Raebert and I are still disagreeing about how we see the guy. My view’s on the left, his is on the right. Maybe we’re both right this time.

Once again, Hannity’s trying to prove the obvious. And once again, he feels compelled to invite the participation of one of the most indefatigable Democrat spinners, Lannie Davis.

The president may have oversold the plan a bit. But it’s still a great plan.

There’s also a Democrat pollster who thinks it’s more important to fix the website than investigate what went wrong. And Yuppies who insist that the intentions are so good it doesn’t really matter how badly ObamaCare misses the mark.

Yada yada yada. But the Democrats are offset by the (as usual) outstretched legs of Kimberley Guilfoyle.

Democrats are stupid, but… yeah, stupid.

All is well. (Okay. Other people are saying other things, but who cares?) Sean is smiling. Let not your heart be troubled. He knows he can bring back the dead and broken body of ObamaCare sooner or later.

Even a poodle has serious skills.

What Raebert tells me, anyway. Hounds don’t retrieve. Ever. He’s a fan of the clowns who do what people command them to do. It astounds and mystifies him. And he has faith in The Guilfoyle’s legs.

Not much I can do with him. Sorry.

P.S. More seriously, the poodle proved worthy of his breed. He did something fine. Having called the 800 number for ObamaCare, he learned that the operator he spoke to got fired for answering his questions honestly. He made it right out of his own pocket (a year’s worth of income) and got her a job to boot. It’s possible he’s a nice guy despite his incredibly low forehead.

Yo, Sean. You’s a gentleman.

So Megyn asked a good question: In light of the Healthcare.gov disaster, any chance the MSM is feeling guilty for not having asked hard questions about ObamaCare before it became law? Howard Kurtz, the new Fox News media critic, was forthright in his answer. Well, he reported, the New York Times and the Washington Post have both run stories in the last few days asking hard questions about how well this law is going to work. That ought to put the kibosh on rumors of media bias. He was beaming like a cocker spaniel whose mistress just got home. You could practically hear his little tail wagging. Wow. Such journalistic integrity.

Then Megyn tossed her hair around and went on to more important subjects. Thank God for Fox News.

He’s got the Starfleet pedigree; I’ve got the Vulcan brain.

Yeah. We spend a lot of time watching the news together. We process it in different ways. Sometimes we watch on the iPad and his nose is inches from the screen, his super focused sighthound eyes. He’s sensitive to voices, music, he leaves when he’s offended, because he’s not as logical and unencumbered by emotion as I am.

But we mostly don’t fight because of the mind-meld. We just visualize things differently — I with my less accurate human sight and he with his infallible vision. When, rarely, I see photographically, I’m still somehow a step behind.

For example…

<It’s worse now that I have a truly rotten attitude and see almost everything as a cartoon, utterly divorced from any reality I would have recognized a few years ago. As I understand Raebert, he’s resisting that kind of reduction. Where I perceive only two-dimensional imaging, he still somehow detects life. Take Hillary. I see Cruella Deville, and he sees a living being, a member of his own family, however remotely related.

And so it goes. Maybe he’s right some of the time. How do you see Kathleen Sebelius?

.

But we were simpatico on John Kerry, I’m thinking.

I was wrong about McCain. I thought him essentially harmless.

The deerhound view. He’s a ferocious, indiscriminate killer.

My biggest miss. Here’s how I saw Nancy Pelosi.

The evil queen from Snow White.

How Raebert sees her.

Mirror, mirror, make it stop.

There’s more. Much more. We’ll get to it in time, in future Washington updates. But I’ll close with one where we seem to be convergent, although his vision is ever so much sharper than mine.

Wonder Woman

That was mine. Weak compared to Raebert’s.

Sarah Palin. He knows. I’ll try to do better.

Let’s transition to a wholly animated universe, eh Raebert?

Now for an update…

The president is closeted with Kathleen Sebelius to prepare her for next week’s congressional hearings.

Whatever you do, don’t crash and burn near me!

Meanwhile, the White House press secretary is doing his best to defend the administration and deflect attention from the president.

Mr. Carney, is the White House prepared to admit that the president has established a pattern of running away from every blossoming scandal — Fast & Furious, IRS, NSA, Benghazi, and now Healthcare.gov? Aren’t you Obama flacks starting to wonder what sort of sniveling coward he is?

Oops. Raebert’s not entirely pleased. I’ll have to get back to you.

Nothing to see here.

We’re just about an hour into the congressional hearing in which the principal software contractors are testifying about their roles in Healthcare.gov. All we’ve had so far are opening statements by congressmen and the four witnesses.

