Lobsters of the world united today to protest the development of a robot lobster they fear will take their jobs trolling the ocean floor and fighting with claws. The robot lobster, called the "Lobot," was designed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, more commonly known as "DARPA" or "the DoD's tech spooks." The Lobot was revealed at a recent Wired convention, when it sparked outrage in the lobster union ranks. "What makes them think a machine can replace us? I mean look at its sorry excuse for claws! And it isn't even red!" remarked one upset lobster, just before being tossed into a pot of boiling water. He followed up by adding "Aaaaaacccccgghhh!! Boiling water!" but couldn't be reached later for comment.

Lobster labor lobbyists are organizing rallies around the world's oceans to prove to consumers and employers alike that there is no crustacean like a real crustacean. Thousands of lobsters were seen trundling around the shoreline and bobbing their eye stems angrily. Like many workers in today's technology-driven economy, they fear being replaced by a bigger, better, faster, mechanical sea-bug.

But DARPA designers seemed more interested in making their worm wiggle. "It was all about making them squirm," one DARPA developer said, referring to their prototype robot, and not the anxious egg-born versions. "The difference between animals and robots is robots get stuck while animals squirm their way through," said inventor-engineer Randolph Pinky of Phoenix Online University. "It's amazing what you can do with a glob of nerve endings." Pinky wouldn't comment on whether or not lobsters feel pain when boiled. "That's too metaphysical for me," he said "I'm a scientist." He then wrestled a fellow engineer to the floor for control of the joystick.

In their defense, DARPA representatives stated that the Lobot was not designed to replace natural lobsters. Instead, it will be employed by the Department of Defense to scan the sea floor for under sea mines. "As with most cutting edge technology" said one DARPA official "the robot lobster is all about 'kill or be killed'. We have to make sure we keep the bottom of the ocean free from terror. There are caves down there too, you know."

As for lobster connoisseurs, they say there's nothing better than the real thing. New York City chef Lalique Quizlo obtained a version of the $2 million robot lobster, as well as a two pound beauty he bought for just under $20 at the fish market. He boiled them both and smothered them in butter sauce. After the sparks died down, he attempted to take a bite of the metal and wiring of the robot lobster, but soon spit the bits out onto his plate. "No doubt about it, I support the natural lobster's fight" he said, while enthusiastically ripping its tail off.

Calls to Red Lobster went unreturned, although rumors that they will partner with the government to open a "Red Lobot" continue to circulate. The B-52's are said to be considering a "Rock Lobot" remix in time for DARPA's annual Summer Fun Strategic Redevelopment Retreat in Ogunquit, Maine.



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So I got an email today that read:

The subject of your painting "Giantess" has intrigued
me.

Assuming that you are the artist of this work, would
you mind sharing with me what inspired you to paint
this? Do you have any other works involving a
Giantess?

And was signed by a nice person who included their name and email. But I couldn't help replying:

Hello [Name],
Thanks for your interest. I am the artist of the work, and I am in fact a
giantess. At nearly 200 feet in height, like most artists I have trouble fitting in. I guess that was the inspiration.

Thanks!
Holly

I also asked where they saw the painting. I think it must be here on ole elmwoodstrip!

I have only two concerns: maybe they are a gallery dealer and I just screwed up. Or maybe they are a giant too and looking for fun with a big gal like me!

So most of you must have gotten the MoveOn.org petition notice about the funding cuts for PBS and NPR. But the shakedown has been going on pretty much ever since Kenneth Tomlinson was appointed chairman of the Corporation for Pulic Broadcasting. He investigated the political bias of NOW with Bill Moyers' guests, and today it was revealed that he paid lobbyists basically off the books to influence legislation that would have given local stations more control of the Corporation. Maybe you consider yourself so "indy" that even PBS and NPR are too centrist for you, but you'd be wrong about the role that such broadcasting serves in the current media climate and how as a public trust it represents the best of what a partnership between government and the people can create. So what can you do if you live for and love your PBS as much as I do? Well, here's a few things: Write letters and make calls. Contact your Congressman. Mine is Brian Higgins:

27th district of New York:
Congressman Brian Higgins

431 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
phone: 202-225-3306
fax: 202-226-0347

In the event that the funding cut proposal passes the House, beat the Senate to it:
Contact Chuck Shumer:
Contact Hillary Clinton:

Write to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and demand Tomlinson's resignation. I did! It was fun! Send mail to comments@cpb.org

Greetings,
I am writing to demand the resignation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson for violating the CPB's commitment to political objectivity and for working in an underhanded manner to subvert the CPB's mission. Chairman Tomlinson represents exactly the kind of partisan political interference that the CPB is designed to prevent. In addition, he has violated the ethics of the corporation by contracting independent lobbyist to undermine the role that stations play in the direction of the Corporation (Labaton, Stephen. "Lobbyists' Role for Public TV Is Investigated", NY Times 16 June 2005). His successful campaign to have Bill Moyers removed from the air also represents his bad-faith and back-door methods for turning the CPB from centrist, balanced media toward a right-wing agenda. According to a study conducted by the CPB itself, a plurality of viewers surveyed in 2003 found no political bias in Public Broadcasting. But that measure, Tomlinson's cry of "left" surely leads one to conclude that he is nothing if not "right."

These ethically questionable methods are being followed up by his recommendation of former RNC co-chairwoman Patricia de Stacy Harrison for President of the CPB (Farhi, Paul. "Front-Runner for Public Broadcast Agency Job Is Former GOP Chair" Washington Post 9 June 2005). If Chairman Tomlinson is so concerned with political bias in Public Broadcasting, how then can he endorse a Republican politico currently employed by the White House? Who has little to no experience in broadcasting except as the President's promoter? It goes without saying that her appointment would be the very definition of a conflict of interest for a media outlet that purports to be free from political influence.

Today the Congress of the United States received a recommendation to cut funding for Public Broadcasting by a full quarter of its budget. At this time, we viewers and listeners need leaders at the CPB who are proponents of the excellent and entertaining programming we have come to count on. What we don't need are leaders who are so clearly proponents for one political viewpoint, as Tomlinson is and de Stacy Harrison would be as well. For the cultural well being of our communities and for the long-life of Public Broadcasting, I feel it is my duty to inform you of these viewpoints, and to demand Tomlinson's resignation.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,
Holly A. Johnson
Buffalo, NY

Lastly, read up and get pissed:
NY Times: "Lobbyists' Role for Public TV Is Investigated"
Washington Post: "Front-Runner for Public Broadcast Agency Job Is Former GOP Chair"
Hands Off Public Broadcasting at Media Matters for America:
"Take Public Broadcasting Back" by Bill Moyers at Common Dreams

Please help by making a call or sending an angry mail. PR people have some kind of algorithm for determing how many people are pissed off when one person does something like call or write. It's like 20 to 1 or something. So if 20 of us write the CPB or call our Representatives, that's practically like the 400,000 MoveOn signatures all over again!

And to find out what's on tonight, go to WNED.org. Battlefield Britain is one of my new favorites. Interactive maps! Oh, it goes without saying that you should also give your station money. Remember "For the People" requires a little "By the People" after all.

Well, I kinda want to tell you a funny story since I'm here at work and trying to waste time, but every time I try to start writing it I can't finish. I think my typing muscles have atrophied now that it's summer.

OK, so the story. It might be funnier if you know them, but My mom and my sister Cintra were in town yesterday for my niece's graduation. After a long day, they came over to see my new apartment and weren't ready to leave until it was almost 11pm. My mom has years of driving experience since I've always gone away to school and she drove me, so it was decided that she would drive the 2 hours home to Pennsylvania. She opened the driver's side door to the truck with the keys, then she said "Open your door Cinny" and whipped the keys right at my sister's head. Cintra, without even turning her head or blinking, flung her hand up and caught the keys in mid air just before they gouged out her eye. I was like "Whoa, Mom, you're gonna hurt someone" and we were all laughing. So then my Mom says, "Oh that's our new game." See, my sister had said that women never throw things, they always hand them. So to prove a point (and then some) my Mom has started to throw everything she can, as fast as she can, and without warning. And Cintra never misses. Apparently this is great fun for them. Or an outlet for their pent up aggression! See, this is why I didn't want to write this story. It's hard to understand the side-splitting, tearing-up hilarity of these little Johnson family scenarios unless you really know us.

