frankmask

(NOTE: Adaware and Spybot are the internet equivalent of a flaming sword which wields itself to smite one's enemies with ruthless efficiency)

Some days you're ready for anything. Take today, for instance. A flaming nun came crashing through the ceiling today. Actually, five hundred pounds of concrete came crashing through the ceiling, but the flaming nun was chained to the concrete, and I happen to be partial to nuns, flaming or not, so we're going to focus on her.

She came through the ceiling. She was immodestly on fire. She was quite dead.

We're really not going to be talking about her, though. Dead people generally aren't very interesting, there isn't much to say about them. When you're alive you've generally got some really dynamic things going on, like dreams, aspirations, and that whole 'Indefinable spark of the soul' thing. But dead people don't have any of that. All they do is rot and periodically attend seances that they weren't invited to.

So we're just going to skip the nun. Seeing as she's dead and all there isn't much to be said about her, fire and concrete and ceiling crashing not withstanding.

Instead, we're going to start with the fire she caused. Namely, the fire which caused to be burnt to a cinder my very own two hundred and fifty year old baroque brownstone appartment, which is quite interesting in and of itself because when it was built it was neither baroque nor was it a brownstone. It was more sort of a slum tenament, really, but the construction chief happened to be a freemason of the Chimpanzetic branch, and damned if he was going to build a shoddy building just because the owner intended to fill it to three times capacity with recent immigrants then burn it for the insurance money. Coincidentally the owner never got around to burning it. He was a machiavellian bastard, but saying that he somehow contrived to set in motion the chain of events which led a flaming concrete clad nun to come flying in by way of the roof is just stretching the credibility of the story a bit too far.

The appartment burned down. Lots of people inside died, if you're one of those folks who respects the personhood of all living things from the bacteria on up. According to that kind of thinking the death toll was in the low billions. According to the local news, it was three. The first one was of course the nun, who we have already established to be uninteresting. The second was the current owner, descendent of the original owner. You can feel terrible about his death if you'd like, but I don't because he was a right bastard and had a hobby of selling bad insurance in his spare time. The third person to die in the fire incident was the mayor of a small town in rural Dakota. The town was called Redding Downs.

Redding Downs was a town which, apparently, existed for no very good reason at all. The reason was there, all right, and by virtue of bipartisan politics had become very important, if not exactly good. It just wasn't apparent. Being buried six and a half miles underground will do that to a reason. Redding Downs was the site of the God's Spear project.

the organization that ran God's Spear was actually fairly well recognized. It received financial backing from dozens of departments, comittees, authorities, agencies, and whathave you. Everyone who has ever looked at a government line item budget has seen it. The organization is called Misc. Expenses.

Amazing the sort of things you can do by filching 5.50 at a time off of the budget of every government agency in the US.