Bright Lights, Not-So-Big City

Crowbar Headquarters Staff Update

Hi all,

Back after a long weekend of fun and relaxation. Ok, maybe not so much fun...or relaxation. Maybe recuperation. Ok, hibernation. Oh whatever.

Anyway, we all had four days off and we took a calculated risk, deciding to leave Crowbar unsupervised in Headquarters throughout. She doesn't know this, but usually when we "claim" to be taking time away from HQ we work out a little system to take turns keeping tabs on her. It's not that we don't trust her, it's just that she's completely unreliable and untrustworthy. Leave her on her own for too long and the next thing you know there's a SWAT team coming up the front walk and a smoldering police station down the street. We've always managed to buy her out of these tight spots in the past, but one day our luck (or the EBF - Emergency Bribe Fund) is going to run out.

Even knowing this, we're all aware that she's got to be left on her own sometimes and, if we're telling the truth, we also thought it might be rather amusing to see just how far she'd unravel if left to her own devices with no spy work or Mission Critical Emergencies to distract her. Of course we wouldn't want to give you the idea that we find Crowbar's little hissy fits funny, or that we like to mock her - it's just that we do.

So what did she get up to while we were all away? Well, we've actually noticed an odd trend with her lately - for some reason she's been randomly throwing on the Con Allyerd identity, even when Con isn't needed. Twice in the last month alone we've caught her dressed up in knee-high black high heeled boots, short skirts and - get this - carrying a purse. The first time we took it as evidence of either some mission we hadn't been briefed on or signs of Crowbar's mounting psychosis, but either way we figured it was a phase. Then we rolled back into HQ this morning expecting to find all kinds of damage and some new police reports to doctor, and instead discovered that she did it again while we were away. Rumour has it (ok, so we did have her tailed while we were out of town) that she not only donned the Con identity, complete with boots and black miniskirt, but in top of it all she went to a casino. This is definitive Con behaviour. Places with lots of people counting money, machines that spit silver and velvet ropes separating the rich people are Con Allyerd's natural habitat. That's no surprise, but some level of duress is usually required to get Crowbar to don the appropriate identity, and even then she does so grudgingly. Con likes the lights, the bells, the unadulterated, grasping capitalism and the chance to feed on it....Crowbar tends to look for nooks and crannies to plant explosives. In short, we wouldn't expect her to be going voluntarily, and certainly not if there were no scam to pull off to bankroll the Resistance Force.

Perhaps it's some of Con's recent successes spurring Crowbar to let her stretch her wings a bit. We got news a few weeks back that one of Con's works of masterful spin brought close to ten grand into the Resistance Force coffers for the upcoming year. We would have thanked her but she was off somewhere pulling a bank job. Instead we've spent two weeks attempting to find ways to avoid the funder's requested photo op (Crowbar, as you can imagine, doesn't like having her picture taken - we got her out of it). As it stands, Con is clearly way out in front when it comes to pulling her own weight around here, so we're guessing Crowbar thought it only fair that she get a couple of nights out. Sadly, all reports say that CB managed to lose $60* bucks while Con was off in the Smoking Lounge chatting up Baccarat players, so apparently the clothes alone don't make the girl. Seemingly you need the Con attitude to be a winner in the big rooms - something Crowbar on her own doesn't have. In fact, proving the old adage "you can dress her up but you can't take her anywhere", we hear she spent a good portion of the night trying to find excuses to kick someone with those big, black boots, although Intel says she didn't and the EBF confirms it. That notwithstanding, from what we can tell, she actually had a good time and nobody got hurt, except her wallet.

[CB Note - I feel a need to interject briefly here: While it's true that no one got hurt, I want to go on record pointing out that some old lady hit me. You heard me, hit me. I stepped up to a slot machine to drop a quarter in and the woman at the next machine (who had her back to me at the time) spun around and physically smacked my arm away. I was so shocked I didn't even kill her. So it's a bigger thing to say "no one got hurt" than perhaps the HQ Staff realizes.]

Crowbar tells us the creepiest part of the whole excursion were the old people physically jacked into the slot machines - at first she thought the Dark Side had perfected some sort of One-Armed-Bandit life support systems. It seems people who are thoroughly addicted to slot machines tend to use these "Preferred Player" cards, which are like casino credit cards. You slot them directly into the machine, play credits stored on them, and can move from machine to machine whenever you want without cashing out...your credit is all on the plastic. Unfortunately, the casino has seen fit to attach these cards to a long spiral cord like a telephone cord that appears to clip on to your person, ensuring you don't move on and forget it in the slot machine. Apparently old people feel the left breast pocket is the best place to attach the alligator clip on the end of the cord. The visual effect of this, however, is that you can gaze down a row of 50 slot machines and see old person after old person with a cord running directly from their heart into the machine, thus making the slots appear like external pacemakers. It was like invasion of the bodysnatchers, except the seniors stayed connected to the pods by long yellow plastic spiral strings. It's hard not to wonder; if you walked along the row and just started unplugging them, one after the other, would they die? Is the only thing sustaining them the mounting hope that the next spin will be the jackpot, thus requiring them to stay hooked up to these things for hour upon hour, quarter upon quarter? Maybe that's a morbid thought...oh right, it's Crowbar; morbid thoughts are her stock and trade.

