@Imipolex: ? I followed the plot well enough I Thought Everyone Could Do That.
DUMB
Carmel has been struck by the Fog of War, however. He doesn't know that he'd have another $5 million and be the most important human being on Earth, and all before May 1 (that's in a month). I wonder who the most important human being on Earth is? Really, I think things would probably be okay if you killed any one person. People are cool like that, we flow into holes like water. Or something cooler than water. Perfluorocarbons. Gotta love that LCL.
Anyway, probably a bit of a step up from a brothel owner, unless his prostitutes are alien shapeshifters.
If you had told him, he would have asked how to get it really politely and then cut your throat. Or something. Dude's crazy, anyway.
WARNING! A HUGE PARAGRAPH GEOGRAPHY IS APPROACHING FAST. *
Fernando Poo is in a small chain of islands in the Bight of Biafra (that bit of Africa, you know, between the horn and the side, I guess. The "armpit", if you will. Not that continents have armpits. That would require having arms, and if continents had arms, they'd be damn big things. I mean we're talking country-sized. And thanks to the square-cube law they'd just collapse (UNLESS they were extradimensional! They could be from another dimension with some kinda... uh... cube-quartic law! Damn, that would be awesome (although I have no idea how it would work... I need to learn more about engineering before I can plan continent battleships (I didn't mention that, did I? Well, it would be kinda cool. Imagine America fighting Africa! (er, I don't mean to be racist (STACK OVERFLOW)))))) which is unnamed by the book; presumably the Atlanteans have suppressed this information. In the capital (capitol? I hate homophones (except the cool ones, like "scents")), n the early 1970s (we still don't know what year this is, remember) Captain Ernesto Tequilla y Mota carefully read and reread Edward Luttwak
's Coup d'Etat: A Practical Handbook. He "placidly" followed the formula within for a coo deh tah. Made a timetable, converted other officers, formed a clique, arranged things so that officers loyal to presumably the parent country Equatorial Guinea would be on an assignment two days away, bla bla bla. I think that we all know how to overflow a government, Shea and/or Wilson, you don't need to go into such extraneous detail. Really.
He drafted the first statement of the new government, which mixed leftists' and rightists' slogans into a "tapiocalike" * context of bland liberal conservatism. So, like the Democrats. Or Republicans. Whatever they're called nowadays.
After three years of planning, he struck. Key members of the old regime under house arrest, loyal officers take over the media, the "fascist-conservative-liberal-communist" proclamation of the People's Republic of Fernando Poo goes out, we know the drill. He had achieved his ambition - that being promotion from captain to generalissimo *, sorta like Arthur Currie but all at once. And I think it's too late for WWI short of time travel. Clearly Generalissimo Tequilla y Mota has a plan.
Except he doesn't. He hopes that there's a book on running a government as good as the one on coo deh tah.
...
People are so so smart, and so so stupid.
edited 7th Sep '09 2:05:44 PM by Tzetze
[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.
frozen in time
I probably could've followed the plot had I made the effort to, but I guess I got lazy. Will have to reread it at some point.
no one will notice that I changed this
Hexachordal Combinatorial
There we go. That's more like it. Back to incoherent, I see.
Ecstasy is Sustained Intensity
"Tequilla y Mota". Cute. I completely missed that my first time through.
I will keep my soul in a place out of sight, Far off, where the pulse of it is not heard.
What does that mean?
DUMB
"Tequila and pot"
[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.
Wut. This is pretty confusing but amusing. Must keep track of this liveblog.
"You fail to grasp the basic principles of mad science. Common sense would be cheating." - Narbonic
DUMB
Poo is famous by the next day. Famous in certain circles, of course, thanks to the magic of security clearance. Every representative in Congress, every senator, every Cabineter, every Joint Chief of Staff except for that one guy Phil who honestly is kind of a douche, you know?, and every single president knows his name.
The president's first reaction was "Where the hell is Fernando Poo?". I guess he hasn't been reading this, since I have it spelled out pretty clearly right there. I mean, I can understand him not wanting to read this monster of a book, but I can't think of a single decent excuse for not reading a series of reactions in text on an obscure website by a teenager to an obscure book that was written several years later when the internet doesn't even exist yet using far too many appositives. I learned that word yesterday, "appositives". Edgar Allan Poe used them a lot.
My mistake - those are prepositional phrases.
Before President Poe can get onto the Internet to read this, thus solving every problem that occurs in the remainder of the book, the action switches back to Saul, who takes off his glasses and polishes them. Must be a Jew thing. So that they can more clearly witness the subhumans that they subjugate, you see.
"I outrank you, Barney," Saul began.
Muldoon grins, a vicious little grin, the grin of one who's about to rip apart a corpse to get to the delicious liver. See also: my avatar. He knows what's coming, and for once it isn't sodomy.
Saul asks Muldoon who on his staff he thinks is a CIA agent. From here they discuss the identity and removal of several hidden government agencies. Cloak and dagger shit, this is. If you crushed up this page and smoked it, you'd get high, and think that you were invisible.
They might be hearing from the FBI. Saul is going way out there on this one, and Barney is apparently happy to come along. It's a heavy case. Probably filled with depleted uranium, since it's heavy, you know, since it contains the souls of damned Afghani children.
Kinda surprising to me that Barney's going along with this considering how skeptical he was before, but hey, buddies, and really, who could ever turn down a showdown with the government?
[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.
HIGH IMPACT SEXUAL VIOLENCE
Did my mind just get raped?
