We spend our lives bein’ referred t’great years: th’ crash of ‘29, Pearl Harbour ‘42, th’ Boston Tea Party of 1773.

Wal, mah friends, we is retchin’ th’ end of an histo’ic year indeed, an’ one we acshully lived!

This hyar is th’ year wo’ld narrative confess’d th’ devastatin’ truth of climate change an’ peak oil, we endured th’ greatess collapse in financial histo’y, an’ a black man was elecked President of South Car’lina.

Not jest enny black man. An intelleckual, an orato’, a statesman - a an’ a Warshin’ton outsider.

Menny of mah white feller South Car’linans is whisperin’ Obama will deport us t’Guantanamo Bay, o’ wo’se, th’ Ivory Coast.

Mo’e wo’se, he will give th’ rich folks’ hard-won money back t’th’ pore fum whom they fus’t stole it.

They say th’ Presidential cavalcade will sport mo’e bling than a Harlem pimp wif rim-spinnin’ SUVs an’ 20-stone black fro’d bouncers, an’ a Secret Service full of unnercovah brothers.

An’ Paint it Black be th’ noo nashunal anthem, eff’n not th’ fate of th’ White House, which insiders cruelly suggess will soon resemble th’ Soul Plane.

So, yoo want th’ real deal on Bareek Obama, our noo Comman’er in Chief?

Click hyar t’read mah eleckshun roun’up.

Burn, baby, burn!

It should take them only a decade to create the most prosperous and smart nation on the planet .. and leave us in their dust. Why are they so dumb that they haven’t done it?

She’s right. What is wrong with these people?

My ex-boss’ IQ well-exceeded 150 and I marvelled at his tolerance, neither hiring more like genii to take some load off,  nor treating me like the lap dog I was. Perhaps those practiced knowing looks and dry sarcasm kept him in check. I had cunning to fall back on, after all.

And precocious kids. No matter how brilliant the student, they aim no higher than military-industrial footsoldier and “hope to be a scientist.” Sigh. Even beauty pageant wannabes set the bar at world peace!

Science fiction authors have long toyed with scenarios of scientists forming communes of intellect.

Howard Fast’s “The First Men” painted an unlikely but ultimate outcome: his advanced society began as a military experiment that isolated itself just in time to survive the predictable reaction of a feeble-minded society - so often portrayed in film and novel - to destroy the advanced or mutated species as a survival threat to resident room-temperature plodders.

Fred Hoyle based Ossian’s Ride on off-planet interlopers sealing off some of Ireland, with much detail on security and organization. Herbie Wells smote us all with a comet to clear the planet of woe, while John Wyndham’s Midwich Cuckoos - though alien and malevolently implanted - showed what a bunch of really smart kids (with supernatural abilities) might do.

But what if the smarties have done it already? Where the heck are they?

Have they created utopia but cunningly present as a failed state, like the rest of us. If so, can someone kindly blow the whistle?

Is it Iceland, New Zealand, Tasmania, Sweden, Monaco, Anguilla, Maui, Liechtenstein? The United States of America?

On that trail, why haven’t the world’s wealthy - who also are typically smarter - purchased, or simply invaded, a big fat tropical island and set up their own bank and government - eliminating taxes and controlling security?

While they like to hole-up in luxurious ghettos in quieter precincts of certain cities, that isn’t a plan, it’s a reflex.

My reader and I again plead:

• - If anyone knows the whereabouts of an advanced collective of altruistic, scientific minds, kindly reveal
  
• - If certain it exists not, explain then why smart people are so dumb .. in terms we, the dumber, might understand. 

Every facet of our species’ brilliant and ever-advancing career finds us, whichever specialty, not quite in control.

With disorder tamed to an acceptable death rate, expertise is claimed.

When un-garbage in equals un-garbage out, design defers to mass production - with mass recall a hair-breadth off.

As matters progress quite swimmingly we are proud masters of our domain. But humans being people, a train wreck usually looms.

And so, as another paramount year unfurls, the entirety of this planet’s mug punters find their fortunes astride some lurching blindfolded mule, shattered in dismay it’s not the magnificent sure-footed stallion the guy in the suit told them to bet a life’s savings on.

A snowboarder hurled from chopper onto 60 degrees of powdery snow chances life, if not avalanche. Likewise, and with bells, entrusting the world’s inventory of toil, manufacture, plant, and property to a self-serving recursive bubble of avarice begs eversion, if not oblivion.

If democracy is the worst possible system of government, except what follows when it fails, then financial bedlam is the nightmare sequela to a brief flirtation last century with public ownership, to the governance of science and knowledge-based national planning, and even respect (if grudging) for social visionaries and an intellectual elite.