But, for those of you who know us, we're dying for a camping trip to the Mines... Why not even the weekend after next? June 17th?

Well, for the first time since I moved to Buffalo, I'm moving to a new apartment. It will be sad to leave the little closet I've lived in for 3 years, but it will be an improvement. The new place is on the corner of Parkside and Hertel. Hertel is my favorite street in Buffalo, no offence to Elmwood intended. But Hertel is more diverse and less commercial. You get as many people out walking the streets and sitting at sidewalk cafes, but not all of them are yuppie moms in birkenstock clogs, or student hippies, also in birkenstock clogs, come to think of it. You know, middleclass types who think they're environmentalist just because they wear fleece and forego those cardboard coffecup insulators. Hertel is more like a real urban neighborhood, with the old established Italian retaurants shouldering up with Halaal butchers. It encapsulates my little hopeful vision for Buffalo: a city that preserves its everyday gems (the Northpark theater) along with the bustling changes of a cosmopolitan community. It will be nice to look out on the corner from my 2nd floor porch and watch the neighborhood ebb and flow, come and go.

I'm also going to be moving in with my boyfriend, which is scary, but at this point it just seems practical. I mean, why keep paying for two places when we are only ever in one at a time, together. I really care about Matt in like a romantic way, obviously, but the more level-headed part of me just thinks its so much more practical to be in a dedicated relatinship than it is to be alone. There's no poem about how much money it saves you, or how someday you'll get to be on his health insurance, but hey, when you get to be my age, nothing is more thrilling than saving a ton of money. Not even sex maybe. Unless you have some kind of hooker coupon that gets you a reduced rate or something. Then you'd be both sexy AND frugal.

Of course, we have to move on May 1st, and I have major school projects due April 28th and May 2. But I have like the worst senioritis ever. Fuck school. I've like cut like every class I could for like the past month. I just can't sit through anymore of it, even if it is good for me. Forget it! I just want to do my own projects and read what I want and just go to work and shit. But then again I did spend a couple of hours today googling current Berkeley Rhetoric PhD students to see how I hold up against their stellar CVs, but apparently they're too busy being geniuses to learn some HTML, since I can't find anything good on any of them... Me, on the other hand, I've already had an illustrious career as a pop star. Just go to www.hollyjohnson.com and see.

So for my first effort in my new life of independent work, I'm off to a conference at the University at Iowa, called the "Collage as Cultural Practice Conference" . I'm pretty excited about it, but I'm still trying to whittle my 28 page paper down to a 20 minute presentation. That means I have to cut so much! By Thursday night! Plus I still have to get a new pair of pants, and a new brassiere so that I don't look like the floppy-booby frayed-kneed hippy grad student that I really am. But the University of Iowa is a mecca for writers and poets, so I'm psyched to go to a famous bookstore there, Prarie Lights, and maybe see their poetry collection, although it prolly isn't as cool as the one at UB! Luckily too my Matt is coming with me so I don't have to be all alone during the social hours, when I find it hard to be social. And we can have hotel sex! Yeah!

So, should be a feather in my cap, right, (going to a big conference, not the hotel part) but of course I got another talking to for missing this first year MFA review thang that I didn't even think I had to do since I'm a transfer, not really a first year. A proffessor told me I was a "fuck up", and I quote, for missing it. That's such a laugh. Why oh why do I have to fight all the time? I know I'm a very proud and haughty person, and I'll be the first to admit that I barrel into my fair share of head butts. But honestly now I don't try to bring it on. I'm just sick of being talked to like a snot-nosed undergrad. I can't get no respect. I'm so very close to just dropping out of society and gnawing on branches for the rest of my life. Not really. Instead I'm making a video in which I do. I wrapped myself in deer skin and ran through the waist-deep snow. Gnawed some branches. Very satisfying... life imitates art imitates life imitates art imitates wing-nut drop-outs who can't manage to get along with anyone!! :(

The Swan is Dead!



