I wanna write to you about the dead birds I've been seeing. I hope this doesn't creep you out.

I want to write about the birds I've been seeing. The dead ones. You don't normally see a lot of dead birds. You'd think you would see more. Lot's more of them.

I think birds number in the billions. And birds don't live very long. At least pigeons and black birds don't. I think. Maybe birds live a long time, but that still doesn't explain why you never see piles of dead birds lying on the street.

But lately things have changed. I've been seeing a lot more dead birds lately. It all started with the dead pigeon at my front door. I opened my front door to see a dead pigeon. Just lying there. Dead. Almost like my cat delivered it for me in that creepy cat way that cats have for showing you they like you.

Only I don't have cat.

But I've noticed since finding that dead bird that cats have been coming around the house a lot more frequently since I let that dead pigeon sit on my front porch for so long. It was really only a few days, but that was long enough to draw attention to this house for the neighborhood felines. They tend to pick up on these things.

But maybe the cats are on to something. Because it was my hope they'd take off with the dead pigeon. Relieving me from the "bad medicine" that a dead pigeon represents. Or at least sparing me the icky collection process.

No such luck. No cat would touch that pigeon long enough to drag it off. And no cat felt that this pigeon was what you might call a "prize" to take home to his overweight and lonely misses.

I am not as freaked out as my roommate over the dead pigeon. I am not what you call spiritual. I tend to get pissed when I am at the Grand Canyon and I can't get my Quizno's on. Warm and Toasty is how my God wanted my cheesesteak to be.

All that was before I began to see the dead black birds.

Normally I would all be for the death of as many black birds as I could find. Me and Black Birds have history. Black birds are spooky. They make your intestines queez up and like a big heaping spoonful of Olestra.

I hope their is nothing supernatural going on. That all these dead black birds I see everywhere aren't some kind of warning that only a forum loving chat room Lost watcher could decipher. Because if so we may well be all doomed. I don't see why the gods always deliver signs to the people least likely to see them or believe them.

Why can't the Pope see all these dead birds? I am sure he'd know exactly where to find this in Deuteronomy or Acts or whatever.

But nope it's just me. And I will just keep stepping around all these dead birds whenever I run into them. I am not going to let any of you asign any value to this occurence whatsoever. No matter how freaky this gets. I am just not.

Cuddles.

Romius T.

A Small Tale of a Guy Who Worries Too Much About the Amount Of Tooth Paste He Uses

After flossing he took out the tooth paste from inside the middle drawer of the mirrored cabinet and placed a peasized amount of tooth paste on top of his tooth brush. He did so only after first rereading the warning label printed on the side of the tube, "children should use a peasized amount and be supervised until they develop good brushing habits i.e. not swallowing."

He'd read that warning label a thousand times, though as a child never followed it. Always in turn placing as much tooth paste as he could fit on to his tooth brush. Sometimes overestimating the amount one could place on a brush, he'd watch the toothpaste drip off and fall into the sink.

He supposed that his placement of peasized amounts of toothpaste as an adult was some kind response to not obeying those instructions as a child. A kind of atonement for past mistakes.

Not that he actually regretted his little rebellions when he was a boy. It was just that today he no longer needed to rebel against authority the way he did as a child. In addition, he worried about the cost of toothpaste.

That's why he held onto several tubes of toothpaste he was given for serving three days is jail for a DUI charge of which he was most certainly guilty.

In the jail each prisoner, he was not certain if the technical term for someone guilty of "just" a DUI and serving his sentence in a city jail was prisoner, but he knew of no other term for it, so each "prisoner" then was given three tubes of toothpaste. That had been three years ago. And he still had one of the tubes left.

"It was quite ironic," he thought, "that the tubes of tooth paste came with a warning on its side for children. Did they really intend "Jail House" tooth paste to be given to children?"

I guess one could say he failed to consider the option that tooth paste for criminals could be given to juvenile delinquents.

It took a long time for all those thoughts to appear in his mind and when they were done he looked back down at the tooth brush he had been holding in his hand and began to to clean his teeth. First he started on the right side of his mouth and then he scrubbed at the gums of his sore molars.

He'd had the molars removed at the age of thirty three. Well after the time the dentist alerted him to the problem. And occasionally the surrounding tissue of the root canal would flare up and give him a painful reminder that at one time his molars had given the marching orders in his mouth.