What we did learn from this latest adventure is that Crowbar definitely feels dark casinos full of obsessive gamblers are the exact, correct locales for her to spend Easter Sunday. Being surrounded by terrifyingly dressed seniors and acne-ridden teenage crimelord wannabe's appears to be her millieu. Her choice of timing for the outing did beg the question of whether more or less people go gamble away the mortgage payment on Easter? Do fewer people go 'cause gambling's a sin and they feel they should pretend to piety on at the weekend of JC's supposed resurrection? Or do more people go, banking on the notion that Christ coming back from the dead was surely the greatest odds-breaker of all time, thus the 'anniversary' of the resurrection is luckier than the rabbit's foot? Not being a frequenter of these establishments, Crowbar is still unsure, but we figure we'll run it past Con when she next flits in - if it has to do with money and when people are most likely to part with it, our beloved Minister of Finance will know the answer.

*No Resistance Force funds were lost in the making of this losing streak. All payments were drawn on Crowbar's personal embezzled accounts.

Prison Diaries # 4 - I Could Have Been A Waitress

The following communique was received from Cake Wafit at Crowbar Headquarters last night, marked 'Urgent':

Subject: "Help. Trapped with Crowbar Resistance Force Operative Squirrelly in a room full of hostile teenage girls."

"We are trapped in a room full of girls who hate each other. They are hitting each other, calling each other 'bitch', 'fucker' and a plethora of other names, coughing, sighing, fidgeting and interrupting when someone they don't like is speaking, and loudly commenting on the behaviour and attitudes of "some people" when clearly referring to the girl next to them.

In the last hour alone one group member:

• snapped a plastic protective poster cover in half and tried to stick it back on the wall so no one would find out
• wore a lampshade on her head
• spun the aforementioned lampshade around on the lamp until it flew off and nearly broke her finger
• stood on the furniture pulling wire tacks out of the ceiling in order to get an extra tack and thus re-wire the room we were in
• got stucco in her eyes while performing the above task
• climbed up 6 feet to the top of a tackle dummy and "rode" it in a graphic sex pantomime
• interrupted everyone else's sentences, every time they spoke, even while explaining the "no interrupting" rule to other members
• called other women "bitch" no less than 25 times
• called other women "fat bitch" no less than 20 times
• hit, pinched, flicked and kicked another group member no less than 20 times when she thought we weren't looking (and sometimes when we were)
  

The first punch was delivered no less than two minutes after we entered the Dark Side Behavioural Modification and Re-education Centre and I can attest to the fact that it landed hard (since I was about a half a foot from it at the time). The young women are thinly disguising their hostility as "joking", and using "I'm-just-playing-around" as an all-purpose smokescreen to nail one another every time they get within three feet of each other.

The PURE EVIL Dark Side(TM) staff operatives have also got some kind of latent hostility problem. From the moment we arrrived we noticed they would not look us in the eye, made us talk (in falsely friendly tones) to the backs of their heads, and generally displayed the kind of behaviour that would have them locked in their cells for "attitude" were they incarcerated in the facility rather than running it. This has spread to the young women and elevated the tension to unsustainable levels. It appears interactions are teetering only inches away from explosion. Our attempts to defuse this in group have thus far failed miserably.

Squirrelly is beginning to live up to her code-name and is starting to twitch every time she sees another smack get delivered. I am having difficulty containing Crowbar, who is leaking through my cover identity and saying things like, "Ok fuck, we've got better things to do than sit here and watch you two kick the shit out of each other".

We fear we may be getting close to losing it, pulling out our weaponry and screaming, "Ok, that's it, shut up, all of you fuckers and listen up! You're gonna fuckin' get along, understand?! You're going to be supportive and validating for each other or this room turns into a bloodbath, get it?! Now BE NICE!!"

We have aborted the group mission in order to avoid all-out brawling and plan to pull out soon. We are returning to Headquarters and will require alcohol, debriefing and reinforcements before we are reinserted into the mission next week."

- Cake & Squirrelly Out.

Prison Diaries # 3 - Cake Wafit Infiltrates Control

The other day Cake Wafit arrived early for an 8:30 a.m. meeting in the prison. This brought her inside the jail before the usual administrative starting time, meaning most of the interior lights were off, the offices were shut down, and the guys in Control were watching Psi Factor on a large-screen t.v. Cake asked one of them (in a jovial, buddy-buddy kinda way) if the administration allowed the staff to watch t.v. during Control shifts and he said 'yeah'. She noted with interest, however, that before 9 a.m. rolled around he had turned off the television and pulled an extension cord back through the Control door and across the main thoroughfare of the jail, into the conference room where it obviously usually resides. One suspects that perhaps the bosses don't know that the night staff are watching cable instead of the security cams after all.