Long Live The Swan!



Well, after nearly 3 years of being used, abused, degraded and confused by a boss who shall remain nameless, except for those who know who I'm talking about, yesterday I finally had the semi-satisfaction of resigning for good. I say semi-satisfaction because when I walked into the room she looked and me and said "you're resigning." She denied me even the pleasure of getting to say it myself! Always has to have the upper hand. What an ugly duckling, eh? But I don't even care at this point. No skin off my nose, as they say. Sure she gets away with my idea, and she'll get a book out of it, and her hardscrabble climb to the top of her hallucinatory ladder will once again be boosted by the lift she got from my shoulders, but what do I care. The one thing I wish I had gotten to say to her is "I hope I'm never anything like you." She couldn't seem to grasp the fact that someone who is smart and talented is not also plagued by unbridled ambition. I just want to live, man, and I don't need to be dragged into my overseer's office every week for a dressing down, especially when I was 90% of the project. The saddest thing is that she is still convinced somehow that I'm lazy and insolent, that I don't manage my time well, and deserved to be fired. She almost even mananged to convince me of it. If I didn't believe so wholeheartedly in the wheel of karma, I'd be so pissed off right now. Well, okay, I am pretty pissed off right now. I'm no guru, alright!?

So now that I have time to live and breathe, I'll stop having nightmares and anxiety attacks, start sleeping, start eating, start, you know, doing it, again. I might even start keeping this journal again! Ha ha! At the very least I can start hanging out with my old firends again. Now if they'd only get over themselves and call me (hint hint...)

I never thought I'd say it, but jeez I wish it would snow more. Today is okay, but it doesn't seem like it will last. My friend Sebastian is coming tonight from Philadelphia for a visit, and the least we could do is have a blizzard in his honor. Last year, or was it two years ago, when he was here there was a lot of snow and he wanted to take my picture atop a parking lot mountain of plowed gritty snow, and I said, nah, next time you're here. But now there are no parking lot mountains! Only slushy white stuff.

On Sunday I went cross country skiing in Delaware park: around Hoyt lake, up by the David and the expressway, down the hill and back around to the dog park. It was icy, muddy, and blades of grass were showing through. But it was still fun, and I didn't die the next day from painful thighitis. But the next morning all the snow was gone again. Since skiing is about the only excercise I get all year, it's becoming an (in)convenient excuse that you can't ski without snow.

I was in Ellicottville on New Years and I wanted to go to Allegheny to ski with my boy Matt. I called the park to see if they were renting skis on New Years day and the lady said "There's no snow on the mountain" and I said, well can you rent snow shoes at least and she was all like, "There's no snow" as if to say, what part of that didn't you understand? So instead of skiing on dirt, and due to the nervousness from Matt meet the fam, I got ripping drunk in a house full of twelve-steppers and puked in my sister's guest room. Fun! See, if there had just been snow we could have avoided a very embarrassing situtation. Luckily twelve-steppers are the best people for nursing a hang-over-- plenty of experience.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, I'll be screening my short movie at Squeaky Wheel. That's part of why Sebastian is coming up. That and because at Christmas time he sent me a 144-page letter! He spent a month filling a blank book with his adventures, observations, and memories of our friendship-- journal entries just for me. So we have a lot to talk about. Plus he wants to support my forays into movie making. Anyone is welcome to come too to see the final results of my Keys Train Brain, I mean, Brian, movie, called "Duplicates". It should start around 8 pm.