Not only did the molars tell his mouth what to feel and when, but they had been secretly giving him nasty headaches. He used to take massive doses of aspirin and Tylenol during that time to deaden the pain while his friends taunted him with out mercy for doing so. Saying things like, "You swallow aspirin likes its candy." He often just nodded numbly to their accusations and pretended that the insults they doled out didn't bother him.

But the insults did bother him. They built up inside him. One brick at a time. The insults gave him doubts about the reality of the pain he felt. He began to lose confidence in his minds ability to determine the rationality of his fears.

Later in life his inability to control his irrational impulses would cause his doctors to mistakenly diagnose him with heart trouble. A few weeks stay in a hospital landed him $13,000 in debt. And the sourness of that debt would finally force his friends to confront his hypochondria.

"It was probably just gas." They would say anytime he hung around all his friends. They still enjoyed getting together. And they would razz him like they always did. Hoping this time it would work.

My buddy Enis, who's girlfriend was so hot that an Angel lusted after her, and so she begat a giant, and the giant was evil, and the giant killed us.

Not to mention that the Giant ate a lot before it decided to kill us.

No matter where we went. McDonald's, the local farmer's market, that giant could eat its own weight in food and still want more. A ceaseless hunger that giant had.

I always thought that the mother of that giant was cute, even though she was my best friend's girl. She was skinny and usually that's enough for me. But she also had freckles and a spiral perm. In 1987 spiral perms were totally hot. They still might be today. I never really pay attention to those sorts of things. But I do know that freckles have never been considered hot. Maybe that's why she flirted with me all the time.

I remember the first time I saw Mandi. She had just had a baby. She brought that baby with a giant head to her work which was also my favorite bar. I remember not thinking too much about the kid as the Suns were on TV and Charles Barkley was dunking and shooting his way to a victory over the Spurs.

With less than a minute to go I was staring up at the big screen TV when I noticed out of the corner of my eye Mandi urging her man to leave, "I wanna go, you can watch the game at home."

I saw Enis get up rather sheepishly and I felt sorry for him.

"Why don't you let him stay 'till the end? The game is almost over."
For some reason Mandi relents and allows him to watch the rest of the game. The Suns win on a 16 footer from the "round mound of rebound."

There was an angel in that bar that night. He was watching the Suns game with me. Other than angels drinking at my local bar it had been an unremarkable year in Phoenix. Great basketball and the 130 degree summer temperatures.

That angel looked over at Mandi and Enis' big headed baby and thought to himself, "I wonder what it would be like to have a big headed giant from a spiral haired, cutely freckled, human girl?"

I say he must have thought it, because that's exactly what he did. He even got me to introduce him to her. Later when asked, I wouldn't be able to recall if a skinny blond haired guy in the trench coat frequented the bar where Mandi worked and I so often drank at.

At the time I probably just figured that the guy was there for the same reason I was. His wife had left him and now he was trying to pick up on girls half his age. And if that didn't work he could get drunk and hope the bartender would flirt with him.

Which she did. At first it seemed innocent enough. She gave him free beers and he delighted her with stories from his high school debate team.

I remember the first time I introduced Mandi to him. He'd been seated by himself at a table next to the bar stools, picking away at his complimentary peanuts. He was not what you'd call an attractive man. He had patchy blonde facial hair that wouldn't quite grow in. Much like a pubescent boy's won't. He looked animated and cheerful. But his eyes betrayed him. They were sulky and he tried masking that fact through extravagant vocalizations and flailing his arms about whenever he spoke to nearby patrons or the waitress who refilled his bowl of nuts.

He wore a trench coat. Always. Even in the summer. Despite this I never saw him sweat. And the summer in Phoenix is hellish. Even the devil vacations away from Valley in the summer, preferring the moist heat of Hell to the stifling blast furnace faced when one decides to brave the air un-conditioned.

He said his name was Noah. "Like the sailor?" I asked. He laughed a little at my joke. And seemed intrested in hearing how I had been waiting my whole life to meet a guy named Noah. Just so I could use that joke.

"Do you plan a lot of things like that?"

"I do." I told him.

He thought I was bit odd. And that was OK. He was used to weirdness. He had been in, "Drama club in high school." He didn't get offended when I called him a "Drama Fag" for being in theatre.

That's how I came to introduce my new friend, Noah, to my best friend's girl, Mandi.

Part II coming soon.

Ninja World Movement Alert

World Control has become aware of a massive deployment of Ninjas.

Angola has entered into the collective unconscious of this blog by sending 2500 of its deadly Ninjas to attack Zimbabwe.