Interestingly, to hear the witnesses tell it, they performed their jobs as contracted, met their goals, and are proud of their work. So I guess the system is actually working quite well.

Who knew?

Somehow I doubt congress is going to make much of a dent in their jargon-filled testimony. But we’ll see.

uh, Ms. Sebelius, how was the gala in Boston last night?

Slurring and incoherent. Actually, nicer than usual.

I was going to cite some facts and anecdotes about his recent appearances on The Five. But he makes everything up to suit his own purposes, so screw it.

His much ballyhooed sobriety is gone. He slurs his words, he nods off when he thinks he’s off camera, and he can’t keep his hands off Kimberley Guilfoyle.

Guilty as charged by me.

Help me out here. I’m a big picture guy, not a lawyer. It’s obvious upon reflection that ObamaCare is supposed to fail and bankrupt all the private sector insurance companies. Which feeds automatically into single payer government control of all healthcare, which means the government owns your body and everyone else’s too.

But there’s not enough time for this to happen in Obama’s second term. He needs, must have, a third term, paving the way for the title ‘President for Life.’

I know that the easiest path is an excuse for the declaration of martial law. But somehow it seems too obvious. Except that I can’t think of a way more suited to O’s authoritarian personality. So, I guess, the excuse has to seem like an unexpected calamity. Collapse of the world economy in the aftermath of Iran nuking Israel? Collapse of the world economy following a 50 percent crash in the stock market and the hyper-inflation generated by the traitorous chairman of the Federal Reserve who finally stopped printing money backed by nothing? Another 9/11 scale attack on the nation that succeeds in spite of the valiant efforts of the NSA to protect us by listening to our bedroom conversations via bugs in our wives’ negligees?

Or will it be as simple as the sudden death by toaster malfunction of Justice Scalia, leading to a good-will Republican confirmation of Van Jones as his replacement and a sudden reversal of the 22nd Amendment in a test case involving the Obama Action Committee’s fundraising for the 2016 election.

Or maybe he’ll just declare that he’s running for a third term and the New York Times will tell us that any opposition is mere racism, and Eric Holder will explain that, once again, the Constitution doesn’t matter.

As I said, I don’t know. You smart ones need to lend a hand.

Rednecks with a capital “R.” It’s the perfect solution. A way out of the PC nonsense and a lesson to boot.

Not without precedent. Here’s an actual Washington helmet from the past:

Yup. It was and could be again.

Oh. The feathers. They have to be replaced. Easy. Redneck war dress includes something called headers.

How a Roadrunner scalps a Goat.

Oops. Did I say something incorrect? Ah, forget it. That’s something we can move beyond with the new name. Redneck is a pejorative term far more commonly used these days than Redskin. The latter is, if offensive to some, quaint, the memory of a hard-on nobody has anymore. The former is a contemporary raging hard-on of a whole generation of spoiled twits who live in high rises and gated communities and sneer at the ones who don’t. Meaning the ones who do all the real work, like, say, building their high rises and gated communities, and the roads they drive their Bimmers on, and the electrical and electronic grids they simply couldn’t live without. And, aw, they didn’t go to college, which means they don’t know all the crap that just ain’t so which “informs” the cognoscenti who dismiss them as a worthless, faceless herd of fools.

You see, Redneck is not a racial term, except perhaps to the Yuppies who stereotype them all as white trash. In reality, there are rednecks of every ethnic and geographic origin. They do a lot of stuff outdoors. They shoot guns, they hunt, they bowl, they have pig roasts on the Fourth of July, they go to church or they make excuses for not going to church, they usually didn’t arrive here on the Mayflower but on the run or in chains, their wives and girlfriends show off their figures and dance to sexy songs played by jukeboxes, they live everywhere in the country, including New York City, where they insist on liking Elvis and Aretha more than Bach or The Beatles, and all the suited ones just know they are the stupid cattle it is their mission to rule and confine to their seedy trailer parks.

Fair enough. Except that Rednecks don’t care what you think of them. Unlike every other group whose sensitivities liberals spend so much time protecting, Rednecks are an active target no one even tries to protect. Why is that? Partly because liberal tolerance doesn’t extend to those they can’t exploit as useful victims. And partly because Rednecks actually revel in liberal disdain.

That’s gotta hurt. Everybody else has a rights group, a defense group, an attack group, a litigious little army of resentful paranoids. Rednecks have a BRAND.

