Million-Pound Shithammer

2010-11-06T09:22:00.003-07:00

Hey look -- actual election fraud!

San Francisco police have arrested an election worker but have not recovered 75 ballots he allegedly stole from a polling station, police said Wednesday...

Karl Bradfield Nicholas, 50, of San Francisco left his post at 4:15 p.m. on election day at the station on Knott Court with the ballots and a memory card that recorded the votes cast, said Lt. Lyn Tomioka, a San Francisco police spokeswoman.

Of course, I'm sure that millions of illegal aliens were voting Democratic at the same time, but nobody bothers to report that, right?

Here's and interesting Salon article detailing how the most prevalent voter fraud is actually state-sponsored voter suppression -- challenging the voting rights of residents of low-income minority neighborhoods seems to be the most common tactic. Really, how many people are going to go to the effort of traveling to a civic center to prove that they've got the right to vote?

Also, let's not forget Bush's notorious U.S. attorney firings, which everyone seems to have agreed were motivated at least partially by those attorney's unwillingness to push a political agenda of pursuing spurious claims of Democratic voter fraud.

While actual numbers are shockingly hard to come by, it seems that fewer than a hundred people have been convicted of voter fraud since 2000, and those were individuals who double-voted, voted in the wrong district, etc. Voter fraud just isn't that big a problem. Apparently, the system works.

Odd, right?

2010-05-29T13:16:00.001-07:00

Crafting a story of my own devising on a table I built with my own two hands. I'm kinda proud of that.

2009-11-04T23:18:00.002-08:00

Watching Al Gore on The Daily Show and he lost some weight and changed his hair and at a three-quarter angle he's pretty much a dead ringer for Fred Schneider.

Pretty odd.

2008-11-20T21:55:00.002-08:00

Okay, I hope the guy's okay but I can't help but think he was just choking on what he was saying...

Mukasey, 67, was giving a spirited defense of the Bush administration's legal policies when his speech began to slur and he lost track of his thoughts roughly 30 minutes into his talk. Seconds later, he became rigid and then began to slump.

Y'know?

2008-11-06T22:30:00.003-08:00

So, yeah, keep on going back to check up on the FReepers, because, shit, I dunno. The trainwreck of the whole conservative thought process, I suppose.

There's one guy -- DarthVader by his handle -- who tags his signature line with Liberal Democrats are the party of EVIL whose time of judgment has come.

Evil? Liberal Dems? C'mon.

I'm perfectly happy to admit that a fundie consie "Christian" will consider a great deal of lib thought (sex for fun, tolerance of non-Christian groups, questioning FoxNews) to be immoral. That's fine. Libs tend to consider consies immoral as well (or, at least, astoundingly hypocritical for secretly doing the same kinds of things that Libs do more openly). S'fine, right? Immorality is highly subjective and it's pretty easy to be immoral in someone else's eyes.

But evil is a whole other kettle of fish, right? Evil crosses party lines. Evil is rape, is murder, is fucking with the weak and the powerless for fun. At its most basic, evil is a complete lack of empathy for other human beings. And no matter how much you might despise the party you're not a party to, can you truly say that they're evil? Callow, cowardly, assholes, bastards, brainless drooling troglodytes, unbelievable fucktards...but evil?

So, yeah, I read this DarthVader guy's rants and I'm thinking a couple of things:

1. He's calling himself Darth Vader fer Chrissakes. That makes him a bit of a basement-dwelling nerd to start off with. Secondly, 'Darth Vader' is pidgeon Dutch for 'Dark Father', a bit of foreshadowing for multi-lingual Star Wars fans that also puts Vader firmly in the bad guy column. And, really, pretty friggin' evil, right? We all saw him strangle that poor Death Star officer.

2. He's a guy who's posting a LOT of stuff about what God wants for the country, and about the ministries he's associated with, about "Prayer Warriors"...but then talks about how Obama is dead wrong for the country, how he's going to get everyone killed in terrorist attacks, and how God has turned his back on America. Now, if you're truly faithful, and you've prayed your little heart out for the 'right' candidate to get into office and that doesn't even come close to happening, isn't there every chance that you were demanding that God agree with you, rather than you agreeing with God?

And there's more but I'm done with this. I can't read any more posts. The FReepers make me sad. Little, angry people without power, without a voice, without much self-respect or true courage. People who decided however long ago that their little interpretation of the world was the only one that could possibly be right, and can't even begin to engage a critical thought process. And the thing that really bugs me is that I've gotta share a country with these idiots, and they think I should be jailed or hung or exiled for not believing in their little idea of God.

Bah. Sloppy post. Sorry. Bah, bah, bah.

2008-11-05T07:28:00.003-08:00

And again with the FReepers:

Now That Obama is Fraudulently Selected Does This Mean...

....that the Left can still play the race card now that they have convinced America that its OK to cheat your way to a "win"?

The most unprecedented and massive Democrat vote fraud in history doesn't make this coup and stolen election legitimate.

Lessee...Obama got 338 electoral votes, McCain took 163. The Dems swept the House and the Senate. Long-standing Republican stronghold seats and states tumbled over for 'Bama.

Vote fraud? Really, are they kidding?

2008-11-05T07:21:00.002-08:00

Y'know, I thought I was a little too cynical, a bit too crusty to feel this way, but this morning is sunshiney and bright, I've got a spring in my step, I'm actually looking forward to the future again. I'm starting to realize that I've been holding my breath for the last eight years, and it's nice to breathe in some fresh air.

Also? I can't help but be a bit giggly at the thought of Bush administration minions busily shredding, burning and composting every piece of paper in the White House...

2008-11-04T21:59:00.002-08:00

Man, I love the FReepers:

A lot of people laugh at Biblical predictions, but with weapons and the world as it is today they will not be laughing long. And it is not far-fetched to believe Obama could very well be the antichrist. Israel is about to be betrayed and our downfall most certainly begins.

Do you suppose there's an actual shrinkage of the brain involved?

2008-11-04T18:44:00.001-08:00

Well thank goodness for that.

Y'know, the orgasmic release of the moment is almost worth the eight years of bullshit that's preceded it. Too bad so many people hadda die, right?

2008-09-28T22:54:00.003-07:00

For anyone who might still be paying attention, working on something new. I've gotta ask, though: is it reasonable to write a sequel to something that was never written in the first place?

Hope so. Got this old, old story in my head and it's just too deeply entrenched and juvenile and horribly personal to ever make it to the page, but for the last little while (oh, like, five years or so...) the next part of the story has been compiling in my head. And it's got some homecoming stuff and there's some Christmas in there and some reunion and a little bit of antagonist fuck-you that appeals to me.

Dunno. Hand-wrote a few pages tonight and it'll probably come to nothing, but it was nice to have even that.

Managed to finish a book tonight, which is what triggered it, I think (Stardust by Neil Gaiman. S'okay. Nothing to write home about). I read so little these days - Mostly thanks to Jack, who insists on wanting to rip to pieces anything I happen to have in my hands - that when I do manage to slug down some words it refires what little passion I've got for my own writing. A novel before 40? Nah. But at least one, at some point. I think that's still in the cards.

So, how's everyone doing?

2008-05-31T00:42:00.003-07:00

Yeah, so that Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull Thingee? Holy shit, what a terrible, terrible, awful movie. Oh GOOD GOD it's bad.

Ya wanna know why?

Ring Ring Ring

Georgie! 'sup?

Steve, dude, I got it.

Got what?

Indy 4, I totally got it.

Lay it on me, bro.

Aliens, man. Fuckin' aliens.

Aliens?

Totally. Aliens. Aliens and all the CGI I got left over from the prequels.

Aliens?

Dude, trust me. Aliens. It'll kick ass.

*Sigh* Sure, why not. I'll call Harry...

Holy, holy, holy shit. Bad movie. DO NOT GO SEE. Don't even think about going to see. If you already have seen and thought "Well, that was okay..." you're wrong. Wrongity-wrong-wrong. Bad script, bad acting, bad pacing, bad effects, bad directing, bad music. BAD movie.

Holy cow. My brain hurts now.

2008-05-30T07:50:00.003-07:00

Btw, all of you who know me know that I'm a giant Warren Ellis fan, right? Well, he's been doing one of his better bits lately for free and online (actually, I dunno if his comics have been good lately; I've got an eight-month-old, so I don't get to blow my paycheck on comics anymore. His novel was pretty bad, though, so I'm using that as the gauge), the story of a flooded, possibly post-apocalyptic London. It's called Freakangels, publishes once a week with art by Paul Duffield and can be found here. Or, hit this link to go to the first in the series (they're on #15 now).

Anyway, Warren just emailed a request for advertising, so I guess they're not getting the hit-count they were hoping for. Dunno why. It really is a nice piece of writing, and the art, while rough on the edges, has a nicely distinct feel to it. Check it out. I think you'll enjoy it.

2008-05-27T22:36:00.005-07:00

So, just finished Chuck Palahniuck's new book, Snuff, and, yeah, it's okay. Funny, sure, and more than a little disturbing and he sure did a lot of research on porn, but that's kind of it. And that seems to be the way he's trending, really. There's a lot of surface goo to deal with, but very little beneath.

I guess I'm just feeling as though Palahniuck maybe owes us a little more, y'know? Fight Club, Survivor and Invisible Monsters were brutal examinations of a society's faults, critiques of a country that could only get it up for glamor, gore and God. And, man, we ate it up. Well, at least we ate it up after Brad Pitt showed us who Tyler Durden really was.

But that societal critique streak ended with Choke, and the gore, the blood, the shivery details that had helped to outline our collective faults were turned to just grossing us out. Gross us out and make every book "controversial".

Not that Choke is a bad book. It's not; it's a fun read, Vic Mancini is human enough for us to root for him (not root hard, mind you, but root nonetheless) and there's enough salvation in there to feel good when all is said and done. And maybe that last part is the problem.

Look at the first three books that he published: Fight Club, Survivor, Invisible Monsters. All very fine books turned out by an author who had little to lose and nothing to fear. When he wrote Fight Club he was a line worker at a Freightliner plant. He installed truck drivelines all day long. The book flops, what the fuck does he care? There's always more trucks to build, right? Same with Survivor and Invisible Monsters. It was still early in his writing career and he was fighting the world with his words, either still naive enough to think that he could change things or just angry enough to rant and rave without really caring what happened.

And then what? I don't know. 9/11, maybe. Survivor is told entirely from a 747 that's doomed to crash into the Australian outback, the space monkeys in Fight Club are nothing more or less than domestic terrorists targeting fat, comfortable middle-class Americans. Chuck got scared, I think. He'd gone from grease monkey to man of letters, and those letters were going to put him on the wrong side of the new, ultra "Patriotic" America. His kind of writing, in that kind of enviroment, well, shit, publishers are cowardly fucks, right? Hell, show me any media that isn't craven at the core.

So he moves away from true societal critique and into, what? I don't know what to call it, really. Adult gross-out fiction. Urban psychological horror. Choke has Vic Mancini blasting a week's worth of pent-up shit all over a police detective (and never mind the idea of metaphor; that was played for the disgust factor), Lullaby shows us the main character going down on his dead wife, Haunted we're treated to the sight of a woman being served a hunk of her own microwaved ass cheek for supper. And, yeah, Fight Club has endless descriptions of the narrator's ripped-open cheek, Invisible Monsters goes on and on about the main character's missing jaw, both of which are as disgusting as anything else in Chuck's canon, but I'd argue that those come naturally out of the deeper issues in the story. In Fight Club, the narrator's cheek is ripped open because he can't stop tonguing at it -- he's wearing his scars for everyone to see, hoping that someone will stop him. In Invisible Monsters, the fashion model main character has to blow off her own jaw -- destroy her ability to speak -- before she can get anyone to listen to her.

I dunno. He still writes entertaining books, and I'm sure I'll keep on buying 'em. Rant was an excellent read. By far his best-written of the more recent books. I dunno. I guess I just keep hoping for a bit more from a guy who started off so strong. Ah, well. There's always Bukowski, right?

2008-04-19T19:14:00.002-07:00

Choke on it, bitches:

Early one Friday morning, [the White House] put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance

Does it strike any of you as significant that there's nothing in the Constitution that says the government can't lie its ass off to you?

2008-04-14T22:35:00.001-07:00

2008-04-14T22:01:00.001-07:00

2008-04-03T06:09:00.002-07:00

Okay, I realize there's a huge gap here, but, hey, I've been busy. New kid, trying to look busy @ work and we moved from suburban Sand Point to rockin' hip Ballard. Anyway, here's a vid of Jack getting his first taste of prunes to help make up for it:

2007-09-21T07:17:00.000-07:00

OH RLY?

The security firm Blackwater USA today resumed limited escorts of American personnel in the Iraqi capital after an incident in which eight civilians died, the US embassy in Iraq said.

As Blackwater guards returned to the streets of Baghdad after a three-day suspension, the Iraqi interior ministry said it planned to end immunity from prosecution for security contractors.

The interior ministry spokesman Major General Abdul-Kareem Khalaf said the ministry had drafted legislation giving it tighter control over contractors and calling for "severe punishment for those who fail to adhere to the ... guidelines".

Iraq has said it will review the status of all security firms after what it called a flagrant assault by Blackwater contractors in which at least eight people were killed while the firm was escorting a US embassy convoy through Baghdad on Sunday.

Is anyone even pretending that the Iraqi government has a say in things anymore? Did they ever?

2007-09-16T11:18:00.000-07:00

Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ -KV

Jack Henry Hardwick, born screaming into this world at 12:42 on the morning of September 15, 2007. 7 lbs, 15ozs of screaming, thrashing, surly little man who will be taught, amongst other things, to be strong, to be kind, to be true and, above all, to never forget who he loves, and who loves him.

We love you Jack, always and always.