Angola sends 2500 'ninjas' to Zimbabwe - World - smh.com.au

The move was called "normal" and "unnewsworthy" by Zimbabwean authorities. We at World Control know better.

Agnosticism is about knowledge.

What is Atheism?

"Atheism entails, minimally, the disbelief[1] in the existence of any deities.[2] It is contrasted with theism, the belief in a God or gods. Atheism is commonly defined as the positive belief that deities do not exist, or as the deliberate rejection of theism.[3][4][5]

However, others define atheism as the simple absence of belief in deities[6][7][8] (cf. nontheism), thereby designating all agnostics, and people who have never heard of gods, such as newborn children, as atheists as well.[9][10]

In recent years, some atheists have adopted the terms strong and weak atheism to clarify whether they consider their stance one of positive belief (strong atheism) or the mere absence of belief (weak atheism).[11][12][13]"

I know I've answered this before. But recently a friend of mine asked why (so called strong atheists) believe "a negative- something that can't be proved."

Here is a quote from Richard Dawkins:

"A friend, an intelligent lapsed Jew who observes the Sabbath for reasons of cultural solidarity, describes himself as a Tooth Fairy Agnostic. He will not call himself an atheist because it is in principle impossible to prove a negative. But "agnostic" on its own might suggest that he though God's existence or non-existence equally likely. In fact, though strictly agnostic about god, he considers God's existence no more probable than the Tooth Fairy's.

Bertrand Russell used a hypothetical teapot in orbit about Mars for the same didactic purpose. You have to be agnostic about the teapot, but that doesn't mean you treat the likelihood of its existence as being on all fours with its non-existence.

The list of things about which we strictly have to be agnostic doesn't stop at tooth fairies and celestial teapots. It is infinite. If you want to believe in a particular one of them -- teapots, unicorns, or tooth fairies, Thor or Yahweh -- the onus is on you to say why you believe in it. The onus is not on the rest of us to say why we do not. We who are atheists are also a-fairyists, a-teapotists, and a-unicornists, but we don't' have to bother saying so."

Why should we leave the philosophically comfortable and safe position on agnosticism about God and postulate [below] a positive proposition like Strong Atheism?

"Strong Atheism is the proposition that we should not suspend judgment about the non-existence of a god or gods. More extensively, it is a positive position against theistic values, semantics and anti-materialism, a rational inquiry in the nature of religious thought, a new way of thinking about religious and spiritual issues."

There are good reason to not believe.

Empiricism, Science, problem of evil, the god answer solves no problem, the gambit jumbo jet.

Hence if knowledge says there is only a small infinitesimal probablity that the supernatural exists, we shan't believe.

Hugo Chavez gives good interview to Barb

I know I haven't been keeping you up to date on Hugo Chavez. But with the Comunist Party here in Tempe having a lecture on him this March 25th at its annual picnic I thought this would be as good time a time as ever to post this U-tube.

Sunday in the ParkJoin us for a PICNIC with music, poetry andprogressive politics. Special guest:

James Jordan, WesternRegional Director of the Venezuela Solidarity Network who will speak on:

THE BOLIVARIAN REVOLUTION:BUILDING SOLIDARITY WITH VENEZUELA

Sunday, March 25th 1 pm Kiwanis Park in Tempe. Ramada #10

From Baseline south on Mill Kiwanis Park will be on your right.

We will have cold beer and picnic food including vegetarian-------------- ------------- -------- Poets for Justice will present Spoken Word----------- ------------- ----------This picnic is dedicated to welcomingback local activist Laro Nicol, a victim of government repression.------- ----------- -------- ------

-$5 minimum donation requested $2 for low income, kids free

Hopefully you can donate more! Proceeds to benefit the
PEOPLES' WEEKLY WORLD newspaper Check it out - pww.org

I am a winner

The universe is always looking out for me. Like just today I learned that I could win a prize simply by clicking on Kevin Federline's search engine.

How cool is that? What's the prize you ask? You can win tickets to attend K-Fed's birthday party. Wow. Do you think I care that accommodations and travel are not included. Hell no. Who wouldn't want a chance to meet the Fed? Even if it means paying for it.

Want more proof that God loves me?

It turns out the cat and dog food you've been giving your animal companions is slowly killing them. I knew if I prayed long enough god would revenge me.

I've been reading Jung lately. His answer to Job. God is amoral. Unconscious. An antinomy of contradictions. Yes, god attacked me with a German Sheppard. But god also got his revenge against that animal.

Millions of pets slain. Perhaps that's why in the future we domesticate the ape. And plant the seeds of our own destruction.