While all stood deluded by concepts of equality, societal perfection, and control of human destiny, economic dogmatists stole the fleeting moment, like the arrogant ignorant greedy thieves they are.

And now these self-congratulating fools, these “Alpha Beings” who would save us from the perils of socialism, nanny states, and utopian pipe-dreamery, stand revealed in their finest moment as masters of .. that train wreck.

But don’t mind too greatly for their well being, as governments across the globe, having privatised profits of social infrastructure, now nationalize the debt of its gutted carcase. Our captains of gluttony stand, as always, to inherit the skimpy surfeits of dullards like you and me, whichever way the wind blows. It’s the natural order of things. Didn’t they explain this at school?

Well, for we bottom-feeders as usual nothing much differs. Still a world of animal indifference and jungle law from which we imagined struggling through endless millennia to emerge in celebration of human intellect. Still sustained by much day dreaming of equality, religious salvation, social justice, or portentous proletariat proselytising.

Parting clouds long ago snapped shut on any chance of an efficient, measured, benevolent, and dare I lament ’spiritual,’ procession to the future. Demented as any religious fundamentalist, free market zealots engendered a tsunami of greed that rolls its selfish deconstruction across the shores of every nation and doorstep of each life, endlessly, mindlessly, and each day more irretrievably.

Ha! Another Utopia rant, you might sneer. And you are right .. except to sneer.

In no corner of science do two eminences agree on nature’s intention, or if it has one. Moving from cold hard yet disputed facts to softer mental pursuits, like economics, finds but an Armageddon of pseudo-intellectual mayhem to rip the heart of hope from any foolish optimist on this craven little mudball.

Turning finally to fellow salts-of-the-earth for inspiration, hope, or salvation, finds in their deluded greed-lit faces only the cause of our eternal distress.

What part of moderation do 6 billion opportunists not understand?

Who will concede “I only need this much to live; others have greater need”?

When does social narrative admit our existence and future is predicated on consumptive madness and blind unsustainable growth?

Almost delicious, watching the world’s economic powerhouse unravel in viral greed and utter stupidity.

Except it’s my house, too.

Doom-saying newsprint headlines dematerialised while pessimistic leads went oddly volatile from news caches.

Events faded from human memory horizons - indeed, too, from Gaia’s.

All creatures paused an atomic heartbeat in vague unease, then, as if startled from a dream, resumed in tedium their virtual toil.

The surreal dreamscape of an unreal world persists - to allow this transient report - till dreams ascend, end, presents desist, and awareness leaches to void.

At 9.28am GMT, September 10, 2008, in a former reality - as two streams of protesting protons tore, deflected 27Km circular by the most powerful of supercooled magnets - an oscilloscopic double-trace brought unalloyed exultation to the virtual faces of dozens of science doyens pressed into an evanescent control centre.

Euphoria, as do wave-fronts, spread, echoing elation to the ghost-like countenances of thousands of former beings on a non-existent globe, centre of a distorting blane merely 8 minutes from an unconcerned star named Sol.

Forgotten in this throng of self-congratulation a prophetic exchange 25 years earlier between scientists from NYC’s Columbia University:

Dr. Egon Spengler: There’s something very important I forgot to tell you.
Dr. Peter Venkman: What?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Don’t cross the streams.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Why?
Dr. Egon Spengler: It would be bad.
Dr. Peter Venkman: I’m fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, "bad"?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Dr Ray Stantz: Total protonic reversal.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Right. That’s bad. Okay. All right. Important safety tip. Thanks, Egon.

The blackhole tree tightly refutes risk from any renegade, matter-munching, mini black holes (pacman holes).

Should one not instantly evaporate, the algorithm asserts, or shoot from Earth’s proximity like its wild high-energy cousins, a duration much greater than the Universe’s age must transpire before it might expropriate the earthly mass from beneath our unwitting feet.

In unison, scientific intelligentsia piffled suggestions that CERN’s Large Hadron Collider risked human existence, as did predecessors that the first atomic detonation might ignite planetary atmosphere, or strangelets might transmute this earthly realm into another.

This eminent consensus ultimately rested on indisputable proofs supplied by a working universe, that such events go on endlessly without cataclysm on and within Earth, the moon, the sun, red giants, white dwarfs - and of course, in, on and around relatively static and indisputably real and rather larger black holes.

Other, however, than on Earth would unlikely be found teams of human engineers, directed by postulating boffins, misdirecting the forces of nature … as they had ever since opposing thumbs dammed rivers, burned forests, combusted fossil fuels, or harnessed horses, if not nuclei.