I've been working with my friend Brian on this trains project. We made a cool video that partly involved trains for the Mole People cabaret show. And I edited some train sounds into a strange TrainScape song. Now we're back down there again. This time for a couple of projects, my Lost Keys video and Brian is working on some installation stuff. Basically we're getting entranced by the sounds and glows and slow high pitched flute music the rails make. We go down in around 10 to midnight, when it's practically deserted. It's like a whole other world down there then.

Here are some still shots from the video we made. I would put up a Quicktime movie, but alas, no Quicktime. And I can't get the mp3 of the sounds small enough right now. 100K!?

I have the plague. Or maybe it's SARS. Tuberculosis? Alright, how 'bout plain old bronchitis. At the very least, walking pneumonia. Whatever it is, I've had it about a week, and after the near-101 degree fever, its main symptom seems to be body-wracking whopping coughs that sound kind of like the death thralls of a goose trapped at the bottom of a well. Oh well.

So the way I've been coping with it is of course to chug bottles of cough syrup. Active ingredients, dextromethorphan (robotripping, anyone?), guaifenesin (an "expectorant" (what a beautiful word for spitting)), and good old pseudoephedrine. Ah, pseudo-ephedrine. Drink enough of it, and there's very little "pseudo" about it. It's speed, people, pure go-juice, and it's making me twitchy, itchy, and tingly. Not to mention kinda spastic. But maybe those are all the same ways of saying I can't hold still or concentrate.

And I can't hardly sleep at all, even though sleep would probably help me recover from this illness. But if I don't take the cough syrup, I cough all night long, and if I do, I lay in bed wound up for about an hour before I slip into a shallow sleep broken by erratic and unsettling dreams.

Then this morning, about 6 am, my phone rang, and I came to just as my machine was picking up. The caller didn't leave a message. I was wide awake in an instant. Ever since Maria disappeared, I fear calamity's around every corner, so a phone call at dawn was a little unsettling, in and of itself. I got out of bed and star 69'ed. The number was blocked.

Back to bed. Laying there I kind of felt like Maria was close and watching me, and I asked her to go away till morning. I wondered what her body looked like when they found her in the lake. I shivered. My throat felt raw and scratchy. My eyes were dry.

The phone rang again. This time I threw the covers back and walked blindly but deliberately as possible to the phone in the living room.

"Hello," I said kind of anxiously. What was I expecting? The police? A distraught friend caught at dawn in some kind of horrible cycle?

A man's voice I didn't recognize said "Holly?" in a low tone.

"Yes. Who is this?"

And then, like he was asking to borrow a cup of sugar, "I was wondering if I could cum inside you."

I hung up the phone. I was standing naked in the dark in the living room and suddenly I felt very vulnerable, cold, and painfully alone. I walked back to my bedroom, avoiding the windows, and put a nightgown on. Then I went over to the window, pulled the curtain back and peered out like some old suspicious woman. There was no one out there, but I still felt watched.

I turned on the light and sat down on the couch, lighting a cigarette and quivering. My nasal passages were dried out from the cough syrup abuse, so I could hear my breath whistling in and out of my sinuses.

The phone rang again in about 15 minutes. I let the machine pick up. Nothing. Then the same thing again, immediately after. Nothing again. I smoked some more and watched infomercials till the sun came up, then crawled back under my now-cold covers. I lay there curled in a ball, listening to the little shifts and tics of the building, imagining footsteps, trying to unclench my muscles.

Today I looked myself up in the phone book, running my twitching finger down then rows of first names under Johnson until I landed on my own first name, and address. I tried to imagine myself as a stranger would. What about those five black letters would make you want to call me in the middle of the night, sex crazed and persistent? Is it because my name seems young? Or pretty? Or maybe there isn't any reason at all, and phone stalkers are as arbitrary as everything else in the universe seems to be. How's that for a grand theory?

I wish I wasn't so twitchy and distracted by this. I wish I wasn't sick and could sleep as l
ong as I want in utter safety in clean flannel sheets with everyone I love beside me. I wish there was a way, some guaranteed way, to keep the outside out, and the inside in.