And they love it. Think that’s an overstatement? They’re not as dumb as you suppose. They know they’re the only acceptable target of vicious bias based on stereotypes left in our politically correct banana republic. And more than that, they know your contempt for them is tantamount to the minstrelsy tropes you make up inferentially in the ordinary speech of your political opponents. They’re happy to play this role. They. Expose. Your. Absolute intolerance.

We’ll still be here when you’re escaping to Switzerland.

Some Brit said no man is a hero to his valet. Think about that. You write regulations for an agency in DC. Pretty important, huh? Some Redneck unstops your toilet when your shit clogs the pipes. Maybe way more important, huh?

Could be the real reason liberals hate Rednecks so virulently and openly is that they refuse to be victims and aren’t buying your phony, superior act.

And they know that some part of you secretly envies them.

They don’t make these at Bryn Mawr.

Talk about reparations… DC power players have plenty to make up for with the hardworking people they’ve scorned as trash while they do almost nothing worthwhile. Here’s a solid first step.

And because I can’t not do this, Redneck Opera. Or do you prefer Redquiem? Or maybe Redneck Aria… Unless you want downright Redneck Tragedy our president would only laugh at, which this is, truthfully, awfully, and left as a lifelong burden to the lady who wanted something in red. She got it. No. Not kidding. You could look it up. Rednecks routinely experience emotions ten times the intensity of the drab who sneaks smokes out of sight of his wife in the White House.

Won’t do what I could — Cher, Madonna, Lady Gaga, and Mylie. The braindead empties of a lost generation.

Me? I’ll stick with the Rednecks.

Shut up and follow the candy.

New hypothesis. He’s just a precocious but emotionally arrested kid with borderline sociopathic tendencies.

His Rose Garden performance today was an astonishing display of denial and willful self-delusion.

He’s living in a universe that simply doesn’t exist. In point of fact the specific reasons for his break with objective reality don’t matter. He actually preened on stage, backed by people who didn’t really enroll in ObamaCare, and delivered an infomercial for a program that does none of the things he insisted it does.

The people whose job it it is to scurry around with pre-printed cabinet petitions asking the president to remove himself from power for reasons of personal incapacity should be scurrying double time right now.

He’s in a state mental health professionals normally refer to as a psychotic break. Whatever reality he thinks he’s in is not the reality the rest of us are living in.

My advice? Give him a Lego set and tell him it’s the best way to “transform” America in the remainder of his term in the asylum, er, office.

NOTE TO FOX NEWS: if you want to preserve your reputation as being distinct from the mainstream media, please be advised that the term “glitches” was retired by all but leftists a week or so ago. A system that doesn’t work at all isn’t suffering from glitches. It’s a software disaster. So it might behoove you to remove the term from your chyrons and the mouths of your anchors and opinionators. Also, as with the Global Warming nonsense of a few years ago, don’t go to political pundits for comment on science and technical matters on which they are entirely ignorant. Nina Easton knows nothing about the dire intricacies of software development and failure. Get someone who knows what the hell he is talking about or do another segment on the latest Victoria’s Secret show.

I guarantee you she knows as much about the real calamity lurking inside ObamaCare as Nina Easton of Fortune magazine.

Although her costume probably cost less than Nina’s usual get-up.

My hobbies are quantum econometrics and Univac machine code. And classic Chanel.

Portrait de Francois Marie Arouet dit, 1694-1778, tenant l’annee litteraire. Peinture de Jacques-Augustin-Catherine Pajou (1766-1828), 18eme siecle. Paris, Comedie Francaise

Among other things, he was famous for saying, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

Wiki needs more than one entry to cover his c.v. Here’s the thumbnail backgrounder:

Born
François-Marie Arouet
21 November 1694
Paris, France
Died
30 May 1778 (aged 83)
Paris, France
Resting place
Panthéon, Paris, France
Pen name
Voltaire

François-Marie Arouet (French: [fʁɑ̃swa maʁi aʁwɛ]; 21 November 1694 – 30 May 1778), known by his nom de plume Voltaire (/voʊlˈtɛər/;[2] French: [vɔltɛːʁ]), was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit, his attacks on Christianity as a whole, especially the established Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of speech and separation of church and state.

Voltaire was a versatile and prolific writer, producing works in almost every literary form, including plays, poems, novels, essays and historical and scientific works. He wrote more than 20,000 letters and more than 2,000 books and pamphlets.[3] He was an outspoken advocate of civil liberties, despite the risk this placed him in under the strict censorship laws of the time. As a satirical polemicist, he frequently made use of his works to criticize intolerance, religious dogma and the French institutions of his day.