Nowhere else in the universe had bridges, dams and burning World Trade Centres collapsed, or cryogenic inner-triplet focusing-quadrapole magnet supports broken during pressure testing in oversight of "very simple balance of forces" despite four engineering reviews.

Not to mention, so I do, had (from engineering oversight) planes, trains, cranes or cars collided or crashed on a scale elsewhere unseen, except  upon this brownish little bluish planet.

Nature’s impersonal perverseness might smite civilizations or cruelly terminate lineages of creatures, yet only humans could both ensure and accelerate such chaos.

Nature supplied the raw ingredients for TNT yet man brought these together to blow himself up. Nature danced more protons within the smallest sun than humankind could ever imagine - yet only this arrogant ape chose to concentrate them in pipes to leap in glee at the collisions.

A naked ape that chose to spend 6 billion Euros over 2 decades on a project to selfishly preoccupy the most valuable intellects on Earth - while nations cried in misery and the planet wilted from environmental assault.

It chose to ignore a trillion dollars thrown at a war to nowhere in Iraq.

It plundered neighbors and their lands while breeding a human plague - staggering blind stupidity from which we shall never recover.

Whether it was yesterday, September 10, 2008, or some time further into the future, that we chanced in flukish fumbling a billionth-billionth possibility and managed to demolish it - or dully, slowly cook it - I will never know.

Dreams fade in memories volatile and something went wrong, that’s all I know.

How could we not have noticed?

That our ovine friends might sink like a lanolin brick is an unhappy possibility.

Take a splash wearing 10 pounds-weight of soaked wool with just hooves for paddling and see how well you fare.

Images at right: By Turkadactyl, from his YouTube video - see below.

As do greased bird feathers, the oily fibres slowly waterlog and floatation must increasingly rely on forward motion.

Fatigue from strong currents or ocean waves would eventually doom our hapless, incongruously-placed cousin.

Though able to instinctively handle flooding and rivers, it is not their element, and animal rescuers report seeing them stuck upside-down struggling, or drowned.

The tale of our beloved “Sheep Overboard” signage starts 4 centuries ago and involves one Samuel de Champlain, of Quebec City fame, and lovingly coined “Father of New France.”

His derring-do, like all great white heroes of that era, might be condense to ignoble exploits thus:

Champlain fired his arquebus and killed 2 of them (Iroquois chieftains) with one shot. One of his men killed the third. The Iroquois turned and fled. This was to set the tone for French-Iroquois relations for the next one hundred years.

Champlain, and fellow thieves de Monts and Dugua, were perusing the coast of Nova Scotia seeking to purloin chunks of native title in the name of France, God, and Greed, when legend has it the sheep became excited at the sight of land, leaping overboard and swimming to what is now named Port Mouton, Nova Scotia.

More seasoned hands among us cynicaly reckon the sheep’s enthusiasm for the deep six resided in sore crutches from their two-legged colleagues’ relentless carnal appetite. Or not.

So, can sheep truly swim?

The argument is moot, dear ovinophiles, as Mr. and Ms. Turkadactyl, God bless their sheep-lovin’ hearts, offer video evidence to put the mess of innuendo and urban legend - passing for informed comment on the Internet regarding this contentious improbability - resoundingly down.

From the man who is a cross between a pterodactyl and a turkey, who has literally tried (with video proof) to stare down a sheep Crocodile Dundee-style, comes this fortuitous and delightful video of Peter, an intrepid but distressed Scottish Blackface sheep who - after his bellowing failed to bring opposite shores together - decided to swim back to his mum, a furious 2-minute sheep paddle across the Loch.

One has the fear, watching, that he might tire and float away. As minutes elapse Peter’s head seems to sink, and one has the fleeting horror his unlikely floatational speed-walking cannot be sustained.

The significance of this recording is that Peter evaluated the considerable (and unknown) risk, judged it do-able, then chose to leap and swim. Unlike, I assume, the creatures below which have been cajoled by humans into a herdlike habit.

Image above: Of course they can swim - every farmer know it.  From Abdul Sayed’s wonderful YouTube collection.

Turkadactyl joins the ranks of esteemed ovine sociologists with his suite of 32 videos, including the invaluable sheep chewing, Pterodactyl encounter and retaliation, sneaking up on sheep, teasing sheep, and interviewing sheep. These he recorded on Island of Mull, Scotland, at the Camas Centre.

A river of images - family, friend, or fickle fate itself - captive in the stream of electronic imagery now sustaining us.

From the well-worn email circuit we daily find the most astounding images.

