So I’m headed to Singapore on Sunday for 3 days. Pretty sweet. Obviously that cuts into my get-shit-done-before-Vietnam schedule, but who cares? I hear it’s pretty cool over there. I find it amusing that you can't spit out gum over there but they have a red light district. I’m sure that there’s some wry joke waiting to be made about Singapore having its priorities straight, but whatev. I’ll leave that to the likes of PJ O’Rourke (who remains my bedtime reading – a couple chapters at 12.30 each night and I’m both entertained and woozy). He’s okay – his writing reminds me of my blog writing, which is to say that I’m not all that impressed. He’s like an erudite Dave Barry – you can almost predict the ends of some of the sentences. Still, he’s pretty funny and it’s always cool reading about student riots or trying to get on a bus in South Lebanon.

Anyway, I’m headed to Singapore on Sunday and back on Tuesday evening. One more country under my belt, and it’s all on the company dime. Sweet-ass sweet. My passport is going to be mackin’ it by the end of the year, esp if I make it to Costa Rica with Skaggy or Pagalooganugga or hit Ireland (and perhaps Holland) with my sister. Ireland is pretty much a lock, and if we have time we’ll head over to see Holland for a couple days, but who knows what’s up with Costa Rica. Gotta get there before my Lonely Planet book gets all out of date.

Yesterday, while reading the Technology section of the South China Morning Post, I saw articles about two websites that celebrate and incorporate two of humankind’s most valuable inventions ever: the computer and the gun. The first one, http://www.live-shot.com/, allows users to shoot a gun from anywhere. What? Yeah, you log on and somewhere out there, in the West or something, is a ridiculous-looking contraption that includes a gun, a camera, a computer on a table, and a dude who kind of oversees things. You aim and shoot from your desk in Manhattan (or wherever) using your mouse. I shit you not. The guy is there to oversee the final shot, to like clear it or something. I mean, there’s an onion story in there somewhere. How dumb. It’s like making a video game partly real, except you’re not in the cool mountain air, feeling the recoil and the noise and smelling the smoke. You’re sitting in your cubicle. It’s only for target shooting now, but the guy who runs it wants to expand to hunting. What are they going to do, set it up at major deer crossings? I’m sure the deer are really going to be cruising past the guy sitting at the table with the monitor and the gun-camera thingy. Maybe someday they’ll have a robot you can control that walks over and skins the thing for you and maybe drinks a cup of blood like they did in Red Dawn.

The second thing I read about is called www.jfkreloaded.net; that website allows members to play Lee Harvey Oswald. It’s computer-simulation Kennedy assassination software that uses the vast amount of data surrounding that event to re-create Daley Plaza, the motorcade, and the shooting. Dig – you can control, among other things, the crowd sounds, music and radio sounds, the blood effects, and the ‘motorcade behavior’ (Real, Exaggerated, and Chaotic). Since the real event was fairly damn chaotic, I wonder what the Chaotic setting is like. I mean, are there Secret Service dudes humping the bike cops while shooting wildly into the crowd? “It was chaos,I tell you!”

You can view your handiwork from the perspective of Abraham Zapruder, though there are options to change the location of the ‘camera’ through which you see the action as well as the object on which the camera centers. So you can put the camera on the front of the limo and aim right at Jackie’s face to see her expression or something. And, of course, there are trajectory graphs that show where your shots went – you know, “through motorcycle cop #1 and lodged in President’s arm” and little lines on the screen to show that. I have to admit that it’s pretty sick, and it seems like it was more borne of an ability to do something with all this available, meticulous data than of a great public demand to play Kennedy’s alleged killer. I just don’t want to pay for that. Free, sure, maybe once or twice, but why pay? I also think it would be more fun to try to shoot someone in the ass. Maybe hit Zapruder and see what his camera view looks like after a good ass-shot.

I also have to admit that I’m pretty weary of all the conspiracy theories and specials on the History Channel and so on. It seems pretty clear that Oswald didn’t do it from the most basic evidence – namely, that Kennedy is so, so obviously shot from in front and not from behind – but shit, man, there’s so much messed-up lyin’-ass stuff going on these days that I really do not care. The most plausible thing I saw was this one special showing a lot of good evidence that he was shot from this big rain drain on the right side of the street – but I’m so burned out that I don’t care.

Anyway, more later.

Chucky