For our purposes, the work of most interest is a short novel called Candide, a kind of candied poison cooked up for the philosophers of his day. Wiki gives us the lowdown.

Candide, ou l’Optimisme (/kænˈdiːd/; French: [kɑ̃did]) is a French satire first published in 1759 by Voltaire, a philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment.[5] The novella has been widely translated, with English versions titled Candide: or, All for the Best (1759); Candide: or, The Optimist (1762); and Candide: Optimism (1947).[6] It begins with a young man, Candide, who is living a sheltered life in an Edenic paradise and being indoctrinated with Leibnizian optimism by his mentor, Professor Pangloss.[7] The work describes the abrupt cessation of this lifestyle, followed by Candide’s slow and painful disillusionment as he witnesses and experiences great hardships in the world. Voltaire concludes with Candide, if not rejecting Leibnizian optimism outright, advocating a deeply practical precept, “we must cultivate our garden”, in lieu of the Leibnizian mantra of Pangloss, “all is for the best” in the “best of all possible worlds”.

Candide is characterized by its tone as well as by its erratic, fantastical, and fast-moving plot. A picaresque novel with a story similar to that of a more serious coming-of-age narrative (Bildungsroman), it parodies many adventure and romance clichés, the struggles of which are caricatured in a tone that is bitter and matter-of-fact. Still, the events discussed are often based on historical happenings, such as the Seven Years’ War and the 1755 Lisbon earthquake.[8] As philosophers of Voltaire’s day contended with the problem of evil, so does Candide in this short novel, albeit more directly and humorously. Voltaire ridicules religion, theologians, governments, armies, philosophies, and philosophers. Through Candide, he assaults Leibniz and his optimism.[9][10]

If it hasn’t already, the name Pangloss will soon ring a bell.

Daniel Pangloss, Gadfly in Residence, Shuteye Town

He makes an appearance in the back room at Moon Books and many appearances in the cocktail lounges serving Shuteye Town’s subway travelers.

Unless you discovered this post by accident, you are here because you are looking for the missing text files of Daniel Pangloss’s Conversations in the lounges of the Shuteye Transit subway system. The good news is that we can give you one Pangloss conversation now (and live links to much more Pangloss here later on below…):

BAHAMMA BULL 

The Sugar Reef – A Millennium Eve Celebration

 

The Speakers of the Conversation: DANIEL PANGLOSS, a journalist; ROGER LANDERS, an emigré, and PATRICK RAYMOND, an entrepreneur. The setting is an open-air restaurant overlooking the night-darkened turquoise of the Carribbean Sea. A mild breeze washes the tables with the smell of salt and wet wood. There is a pervasive sense of nothing urgent in the air. Roger and Patrick have already had a leisurely dinner of fresh water lobster, and the empty shell carcasses are flanked by several empty bottles of champagne.

 