When graphics gurus garrulously grapple garrisons of God we get images the equivalent of SheepOverboard’s news articles - fascinating yet faked affairs fabulously fabricated but falteringly fraudulent.

A quick laugh, flick to a friend, forget.

Many are breathtakingly beautiful, pure works of nature exquisite, patiently sculpted on fragile fascia for eons. Others, imperceptibly improbable juxtapositions of coordinated complexity stunningly staged in a split scintillating second.

Or perhaps you just wish to view our album.

Life is inevitably pain, sickness, death and decay.

Everything is touched by the shadow of dissatisfaction, imperfection, disillusion.

No one escapes.

Sound familiar? Not just my pathetic publisher on a good day, nor just any of us on our 50th birthday.

Simply the first Noble Truth of Buddhism, philosophy 101, lesson numero oono for every child when a parent dies -

You grow old. You die. Life Sucks

If you’re lucky, you don’t grow old.

SheepOverboard is obsessed with life, the universe, and everything. Especially (and increasingly with age) the moment our bodies fail, launching a dismembering of mind, spirit and matter.

Left alive in this flickering moment we ponder dying or rotting flesh, shell of a person who was, such corpora delicti of life’s offence against itself that draws our bewildered incomprehension toward that dimly perceived and feared Transition, the doorway where time stops, where life’s experience is said to replay, where light claims the pure and burning darkness the fallen, where big bang merges with Omega - where ‘we’ step beyond the paradox of eternity.

Images of Death

Images of death circulate freely now on the net.

We who don’t work with recently and violently deceased, nor have experienced the vileness of war, tend to be morbidly curious - if somewhat nauseous - at first sight of stark destroyed bodies.

Belief - suspended for carnage in horror flicks - returns with vengeance when the victim is real, playing a tortuous kaleidoscope of emotions on an area of mind normally tightly shut.

The Jumper ~ Transformed in the blink of an eye from a human being to its component parts, decelerating from 120 miles per hour to zero - instantly.

Bear’s Meal ~ A sixteen-hundred pounds-weight, 14 foot-high bear ate this unhappy camper’s leg, amongst other tidbits. The creature, later killed, had acquired four 38 caliber and twelve 7mm bullets.

Croc’s Meal ~ (alligator?) Hand of fate. Stomach contents of man-eating reptile, a coffin none of us would wish, at least the way of getting into it.

Snake’s Meal ~ Per the crocodile, above.

Foetus ~ somewhat taboo, but this haunting iconic image can only provoke wonder.

Worse than Death

Most sickening, however, our impunity to a vast community of less fortunate fellow beings who live close to death, in abject misery.

I feel guilty sitting here publishing the image below.

As if it’s going to help anyone and my duty is done.

You feel strongly too, but don’t know what to do, right?

Well, that at least is the first step. Let the feeling grow inside and an opportunity to effectively help will present itself. The saint-like are out there helping, so don’t panic. The more you learn and think, the more effective your help will be when the moment arrives, and how you might help becomes suddenly obvious.

Reflect a little more here with this essay on our Gluttony.

I woke up one morning and all of my stuff had been stolen … and replaced by exact duplicates”

If you’re not familiar with the work of Steven Wright, he’s the guy who once said:  …

So the email goes - as do many websites passing this off as content. Like us.

Steven Wright’s dry wit, reminiscent of a 21st-century Mark Twain, is the most popular, most circulated, text humor doing the email rounds.

His every shrewd message invokes jealous wishing: “If I could devise just ONE smart remark like that in my entire, pathetic life…” 

It springs from where? A deep well, a strong, centered will to stand aside from the consensus beguiling us lesser, compliant, fickle souls.

It’s just … it’s like everyone is caught up in a raging river, in rapids … the call-waiting and the faxes. And I try to get out of the river sometimes, try to grab a branch on the shore … but I can only do it sometimes. I think it’s too fast.”

.. the speed causes more commotion. It’s removing the moment…”

Honestly, I feel like I’m from Vermont in the 1870s … and for some reason they let me drive.”
Time Out New York June - Greg Emmanuel

If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?
 Borrow money from pessimists - they don’t expect it back.
Half the people you know are below average.
 99 percent of lawyers give the rest a bad name.
42.7 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot.
 A conscience is what hurts when all your other parts feel so good.
A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.
If you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.
All those who believe in psychokinesis, raise my hand.
 The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
I almost had a psychic girlfriend but she left me before we met.
 OK, so what’s the speed of dark?
How do you tell when you’re out of invisible ink?
 If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.
Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.
 When everything is coming your way, you’re in the wrong lane.
Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.
 Hard work pays off in the future, laziness pays off now.
I intend to live forever - so far, so good.
 If Barbie is so popular, why do you have to buy her friends?
Eagles may soar, but weasels don’t get sucked into jet engines.
 What happens if you get scared half to death twice?
My mechanic told me, “I couldn’t repair your brakes, so I made your horn louder.”
 Why do psychics have to ask you for your name?
If at first you don’t succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.
 A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.
Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it.
 The hardness of the butter is proportional to the softness of the bread.
To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.
 The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard.
The sooner you fall behind, the more time you’ll have to catch up.
 The colder the x-ray table, the more of your body is required to be on it.
Everyone has a photographic memory, some just don’t have film.

Would you like the full set? Sending you to BrainyQuote.com

At first it seems rather amazing - but then, maybe not. After all, you’ve seen enough movies to know something like r50rd exists .. surely!

Take one dotty old English engineering genius, Dr. Colin Mayhew, who built an awesome robot called “r50rd” as a sort of ’skunk works’ in some back-blocks research facility of BMW’s Mini motor vehicle facility in England.

Then then witness an astonishing video of his robot in action.

His **cobbly old web site [see ** at bottom of this article] is exactly how one expects it to look, with some staggering videos of testing the robot, one of which evokes “oh come on, they can’t do that .. can they?”

Apart from the size and appearance of the thing - and the marvelous revving internal combustion engine powering it, roaring in anticipation of each robot IQ challenge - there is little you wouldn’t expect from eccentric pommy genius. Nice touch, too, using that quaint British Land Rover, an icon that only Colin would be likely to drive. Probably needs it to negotiate the mud and cow shit surrounding the shed that lies detached, no doubt, near a picturesque manor in some estate not too far at all from a postcard English village.

My God! Robots can do that, already?? Searching eight-billion (decidedly) odd web pages for the words “r50rd” and “hoax” eventually leads you to someone who seems to know. Or do they?

That, you see, is the problem - finding truth on the Internet. You only need gather sufficient contra-evidentiary views on any web-based issue to decide if you are being had - but you never really can ever know. Life’s like that. Perhaps a web site, featuring graphics designer Jose Perez and a recent project of his, is ‘evidence’ enough?

But wait, there’s more. This next link might be part of the joke, part of a “viral marketing” hoax, leading you on to intended destinations of unknown machinations. Regulars of Michael Walls’ webzine probably consider this the final word, hopefully the ultimate assessment and not just another convoluted carrot. Are all these people in on the hoax? Let’s face it. It’s a grand publicist’s marketing scheme, working a treat.

Yet you must admit the Internet would be a little duller with out such mischief. Like April 1 without a prank.

We veteran denizens at SheepOverboard find research on these issues uproariously uplifting, a jolly good time being had by all. Rarely, in all the smoky, dingy, poorly-lit chat rooms and forums awash with kiboshing and kibosh, have we found ourselves genuinely delighted, cackling aloud, at the button-pressing and mischief on this Museum of Hoaxes banter debating r50rd’s viability, or verity.

“The Land rover was actually the fake” or “I disconnect my Chevy’s battery every night just to be sure it doesn’t try anything FUNNY while I sleep!” And more: “12 years of Sunday school and 6 years of boarding school turned me into a bipedal robot concerned only with the endless consumption of (low octane) beer and crap electronics, I can’t deny the possibility of this godly mini-me.”

All interspersed with genuinely indignant disbelief that the leg-pullers are that gullible.

** Sadly, all of the links in this article are subject to “link rot” as this delightful little chapter in the Internet’s history fades away. Fortunately, you may still view vestiges of the hoax at: The ghost of Colin’s ‘cobbly old website’ at the blessed www.archive.org

Which only makes us wonder why the originators of this deliciously clever hoax would ever kill the original www. r50rd.co.uk website.

History shows many abuses when government agents can demand your papers” ~ Bill Simpich, Oakland civil rights lawyer

“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety”   ~ Benjamin Franklin

In the USA, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) searches credit records, previous travel history, criminal records, motor vehicle records, banks, web searches, and companies that collect personal information from consumer transactions.

Your life history is gathered and scanned using secret criteria whenever you book a flight or arrive at an airport.

Airlines, without identifying actual regulations, will prevent you from flying .. following unwritten, frequently changing oral Government secret communiqués.

Headsup! Gilmore -vs- The State: on your behalf

Until Americans have the ability to know the contents of the laws being applied to them, our Republic is in danger” ~ http://papersplease.org

Ed: I’ve recycled this little Darkside article from 2004 because the assault is alive and well. Governments of all persuasions - in typically the most ‘civilized’ and affluent countries - seem determined to squeeze freedom from our lives.