidity as a trait worthy of sterilization if not elimination.

Beavis & Butt-head.  When I first saw this I couldn’t stand it.  They were just TOO STUPID to be entertaining.  This had to grow on me.  I noticed the satire of the touchy-feely social studies teacher, Van Driessen; the uptight Principal McVicker; and my favorite, Coach Buzzcut, who shouts everything as an order, as if he’s either a drill sergeant in the Marine Corps or back in Vietnam. But even the stupidity has a certain clever edge to it:

            Beavis [watching video of vintage Black Sabbath]: “Are these guys from Seattle?”

            Butt-Head: “No, they’re American!”  or

            Beavis [watching video of Slayer…or was it Pantera?]: “These guys must get lots of chicks!”

            Butt-Head [actually thinking for a change]: “Uhh, I think they probably SCARE chicks.”

            Beavis: “Cool. The only thing cooler than bands that GET chicks are bands that SCARE chicks!”

Bill & Ted.  In “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” and “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey”, two idiots from San Dimas, California, Bill Preston (Alex Winter – where is HE now??) and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Keanu Reeves, marginally more “whoa”-y in this film than later) are assisted by Rufus (George Carlin) to save Earth from its own thoughtless cruelty and preserve a most excellent and righteous future. 

            The first movie featured them collecting various historical figures: Abraham Lincoln, Sigmund Freud, Billy the Kid, Napoleon (aka “short dead dude”), Beethoven, Genghis Khan, Joan of Arc, and Socrates (whose name they pronounce “So-crates”), in order to successfully complete their history project and not fail, as destiny requires them to remain together as a pair.  

In the second film, killed by an evil pair of Bill & Ted robots near the rock cropped hillside – featured in three separate “Star Trek” episodes – they go to Hell, where they experience various personal “hells” before beating Death at various kids games, an obvious homage to “The Seventh Seal”, the dark, cynical classic B&W film with Max von Sydow.  They get to Heaven and work out – carefully and none too quickly – that returning to Earth alive isn’t enough.  They need help defeating the evil Bill & Ted robots or they’ll simply be killed again.  They get the alien “station” pair to help them out, and emerge most triumphant.

With Bill & Ted, the underlying idea is "be excellent to one another". How can these two idiots somehow figure this out, yet it eludes all us smart people?  What you have is an essentially Christian message hidden inside two dolts from San Dimas.  This is the ultimate stealth moral – a clever, decent message hidden deep within what appears to be colossal stupidity. 

Fast Food Revisited

Eric Schlosser obviously has his own opinion of fast food – and I have mine.  I don’t eat nearly as much of it these days as I used to – and only abstain completely during Lent, a particularly onerous sacrifice which makes Easter Sunday that much more meaningful – but I still love much of it.

 Chipotle.  When it first came out, I initially shunned this place as pretentious, although the first one I saw open was only two blocks from my apartment.  It is, very much, an upscale Taco Bell, but much more than that.  Rather than Taco Bell, which slaps your taco, burrito or chalupa in the back, out of your sight and control, according to a predetermined formula, with Chipotle it’s made right in front of you to your exact specifications, so no one can sneeze, piss, or spit into your taco without your knowledge (unless you ask them to).  And the ingredients taste like normal, real food (which can’t be said for Taco Bell), no headless chickens or cannibal cows.  Once I discovered Chipotle and its steak soft tacos, it was ADIOS Taco Bell.  Incidentally, I can’t seem to enjoy the various copycat upscale competitors, Moe’s Southwest Grill, California Tortilla, Baja Mexican, Baja Fresh, etc.  They all seem like bad imitations, no matter how hard they try, though they do taste more wholesome than Taco Bell.  Remarkably, I’ve never seen ANY TV ads for Chipotle.  They’re no longer owned by McDonald’s, for those of you who do the “who owns who so we can boycott them” analysis.  Given the Mayan motif in many of the stores, an “Apocalyptica” tie-in might have been appropriate, if Chipotle ever went for such things.

 Taco Bell.  As noted above, I used to like this place, until Chipotle showed up.  The steak quesadillas are good, but not much else.  The stuff tastes machine-like, plastic, and fake, more so than any other chain.  Blah.  Does anyone miss “Yo Queiro Taco Bell” with the live-action Ren?  They must have the same R&D dept as Pizza Hut (see below).

