Morrissey croons true

Marr reinvents the guitar

'til '87

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11

Steven Merrill is currently the leader of the Associated Restaurant Workers Union in the territory known as the Northwest Alliance, formerly referred to as the Great Lakes States. The Northwest Alliance is currently the most cohesive, nation-like region in the Federation of Free States, owing mostly to the economic and population dominance of the city of Chicago. Mr. Merrill has been fighting for over ten years now to consolidate the five most powerful labor unions in the Federation into one governmental entity, though he is meeting with stern opposition. We caught up with him on what has been a two-year stint on the road promoting his initiative.

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The stars don't need trained professionals to read them. Fate has been moving since before humans appeared in this world and it will work its wonders after we've gone. That's why we like to invite new people to our humble blog to read the weekly horoscopes from a fresh perspective.

We met retired US Army General Butch Reamer bright and early at 8:00 AM... ahem, that is, oh-eight-hundred, so he could read this week's charts. He expressed an interest in the art of the horoscope not because he considers himself a believer in the ways of the stars but because he is willing to explore the possibilities inherent to any new information that might provide a tactical advantage in life. This is what the General had to say about the battle plan of the planets.

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clicking back and forth

at whatever pace you need

the musician's heart

heat hangs like curtains

over every human face

longing for autumn

giant turkey legs

and people dressed up as knights

for one day a year

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Nathan Crowe, who insisted we call him "Nate", is a freight driver with the Denver Woodwork Company. We hadn't scheduled a meeting with him but we struck up a conversation at a fuel station in the outskirts of Chicago and he had plenty of interesting things to tell us about life in the Federation of Free States.

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The stars don't need trained professionals to read them. Fate has been moving since before humans appeared in this world and it will work its wonders after we've gone. That's why we like to invite new people to our humble blog to read the weekly horoscopes from a fresh perspective.

For reasons which would become obvious to us after seeing him, Mr. Elliot von Kirschenwald insisted on meeting with the Zen Ramblings Zodiac Squad in the dead of night. He arrived at our office at exactly midnight in an old but mint-condition Rolls Royce, wearing a nicely tailored, three-piece suit. He gazed at our necks throughout our introductions and declined our offers for refreshment. Though we're usually wary of allowing the undead into our workplace, we were intrigued at the insights an immortal creature of the night might bring to this week's horoscopes, so we allowed Mr. von Kirschenwald to read the charts.

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Have you ever noticed the preponderance of dead naked ladies in fiction?  I'm talking television, movies, books, graphic novels, the whole shebang.  If it's aimed at adults, it probably has a dead naked lady in it.  This goes extra for any work of mystery or suspense.

Just as a random example, where would CSI and all its clones be without dead naked ladies?  I wonder what CSI: Miami would look like, if its producers decided to challenge the writing staff by banning dead naked ladies from the scripts.

I began pondering this recently as I was reading Stieg Larsson's runaway global bestseller The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.  What started out as a fairly intriguing mystery at one point (not to give anything away) suddenly devolves into a collection of dead naked ladies.  How disappointing.


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9

After spending so much time contemplating cities, wars, politics and economics, I realized that I had lost sight of some of the more enduring aspects of the North American continent. The natural beauty, for example. The truth is, this land of variety and abundance is both blessed and cursed by that very variety and abundance. All of its problems in the aforementioned subjects of contemplation can be traced back to how people have approached America's bounty. After searching for a particular check-in station in a vast tract of under-serviced land in the Federation of Free States for half a day, the crew and I decided to break our routine and set up a camp. We chose a spot along the Platte River, a place that looked like it hadn't been disturbed by people in years. This would prove to be a peaceful respite in between very troubled periods in our making of this film.

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