Not Dead Yet

Beating out Primus for Eleventyeleven Day

2009-11-11T18:02:51Z

obliterati @ 2009-11-11T02:37:00

2009-11-11T11:28:28Z

One month of hell officially started yesterday. This one looks worse than usual. You always say I'm difficult and insane a few days before sending out mass emails alerting the public to the Profound and Difficult Time of Mourning. You weren't mourning when I was dead. The public has been warned about this a lot of times, and if you didn't stop the pain before it got here it can only be because you like it. It's possible that the damage by mid-December will be too big for me to calculate. I would love, love I say, to be wrong, to be mistaken, but my ability to be mistaken is also filled with mistakes somehow, and eventually you have to take a break from the mockery to count all the dead people. Once again, I will not be one of them.

The only song I know about Fort Hood

2009-11-10T18:29:30Z

obliterati @ 2009-11-09T01:12:00

2009-11-09T09:13:19Z

I will probably be struck speechless for awhile but here is a picture so you can see that I didn't kick her in the head on purpose or anything.

Happy Halloween to Quentin in his Dave costume

2009-10-29T19:10:36Z

obliterati @ 2009-10-26T03:37:00

2009-10-26T11:22:05Z

The reaction has been running for 1080 days. I was starting to get lost but then saw that people were actually working on stuff out there, which means I should probably start being more helpful, and remember that the first year was always going to be difficult anyway, so getting lost is normal. Hitting the ground running is still pretty much hitting the ground.

I think I should be up and working hard at something and then it's like ow my back! The moment I decide to get up and do something both legs give out and the back seizes up and I thank LOLCAT above that this is the weekend and I don't have to move if I don't want to.

I've figured out a lot of stuff in the past week. I didn't realize how many of you are out there by now. There's a lot of you guys.

Dig that crazy Scottish Baltar

2009-10-26T06:17:39Z

Eli: My head is pounding, heartbeat has accelerated. It's getting harder and harder to breathe...as our very lives are being vented out into space.
Scott: That is gonna get old very fast.
Eli: This needs to be documented.
Scott: No-one's gonna see that!
Eli: How do you know? We made it here; someone else could too. If we die, maybe this can help them to find out what happened to us.
Rush: Yeah, well, we're not dead yet.
Eli: I'm starting to have slightly blurred ...
Scott: Eli!
Eli: What?!

obliterati @ 2009-10-22T18:55:00

2009-10-23T02:09:52Z

obliterati @ 2009-10-18T01:00:00

2009-10-18T08:01:19Z

Hey Daveheart! Where did all your sponsors go? Yeah I thought so!

Dream Caused by the Flight of the Sacramento Bee

2009-10-17T09:34:58Z

Storm struck like hurricane

The storm that soaked the state this week was the California equivalent of a hurricane, according to experts working to ready the public for the next one.

Called an "atmospheric river," the storm pulled a geyser of moisture all the way across the Pacific Ocean, from the tropics near Indonesia. The narrow channel of intense rain scored a direct hit on California's Central Coast, then gushed like a fire hose all day.

Near Big Sur, more than 20 inches of rain were recorded in a single day. Sacramento received 3 inches, enough to make this the city's fifth-wettest October in history.

Had the storm hit farther south, it could have caused devastating mudslides on recently burned Southern California mountain slopes. Had it occurred later in winter, when the ground was already saturated, the storm might have caused dangerous floods in the Sacramento region.

"We just dodged a bullet," said Lucy Jones, chief scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey Multi-Hazards Demonstration Project, which is researching atmospheric rivers.

Smaller versions, born near Hawaii, are popularly known as "Pineapple Express" storms.

"We've shown ... they are largely responsible for the big rains and big floods that occur," said Marty Ralph, chief of the water cycle branch at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colo. "Those are the ones to watch out for."

The USGS and NOAA are working on computer models and forecasting to help government and the public better prepare for similar storms.

One new tool will be a numerical rating system to describe the storms' intensity, similar to the "category" number used to size up hurricanes, said Dale Cox, a USGS project manager in Sacramento.

The team is working with the state Department of Water Resources, Caltrans and others to predict how such storms contribute to flooding, mudslides and road closures.

Severity ranking, for instance, could tell homeowners to prepare for power outages and toppled trees. It could help flood officials know where to position emergency supplies, and when and where to recommend evacuations.

Tuesday's storm dealt a relatively modest blow, if only because the worst of the rain and wind hit remote areas. Cox, however, felt the punch.

"I lost one of my favorite trees," said Cox, who lives in El Dorado Hills.

"If you look at the storm itself," he added, "there's a very strong band of precipitation that is much like the eyewall of a hurricane that is, in a sense, stretched out. They bring wind and rain that are comparable to hurricanes on the East and Gulf coasts."

California doesn't get hurricanes; the coastal Pacific Ocean is too cold. But Cox said atmospheric rivers can be viewed as a kind of hurricane.

Instead of spinning in a concentrated mass, the rain and wind stretch across thousands of miles, like a conveyor belt.

Because of its size, this phenomenon was not recognized as a unique weather feature until the advent of advanced satellite weather technology.

Ralph said atmospheric rivers are not new, but our understanding of their behavior and significance is.

Such storms occur every year all over the planet, Ralph said,and are not necessarily associated with either El Niño or La Niña weather patterns.

But they are particularly worrisome in California, where a large population and vulnerable infrastructure rest on the volatile edge of the world's largest ocean.

That's why a major effort is under way to better understand such storms.An important goal is being able to predict where they will land – and where most of their rain will fall – in time to warn people.

Ralph's lab in 2005 began installing weather instruments in the canyons of the American River, making it the nation's most closely monitored watershed. The river was chosen for its potential to cause disastrous floods.

That monitoring system helped track Tuesday's storm.

Now, Ralph said, NOAA has joined with the state on a $7 million project to install more monitors across California.

Another part of the project will model a worst-case storm striking California.

Cox said such a storm would involve back-to-back atmospheric rivers striking the state.

This might have been what caused the devastating flood of 1861-62. The rain started over Northern California on Christmas Eve 1861, and didn't stop for 45 days.

Flooding was so bad that Leland Stanford had to take a rowboat across Sacramento to attend his inauguration as governor. Much of the Central Valley became an inland sea. The state Capitol was moved to San Francisco temporarily until Sacramento recovered.

Researchers believe it may have been the worst storm to strike California in the historical record. But because data from that period are limited, the team is combining data from storms in 1969 and 1986 to help prepare its "worst case" storm sequence.

Both years involved atmospheric rivers, which caused some of the worst storm damage the state has ever seen – including many deaths. "I want people to start identifying with atmospheric rivers," said Cox. "These storms are like our hurricanes."

Watch CBS News Videos Online

What is the Green Rosetta?

2009-10-17T00:54:12Z

Sometimes when you're not looking he just sneaks up on you. He looks like a cheap sort of flying saucer about five feet across with a snout-like megaphone apparatus in the front with two big eyes mounted like Appletons with miniature motorized frowning chrome eyebrows over them. Along the side of his disc-like body are several sets of stupid-looking headers and exhaust hoses which apparently propel him and punctuate his dialogue with horrible smelling smoke rings. In the middle of his head we can see an airport wind sock and constantly twirling anemometer. The bottom of him has a landing light and three spoked wheels. In spite of all this, it is obvious that the way he really gets around is by being dangled from place to place by a union guy with a dark green shirt up in the roof who is eating a sandwich (pieces of which drop off every once in a while and lodge themselves near the hole where they put the oil in that makes the cheap smoke).

He hovers into view and speaks to us thusly...

Central Scrutinizer:
This is the CENTRAL SCRUTINIZER...it is my responsibility to enforce all the laws that haven't been passed yet. It is also my responsibility to alert each and every one of you to the potential consequences of various ordinary everyday activities you might be performing which could eventually lead to *The Death Penalty* (or affect your parents' credit rating). Our criminal institutions are full of little creeps like you who do wrong things...and many of them were driven to these crimes by a horrible force called MUSIC!

Our studies have shown that this horrible force is so dangerous to society at large that laws are being drawn up at this very moment to stop it forever! Cruel and inhuman punishments are being carefully described in tiny paragraphs so they won't conflict with the Constitution (which, itself, is being modified in order to accommodate THE FUTURE).