 Roy Rogers.  Before Chipotle, this was my favorite, so much so that we used to call it “The Temple.”  Fortunately McDonald’s hasn’t killed all of them, so I can enjoy a huge, juicy roast beef sandwich (on a Kaiser roll!!) in Frederick, Leesburg or Franconia.  And the fries, cut so damn big, are equally irresistible.  Sorry, but Hardee’s and Arby’s don’t cut it; the roast beef tastes like ham and they ruin it with a sesame seed bun – leave that for the burgers, you clueless dumbasses.  The curly fries are the only things going for them.  I don’t think I ever saw Roy Rogers himself in person in any of the places, but he did show up in the ads.  The first Roy’s opened in 1968 at Bailey’s Crossroads, Falls Church, Virginia (I’ve actually eaten there, and now it’s a McDonald’s…of course.  Someone from Roy’s should buy the first McDonald’s in San Bernadino, California, if it’s still there, and turn it into a Roy’s – perhaps the current owners, the Plamondons, will tackle that sensitive operation).  The largest fast food location in the world was the Roy’s at the Stamp Union at the University of Maryland, College Park – if only because the eating area also doubled as the eating area for the University’s own Stamp Union eateries.  My sole fast food employment experience, all six nasty weeks of it, were at the Stamp Union eateries (which is another story….).  There are still a few Roy’s at the rest areas on the New Jersey Turnpike.

 McDonald’s.  “Evil Clown”, as we began calling them after they bought out Roy’s and started shutting them down or converting them into yet MORE McDonald’s (as if there weren’t enough already).  I’m ambivalent about McDonald’s.  I like the McNuggets and Selects, but I would never touch a Big Mac or a Quarter Pounder.  I really hate complex tastes, so any kind of burger where they add in everything but the kitchen sink – particularly mustard, mayo, pickles, etc. – really stinks.  If I want a burger, I’ll go to Fuddruckers and get a huge, well-made burger that I can dress the way I want: just with ketchup.  (Is Fuddrucker’s fast food?  A judgment call on that one.)  However, for breakfast, McDonald’s has the best pancakes, aside from IHOP.  Where are the Hippie Meals with McAcid (“do you believe in acid?”).  Everyone already knows about McDonald’s, anyhow, and I kissed their McAss in the FFN & Reefer Madness blog.

By the way, what is Grimace??

 Burger King.  Since Burger King’s main deal is the Whopper, another of these burgers with too much shit inside, BK is not a big one for me.  At least their breakfast menu has Mini Cinis.  The fries here are good, though not as good as Roy’s.  Where are the Burger King glasses?  All the movie tie-ins these days are for kids meal toys.  (Why no “Reservoir Dogs”, “Eyes Wide Shut”, or “Scarface” tie-in?  Come on!)

 Wendy’s.  Lame – they make a “big” burger by stacking up the smaller, thinner ones.  Uhh, yeahh.  Once was enough for their crappy excuse for a hamburger.  But the chicken nuggets and fries are worth indulging in. RIP Dave Thomas…no, not the Doug McKenzie guy from SCTV.

 Five Guys.  Not a bad burger.  This started out as a local – Arlington, Virginia – chain with just a few locations, then expanded dramatically in very recent years.  Now there’s one in Frederick to tempt my mom, though with a Roy’s right next door, the temptation can’t be that strong.

 KFC.  Quality chicken, though I can’t stand dark meat or “buffalo wings”.  The crispy skins on the chicken are a guilty pleasure.  Even the crispy strips are great.  I’m not big into chicken, but I’ll go with KFC every now and then.  Back in the 70s’, several KFCs were Gino’s (1959-82), with an indistinguishable menu.

 Long John Silver’s.  Along with Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips, the only seafood-oriented fast food place I know of, and both are equally thin on the ground in my neck of the woods.  There is a LJS in Falls Church, but I’m not aware of where the nearest ATF&C is.  Both were pretty much the same, not bad, but seafood is not my cup of tea.