Just for the purpose of clarity, "Control" is exactly what it sounds like - a central glass room that acts as the nerve center for the prison. Multiple video screens hang from the ceiling, showing the outside of the jail from all possible approaches (including a water-filled culvert that must creep up behind the facility, as Cake's never seen that particular locale outside). The guard behind the glass has complete control (hence the name) over all movements inside the facility. If you want to go through a set of doors, he (and it is invariably a "he") must release the magnetic locks from inside Control. If you want to see a particular inmate, he radios to the living unit for a guard there to bring that inmate up to the main building. If any prisoner (a.k.a. teenager) is moving anywhere in the facility, Control must be informed of every movement. So, for example, if a youth is coming out of the Day Room and going into the main hall, the guard with that kid walkie talkies to Control the phrase "Control, coming out of the Day Room with One." It doesn't matter if the guard is leaving the Day Room with 5 additional people, they still say "with One", meaning One Inmate. Control is physically a large module in the centre of the main facility, encased completely in bullet & shatter proof glass which appears to be soundproofed as well. This is so the guards can sit behind the glass and say whatever they want without being heard by the prisoners they are talking about. It's also convenient for ignoring people like Cake when she comes in and stands on the other side of the glass, waiting to sign in and request the list of people who have asked to meet with her that day.

The "Cake Wafit" identity appears to be having the desired effect, however, of whittling through the defenses of the PURE EVIL staff. Much of the time they appear to be buying her quasi-mild mannered, polite "counsellor" exterior; the image of the woman who "just wants to help" the poor delinquents. Although the PURE EVIL staff are contemptuous of this (believing the 'little criminals' to be deserving of cruel and unusual punishment), they only scoff at and subtley demean Cake. If they knew that Crowbar hides just under the "Cake" veneer, they'd likely restrain, eject, or even try to arrest her. As such, Crowbar usually goes along quite happily with the 'scoff and deride' version of PURE EVIL, as it does little to impede her revolutionary goals. She knows, additionally, that it is critically important that she maintain an effective Double Agent identity in order to maintain her access to the jail. Letting that slip, even insofar as to appear annoyed or offended by the guards' condescension, would jeopardize the Mission Objectives beyond repair.

Lately, though, the Cake Wafit identity has been noting some subtle changes in the attitude of the guards in Control toward her. Where they used to always keep her on the other side of the glass, shouting to be heard through the metal voice conduit, recently she's noticed they will sometimes open the Control door and let her speak face to face in a normal tone of voice. Where she used to always have to sign in by having the clipboard passed to her through the metal drawer, now more often the guard will open the Control door and let her come in a few feet to sign in using the desk in there. Admittance into the inner sanctum of Control is a form of tacit acceptance; a grudging sign that they are now viewing her as closer to "one of them" than "the enemy". While this has the ability to make bile rise in Crowbar's throat, the Cake identity reminds her that this is exactly the desired progression for a Double Agent.

And so, returning to our narrative, this particular morning Cake was the first non-staff person to enter the facility, as we said, even beating management and administration to arriving. This appeared to only further her 'one-of-us' status with the guards in Control as they not only let her in the nerve centre, but tolerated her leaning up against a desk and feigning interest in Psi Factor along with them. The two guards shot the shit about goings-on in the facility during the night as though Cake weren't there - the clearest sign so far that she's moving even beyond the level of acceptance that Management receives. Cake is well-trained in playing this hand, and knows the key is not to overplay it - that is, not to look either too eager or too interested in what they're talking about. When rubbing elbows with PURE EVIL, the best demeanor to adopt is a sort of nonchalant, semi-bored inoffensiveness and you'll quickly find they mistake you for "one of the boys" before long. Both guards in Control did so this particular morning, tossing comments back and forth to one another about a "new kid" in the boys unit and offering up their decidedly uninspired evaluations of him. Cake listened to this while appearing to be riveted by Psi Factor (which, if you've ever seen it, should have been a dead-giveaway that she was up to something) and threw in a seemingly disinterested question when the timing was right:

"What's the deal with him?"

Doesn't sound too articulate? You have to know that articulation would immediately expose Cake as being a Resistance Force agent. Grunted, non-commital half-sentences go a lot further in identifying one as part of the in-crowd when you're hanging out with prison guards. The Control boys thus rushed to tell her all the problems with this new kid, and all the reasons they need to be on top of him all the time. As it turns out, the main problem seemed to be that the kid is large for his age. This wouldn't appear to be an issue for the average person but you've gotta remember that these guards are used to being able to feel like they're tough guys because they're able to overpower and subdue 90 pound 13-year-old boys - not surprising that anyone approximating their own size would be viewed as "dangerous".

Cake's skepticism may have been a bit too obvious, however, as one of the guards, noting the look on her face, proceeded to say, "No, it's bad - this kid's violent. He's got Armed Robbery and Assaulting A Police Officer."

Cake raised an eyebrow. Well, actually she probably raised two, but she's always wanted to be able to do that cool Jack Nicholson, one-eyebrow thing. Armed robbery and assaulting a police officer, huh? Ok, we could see how the uninitiated might see those as indications of violence, but you really do have to know how this stuff typically goes down to realize just how meaningless those charges can sometimes be. Right off the top it needs to be said that a whole lot of teenagers rack up an "assaulting a police officer" charge when they're being arrested. Off the top of our heads we can think of about 10 girls who were slapped with that charge for spitting on a cop while being cuffed. Then we can think of a few who fought being cuffed or, let's not forget that all-time favourite, the ones the cops beat up and immediately charged with 'assaulting a police officer' so they could justify the 'use of force' on the kid.
"Why'd you break this prisoners nose?"
"She was assaulting us, Your Honour."
Suffice to say, that particular charge doesn't mean much to the Crowbar Crew until we hear the details.