I bring you now a special presentation to show what can happen to you if you choose a career in MUSIC...The WHITE ZONE is for loading and unloading only...if you have to load or unload, go to the WHITE ZONE... you'll love it...it's a way of life...Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha...Hi, it's me, I'm back. This is the CENTRAL SCRUTINIZER...The WHITE ZONE is for loading and unloading only...If yah gotta load, or if yah gotta unload, go to the WHITE ZONE. You'll love it...it's a way of life. That's right, you'll love it, it's a way of life, that's right, you'll love it, it's a way of life, you'll love it. This, is, the CENTRAL SCRUTINIZER!

A "rosetta" is a device for translating cyphers right? And a "green rosetta" would be a green decoder item for translating these cyphers right? And the only green items on the album are the words "Acts I, II, and III" on the cover. Does this point to the actual Acts I, II, and III? Like what happened to Frank Black on that show all the time, or that dude Phillip K with his electric sheep? There are weirder things right? On Freakangels Friday it's not that weird to wonder about people who are supposedly dead all sneaking up on you and some dude named Luke is involved, right?

The structure of the book of Luke is closely tied with the structure of Acts. Both books are most easily tied to the geography of the book. Luke begins with a global perspective, dating the birth of Jesus to the reign of the Roman emperors in Luke 2:1 and 3:1. From there we see Jesus' ministry move from Galilee (chapters 4–9), through Samaria and Judea (chs. 10–19), to Jerusalem where he is crucified, raised and ascended into heaven (chs. 19–24). The book of Acts follows just the opposite motion, taking the scene from Jerusalem (chs. 1–5), to Judea and Samaria (chs. 6–9), then traveling through Syria, Asia Minor, and Europe towards Rome (chs. 9–28). This chiastic structure emphasizes the centrality of the resurrection and ascension to Luke's message, while emphasizing the universal nature of the gospel.

My favorite part of the bible is when David looks out his window and is like "Oooh! Hot chick in a bathtub!"

0.5% of LJ news subscribers

2009-10-16T11:57:21Z

hmmm.

obliterati @ 2009-10-15T22:36:00

2009-10-16T05:37:18Z

World's most famous Albanian.

just thinking

2009-10-14T02:46:00Z

http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=6972&page=4#Item_19

http://warren-ellis.livejournal.com/598431.html

Real time activities

2009-10-13T20:04:38Z

Watching this on SyFy at the moment:

Friday the 13th The Series, season one episode 11, "Scarecrow".

Never seen it before today or knew of its existence.

The names Mr. And Mrs. Cobean have made me laugh pretty seriously out loud just now, pretty good for a show made in 1988. Forgot that scarecrows live on crosses.

Old lady Cobean struggling through the marshes confronts the scarecrow rigged up like a puppet by some kind of malicious brunette. She runs back to her obvious pentagram house and gets chopped up before getting in the door. Mrs. Cobean screams her last and alerts Robey, who walks out to find Mrs. Cobean's severed head wobbling on the ground, horror still frozen on her face. The scarecrow with his blank mask seems to stare at Robey and shake his scythe around in a menacing way. Robey screams. Insurance company commercial interrupts. Identity protection service commercial follows. Injury lawyers. Honda commercial with the words "Twin Peaks".

Robey is back now, help is coming but the scarecrow is gone. Cop on the scene. Robey says she found decapitated grandma and the scarecrow come to life but no one believes her. Cop says "don't confuse your friend with nonsense like that".

Longacre Inn, this is the pentagram building. Cop questions the maid. Maid claims the scarecrow story sounds like nonsense, revels in her evil. Robey and dude question local mechanic, looking for scarecrow lore. Rainstorms washed everyone away except for that one house, Dave's place.

Dave Meano? Wha? How do you spell this? "He'd walk a mile to pay you back a penny. Him and the boy just vanished." Dave is one of the disappearances? Robey and friend on way to Dave's house. Nice! Yes please come over Robey you are welcome any time!

Dave's house is desolate abandoned farm. Guy who isn't Robey goes investigating in the barn, eerie piano music, kitchen table and dead fridge, dude closes dead fridge door. Robey frightened by crow, finds trail of blood and starts to follow. Wind picks up. Noose dangles in the distance near what could be a body.

Dude attacked by little boy. Robey walks over hay to get to the body which turns out to be a basket of tomatoes under a tarp. Audience starts to believe the Dave residence is a squat inhabited by a harmless kid. Then Robey is attacked by scarecrow with scythe. Robey barely evades a chopping, there is chase, Robey falls. Dish Network says their service is better than cable. Man with scythe shot by conveniently placed sheriff. Mask is removed, dead blonde human underneath. This apparently is Dave.

