(MRR 345) Penn State vs Apple a not so rosey bowl

You're Wrong

An Irregular Column

for MRR 345, February

by Mykel Board

aka  Mykel continues his Steve Jobs attack, enlisting the Penn State football team to help.

“As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly.” Proverbs 26:11

I lie naked on on the bed... gasping... my mouth half open to let air in and out. Each breath hurts. My lungs whistle as they struggle for air. I'm going to suffocate. Half blind, I feel for something to clear my nose in. A cloth... soft... white... a t-shirt turned inside-out as if worn and discarded. I can vaguely see GG Allin through the material... I don't care... I pull the crumpled t-shirt to my face. Using what little lung-power I have, I blow air out my nose. BLLLLLAAAR! BLLLLLAAAR! BLLLLLAAAR! For a second I breathe. Feel the air through one nostril-- like mint on a spring day.

I look at the yellow glob of snot in the t-shirt. It's flecked with red... blood... looking like veins in a leaf... nourishment for the pus... a living organism, that'll drop off the cloth... onto the floor... and start crawling. It doesn't.

The fantasy of crawling mucus doesn't last long. The snot I didn't expel has lodged itself in my lungs. I gag... cough... gag again... manage to pull myself up... to my elbows. The coughing doesn't stop... deep heavy coughs... below my lungs... into my stonach... more gagging... I'm gonnna choke on my own vomit... like Jimi Hendrix.

I can just roll out of bed and crawl slowly toward the bathroom... too slowly... Before I reach the toilet, I cough hard enough to dislodge the food in my stomach... taco salad... shot of ouzo... nacho chips... with beef and cheese... all in various degrees of digestion... all pouring out of my mouth onto the tile floor.... not pouring, but spraying... hard... onto the floor... up and out my nose... everywhere... with enough force to splatter... to splatter my hands... my arms... drip down my face... hang in strings from my beard.

Green... gray... yellow... white... clear... this too, flecked though with tiny rivulets of blood... it's not over... more coughing... violent... puke... not like a beer puke... not like a fever puke... puke without nausea... a hard puke... coughing food from my stomach... inhaling the puke and coughing it out again ... spraying the floor like a machine gun sprays Iraqis.

The fluorescent light in the bathroom brightens the viscous mess on the floor.

Flash to a locker-room in Pennsylvania: A big, smiley gray-haired man is naked, kneeling next to a pre-pubescent, also naked. The kid is a white boy, with a shock of brown hair, falling Justin Bieber style, over his forehead. He lies on a wooden bench. He too is naked.

The grey-haired man lowers his buck-toothed mouth over the boy's crotch. He laps, starting low, between the legs... he raises one eyebrow to watch the boy move from limpitude to youthful stiffness. Then he takes that stiffness into his mouth...

I don't know if that's what happened. The coach says he only “horsed around with” the boys. It could've been nothing more than sharing a shower.

You (think you) know the story. You saw it on TV. TV news and the press have turned the adventure into something more disgusting than my vomit on the bathroom floor. They spray it in your face whenever you turn on the TV. The latest, in Pennsylvania: Jerry Sandusky, the defensive coordinator of the Penn State football team is charged with sexually abusing eight boys over a 15-year period. The man played football at Penn State and was a coach there for 32 years — 23 of them as the team's defensive coordinator.

Along with him, Joe Paterno, the long-time football coach-- and the winningest coach in college football-- and several other people were fired. No trial... except in the press.

Sandusky talks about showering with the kids and “horsing around,” which means things like snapping towels... not things like licking testicles.

A Janitor had reported Sandusky in 2000... saying he saw something lewd in a college lockerroom shower.

What is the coach charged with? Seven counts of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse. What the fuck is involuntary deviate sexual intercourse?

We get more. More spew from the press... right and left... from tsk-tsking conservatives who say that's what happens when you let GOD out of your life... to tsk-tsking liberals who say that's what happens when sports and its idea of winning is the only thing take over.

Excuse me while I puke.

Did the kids complain? Was there an injury? A visit to a doctor? None of that.

Where's the crime?... I'll tell you.

Flash to Zhengzhou in the Henan Province of China: On the 25^th floor of an anonymous factory building. It's slave labor. Workers forced into 12-hour days, at about 50 cents an hour. Chung Tang, about 25-- but looking 50, has been working for 36 hours straight. He's forbidden to speak to his co-workers... he couldn't anyway... he has to put a circuit board on some pegs. One every seven seconds. If he misses, he's fired... out on the street.

The smell of chemical solvents permeates the air. They use the chemicals to etch circuit boards. They also etch lungs. It's painful to breathe. Straight thinking is impossible. The man's brain is fried from the work and the chemicals. After work, he drags himself to the single room he shares with five other workers. Not today.

All he can do is count. 36 hours... ten more boards and he can go home. Nine... Eight... Seven...

His supervisor walks to him.

“You have more,” he says. “There is a new order. You must stay.”

A scream wells up in Chung's throat like vomit wells up in mine. It escapes. AAAAARRRRRRR!

He pushes past the supervisor heading for the window. He jumps. He dies.

It's just another day at the APPLE FACTORY. Another few million iPhones assembled and ready to go. Another worker out the window.

Meanwhile, in America, the Steve Jobs worship continues, despite revelations that Foxconn, their Chinese contractor, operates such a horrible sweatshop that 12 workers jumped out the windows, killing themselves. The crisis is so deep the company installed safety nets between buildings to catch the jumpers. No shit.

Students and Scholars against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM), a Hong Kong-based workers’ rights group, released a report about Foxconn. It details the exhaustion of 12-hour (or longer) shifts, the alienation from not being allowed to speak to co-workers, and the frenzy of a rapid just-in-time production model that has workers putting in a phone motherboard every seven seconds.

With conditions worse than prison hard labor, workers see no alternative to a flying leap out the window.

Two stories:

One: seven young guys who may or may not have fucked a football coach. Two: a dozen people a killing themselves rather than facing Apple's working conditions. Which is worse? Sex or death? Apple or Penn State?

Look up the answer on your iPhone. Me? I gotta go throw up.

ENDNOTES: [email subscribers (god@mykelboard.com) or blog readers (mykelsblog.blogspot.com/) will get live links and a chance to post comments on the column]

-->NOT dept: My defense of, and support for the Occupy folks (in last month's column), looks like a direct answer to Lefty Hooligan's column about how they're too tame. It is not. Because of the advance deadline, I had not read Lefty's column before I wrote mine. Not that it would change anything. He's wrong. I'm not.

-->How they keep a majority dept: It's clear that MOST Americans support the Occupy folks and would as soon vote for Jerry Sandusky as any 1%-Republican. The only way for the Republicans to keep control of Congress is to prevent people from voting. So, that's what they do.
      In Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin, voters will have to show photo IDs to vote. Ten percent of the citizens of those states do not have photo IDs... mostly poor and young... the same people who would wish the Republicans a good ass kicking! Hmmmm.

-->Imagine ordering the cops to do that? Dept: NY Police commissioner Raymond Kelly has ordered his cops to “follow the law” when making arrests for pot. Until that order, cops would routinely stop and frisk people (mostly young, mostly black) and then, when they found weed, claim to the court it was in plain sight. Cops are now prohibited from doing this.
    Hmmmm, strange how the rest of us have to follow the law all the time, but cops (finally!) only have to do it when making pot arrests. And that's a NEW rule.

-->Fire me, please! Dept: HP CEO Leo Apotheker was fired for disastrous performance for the company. He was replaced by failed California gubernatorial right-wing candidate, Meg Whitman. (Fat chance I'm gonna buy anything HP!) Don't feel sorry for Apotheker, though. His “termination benefits” are valued at 31 million dollars.

-->On my turntable dept: So Shut-Up Records sent me a buncha stuff that laid on my cabinet for months. Then WOW!!
       I guess you guys know THE STUN GUNS. I'm out of the vinyl loop... I shouldn't be. This colored marble piece of vinyl is so strong, it gives me a hard-on! Quick find me a a locker-room in Pennsylvania!

-->Mentioning it again dept: It should be a requirement that every judge spend at least six months in jail. Then he'd know what he was doing when he sentences people to that hellhole institution of new slavery.
     I've written before about Waldo, my artist jailpal. He will draw you a picture from a photograph, or his mind. For free. I used one of his (me licking a Japanese samurai sword) for my Facebook profile pic. Just write to him and tell him what you want. He's got a lot of time. Waldo c/o Ryan Homslay #747267, MCDC 1120 SW Third Ave., Portland OR 97204

-->Get on the List Dept: It's always a good time to be a spy. How can you fight the badguys if you don't know what they're doing? Wikileaks? We need 300 million Wikileaks.
      A front group called United in Purpose, is supported by a couple California venture capitalists. Among them Ken Edred, a wealthy Republican donor, and Reid Rutherford, who, when not working for the Christian right, beats doors to promote solar power. (Yeah bad guys like solar energy too!)
     The purpose of United in Purpose is to data-mine, forming a database of “every unregistered born-again and evangelical Christian and conservative Catholic in the country.” What happens to that list is anybody's guess... but it shouldn't be.
    What to do? Register with a Christian conservative group. Put your name and email address on some stupid Right to Life petition. Send for information from The 700 Club. It probably won't take much to get on the list... then see what happens. Let me know what you find out.

-->Who wudda thunk it dept: Ok, buckaroos, guess who said this, “Even where the protection of children is the object, the constitutional limits on government action apply. Individual famlies must set their own rules, without imposing what the State thinks parents ought to do.”
   Is this the ACLU? The National Coalition Against Censorship? NAMBLA? Nope! It's our own maleficent Anthony Scalia, the most totalitarian and evil of the Supreme Court justices. But this broken clock was right once! He wrote the statement in his opinion rejecting the California video game censorship law. Credit where it's due.

-->What happened? dept: For awhile I was getting a buncha those kind of DVDs from fans. (I love that rub it all over me one from Justin and Samantha.) For the last month, or so, things have... er... dried up. Keep 'em coming! On the edge (but LEGAL!) of course. As always (Mykel Board POB 137, Prince Street Station, NY NY 10012). Don't send me links or attachments. I just delete that stuff.

-->Sure it was an accident dept: Yahoo has apologized for blocking the delivery of emails that contained a URL related to the "Occupy Wall Street" demonstrations.
    Yahoo admitted that it blocked the emails pertaining and issued an apology on Twitter, saying that the blockage was “not intentional.” The mega-corp blamed its spam filters for stopping emails that contained the campaign website OccupyWallStreet.org.
    Not intentional? Yeah, right.

-end-

Mykel's not-quite-functioning homepage is at: www.mykelboard.com