Amoeba’s Lorica: Meme-ories 48 (The Best Thing About Friday Harbor)

As mentioned a little while ago, OC and Quilly, after a decade enjoying the palm trees, wildfires, and centipedes of the great state of Hawai‘i, will (???????? ?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?????) be returning to the balmy freezes of Friday Harbor, in the Pacific Northwest of Washington State. While the local Rain Festival (September to May) may be under-appreciated, the welcome of old friends will not be. Nor will access to apples and other garden produce that hasn’t had to make a 2,000 mile ocean voyage to get to the table.

And, on this day in which We the People of these Untied States of America have, once again, demonstrated Our ability to learn nothing from past events, and may no longer (if We ever did) have the capacity to learn from them, Friday Harbor has a most welcome, even compelling, geographical advantage.

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Amoeba’s Lorica: Rocked-bury

A work (as this is written) of fiction. Resemblance of names to living persons and extant places are for satirical intent, or are coincidental.


BOSTON, MA (API*): Large sectors of the Roxbury and Dorchester neighborhoods of Boston are smoldering ruins at this hour, while armed forces from South Boston, responding to the St. Patrick’s Day attacks by the A-Nation movement headquartered in Roxbury, pursue their objectives of destroying all A-Nation infrastructure, eliminating A-Nation leadership, and recovering hostages. A humanitarian crisis, resulting from the obliteration of essential services to people crowded within the embattled neighborhoods, and the near-total blockade preventing goods and persons from entering or leaving them, is focusing national and international attention on the fighting, but direct intervention is being withheld for fear of triggering a larger conflict.

The assault on A-Nation territory by South Boston militias is in its fifth day. It began two days after the surprise attack on the South Boston St. Patrick’s Day Parade by A-Nation troops, who swooped onto the parade route, hurling grenades and launching shoulder-fired missiles, killing and wounding hundreds and claiming dozens of hostages including the Bruin, the mascot for Boston’s National Hockey League team, before vanishing among the tenements of Roxbury and Dorchester. Special forces squads have recovered a few of the hostages, but most of them, including the Bruin, remain in A-Nation hands. At pubs throughout Southie, patrons are raising Stanley cups in solidarity with the Bruin, and are vowing his recovery and all others, and revenge on Roxbury.

The St. Patrick’s Day attack, and its size and scope, caught most observers by surprise, but the speed and power of South Boston’s response has been far beyond anyone’s expectations. “Look”, explained South Boston commander Collin Collins, a former Green Beret, “these people are supremacists. They think white people, Irish people, are monsters created in a lab somewhere, and they want us gone. We’ve been watching, and we’ve been preparing. We thought we had a handle on their movements. We were wrong. We will not be wrong again. We will stop when A-Nation can no longer trouble us, because it no longer exists.” When asked whether South Boston forces were achieving those objectives, he said “Yes” but offered no details, and when asked about collateral damage, he brusquely ended the interview. Claims from other sources about South Boston’s progress towards its military objectives could not be independently verified.

Social media posts showing battle zone residents squatting in the rubble of their homes, without food or water or power, have led to mounting criticism of South Boston, and increasingly large demonstrations in support of the people of Roxbury and Dorchester. These protests have been met by massive counterdemonstrations, in which the participants carried “No Irish Need Apply” signs, and equated any critique of their actions with support for Irish genocide. Universities that tolerated protest activities from Black Lives Matter and other groups expressing support for Roxbury reported huge financial losses from withdrawal of endowments and other high-value giving, and several senior executives, including at least one university President, have been censured or dismissed.

Intense diplomatic efforts are being made by local, state, and federal governments to induce the belligerents, especially South Boston, to scale down or cease the fighting, secure the release of hostages, and allow humanitarian aid to reach residents of the battle zone. More direct interventions have, so far, been avoided, lest a wider conflict result. The Massachusetts National Guard has been called out, but has been used only to direct citizens away from the war front. A source within the Guard, who spoke on condition of anonymity, stated that Guard commanders were arguing against using their troops in an effort to stop the fighting, fearing the divided loyalties of their soldiers and that, even as a united force, they were inferior in experience, commitment, and supplies to South Boston.

In other news, drone attacks against houses of worship associated with Abrahamic religions, ongoing for the past two weeks, continued today. A synagogue in Brooklyn, a Baptist church in Houston, and a mosque in Chicago were all targeted, with varying amounts of property damage but no casualties. No organization has claimed responsibility for these attacks, but from what has been learned about the drone flights to date, with distant launch sites from targets and strong evidence for autonomous guidance, a group with significant resources and advanced artificial-intelligence capabilities is suspected. A request to AI leader Sam Altman for comment was responded to by a computer-generated announcement of Mr Altman’s candidacy for President of the United States, with the campaign slogan “A Better Way” and a campaign office in Berkeley, California. DoorDash delivery folks confirmed the existence of the office, but complained that, despite activity inside continuing at a high level at all hours of the day and night, no one ever ordered anything to eat.