As for Armed Robbery, well, in our experience...and we mean no disrespect...sometimes kids can be dumb. Sometimes they do things like carry a weapon (or any object, really), thinking they'll be less likely to end up in a physical confrontation due to it. Or sometimes they brandish something in their hand like they're going to hit someone with it, even if they have no intention of doing so. Or sometimes they're just assholes who feel like they're tough if they've got a knife. Invariably what Cake hears from the young women she speaks to is, "I would never use it!" [At this point Cake often debates the usefulness of stating the obvious about those who carry weapons not pulling them unless they're prepared to use them, but it's a coin toss about whether or not we go there in the moment.] Our personal favourite are the youths who get charged with Armed Robbery when they bully some other kid out of their bus pass and happen to be holding a bottle or something in their hand. All the police report has to say is that the victim believed they were going to be hit with the bottle if they didn't turn over the bus pass (or other desired object), and your standard mugging moves up the ladder to Armed Robbery. None of this is to say that it's ok to be bullying or stealing in the first place, nor that no youth has ever been dangerously in control of a weapon they're prepared to use - certainly, some have been right nasty motherfuckers. Cake's point here is solely that the "armed robbery" charge is certainly no proof that they're anything more than stupid - and that certainly doesn't equate directly to their being a violent individual generally.

Did Cake say all this to her new-found prison guard buddies in Control? If you've answered yes to that question you are going to be left back in spy-school a few weeks. Arguing with the Dark Side's established parameters of any label is a sure-fire way to distinguish oneself as a member of the Resistance Force. Hell, even people who are utterly unaffiliated with the Resistance Force have been accused of being operatives, just for the crime of questioning the logic of some accepted Dark Side precept. So Cake, knowing what's in her best interests, kept her mouth shut and kept watching Psi Factor. For those of you who would question her choice, its strategic nature became clear in mere minutes.

One guard stood up and said, "Well, I'm gonna get a coffee..." and turned to Cake as he started toward the door of Control. Cake began to shift herself, believing this to be her hint to go back to her established loitering post in the main concourse, when he said, "You wanna coffee?"

Cake Wafit, my friends, is IN.

Ask Me No Questions And I'll Still Tell You Lies

Like most zealots, Crowbar is often unrelenting and unforgiving in her moral exactitude. She holds individuals and herself to a standard of absolute consistency that is near-impossible to maintain. Knowing this, we find one peculiarity in her personality difficult to explain: Crowbar passionately hates the Nigerian Email Scammers.

Now we know what some of you are thinking: "Why shouldn't she? We all get furious when we receive those ridiculous emails telling us the writer has personally selected us to help them collect 20 million dollars if we'll just put out a little cash up front." There seems to be no good reason Crowbar wouldn't despise email scammers, right?

Not quite. Crowbar is the type of obnoxious person who immediately starts countering your points about these idiots with information about the rates of poverty and unemployment in Africa versus the rate of consumption for the average American. She'll start pointing out that when you condemn people to a futureless existence, provide them with no opportunities to earn a living wage, and make health and education a privilege only the wealthiest can afford, they will begin to come up with more ingenius ways to attempt to create a better, more financially stable, future. In short, she'll essentially tell you the beast is of your own creation.

Usually.

In the case of the Nigerian email scammers, Crowbar knows all these things but, for some unexplained reason, cannot control her rage and fury when she receives one of the infamous, god-heavy pleas for assistance or "business opportunities". Thus, after sending her an urgent request to help him disburse his millions of dollars to charity (due to his overwhelming deathbed wish to reconcile himself with God) one "El-Basir Mahjoub" found himself the unlucky recipient of the following Crowbar reply this morning:

You are scum.
You are garbage wrapped in skin.
Don't you check out who you're fucking with before you send this crap out?
What makes you think spouting deranged subservience to non-existent gods is going to do anything less than enrage me?

I hate people who try to steal from the poor, and I hate people who babble bullshit about "god".

You will be dealt with.

We've told Crowbar a million times that she just makes an ass of herself when she stoops to sending out these ridiculous threats. We've told her that the recipient doesn't give a shit, as they've sent their email out to hundreds of thousands of people and her silly little replies aren't even read. She knows it, and yet she can't stop herself from pounding out her weak attempts to assert her supposed superiority. It's kind of pathetic, really. She knows it isn't any different than the kid in the schoolyard who replies to verbal taunts by yelling: "I don't care what you say either, because you're STUPID and you STINK!" We've gently suggested that this would seem to be the action of one who really does care. Like the kid in the schoolyard, all we get for our efforts is a dirty look and muttered curses now directed at us.

We've found our best response is directing Crowbar to one of the many "scam-baiter" websites, home of folks who have truly perfected the fine art of fucking with other people. One has to be careful to avoid the inevitable racist-disguised-as-prankster sites, but currently www.scamorama.com seems to be doing a good job of keeping CB amused without pissing her off still further.

All her annoyance becomes truly worth it when these talented scam-baiters actually get the email con-artist to send them money instead. It's a thing of beauty to behold, even if it is illegal. 'Cause you know how we here at the Resistance Force feel about things that are illegal, right? Right.