 Dunkin’ Donuts vs. Krispy Kreme vs. Montgomery Donuts.  I’m not a cop or a donut guy (Homer Simpson: “donut….”) so this really isn’t my scene, but once I discovered KK it was all over.  While the KK donuts freshly baked at the store, right off the flat rack, are heavenly – well worthy of Homer’s drooling adoration – the ones that make it to the supermarkets aren’t worth considering.  For some reason Montgomery Donuts had a store policy of always having a cheap shitty radio cranking out the local news channel. 

 Baskin-Robbins vs. Carvel vs. Cold Stone.  I’m not much of an ice cream guy; to me Dairy Queen is in a league of their own.  Among the lesser lights, BR is probably the best.  Carvel had the ice cream cakes, but to me cake should be cake, right?  If I want ice cream I’ll eat ice cream.  They did have the chocolate-sprinkled Lollapalooza, though I don’t know if they still have it.  The one in Gaithersburg was right next to the record store where my brother got Hotter Than Hell (KISS) and I got a Sha Na Na record (which of those two bands filled the stadiums, huh?).  Cold Stone is not to be confused with the idiotically named Stone Hot Pizza.  You know, like Queen’s “Stone Hot Crazy” and the wrestler “Stone Hot” Steve Austin.

 Bob’s.  Only in Brazil – the first one opened in Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro in 1952.  The guy who started Bob’s in the 50s used to work for McDonald’s, so it’s no surprise that this Brazilian chain is virtually indistinguishable from McDonald’s.  Not bad at all, if you like the burgers, fries, and drink deal, but nothing special beyond that.  They don’t have any evil clown or bizarre, H.R. Pufn’Stuff like psychedelic characters to entertain the kids and freak out the adults.  It’s just remarkable that Brazilians can pull off such a good copy of McDonald’s.

 Habib’s.  Another only in Brazil, Portugal and Angola (when I think of fast food, I definitely think of Angola).  This is Lebanese fast food – go figure!  Not only that, they serve beer and caipirinhas!  Mixed drinks at a fast food place?  Amazing.  Even more remarkable, the guy who founded it in São Paulo is Portuguese, not Arab!  Top menu items are esfiha (not bad with meat filling) and kibe, sort of an egg-shaped grenade of ground beef laced with onions (blah).  They were going to expand to the US in 2001, until that minor incident on September 11 made Arab things somewhat unpopular here.  They might as well have called it McJihad’s for all the good it would have done.   If the war in Iraq ever ends (?) maybe they can get Habib’s going here.  There is no Habib’s in Lebanon, but there is Taco Bell in Mexico.  Go figure.

 Burger Chef.  Gone, but not forgotten (1956-1982).  BC used to have these fantastic pop-up meals, a different one each week, consistently week after week.  You never knew what you’d get, it was like the Grateful Dead of fast food.  Although the food was garden variety fast food (burgers, fries, shakes) the packaging was unique.

 Red Barn.  Another casualty of the Fast Food Wars, starting in the early 60s and ending in the 80s.  I can’t recall the food being particularly special, but the barn motif was unique.  I still see former Red Barns under new mgmt as banks, dry cleaners, etc. in the same barn-like building.  Somewhere there’s a barn out in the country shaped like a McDonald’s, probably the scariest place you could be if you were a McCow or a McChicken.

 Jack-in-the-Box.  Unlike Burger Chef, which is defunct nationwide, JitB only lost the Reston, Virginia location but is still thriving elsewhere in the country.  We went to the Reston one back in the 70s, but the only special element in their menu were the tacos, long before we even knew Taco Bell existed.

 A&W.  I’m not a big fan of root beer, but this place has decent food.  Not so decent, though, that I feel compelled to visit the only one I know of still in existence in my area, in Chantilly near the intersection of 28 and 50.

 Dairy Queen.  They had one at Walnut Hill, in Gaithersburg (near the Kramer’s where we got the Star Trek shirts mentioned in the last blog), which closed ages ago; now they seem to be coming back.  Although it has a non-ice-cream menu – including burgers – I only go there for the delicious hot fudge sundaes.  They used to have Dennis the Menace as a mascot.