*  API: Amoeba Press International. All the News That’s Fit to Fake Print Post.

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Aloha ʻOe (The Dude and Dude 2023 Year In Rear View)

“A flippin’ flannel shirt, dude?!?”

“Put it in tha box wit’ tha rest a ’em, dude.”

“‘Tha rest a …’ Dude, this is Hawaiʻi! Where a dude c’n roast at midnight wearin’ skivvies! Where did this come from, an’, like, fer why?

“It came from tha closet, dude, where OC an’ Quilly put it when we got here, a decade ago. They kept it, along wit’ their otha ‘warm clothes’ stuff, thinkin’ they might need it, ’cause they’d be goin’ back ta where they came from. A’most like they knew what they wuz doin’.”

“[…] OC knowin’ what he’s doin’?”

“Ain’t that whut I just said, dude?”

“It wuz a accident.

“Riiiight. Don’ set up shop as no fortune tella, dude, ya’ll go broke.

“An’ this is diff’ from now, like, how, dude?”

“[…] Dude?”

“Yeah?”

Shaddap. Ya gonna help pack, ‘r whut? If’n you an’ yer skivvies ‘r gonna try ta keep warm by yappin’ alla tha time once we get where we’re goin’, yer gonna get flippin’ tired and ya’ll still be cold.”

“Oh OK, all right. But it burns me, yeah? All that work, all year long, so’s we c’n stay Hawaiʻi, an’ at tha enda it all we’re leavin’ ennyways.”

“You? Work? Whut work??”

“Bein’ quiet an’ respectful! Dude!!”


Links lead to cited blog posts or associated Wikipedia articles.

8 January: She laments to He that she doesn’t have the correct fabric on hand to make him a nice Hawaiian shirt.

15 February: In an alternate timeline, microbiologist Alexander Fleming contemplates the failure of penicillin, and is acclaimed as a hero by Alexa Health Services, which engineered the failure.

19 February: Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba cain’t get no grocery action.

14 March: On the world’s most famous, and punniest, irrational number, and the consequences of its mispronunciation.

29 March: Commemorators of Vietnam War Veterans Day gather at the West Hawaiʻi Veterans Cemetery and, in a solemn ceremony, unveil a memorial to the war that never was. YFNA, a not-so-proud inhabitant of Generation Jones, played in the band and reflected on the history.

5 May: The World Health Organization declares that COVID-19 is no longer a global health emergency, four months earlier than YFNA predicted in April 2020. Meanwhile, banks fail, supply chain issues continue unabated (see 19 February), and governments hike interest rates to contain inflation and play chicken with economic recession.

21 May: Memo to Lenny Kravitz: flying like a dragonfly could be a little more complicated than you think.

28 May: Flowers”, the teacher sniffed. “Maybe you can get a slave-labor tech job with Megazon or TesX or any of the half-dozen other commercial empires that run things in this country now. Megazon is hiring. This week. Maybe.”

5 July: “The ones who do what they are called to do, and seek no selfish gain from the doing, will be forever at peace. Such ones will be untouched by sin, as the lotus leaf is untouched by the water on which it floats.” Not.

9 July: The staff are still working up the nerve to present their case for wages and retirement benefits.

22 July: In which a civilization spends extraordinary amounts of sucroot on a search for intelligence in its galaxy, and fails.

8 August: A wildfire on the leeward slopes of the Hawaiian island, Maui, obliterates the historic town of Lahaina. Just as they did five years prior, during the 2018 eruption of Kilauea volcano, YFNA and Quilly spend the next several days correcting erroneous news reports and assuring friends and colleagues that they – unlike the 100 dead and thousands homeless on Maui – were out of harmʻs way.

3 October: Speaker of the US House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy is voted out of office, leaving the House without a leader for the next three weeks. Chaos ensues, despite the de jure irrelevance of the House of Representatives, because only twenty-seven of its alleged 435 members actually won election to their posts.

7 October: The nation, Israel, experiences its very own 9-11. It is warned against repeating the mistakes made after the 2001 event, so far without obvious avail.

22 October: The Dudes go into survivalist mode.

6 November: “I’d like ta see ya try ta make that sandwich wit’ bread made from imaginary ingredients, dude.”

16 December: Just days before the annual Christmas mission, Santaworks LLC is threatened with a calamitous work disruption, because the hundreds of thousands of reindeer needed to move Santa’s sleigh, at serious risk to life and limb, are all working without a formal contract.


For OC and Quilly, January and February 2024 will be transition months, as they change islands and jobs. Have patience with us. We will miss friends in Hawaiʻi, and citrus from our own trees, but we will welcome old friends in the San Juan Islands of Washington State, and apples that are worth eating. And we may even survive the move.

Be safe, be well in 2024, and may your Congressional representatives be worthy of the elections that they didn’t win.

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