If only I hadn't been exhausted

I met an interesting character last week in Pismo. A pleasant enough place, Pismo, famous for it's clams and it's scooter trash*. The highlight of last year's Pismo Car Festival was the appearance of a couple of dray horses, which I am sure invites comment but I can't imagine what.

Anyway, it happened late at night, as so many of these encounters do, but I wasn't drunk or even in a bar. In fact, I was checking into a hotel after a long day, thinking of nothing beyond a few hours sleep. Without provocation, or even any apparent sequitur to the conversation, the desk clerk turned to me and asked if I knew that the the 9/11 attacks were not the work of al Quaeda but were actually part of a CIA conspiracy? Inwardly I groaned, and prayed (in vain) that my companion would stop laughing. In my experience any kind of response, even laughter, only encourages these people, and as I have said before lunatics always seem to catch me at my most vulnerable (in this case from sleep deprivation). Whether emboldened by my companion's laughter or in spite of it, he went on to explain how the Twin Towers were demolished. He then informed me that the whole of Iraq is contaminated by the minute shrapnel from depleted uranium shells, and that then irradiated aerosol cloud was making its way around the globe. His parting shot was an admonishment not to own a cell phone, since they can listen in on you, even when it's switched off. An informed man indeed, who truly has his pulse on the .

Being exhausted I felt unable to engage him further and ask him the burning questions posed by his peculiar tirade, so I set them down here in the hope that one of my readers can go to the Pismo Lighthouse Suites and ask him themselves.

1. If a government is capable of slaughtering 3,000 of its own citizens in a complex plot that involves the silencing of hundreds of skilled demolitions workers, air traffic controllers, eye witnesses and security personnel, how come they've allowed him to stay alive and spill the beans to any random tourists passing through the Californian Central Coast?

2. Consider that any airborne particles are washed out of the atmosphere after about two months unless they reach the stratosphere/upper troposphere, and consider also that depleted uranium (being dense enough to pierce modern armour) can't get that high in the atmosphere without the aid of either a major volcanic eruption or a nuclear strike. How, then, is this DU cloud supposed to have just sat in the atmosphere for four years? I think we would have noticed a volcano or thermonuclear explosion.

3. If my cell phone is out of range, can they still listen to me? What about if I'm roaming, or if I just forget to pay my phone bill?

He has a website you know. I can't be arsed, but feel free to check it out.

Pismo - famous for clams, scooter trash and mentalists

*Note for British readers: Do you have dirt in your arches? Do you like to unwind with a 12-gauge and a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon? Do thoughts of the unspoilt wilderness evoke the smell of two-stroke mixture in your nostrils and the gentle scream of a kawasaki in your ears? If so, you're probably scooter-trash.