2007-08-19T01:48:00.000-07:00

Because, somehow, you forget the rain in Seattle whenever it’s gone for a few days. It’s silly, that you should manage to forget the smell and sound of it, the pitter patter of slender Jet City rain on the trees and the rooftops just because it’s been sunny and blue for a little while. For a week or maybe two it resets, the sky is clear and then it’s raining and you’re amazed because you’ve managed to forget how pretty the rain is in this town. How it feels like it was designed to be wet, to be washed down and renewed, wiped clean of the filth and clutter that accumulates in the sunny weather.

That’s tonight, and I can see the slow drops falling through the coronas of the streetlights and hear car tires sizzling along wet blacktop. It’s just me and the rain and the world, late on Saturday or early on Sunday, however you like to see these things. Buttons is barely sleeping, the baby battering away at her from the inside and I’m out here, more awake than asleep, smoking #2 for the day and wishing this was something more than just this little thing that it is.

Then again, it’s words flowing and that’s all that can really matter. The words are so slow these days. I keep worrying that I’ve lost them but they’re always here when I go looking for them. Maybe that’s it, then. I’ve just forgotten to go looking for them like I used to.

I’m still angry, but I don’t feel powerful anymore. When I was a kid, when I dropped words on a page, man it was all blood and thunder, earth-moving, world-shattering stuff. Bad, yeah. Nothing that was worth having said in the first place. Empty, but empty with that heaviness, that grandeur that only kids have. The shit you drop before you’ve learned to close up and play it close to the vest. Before you’ve learned to let someone else be the first one into the minefield, let them be the one to get blown to smithereens.

I worry about what I’ve got to give to the kid. Kids. I’ll feed them and house them and keep them close, love them to death, but I don’t know what I can teach them. I can talk myself blue, but kids only learn from what we do, not what we say. I can tell them to be strong, to never waver, to reach out for everything they want, but man, can I say that I’ve done that?

I want to throw more words in here, but anything else would tangential. More so, anyway. This is enough for now, a little nugget of something that I can post and feel happy about. Nobody’ll read it, nobody’ll know, but it’ll float out there. Heh.

2007-04-11T23:46:00.000-07:00

Poo-tee-tweet?

Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died Wednesday night in Manhattan.

Goddammit.

2007-04-05T21:46:00.000-07:00

About the whole Iran hostage thing:

The shop radio plays pretty much nothing but NPR these days and today, at every newsbreak, they played that clip of Blair saying that the 15 Brit sailors and marines had been released "without any deal, without any negotiation, without any side agreement of any nature whatever".

Which is to say that Blair & Co. bitched to the UN and then sat on their hands while Ahmadinejad kept quiet (or, at least, was ordered to keep quiet by the supreme leader) and the world waited for the fighting to break out. And everything seems to have worked out fine, which is nice. Nobody died, the captured soldiers seem to have been treated ridiculously well and Bush doesn't have a reason to shoot missiles at Tehran in the morning.

But it's Blair being so fervent about how the Brit Gov't DID NOTHING and how that worked out so well that's been cracking me up. I mean, c'mon, how can the guy take credit for Ahmadinejad's prudence with anything like a straight face?

It's got me thinking about what should be a Monty Python sketch, if only I can travel back to the late 70's and ply the boys with some good 21st century weed.

The Office of Officious Hand-Sitting

(Open on a typical office, several desks with telephones and in/out baskets ranked in neat rows facing the camera, with a counter to the right side. An older man in a dark blue suit is seated behind one of the desks, looking blankly forward. A younger man enters and approaches the counter)

YM: Good morning.

OM: Oh, yes sir. A fine morning indeed.

YM: I'm looking for Mr. Brewster.

OM: (Smiling, jaunty) I'm Brewster. How can I help you, my fine young sir?

YM: Oh, well then. (Pulls a folded piece of paper from his jacket pocket) I'm Forbes, sir. Central Staffing told me that you were short a man today.

Brewster: (Not moving from his desk) Ah, very good, very good. Welcome to the Office of Officious Hand-Sitting. Yes, Wellesley called in absent this morning. Something about his wife's head stuck in the oven again.

Forbes: Ah, well. (Obviously non-plussed) I suppose that would be something of a crisis.

Brewster: Oh, yes. No end of trouble, that wife of his. Last time it was something about running the car with the garage door closed. HA! Women and technology, eh?

Forbes: Ah, yes, I suppose. (Still holding out the paper) So, then...I'm to fill in for him, then?

Brewster: Yes, of course. Take any desk, we're not the types to stand on formality here.

Forbes: Thank you, sir. (Walks around the counter and takes a desk to the right of Brewster. He rests his elbows on the desktop, still holding the paper) Would you care to see my work order, sir?

Brewster: Oh, I'm sure it's just fine, Forbes, just fine. These things have a way of working out in the end, don't they?

Forbes: I suppose so, sir.

(The two men sit, Forbes twiddling his fingers, Brewster's hand noticeably absent from sight. Just as the silence becomes unbearable voices are heard from off-camera and three men dressed in dark suits enter, chatting back and forth. They seem perfectly normal except that all of them have their hands behind them, palms out, knuckles up against their asses. Brewster smiles and addresses them)

Brewster: Gents! Glad you could join us today!

(The three call out a hail of Good Mornings and take their places behind the empty desks, sitting straight down on their hands. They all stare forward blankly. A clock ticks away behind them. Forbes is twitching and looking around. He finally addresses the man to his right)

Forbes: Excuse me...

MTHR: Good morning!

Forbes: Er, yes. Good morning. I was wondering...what is it we do in this office?

MTHR: (Smiling, jaunty) We serve to the best of our ability, my good man. To the very, VERY best of our ability.

Forbes: Ah, yes, of course. But I was wondering...

MTHR: Yes?

Forbes: Well, would that involve, uh, filing or typing? Perhaps answering phone calls?

MTHR: Oh, come now. How could we possibly do our best if we're typing or filing or answering phones? (Leaning closer, his hands still firmly under his ass) You might want to watch what you say if you want to get ahead here.

Forbes: Ah. Um. Thank you.

MTHR: Think nothing of it! Always happy to lend a...always happy to help out.

(The men sit and stare forward. The clock ticks in the background. Time passes. A man in workingman clothes enters)

WORKINGMAN: Excuse me...

Brewster: Good morning! (The men at the desks, with the exception of Forbes, call out a chorus of Good Morning!'s)

WORKINGMAN: Yeah, good morning. I've got a problem and they sent me up here.

Brewster: We'll do everything in our power to help you, my very good sir.

WORKINGMAN: Good to hear it. It's my house, you see. The plumbing is faulty. Leaks everywhere. I need it fixed.

Brewster: Say no more, good citizen. We're on it.

WORKINGMAN: Wonderful news. So I should be expecting a plumber shortly, then?

Brewster: That would probably be the best course of action. A fine idea.

WORKINGMAN: Uh, so should I give you my address?

Brewster: No need, sir, no need. The Office of Officious Hand-Sitting is on the job! (The chorus sounds off with huzzahs and tally-hos)

WORKINGMAN: So it'll be soon, then? My kitchen has a foot of water in it. The cat's gone missing.

Brewster: Sir, I assure you that we are doing everything in our power to assist you. I have every confidence that this crisis will soon be naught but a distant memory.

WORKINGMAN: Er, well then. I'll be off then. I should be expecting a plumber soon, then?

Brewster: Expect away, sir! Optimism is by far the best attitude, wouldn't you say?

WORKINGMAN: I expect that's right. Well, thanks, then.

Brewster: You have my very welcome sir!

(The workingman exits. Forbes addresses Brewster)

Forbes: So should I contact Central Services, sir?

Brewster: Whatever for?

Forbes: For a plumber, sir.

Brewster: Is there a problem with your desk, Forbes?

Forbes: Uh, no sir. For that man that jut left. Should I get a plumber for him?

Brewster: (Looking stern) Look, Forbes, I know it's your first day, but you'd better get with the program if you're going to fit in here.

Forbes: Uh, yes sir. Sorry, sir.

Brewster: No need, no need. First day's always a bit rough, eh?

Forbes: Yes, sir. I expect so.

(A well-dressed man enters, looking harried)

WDM: Help! I need help!

Brewster: Good morning! (The chorus Good Morning!'s)

WDM: No, it's bloody well not! I was just robbed!

Brewster: Frightful news, sir! Frightful news indeed!

WDM: You don't know the half of it. I was on the way to the bank to make a deposit. The brutes took five hundred pounds off me!

Brewster: That's quite a haul, all right. Well, never fear sir. The Office of Officious Hand-Sitting is on the job! (The chorus huzzahs and tally-hos)

WDM: Well, thank goodness for that. Should I give you a description of the robbers, then?

Brewster: No need, sir, no need. We are already working fervently to resolve your problem. I believe with every fiber of my being that the issue will be settled in so short a time that you'll barely have time to pop out one more bead of sweat from your noble brow.

WDM: That's exactly what I want to hear. What course of action do you plan to take?

Brewster: Every possible course of action, sir. Every feasible action we possibly can. Every action conceivable within the mandate of the Office of Officious Hand-Sitting is being undertaken at this very moment.

WDM: Well, then. That's excellent news. Perhaps I should get a cup of tea while I'm waiting, then?

Brewster: An excellent notion, fine sir. Perhaps the finest notion I've heard this fine day.

WDM: All right then. And might I say, sir, that you are a credit to bureaucratic employees everywhere.

Brewster: And might I say, sir, that you are a credit to the citizens of this mighty country! (The chorus tally-hos and huzzahs)

(The well-dressed man exits. Forbes picks up the phone and begins to dial)

Brewster: Forbes! What in name of all that's holy do you think you're doing?

Forbes: I'm calling the police, sir.

Brewster: The police? Forbes, have you been attacked?

Forbes: No sir. I'm calling them for the man that just left. The man who'd been robbed?

Brewster: (Sighing, looking stern) Forbes, not every man is cut out for the Office of Officious Hand-Sitting. I think it's time for you to report back to Central Staffing and request they place you in a position for which you are more appropriately suited.

Forbes: But...

Brewster: I'm sorry Forbes, but my decision is final. Don't take it to heart. We can't all be Officious Hand-Sitters. I'm sure there's another office that can make use of your...skills.

(Forbes takes his paper and exits, looking back as if to say something as he nears the exit but remaining silent. The men at the desks sit in silence and the clock ticks. After a few moments smoke begins to fill the room. One of the men at the desks addresses Brewster)

Man: Fire in the hallway, sir. Looks like it's spreading pretty quickly.

Brewster: All right then, men. You know what to do.

(The men screw up their faces in concentration)

Brewster: The Office of Officious Hand-Sitters is on the job! (The chorus huzzahs and tally-hos as smoke fills the screen)

(Cut to animation of Queen Victoria farting on Westminster Abbey)

2007-04-03T23:14:00.000-07:00

Okay, it's been a while, and there's some personal life things a'happenin' (no, we don't know if it's pink or blue yet, but the genetic screen has come back clean, thank goodness), but I just felt the need to chime in for a minute on this whole Iraq 'emergency' funding bill thing.

A while back I threw up a post in which I posited that the fuck-ups in the Iraq war weren't fuck-ups, but a fairly devious plan that Jr. and Shotgun Dick were threading their way through. I don't remember the details, but I remember that. And, sorry, it's too late for me to run through posts trying to find it.

Anyway, my point was that acting stupid and bullheadedly arrogant has become de riguer for the White House boys and it gets all the liberals yelling and screaming and acting like angry 10-year-olds, making them look fairly idiotic AND keeping them from doing anything dangerous (to the Bush administration). It's a great tactic, so long as you're sure that you've got the money and the juice to push your agenda through regardless. And Jr's current stance, the "I'll veto anything with a timetable" thing is setting up a perfect out for the Iraq War.

Listen, no matter what the plan might have been in the beginning, it's failed. Completely. I doubt if anyone in the White House really thinks that we can "win" (whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean in this context). But to pull out without some kind of solid finale to the crap going on in Iraq would be the absolute death of whatever movement the Project for a New American Century people think they've got going on. Jr could just run out the clock, keep the war going on until Hillary or whoever saunters into office in '09, and I don't doubt for one second that he'd be happy to do that, but I'm figuring that even his nearest and dearest have gotta be advising him against that at this point.

So what to do? Easy. Do what Rove has been telling him to do this whole time: turn it around. Barefacedly bullshit the people and the press, make the Dems the bad guys for pulling the plug. Harry Reid has already said that if Jr. vetoes the spending bill with timeline, he'll push to withdraw funding altogether. Which means the troops walk, no matter what kind of shape Iraq's in. And then Bush gets to slide out of office pointing at thousands of dead Iraqis and blaming the Dems for it, for making the troops leave before the war was "won".

I've gotta admit, it's a great plan. It's vicious and devious and will cause no end of collateral damage to both bodies and reputations. I wonder how long they've been maneuvering to get themselves into this situation?

G'night.

2006-10-15T00:37:00.000-07:00

Hey there, any friends and family: I've got the potential for a second interview for a gig with MSNBC and I need some good thoughts heading my way. So if you're a pal and you love me, send your good brainwaves, prayers, hopeful thoughts or whatever my way, and maybe I can get this life of mine a bit more off the ground.

Thanks, y'all.

2006-09-10T11:48:00.000-07:00

Because at this point they're not even bothering to lie to you:

President Bush would have ordered an invasion of Iraq even if the CIA had told him that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday.

Here's your analogy: You marry this guy and it seems like it's all sweetness and light and then one day he comes home smelling like someone else's perfume and you ask about it and he decides to pound the shit out of you. And then there's the "I'm sorry honey, didn't mean it, love you like none other" speech and you decide to believe him, but just barely. And then a while later he comes home with lipstick on his collar and a pair of panties in his pocket and you start to say something but by the time you've gotten your first accusation out you're on the kitchen floor, getting kicked in the ribs and your guy is telling you that you can either take it or he'll go upstairs and stab the kids while they sleep. So, yeah, you put up with it and then you come home one day and he's getting a hooker blowjob in the living room and you just look away and shuffle off to get the laundry folded before he cums all over the place and you have to clean it up.