Crowbar Cast Of Characters Redux

We realize that we here at Headquarters have introduced you to an awful lot of new people over the past few months. Hell, even Crowbar occasionally has trouble keeping all her secret identities straight so we can only imagine what it must be like for the unsuspecting reader. Bearing this in mind we thought it might be helpful to run over the Crowbar Crew you've met thus far and their various mission roles.

Introducing - The Many Faces Of Crowbar

CROWBAR - a.k.a. Our hero, SuperSpy, Double Agent Extraordinaire and generally troublesome revolutionary-wannabe. Crowbar is into demolition, jealously guards the armory, heads all military and tactical operations, and is Commando-In-Chief of all missions and crew. No one's exactly sure of her full history, nor all the identities she's held, but we know her background is...well, spotty might be a nice way to put it. FAVOURITE WEAPONS: Guess. Apart from her extensive training in hand-to-hand combat, Crowbar can overcome an adversary with just about anything handy, including everyday objects not intended for that purpose. As would seem obvious, however, she generally favours all things smashy.

CAKE WAFIT [Codename for Cake-With-A-File-In-It] - A more mild-mannered (by CB standards), all-purpose daytime identity donned by Crowbar to appear sane, reasonable, and sneak into places she's not supposed to be. Cake acts as a counsellor to teen girls in prison, on the street, in group homes, etc, and regularly passes herself off to the Dark Side as an ally who has succumbed to their brainwashing tactics. Cake's double agent role is complicated and requires great finesse and there are those of us on the crew who feel she never gets the credit she deserves. FAVOURITE WEAPONS: The Validator, The Normalizer.
[More on Cake Wafit...]

CON ALLYERD [Codename for Con-All-Yer-Dollars] - Head of the Ministry of Finance and Marketing Specialist, Con works tirelessly to siphon dollars into the Crowbar Dark Side Resistance Force. Con is flippant, often MIA, and, by all accounts, about a fingernail deep. She's a world-class thief, will rob you blind the minute your back is turned, and has absolutely no moral compunctions about lying blatantly if she's charmed a cheque out of you by the end. In short, she's pretty much like anybody else you'll meet in advertising. FAVOURITE WEAPONS: Con avoids biting the hand that feeds, and prefers non-lethal stealth weaponry. Her greatest art is the Con, and her fallback tools, Doublespeak and pickpocketing.
[More on Con Allyerd...]

CULT ABANDON [Codename for Cultivate-A-Band-Of-Neophytes] - Head of the Ministry of Information, Cult is in charge of deciminating Information, Propaganda and Truth for the Resistance. She further heads up the Political Strategy and Tactical Planning Division and finally handles the recruitment function for the mission team. Cult is non-violent and commits less overt sabotage than the rest of the crew, but perhaps has the greatest long-term impact in that she sows the seeds of doubt in burgeoning minds. FAVOURITE WEAPONS: The Truth, The Real-Life-Anecdote, and The Written Word. Fallback tool: Hypnotism.
[More on Cult Abandon...]

Introducing - The Crew

CHISEL - Crowbar Feline Unit, Chisel's amazing ability to see in the dark and move in complete silence makes her invaluable on stealth and recon missions. Chisel is also in charge of security for Crowbar Headquarters, posing as an every-day domestic housecat. Don't be fooled - she'd take your eyes out if you got more than 5 feet inside the door without Crowbar's consent. Not that you could.

HQ STAFF - Headquarters is staffed by a dedicated group of operatives who perfom all the day-to-day functions of keeping a Command Centre running. They file mission updates, relay Crowbar communiques, and generally try to ensure the trains run on time. Much to Crowbar's displeasure, however, they do not do laundry or dishes. No one knows exactly who they are, or how many of them work out of HQ - that's not the kind of intel we'd allow into the public domain anyway.

SQUIRRELLY - Crowbar Resistance Force Mission Operative. Although Crowbar generally works alone, in any mission requiring two or more operatives Squirrelly is Crowbar's most frequent Mission partner. Squirrelly is extensively trained in strategy, hand-to-hand combat, propaganda, and stealth. She is further the only Mission Operative with complete access to Headquarters, full security clearance for all mission information, and a reserved seat in the Barmobile (Resistance Force transport vehicle).

WEEDERMAN - Part of the Crowbar Mission Intelligence Retrieval System (MIRS), Weederman acts as organic storage for historical mission data Crowbar has deleted from her own memory for security reasons. Weederman further sends regular electronic intelligence reports from his exhaustive news and document scans, and sometimes reminds Crowbar to eat.

Introducing - The Affiliates

BONEZ - Independent Resistance Force Affiliate, Bonez provides intel, systems support and media duplication. Bonez has insinuated himself into Dark Side training facilities and specializes in being impossible to extract, once embedded.

THE COOKIEMAKER - Deadliest Woman In The World With A Spatula, Independent Resistance Force Affiliate The Cookiemaker provides mission soundtracks, inspirational communiques, and, you guessed it, cookies. She specializes in taking out Dark Side(tm) First Response Personnel.

TIBBY - Independent Resistance Force Affiliate, Tibby is a shadowy figure who pops up intermittantly to provide intel, late-night communiques and philosophy. Her specialty is subterfuge, by way of strategy, and she maintains almost as many secret identities as Crowbar in order to accomplish this.

