Ok, you know what?

Ignore that last post.

Running on fumes...

Not a lot to report on here at Chez Lynsey. I haven't found any media stories that are a) funny and quirky and interesting, or b) not way too complicated to talk about. I'd love to go into this whole CIA-has-been-lying-what-a-big-f-ing-surprise-that-is thing, but it's just so convoluted and ridiculous, and frankly, my brain has been trying to take the day off ever since I woke up, so I think I'll at least let it idle, if not turn itself off completely.

I wanted to write about this story about a Brooklyn daycare that turned out to be a front for a giant drug dealing operation (by giant I mean ten POUNDS of marijuana and around $100K in cash in the basement) but most of my talking points kept getting shut down by my brain as I thought more about it. Like, at first I was incensed by people's admonitions that having all those drugs around kids was despicable, because, I mean, c'mon it's WEED. Like, I guess I could see there being a problem if the people in charge of the kids got too excited about the book they were reading, "Mr. Bigglseworth Bakes a Pie," and then went to heat up a pre-made pie in the oven and, being high, obviously, left it in too long and caught the place on fire, but really it's pretty harmless with children.
But then I realized that the reason the operation got busted in the first place was because a gunfight had broken out there a day before, when some robbers went in to try to get the cash. So, yeah, having drugs = having cash = having people trying to rob you = having guns around kids. So, not so great. Not much of a soapbox to stand on there, Lyns.

Ummm, so there's that.

Wow, what a blog fail. Oh well.

But I DID see a guy on the subway yesterday who had his cheekbone pierced. Or something. It was wild. He had a metal stud in his cheek, right over his cheekbone. I don't know if it was like pierced into the bone, or just through the skin, or what, but it was crazy.

Oh and also, I discovered an interesting tidbit of information you might enjoy: George Clooney used to have a 300 lb pot bellied pig named Max (I've seen those giant Vietnamese pigs before - they're the ugliest sons of bitches on the planet) that shared his bed with him in the early nineties after his breakup with Kelly Preston. Turns out, Max, like other, more agile animals, could feel earthquakes coming, and woke George up early one morning in a frenzy, getting him to leave the house before an earthquake hit and ostensibly saving his life. Pretty cool, huh?

OH. MY. GOD. And how the media is trying to send us all into a panicked frenzy.

Ok, so when I first read this: Ant Mega-Colony Takes Over World ... I kinda freaked out a little. I mean. C'mon. Takes Over World?? That's a little terrifying no matter who's doing it, but ANTS? I got these pictures of huge 1950's B-movie Ant Monsters the size of 3 story buildings running around in traffic, wiggling their 20-foot antennae and clicking their human-sized mandibles together and doing any number of the horrible scary things that ants do (ever read up on bullet ants? blind ants? fire ants? nasty little buggers, I'm telling you!) on a ginormous scale. I almost peed myself.

Needless to say, this was not exactly the scenario that Matt Walker from the BBC's Earth News was trying to describe. The story itself isn't all that fantastic: basically there's this highly invasive species of Argentine ant that has been spread all over the world by human activity, and that has now established 'super colonies' in Europe, the US, two in Japan, and of course in South America. The ants are currently on every continent except for Antarctica. This is bad, because according to Suite101.com, these ants are among the world's worst invaders of new territory, causing serious damage to ecosystems when they land in new places and start up their monstrous colonies. And while that's kind of so-so on the unpleasant scale (at least for us; I'm sure there's some species of native ant out there lignering on the brink of starvation in little ant refugee camps, huddled around campfires and singing their native ant-farm songs in the night), things got a little creepy when researchers from Japan started putting the ants from super-colonies thousands of miles apart together to see how they'd react - and they got along. Ants are pretty aggressive critters, and as a consequence, when presented from an ant not of their own colony they usually get into fights. But these Argentine invaders (those from the bigges of the super-colonies) had no beef with each other. They basically just bought each other beers and started telling crazy stories about their mutual extended relatives antics at the last Argentine invaders' company holiday party. The researchers, surprised and unnerved, apparently let it slip that ants usually only act this chummy around others from their own specific colony, and that "the enormous extent of this population is paralleled only by human society."

Well, yeah. Ok. But then the BBC turned these observations into statements like these:
-"billions of Argentine ants around the world all actually belong to one single global mega-colony."
-"The colony may be the largest of its type ever known for any insect species, and could rival humans in the scale of its world domination."
-"further experiments revealed the true extent of the insects' global ambition."

Dude. Come on.

Unless you have evidence that someone has actually found a giant underground series of tunnels leading from Japan and the US and Europe to an Argentinian home base with a giant ant-head that glows transmitting doom thoughts to billions of other ants around the world, don't give me shit like this. I'm way disappointed.

BUT! I am published again! My little Rant Rez from the other day went up today on The Whiskey Dregs. I rule!