Okay, clunky, but yeah...isn't the country kinda feeling like that these days?

Bah, motherfuckers.

2006-07-18T22:17:00.000-07:00

So, this whole thing with Israel and Lebanon...what?

Okay, so, for real, Israel's all ganked that Hezbollah lifted a couple of their soldiers. I get that. It makes sense that they'd want to get them back safe and sound. Hell, it doesn't just make sense; it's actually a good and reasonable thing that they want their guys back. Nobody is saying it's not a good thing. Shit, even Hezbollah thinks it's a good and reasonable thing, otherwise they wouldn't have grabbed 'em up in the first place.

But all the good and reasonable ends right there, doesn't it?

I don't quite get Israel's reasoning here. First they go batshit on Hamas by blowing up the power station that feeds most of the Palestinian state (and, therefore, most of the Palestinian population), then go SUPER batshit on Hezbollah by shelling apartment buildings and suburban neighborhoods, whacking out civilians pretty much indiscriminately in an attempt to nail a couple of high-profile militants.

Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I am HUGELY of the opinion that civilians should never have a first-person view of a bomb tumbling off the wing of a fighter jet. Especially not off the wing of a fighter jet that MY FUCKING COUNTRY helped to pay for (seriously, we're tapping Israel something like US$5 billion a year in aid, and fighter jets are pretty fucking spendy). And any country that takes that step and calls it reasonable has lost their collective fucking mind.

Okay, yeah, Hezbollah can easily be called bad guys. I'm down with that. Their whole thrust is about hatred and intolerance, but keep in mind that the organization didn't exist until Israel occupied Southern Lebanon back in the 80's. And, yeah, Israel had some pretty compelling reasons to be there, but since when do you invade a country and not expect the people you've invaded (and their allies) to do everything possible to kick your asses out of there?

Now, if we're talking about two somewhat equal groups duking it out, okay, well, that's some potential for big, bad shit. But when you've got one tiny, angry pit bull of a country blowing farts at a whole fuckload of people who've got a bunch of cultural and religious reasons to not particularly like 'em to begin with, well, there's really only one way that should play out, right? Sure, the pit bull bites the crap out of everybody and then someone puts a bullet in the back of its head, dumps the corpse in the river and everyone calls it a day. But when your tiny little angry country is getting backed up by the biggest, meanest, toughest country on the planet the equation flips itself on its head, doesn't it?

So everybody hates Israel but none of the nations are really ready to move on them for one of two reasons: 1. They're too small and weak to really do any lasting damage and have to settle for terrorist actions (Palestine/Hamas, Lebanon/Hezbollah) or 2. They could probably win it, with a lot of damage, if they were willing to have the US come thundering down on them (Syria, Iran), which they aren't quite willing to do.

Or, actually, haven't been willing to do in the past. But in the past the US wasn't stuck neck-deep in Iraq and Afghanistan, right? No, in the recent past the US armed forces would have been able to move in with a fair amount of freedom, blast the living shit outta Tehran or Damascus and still have some munitions left for mopping up wherever. That threat is, I think, a lot of what's kept things relatively even in the Middle East for the last few decades.

Don't get me wrong; there's been a TON of wrong shit going on out in the desert, but it's been a lot of primarily internal stuff that the US couldn't get overtly involved in (covertly, sure, but for that track yourself back to Kermit Roosevelt and the overthrow of the Ayatollah in 1953 and then all the oil deals and close ties to Saudi Arabia since then) without taking shit from the rest of the world. And, yeah, we bust into Iraq and the whole fucking world calls us assholes, and suddenly, it seems, the whole goddamned pot is boiling over.

Right, I know, I'm swirling around the bowl here, but listen to me. Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Egypt, all those guys pretty much hate our guts, but do you really dig why? Think about it; all those joints were occupied or colonized by white Europeans going back to the 1800's and it wasn't until after WWII that most of them busted free and got to be their own countries again. So, yeah, there's a basic distrust of white Europeans throughout the middle east FOR A VERY, VERY GOOD REASON. They, the white Europeans, couldn't be trusted to keep their hands off other peoples' countries. And America, really, is just the cancer growth that white Europeans are capable of when there's no borders to hold them in check. So, okay, the middle east manages to reclaim themselves to a greater or lesser degree and there's suddenly this faint hope that maybe all the fucking paleskins are gonna go home and STAY there for once, and then the three most powerful countries on the planet (the US, the UK and the USSR, for those of you who might be a bit foggy on where the hell Israel came from) swoop in and say "By the way, we're taking this hunk of land that a bunch of other people are living on and that contains some shit that's sacred to 'em and giving it to the Jews 'cause, really, they just had a totally rough time of it and we feel bad."

"Wait, hey, how come here? 'Cause, y'know, we've been living here for, y'know, a while now, man."

"Yeah, well they've got this sacred scripture that you guys don't subscribe to that says that their god told 'em it was theirs."

"Hey, wait, we're not totally cool with that."

"Really? 'Cause, y'know, we've got a ton of guns and just nuked the civilian populace of another tiny little county, so, really...you sure you're not cool with that?"

Right. And so a country is born. Or reborn, depending on how you like to look at these things. And never mind that it was as contentious a land grab as you could ask for, and that it displaced one group of people who seemed to be getting along with everybody else pretty well with a group of utter xenophobes who kept talking about how wrong everybody else was, and never mind that the fighting started about ten seconds after the first kibbutz started planting their first row of tomatoes. And, moving forward, never mind that the Israelis proved themselves to be some of the most homicidal motherfuckers on the planet, and never mind that they seemed to have no problem moving into other people's land and setting up shop there, and never mind that, as a country, they seem to have taken the idea of 'the ends justify the means' to a level that even Genghis Khan might've felt a tad uncomfortable with. And, hell, never mind that Jewish commentators have taken to comparing the Israeli government to the Nazi party. And never mind that even fucking NPR & FOXNews are starting to side with the Lebanese and Palestinians. Never mind, really, that the Israelis are as wrong as they can be, that they're rapidly becoming more terrifying than any of the terrorists they claim to be fighting against.

Ah, never mind. As the father said, when I asked his opinion, "A pox on both their houses."

Dad is so Old Testament.

Sorry, that's a long ramble for no real payoff. I guess all I'm trying to point out is that Israel was created with, I truly believe, the best of intentions. A nation for people that had been displaced for milennia, somewhere that a culture with a long and rich history could be secure and thrive. Great idea, nice concept. Real heart-touching. But when the only way you can be 'secure' is by blowing up everybody who looks at you cross-eyed, isn't it maybe time to call the experiment failed and try something else? Not that I have the slightest idea what, but, shit, there's gotta be something. 'Cause I'm tired of having my government playing legos in the sand over there. I want my people to come home, and I want us to treat everyone else over there like adults, and to let them handle their own destiny.

C'mon, is that truly too much to ask?

Ah, probably.

I can't believe I missed The Daily Show to type this. I'm very angry and need to lift weights now.

Bah.

G'night.

2006-07-10T22:48:00.000-07:00

Okay, so, this is kinda interesting. I may well have come up with a whole new damned religion. Or I'm an adherent to one that's been around for a while and I just can't find a neat synopsis on the web anywhere.

So, yeah, FARK posted up this, which, if you're too lazy to click, is a comparison chart of big world religions. All right, I grew up in the midst of a great deal of religion, and religion pervades my family to this very day (which is probably why I married someone who, truly, couldn't care less about religion, but who has a deep and abiding faith in predestination...which is a definate faith in something bigger than yourself, but doesn't require you to give up Sundays or spend a lot of time memorizing someone else's moral coda), so, yeah, I've got more than a passing interest in the weirdness that people dedicate their lives to for no concrete reason.

So I click over and do some reading and find this under Atheism, Adherents Worldwide: "1.1 billion (this figure includes AGNOSTIC and non-religious, which tend to be grouped on surveys)" Yeah, okay, I don't always spend a fuckload of time truly learning the meanings of words that I throw around with great abandon, but since when does AGNOSTIC = ATHEIST?

I've never claimed to be an Atheist, even in the midst of an argument with whoever in which I did my damndest to use logic to disprove God. I've always called myself an Agnostic, understanding that to be a catchall term for someone who bought into a grand Creator/Overbeing thing, but not one that was truly explained by any particular religion. Really, I have a hard time with the whole concept of something as big as God (or god, or gods or Gods) bothering to try and make itself understood to something as tiny and confused as human beings.

Don't get me wrong; I tend to like human beings, for the most part. But you've got to admit that 'tiny and confused' goes a good way to describing the whole of mankind.

Right. Anyway, so now I'm at a bit of a loose end, 'cause I thought I had pigeonholed myself quite nicely into this 'Agnostic' thing, but now I'm wondering. So I do some searching and come up with a couple of different definitions (courtesy of a Google search for definitions of Agnostic):

"A word first used by Professor Huxley, to indicate one who believes nothing which cannot be demonstrated by the senses."

Okay, not really me. I tend to stick to my senses in moving throughout the world, but, really, if you write anything that takes place outside the world you live in (which is mostly what I tend to write), then can you truly say that you don't believe in anything outside your senses? No, you can't, dammit, and don't fucking argue with me on this one. This is not the time for that. Unca Billy's trying to make a long-winded point here.

"Agnostic: one who questions religious or spiritual beliefs, and who may choose not to claim any system of knowledge"

Okay, that's a little bit closer to where I'm at ('cause, yes, I will happily and endlessly question religious beliefs), but not really. I do claim a system of knowledge, which is pretty much 'Don't fuck with anyone just for the sake of fucking with them, don't hurt anyone just because you can, be unfailingly polite no matter how pissed you are, and try not to be a giant dick more than once a year or so.' As a system it's pretty simple to say and REALLY fucking hard to do. Try it. It's rough. And, yes, it is a system of belief for me, 'cause I tend to believe in the idea that a fucker will end up being a fuckee as many times as he's a fucker. Regretably, I didn't come to this conclusion until I'd spent a lot of time being a fucker, so I've still got some dues a'comin'. And if like me, you've spent a lot of your life bouncing around the country, getting away from the people you've fucked, and still have reason to believe that what's gone around is coming around, then you've gone well beyond simple human revenge and have tapped into some kind of giant spiritual merry-go-round, which kind of kills any idea of not having some kind of spiritual sense to glom onto.

Still reading? Goddamn. You must be one of my friends.

Okay, one more:

"Someone who claims that they do not know or are unable to know whether God exists."

Okay, sure, I can't quantify God, but that doesn't mean I don't have faith that there's something out there. So, yeah, that one's fucked as well.

And those three seem to kind of cover what is traditionally meant by Agnostic. Okay, so, tonight I've had an Epiphany, and realize that I am not an Agnostic in any of Google's traditional senses of the word.

Well, hell. Okay, I need my pigeonhole, so I dredge up another word: Deist. 'Cause Deists believe in some kinda creator, but don't claim to know all the details, right?

"A person who believes that God created the universe and then abandoned it"

Nope.

"One Creator God who is uninterested in the world. Reason is basis for all knowledge."

Pretty much the same thing, and still nope.

"One who admits the possibility of the existence of a God or gods, but claims to know nothing of either, and denies revelation. An agnostic of olden times."

And we're back to the Agnostics. So, nope.

Okay, well, that's pretty much tapped me out, I guess. Scanning the rest of the big religions, I'm not a Buddhist ("Purpose is to avoid suffering and gain enlightenment and release from cycle of rebirth, or at least attain a better rebirth by gaining merit." Reincarnation, to me, seems like you're just loading a saved game in GTA or something...too easy, too simple), a Confucianist ("Purpose of life is to fulfill one's role in society with propriety, honor, and loyalty." Sounds good, but when you dive into it, there's a whole lotta bowing and scraping and I'm just too much hateful of authority to buy into that) or a follower of Shinto ("Humans are pure by nature and can keep away evil through purification rituals and attain good things by calling on the kami." I tend towards the idea that 'purity' is just a way for someone to avoid doing things that they're afraid they'll like too much, or that they're simply scared to try). Yeah, okay, there's a WHOLE lotta stuff that I'm not, but there doesn't seem to be much that I am.

Listen to me: You're all-powerful and you're bored. You kicked off the universe, spun out super-heated plasma into an arc that spans lightyears, watched as the stars and planets formed, checked out the cool gas clouds that spread out across billions of miles in the cold dark between the galaxies, and it was all really groovy and really pretty, but, y'know, it's done. Sure, some shit goes boom! every once in a while, and that's just big fireworks when you're divine and infinite, but, really, it's done, the big act of creation, and all you can really do at that point is wait for entropy to kick in and kill the whole thing. Dullsville, truly.

But, yeah, you're powerful as all hell, and you're all alone. Admittedly, I can't really put myself into the mind of God (or god, or gods, or Gods), but I'm thinking there has to be a period of some hyper-dimensional thumb-twiddling that goes on, that you've hit a lazy Sunday afternoon that goes on for a few thousand millenia and, man, you're just clawing at the walls. What to do?

This is what you do: You make something that's curious, something that's smart, something that has an overwhelming drive to build and learn and push the envelope of what's possible and what's just dreaming. And if you're my kind of God, you make 'em with the potential, just the barest sliver of a fragment of wish of a dream, to become just as big as you are. You make something that, if everything works out right, will become something that you can truly befriend and admire.

I guess that's just me, this thought that we can, perhaps, become equals with the universe, with the creator or everything that is, was or will be. That the only God I can allow myself to believe in isn't looking for prostrating drones singing praises or mumbling pilgrims talking down their own worth, but has enough self-confidence to create the beings that will someday supplant it. I guess my God is the best of parents, the mother/father that wants nothing more than for its children to be in all ways superior to itself, that is content in knowing that it gave up itself for the sake of a better world, a better universe, a better creation.

Of course, the flipside of this is that I can't help but feel we're doing a hell of a job letting it down.

Ah, well.