---

As we introduce you to new people we'll add 'em to this list and perhaps, if we get real dedicated, you'll eventually find a link to the crew on the sidebar too....

Crowbar Headquarters Staff Update

We tend to despise all things "cutesy" here at HQ, but due to the running cleaning theme we've had going lately, we enjoyed a link that showed up yesterday in the Crowbar Inbox, entitled:

Your Computer Screen Is Looking Like It Needs A Cleaning.

This apparently came from http://buggydoo.blogspot.com by way of Crowbar Resistance Force Independent Affiliate, Tibby.

Cake is currently scurrying around getting ready to head to jail for the day. She's unbelievably unpleasant about this and we're starting to question her ability to keep up the charade much longer. She wastes no time letting us all know just how much she hates it there, and we've noticed that lately she can find just about any reason to postpone it, including "it's snowing", and "my nose is running". We're taking it as a sign that she needs a vacation, but all Crowbar Identities and Mission Operatives are ridiculously touchy about any suggestion that they might need a break. They seem to take it as an indication that we, the HQ Staff, are questioning their competence or something. While we are sympathetic to this reaction, we're also pretty clear that we don't want to put up with Cake's grumpiness much longer. She has a hard job, and we appreciate that, but damn it, it's a bit of a buzzkill, to tell you the truth.

We're being glared at currently, which we can only take as a hint that we should be working, so we'll check back in with you later.

Meet Bugsy: The Man Under The Floorboards

(Remember when you were a kid and you thought there were monsters in the closet....?)

As you all know, if you've been following our story, Crowbar Headquarters is cleverly disguised as a rundown apartment in an old house. As the attentive among you will also know, it's usually a pigsty. There's a high level of activity around here, staff running in and out, people whipping off one disguise to don another, Cult Abandon scribbling out manifestos on reams of scrap paper while crumpling up pages and pitching them over her shoulder, Crowbar throwing shit...generally it's not exactly organized.

Most of us just get used to living in the middle of the mess - Cake looks exhausted, saying "I work too fuckin' hard to deal with this domestic shit", Cult is apparently too "cerebral" for cleaning, Con...yeah, right, you try getting Con to make her own coffee, let alone clean up, and Crowbar...well, Crowbar's best known for demolition, not rebuilding. And we, the dedicated Crowbar Resistance Force Headquarters Mission Team (otherwise known as "Staff"), figure we don't get paid enough to take the bus, let alone clean up after these maniacs.

That said, you may remember a few nights ago when we found Crowbar unconscious in a chair, drooling on a stack of secret documents and surrounded by the detritus of weeks of obsessive reading. We took pity on her. We also had the fun job of attempting to scrape her out of the chair she seemed to be stuck to, and if you think that wasn't gross....well, even we have our limits, so we all pitched in yesterday and launched a massive Headquarters clean-up mission.

We washed, we dusted, we laundered, we even did windows. We mopped floors and, yes friends, we vacuumed. And that's about where our story gets interesting.

We mentioned HQ is situated in an old house. Most of the floors are hardwood, but if you look carefully between the cracks (as all the slats have separated) you can see gaps between the wood and the floor underneath. Well, while we were vacuuming last night, we lifted the heating grate out of the floor to vacuum inside of it. This house is old enough that the vents to the furnace are set directly into the floor and have the old fashioned iron "lattice-work" grates on top. Not bolted in, mind you. Not anchored in any way, really, except that they fit pretty well into those big holes in the floor.

So there we were, with the grate pulled out, vacuuming inside the heating duct, running the hose along the edge, when we noticed what looked like a slip of paper being sucked out from the space between the hardwood layer of floor and the stuff underneath. Just a corner, at first, but we saw it. At first we ignored it 'cause that's what we do with random slips of paper around here - we ignore them and hope someone else will pick them up. Then we remembered this was a Cleaning Mission, so we turned the vacuum back on it, hoping to suck it out from between the two layers of flooring. Honestly, we figured it was an old receipt or something. [Crowbar seems to think filing receipts means dropping them in random places and trying to scoop the majority of them up come April. Seeing as this entire operation is underground and we're not exactly writing off our shoe phones and lapel cameras, we don't usually worry about it too much either.]

What came out was an absolutely filthy, folded piece of heavy paper. When we unfolded it, expecting to see purple cash register ink, instead we saw what looked like a very old photo:



As you can see, this looks an awful lot like somebody's mugshot, except there are no numbers identifying him. Did cops always use those number plates, back in the old days? The paper is very old photo paper, we noticed after unfolding it, so it seems to be original, albeit awfully hard to date. Who is this man? What is his folded mugshot doing underneath our Headquarters floor? How many years ago was this taken? Was it deliberately hidden there, or did it just fall out of someone's pocket while they were laying the hardwood? What else might be concealed under the floorboards? (CB Staff Note: that particular question has forced us to keep a close eye on Crowbar, as she keeps prowling around staring raptly at the floor, while carrying - you guessed it - a crowbar.)

As you can see, this little mystery has our curiousity pretty peaked. We've conjured up all kinds of elaborate, romanticized stories to explain this, and some of them are pretty fantastic. Buddy here looks like he could have been a member of Capone's crew (but that might just be because he's wearing a tie). Either way, we're fascinated to think that he's been here for the whole 14 years Crowbar Headquarters has been using this house as a cover. Goes to show you just how bad Crowbar's housekeeping skills really are.

