NEW DELHI — Nearly two million people risk statelessness and detention after they were left off the final version of a registry of Indian citizens, part of a controversial exercise to identify suspected illegal migrants in the northeastern state of Assam.

The zebras had to be counted, and verified -- that much was certain. Higher authorities than myself decided that a world wide census must be taken, and taken soon. The situation was getting out of hand. Incidents were being reported everywhere. So measures had to be taken. This much was obvious to even the lowest cretin among us. And there were many cretins among us; they were good workers; obedient, docile, and willing to get their hands dirty at all times. 
We were also blessed with a large body of clerks keen to rise in the ranks and become media influencers. They scrupled at nothing when it came to enumerating and discriminating. They used trained algorithms to sniff out the imposters and troublemakers -- and these were the zebras that we needed to discover quickly and remove, before the recurring incidents became more frequent and widespread. 
As it turned out, it was all rather simple. The zebras peacefully gathered, were tallied, and it was quickly discovered that there were over two million of them that were not zebras at all. They failed to pass the zebra test that our perceptive clerks had devised. Plus they did not have the proper hoof prints. There's a subtle difference between the hoof prints of loyal zebras and those who are an unwholesome influence on the herd. I confess that I myself do not know how to make that determination, but we have an elite cadre of dedicated experts who do it all day long -- blindfolded and with their hands tied behind their backs.
For their own good, the non-zebras were swiftly taken from their own herds; otherwise the real zebras would have torn them hoof from hoof, so high had feelings become among the loyalist zebras. 
We were gentle and generous with the outcasts -- no one can say we were not!
They were shipped off to certain islands in the Aleutian Sea, where wooden barracks had been prepared for them. And to tide them over the harsh polar winter we provided bales of sawdust and tubs of mineral oil. 
That they were all dead by the next spring is no fault of ours. They obviously lacked the organizational skills to pull together and form a more perfect union. 

Out of nowhere, raw poultry parts blanketed a block in Brooklyn — and then they were gone.

There's all this talk going around about chicken parts, but nobody is doing anything about it. Well, that's not how I roll. I don't talk about chicken parts, I DO something about it. I built a chicken skin dirigible. 
As everybody knows, there's chicken parts all over the streets of Brooklyn -- put there by mob bosses who want to distract the DA's office from what's happening down at the docks. So I went to Brooklyn in a pedicab and collected a thousand yards of chicken skin in less than an hour. I brought it home and sewed it up into an airtight bag, which I proceeded to fill with helium. Of course I didn't do all the stitching myself -- I had help from the Oswego Macaroni Club. Much appreciated, girls.
I set sail for Macao, across the Horn of Africa and the Indian Ocean, with a crew of intrepid lipids. They are a cutthroat lot, so the first thing I did was show them who was boss by tossing a dozen or so overboard for insubordination when they sneezed without permission. That whipped them into shape toot sweet. Once we landed in Macao I traded in antique seltzer bottles for a season, then converted my profits into strips of candy buttons and flew my chicken skin dirigible off into the clouds over Tibet. Half the crew froze to death as we passed the summit of Mount Everest. The rest deserted when we landed in Spittal an der Drau near the Austrian border. The craven marmosets. 
I was forced to shanghai the Vienna Boys Choir en masse in order to sail back to Brooklyn for chicken skin repairs. But when I got there the chicken parts that once blanketed the roads in such abundance had mysteriously disappeared. Some said the government had sent them to detention centers in Texas; others said the chicken parts had come alive again and walked back to the Tyson plant in Poughkeepsie. Me, I think the rats ate 'em all up. The upshot is I'm stranded now in Brooklyn. Puberty has broken out amongst the crew, so I quarantined them. The next move is up to my arch nemesis, who goes by the name of 'The Nematode.' In the meantime I'll keep my powder dry and my cakes moist. 

Google researchers uncover 2-year iPhone hack tied to malicious websites

"I'm going off the grid!" declared Crazy Henry a while back, when we were out back at his place cracking open butternuts with a hammer. He wanted to make a butternut cake for his Aunt Smedley's birthday.
"Nobody can go completely off the grid -- it's impossible. You have to have some contact with the outside infrastructure and communications or you'll get mummified or something" I told him decisively. 
"We shall see what we shall see" he replied enigmatically. "I'm through letting all those darn hackers and viruses steal my personal info and mess up my online solitaire games. I'm going to end it by hook or by crook!" He gave some butternuts a vicious whack with the hammer, smashing them into paste. 
"Indeed we shall" was all I said in return; I can be just as enigmatic as Crazy Henry, when I want to be.
So we finished up cracking open the butternuts and then went inside. Crazy Henry is a really good cook, when he makes the effort, and that day he outdid himself -- the butternut cake came out of the oven smelling like a little piece of heaven itself. He also made some butternut cookie dough, and we baked those up after the cake and feasted on them with ice cold milk -- man, we were living the high life!
"Now just how are you gonna fall off the grid?" I asked him, after we had polished off the last of the cookies. 
"Actions speak louder than words" he said as he went into his bedroom. He came back out with his pc, keyboard and all, and tossed it right out the kitchen window into the dumpster below. It made a satisfying cartoon crash sound, with tinkles and muffled implosions. Then he fished his smartphone out of his pocket and put it in the food processor with a cup of canola oil and turned it on. The racket was horrible, but in less than a minute he had cell phone salad dressing. He poured the mess down the sink and turned on the garbage disposal. He sat down  with a satisfied smirk on his face, so I had to needle him.
"Don't you pay all your bills automatically online with your bank?" I asked him derisively. "They can always track you that way."
"By gadfrey, you're right!" he gasped. "Let's get to the bank, quick, before it closes!"
Crazy Henry spent the rest of that day unplugging from the grid, or trying to. He even disconnected his doorbell.
The next day I drove him down to the bus station. He was joining a nudist colony up in Canada.
"That's going off the grid with a vengeance!" he crowed gaily as he boarded the bus for Toronto and points west. I didn't hold my breath. Crazy Henry's inspirations and tantrums last about as long as an igloo inside a sauna.
True to form, he was back at my place two months later -- looking all hangdog.
"They kicked me out" he said. "Because I had too much body fat."
I comforted him with a trip to Aamodt's Apple Orchard, for the last of their apple cider donuts -- you can't get those anyplace else as good, believe me. 
Crazy Henry cheered up again pretty quick. When I ran into him down at the rubber mallet store he told me he was going to work for his Aunt Smedley, the mayor of our town.
"What?" I exclaimed. "Get out! That's great, man. What is she gonna have you doing?"
"I'm her new IT consultant" he said proudly.
I could only stare at him for a moment.
"But, but . . . I thought you were through with the internet and all that stuff!" I finally sputtered in surprise.
"Oh, I am" he said, a faint green glow flickering in the back of his eyes. "I am. I'm gonna learn how to make a computer virus so pickin' strong it will wipe out every algorithm and cyberlink for the next twenty years . . . "  He walked out the door with his sack of new rubber mallets without another word. I could only shake my head.
Look out, world. Hell hath no fury like a nudist scorned. 

Unspeakable Things

 And many of them saw and heard unspeakable things, which are not lawful to be written.

3 Nephi 26:18

Unspeakable, the things that God can share with faithful Saint;

 visions that would make ungodly fellows weep and faint.

The Lord of Hosts is mightier than man can ever know;

the Son of God is far beyond our learning weak and slow.

And yet they condescend to open wide our eyes the most

whenever we will seek the presence of the Holy Ghost.

Vast panoramas hover just beyond my mortal ken,

available to me and mine when God has spoke "Amen."

Should You Take Your Shoes Off at Home?

When the world wide Revolution came at long last, it wasn't what anybody had been expecting or hoping for. In fact, it was downright ridiculous and trivial.
What finally happened across the globe was that people got sick and tired of the inequalities of wealth and poverty, which was anticipated -- but instead of rounding up the bankers, industrialists, and millionaires, and then shooting them and making off with all their wealth, the great mass of people simply threw away all their own cash, all their coins, all their bitcoin accounts, all their precious jewels and gold and silver ingots. Fort Knox was stormed like the Bastille, but not one red cent was kept by anyone. Nope. It was all destroyed and deleted like trash. Stocks and bonds were confiscated and cut up into paper dolls. Those who held on to their conventional wealth were put on pumice rafts and set adrift in the Indian Ocean, never to be seen again.
What took the place of money, what the vast mob world wide decided simultaneously to do, was make shoes the only viable currency on the planet -- in perpetuity. 
A car now costs a pair of penny loafers, used or new -- doesn't matter. A modest 3 bedroom house can run into several pairs of jogging shoes. Depending on location. I recently took a month-long cruise of Norwegian fjords for a pair of huaraches. Smaller purchases can be made with sandals, flip flops, slippers, or even shoe laces (if they're brand new.)
There was some talk of allowing socks into the currency pool, but the thought of handling someone's dirty tube socks for a bag of potato chips made every cashier in the world scream with dismay -- so it was eventually dropped.
And while the New System has done away with much of the old inequality and unfairness, it's not quite perfect.
First of all, there were all those silly women who had stockpiled shoes over the years in their closets. They came out as the billionaires of the New Order. The smart ones set up footwear banks and immediately began making loans.
And cowboy boots unaccountably became worth more than anything Nike could offer. So all those down at the heel Texas and Montana roustabouts who had been digging ditches all their lives suddenly became power players on the world scene. Most of 'em moved to the Riviera in France and got themselves a chateau full of original Picassos. 
Naturally there was a run on every thrift store in existence, with deadly riots breaking out all over the place. But it only lasted a few hours before national governments called out the military to quell the mobs -- and who do you think wound up with most of the shoes from those gutted thrift stores? You guessed it -- the generals. No surprise there. All regular retail shoe stores were quarantined by the government, then burned to the ground -- or in the case of big box stores actually bombed out of existence with nuclear strikes.
 But on the whole, the New Order is working pretty well. No more homeless people on the streets; food is abundant; and global warming has completely vanished -- in fact the planet is entering a new Little Ice Age. Just how all this is related to footwear beats me with a stick -- but it's best not to question the status quo too much. Outspoken critics of the New Regime have been found dead, with rubber galoshes crammed into their mouths. 
My advice to the rising generation is "Don't take any wooden clogs."

Jack Ma, once proponent of 12-hour workdays, now foresees 12-hour workweeks

I got to work on a Monday morning at 9, like always; but when I tried to leave at 5 my boss blocked the doorway, arms akimbo, and told me I'd have to stay and continue working late into the night and then would be allowed to sleep on top of my desk.
"That's outrageous" I said to him, feeling sick to my stomach; I had known something was up when the corporate big wigs came snooping around earlier in the week, looking as sour as snakes in vinegar. The scuttlebutt was that profits were down and that the unlucky ones would have to double down at their work or be laid off. 
"Can't be helped" my boss replied stoically. "Go back to your desk and run some inventory checks and then write up five thousand words on the coal industry in Greenland. Have it on my desk by two this morning."
"But I can do all that at home on my laptop" I spluttered.
For answer my boss put a black vinyl collar around my neck, which immediately began to buzz and vibrate.
"If you attempt to walk out that door without my permission that 'employee motivator' around your scrawny neck will emit a series of pencil thin laser beams to sever your head." he said grimly.
What could I do? I went back to my desk and did the work he had commanded me to do, then folded up my coat as a pillow while I slept on my desk.
The next morning the boss brought me hot chocolate and a stale donut sprinkled with powdered sugar for breakfast. 
"Can I go home today like usual?" I asked timidly.
"No" he said, not unkindly. "You'll be required to stay here for the next thirty-five years; then we'll take off the collar around your neck and give you forty acres and a mule."
The first ten years weren't so bad -- I got three meals every day, mostly beans and Irish soda bread with an occasional stalk of celery, and each December my boss took away my old clothes and gave me a new set of clothes, made from bright and shiny blue nylon. I learned how to bathe out of the sink in the men's room. And I grew a long bushy beard.
But in my eleventh year at work I noticed that I was the only one who had to stay overnight. Everyone else in the office walked out the door blithely right at 5 and came back the next day at 9. And there was nobody in the office but me, and the boss, during the weekends and on holidays. I tried asking my co-workers about this in the break room, but they just put brown paper sacks over their heads and hurried away -- often running into the wall. One other thing I noticed -- the boss had the same kind of black vinyl collar around his neck as I did. So he was a captive, too. That's when I decided that I would escape, no matter what.
One evening after everyone was gone I noticed the boss standing just inside the door, cleaning his nails with a pen knife. Silently I glided up to him, then pushed him through the door. His collar glowed a bright red, he gave a scream, and then his head rolled off his neck in a welter of blood.
 I felt no compassion for him. He had it coming. My own collar continued to buzz and vibrate, so I knew it was not yet disarmed. I went into the office of the boss and tore the place apart looking for the controls to my collar. I found a panel of blinking lights and metal toggles under his desk calendar, so I took a chance by flipping each toggle until all the blinking lights went dead -- and my collar became still. Gingerly I used a pair of scissors to cut it in half. I was clear at last!
The breeze out on the street was cool and clean. I greedily filled my lungs a dozen times, reveling in my escape. But the moths -- the moths were everywhere. I didn't remember there being so many of them at night. They fluttered around the streetlights by the hundreds, and they covered every lighted window, crawling blindly around in erratic circles. Then they began landing on me, their wings creating a wild scented breeze that lifted me up beyond the buildings and bore me away to a lake surrounded by pine trees and full of cattails and grunting bull frogs. The moths landed me on top of a great hollow log, and that is where I live to this day -- being worshipped by the local natives as a deity of the lake; they bring me baked meats and ripened fruit each day, and in return I do not enslave them but simply command them to dance all night and keep their hair combed. 

The people of the earth are all our Father's children

President Gordon B. Hinckley

We must never forget that we live in a world of great diversity. The people of the earth are all our Father’s children and are of many and varied religious persuasions. We must cultivate tolerance and appreciation and respect one another. We have differences of doctrine. This need not bring about animosity or any kind of holier-than-thou attitude.

President Gordon B. Hinckley 

There is no animosity when in Christ's full embrace;

we must regard each other with great tolerance and grace.

Respecting all opinions, we can still be faithful saints;

refusing to spread rumors or to propagate complaints.

Appreciate the beauty of diversity, my friend,

to avoid arriving at a spiritual dead end.

********************************************

An email response to the above verse from an old friend who is a retired Institute teacher:

Great analysis and poetry!  Thanks for sharing.  I trust that your and GBH’s comments don’t mean that we shouldn’t be a bit cautious and NOT fully embrace what others are believing and practicing. For example, Islam’s book defines any and all non-Muslims as infidels and thus worthy of extermination.   I don’t want to be anywhere near a Muslim fanatic who is carrying a knife, gun, or bomb.  Neither am I willing to board an airplane which has a Muslim woman wearing a full hajib and who has somehow been given a “pass” by TSA because she is “special.”  And no, I don’t wish to shake hands with LGBTQ+ folks. Well, maybe if I can wear rubber gloves. Yes, be kind and gracious, but there’s no need to embrace others’ doctrines, belief, and practices.  Perhaps a meal when they’re sick, or a card for a birthday.  Be kind and pleasant, but know the boundaries.

LRC

The Food Shelf

I went down to the food shelf for to get a loaf of bread;

the month had not yet ended and my finances were dead.

They kindly gave me cans of beans and lots of mac & cheese,

bags of corn meal flour, bottled honey from the bees.

With grateful heart I took it home to make some modest feasts,

and that is when I noticed there were also little beasts.

Beetles in the flour and evidence of microbes live

in my bulging cans of beans -- was this a bunch of jive?

I checked the expiration dates of all this charity;

all of them had run out long before two-thousand-three.

But beggars can't be choosers -- so I've heard it often spoke.

And so I'm eating maggots while I try hard not to choke!

Remnants of a supernova were found in Antarctic snow. The space dust could be 20 million years old.

When I was a kid I read with horror the theory of one space scientist who said that moon dust was so deep that any craft landing on the moon would sink into the deep dust and never be heard from again. Men trapped a mile down in gray sterile moon dust -- that image stayed with me and grew like a mental parasite until we finally landed on the moon and blew that accursed egghead's theory to smithereens.
Just a few years ago I was idly clicking on 'random article' on Wikipedia to see what would come up and I got 'cosmic dust.' The article said millions of tons of cosmic dust enter the earth's atmosphere every day. And once again my imagination went into overdrive. Looking up at the dusty blue sky, I began to choke on space dust. Probably radioactive dust settling in my lungs from a long-ago supernova across the galaxy somewhere. What if a dust storm of cosmic dust were heading towards the earth right this instant? We'd be engulfed, smothered with microscopic interstellar motes. A horrible way to go. I stopped sleeping nights, sitting outside in a lawn chair awaiting the inevitable inky black cloud blocking out the stars as a prelude to blanketing the earth. I probably should have gone to see a shrink, but instead I began writing vers libre to combat my anxiety. It seems to have worked. 

But today I'm in trouble again with space dust, because I became so cock-a-hoop about mastering my fears of it that I began studying the language of space dust and soon learned what the particles were telling each other. Their lingo, by the way, is based on the same algorithms that control the Riemann Hypothesis. 
Turns out cosmic dust is really the precursor of meteor mites -- small intergalactic nits that can take over a planet in a matter of days, sucking it dry and leaving behind a lifeless husk. They drift from galaxy to galaxy, sending the dust ahead of them to scout out virgin territory for their predations. The stardust that has been inundating our planet for centuries and managed to enter every nook and cranny of our ecosystem has sent back its report to the meteor mites, and they are on their way here. The dust knows that I know what they've been up to, and they want to shut me up, permanently, before I can expose them -- which would allow the Earth to prepare for their arrival.
So I'm on the lam, hiding out in dumpsters and discarded telephone booths in old hotels. When you read this, if you read this, for pete's sake contact the nearest NASA office. At this late date we've only got 72 more hours before the meteor mites arrive. The only way to stop them is with good old American know-how, and flypaper; put enough of that in orbit and they'll never reach our planet. 
If I don't make it out alive, tell Halle Berry I love her . . . 

Kentucky mom who helped search for missing persons has vanished (New York Post)

(Dedicated to Jackie Salo)

I have disappeared gradually since taking early retirement five years ago, until today I have vanished completely -- without a trace.
It started small, with a drop box installed in the lobby of my senior apartment building; instead of visiting the office to give them my check each month I dropped my rent into the box -- thus missing out on my monthly conversation with the lady behind the Plexiglas window at the office. I never knew her name but she was friendly and somewhat inquisitive. She'd ask me how I was doing and I'd usually say "Oh, fair to middling." She'd comment on the weather, and I'd agree with her most of the time -- but always in a tone that indicated I reserved the right to think independently about the weather anytime I wanted. So I fell off the face of the earth, as far as that lady behind the Plexiglas is concerned.
Then all my mail came addressed to 'Resident.' Even my bills; some kind of postal conspiracy there, I'm thinkin'. I wrote to my Congressman about it but never heard back. Why am I not surprised?
I get so sleepy nowadays that when I want to go out for game night in the community room or go visit a neighbor with some cornbread I just made I fall asleep in my recliner instead, and when I wake up it's the middle of the night. So I just go back to bed, and never go out anymore except for groceries and postage stamps. And I haven't really been hungry or wanted to write a letter in a long time.
When I call my children all I get is their voicemail. They never return my calls anymore. 
The finches have stopped coming to my thistle sock on the patio.
I saw my picture on a tattered piece of paper taped to a streetlight pole; it said I was missing and last seen wearing a Santa Claus suit back in November. I called the number on the poster to report myself as not missing at all, but the number was to an insurance agency that was only interested in selling me car insurance. And I don't drive anymore. 
This morning I looked in the mirror and the man looking back has no distinct features whatsoever. It could be anyone, or no one. Now I long to go live with owls and bats; people are a distasteful distraction. Somehow they have disappeared me, and I'm not that bitter about it. I don't even wonder whatever became of me. I am satisfied to be nothing more than a puddle of melted influence.