Long and short of it, the babe didn’t make it.

Once upon a time there was a baby.

It was worse than other babies. For
one thing, it was larger.

Its body was not merely obese, but
downright bloated.

One of its feet had too many toes,
and the other one not enough.

Its hands were both left ones.

Its nose was beaky, and appeared
to be considerably older than the
rest of it.

Its tiny eyes were surrounded by large
black rings due to fatigue, for its
guilty conscience hardly ever allowed
it to sleep.

It was usually damp and sticky for it
wept a grat deal. It was consumed
by self-pity, which it this case was
perfectly justified.

It was capable of making only two sorts
of noises, both of them nasty.

The first was a choked gurgling,
reminiscent of faulty drains. It made
this noise when it had succeeded in
doing something particularly atrocious.

The second was a thin shriek suggestive
of fingernails on blackboards. It made
this noise when it had been prevented from
doing something particularly atrocious.

Fortunately, it was unable to walk.

It had never been given a name since
no-one cared to talk about it. When it
was absolutely necessary to do so, it
was referred to as the Beastly Baby.

Dangerous objects were left about in the
hope that it would do itself an injury,
preferably fatal.

But it never did, and instead, hacked
up the carpets with knives.

Or burnt enormous holes in the upholstery
with acid.

Or shot bric-à-brac off the tables.

A day in the broiling sun had no other
effect than to turn it a horrid purple.

When it was taken bathing, it always
floated back to shore, festooned with
slimy green weed.

In public places some officious person
was certain to point out that it was
in danger of being left behind.

Inevitably, a policeman was looking on
whenever it was just about to be
momentarily set down on a doorstep.

In the meantime it grew larger and older
every day, and what this would
eventually lead to, no-one liked to think.

Then one day it was taken on a picnic.

It was set on an exposed ledge some
distance from where the food was.

A few minutes later, a passing eagle
noticed it there.

The eagle, having never before been
presented with this classic opportunity
carried it off.

The Eagle found keeping hold of it more
difficult than he had expected.

He attempted to get a further grip on it
with his beak.

There was a wet sort of explosion,
audible for several miles.

And that, thank heavens! was the end
of the Beastly Baby.

— Edward Gorey

Amphigorey Too

If tame is your cup of tea, go away now. Otherwise here’s how you can begin exploring the very involved and unexpected world of R. F. Laird. You can click on the graphics below to be transported to a relevant url. (You can return with the back button or the open file listings on your screen.) Other links are straight from text.

Here are a lot of his books:

Some on-line books are free elsewhere…

Laird on Trump

Instapunk on Cars

Click on the photos below for links to some major sites…

Here’s his 3,000-pg video game/puzzle/labyrinth called Shuteye Town 1999:

Here’s his massively hyperlinked fictional country, called Shuteye Nation:

Here’s the website that will tell you the most about R. F. Laird and his work:

Here are links to most of his blogs:

InstaPunk Returns (2018-Present, 125+ posts)
InstaPunk Rules (2014-2017, c.600 posts)
RFLaird.com (a.k.a Deerhound Diary, 2013-Present, c.500 posts)
InstaPunk.com (10 years of weekly archives at Wayback, c.2,500 posts 90+ percent intact)(sample single posts here)
Robert Laird @Facebook (2014-2019, 1,000+ posts, Scroll to read)[If you get the Newsfeed not the Main Page, click on the helmet icon to the left of “What’s on your mind?”]

Here are links to some of his other websites:

My Selfies (Spoof site also includes a sampler of representative Laird works)
The South Street Mystery (conspiracy theories about punk writers)
The Gypsy Gallery (representative Punk City artworks)
The Paranormal Plexus (tracking fringe literature and banned books/magazines)
The Boomer Bible and 9/11 (connecting a 1991 book and a day almost exactly 10 yrs later)

Miscellaneous:

Laird’s Author Page @ Amazon.
Laird On Laird (6,000 words and a tombstone)

There you have it. One page of text, plus links. One computer page anyway.