Fucking people.

G'night.

2006-04-19T23:54:00.000-07:00

This is pretty amazing. Caltv mashed up a dance track of John Lennon's 'Imagine' with some 40+ GW Bush soundbites, giving us the Deep In The Heart Of version of a hippie standard.

Go, listen. You'll be happy you did.

2006-02-27T18:22:00.000-08:00

One product that has always been missing from food storage has been real CHEESE. It's true that, if you have a wine cellar, you can buy a waxed reel (or is it wheel?) of cheese and store it (= age it) for years. That's a bit expensive and unwieldy, but if you are wealthy enough to own a wine cellar, you probably can afford a 25 lb reel/wheel of cheese . . . and won't mind throwing about half of it away as it molds after you cut it open.

For those of us of more modest means, we now have real Kraft® Cheddar Cheese. In a can. Its technical name is "Pasteurized Processed Cheddar Cheese Product." It's that name you have to give it because it wasn't "naturally" produced by a Wisconsin cheesemaster. It's a legal thing. From the ingredients and from the TASTE, you'll believe it's honest-to-God real, Wisconsin-made cheese! It's just plain delicious.

Holy Cow. By far the FUNNIEST right-wing, God-fearing, conspiracy-sniffing, terrorist-fearing (btw, the Allah folks are apparently in league with Communist China...you heard it here first!) and jingoistic online survivalist foodstuffs supplier ever. Ever, ever, ever. I highly suggest that you click on over and spend a little time perusing and perhaps pick yourself up a 4-year supply of dehydrated food (only $2,999.90 + shipping).

2006-02-19T16:23:00.000-08:00

Hey there, y'all. Sorry it's been a while, and it's going to continue to be a while, I think. Mostly I just wanted to post up this, just in case I ever find the need to send someone a box of poo.

'Cause, y'know, it seems likely that at some point, fairly soon, it'll be worth $25.00 to truly, truly disgust someone.

How far into the White House do you think one of these would make it?

2005-10-03T23:05:00.000-07:00

And one more for today, from, actually, a couple of days ago (Free registration required...c'mon, it's the NY Times, go fucking register):

WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 - Federal auditors said on Friday that the Bush administration violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of President Bush's education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring a public relations company to analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party.

In a blistering report, the investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, said the administration had disseminated "covert propaganda" in the United States, in violation of a statutory ban.

The contract with Mr. Williams and the general contours of the public relations campaign had been known for months. The report Friday provided the first definitive ruling on the legality of the activities.

Lawyers from the accountability office, an independent nonpartisan arm of Congress, found that the administration systematically analyzed news articles to see if they carried the message, "The Bush administration/the G.O.P. is committed to education."

The auditors declared: "We see no use for such information except for partisan political purposes. Engaging in a purely political activity such as this is not a proper use of appropriated funds."

Just in case you thought, y'know, that your government was doing anything but fucking with you. 'cause some of you guys still seem to think that. Fer some damned reason. Oh, right, 'cause they're Christians. Of course, must, automatically, be great, great people...

2005-10-03T22:57:00.000-07:00

Heh heh heh.

AUSTIN, Texas - A Texas grand jury indicted Rep.
Tom DeLay on a new charge of money laundering Monday, less than a week after another grand jury leveled a conspiracy charge that forced DeLay to temporarily step down as House majority leader.

Suck my ballsack you wax-faced motherfuck.

The Evil Empire is starting to crumble, I think.

2005-10-03T22:06:00.000-07:00

Jesus, where the fuck did I go?

Righty-o, kids. Sorry about the vanishing act. Billyhank has been dying inside for a little while now. But I'm feeling better.

News. Me n' Buttons are getting hitched in the spring. Up at Lake Quinault where she & I met one drunken week many years ago. Yeah, so, fuck if you happen to be up there and see a slighty tipsy skinhead getting hitched to a cute little red-headed girl, well, then, shit you're probably one of my pals, and thanks for hauling your ass all the way out to the Peninsula.

Rev. Sparky berated me not so long ago for not chiming in on Karina, and I feel like I should write something, but I haven't the slightest idea what. Dunno. There's a lot of directions in which to point our fingers, but I'm not really caring about that right now. There's not much point, is there? The screwups go up and down the line, and it's been happening on a small scale for-fucking-ever and why in the world did anyone thing it would ever work right on a large scale?

Listen: I used to work for a very smart engineer-turned-biz guy, and the company ended up having to get a bunch of investors involved to keep everything solvent, and they came in with a bunch of fairly bad ideas and pushed them through despite the objections of the people in the company who understood just how bad those ideas were. And I used to go to my boss and collapse in front of his desk and ask him why the hell he didn't fucking DO something about it all. And he would just smile and light a cigarette and say "If you give the idiots enough rope, they'll hang themselves with it."

At the time, I saw that as sage advice and tried to counsel myself to patience. But I was twenty-something then, and patience was in short supply. So I fumed and fussed and swore and generally made myself fucking miserable about something that, in hindsight, I should simply have walked away from. Back then I saw standing on the deck of a sinking ship as something noble and worthy. The experience has since taught me that sometimes it's okay to cut and run when you're sailing with a bunch of people intent on self-destruction. It's not cowardly; it's just fucking smart.

But my boss was right, I have to admit. The idiots were given all the rope they wanted, and managed to hang themselves and sink the ship and force a company that had every shot at success to go straight into the toilet. The problem was, the investors survived. They had other businesses and other money and hanging themselves in one place didn't mean much to them. My boss didn't have anywhere to go and died, both figuratively and literally, when the whole thing came crashing down around him. And while the whole rope & hanging thing still seems valid to me, I have to amend it to something like "Give the idiots enough rope and they'll hang SOMEBODY with it."

This is where it's going in this country. Maybe all the countries. I'm not terribly well traveled, so I dunno. Fuck, I can barely pay attention to everything that's going on in Jet City, never mind the rest of the world. The Power is becoming so insular, so buffered, so remote from the People that it's getting tough to see any way to bridge the gap. I dunno. Any government that's decided $5.35 and hour is enough to survive on is so out of touch as to be laughable, that passes laws to make it easier for Corporations to not pay taxes, that allows, what, half the people in the richest nation in the world to go without health insurance...I dunno. I just don't know. The system stopped making sense so damned long ago. Hell, maybe it never really made any sense. I'm sure that Washington and Jefferson were cutting backdoor deals to get government contracts for themselves and their friends, that Lincoln ruthlessly crushed his opponents whenever he had opportunity. Shit, we all know that FDR was banging his secretary and let the Rising Sun put the torch to Pearl Harbor.

Goddamn, we sound so good on paper. Duly-elected officials, three fingers of government keeping each other in check, a Constitution that spells out just what we are and aren't entitled to as citizens. One guy to run the army, some other guys to pass laws, some other-other guys to say what's fair and what's foul. How come it's all fallen apart so fast? How come we're all whining, but nobody's doing anything about it? Yeah, yeah, I'm typing, but I'm not doing anything. I'm with you. I agree.

We were talking at work today and Deetroit posed a query: What's one thing that was better about the 1800's than the modern day?

I thought about it for a minute and, maybe 'cause all this shit's on my head right now, all I could think is that it seemed like shit was less locked down in the 1800's and that it was a helluva lot easier to start up an armed revolt against your government when it wasn't fulfilling its duties. Which, yes, yes, is kinda juevenile and not something I'm probably capable of doing. But maybe that's the problem right there; we've lost the capability of being in charge of ourselves. We're so fucking used to it, so indoctrinated to the idea that the people in charge are the right people to be in charge...fuck, shit, dammit. Dunno.

Bah. Screw this. I need guns and bombs and warm bodies. Welcome me home, kids. Send me your love, your fealty and your willingness to do what's right. Let's ride, and clean up this shit.

2005-07-05T10:20:00.000-07:00

Dudes, I just found the guys who're gonna make me rich:

Writting Is an Art ( Get Paid for it )

hay,
Where a growing company that needs and still looking for the next Steven King,... If you can write a story line for a TV Law movie or a Play write then this is for you,... We are looking for that kind of person that can met deadl;ines on time and bring freash new idears to the group.Provided us with a sample of your work and we will happlyly look it over

I'm SOOO psyched. I just sent 'em over five screenplays, two stageplays, a collection of short erotic fiction and my 4,000-page "I'm the next King/Barker/Straub" magnum opus of a novel.

I've got a really good feeling about this whole thing.

2005-05-31T22:09:00.000-07:00

Okay, yeah, so that Return of the Sith movie? The one that's supposed to vidicate Lucas, make all of us fans happy that we sat through Phantom and Clones?

Oh, Jesus. I don't think it could have been any worse. For real. Utterly, utterly, horrifyingly bad.

How bad? Picture a newly-armored Darth Vader standing center screen, fists clenched, bellowing "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO...."

Oh, Lord. A piece of my soul just died.

Lucas needs to be killed before he fucks with THX 1138 and AMERICAN GRAFFITI.

2005-04-12T21:37:00.000-07:00

Hundreds showed up at Wisconsin Conservation Congress meetings around Wisconsin on Monday, many to voice their opinion on a proposal to allow hunting of free-roaming cats.

Outdoor enthusiasts gathered for spring hearings in every county to vote on hunting and fishing. The results get forwarded to the state Natural Resources Board. The proposal was one of several dozen part on the agenda of the annual meeting.

About 2,000 showed up in Dane County at the Alliant Center. Cat hunt opponents said that hunting cats is not going to fix any problems with declining song bird populations.

"Although feral cats may contribute (to) the problem, the destruction and loss of habitat is far and away the primary reason for the loss of song birds, gamebirds and other birds," one opponent said.

Supporters of a cat hunt said that current programs to control cat populations are not working.

Wait...

What?

2005-04-02T23:42:00.000-08:00

Also, on the SIN CITY front, I'm thinking that Basin City is supposed to be in New Jersey. The movie's got two really clear shots of an I-287 interstate information sign, and all the info I'm finding on I-287 shows it existing only in Westchester County, NY and running throught middle of Jersey (also going on personal memory here; I-287 was an often-used road in travel throughout the Tri-state area during the messenger days).

Anyway, yeah, so I figure that if you're gonna put it anywhere, stick the fucker in Jersey. Really, who the hell's gonna complain?

Also, this is possibly the funniest review of the movie, if you're someone who liked it. From the way, WAY Christian point of view. A clip:

Perhaps more disturbing than the violence is the line of thought that undergirds this movie, that each man is utterly alone and therefore pitted against the rest of society. That is the lie of Romantic individualism. The Bible tells us that we are all part of the body of Christ and, by extension that we should exist in communities. As adopted sons of God, we are not individuals in the Romantic sense, but actual members of a family network. The dangerous individualism of SIN CITY teaches us that we cannot trust any man, which results in the amorality and paranoid violence exhibited in the movie.

It's a rare movie review that attempts to both tell us about the flick and proselytize in the same breath. God love those screeching, nail-biting Christians. Endless fun for us agnostics in the room.

G'night.

2005-04-02T23:09:00.000-08:00

Me heart Marv

Yeah, okay, just got back from SIN CITY, and, my friends, it's nearly as good as I could've hoped. Some stilted dialog and, honestly, they could've ripped out about half the voiceovers without hurting anything, but, fuck, it IS Sin City, just with pictures moving across the screen instead of static panels in your hand. Remarkable, and, hopefully, a harbinger of well-done and faithful adaptations of graphic novels.

Yeah, not much of a review, but, hell, reviews are just to give you an excuse to not leave the house. Go see it, if you love comic books or Mickey Rourke or crazy levels of utterly surreal violence. And get down on your knees and thank Robert Rodriguez for making the movie that will, God willing, finally get the big guns to make GOOD adaptations of such standouts as The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, Sandman, Transmetropolitan, etc.

Nice going, Bobby. Ronin, anyone?

2005-03-23T20:49:00.000-08:00

So, yeah, hey there. Been a while. Sorry about that. There's actually a new thing that I'll probably be putting up info about in not too long a while, but not quite yet. So, yeah, there're Billyhank words out there, somewhere, for those who care, and I'll spill 'em soon.

But tonight, I'm both enamored and frustrated with the idea of Intelligent Design. I have, for years, been perfectly happy to balance the idea of evolution on one hand with the idea of God setting the shit into motion on the other. To quote DEVO: "God made man but a monkey supplied the glue." I have no problem with this, truly. But it is, and this is important, A MATTER OF FAITH.

Because, as we all know, God, in any shape or form, is an article of faith. Exclusively. God cannot prove itself, because proof denies faith, and without faith, any adherance to those amorphous laws supposedly handed down by who-the-fuck-ever is absolutely meaningless. There's no morality if you're following laws ONLY because you KNOW that you'll be rewarded or punished. That's like when you were a kid and were really, really good the week before Xmas, or when you slow down to 55 mph when a state trooper comes rolling up your bumper on the freeway.

See, I think what's going on here with these folks is not so much that they believe in God and believe in behaving in the way they think God wants them to act (which I'm sure they do, mostly), but that they just want to be right. Y'know? It's like those idiots that wrote the LEFT BEHIND series, or when Jr. goes out of his way to try and save a bag of caucasian breathing meat down in Florida after legally slaughtering scores of Texan blacks and hispanics when he was governor of the one-star state. They don't believe so much in the idea of morality for morality's sake, they believe, firmly, in the idea of reward and punishment for adhering to a particular set of rules. So they're doing everything they can to adhere to the rules, expecting to be seated at the Right Hand of the Father, blah, blah, blah. Again, I say, if these are the folks that're going to be in Heaven, I'm almost relieved that I'll be heading for hell.

Intelligent Design (also known by the WAY too cutesy ID) seems to be trying to buck for that reward at a more materialistic level. Essentially, you indoctinate the kids into believing something that puts any control of their lives so far out of their hands that they can't believe they'll ever really have any freedom or control (which, yes, is exactly what's going on now, but that's relating more to the government...this is God we're talking about, fer Christ's sake), and then put yourself in a position of acting as a conduit between them and the Great Googley Moogley. And reap, reap, reap the benefits. Essentially, this is how you become Pope for the eccumenicals and fundementalists.

And the cool thing is, you get to claim you're a scientist and fuck all those liberals right in their God-damming eyes.

It's tough to argue with ("What, you're saying there's NO problems with Darwin's theories?" "Well, of course there are, but..." "So you won't even LISTEN to my ideas? I thought you were a scientist...") and it seems like too many folks are bending over. The thin edge of the wedge is coming mostly from the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based (my face is red, yes) group that's trying to present themselves as a forward-looking, technology-centric thinktank looking to change the world into a kinder, gentler, more compassionate place, but who couldn't have less personal interest in Intelligent Design. Two problems with that: 1. Their Fellows seem to have a lot of religion in their backgrounds (and, also, they're mostly fellas...3 chicks and 34 guys...in Seattle? Guys, c'mon...) and 2. They've got pro-Intelligent Design propaganda all over their front page.

I dunno. It's just one more thing that's being used to define who's right and who's wrong, but the ethics that are being put out there are all about fear and power and rightousness. There's nothing in any of it to allow for moral and compassionate Humanists, Agnostics, Athiests, or, shit, just anybody who ain't Christian. Seems to ignore pretty much EVERY FUCKING THING THAT JESUS EVER FUCKING SAID, doesn't it? It's not about forgiveness, it's not about joy, it's not about free will, it's about poking holes in free thought, it's about bringing fear (or at least intimidation) to the people, it's about putting one small group of power-mongers in charge of what a whole lotta kids (and dumb adults) are gonna think.

Or to quote Adam from Mythbusters: "Everything we can't explain is God."

Of course, he was speaking of about the superstitions of ancient peoples. Isn't it time that we got over that kind of stuff?

2005-03-06T15:42:00.000-08:00

Just in case you were operating under the premise that your Gov't wanted you to be aware of what they're up to:

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration is aggressively wielding a rarely used executive power known as the state-secrets privilege in an attempt to squash hard-hitting court challenges to its anti-terrorism campaign.

How the White House is using this privilege, not a law but a series of legal precedents built on national security, disturbs some civil libertarians and open-government advocates because of its sweeping power. Judges almost never challenge the government's assertion of the privilege, and it can be fatal to a plaintiff's case...

...The secrets privilege is an especially powerful weapon because federal judges, reluctant to challenge the executive branch on national security, almost never refuse the government's claim to confidentiality.

That is true even though a growing body of declassified documents suggests that the privilege has been used in the past to protect presidential power, not national secrets, according to Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at the George Washington University, which works to expand public access to government documents.

No snide commentary needed, I presume.

2005-03-06T11:48:00.000-08:00

Here's your Sunday morning "Ah, hell, they're at it again" story:

"...There is an evangelical resurgence in this country and what is happening here in Kansas is symbolic of much of the nation," said First Family senior Pastor Jerry Johnston.

Indeed, a host of conservative Christian causes are moving forward: on April 5, Kansas voters will take up one of the strictest anti-gay marriage amendments in the nation; the state school board is embroiled in arguments between evolution and Biblical beliefs about creation; and fresh battles have begun over book banning and abortion rights.

This is one of those scary articles that makes you realize that consie Christians are really in a position to take over large chunks of the country. Large chunks of the country that we need, I feel I should point out, if only because they tend to produce a great deal of our foodstuffs out in the flyover states.

And, really, I can just about feel empathy for 'em, if not sympathy. I mean, hasn't the same kind of stuff gone down, in reverse, in most of the big urban areas? The coastal urban areas are where the gay folks came to live, the atheists, the artists, the free thinkers, the leftists all came West or East and settled in the big population centers and changed the angle that the population was coming at societal control. It's democracy in action, really: majority rule. If enough of your citizenry is sympathetic to a particular cause, you will change your rules to reflect that. It's about as simple as it gets.

And that's all that's really going on in Kansas. Buncha folk who THINK they're following the bible (which they are, so long as they stop with the Old Testament...which, I think, actually means that they're adhering more to Judaism than Christianity, but that's just me) want the laws they have to live with to reflect that. They're not calling for national change (at least, not yet), they just want to have their home they want they want it. Which, again, is exactly what happened on the coasts twenty, thirty years ago, and which is happening again. Massachusetts Yankees don't necessarily want to see a couple of guys making out on Cambridge Square, but otherwise they're pretty much okay with guy/guy, girl/girl stuff. Maybe they're just more cosmopolitan, maybe they're all closeted queers. Either way, their laws make it cool.

What's interesting about this story is actually THIS story, which ran in the Seattle Times today:

The state Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on whether the state constitution entitles the Rainier Beach couple and 18 other gay and lesbian couples to marry. All are challenging Washington's Defense of Marriage Act, which limits marriage to a union between a man and a woman.

If the justices rule as the couples hope, Washington could become the second state in the country, after Massachusetts, to grant gays the same marital rights as heterosexuals. And it would be the only place — at least for a time — where gays and lesbians from any state could marry each other.

And what's interesting about Washington State voting on same-sex marriage comes down Washington's dualistic nature. See, Washington's got The Cascade Mountain Range running just East of Puget Sound (which is where Seattle and Tacoma and Olympia are located), and those mountains are the dividing line for politcal thought in the state. All the abortion-loving, queer-postitive, tax-and-spend liberal types are on the western side of the mountains, which also happens to be where the majority of the population resides. The gun-toting, fag-bashing, Christianity-lip-service-paying, we-hate-outsiders types are roaming around on the eastern side of the mountains, keeping a hairy eyeball on all us nutty shitheads over here. CNN's 2004 election results show it pretty clearly. Everything to the East of the Cascades is Red State, and everything to the West is Blue State.

So in local elections, no problems. The hippie liberals get what they want in the cities, and the God-fearing illiterates get what they want out in the countryside. But when it comes to state issues, like same-sex marriage, all the bullshit suddenly comes flying out, and Washington becomes the country in microcosm. But reversed, with the Dems controlling everything (after the state Supreme Courty decided that the Dem won the gubernatoral election) and the Reps bawling and scowling and sucking their thumbs every time something doesn't go their way. So there's a really good chance that same-sex marriage will go through, if only because so many of the people want it that way. And that will get the Red State Washingtonians and the Kansisian puritans all fired up and there'll be more chanting in the streets and people passing legislation that tells people how they can live, how they can feel, what they're allowed to want and there will be fire, and riot and death and pain and hatred (in the name of Christianity and morality, no less), and, hey, won't that just be the most fun?

I dunno. I look at this stuff and realize that it doesn't make any sense for a country this large and divided to exist. I mean, really, who thinks this is working? You've got at least two distinct camps trying to wrest power from each other, you've got different ideaologies driving different economies driving different values driving different populations towards different goals. You've got endless squabbling at a national level that clogs up resources the rest of us could use to, y'know, get on with our fucking lives. You've got a situation in which a large portion of the population willl ALWAYS be dissatisfied with what's going on in the country.

So, for real, let's break up. It's not you, it's me, okay? I just want different stuff than you, that's all. It's not like one of us is right and one of us is wrong...we've just grown apart...we've stopped moving towards the same goals...we're both looking for something different in this relationship...we're, really, just two wildly different people, and while opposites attract in the short-term, the only way you can have a successful relationship, a successful Union, if you will, is if the partners are working with the same ideals. And we're not. You know it as well as I do, so let's just call this whole thing quits, split the assests down the middle, and go our separate ways. I love you, but I'm not in love with you, if you know what I mean. No, there's nobody else, it's just time to end this farce and get on with our lives. Is that harsh? Okay, then it's harsh, but it's time. You know it as well as I do. Let's put some walls up along the coasts, around Chicago and Austin, man the gates, issue passports for The Western Republic, The Union of Eastern Territories, The New Confederacy.

Man, wouldn't that be nice? Small, self-contained territories that can deal with their own issues and nobody else's. Your little country passes laws against free speech? Who gives a shit! Move fifty miles away and you'll be in a whole new place with new rules and new concerns. Don't like those rules, but love the place you live? Not a problem. It'll be small and streamlined. Most of the legislature will be your neighbors, people you grew up with, people you've invited over to your house for dinner. Changing the laws, when most of the people around agree, is like initialing a company memo. It's presented, it's voted, it's done. Life is simple, and you don't have to keep changing and compromising to make sure that the liberals and the consies and the religious nuts and whoever else are all happy.

Okay, that's been nothing but a big long ramble, but I think maybe I've hit upon something here. Let's split up the fucking country. For real. Let's just find the obvious idealogical borders and lay down a fence right there and start picking out new names. Let's burn the old flag and come up with new ones. Let's all design our own currency. Let's have the atheists and agnostics in one place and the theocracies in another. Let's stop having an ego about how important this piece of land is and slice it up into sections that we can actually handle and get on with our fucking lives.

Okay, everybody start thinking up borders and picking out names. I call The Death Star...

2005-02-26T10:22:00.000-08:00

LOVELAND, Colo., Feb. 25 - Joshua Noble, a 21-year-old who loves to snowboard, jolted Wal-Mart Stores last November when he got a majority of employees here at the Wal-Mart tire-and-lube shop where he worked to sign statements saying they wanted to vote on bringing in a labor union.

The unionization drive begun by Mr. Noble created a storm in this onetime ranching town at the foot of the Rockies - even the BBC covered it - and became a closely watched test of labor's efforts to unionize the world's largest retailer.

But on Friday the workers at the Wal-Mart Tire & Lube Express abandoned Mr. Noble, voting 17 to 1 against unionizing, another setback for organized labor at the very moment when its leaders are mapping a campaign to pressure the company to improve wages and benefits.

With Friday's vote, Wal-Mart can continue to say that not one of its 1.2 million American workers belongs to a union. Support for organizing dissipated here after the company repeatedly showed workers videos about what were portrayed as the shortcomings of unions, and transferred into the shop six new workers who, Mr. Noble said, had been screened by the company to ensure their antiunion sentiment.

Okay, so Wal-Mart squashes the unions again, no big surprise. What is surprising is the really, REALLY obvious lengths they'll go to in the process of keeping the unions out of their stores. Employees were subjected to multiple daily screenings of anti-union videos, phone calls from store execs debasing and ridiculing unions and the transfer in of anti-union Wal-Mart employees to dilute the vote.

Really, really scary. Not Wal-Mart's reluctance to be forced to treat their workers like human beings, but that the cudchewers working there seem to be willing to believe that Wal-Mart has the interests of their employees at heart when they say "that unions only want workers' dues, that they cannot guarantee better wages or benefits, that they want to put Wal-Mart out of business, that they foment walkouts in which the strikers can lose their jobs."

Y'know, if people are willing to buy that (and a 17-to-1 vote against would seem to indicate that it was bought quite handily), then maybe they don't deserve unions, or fair business practices or laws to protect worker's rights. Maybe, really, the working class in America (or at least 1.2 million of 'em) needs to lose their workman's comp, their minimum wage, their overtime laws, their basic, basic Federally mandated rights as workers and get thrown back into the days of serfdom & child labor. Maybe that's what we need, y'know? The same conditions that got unions going in the first place need to reappear, get the spark going. American workers think, I believe, that they've got it really good, that they're covered, that nobody is going to let them fall. I think maybe they need to have the pins kicked out from beneath them, and understand that there's no truth AT ALL to that thought, and that if they don't stand up for themselves, there's nobody else out there who really gives a fuck.

Anyway, that's it. The Free Market Cowboys win another round, and the great unwashed lose another little piece of their laughably incomplete rights.

Ah, fuck 'em, right?

Bah.

2005-02-21T07:40:00.000-08:00

oh my god:

ASPEN, Colo. (AP) -- Hunter S. Thompson, the hard-living writer who inserted himself into his accounts of America's underbelly and popularized a first-person form of journalism in books such as "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," has committed suicide.

Thompson was found dead Sunday in his Aspen-area home of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, sheriff's officials said. He was 67. Thompson's wife, Anita, had gone out before the shooting and was not home at the time.

Oh my dear Jesus. I don't know what to say. Nothing else matters today. Get out your books and cherish him.

Ah, fuck.

2005-02-20T10:38:00.000-08:00

Here's a good one for all the atheists/open-minded/generally tolerant folks out there:

Repent America

Notice that the site's front page has two entry options: Christian & All Others, which is my preferred entrance, as it gives an over-simplified explanation of the Ten Commandments that, if you accept it, means that there's no way in Hell that you, you horrifying sinner, are going to get into Heaven.

My favorite, FAVORITE part of the site has to be the "Ain't Hardly Nobody Going To Heaven" counter located here (left hand side, scroll down, under the tribute the Judge Roy Moore), which points out that 153,000 people are going to die today, and that most of them aren't 'saved', and then helpfully counts the number of folks who've died since you got to the site and are, presumably, headed right for Satan's playhouse.

And, y'know, I almost thought there were parts of this site that I thought I was going to agree with when I stumbled across BushRevealed.com. Here, I'm thinking, I'll find some serious Christian thought given to the White House policies that punish the poor for their poverty, that punish the weak for their weakness, that would chastise our 'Christian' President for launching a war that murdered tens of thousands of people for what appears to be nothing but financial gain. That's a reasonable expectation for something called Bush Revealed, right?

Heh.

Here's what I found:

'BUSH 'WORSHIP' SHINTO TEMPLE TROUBLES CHRISTIANS IN JAPAN AND U.S.'

'BUSH APPOINTS OPENLY GAY HOMOSEXUAL, FIRST EVER BY REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT'

'BUSH MEETS WITH GAY REPUBLICANS, SAYS GAY LIFESTYLE IS PERSONAL AND PRIVATE'

Yeah, seems like there's a little bit of hobbyhorse down there, huh? And "Gay Homosexual?" What, they're so pissed off that Bush let one gay guy inside (to head up the HIV/AIDS Commission, natch, 'cause straight people don't get those queer diseases, right?) that they had to make sure their slower readers didn't fail to understand it?

Anyway, that's my fun find for a Sunday morning. I suggest you go take a cruise through it, if only to help galvanize your particular hatred/intolerance. As for myself, it's just helped to shore up the thought that if this is the kind of people I'll find in Heaven, thank the Good Lord above that I'm headed for Hell.

2005-02-15T23:31:00.000-08:00

And, I almost forgot, while in NYC, I found my new career!

Check it out:

Details can be found @ Doctor Metropolis.

I'm just so excited for my cape & cowl....

2005-02-15T18:23:00.000-08:00

Hey, y'all. Not much posting lately, but me 'n Buttons took a ride out to the East Coast for a little while. If you'd like to have a Billyhank-kinda trip to the Tri-State area, just keep reading for step-by-step instructions as to how you can, like me, get tattooed, sick, tired and very nearly split up in just 10 days.

Step 1.

Haul yer ass down to Seatac. Be 90 minutes early for your flight, like Jetblue suggests. Breeze through check-in and security in about three minutes, and then spend an hour-and-a-half here:

Your entertainment will include Muzak versions of The Police's "Walking on the Moon" and U2's "With or Without You." This will make your girlfriend look like this:

Step 2.

Fly into JFK around 8:00 am, Eastern Time. Say hello to your family, have a brief breakfast with them, then steal one of their cars, abandon your girlfriend, and drive north until you hit Kingston, NY, where you will find Smiley Rich awaiting your arrival:

After a few hugs, a couple of dastardly practical jokes and any amount of sleep deprivation-inspired smiling, sit yourself down in an old dentist's chair and allow Richie to attack your arm with needle and ink until something like this appears:

(I will send $1.00 American to any stranger who can tell me the origin of this design. Hints: It's about words, and those words came out of a head in the Jet City Metro).

Step 3.

Okay, so once that's done, head back to CT, crash @ your sister's place (which is really your mom's place, but mom's in China, so she doesn't need it right now), play with the new puppy (sorry, no camphone pics. Requests will generate scans of film pics, if anybody is interested in the sheer cuteness of a Boston terrier named Trot Nixon), sleep, sleep & sleep, and then go have dinner with your grandmother, a couple of aunts, some cousins, some in-laws and one or two unaffiliated folks who seem to end up at these family deals. There are no pictures of this shindig 'cause I left my phone in the car, dammit.

Step 4.

Spend some time in CT checking out the sights, such as they are. Which, in the middle of February, they really aren't. Watch THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW and, yes, realize you were right to have avoided it in the theater. But it's okay 'cause your mind isn't working real well at this point and you need simple things to amuse you. Also, at this point you should realize that your throat is scratchy and your sinuses are getting that stuffed-with-wet-cotton feel. And make sure to take your grandmother out to lunch, 'cause you love her to death and it's fun to watch her try to make up her mind when the menu's 10 pages long. Also, fail to take any camphone pictures that would be easy to upload on your blog, just to make sure that anybody reading has lost interest at this point, which takes the pressure off you to write anything interesting from this point forward.

Step 5.

Go to Yonkers, against your better judgement. Be pleasantly surprised when you find that D's new apartment is bright and sunny and overwhelmingly cozy & comfortable. Go out for a diner meal that shocks you with its goodness and then go back to the apartment and play GTA: VC with D while your girl does crossword puzzles on the sofa. Again, fail to take any pics with your astoundingly useful and simple camphone, just so you can leave your readers confused as to what a "D" is, and just what constitutes "overwhelmingly cozy & comfortable." Take solace in the fact that your readers dropped out shortly after the picture of the tattoo.

Drive back to CT, listening to a CD of Patton Oswalt, laughing your ass off and occasionally telling your girlfriend that you feel kinda crappy. When your girlfriend suggests that you get some more sleep and take some of the vitamins you hauled across country, backpedal and tell her that you don't actually feel that bad. When writing about it later, realize that your girlfriend is far, far smarter than you will ever be and resolve to listen to her the next time she has a suggestion regarding your health and well-being.

Get back to CT, play with the dog, smoke a lot, and go to bed far too late to do you any good. Also, make sure you cough and sneeze a whole bunch. And sniffle. Sniffle more than seems reasonable.

Step 6.

Go to NYC on the afternoon train. Remember the first few times you rode the train into the City back when you were a kid and you tried to write all kinda profound stuff about riding the train. Immediately try to forget the attempts at profundity, fail to forget, get embarrassed, bury yourself in your book and then get bored with your book and help your girlfriend with her crosswords. Realize that when your girlfriend is thinking about a word she sticks the tip of her tongue out of the corner of her mouth and that that's about the cutest fucking thing you've seen in years. Realize that you love your girlfriend as much as you do as much for her cute habits as her strong will and sharp mind. Suddenly get fearful that she'll stop doing cute things. Then realize that she's been doing cute things for 30-some-odd years, and that she's neither going to add nor delete cute things to her repetoire just because of you. Feel relieved and slightly less important than you did a minute before. Realize that riding the train is doing strange shit to your head and that maybe you should figure out some other way of getting home.

Arrive in Grand Central Station and remember why it always took your breath away. Take crappy camphone shot that doesn't even begin to show the granduer:

Hate yourself for not having a better camera.

Take the W train up to 57th & 7th, check into your big-ass, slightly pricey hotel and take the best shower you've had in days. Go walkies with your girl and smile quietly as she walks into every gift-&-tee-shirt shop you pass by. Keep smiling as she walks out of every one empty-handed, knowing that at some point in the next couple of days she'll drop a c-note in one of them (the next day, to be precise, on our way to Fort Washington for dinner; 1 NEW YORK zip-up hoodie, 1 D TRAIN: BRONX TO BROOKLYN tee-shirt, 1 NEW YORK baseball-style jersey. Also, some stuff from The Strand, but that's, y'know, its own thing, and I don't have pics of any of it). Eat a big dinner, go walkies some more, see the uprights for that damned The Gates thing in Central Park (like I said to dad, I think it's cool, but it's not art, and it's a fucking waste of millions of dollars...), and then rush back to the hotel for, well, y'know...

Oh, and, yeah, start horking up snot and coughing up gray phlegm on a regular basis at this point. Also, your tattoo should be flaking like filo dough, your joints should ache, and you should realize that the heavy coat you left in CT is what you need in NYC, and that your Jet City raincoat/hoodie combo seems to only have the affect of trapping cold air inside your clothes. Spend a lot of time shivering.

Step 7.

Head out to Staten Island, where you'll get picked up by the ever-illustrous MikE!, which is weird and kinda intimidating 'cause he's only had his license for like three months. Not that he's a bad driver, but he's a DRUMMER fer chrissake, and, shit, I don't trust drummers to know how to do anything, period, beside pound their kits. But apparently he's kind of a crappy drummer, as we made it out to Casa de Hippy with nary an incident (I kid because I love, MikE!. And because I'm too far away for you to pop me one). And we get to meet lil' Emily, who's just as fucking cute as one figures a baby will be:

See?

Righty-O, so have a nice afternoon, watch your girl get all moony over the kid, watch her give you that look that says "I need a ring and a fertilized egg RIGHT FUCKING NOW," think that while it's nice to see old pals and new kids, maybe you shoulda left the girl back on the other side of the East River.

And, as always, hack, cough, cough, hack, spit, hack, snort, hork, cough, etc.

Step 8.

This is where the head cold takes control and you lose track of where you are and what you're doing. You know that you make it back to CT at some point, that you go back to NYC at some point, that you go to flea markets, to lunch, to dinner, that you visit a Vespa dealership, that you develop some pictures, that you get an eggplant parmesean grinder, but you really don't know when those things happened, or in what order. Your last couple of days are a whirlwind of trains, SUV's, sinus congestion, friends, family, food and the occasional bit of sleep. You're not really sure of what's happening until sometime on Valentine's day you end up back at Terminal 6 of JFK on the phone with Richie and smoking that last cigarette before you load yourself into a shiny tube full of strangers and bags of smoked almonds. You've had fun, you think, but you know that you've spent too much time back in what you used to call home, and that Jet City has sunk into you too much for you to ever go back. You're fucked, friend. You belong to the West now. And as you ride that Airbus backwards across the country, you have nothing but relief at the thought of your own bed, your own shower, your own dresser, your closet, all the little miniscule things that, amazingly, seem to define who you are and what makes you happy. And while as little as five years ago you would have railed against the idea that something so simplistic and domestic could make you happy and content, this new, wiser you has to admit that you're looking forward to sleeping in your own bed nearly as much (or slightly more) as you are for Jr. getting ejected from the White House in 2008.

And that would be sad, but, really, you're too sick to care. And your ears are going to be stuffed up for, probably, the rest of your life.

But, y'know, you're still you, and to prove it, you use your camphone for one small act of pointless and entirely safe act of social rebellion:

Eat my smoke, Jet City.

Rebel without a care, motherfucker.

G'night.

2005-01-24T23:26:00.000-08:00

The sky over Lake Union this morning, walking up Westlake to work:

Stuff like this? Just about the only that makes me believe, or want to believe, in a just, loving and beautiful God.

G'night, y'all.

2005-01-23T22:51:00.000-08:00

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

RENO, Nev. - A 50-year-old Reno man who was hospitalized after he castrated himself told police he learned of the procedure on the Internet and did so to lower his libido. The man, whose name was not released, called 911 at about 1:30 a.m. Monday and asked for help because he could not stop the bleeding from a self-castration operation, police said.

WHY DO GUYS KEEP DOING THIS?

2005-01-23T22:23:00.000-08:00

Finally...some good news on this whole tobacco thing:

Tobacco may have at least one virtue - that of providing some protection against the onset of Parkinson's disease.

Researchers at the Karolinska Institute, Sweden's leading medical research centre, have looked at the medical and death records of sets of Swedish twins in which one smoked and the other did not.

"Many studies have shown a protective effect of cigarette smoking on Parkinson's disease," said the study.

The study was published online this month by the Annals of Neurology.

Not that I'm suggesting anybody start 'cause of this'n, but since Parkinson's runs in my family, hey, cool....

2005-01-23T22:17:00.000-08:00

Because, I'm figuring, they keep looking and looking and they can't use it to prove that God's out there and that it's American:

The future of the Hubble Space Telescope is in doubt after the White House refused money for a rescue plan, US media has reported.

US space agency Nasa will announce the decision in February, ending plans to send a human or a robot repairman, the Washington Post reported.

The service cost was expected to top $1bn, but has been cut from the federal budget request, sources told the paper.

For 15 years Hubble has captured some of the most profound images of space.

For those of you not keeping track, $1 billion is about what a week's worth of the Iraq War costs. Lessee...1 week of violent oppression in the name of freedom is worth more than understanding how our galaxy is constructed...

2005-01-22T01:32:00.000-08:00

Bad Bus Poetry part 3 or 4 or 5 or something...

Pretty much just for MikE!

It's too damn late, y'all. Billyhank's going to bed. Sweet dreams.

2005-01-16T21:00:00.000-08:00

NEW FAMILY GUY!!! NEW FAMILY GUY!!!

Gotta run...

2005-01-12T23:51:00.000-08:00

Hey y'all. It's not political or whiney or a complaint or anything this time. Just checking the Gmail account and I've got six addy's to give away. Anybody who'd like one, drop me a line and gimme a good reason.

And, really, just being here to drop a line is a pretty good reason, so it's pretty much an automatic...

2005-01-12T12:05:00.000-08:00

Little lunchtime blogging today. File this one under: AND WE VOTED THE BASTARD IN, ANYWAY:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. force that scoured Iraq for weapons of mass destruction has abandoned its long and fruitless hunt and is assisting in the more immediate task of counter-insurgency efforts, U.S. officials said on Wednesday.

President Bush and other U.S. officials cited the grave threat posed by Iraq's chemical and biological weapons and Baghdad's efforts to acquire a nuclear arms capability as a central justification for the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. No such weapons have been found.

The 1,700-strong Iraq Survey Group, responsible for the hunt, last month wrapped up physical searches for weapons of mass destruction, and its mission is now refocused on gathering information to help U.S. forces in Iraq win a bloody guerrilla war, officials said.

Y'know, I'm wondering just how good the planning was on this thing. Seriously, no jokes. Okay, yeah, it's obvious that there was never a plan for holding the country together after ousting Saddam, but it seems like the plan for holding the oil fields was in place before anything else, and while that's not going hugely well, it's doing much better than the "self-governing" thing that's been paid lip service, and little else, since Baghdad fell.

So, yeah, Bush rolls in, knocks the pins out from under whatever peace there is in there, knowing full well that it'll lead to a native & foreign insurgency that will quickly and effectively get people to forget about the originally stated reasons for going into Iraq (WMD in every cupboard, barn, turkey farm and Toyota in Iraq) and get them concerned about the American troops (primarily), 'Coalition' troops (secondarily...way secondarily) and Iraqi civilians and officials (maybe thirdly, but I'm thinking that most people are more concerned about journalists, oil and what they got for Xmas than what's happening to Iraq's civ population) that are getting killed on a daily basis.

So, end result is that Jr. gets his war, his pals get their oil, his other pals get to scare the rest of the world and all it cost was some tiny fraction of the army in boxes or hospital beds, a buncha dead Muslims (which, realy, is okay, 'cause they're all with Allah now, right?) and the integrity of the US.

I'm starting to think that maybe pinning the 'Bad Planning' tag on this whole thing is just what the bastards were hoping for...

2005-01-11T18:35:00.000-08:00

File under Exploding, Detector, Bullshit, My:

WASHINGTON -- The White House says it hasn't made a practice of paying people to plug its political policies.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said that paying off black conservative Armstrong Williams to tout its education policies was an isolated incident.

It came to light last week that the Education Department had a contract worth nearly $250,000 to get the syndicated columnist and TV personality to tout the "No Child Left Behind" program.

The Education Department is still defending the contract, but McClellan said the arrangement "ought to be looked into." Some lawmakers have called for an official government inquiry but McClellan didn't go that far.

The contract required Williams' company to produce radio and TV spots featuring Education Secretary Rod Paige and to use his influence with other black journalists to get them to discuss the overhaul measure.

Oh, fer Chrissakes. WHY ARE WE STILL PUTTING UP WITH THIS ASSHOLE?

2005-01-07T10:45:00.000-08:00

Just a couple of quickies ripped off from FARK:

Seeking to build support among black families for its education reform law, the Bush administration paid a prominent black pundit $240,000 to promote the law on his nationally syndicated television show and to urge other black journalists to do the same.

The campaign, part of an effort to promote No Child Left Behind (NCLB), required commentator Armstrong Williams "to regularly comment on NCLB during the course of his broadcasts," and to interview Education Secretary Rod Paige for TV and radio spots that aired during the show in 2004.

Williams said Thursday he understands that critics could find the arrangement unethical, but "I wanted to do it because it's something I believe in."

Hardly surprising, really. The White House did the same thing a year or so ago with the Medicare Drug Benefit propaganda that looked like real news reports. Just more insidious bullshit from a government that thinks you're too stupid, cow-like and mentally castrated to care that they're doing sneaky, snarky bullshit in the name of the American people.

And, just 'cause it's local:

LAKE STEVENS, Wash. - Someone in the Census Bureau (news - web sites ) may be watching a little too much MTV. Bevis Lake, a 5.7-acre body of water in a forested area about 25 miles northeast of Seattle, is now appearing in Bureau records with a different name: Butthead Lake.

Ah, Washington...

2005-01-03T23:06:00.000-08:00

Dammit.

Just lost a whole long post when Firefox crashed. Isn't it supposed to be more stable than IE?

Right, okay, what I was working around to was that I was thinking about Stashbuster Bill while I was working on some mind-numbing kinda shit at the job and jotted this down on some poor bastard's BOM:

You're not big enough to be anything that you're not already. There's not enough of you to become anything you haven't already become.

And I think that's what bothered me so much about the pretty, popular kids in school, so very many years ago, and what's continued to bother me about the pretty, popular people that I keep stumbling across in the world. They're done, y'know? They've already crested the peak of the world, they've become king of the hill. They've got nothing left to shoot for, nothing left to fight for. Whatever battles they might've had to have fought quietly disintegrated in the face of perfect bone structure and nice teeth. The poor fuckers were perfect out of the box and never had a chance to move past any deficiencies and struggle and learn and grow strong.

I think I mean that. Really. I mean, I've hated the pretty and the perfect for as long as I can recall, have resented the smooth and even and symetrical, have always been drawn towards the freaks, the pervs, the grinning, laughing, crying, screaming castoffs that had to fight, and, having fought, learned to ignore that societal urge to become smooth and perfect and beautiful and moved on to lives that made them more than they'd been before and more than their pretty and perfect contemporaries could ever hope to be.

I dunno. Not really a point to this one. Just some random, burbling bullshit running across the inside of my head and I figured I'd share. If you're one of the pretty, perfect folk, and you're reading this, then I apologize. Not for my words, which are true and can't be apologized for, but for not giving you a harder time when I run across you in my world, and maybe give you a shot at being something more than you are. At offering you that one chance to be something truly remarkable, rather than something simply nice to look at.

G'night.

2005-01-03T19:55:00.000-08:00

Hey look everybody...it's Marv!

More specifically, Mickey Rourke as Marv. Okay, I know I'm Johnny-come-lately on the whole Sin City movie thing, but I'm catching up fast, and man, it looks just fucking kickass...

Teensy little Quicktime trailer here.

2005-01-03T19:10:00.000-08:00

Well, you've seen it everywhere else, you may as well see it here:

Laura Bush flipping a salute to her one and only Dark Lord, who was apparently hovering somewhere amongst the White House press corps.

Born-Again Christian my ass.

2005-01-01T09:29:00.000-08:00

Found @ MODIFIED:

Mostly posted fer Buttons, 'cause she'll think these are one of the cutest things she's seen in a while. Besides, who doesn't like to see a pair of funny panties every once in a while?

2004-12-31T22:34:00.000-08:00

Arianna Huffington's list of bad shit from 2004, in part:

Bernard Kerik's nanny. Bernard Kerik's Ground Zero love nest. Bernard Kerik.

That the woman who dismissed a presidential briefing entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." as a "historical" document is going to be our next secretary of state.

That a man who finds the Geneva Conventions "quaint" is going to be our next attorney general.

Janet Jackson's briefly exposed right boob.

That it took 14 months and public protests from the victims' families before the president OK'd the 9/11 Commission, but only two weeks before the first hearings were held on Janet Jackson's boob.

That the media thought "Don't be economic girlie men" was a great line.

Funny, sad & frustrating. And, to my shame, I was truly beginning to let some of this crap slide out of my head. Starting a new year by forgetting the old seems like a really poorly thought-out way of going about things. Although it kinda seems like the way our gov't is working these days, doesn't it?

All right, still determined to have a nice night, so I've cracked Pal A's Xmas present of homemade Irish Cream. The woman makes a strong drink, friends. Praise Jesus.

Happy New Year!

(link via Fark)

2004-12-31T17:45:00.000-08:00

And posting on THE DARK TOWER has got me thinking that I should have said at least a few words about THE LIFE AQUATIC, which Buttons 'n me and some pals saw on Xmas day, and about Wes Anderson flicks in general.

It's a good'n, for sure, and I think that I prefer it over THE ROYAL TENNEBAUMS (which is probably mostly 'cause Bill Murray was just plain ol' kickass and Jeff Goldblum gets shot), but really what it comes down to is this: NOBODY LIES IN WES ANDERSON FLICKS. Mostly. I mean, Max Fischer kept saying his dad was a brain surgeon and Margo Tennenbaum hid any number of things from her friends and family, but with few notable exceptions, everybody answers questions with the utter screaming painful truth and they wear their hearts, minds, opinions, fears, anquish and lacks on their sleeves.

It's very comforting, while watching one of Anderson's movies (for the uninitiated, whoever you are, those would be: BOTTLE ROCKET, RUSHMORE, THE ROYAL TENNENBAUMS & THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU), to know that whatever huge scary truth that's skulking around in the background will come out at some point and it will be funny, sad and shocking, all in the same moment. Billyhank like.

One note, however, on THE LIFE AQUATIC: Music. Uh, Wes? You kinda fucked it, friend. The soundtracks to RUSHMORE and THE ROYAL TENNEBAUMS are in regular rotation in my CD player, but I can't imagine that I'll enjoy a whole albumful of Seu Jorge covering Bowie songs in Portuguese. It's pretty, certainly, but previous choices of music (The Who, Cat Stevens, The Kinks, Lou Reed, Mark Mothersbaugh) were a helluva lot better. Sorry man. Better luck next time.

All right, out for drinks, salmon dip and whatever whacky shit 2005 will bring. Have fun, y'all.

2004-12-31T17:06:00.000-08:00

Just in from the deck, shivering my ass off while I finished off THE DARK TOWER. Goddamn. Nice work, Mr. King. This CR, at least, is mightily satisfied.

Y'know, I've given King any amount of shit about his later writing (the Dark Tower books specifically) in the last few years, especially since The Chin started reading him and I had someone to argue merit with, but this last one, the wrap-up of the entire work it seems, vindicates any amount of glumped together shitty prose and apparently unedited tedium. Again, Goddamn.

Anyway, not a whole lot to say that wouldn't sound sillier than the above. Nice job, Mr. King. A good ending, despite your own objections. And while you might talk retirement, homeboy, it's a pretty empty threat when you hint at a new book while charging through the last third of your magnum opus. We know you, King. We know you better than you think we do. Sometimes we love you, sometimes we hate you, sometimes we throw up our hands and wonder where the fuck you went wrong, but in the end we know that no matter how much you might claim to be done, fella...you've got at least one more story to tell. And one more, and one more and one more.

I, for one, am looking forward to the back story of the Tet Corporation. Anybody with me?

Out, for the nonce. If I don't make it back in, y'all have a kickass New Year's, and I'll talk at you soon...

2004-12-25T01:28:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night...

Drinking, exchanging presents and seeing movies today, so I'm wishing the best for y'all nice and early, and hope to hear some good stories come Sunday.

Have fun & a Merry Christmas!

2004-12-23T08:23:00.000-08:00

File under I HOPE YOU TAKE IT UP THE ASS YOU SQUAREHEADED LITTLE BITCH:

(AP) Former Gov. John G. Rowland, driven from office by a corruption scandal, said in court Thursday that he would plead guilty to a single federal charge. It carries a sentence of up to five years.

Speaking before U.S. District Judge Peter Dorsey, Rowland said he was prepared to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to steal honest service.

The plea deal would end the two-year-long investigation into corruption in his administration. Rowland resigned July 1. Rowland's lawyer, William F. Dow III, acknowledged the former governor was "the recipient of certain gratuities."

After Rowland spoke, Dorsey questioned him about the plea agreement, before deciding whether to accept it. He advised Rowland that he faces up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. He also told Rowland that as a convicted felon he would not be able to vote or hold public office.

Couldn't happen to a more appropriate public official. I mean, it seriously couldn't, really. John G's just a little fish in the pond of national politics. Anybody higher up the chain (*ahem* Mr. President? Congressman DeLay?), would've bought their way out of it. I guess we'll have to take this one as about the best potential victory. Wish somebody'd found him out before he laid off 3,000 state workers, though.

Die, die & die, you sweaty bitch.

2004-11-15T23:17:00.000-08:00

Oh fer Christ's sake...so to speak:

GREENVILLE, S.C. (AP) -- Bob Jones III, the president of fundamentalist Bob Jones University, has told President Bush he should use his electoral mandate to "appoint many conservative judges" and approve legislation "defined by biblical norm."

"In your re-election, God has graciously granted America - though she doesn't deserve it - a reprieve from the agenda of paganism," Jones wrote Bush in a congratulatory letter posted on the university's Web site.

"`You have been given a mandate ... Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil. You owe the liberals nothing. They despise you because they despise your Christ," the letter said. It is dated Nov. 3.

A White House spokesman said he didn't know whether the president had seen the letter.

...In February 2000, Bush spoke at Bob Jones University when he was running for his first term in the White House. At the time, the school banned interracial dating and included anti-Roman Catholic material on its Web site.

The private Christian college has since dropped the dating ban but still maintains material questioning Catholicism on its Internet site.

Bush came under fire for the visit but defended it. He later wrote Cardinal John O'Connor of New York to apologize.

Indicative of nothing, of course, but, hey, anything that makes that fucking monkey more obvious to the 59 million hosers who voted for him, I'm down for that.

And Bob Jones? You call that a memorable name? Fer fuck's sake, pal. Get something that'll stick in a memory. Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggert. Y'know, something with a little zing. Ya dope.

2004-11-15T07:53:00.000-08:00

File under surprise, surprise, surprise:

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell has handed in his resignation -- as President George W. Bush continues with what's shaping up as a major Cabinet reshuffle.

Officials say Powell has told his aides that he intends to leave once Bush settles on his successor.

...CNN reported that there is a lot of speculation that Condoleezza Rice will be offered Powell's position.

I dunno whether to call all these cabinet resignations something akin to rats leaving a...well, shit, the ship certainly isn't sinking, is it? Rats leaving a ship that's headed for really scary waters, perhaps. Or rats, maybe, that have been asked to fling themselves overboard to make room for other, bigger, more brutal, less humane rats, along with some pigs, some sprightly young elephants, a few vultures and a couple of skulking velociraptors.

Whichever, I'd like to think that this might be Powell's chance to redeem himself, blast the administration for which he never truly stood, but I doubt if that will be the case. More than likely he'll be handed a fat position with the Carlyle Group or General Dynamics or a Halliburton subsidiary and the secrets will go with him to his grave.

So long, sellout. Hope your reward is worth the buttfucking your name got over the last four years. Hope to Christ we're done with you.

And Condy as Secretary of State? Oh, fer fuck's sake, man.

2004-11-07T00:02:00.000-08:00

Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me, haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaappy birthday to billyhank, happy birthday to me.

Pointless ego over here, really.

Seeing The Incredibles today at some point, and then some drinking, I think. A good kinda sunday.

Talk to you soon, y'all.

2004-11-03T13:19:00.000-08:00

In an attempt to make the post-election teethgnashing a bit easier to handle (for myself, if nobody else), here's something pretty damned cool:

Take only pictures, leave only footprints.That's the urban explorer motto.

The exceptions are small artifacts, like the Fort Shelby's reservation cards or pieces of wallpaper. They would be committed to ruin otherwise.

"By taking these artifacts out and taking photographs, that ensures that it'll be around as long as we're around," Tantalo says.

Inside the Fort Shelby on the recent Sunday, the group found notes with phone messages and hotel keys still in cubby holes, behind the front desk. They ventured into the handful of crumbling and empty ballrooms on the first floor, then headed upstairs to the more than 20 floors of hotel rooms. Forging up a narrow stairwell near the fourth floor, they noticed that entire walls are missing, completely removed by looters seeking bathroom fixtures and piping.

Urban spelunking in Detroit (apparently the #1 place in the country for finding cool abandoned buildings to wander around in). So, yeah, okay, everybody head for the Motor City and get yourself some exploring.

And, hey, that makes me think about city nicknames. Living in Jet City now, used to live in the Brass City, have spent lotsa time in the Big Apple, have visited the Big Easy, Motor City & Silicon Valley. What other good city nicknames are there? Post a comment, y'all.

(via Fark)

2004-11-03T13:11:00.000-08:00

FUCK.

So, the question is: Are we cool with this, or do we fight with any weapon we can find?

When they kick in your front door
how you gonna come?
With your hands on your head
or on the trigger of your gun?

Out back, Molotovs, etc. Call me if anything good happens.