Sherrif says boy should be sent down to his Aunt. Says the myth of the scarecrow is finally figured out now that he's shot the guy in the scarecrow mask. Evil brunette is evil. Goes through Robey's wallet. Dave and Mrs. Cobean now dead, usually there are three people missing every Harvest, but currently there are only two. Tracy Morgan from 30 Rock is the new host of Scare Tactics. Transformers will be out soon on DVD.

Mr. Cobean freaking out in his chair belting whiskey. Little kid says when he was young he snuck into the barn and saw a body hanging. They investigate and find Charles Cobean who's been stabbed by malicious brunette.

Robey dresses down Sheriff. Sheriff gets her a blanket from closet labelled "13". Robey realizes the sheriff's raincoat fits the kid's description of a killer he saw once, out in the barn. She locks sheriff in closet and escapes. Now Robey faces malicious brunette. Brunette is named Marge. Well that's not weird. Marge locks Robey into her hotel room, Robey is trapped after having just decided the sheriff is the killer. The scarecrow appears with scythe inside the locked room. They fight. Marge knits during the conflict, picks up scissors as a weapon when sheriff appears outside. Sheriff was not the killer, Robey overreacted and now Ryan is on the case with Sheriff in tow. Marge stabs sheriff in the back. Ryan fights Marge. Scarecrow fights Robey. Marge beats Ryan like a gong, Robey escapes locked room and is faced with Scarecrow in the hallway, where Ryan jumps on him and dislodges Robey's picture from scarecrow's chest region.

This is no longer real time commentary, I stopped writing this to go and pee and now it's hours later. Robey had the bright idea to stick Marge's photo in the lapel of Mr. Scarecrow and then Scarecrow turned on the unsuspecting Marge. Marge's severed head tumbled on the floor. When Robey drives away the cross in the field falls over.

Hours later elsewhere on Livejournal, Robey is warning people against having a bad night in Bangkok.

Now, Tracy Morgan is stalking people with hidden cameras and freaking out some dork named Danny.

obliterati @ 2009-10-12T16:30:00

2009-10-12T23:31:10Z

holy shit

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_12

obliterati @ 2009-10-11T01:30:00

2009-10-11T08:33:34Z

Was watching this clip from The Prisoner and stopped a minute or so in to wonder what Tracy Morgan would think. All the time I'm catching myself liking stuff that Tracy Morgan would probably never watch on purpose and wondering what my deal is anyway. I don't know. Tracy I have no idea. Something's fucked up, that's all I can say for sure.

obliterati @ 2009-10-10T21:28:00

2009-10-11T04:50:42Z

You know, Michael Moore, what can you do with Michael Moore, who wants to see a guy and his squealing about an economic system that pays no attention to him, even though he was right about General Motors, he was right about the Bush administration, he was right about the health care system being about to fail. I guess it's better to overlook a man who constantly and accurately finds serious flaws in the system because we can't all be filmmakers, some of us have to eat tree bark and fling shit at each other and live off the oil in a french fry vat and never get to the movie theater.

The Nobel Peace Prize is making a lot of people wonder why Obama deserves something so huge after being in office only nine months. I think a lot of people are forgetting what it felt like when Bush demolished the social order just 8 years ago. Bush 43 wasn't just wrong as a person, he wasn't just a jerk, he was a mass murderer who nearly destroyed the world. It's easy to get lost in the siphon of the current stories, news channels still yank audiences all over the goddam place trying to get consensus on a bunch of moving objects. Just stop and remember what was finally ended when Obama took office.

This just scared the bejeezus out of me, remembering 2002 and the constant, constant sadness. Tom Ridge came out to be one of the good guys recently. It was a pleasure to see him finally say the terror alert system was being abused by election people. It was a pleasure to see anything at all actually.

Enjoy your prize Barry. Take a breath if you want.

obliterati @ 2009-10-10T16:09:00

2009-10-10T23:16:42Z

Apollo 13, there are five engines on the second stage booster and one of them fails, the center one, but the other four compensate, and then when they reach 12:34 minutes of burn they cut engines. This is when whatsisname starts puking, before they eject the second stage and wander off to get the landing module in the right place.

5 engines for 12:34 minutes of burn time.

