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Sometimes things end well. Jill Carroll has been released by her captors after 82 days spent as a hostage.

The good folks over at The Christian Science monitor—for whom Carroll was reporting when she was abducted—can tell the story better than I, so I’ll defer to them, and leave it at that; I think our song today captures the sentiment at The Aural Times as good as anything will.

In other news, it has been another exciting week in the office. While our Technical Director has not exactly been a beacon of calmness, she has not threatened either to faint (which she has asked me not to mention, and has further asked me to mention that it happens only infrequently should I decline to respect that first request), nor to strangle someone (though I had the names of a couple likely Interns in mind, just in case). In other words, smooth sailing here at the Times.

And our Marketing Director has assured me that there is something exciting happening on the merchandising front. I look forward to an unveiling of sorts on Monday—stay tuned.

Stanislaw Lem is dead.  He was 84, and he was magnificent.

It’s not easy being Editor-in-chief, you know.  It’s hard to run a business, and it’s hard to keep everything in place.  I do my best, but sometimes I get caught so utterly off-guard that things slip away from me—and before I know it, the Interns are running around playing grabass and there’s a fire in the staff washroom’s toilet and I don’t even feel like yelling at them.

Such is the power of losing a hero.  I sit here, listening to the bluesy obit number we’ve put together for this issue, and I thumb through a well-worn copy of The Cyberiad which was my father’s before he gave it to me.

If you have not read any of Stanislaw Lem’s works, do so.  The Cybriad is wonderful, The Star Diaries likewise; really, all of his work is excellent, though in some cases (for example, the twice-filmed Solaris), the English translation—Lem wrote in Polish—is less-than-stellar.  Ask your local independent bookseller; they will almost certainly have a suggestion.

Funny how just talking about something can make you feel better.  In fact, I think I am quite ready to yell at some Interns now.

After a months-long series of delays, commercial space-flight startup Space Exploration Technlogy finally managed on Friday to achieve a milestone:  screwing up a space-craft launch for a fraction of what NASA charges.

It’s a fact—new rocket fails on its maiden launch.

Frankly, I do hope SpaceX has more success in the near future.  I have always been fascinated by space—my youth spent idolizing men like Neil Armstrong, James Tiberius Kirk, Ralph Kramden—but I’m afraid space flight continues to be a bit out of my budget.

Site news: our Graphic Designer, with some help from our Technical Advisor (who is still recovering from our recent headaches), is installing the a new site design as I type this.  So by the time you read this, the site itself should be transformed utterly.  We are very excited about this.  Or at least we’d better be; it’s costing me a lot of money that I won’t be spending on a space shuttle vacation.

Bow your head and pray for the tobacco lobbyists:  Cigarette eyed in deadly cruise ship fire.  Richard Liffidge, a 75-year-old passenger of The Star Princess, expired during the maritime blaze—and while the doctors are saying cardiac arrest, I think we know the real culprit.

Flavor country.

As for the song we’ve got for you this March friday—I should warn you that the Interns responsible, though they have dreadlocks and khaki duds all, are not remotely Jamaican.  And judging by how they smell, I’d venture that they’ve never been in a bath, let alone the waters of the Caribbean.

And now one of them is giggling and singing “rub-a-dub Dub” over and over again.  These kids are incomprehensible.

NEWSFLASH:

I’ve been informed by a visibly shaken Technical Advisor that something she calls “our registrar” is suffering what she calls “a Distributed Denial of Service” attack against what calls “their freakin’ nameservers”.  See above comment about incomprehensibility, but I’ve asked her to explain, and from what I understand, she means this:

Some uncivil jerks have been hammering on our service provider and consequently preventing you, our readers, from visiting this site.  If you are seeing this, then the problem may have passed.  Understand that as I write this, we at The Times cannot view our own site.

I loathe mornings.  Someone is getting FIRED.

No more dawdling!  So said US Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, on Tuesday, to Iraqi politicians:  Senators push Iraq to form government.  Apparently, Iraqi leaders have been fighting the good infight since the formation of a permanent parliment in December of 2005, and the Senators—Levin, Warner, and four others—want to see something get done.

I am, frankly, confused:  are we not trying to help Iraq create a free democratic society in the very mold of the American vision?  And yet we want their politicians, of all people, to be efficient?

A wire has been crossed, somewhere.

The news: cyclone batters Australian coast.

We had a “Cyclone Larry” back when I was just a boy.  Larry Jenkewski.  We’d feed him candy bars and sweets and anything else we could find that had a high sugar-to-mass ratio, and after a while he’d just start spinning and spinning and, well, up until that point it was all damned good fun and so the next bit was generally glossed over.  And then we’d chip in to pay to have his shirt washed so that Mrs. Jenkewski wouldn’t freak out.

Ah, youth.