My Dog in the Hunt. I was this guy. You can’t see the eyes that made it work when I was the Best Living Consultant. On the road, all the time, on the Mission every minute. Until he threw away all the big paydays to become the Greatest Living Writer. (My wife never knew about the white-shirt-gray tie-charcoal suit version of him. Saw him only just before and long after. Missed all the hunkering and fuming in airports. All the cooling of heels in the anterooms of the great, who were taking credit for work they hadn’t done themselves and advancing their own careers enormously thereby.) She rejected this post for InstaPunk Returns.

Tried to watch this movie that Netflix promised would be fun, Brampton’s Own. Here’s the trailer:

Here are representative reviews for the 5.2⭐critics ratings:

Now I have to tell you how much it sucked. Why I stopped watching halfway through even though the trailer(s) had already told me how it would end. My wife can affirm I predicted the turning point of the movie was the pool game between the washed up minor leaguer and the smarmy, successful dentist. The ballplayer was going to lose and go on to win her back, or win and go on back to win everything else too. Either way, not the pool game played by corporate ronin.

What’s our way? No, we won’t be comparing ourselves to big city cops, firemen, and ER workers. But we are comparing ourselves to thousands of people, men and women both, who leave the state, the hometown of their birth, and move after the right amount of schooling to where the jobs are. Minor league ball players fall into this category too, just so you know this isn’t a grad school snob thing.

Who are we? We’re the ones with hopes of families, schools, communities riding on them. We were raised if not born to be successes in very specific lines of endeavor. To work for the firms and corporations and many other kinds of institutions that rule the world. We are aimed at acquiring the disciplines which make you NOT the fighters — for firms, companies, teams, disciplines, and other competitive environments where if you fail at the fighting, you are just the scrap left behind.

It’s not put to us this way, of course, not in so many words. Like in Brampton. Don’t make it seem to be the town’s major league hope for immortality, don’t ever come back. That’s it’s own kind of ultimatum, the kind the movie thinks is mildly funny, proof of immaturity, the sin that needs to be appeased. The girl who recounts the style of her house, number of children, life expectancy, and final hobbies is itemizing the bill of indictment for those who carry other people’s dreams and drop them along the way.

What’s wrong with Brampton? He is accountable to them. He excels at a sport, a talent, a discipline most people are simply also-rans at best at. It takes him away from home for years, from family and loved ones for thousands of hours, he is expected to apply maximum focus, all his practice time, and a continuously ingenious level of talent to accomplish what? For doing what all the bystanders back home can’t.

What’s that? Going where he’s needed, where the fight is, bringing home the win, the sale, the verdict, the settlement, the contract, the statistics, the headlines, the partnership, the nomination, the championship, the awards, the fame, the eternal vindication, the immortality, for all the ones who were counting on them to do that in their place.

Here’s how it’s actually done for the most part. By people who have spent enough time away at school or training camps, in the minors, on the road, on planes, surrounded by relentless driven ones much like themselves, until chance, as it will so often have it, forces a once-in-a-lifetime moment of decision in which one may win a little something — if he can remember what it is — and more than one will lose everything. Such people are rarely entreated home by their mothers. Here’s how that actually looks when it’s done by someone who does remember exactly what it looks like, what he wanted in the first place, no matter how much it cost:

The guy in the movie was always a loser. But more importantly, he should have known he wasn’t going to kill any kind of “lunger” to save anyone from anything. He had too many people rooting for him. Very few All-American boys win the particular kinds of competition we’re talking about. They generally (always) do have backup plans. They have no need to go crawling back home. It’s still, always been, home to them. The movie a fundamental lie in this respect.

For the truth is, there is no home among the usual suspects. Friends will envy and despise, family will resent them, the institutions to which they gave fealty will ignore them. Why they’re so waspish as to say, “I’m your huckleberry.”

They know they ARE the huckleberry. Why they have to be. After all, there are the ronin who finally, ultimately, aren’t fast or accurate enough on the draw.

You see, this also happens, but never at the hometown pool game. It happens on the road, after a couple of ordinary lifetimes of grief, penury, pain, and loss.

And this happens too.

To whom? The ones who insist on being carried, all their treachery and backstabbing notwithstanding. Those ones get what they actually all wanted. Part of the prize they do nothing to earn.

There is mercy. But only for the ones who know how many miles have been traveled and how little value is attached to it by the ones who grant it.