Of course, there could be some ridiculously mundane explanation for his presence. This might not be a real photo at all, it could be a posed shot as part of someone's Halloween costume or something. This guy even looks vaguely like someone Crowbar knew long ago on another mission, and he was the kind of guy who had no higher aspiration than to be mistaken for one of the Kray brothers. Maybe this picture is just a leftover prop from one of his fantasies of being a crime lord that managed to wiggle its way into the heating duct, along with so many other scraps of useless paper.

Maybe. But that won't stop us from coming up with far more interesting scenarios. Watch this space regularly for news of the Crowbar Resistance Force Headquarters Ghost, a man who was gunned down fighting the coppers and subsequently broke out of the Kingston pen to flee the country with the loot from a bank robbery under his arm......

My Harrowing Tale Of Earthquake Survival

Late last night I was industriously working away at my computer when I noticed the house swaying underneath me. As I looked at the monitor, I could see it swinging back and forth rather quickly. This continued for a minute or so.

My thought? "Man, I can't imagine what a houseguest would think, feeling this. You'd think the house was about to sag and give way."

But did I run? Did I panic and dive for doorways? Did I turn on the radio to find out if Armageddon was beginning?

Why no, of course not. I now know that what I was experiencing was residual tremor from an earthquake that had occurred some hundreds of miles away. While this is interesting to discover, it solves no mystery for me, as I never perceived one to begin with.

You see, my house does this all the time. Just gently sways, like a hammock in the breeze, rocking back and forth in a near soothing fashion. You should feel what happens when a big truck goes by. Our idea of structural integrity around here equals not having the floor give way under the shower while you're singing Ramones songs at the top of your lungs. Or not having too much plaster land on your head while you're brushing your teeth. Or being able to stuff enough towels under the back door to block that Arctic northern wind as it whistles through the gaps that show daylight. Or, of course, having the house stay standing through the passage of eighteen wheelers. Earthquake? What earthquake?

Maybe that would make a good game show: "Natural Disaster or Slum Landlord? You Decide!"

I Was Just Testing You to See What *You'd* Say...

Crowbar Communique:

"Ever drink so much coffee and smoke so many cigarettes that your whole body shakes uncontrollably until the muscles in your biceps are screaming in pain, just from vibrating for so long? No? Um....me neither."

"What did you say she's been reading...?"

Crowbar HQ Staff Report

Greetings all you Resistance Force types, from the early morning hours here at Crowbar HQ. I have just entered Crowbar's office and stumbled upon her, unconscious on the desk in front of the computer screen. She almost looks innocent when she sleeps, except for that somewhat-unflattering string of drool on her cheek and the hand reflexively curling and releasing the ever-present iron bar she holds, even while unconscious. Actually, it's taking your life in your hands to try to move her away from the keyboard in order to type - Crowbar has an unfortunate tendency to swing first and ask questions later if surprised while she's sleeping.

That said, I appear to have her suitably shifted over to one side now (she did swing kinda half-heartedly at my shins while I did it, but then muttered and rolled over) in order to send a few lines out to you.

I must say, we're all a bit surprised to discover how absent she's been from regular communication with you, her stalwart comrades in arms. We've been watching her prop herself up in front of the screen almost constantly for weeks when she's not out performing her double agent duties, so I was under the impression that she had written you a treatise by now. I see from her posting dates that this is not the case. So what has our hero been up to, if not giving you the dubious honour of watching her every move?

Well, before I answer this, it might be useful to remind you of a few little facts about the psychology of our fearless leader. You've heard of obsessive-compulsive behaviours, right? Well, Crowbar is the poster child for behavioural extremes and she demonstrates this no where so much as in her inability to leave something alone, once she's become interested in it. All these long hours we thought she was writing to you and mustering the Revolutionary vanguard? Turns out she'd gotten her brain hooked into all kinds of arbitrary things and has been burning holes in her head reading about them on the internet.

First it was Somalia. Why the hell did she decide she needed to understand everything about the US "humanitarian" mission and subsequent military action in Somalia, you ask? The answer is, there is no damn reason at all. It just occurred to her one day that she didn't feel she really understood the history of what happened there - next thing you know, she hasn't left the chair in two days, she's chainsmoked about 4 packs of cigarettes, consumed a few kilos of coffee and we're all walking past unobtrusively spraying her with Lavender Bath Mist, hoping she'll take the hint. The sun came up and went down a few times before she realized she hadn't moved more than 8 inches in as many hours and that her butt was so far past asleep that she was numb from the waist down. After satisfying herself that she now grasped all the socio-economic and political factors leading up to the uninvited "military intervention", she got so deeply engrossed by a reporters minute-by-minute re-telling of the infamous "Black Hawk Down" incident that no one could speak to her for days. After spending something like ten hours just reading the discussion forum, she finally lifted a bleary head, smelled herself and stumbled off to the shower. No explanation was forthcoming. Like we said, we thought she was writing to you.

