Please Welcome Our International Correspondents!

If my suspicions are right, Europeans are beginning to join us on Vleeptron, and I couldn't be happier. I hope they enjoy our Vleeptronese cuisine. The Vleeptroids are particularly proud of sniiboo, their country sausage made from the wild mountain nauga, the animal from which we get naugahyde to upholster our inexpensive sofas and car seats.

Pat Z. has begun to graffiti the Comment Sewers with reports from .CH, the Confederatio Helvetica, a.k.a. Switzerland. Most recently he supplies information about the current state and culture of Switzerland's famous system of universal military service. I will have Vleeptron's viewpoint on these developments soon. Suffice for now to say that I am shocked, and always thought Switzerland would always base its military defense around its universal conscription forever. I'm particularly shocked that they're letting men out much younger than the traditional Age 40. I'm not saying that's a bad thing -- I'm just surprised.

Now §J§ from Lisbon/Lisboa, Portugal has begun to Comment, because I threatened to sing ABBA songs through his computer speakers.

§J§ has been reading News & Weather from Vleeptron since his teacher assigned an early post, the obituary of Peter Benenson, a bowler-hatted London barrister who founded Amnesty International when he read about two Portuguese students who were tossed into prison for drinking a toast to Liberty in 1961 during the Salazar years.

I am nosy about those two students. I would like to know what happened to them, what they grew up to become in the new Portugal. (They would be about 65 now!) Perhaps §J§ can ask around, or perhaps Portuguese newspapers have followed them from time to time. They just wanted a glass of wine and some Liberty one nice summer evening; they never meant to trigger a world-wide human rights movement, and they certainly didn't intend to go from their Lisboa cafe to a prison for seven years.

"Some are born great, some achieve greatness,
and some have greatness thrust upon 'em."

-- Shakespeare, "Twelfth Night"

PUBLIC NOTICE: If you are from Europe or Latin America or Asia or Africa or Antarctica, perhaps you are a little nervous about your English skills. Don't be. You should see me try to speak your language. (I do possess a certain fluency in a language spoken by millions of dead Romans.) But mainly, we here on Vleeptron are just really curious about What's Going On wherever you are, and are delighted when you speak up.

Here is an agency of the United States Government giving its citizens lots of useful information about the nuclear bomb biproduct, the radioactive isotope strontium 90. It's honest, forthright, straightforward, informative. To summarize the government's findings:

1. If it's in your neighborhood's air, there's no way you can keep from breathing it in.

2. Chemically it resembles calcium, so it will accumulate in your bones and teeth. 29 years after breathing it in, half of what you ingested will still be in your bones and teeth.

3. Its ionizing radiation will give you leukemia.

4. There's a lot less strontium 90 since the superpowers stopped testing their atomic weapons in the atmosphere.

5. But you can forget 4. if your nearby nuclear power plant has an accident.

6. Your government is always looking out for your safety by bringing you this scientific information. Thank you for visiting our website, and have a nice day.

Among his other interests, §J§ likes NIN = Nine Inch Nails. Trent Reznor has a personal mission to bring back and re-popularize the wormwood-based alcoholic beverage absinthe, which has been banned in most of Europe and the USA since around 1900. I smuggled back a bottle of Czech absinthe in my dirty underpants, and me and my friends had a Forbidden Absinthe Party, during which one guest set the coffee table on fire. We had much fun that night!

Czech absinthe (Hill's) has wormwood -- the actual Fun Molecule is called thujone -- but in a mild modern concentration.

But there's a rumor that Portugal still makes and sells absinthe that has Great-Grandma's original wormwood kick to it. Is that true? If it is, I'll go to Lisboa and smuggle some of that back in my dirty underpants.

§J§ also likes the poet Rimbaud (Leo diCaprio plays him in the movie), who was one of the 19th century's Naughty Poster Children who made governments want to ban absinthe.

An American chemist who specializes in thujone believes the intense shimmering colors of Vincent van Gogh's Arles paintings were a neurological characteristic of his absinthe addiction -- he was in an asylum in Arles in the last years of his life. Before it was banned, everybody all over Europe loved the green stuff, and knocked it back during l'heure verte -- The Green Hour. I suspect all the lurid 19th century tabloid stories about it didn't really have a solid scientific foundation, and the damage attributed to it wasn't really the wormwood, but just the alcohol.

Okay, that's it for now, I have to pack my red suit and get some sleep, I'm travelling to Indiana tomorrow to meet the Zeta Beam and fly across the universe to the galaxy Dwingeloo 2, and spend some time on the wonderful planet Vleeptron, which once had nuclear weapons, but never used them against their fellow Vleeptroids, and then destroyed them all, because they were scaring the kiddies!