Behold. This is the nature of the mighty Machine whose beautiful intricacy we have ungratefully inherited.

This is not an essay about the superiority of white men. It is a defense against the ridiculous characterizations of white men and the liability they supposedly represent to progress as progressives define it. It could have been quite long, but I’m saving words and time by using a lot of pictures and severely restricting the sample population necessary for a robust defense.

I implore everyone who reads this to forward it to all friends, family, and acquaintances on both sides of the aisle. An absurd libel has been promoted in recent months of political campaigning, and it also happens to be an incredibly self-destructive libel for those perpetuating it.

Our sample population is large, but not a majority. It consists of men who tend to get lumped in with the similarly slandered vultures of Wall Street, Madison Avenue, and quite suddenly the so-called “Tech Gods” of Silicon Valley. I’m talking about some of the hardest working, most creative and productive members of society, the engineers in myriad disciplines who design all the working machines in our lives, as well as the machines that build them.

Over the last half century engineers been almost exclusively white men; until very recently, others did not apply. They have college degrees, they have a variety of lifestyle benefits, careers and promotions, and they are well compensated for the most part, but the overwhelming majority of them are not rich or trying to be. They are in every sense of the term “working people” with the same characteristics politicians praise in skilled and semi-skilled blue collar jobs. But they are routinely slighted by politicians who proclaim “You did not build that!” because they wear ties and usually don’t have dirt under their fingernails.

What else are they not? They are not the power brokers who seek to decide for us what we want and who should have it. They are not the “social engineering” despots who would invade people’s everyday lives ostensibly to make them better or — if it is deemed a good for someone more deserving — make them worse for a fancied privileged minority. They are not the lecturers, sermonizers, scolds, legal crusaders, and provocateurs who build nothing but incite various kinds of destruction, cultural, physical, and human. They are not the deciders who usually levy blame for what they themselves have wrought.

What are they? They are the builders. The ones who, more than anyone else in the nation, really have built that nation, not just assembled the steel and concrete skeletons of buildings, the wooden beams, the pipe fittings, the phone lines, the home you live in with its roof and windows and toilets, and the new SUV in your driveway. That is invaluable, indispensable work, understood to be so by most. But it is the rarely acknowledged engineers who have BUILT it all in the deepest sense of that word, the skyscrapers from blueprints to floor layouts and HVAC designs, the private, affordable homes that don’t blow away in a storm, the millions of miles of highways, the bridges and dams of every size, the power plants, the hospitals and their lifesaving medical equipment, commercial airliners and container ships, the grids of wire and plumbing and air traffic control and emergency machines (not to mention the light bars on top and the fireman’s helmet), and the vast military umbrella that has overarched all these grids and protected this greatest of all nation’s people from August 1945 to right now.

Wherever you are right now, you can reach out and touch any ‘thing’ and its physical design and the manner of its construction will be the brainchild of an engineer. They went to work after the 15 years of the Great Depression and built the safest, most prosperous, and healthiest nation the world had ever seen. They didn’t get princely salaries or homes. Many lived in the new cookie cutter developments required to fill a deficit in residential housing. Communities pioneered in places like Levittown, Pennsylvania, and Huber Heights, Ohio.

They worked under business managements that knew how to make money from the honest asset of well designed, reliable, safe, and affordable products, from the smallest sewing needle to the biggest cars and trucks. Which poured into the United States like a mechanical flood.

A lineup of Ford Focus vehicles is seen on an assembly line prior to a speech by US President Barack Obama about the automotive manufacturing industry at the Ford Michigan Assembly Plant in Wayne, Michigan, January 7, 2015. AFP PHOTO / SAUL LOEB

They worked for government managements too, inventing the new technologies and methods needed to build an interconnected state highway system, an international air travel network, and astounding new bridges, dams, and power generation systems to serve the needs of diverse regions and resource requirements.

Everyone alive today can’t help but take most of this for granted. The easiest way to take a private measure of what they built for us is to consider life without it or even life without the same degree of safety and convenience. An international air traffic network could have been made operational, profitable, and well accepted if there were — in today’s population — one major air crash a day. Passenger miles flown every day are in the millions in this country. A death rate of 200 per day would be less than 75,000 per year, roughly twice what we lose in automobile accidents, except that without contemporary technologies like seat belts, air bags, anti-lock brakes, collision-optimized chassis, and tires more than twice as sticky as 1945 levels, death by 350HP V-8 automobiles would probably be higher than 150,000 per annum.