 Mario’s.  A local sub place in Arlington, only ONE location since the 50’s and now open practically 24 hours a day.  They make the lousy square-sliced pizzas (not that great) but they have the best steak & cheese subs anywhere, bar none.  The meat is super thick, no one else does it that well.  On Wilson Blvd. east of Ballston and west of Clarendon, two blocks from the George Mason University School of Law – I had lots of subs on lunch breaks during law school.

 Jerry’s Subs & Pizzas.  Excellent subs, a good 2^nd to Mario’s, and the pizza is damn good considering how cheap it is.  They have a great chopped steak sub, and several chicken subs.  The Beast is too big for me to finish even half of.  Their radio ads are pretty good.

 Subway.  I had a “Falling Down” moment when I tried their new steak sub, which looked NOTHING like the ad – totally lame.  They may have nice, freshly baked bread, but little of value to actually put on that nice, freshly baked bread.  No grill!  It’s all healthy, perhaps, but that doesn’t mean it tastes that great.  I can endure their meatball subs or grilled chicken breasts, but the steak subs are low quality.

 Quizno’s.  BLAH. Toasted subs, rat meat.  I can’t stand this place.

 Vocelli’s.  They took over from Domino’s as my favorite pizza delivery chain.  What can I say?  My particular taste in pizza.  I first had it out in Centreville at my brother’s house, and they gradually expanded into my neighborhood, thank God.

 Domino’s.  A close second to Vocelli’s.  The breadsticks are also quality.

 Pizza Hut.  VOMITO.  I can’t stand their cheese.  What diseased cow do they come from?  The breadsticks are quality, though.  For some reason the lunch buffet pizza is not bad – but why it should be any different than the usual pizza, I have no clue.  Usually the all-you-can-eat stuff is noxious trash compared to the a la carte menu, here it’s the other way around (this is why I avoid Old Country Buffet and the other all-you-can-puke buffet places).  I will say this: they are the most innovative at coming out with bizarre variants, like stuffed-crust pizza, though it would mean more if the cheese wasn’t so disgusting.  Maybe their R&D Dept. is a bunch of stoners high on weed – truly inspired!!!  Picture a house full of stoners, cluelessly toking and eating pizza, listening to the Dead, Floyd, Allman Brothers, while behind a two-way mirror, unknown to them, Pizza Hut scientists in white lab coats holding clipboards diligently monitor the unwitting subjects, waiting for them to come up with yet another “totally radical” pizza innovation – and laughing when the stoners recognize, in Pizza Hut commercials, that “dude, they totally ripped off my idea!!!” and then get paranoid (rightfully so) before, like, crashing.

 Papa John’s.  #3 after Domino’s and Vocelli’s.  Not bad, just not as good as the others.  Their breadsticks, though, are a bit weak.

 Incidentally, I just got back from New Jersey (just outside NYC) and had some fantastic New York style pizza.  For some reason it’s practically impossible to find it outside the NYC/NJ area, though there are countless places around here which claim – incorrectly so – to have so-called “New York style” pizza.  It’s good pizza – though not necessarily the best.  The worst pizza is a tie between University of Maryland Dining Services and any of that cake/pie/crap they call “Chicago style pizza”.

 Little Caesar’s.  Now few and far between – most of the ones in my area are now Papa John’s - but an excellent deal when they were around.  Their carry-out special was unbeatable, so we’d gladly go there to pick it up.  My first night I had my base Firebird, November 22, 1992, we went out and got Little Caesar’s TWICE.  Good memories.

Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD)

Despite what happened with Marge in the kitchen, Shelbyville cannot lace Springfield’s (or anyone else’s) water supply with LSD: the drug is too unstable and complicated, and gets broken down immediately by the chlorine and other chemicals in the water treatment plants.  This is the same reason the water supplies are essentially immune to potential biological terrorist attack, as these chemicals attack bacteria as well.  In any case, the effects would take an hour or two to really get going, not instantaneous as happened to Marge.  