Religion isn’t what it used to be.  I can’t fault L. Ron Hubbard for dabbling in the Religious Startup business—it’s certainly a stronger business model than, say, a singing website—but his acolytes seem to made of less stern stuff; in fact, they seem to be a bunch of whiners.  Hence:  Scientologist Hayes leaves South Park, citing religious intolerance.

In his defense, however, Hayes has not, reportedly, burnt down any churches lately, as a joke or otherwise.  So the Scientologists are doing a bit better than college kids from Alabama.  Bold praise, I know.

Those eggheads at NASA have done it again—water hints at life on moon of Saturn.  The moon Enceladus, that is, and only for certain values of “hints at”, anyhow; scientists within the agency have been reserved as to the suggestion that a watery geyser on a frozen lump of space-rock means life is present.

But one cannot be too careful.  Theoretical though they may be, microbial though they would in their unlikely geyser-dwelling existence be, I prefer nonetheless to acknowledge Brockman’s Wager: I most heartily welcome, should they happen to exist, our new Enceladusian overlords.  Let us hope they find Yellowstone a comforting home away from home.

And now, a promotional concern: some of our work here at The Times has been featured in the latest podcast episode of The Delta Park Project’s biweekly flagship product, The Big Show.  We’re please as punch to be featured by such excellent Portland folks, and heartily recommend this and their other programs.  Examine the whole roster at deltaparkproject.com.

Imagine this:  you’re twenty.  You’re in college.  Your family has money.  And you’ve just gotten arrested for setting nine churches on fire.  If I were to ask you how you could make yourself look like any more of an ass, what would you say?

“It was a joke”, would, I wager, be a good start.  So say
three students held in arsons at churches—but don’t think they’re being too whimsical, because only the first five were funny.  After that it got, apparently, “out of hand.”

Call me a fuddy-duddy.  Call me an old square.  I don’t understand your Carrot Top or your Space Ghost or your Pokemon—fine, my sense of humor is out-of-date.  But church burning?  Is that what kids do these days?  Is this something I’d need a cellphone to understand?  Do you sit around in your pre-distressed bluejeans and send each other little arson proposals?  “LOL U WNT 2 BRN A CHRCH ROFL”?

Is this what the Interns are doing when they aren’t getting work done?  Which is to say, almost constantly?

I’d better go check the batteries in the smoke detectors.

“Hello?  Oh, good morning, Mother.  How are—what?  What’s that you say?  AT&T to acquire BellSouth?”

“No, Mother, now that you ask, I suppose I don’t particularly miss Ma—”

“Ma Bell, I was going to say.  I mean, really.  Look, are you done?”

“Right.  Good.  Well, while I’m of two minds on government regulation of business practices, I have no love in my heart for—”

“For monopolies, Mother!”

“No, of course I didn’t mean you.  You’re just being—”

“You know who is monopolizing this phone call, Mother?”

“Hello?  Mother?  Hello?”

For you, it’s a headline—for me it was Saturday, outside the Times’s office:  thousands march against immigration crackdown.

In the spirit of the theme, I’ve asked the interns to whip up something folky.  Not quite a protest song per se—we attempt something of an even editorial keel around here—but in the aesthetic neighborhood, perhaps.

Here at The Aural Times, our focus is national and international news, but we are, all else aside, a Portland publication.  And while HR 4437 is making waves nationwide—bishops in Colorado—pollsters in El Paso—the issue feels particularly local when thousands of folks march by one’s window, with placards and mottos, chanting and singing, flanked by cops and counter-protesters.

And, in truth, Portland loves a good protest.  We’re even fond of the mediocre ones; a Friday anti-war demonstration has run more or less weekly for some years now, down at Pioneer Courthouse Square, though at this point it is largely a demonstration of stubbornness on the part of the few remaining stragglers.  In that light, this weekend’s march was refreshing in its size and vigor.  And besides, as a card-carrying member of the American Union of Militant Pedestrians (may God help you if you nose your Volvo into my crosswalk) I approve of anything that disrupts traffic.

So forgive, if you will, this bit of local flavor.  We’ll return Wednesday to our usual wider focus.

It’s worth saying—the problem is H5N1, not the bloody cats.  I’m not a “cat person”, myself, mind you; if I wanted to clean up the droppings of a prissy, self-absorbed grimalkin, I wouldn’t have gotten divorced.  But—I was going somewhere with this, I think—don’t panic.  Keep an eye on your cats.

The interns—I’m not sure where they learned their ethics; they may not be throwing cats out the windows of The Aural Times’s offices, but they are stealing beats, viz:

Sheep Beats, a sickeningly cute trio of ovis aeries laying out compelling (if not entirely well-tempoed) sequenced music.

Also—RSS feed.  I don’t know what it is, but our Technical Advisor assures me that it will improve site readership and is well worth the overtime pay I am required by state law to pay her.  There’s a link on the sidebar; click on it, if you dare.

According to on of the interns here at The Aural Times, today’s song is some sort of “europop” or “discopop”.  Or something.  I frankly do not know what to make of it.  Perhaps I am just getting old.