ALL CREATURE WILL DIE AND ALL THE THINGS WILL BE BROKEN. THAT'S THE LAW OF SAMURAI.
(weaving)
Schitzo: No, this is Tzetze reading Tzetze's kind of book.
SHIKI is dead.
I don't know if this has been mentioned before, but the first time I read this I was surprised to find that Fernando Poo is a real island off the coast of Africa. It even has a rather strange political history, although as far as I know it hasn't been the flashpoint of any nuclear crises.
Reading books set in the near future but written in the slightly more distant past is always a little strange. I was never quite able to extract a coherent timeframe out of Illuminatus! — for various reasons my best guess is the early Eighties, but it's a very different Eighties than ours were.
edited 16th Sep '09 11:55:18 AM by Nornagest
I will keep my soul in a place out of sight, Far off, where the pulse of it is not heard.
My guess is '76 — near future at the time, and the bicentennial anniversary of the founding of one of the organizations involved.
DUMB
Fernando Poo is real?!
O_o
...did the authors actually show their work...?
edited 16th Sep '09 6:43:53 PM by Tzetze
[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.
Well, I don't think that...
Er, it doesn't seem likely that the...
Never mind. I can't answer that question without spoiling plot points.
I will keep my soul in a place out of sight, Far off, where the pulse of it is not heard.
DUMB
Fair enough. I suppose that this is the kind of book that I can't be a Spoiler Hound for.
I'll put up another installment on, let's say... Saturday.
[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.
Let's just say that Shea and Wilson are obviously smart, well-read people. Smart, well-read people with lots and lots of drugs.
I will keep my soul in a place out of sight, Far off, where the pulse of it is not heard.
DUMB
Like Philip K Dick, or Aldous Huxley! My favorite kind of author, I think.
Although of course the latter wasn't as much of a druggie, and the former quit and caught the schizzies later.
edited 16th Sep '09 9:47:17 PM by Tzetze
[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.
This just gets weirder.
"You fail to grasp the basic principles of mad science. Common sense would be cheating." - Narbonic
DUMB
FOURTH MEMO TIME
This letter showed up in Playboy a few years ago. "The Playboy Advisor," Playboy, April 1969, pages 62-64. I Read It for the Articles indeed - where else could you learn such wisdom as this with it being suppressed and whatnot?
It's pretty standard as such letters go. A crazy old right-winger related to the author has a conspiracy theory. "The recent wave of assassinations in America" are the fault of a spoooooky conspiracy called, yes you guessed it, the Illuminati. They've existed throughout history, are all 32nd *-degree Freemasons, some loser by the name of Ian Fleming knew so they killed him, etc. I've been thinking of making some conspiracy-theory YKTTWs but I'm not sure about it. Mostly I think "Influencing-Machine Delusion" would be a cool name. But I digress.
All of it of course seemed crazy to the writer until he heard that Allan Chapman, one of Jim Garrison's investigators in the New Orleans probe of the JFK assassination, believes in the Illuminati! Ho damn.
Playboy thinks that it's bunk and cites Encyclopedia Dramatica to prove it. Considering how much collective knowledge Anon has, this proves quite a lot of nothing.
MEMO OVER THAT WAS KIND OF SHORT AND LAME
"Pricefixer stuck his head in the cafeteria door." Flattering name there. I can't help but think that he's Jewish and this fills me with shame.
Guy named Peter Jackson is here, supposedly the associate editor of Confrontation. He's gonna speak about his last meeting with Joe Malik.
He's black. Actually black, too, none of this "My family's lived in Washington for five generations" crap, I'm talking down-home Georgia black. But he has a vest, and is wary of policemen.
Saul, being an Old Fogie What Knows What He's Doing, asks Jackson to repeat what he told the officer. Apparently the trick is to make you seem like someone else - in this case, Saul has a medical degree, so he can just rip the information out of his skull with Made Of Meat-like flair.
"Well, this is prahbably not impahtant. It may just be a coincidence."
Saul reassures him that cops listen to stupid bullshit all day and so he won't mind.
"Everybody but the lunatic fringe has given up on this by now. It really surprised me when Joe told me what he was getting the magazine into."
Okay boring to literally write what's in the book. Fuck that. That's not Pierre Menard did it anyway, I need to write it originally. Get in the mindset of a 1960s Playboy writer. Take a ton of... what'd they take? Lysergic acid diethylamide probably! But that stuff's hard to get. All the drugs nowadays are cheap stims and shit, there's none of the psychedelics. That's why there's a drug war, it's because we've forgotten about the 60s! I should contact my senator right away.
Anyway the thing was reopening the investigation of Martin Luther King and the Kennedy brothers. Funny, I thought that the modern accepted "Fight Club gone horribly wrong kills all three" theory was widely accepted back then. You learn something new every day!
[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.
DUMB
Anybody actually reading this, or can I go back to reading it normally?
[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.
I read this, I don't really comment much, but I do enjoy., I think I missed this update due to clicking "mark all read".
I do wiish you'd pick up the pace, we'll never get to the good bit with this speed.
DUMB
That's a good point, but school started up... well, I'll see what I can do. I spend a lot of time doing nothing anyway, might as well devote it to something that's, in some hypothetical existence, useful.
[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.
The thing is, also, that I sped through the book in a couple of days, and despite the nature of the book, managed to follow the plot well enough.
A reincarnation of Napoleon? What a Harry Stephen Keeler rip-off!
edited 6th Sep '09 7:30:20 PM by CTrombley
Mathematics Is A Language.