What was her excuse tonight? Because, oh-yes, she's been at it again, sitting in front of the screen for 15 hours or something close, devouring...what? Well, we're kind of embarrassed to tell you this part. Are you at all familiar with the novels of Ayn Rand or the philosophy of Objectivism? Well, long ago when Crowbar had adopted the cover-identity of a philosophy student for an entirely different mission, she made her first acquaintance with the collected essays, "The Virtue Of Selfishness". She had actually read "Atlas Shrugged" years prior to this, but was unaware in her youth that it had gone on to spawn a philosophical movement [well, I guess that depends on who you ask - philosophical movement to some, cult to others]. Crowbar easily gave Rand her due as one helluva storyteller, but wasn't so quick to think she was one helluva philosopher. We won't get into all the premises Crowbar felt were flawed, or the seemingly "logical" conclusions that certainly followed if you omitted or ignored some fundamental premises, but suffice to say these debates in so-called "Objectivism" continue heatedly to this day. However, that's not why many people end up fascinated with the rise and almost-total fall of the Objectivist Movement. That particular story has its roots in much more human stuff than Rand's philosophy ever espoused - namely malice, lies, moral pronouncements, excommunications and, of course, sex, sex, sex. The history of the Objectivist split, which began in 1968, reads better than "As The World Turns".

And what does that have to do with our slumbering hero? Well, Crowbar has a habit of picking up books she's already read - "easy reads", she calls them, before indulging in her main vice (after cigarettes, coffee and violence), that being the bathtub. Earlier today she picked up "Judgment Day: My Years With Ayn Rand" by Nathaniel Branden. I know, I know, we didn't explain who he is, but this isn't a book review and we don't have all night here. Go back to the sex, sex, sex part and you'll have an inkling. This led, inevitably, to her wanting to check out some detail about Alan Greenspan, a core member of the Objectivist in-crowd and, later, head of the Federal Reserve Board. Well, that was it. Once she was on the 'net and reading, we lost her completely. As you know, 15 hours later this is where we found her.

Some of Crowbar's meanderings led her to an objectivist's blog where a debate raged about whether it was Branden or Rand or both who deserved "moral judgement" (an important concept in Objectivist ethics) with regard to their now well-known affair. The debate was justified under the banner of examining whether Objectivism represented a closed or open system, but upon reading, it becomes clear that this handful of followers more closely resemble tabloid readers than philosophers. The muck-racking about who slept with who, who lied more, who's lies were morally acceptable and who's were evil...the tone is identical to those used in discussing Hollywood breakups. Branden and his ex-wife both weighed in on their opinions of the matter, threaded amongst some commentators who made sense, and some who sound like raving, dogmatic idol-worshippers (one such individual claims that it is impossible to understand Objectivism and honestly disagree with it, as "Objectivism is TRUE" - all of us here at the Crowbar Resistance Force would have to vigorously oppose that reasoning). Regardless, any philosophy which appears to treat its fundamental ideological precepts as equally important to the unswerving worship of its founder is....well, creepy. When a school of thought demands, as part of its core, that you must worship one individual and adhere rigorously to the mantra that she is incapable of committing moral wrongs or being inconsistent, I start looking around for the KoolAid.

But this isn't about me, is it? It's about Crowbar and her seeming inability to walk away from knowing "everything there is to know" about something [HQ Staff sidebar: Crowbar most certainly doesn't know any subject in enough depth to claim 'everything there is to know about it'. But don't tell her we said that - she carries a length of pipe, after all]. After 15 long hours she can probably tell you one hell of a lot of information about Objectivism today, about debates around current 'schools', about denunciations of key players. But why? Why does she need to know? Further, as CB herself would admit, in a year she's not likely to remember most of it anyway. Crowbar is amusingly reminiscent of Homer Simpson in that respect - in order to add any new information to her brain, it is necessary that she first delete some old piece, in order to create space. Add to that her life-long training to fog over mission details in order to maintain their secrecy, even with herself, and what little retention she might have had left is polished off [others might argue that her participation in early LSD experiments might also contribute to this]. So why stay up for days, voraciously devouring information and consuming intricacies and nuances to the detriment of all other projects she's engaged in, when she has no current need to know it and is just going to forget it all anyway?

Because that's Crowbar, and we kinda love her for it. She's a "Go Big or Go Home" kind of girl, making her intensely engaging in short bursts, and unbearable to be around for any long span of time. It's hard to imagine it now, watching her snore gently while hugging her favourite crowbar - she almost looks calm. One has to peer a bit more closely to see the wispy rivulets of smoke curling gently up from her body (Crowbar perpetually lives at only a few internal degrees off of spontaneous combustion and consequently smokes faintly at all times - what, you thought that was just the cigarettes?). Despite it all, without her volatile nature we doubt she'd be nearly so effective at termination, smashing, and unflinching retribution - all actions we rely solely upon her to perform.

At the moment, however, we're wondering if we should try to nudge her into a horizontal position. It can't be good for her to always end up sleeping sitting up, and the physical pain it causes probably contributes to her general crankiness. On the other hand, at least she's not sleeping with her eyes open - it totally freaks us out when she does that.

That said, maybe we'll just leave her here. It'll be light in a few hours and no doubt she'll put on more coffee and get hooked into some other massive study of irrelevant material. We will, however, try to gently suggest that she remember to send more updates and communiques to you, the isolated individual freedom fighters of the Resistance Force. She's surprisingly approachable on that score - she probably won't even break anything.