Did this really happen or was it just for the movie? What were they doing? Do I know already?

obliterati @ 2009-10-09T08:31:00

2009-10-09T15:31:49Z

okay this is the year I will spell things right, I just know it.

obliterati @ 2009-10-07T21:08:00

2009-10-08T04:10:35Z

"I am deeply disturbed by reports of a crackdown and arrests ordered by Chinese authorities in the wake of peaceful protests by Tibetan Buddhist monks. I condemn the use of violence to put down peaceful protests, and call on the Chinese government to respect the basic human rights of the people of Tibet, and to account for the whereabouts of detained Buddhist monks.

These events come on the 49th anniversary of the exile of the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists, the Dalai Lama. They demonstrate the continuing frustration of the Tibetan people at the way in which Beijing has ruled Tibet. There has been an informal dialogue between Chinese leaders and the Dalai Lama's representatives over the past six years. It is good that they have been talking, but China has thus far shown no flexibility on the substance of those discussions. Indeed, it has delayed in scheduling the latest round, despite the willingness of the Tibetans to continue dialogue.

If Tibetans are to live in harmony with the rest of China's people, their religion and culture must be respected and protected. Tibet should enjoy genuine and meaningful autonomy. The Dalai Lama should be invited to visit China, as part of a process leading to his return."

-Barack Obama, Chicago, IL March 14, 2008

obliterati @ 2009-10-07T13:25:00

2009-10-07T20:25:15Z

obliterati @ 2009-10-07T02:00:00

2009-10-07T10:41:50Z

Brain is completely fried with information. Or was anyway. The second half of today got more relaxing somehow. For awhile I was thinking of trying to figure out Bill Murray's private phone number and probably guessed wrong, but it was exciting for a little while. People don't want to see themselves as made of numbers and so are probably unwilling to believe that a telephone area code which builds into phi probably attracts bad weather according to a vast psychic sewage system installed centuries ago by folks with serious Egypt envy. Southern Illinois where lots of phone numbers would match up approximately with phi is so flood-prone that George Carlin made a special point of mocking everyone who lived there year after year through disasters that change the map of three States pretty much every Summer. There are people who know all about this but figure citizens are mostly disposable when there is all that money to be made building cities into giant factories.

There were pretty girls on the internet, I like those, there were morons repeating some bullshit about the same identical abusive and criminal memetics from last year and the year before that somehow being art, there was Lady Gaga forming some seriously hot fractions in New York, there were jackhammers, and all the rice I burned by mistake, and my last piece of filter paper for the coffee machine. There's a massive and totally awesome relief effort for Indonesia and a storm about to wreck Japan. There are a bunch of webcomic fans who never read Yeats and there was me not being paid enough to type out the entire quotes from The Golden Ass that Ryan North requested. Yes Ryan, it's in there. There was some peace and quiet that I enjoyed, I hit zero a few times and that was nice. There was a voice in the back of my head that told me to google Damien Hirst to figure out if he had falsified the gold relics found in in England recently and so I did and there he was.

Hirst also said that he found it “difficult to square up the money and the fame with the art and the integrity”. A bevy of art critics suggest that the money/fame dyad has overwhelmed the art/integrity couplet, so I request elaboration. “Integrity is about what you’re doing,” he says. “It’s about being honest. Warhol said, look, I’m a star-f***er. If you admit it and you are true to yourself, then it works.”

Are you a star-f***er? I have to ask.

“I think we are all star-f***ers to varying degrees. The whole celebrity thing comes out of a fear of death, which is what art has always been about. The desire to draw is fundamental to art. Connected to that is a desire to be the best drawer in the class. Then the class gets bigger and bigger and that grows into a desire to be the most famous artist in the world. You meet famous people and it makes you feel closer to being immortal in some way.”

Hirst crosses his arms and looks up at the Little Electric Chair.

There is the movie Wargames with all the names rearranged due to weird mistranslation. They named the heroes David and Jenn because they didn't know any better, but you would never guess what Joshua really is. With all the Zissous and Colberts in the world you would almost never guess who Stephen Falken is supposed to be. I mean I would forgive you because it's pretty obscure. It has some bearing on current events though if you're me.

I made this resolution once a few years ago to just stop thinking about apostrophes anymore except for the Zappa album with the song about the foot on it. Like the bass cleff, like the comma, the apostrophe is another golden spiral if you're using the right font, the people who invented writing weren't fucking around you know. The first form of writing ever made, in the mountains in southern China, had some characters including the shapes for the numbers two and six and also a spiral.

There are some people trying to make me go outside when I don't want to. If my apartment were secure maybe I could leave it alone for awhile but it's not. There are some Masons who owe me a phone call. There is confusion about the RAND Corporation and their knack for simulation, because my Dad's family grew up in an IBM project and my hometown is a GE project so I don't know for sure how RAND fits into it though the military and RAND both contract out to everybody. Its name is really an acronym for "R and D", which I forgot. And what would happen if I managed to piss off Apple's chief cryptographer a few years ago anyway on top of everything else? It's all pretty mindboggling.

I used to try and write something every day so I could give my brain some exercise and then eventually it became a form of making new sutras when the years started flowing according to discernible patterns that I could go and look up easily in old journal entries. Zappa's imaginary dog said his conceptual continuity was the apostrophe, the word sutra basically means the same thing as Zappa's conceptual continuity in its larger context.

Trying to weaponize dharma is pretty seriously complicated, it requires a massive psy op that makes it so your buddha is always working from the perspective of love even if that love is somehow fabricated, but then whatever gain you get out of it from a military standpoint always comes back to bite you because some people only appreciate victory and don't get the love part. I forget which tale in The Thousand and One Nights has the story of the magician who had to be given the magic lamp rather than just grabbing it himself. You can't just take it, you have to deserve it somehow. If something designed our reality it put a safety catch on whatever harm a single person could do, you have to be willing to suffer for a very long time and even die for love before you get to throw oceans at people, and even then you can't really do it exactly on purpose. They have to deserve getting an ocean thrown at them. And there is a formula for determining if someone deserves it, and there are temporary fake oceans too, for people who don't have the patience for merit and so doom themselves by fucking with nature.

I am a bad Jesus, I'm getting fat on ice cream. I think I lost a few Facebook friends for appropriating a rap lyric about cocaine just so I could rhyme something with "tased".

Good people don't need illegal surveillance do they.

Did you ever notice in the Omen movies that the actual heir to the Thorne empire was this blonde American kid but the adopted Damien who killed his whole family to get at the money was British? Pretty funny that Hirst was interviewed by a Ms. Thornton yeah? These are funny jokes to me.

You know how sometimes you make up a story to get rid of someone obnoxious like saying you have a meeting and so you have to get ready and so goodbye for now see you later? You know what I like? I like when a massive company gets sick of one ignorant tool named Mark and evicts him from his home saying "oh, yeah, we're tearing the place down see, so you can't live here anymore" and then just stops responding four years later when the house is still there. Fucking hilarious.

obliterati @ 2009-10-05T11:48:00

2009-10-05T18:49:14Z

obliterati @ 2009-09-29T12:35:00

2009-09-29T19:51:00Z

Watching The Abyss now because I got all traumatized by the violence in I am Legend. Just don't want to see a guy hurt his leg again today is all. I am way behind and needing to catch up. New earthquake today. 7.8 in the South Pacific with no tsunami. [edit: okay there was a tsunami, my bad]

While still on the staff of Rolling Stone, Duke applied for the position of Governor of American Samoa, and to his - and everyone else's - surprise, was actually appointed to the post by the United States Congress. His term as the Governor was a period unlike anything the island's inhabitants had ever seen, a term that saw one crisis after another. Most notable of these crises were a series of natural disasters ("I'm a reasonable man, Mac, so I know this isn't snow.") precipitated by a volcano virgin's refusal to sacrifice herself as scheduled, and a hostage crisis instigated by Duke himself that resulted in a U.S. rescue operation highlighted by the rescue force's inability to locate American Samoa. During this period, Duke also recruited his nephew, Zonker Harris, as the Lieutenant Governor, who accepted the assignment for the sole purpose of acquiring the perfect tan. Despite these events, then-President Gerald Ford expressed his positive impression of Duke's "knack for diplomacy", and appointed him Ambassador to the People's Republic of China where he served from 1976 to 1977, before being recalled by newly-elected President Carter. While in China he met translator Honey Huan, who softened his harsh rhetoric, dragged him out of drug-induced stupors, and eventually fell madly in love with him in a Quixotic, not to say masochistic, one-sided devotion that would last for the next thirty years.