DANIEL: I see that everyone has started without me. You’d better order another bottle of Moet. I’ve got some catching up to do.
ROGER: You’re not the only one who needs to catch up. I’ve been dying to hear all the latest gossip from Ameria.
DANIEL: Surely, Patrick keeps you current on the news. I myself don’t pay much attention these days to goings on outside Shuteye Town. It’s a lot of responsibility working with the wonderful kidz of Ameria. Doesn’t leave much time for kibitzing on the great events of the day.
ROGER: Really? Even if the great events of the day seem increasingly to involve school shootings by the wonderful kidz of Ameria?
DANIEL: You see? You have been keeping up with things. I can’t think what I’d be able to add to your own perceptions and insights.
PATRICK: That’s where I’d say you’re being too modest, Daniel. I can inform Roger about the headlines since his escape—the tragic death of Lady Die, the empeachment of the Presdent, the ascent of the martyr Hillery, and the continuing sorrow of Ameria’s classrooms—but I’m at a loss to explain to him why it’s all for the best. And that is your new stock in trade, is it not?
DANIEL: I do my poor part to shed a ray of friendly light on fortune’s face. Would you prefer that I yielded to cynicism and fled the land of my birth?
ROGER: As I understand it, Ameria is consumed with curiosity these days about the phenomenon of their wonderful kidz shooting each other and their teachers to death. Patrick says the mass media are thrillingly sincere in their determination to find out why. Perhaps you could shed a friendly ray of light about that for us. You must remember, after all, that we are members of that low company who have yielded to cynicism. We are having a hard time, for example, understanding why the ‘why’ seems so impenetrable to the geniuses of the media.
DANIEL: Ah. I will confess that I, too, was puzzled for a time about that. Like you, I suppose, I considered the answer obvious. It took me some little while to work out the underlying beauty of the process which insists on transforming the self-evident into the inscrutable.
PATRICK: I would enjoy being able to see such an underlying beauty.
ROGER: Me too. I wonder what stands in my way. Is the beauty obscured by an intervening layer of ugliness? Or is it that the ugliness—unbeknownst to ignoramuses like Patrick and me—ought properly be regarded as a thing of beauty?
DANIEL: As an artist, Roger, you must be aware that beauty often contains features that would be ugly if they were not so harmoniously resolved in the whole. A beautiful woman is rarely pretty, just as a pretty woman is denied the attainment of true beauty by the predictable uniformity of her features. Yes, there is ugliness in the components of the school-shooting mystery. But there is also a triumphant beauty in the whole of the cultural response to that mystery.
ROGER: Just so we don’t get at cross-purposes in this discussion, can we agree on some matters of ugliness? For example, when we agree that the answer seems obvious, are we in fact agreeing that that obvious answer is the collapse of all institutions, professions, and disciplines which play any part in the raising of children? That everyone who dares to point a finger in any specific direction is also an accomplice? That it is not a question of deciding between video games and filmed entertainments, or between parents and teachers, or between child psychologists and juvenile court judges, child welfare bureaucracies and school administrations, rap and alternative rock music, drugs and corrupt role models—but that all of these are implicated, none of them incidentally, which means that there is no combination of censorship, surveillance, legislative extremism, and suppression of civil rights which can restore what has already been lost? Can we agree that this is the obvious answer we have been alluding to?
DANIEL: Yes, indeed. Absolutely. I thought it too obvious a point to articulate in this company, but I see that your cynicism has made you suspicious. Every individual and every institution is culpable. The society of Ameria exists in a state of universal abortion—which is to say that the Baby Boomers will not produce a generation of adults. Their offspring will grow to physical maturity and eventually to senility as superannuated children, locked forever in the absolute selfishness of the infant mind which has never been created as a self in the first place. We confront in our wonderful kidz an army of clothes hangers. But they are clothes hangers endowed with appetites, voices, and ceaseless motion. Their motion is like the milling of a crowd in some public place where there is nothing to see, nowhere to go, and nothing to do. Periodically, the milling builds to the semblance of a riot, but it contains no more real malice than a pot of soup brought accidentally to a boil. The boiled soup does not see itself as ruined. That definition exists only from the standpoint of those who stood ready to consume it.
PATRICK. We are still waiting for the beauty.
DANIEL. The beauty? Oh, yes. The beauty. I would say that the whole presents three distinct faces of beauty. The first is the beauty of poetic justice. The second is the beauty of perfect irony. The third is the beauty of a new birth, the emergence of a new form of being.
PATRICK: Now that you mention it, I do believe I see the irony. Here is a generation of parents who have been so consumed with their own desires and appetites throughout their lives that they embarked on a secret experiment—the attempt to sire a new generation without accepting the responsibility for raising them. Let the teachers teach them, let the television babysit them, let the mall and the mass media introduce them to the culture they would inherit. Meanwhile, the parents were free to do as they wanted. Free to be self-serving film producers, network executives, teachers, advertising copywriters, attorneys, politicians, journalists, and businessmen. Free to add their own little molehill of ugliness to the mountain of bad influence their children would have to surmount in order to raise themselves. Because this was a generation of parents who had also developed their own definition of freedom, meaning that freedom consisted of their right to act in their own self-interest even as they sought to limit the freedom of anyone who got in their way. Such a novel definition of freedom had to be accompanied by an equally novel definition of virtue—that whatever they did in their own self-interest was virtuous because they were the ones doing it, and whatever anyone else did in their own self-interest was something that needed to be regulated by the government.
ROGER: There was, to be fair, some guilt involved.
PATRICK: But a guilt denied. That’s why the irony is, as Daniel has suggested, so perfect. For the wave of denial has been the size of a tsunami. Parents who could not hold a hundred-word conversation with their own children professed a love and commitment to their kidz which was nauseating in its saccharine, self-serving hypocrisy. Citizens of the richest nation in recorded history, they lamented the declining standard of living that required both parents to hold full-time jobs, lest they be reduced to the penurious state of living without that second VCR, that third television, that fourth movie channel, that fifth trip this month to the restaurant. In penance—and in proof of their love for the kidz—they bought the little bastards off, with hundred-and-forty dollar sneakers, TVs, computers, cell phones, and all the baggy designer togs a kid might need to hide out in. And when anything went wrong with their little darlings, they were savage in their denunciation of the violence in the movies, the sex on MTV, the incompetence in the classroom, the easy availability of drugs, the danger of guns, and the dearth of fit role models for the sullen, resentful slugs they had spawned.
ROGER: And the irony? The beautiful, perfect irony?
PATRICK: I’m beginning to take Daniel’s point. The beauty of the irony is that they don’t know what’s wrong with the kids because none of them has ever really talked to the kids. If they had tried, they would know that it can’t be done. These are kids with only one skill—the ability to terminate any conversation attempted by an adult with a few inarticulate grunts. That’s why the teachers can’t teach them and don’t really try to. It’s why the mass media journalists can’t explain them, why child psychologists can’t help them, why the drug counselors can’t save them. Nobody knows why school shootings happen because nobody has any real communication with the kids, and everybody is denying that this is so. If the parents and teachers and child experts were any damn good, this wouldn’t, couldn’t be a mystery. The perception of mystery is, all by itself, the perfect indictment of universal neglect and incompetence. It really is kind of beautiful when you think about it.
DANIEL: If you can perceive the irony, you shouldn’t have too much trouble with the poetic justice.
PATRICK: You’re right. It’s your point about the soup. The Baby Boomers have flitted from one fad to another all their lives, looking for happiness and salvation in a world without meaning. Belatedly, they hit on the idea that having children would save them, especially as they began to fear the prospect of old age. They fully intended to consume the pot of soup. But the soup is spoiled. Their beloved kids won’t give a shit about them when they reach their dotage and need that soup. That’s another reason the mystery is necessary. Till the very end, the parents don’t want to admit the lonely old age that’s staring them in the face.
ROGER: And the third face of beauty?
DANIEL: Stop playing dumb with me, Roger. I know as well as you do that you didn’t leave your journal unfinished when you left. Everything important is already in there. You tell me about the new birth.
ROGER: Okay. From here on in it’s a new world. The technocratic system has come into its own now, and the X-Generation is perfectly adapted to that system’s wants and needs. There are two possible alternative outcomes—a long twilight of diminishing freedom and accelerating transactional velocity; or a cataclysm of some sort, a large-scale die-off that trims the human race back to manageable proportions. Either way, the principal attribute of the X-Generation—which is its undeveloped capacity for the experience of deep human emotion—will prove to be advantageous for the physical survival of the species. I cannot offer a helpful comment about the value of physical survival in the absence of emotional, intellectual, and spiritual survival. I am a cynic. I see no value in mere physical survival. But you, Daniel, I am sure you can articulate it if there is any.
DANIEL: I’m sure I can. Is there any more champagne?
PATRICK: Here comes the waiter now.
ROGER: It’s nearly midnight. Shouldn’t we be drinking a toast to the new millennium?
DANIEL: I’ll drink to that.
PATRICK: Me too.
ROGER: What the hell. Why not?