 In the Beginning, there was Sandoz.  Working on ergot alkaloids for Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland, Albert Hofmann (one f, two n’s) invented lysergic acid diethylamide in 1938.  They marketed it as Delysid.  Can you imagine the ads today?  “Delysid is not for everyone…consult your doctor about Delysid.  Side effects may include…”.   Having successfully developed several other (non-hallucinogenic) ergot compounds which became commercially successful for Sandoz, he put LSD aside for the time being.  In 1943, he dusted off the LSD and began working on it again, and accidentally ingested it through his skin, becoming the first person to trip on it.  Soon after he took another trip, resulting in a horrifying bicycle ride (wartime restrictions limiting gasoline engine vehicles).  The rest is history.  His book, LSD: My Problem Child is remarkable, although only half of it is really about LSD itself.  The drug definitely changed him, although he remained the efficient, normal-looking Swiss chemist with the analytical mind we expect from Germans/Swiss.   

 Eventually Sandoz was embarrassed by the publicity surrounding LSD and stopped making it.  The premier LSD source of the 60’s, Augustus Owsley Stanley, III, better known as "Bear", claimed to be able to make purer LSD than Sandoz itself; his variety “Blue Cheer” became the name of a SF metal band, and his poetry graces the inside covers of their albums, but he is usually associated with the Grateful Dead and claims he was never very impressed by Blue Cheer.

 Effects. LSD is the most powerful drug known to man, as noted in the Guinness Book of World Records.   Doses are measured in micrograms, not milligrams.  Although it’s been produced in tablet and liquid form, blotter paper (as shown second left) is probably the most popular and well known, and certainly uniquely open to artistic interpretation, something that can't be said about a drug which is injected, snorted or smoked….LSD doesn’t have to be injected, snorted, or smoked.

Low doses.  The spaced out feeling like a mild fever, or Darvocet/Percocet.  Something isn’t quite right, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  Still able to have something close to a normal conversation.

            Medium doses.  The visuals show up – trails, colors are brighter, glow, and begin to melt into each other.  Patterns, like wallpaper and oriental carpets, begin to shift, swerve, or scroll; lines on a flannel shirt will dance, woodgrain breathes.  Grass grows before your very eyes.  Album covers breathe and begin to act up, like the living portraits in Harry Potter.  Speech becomes more difficult as the brainwaves no longer directly connect thoughts to spoken words – someone inside (who?) has to translate from the brain to the mouth. 

            Higher doses.  Totally out to lunch, on another planet.  More intense visuals, and the mindf**k goes into overdrive.  The self dissolves into the universe at the molecular level, the ego disappears and nothing has any true meaning anymore.   You’ve shifted into a completely different dimension.  Welcome to “where the hell am I now???”

There is no “cure” for a trip, but thorazine will calm down a bad trip somewhat. Theoretically, a bad trip can happen to even the most experienced tripper, but it's most likely when LSD is taken carelessly  in the wrong set or setting - or if it's given to someone without their knowledge ("Somebody Put Something In My Drink", as the Ramones might  say); the Dead were notorious for doing so, so much so that it was common knowledge to avoid eating or drinking anything in their presence.  Syd Barrett's friends would constantly dose him, thinking they were doing him a favor by keeping him tripping 24/7, ultimately not helping him. 

 The CIA.  It experimented with the drug in the 1950s in the MK-Ultra program, as fully described in Acid Dreams, by Martin Lee & Bruce Shlain.  It turned out to be a lousy truth drug: the subject was as likely to spout complete nonsense as the “truth” (however that could possibly be defined under the influence of the drug), with the interrogator scarcely able to tell one from the other.  It was also useless as a mind control drug, because its effects were so unpredictable and (as noted above) it breaks down in the water supply.  The CIA finally gave up on it altogether, about the same time certain anti-establishment elements discovered it.  This is the twisted part about LSD: it started out within the darkest depths of the establishment, the CIA, and then went to the counterculture.  Before Leary (mentioned below) there was Captain Alfred M. Hubbard, one of the CIA’s biggest fans of LSD.