Ford 302 Engine Diagram 289 Engine – Google Search | Buzzy | Pinterest | Engine – Diagram Chart Gallery

The engineers working for both business and government weren’t satisfied with making cars more powerful and airplanes more long-legged. They developed new kinds of engineering to prevent crashes and, when they occurred, show up with their tools and brains to find out why and make sure it couldn’t happen again.

You don’t lose electrical power two, three, or five times a week, do you? Take a look at the countries of the Middle East. When the storms cause street filling floods, you don’t die by the thousands in your neighborhood, do you, because you’ve got warnings and Coast Guard helicopters. They still lose thousands in China and other countries, and hundreds sometimes even in Europe. When you do have a catastrophic accident like loss of a limb, you don’t have to become a homebody or a dependent, do you? Falling ill isn’t something you face with little on your side but hope and fatalism, is it?

You may think that the new age of advanced computer technology makes a lot of these older accomplishments obsolete. Smartphones replace old fashioned radios, televisions, telephones, and even arithmetic and basic handwriting skills. The software and its constant flow of new apps is in the capable hands of tattooed young software writers who don’t need mechanical drawing or design easels.

Here’s a very dirty secret. The hardware is mostly fine, but this whole 21st century generation of software is junk. If your car operated like a laptop computer, you’d be spending a lot of time getting your hands greasy in the garage. You don’t get a new operator’s manual for your car dropped on the driver’s seat overnight every month or two, do you, a vague list of changes without an explanation of consequences. You don’t get telegrams telling you to change your oil from 10W30 to 10W50 because a leak has been discovered in the oilpan design and can’t be fixed until the new point-release crankshaft is out of beta test. You don’t find the rules of the road changing on you suddenly, with Yield signs now to be taken as Stop signs and speed limits reduced by a third or else no more driver’s license. You don’t discover that your car radio no longer works because your smartphone blacktooth is incompatible with Blaupunkt. Or any number of other things that could cause the sudden appearance of the blue screen of death.

You don’t get a warning buzzer when you turn in a direction not indicated by your GPS, which if ignored will either proceed to stop the car on its own or make you back up two times to reset the GPS before you can turn right into your driveway, not left into the river.

Software writers, uh the software “engineers” writing your everyday code, are nothing of the sort. The ones outside the exacting engineering world of the military are illiterate doodlers in a subset of Engrish that attempts to imitate logic in “algorithms” without resting on any foundation of mathematical knowledge or basic syllogisms. They are fakers working for Barnums who believe their grandiloquent boasts. They are not making you safer any more than the business versions of their lame code are not costing big and small businesses and their customers untold billions with outdated data security measures hacked by someone smart last night. Here and there and a little or a lot everywhere they are getting some of you killed. There are no safety standards, no engineering specs for preventing loss of life, limb, health, family, and happiness in this dumb new smartworld we’re desperate to trade the old evil white men in on.

And of course it isn’t only white men who can be the builders and the solid practical brains that measure what they create and correct it before it kills again. More and more women and minorities are joining the ranks of engineers now. But are they still acquiring the craft of old? The discipline, the sense of duty, the reliability, the willingness to wait patiently before book knowledge becomes real world expertise? Are they humble enough to accept that their job is to work the task at hand to the best of their ability without getting distracted by the desire to tell others what to want, what to do with their lives, and why they better do it or else? Is it really a good idea to demonize the ones who made so many things work so well for so long?

I have my doubts about that. At the very least, we owe them the respect of withdrawing and apologizing for the libel.

I’m going to leave you with three videos. If you’ve followed me till now, you’ll know why they’re worth your while.

There are two more parts to this next one, accessible from the end screen, detailing how the engineers and contractors fixed an architectural disaster of epic proportions.

How long can we fake the future with illiterates and Barnums? Do you really want to find out?

P.S. If you’re having a hard time imagining your life without all the conveniences and labor-saving devices designed and built in the the last 50 years of the 20th century, try this: