Bob was wrong about the rented office space in the strip mall

Click. No promises.

Any questions? What part of this is unclear? What, precisely, do you need explained?

1. Buy copy of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

2. Buy videogame system that will run it, attach to TV.

3. Somehow punch a bunch of numbers called the Hot Coffee Mod (available free on the Web) into the game console.

4. See a bunch of secret hidden raunchy sex performed by non-existent Platonic Objects who look hot and young and beefy and sweaty.

S.W.M.B.O. and me got a X-box, not the 360, but one of them old steam-powered X-boxes from when McKinley was president. Hooked up to the Deep Bass Speakers and Bob's Atomic Supercallifragialisticexpialidocious stereo system (Hafler solid-state kit power amp), you should see and hear the giant war bots make fried peanut butter out of those filthy terrorist Blakees fuFOOOM! This can be an incredibly pleasurable experience, bypassing Reality entirely for an hour and releasing one's Id onto the neighborhood with not an iota of accountability, reponsibility or obligations to anything bigger than Me.

These are our private moments of The Inner Viking, our Hour As Captain Kidd. There is Another World out there, in many ways a much richer and more interesting world than this joint, and we access this New World with a big-ass TV screen and a handheld game controller. We stay until we reach Level 12, or until somebody tells to wash up and come to dinner.

[Spritual Bob paid money for and likes "Crimson Skies" by Microsoft. It is largely flying piston-engine high-performance combat aircraft through endless skies in an Art Deco 1930s, occasionally swooping in on a giant dirigible and machine-gunning it and its crew into flames.]

Sometimes, I admit, I get an impulse to wreak the maximum physical havoc on the Quad County Area, some spree worthy of tonight's network news shows, but I know there will be Large Negative Consequences, to myself and others, if I give in to my impulses. (My nickname in elementary and junior high school was Poor Impulse Control Bob. There is a very interesting recent memoir of an American guy's life entitled "Runs with Scissors.")

But in the Locus of the Video Game, there are no consequences. The kilolitres of blood are all just a frequency digit stored in adjacent addresses of random access memory, the nun's severed head ditto. If there is a Reality to all this (and the Pythagoreans say there is), it looks like this:

0010111100100011
1101100000011000
0000101100111000
1010110100100100
0010111100100011
1101100000011000
0000101100111000
1010110100100100
0010111100100011
1101100000011000
0000101100111000
1010110100100100
1101100000011000
0000101100111000
1010110100100100
0010111100100011
1101100000011000
0000101100111000
1010110100100100

That's the Ultimate Reality of what you're masturbating to.

Stopping for meals and trips to the bathroom and the grocery and a little sleep now and then, it is now possible to live most of your life as Tamurlane the Magnificent, possibly one of history's most Superego-absent and violence-prone individuals.

What has been missing in your life to date? Have you longed to say

Wash that one and bring her to me.

Or perhaps

Kill every tenth man.

and very promptly get what you asked for. Well. You can now. Just not in Maryland or Iowa, or even in Ulan Bator anymore. But by making contact, through (as Plato advised) the Intellect, we can spend the next couple of months as General William Tecumseh Sherman commanding a Union army marching through Georgia to the Atlantic Ocean.

Bob the Ferocious, Until Dinnertime.

They got the mega-violence part down pretty damn quick in this curious industry.

The sex took a little longer. (Actually porno vidgames were born about two weeks after Pong went on sale, there is a long, strange museum of seXXX videogames with unimaginable depths of artistic and psychic crudeness.)

Big-ass fiery explosions are pretty easy to program. A night of emotionally-involving erotic passion between or among n entities, The Kind Men Like, this is not so easy to squeeze out of 2.2 million lines of C++ code.

This being The Republic of Gilead during the last few years, no government entity has ever objected in the slightest to the Niagara of Blood and the Microwave of Seared Flesh and the 40,000,000 kick-boxed Broken Necks. Violence along the lines of Paris during the Terror is good for growing, developing, healthy Personalities.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas possibly enjoys the distinction of being the first explicit rough-trade S&M-flavored whip-me-beat-me porn entertainment experience to be manufactured and sold by a huge, above-board NASDAQ-listed (TTWO) corporation.

Above, a screenshot of Take Two's Achievement in Artistic and Erotic Visual Depiction. In the Hot Coffee-decoded hidden Sexual Adventures lurking beneath the car accidents and gunfire of GTA:SA, the carjacker takes little recreational breaks from homicidal mayhem to get a little strange, with one (only one at a time, I think) of about 20 Neighborhood Friendly Girls (hetero sex exclusively) who tingle and leap the instant the carjacker (You) rings the bell or kicks the screen door down. I think that little glowing thing on his head is some kind of Last Longer / Penetrate Deeper magic spell he got from stealing and totalling a late-model Jaguar.

The Vleeptron Infrastructure Directorate informs us that the Frame Story of GTA:SA is about A Guy who had vowed, years ago, to leave the gang and violence world and lead A Decent Normal Respectable Civilized Life in an Honest Suburb far from the Mean Streets of his Sordid, Shameful Youth. But Gang Members murder his Mother. So he returns to the Southern California Urban Nightmare Salsa Meltdown to Reach Level 12. And You Are He. You have a Frame Story to make everything you do Okay. You wouldn't be playing this game if they hadn't disemboweled Mom and laughed while they did it.

But even Mom's Avenger needs to get his ashes hauled boomba-boomba de temps en temps. And Virtual San Andreas, Virtual California, Virtual USA is just the neighborhood for that.

Charles Bronson is not dead. His Soul has been transmogrified into 70,000,000 lines of C++ code. He will Live Forever in that form. Actually this is more like Richard Roundtree's Shaft, a triple-threat man: Violence AND Sex with the Ladies AND the moral and ethical High Ground too.

God made All Life, and that includes 12-year-old boys. All Life is Sacred and Deserves our Respect. Art and Entertainment designed for the Adolescent Male are authentic branches of industrial Art and Entertainment.

Anyway, no use my griping and grousing about any aspect of all this, soon, very soon, U.S. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton will introduce Federal Legislation -- maybe a new Constitutional Amendment -- which will zip right through Congress and Fix This Dirty Video Game Mess which is causing so much damage to Our Precious Children once and for all. She has taken months of stateswoman time she really had wanted to devote to The Large Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and shifted these political energies instead to Hidden Video Game Sex. Something must be done. Hillary For President. (There's a rumor the 2008 race will be Hillary v. Condoleezza.)

Well, okay, until I first encountered GTA/SA and the amazing Hot Coffee secret de-coding key which accesses all the fucking, I just imagined that Products of this sort were cooked up in a rental office in a strip mall in Fort Lauderdale by three guys who got tossed out of Southwest Arkansas Tech. The whole endeavor seemed very Low Profile to me. Not the sort of bunch you want to bring over to meet Mom and Dad.

Nostrabobus and his Amazing Remote Viewing Powers got that Wrong.

Last post featured the corporate mini-bio of the woman who just ran out the EXIT door from Take Two's board of directors.

Here are the ones who haven't called HQ yet to take their names off this Endeavor.

Classy bunch. Stretch limos and pate, the occasional private corporate jet, skiing at Vale. I might possibly know one of these guys, if he went to Camp Takajo.

======================

(remaining members of the)
Board of Directors
of Take Two video games,
developers of the Grand Theft Auto series

======================

Paul Eibeler - Chief Executive Officer, President

Paul Eibeler has been Chief Executive Officer of the Company since February 2005 and President and a director since April 2004. Mr. Eibeler was President of the Company from July 2000 to June 2003 and a director from December 2000 to February 2003. Prior to that, Mr. Eibeler was a consultant for Microsoft's Xbox launch team. From July 2003 to October 2003, Mr. Eibeler was President and Chief Operating Officer of Acclaim North America and, from 1998 to 1999, Mr. Eibeler served as Acclaim North America's Executive Vice-President and General Manager. During the seven years prior to that, Mr. Eibeler held various executive positions with Impact, Inc., a leading supplier of licensed toys and school supplies. Mr. Eibeler is a director of Dwango North America Corp., a publicly held developer and distributor of entertainment content and applications for mobile phones. Mr. Eibeler received a B.A. degree from Loyola College in 1978.

Robert Flug

Robert Flug has been a director of the Company since February 1998. Mr. Flug has been the President and Chief Operating Officer of S.L. Danielle, a women's apparel company, since September 1987. Mr. Flug received a B.S. in Business Administration from New York University.

Todd Emmel

Todd Emmel has been a director of the Company since February 2002 and Chairman of the Audit Committee since April 2004. Since August 2003, Mr. Emmel has served as Director, Structured Products for John Hancock Financial Services. From November 1999 until June 2002, Mr. Emmel was a First Vice President at Ambac Assurance Corporation, a financial insurance company. From May 1999 to November 1999, Mr. Emmel was Chief Credit Officer at Structured Credit Partners, a private credit arbitrage firm. From March 1998 to May 1999, Mr. Emmel was a Managing Director of DVI Private Capital Group, a private equity fund. From April 1990 to March 1998, Mr. Emmel held various positions at Union Bank of Switzerland, most recently as a Managing Director. Prior to this, Mr. Emmel was an Associate at both Drexel Burnham Lambert, from June 1988 to February 1990, and at E.F. Hutton from July 1987 to February 1988. Mr. Emmel received an M.B.A. from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.S. in accounting from Miami University.

Oliver R. Grace, Jr.

Oliver R. Grace, Jr. has been a director of the Company since April 1997. Since 1990, Mr. Grace, a private investor, has been the Chairman of the Board of Moscow Cablecom Corp. (formerly known as Anderson Group, Inc.), which provides broadband cable services to the city of Moscow. Mr. Grace is a general partner of Anglo American Security Fund, L.P., a private investment fund. Mr. Grace received a B.A. in Business Administration from Vanderbilt University.

Mark Lewis

Mark Lewis has been a director of the Company since May 2001. For the fifteen years prior to February 2001, Mr. Lewis held various positions with Electronic Arts, Inc., most recently as Senior Vice President of International Operations. Mr. Lewis has been a director of Muse Communications Corp., a broadband technology company, since November 1997. Mr. Lewis received a B.A. in English and graduated Cum Laude from Yale University.

Steven Tisch

Steven Tisch has been a director of the Company since April 2002. Since 1986, Mr. Tisch has been an independent motion picture producer. Mr. Tisch is the Oscar Award winning producer of Forrest Gump, the 1994 winner for Best Picture. Since May 2000, Mr. Tisch has been a partner of Escape Artists, a private independent film company, and a director of Classic Media, an owner of franchise entertainment properties. Since June 2002, Mr. Tisch has been a director of Film Roman, Inc., a publicly held television and motion picture production company. From 1976 to 1986, Mr. Tisch was a principal of Tisch/Avnet Productions, a production company with credits such as Risky Business. Mr. Tisch is a member of the Board of Directors of the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and The Geffen Theatre in Los Angeles. Mr. Tisch received a B.A. in Sociology from Tufts University.

Michael Malone

Michael Malone has been a director of the company since January 2006. Mr. Malone recently retired as Chairman of DMX Music, a multinational music programming and distribution company that he founded in 1971 and subsequently sold to Liberty Media. He currently has interests in several premium hotels and restaurants and is a principal in MTM Management, a national hotel management company. Mr. Malone serves on the Board of Directors and Audit Committee of Expeditors International of Washington, Inc., a publicly traded international freight forwarding company. He is a past Board Member of the International Business Music Association (IBMA) and a founding Associate member of the World Airline Entertainment Association (WAEA). Among his community activities, Mr. Malone is past president and lifetime trustee of PONCHO (Patrons of Northwest Charitable Organization); trustee and member of the Executive Committee for the University of Washington Foundation; and a founder and current Chairman of the Seattle Police Foundation.