I am posting from the subterranean lair of the Wife’s stepmother. The hair on my tongue grows thick from far too much bourbon consumed last night. Liberal application of pad thai and curry has brought me around, but friends will be arriving in a few hours and the revelry will begin anew. I hope to stand forth behind an incredibly inexpensive locally brewed pale ale until my liver stops throbbing.
The reason for my libatory excess last night is the stepmother’s son, whose 42nd birthday we will celebrate this evening. A veteran of the 7th Group, 82nd Airborne, he is a committed Christian missionary with a stratospheric IQ. In short, a very dangerous man, whom I am only able to keep from turning my mind to mush and rendering me a barking mad soldier of God with threat of black olives. Something about the dye affects him like kryptonite and I am glad for it.
Operating out of an undisclosed location near Spokane, this fellow, who will remain otherwise unidentified, lest the agents of Echelon hunt me down for an involuntary intel briefing, works for a clandestine Christian org aiding the persecuted church barely existing in the Ukraine, Kazakhstan and other countries practically unkown to the west.
Making his way into communist Muslim countries via bus, camel and on foot, he arrives with a netbook in each leg pocket, and an assortment of cell phones, with which he accesses available wi-fi nets, simultaneously serving and downloading Cyrillic and Gypsy Bibles, movies and other Christian propaganda, assisting far flung pastors and their persecuted flocks without benefit of electric power.
During his recent trip to Kazakhstan, he was arrested every three days by the local police, where he spent his time improving their computer systems. There is good reason to believe the local police chief and his family are newly converted Christians. Unfortunately, on his return he was detained by gendarmes at the Chunnel entrance in Calais and forced to request references from the Archbishop of Canterbury and other highly placed pontificates. I don’t know how he arrived home, but after gaining exit permission from France, he was denied entrance into Great Britain.
He is currently running his passport repeatedly through the washer and dryer in an effort to defile it sufficiently that the State Dept. will issue him a replacement without the odious evidence of having been in Kazakhstan.
He labors under the recent issue of three fatwas for a radio program where he debated Muslim clerics and completely shredded their faith with statements of irrefutable logic. While he waits for the furor to die down, he is building a secure website with Christian programmers in Russia and Pakistan. He is also embellishing his array of hardware and software with a USB hub of wi-fi adapters enhanced with wave-guide antennas made from locally sourced Pringle’s cans, of course emptied of chips.
I can’t say much about the open source apps he uses to hack wi-fi defenses when in country. Fortunately, by the time he got around to that conversation, I was nearly prostrated with bourbon. That circumstance may allow me to leave in a day or two with my life.
I must go now in search of life-sustaining Diet Dr. Pepper and perhaps some really nasty Indian food. The house will soon be filling with guests and I hope to stay away from him as much as possible, lest he tell me more and further enhance my situation as a potential and most unwilling enemy of the state.
15:30 PST: The future king of Fiji has arrived. I am not joking.
16:30: Pinot Grigio has begun to flow. Drinkers of Chardonnay have been denounced as utter fools. We are being entertained by three Siamese, a Burman and a Balinese. The missionary hacker is building an optical device consisting of dozens of LCD laser pointers. Apparently, communist cities are overrun with feral cats. He believes he can herd them with a super pointer for use as a potential weapon, presumably against Muslims.
11-22-09 9:30 PST: The party was wonderful, with just a few close friends. We dined on excellent chili with miles of condiments. I cornered the Wife’s late father’s best friend and had him recount his experiences designing fast boats for the CIA during the ’60s. He recently had a guy come up to him in a store and confess to having run one of the souped up sanpans, exfiltrating South Vietnamese officials down the Mekong. He said those boats saved a lot of lives.
Another guest commented on problems Boeing is having building the 787 because of outsourcing part fabrication to the third world country of South Carolina. Unlike BMWs, engineering failures at 38,000 feet tend to be a bit more serious.
We’ll reverse our course on Air Tran in the morning. They took excellent care of us on the way over. We got two round trip tickets for $500. They lay over in Milwaukee and Atlanta. At least we didn’t have to deal with OHare. We should touch down in Raleigh tomorrow afternoon.
We’d planned to visit property some of them own on Kitsap, but the weather remains cold and rainy. We’ve had a great time, but I’ll be glad to get home. We spent four days at the beach recently and George was so upset by it that he threw up all the next day after we came home. Maybe he just got some bad chipmunk and things will be different. Just like here, our lives revolve around the cats. I’d just as soon not go on vacation if it upsets them.
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