 Merry Pranksters.  Yes, these are the anti-establishment elements, led by Ken Kesey (author of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest) – they ran out of the Beatles’ 1964 tour screaming as they couldn’t handle “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” on acid.  Kesey & crew, with a plentiful supply of still-legal LSD, painted a school bus (“Furthur”) dayglow colors and toured the country in summer 1964, freaking out unsuspecting locals who had yet to experience LSD or hippies.  Eventually the Acid Tests evolved, group parties in California where a warehouse would be rented, a vat of electric Kool-Aid (laced with LSD) was there for communal drinking, and a house band, the Grateful Dead, would play – all in safe, nonthreatening environment where you were surrounded by like-minded (?) people and not thrust out into a hostile outside world of squares and pigs.  In London the same experience was imitated, the house band being Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd.  Kesey’s antics are best described in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

 Timothy Leary. The all-time ultimate LSD guru.  After a mushroom trip in 1960, he discovered LSD and proceeded to lose his job at Harvard.  From then he preached the LSD gospel to everyone, convinced that LSD could solve all the world’s problems.  Hofmann met him a few times in Switzerland but felt that Leary was responsible for attracting too much unwelcome attention to LSD and encouraging its use among people who really should NOT be tripping.  Eventually Leary got off his acid trip (after a vacation in exile in Algeria, Switzerland, and finally picked up by the FBI in Afghanistan) and turned his attention to space travel and the ultimate final trip, death itself.  Before he died he engaged in a series of public debates with G. Gordon Liddy, his erstwhile nemesis as a NY prosecutor in the late 60s.

 Change the world?  The hippies, including Leary, felt that if LBJ or Nixon could just be dosed, they would wise up and stop the war in Vietnam.  Highly unlilkely. The effects are unpredictable even for the same person tripping more than once – each trip is completely different, like a snowflake – much less predicting how it would affect the President.  For all we know, Nixon might have decided to nuke North Vietnam.  Not good. 

 Acid Casualties.  Charles Manson & Syd Barrett, who I’ve mentioned in earlier blogs, are the most notorious.  Hofmann, though, notes that no one has ever died of an LSD overdose, which can’t be said for heroin.  Much of the anecdotes about people flying off rooftops because of an LSD trip gone wrong usually turn out to be urban legends (remember Pop Rocks?).  The rumors that LSD damaged chromosomes turned out to be complete nonsense, as Generation X has ably demonstrated (these kids are normal, right?).  And the top ranks of corporate America are full of baby boomers who consumed vast quantities of acid in the 60s and eventually rejoined the mainstream rat race like everyone else, none the worse for the whole “experience.”

 It’s the music, man.  Of course, far beyond Timothy Leary or Charles Manson, the ultimate legacy of LSD is in the music we listen to today.  Although much of the LSD-influenced music was psychedelic with little appeal to those not already disposed to take LSD, marijuana, mushrooms, etc. – notably Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead, and Hawkwind – a substantial amount was, and is, accessible to those of us who would never dream of tasting the temporary madness of LSD, but who can nonetheless enjoy the music made by those who did dare to “turn off their minds, relax and float downstream”, the biggest example being the Beatles and their masterpiece, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.  Very little of Sgt Pepper is psychedelic in the sense of “Interstellar Overdrive” (Pink Floyd), “Dark Star” (Grateful Dead) or anything by Hawkwind or King Crimson.  The LSD effect is more subtle than that: it’s the whole concept of the album and how it all fits together; “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is just the ambassador of LSD within the album itself, to those not in tune enough to recognize it in the whole, the big picture.

            But that’s not all.  To the extent a second wave, an “equal and opposite reaction” in the Newtonian sense, of 70s rock developed, mainly Black Sabbath and punk rock (remember that “Pink Floyd Sucks!” t-shirt?), in defiance of the hippies and California sound, we have a secondary ripple from LSD.  From there, you get the bands Black Sabbath influenced, i.e. Metallica and the whole dark heavy metal genre, and its offshoots such as grunge, meaning that LSD’s impact on music is far beyond the Beatles, Hawkwind, Pink Floyd or the Grateful Dead.  Again, even if some metalheads wouldn’t dream of doing LSD, they still listen to, bang their heads to, and enjoy, music which was indirectly caused by the very drug they shun.  There's also a whole newer genre of heavy metal, which developed in the mid 1990s and continues today, called stoner rock, a genre which deserves its own blog entry in its own right.

             Finally, that brings us to Blue Cheer – not only named after LSD, not only having Owsley’s poetry on their albums, but merging both the San Francisco sound with the darker noise of Black Sabbath and proto-metal...arguably the first stoner rock band.