“Bahamma Bull” is not one of the missing texts of ST99. Because it didn’t take place in Shuteye Town. Daniel Pangloss spends much of his time outside Shuteye Town, in the fictional country of Ameria, otherwise known as Shuteye Nation. This is a place of its own, as much a creature of words as ST99 is of images, quite as vast in its own way and very intricately interconnected by hyperlinks. It has columns from the Shuteye Times and the Balow Star, as well as other mass media outlets from the years 2000 and 2001. It has its own Who’s Who listings of currently famous people, has-beens, foreigners, historical figures (to the extent we can remember them), a Glossary of the American language of the time that owes as much to Ambrose Bierce as the persona of Pangloss owes to Voltaire, and its own Undernet. Pangloss is a major content contributor at what may be the wildest component of Shuteye Nation, the Foreign Gazetteer. You’ll find him sharing his perspective on:

The Cuben Missile Crisis of 1962.

Snazi Germany

Pangloss on the Culture of Yurrup, specifically art, specifically boobs.

The Culture of Franch, specifically boobs, specifically philosophy, spectifically “La Danse Moderne.”

Pangloss moonlights as a travel correspondent, rearching the marvelous progress of Castrol’s Cuber.

At Amazon.com.

And as you might guess from the pic above, you can also read all the Lounge Conversations from the Shuteye subway line. They’re in print and waiting for your delectation. Good news, bad news: the Shuteye Nation stuff is free; the Lounge Conversations aren’t.