This has nothing to do with anything, but...

...I just have to write down my dream from last night before I forget it, because I'm sure this is fodder for an excellent story and I have to keep it. Please, don't be scared off. This is the kind of stuff I have to share with the world.

Last night, I dreamed that I woke up in hell. I had apparently passed away and found myself in a large cafeteria, reminiscent of the one I remember from college. There were rows of hot food buffets and people lined up at them, spooning food onto partitioned trays, just like in high school. It appeared to be mostly cheesy casserole food, as it was all stringy and stretchy. Didn't look bad. People were having pretty typical conversations and were wearing whatever they died in, but everyone was a little sweaty because, obviously, it was quite warm. All the buffet sneeze guards were steamed up from the inside and the outside, and the air just had that stuffy sheen of hot weather to it. Very humid.

I set about determining where I was, and within a few minutes I'd discerned that I was in fact in hell, and also that a lot of my friends were already there. Gretchen, if you're reading this - sorry, but you goin' to the big cafeteria down under. And Amanda Myers and few people I work with, I think. All explaining to me how things worked and how it wasn't really so bad, just endlessly monotonous and the food wasn't very good.

So I sat down with people to my first meal in hell, pretty certain I'd never be leaving, if the legend of Persephone had any bearing. Cause that mac-n-cheese looked delicious and I was gonna eat the crap out of it. Sometime during our meal, in which we discussed how people around me had died (no memory of the details, sorry Gert), the Devil got up and started reading out who was to be on what work detail that week. We apparently worked different jobs in shifts. The Devil was Hitler, except he was bright red and had horns of course, but the face - definitely Mein Fuhrer. He seemed to be in the same mood as everyone else. Doing ok, but just kind of tired and worn out and bored. And sweaty, very sweaty. He kind of gallumphed up onto the stage, read his list of assignments, and then shuffled off.

I got assigned with a group of mostly young attractive women. There were about seven of us, I believe, and we all tromped off to the office we'd been assigned to. When we got there I realized that our job was to assist Mr. Pierre Levai, the former (i.e., now deceased) President of the Marlborough Gallery. It WAS hell! I was on a personal assistantship team for one of the biggest pricks ever known to man (except the leader of the Third Reich, of course). He came storming in, all red faced, and started demanding things of us that we didn't know how to respond to - which is pretty much his modus operandi in life. We were all getting flustered when suddenly Kim Kardashian, who was apparently on my work detail with me, came purring up from her seat and somehow charmed him into calming down. At first I was annoyed, because she was being so blatantly sexual and ridiculously servile to him, but after a few minutes she had talked him down out of a temper tantrum and somehow convinced him to leave the office for a while. Go, Kim! After he left, we talked for a while and I came to the conclusion that Kim Kardashian is actually a pretty cool chick. Go figure.

After work detail was over, we all reassembled in the cafeteria. Kim and I went our separate ways, but we had forged a pretty decent working relationship and I hoped she'd be on my detail the next day. I went to sit down with Gert and Mooie, and suddenly, out of a rift in the space-time continuum, Jon Wagner, Josh Baney and Rich Hess (all high school friends) plopped down near us in hell. We explained where they were, and they explained that they had all been on military duty together in Afghanistan (I think?) and had apparently been killed. We went around the table telling our stories, and it seemed that everyone knew where they were and what they had been up to, but not the moment of death or what it was, specifically, that had done them in.

When it came around to my turn, I suddenly realized that I had no idea how I'd died. No memory of anything at all, not even of the surrounding circumstances. I got very upset, thinking I should definitely have known, and I was informed that I had to go down the hall out of the cafeteria to get my memory restored. There was an office down there, they said, where they'd give me everything I needed.

So off I tromped, down the hall, first door on the left, and entered into... the most delicious looking and smelling pastry shop I'd ever been in. The women behind the counter were all in bonnets and aprons and smiley, although they looked a little bit like pigs. They gave me plates full of pastries, telling me exactly what every one would do for me when I ate it, what kinds of memory would be restored and what to expect to feel. They were very supportive, and by the time I left the room my tray was covered with little peanut butter and chocolate tartlets, chocolate cake, croissants, and cookies.

I was walking back to the cafeteria, licking my lips and marveling at how very nice everyone in Hell seemed to be, when I realized that there was no way I'd EVER be able to eat all of my memories in one sitting. But I knew I'd have to. And suddenly I realized the irony of it all - the people in hell weren't nice, they were sadists! And they wanted me to turn into a pig, too!

....somewhere around here I woke up, and although I fell back asleep a few times, everything got disjointed, so that's effectively where the dream ended.

But, good stuff, no? I feel like it's so heavy with symbolism it's practically dripping. Good fodder for a story down the line. I'm very impressed with my brain.