2004-11-02T21:49:00.000-08:00

I've got a sinking feeling, kids:

Red vs. Blue will never make purple.

Okay, I'll be out back making molotov cocktails, anybody needs me for anything.

2004-10-17T12:31:00.000-07:00

Y'know, it's maybe kinda wrong & fate-tempting to say it, but I'm gonna miss Jr. & the boys if (hope, hope, hope) they get voted out in November. Kerry, Edwards and the rest of the cleancut freethinkers (yeah, that sounds like sarcasm to me too) aren't gonna be nearly so fun to hammer on. I am willing, however, to make the sacrifice.

2004-10-17T12:26:00.000-07:00

SUCH is the power of movies that the first image "Watergate" brings to mind three decades later is not Richard Nixon so much as the golden duo of Redford and Hoffman riding to the nation's rescue in "All the President's Men." But if our current presidency is now showing symptoms of a precancerous Watergate syndrome - as it is, daily - we have not yet reached that denouement immortalized by Hollywood, in which our scrappy heroes finally bring Nixon to heel in his second term. No, we're back instead in the earlier reels of his first term, before the criminality of the Watergate break-in, when no one had heard of Woodward and Bernstein. Back then an arrogant and secretive White House, furious at the bad press fueled by an unpopular and mismanaged war, was still flying high as it kneecapped with impunity any reporter or news organization that challenged its tightly enforced message of victory at hand.

..."The fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never before," wrote William Safire last month. When an alumnus of the Nixon White House says our free press is being attacked as "never before," you listen...

Interesting article in the NY Times about media companies folding over in an attempt to not incur the wrath of Jr. & The Big Chair Players. None of this is new news or surprising news, but it's a good attempt to pull it all together into something easy to see. Essentially, any news source that critizizes the White House finds itself on the wrong end of Justice Dept. & FCC legal guns, and any source that lauds the Reps, or at least trashes the Dems, gets to operate in an utterly unmolested fashion.

Again, it's not anything you don't already know about, if you've been paying the slightest attention, but it's an awfully nice summation.

2004-10-17T10:55:00.000-07:00

ATLANTA, Georgia (AP) -- Fears of a terrorist attack are not sufficient reason for authorities to search people at a protest, a federal appeals court has ruled, saying September 11, 2001, "cannot be the day liberty perished."

A three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously Friday that protesters may not be required to pass through metal detectors when they gather next month for a rally against a U.S. training academy for Latin American soldiers.

Authorities began using the metal detectors at the annual School of the Americas protest after the terrorist attacks, but the court found that practice to be unconstitutional.

"We cannot simply suspend or restrict civil liberties until the War of Terror is over, because the War on Terror is unlikely ever to be truly over," Judge Gerald Tjoflat wrote for the three-member court. "September 11, 2001, already a day of immeasurable tragedy, cannot be the day liberty perished in this country."

I am occasionally proud of my country, its laws, and those who work to uphold those laws for the good of the populace and to the detriment to small, ideological forces in the government.

I'd feel better about this, however, if it were the Supreme Court that had said it. Can you say 'appeal'?

2004-10-14T18:49:00.000-07:00

Good Christing fuck. This whole blogging thing? Yeah, it's gone too far. Far too far.

Here's an exercise in sheer, pointless, masochistic headfucking for you. See that little button up in the right hand corner that says 'Next Blog'? Yeah, go click that. I'll wait. Go click that about twenty times and then come back.

Okay, what did you see? Puerile ramblings? Whiney adolescents? Blogs with names that might have seemed clever sometime in the way, way past before we all started watching Friends and throwing quips and one-liners at each other as part of our daily conversations? Yeah, I'll bet you did, and read a lot of stuff that sounds like the voiceover from an afterschool special. And lotsa bad spelling, right?

What scares me are the number of them that claim to be 'chronicling a normal life' or some similar asinine thing, and then, yeah, go right ahead and do just that. From posts about what they think about their new toothpaste to their lunchtime sandwich to the movie they watched while drifting off to sleep, you get an endless eyeful of the same shit that your own life is already filled with. Really, who's reading this stuff?

Other scary shit:

Blogs filled with links to home refinancing sites, survey sites that'll give you a free iPod/DVD player/PS2/laptop/yacht, cut-rate pharmecutical sites, dating sites, humor sites, shopping sites. Like spam, except you have to go find it for yourself.

Blogs started just so people could have conversations with each other. Like ICQ, MSNmessenger, Yahoo, etc., except that there's no real time communication and you have to keep hitting refresh to see if there's a response to your post. Also, it seems that blogs like this are posted to by people who're in school together, and see each other pretty much every damned day.

Things like this:

Am I just to be a clockwork turquoise?
That symbolizes heaven and that which is of the Spirit?
I certainly hope so.

Ah, the internet. Porn, penis enlargement & bad poetry.

Look, I know that blogs are supposed to be nothing more than online diaries for people drawn to that perverse thing of sharing intimate secrets with anyone who bothers to show up (*cough*cough*), but c'mon, guys. If we're going to be out here, putting our crap up for anyone to see, shouldn't we be putting up stuff that we might actually want people to see? Shouldn't our writing be fresh and interesting and tight? And properly spelled? And inclusive to anyone outside our immediate circle of friends? Fer Chrissakes, don't you guys proof your copy? DON'T YOU FUCKING CARE?

Right, all right. That's it. Never mind me. I'm done. I'll just spend my time with Cory & Warren & Drew and my circle of pals and just forget about finding anything new or interesting under the sun.

Also, all you underage virgin goth girls? Stop trying to sound like you've been getting laid since you were ten years old. It's obviously not true, and it's a little embarrasing for the rest of us to read. You don't go out drinking in graveyards with your little goth friends, you don't have a dangerous boyfriend with his own hearse and tattoo gun, and you've never gotten shut up in a coffin for hours on end. How do we know this? 'Cause you post to your fucking blog three times a day and you've got a list of friends fifty names long. People who spend that much time on the computer don't leave the house, and you have to leave the house go drinking in graveyards, get shut up in coffins and attract boyfriends to have sex with. So either learn to fake it better, or just go actually do something that the rest of us might want to read. Little goth boys, go find the little goth girls, a bottle of absinthe and get on with it.

And on that note, I'm off to make dinner for my girl, who should be home any time now. And you know what? I'm not going to tell you a damned thing about it.

Cheers.

2004-10-14T18:10:00.000-07:00

Billy Gibson's blogging again:

Why?

Because the United States currently has, as Jack Womack so succintly puts it, a president who makes Richard Nixon look like Abraham Lincoln.

And because, as the Spanish philospher Unamuno said, "At times, to be silent is to lie."

Today's post is an awfully interesting look at the DoD and this latest MOST IMPORTANT WAR AMERICA WILL EVER FIGHT.

Make with the clickey.

2004-10-14T17:57:00.000-07:00

HONOLULU, Hawaii (AP) -- Wal-Mart opened a store in Hawaii on Wednesday with hundreds of eager shoppers rushing past a handful of protesters who accuse the giant retailer of desecrating ancient gravesites.

Customers lined up hours ahead and then poured into the discount store after a traditional Hawaiian blessing and the untying of a lei at the main doors.

Native Hawaiian groups had tried to stop the opening until 44 remains of Hawaiians unearthed during construction could be reburied at the Wal-Mart site.

"Wal-Mart's pitch is that it's slashing prices for you. In this instance, it's slashing graves," said Moses Haia, a Native Hawaiian Legal Corp. lawyer who has filed a suit against the store.

Not, really, in any way surprising. Just haven't published a Wal-Mart hate story in a while, and I was kinda missing it.

2004-10-11T20:07:00.000-07:00

This is screaming around the web today, but here it is again, just in case this page is the only reason you hit the web:

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Sinclair Broadcast Group, owner of the largest chain of television stations in the nation, plans to air a documentary that accuses Sen. John Kerry of betraying American prisoners during the Vietnam War, a newspaper reported Monday.
The reported plan prompted the Democratic National Committee to file a complaint against Sinclair with the Federal Election Commission.
Sinclair has ordered all 62 of its stations to air "Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal" without commercials in prime-time next week, the Washington Post reported, just two weeks before the Nov. 2 election.

Sinclair's television group, which includes affiliates of all the major networks, reaches nearly a quarter of all U.S. television households, according to the company's Web site. A dozen of Sinclair's stations are in the critical swing states of Ohio, Florida, Iowa and Wisconsin.

Ah, fuck me. It's just getting tedious, isn't it? It's weird. This may be the first election I can think of that I felt as though issues involved actually involved me and mine and theirs, and the least sincere election I can recall. Really and truly, this whole fucking thing about nothing but spin, appearance & a rapid and succesful refutation of the myriad weirdass accusations that've been made.

So, yeah, the Reps are gonna show a nasty movie in primetime and have been getting Ralph Nader on the ballot all over the place, and the Dems have Fahrenheit 9/11 hitting Blockbuster, and this weird little nugget floating around the web:

CHANHASSEN, Minnesota (AP) -- Campaign aides to President Bush on Saturday laughed off rampant Internet speculation about whether the president was wired to get help from advisers during his first debate with Sen. John Kerry.

"It's not true. It's ridiculous," Bush campaign spokesman Scott Stanzel said.

A still photo from television footage of Bush as he debated Kerry on September 30 in Coral Gables, Florida, appears to show a small, boxy shape between the president's shoulder blades.

Both stories, if you'll notice, are from CNN, the latter from the 'Inside Politics' section and the former from CNNMoney. I guess the question, to me anyway, is what side is CNN on? Both of these stories tend to sympathize with the Dems view, the first by being alarmist about a media mogul using a national network to campaign for the Republicans; the second by giving real media attention to what is, really, an internet rumor (for the record, Salon.com, The Washington Post, MSNBC, The New York Times, The LA Times and Yahoo News all have stories or references to the the flap, although most of those stories refer back to the initial Salon.com article).

Y'know, I don't actually care anymore. I've spent an hour hunting down links and stories, trying to figure out how to build a case about whether or not CNN slants to the liberal, and I'm sick of giving a shit. Really, what does it matter? CNN wants you to think the Dems are strong, FOXNews wants you to think the Reps are unstoppable, the NY Times wants you to think that they're both wrong but that Jr. is more wrong than anybody else, they all want you to read them or watch them or click on them so that they can throw commercials in your face and charge their advertisers more.

Aren't you tired of being nothing more than a walletful of potential dollars for the media and corporations? Here's a fun trick; spend a week, just one week, not buying anything from a national chain. Your groceries, gas, clothes, haircuts, cd's, books, comics, bike, whatever. Skip McDonald's and go to the joint on the corner where the owner works in the kitchen and they'll charge you $6.50 for a burger that's worth it. Throw a brick through the front window of your local Barnes & Noble and head to that tiny store downtown where there's hand-written notes all over telling you what's great about a particular book. Seriously, just give it a try. Bet you won't be able to. At some point you'll walk into a CVS or a Best Buy or Target or, God help you, a Wal-Mart, and pass your dollars across the big rubber belt and, if you're a good and faithful visitor, you'll suddenly remember this rant and have a little 'Ah, Fuck' moment and a small piece of your soul, which was on the edge of shriveling up and dying, will spring back bouyant and joyful and all sorts of other kinda Kenny G adjectives and, hey, you'll save a little piece of yourself from eternal damnation.

And that would be all well and good if I didn't just this second realize that I've got an order from Old Navy coming in via Fedex tomorrow.

Ah, Fuck.

2004-09-26T20:27:00.000-07:00

New York - The United States Department of Homeland Security is buying a tiny town in the western state of New Mexico to turn it into a lab for terrorism response training, The New York Times reported Sunday.

A small New Mexico engineering school will buy Playas, population 50, from a mining company with $5-million provided by Washington, the report said.

HEY! Goddamned Tom Ridge stole my idea! Fucker...stealing good ideas from poor defenseless bloggers. Big bully.

All right, everyone keep their eyes out; if Ridge says ANYTHING about buying "hoverbikes" to patrol his new town, gimme a holler. Gonna sue the bastard for stepping all over my "cool."

2004-09-22T23:06:00.000-07:00

Also, me want:

To quote waymaking:

Hi from Will of New Zealand and as i said you won't believe my next project and here it is the starwars style "hovering jetbike",the most dangerous hunk of junk in the galaxy , this terrifying machine is a real working hoverbike , a true adrenalin rush to ride

And my favorite line:

This machine and trailer is sold as is , no warranty for machine or your life

Currently on eBay, starting bid of $6,000, which seems pretty damned reasonable for a...a...shit, I'm sorry, I have no good metaphor. And even though you'll probably have to bribe every customs official between Australia & L.A. to get the thing into the country, I still think it's a helluva bargain.

And, of course, absolutely perfect for exploring the coast of Kitsault (see below), which would make it a perfect gift for your soon-to-be mayor.

And, hell, my birthday's coming. Go, bid, now.

2004-09-22T21:26:00.000-07:00

Me want, me want, me want:

Kitsault, BC, about 800 klicks north of Vancouver. Why do me want? To quote Yahoo:

The 322-acre ghost town with 2.5 kilometers of waterfront boasts 90 houses and seven apartment buildings with ocean and mountain views, two recreation centers with a pool, a library and a curling rink, a mall with coolers and shopping carts intact, a post office, and even a small hospital equipped with an X-ray machine and operating equipment still wrapped in plastic for storage

Yup, it's a ghost town, abandoned by the mining company that built it to house its workers, and up for sale to the paltry tune of $5.5 million USD.

Which, let's face it, is pretty damned paltry these days. There's probably a few dozen houses worth more than that just across the lake from my apartment. So, really, it would be stupid to not buy the town for such a measly sum, right?

Right.

Okay, everybody pony up and we'll have our own joint, in which we will have, natch, our own rules. Or lack thereof. Pretty much everything's legal in Canada, right?

Yeah, cool. Let's go. I call mayor.

2004-09-21T21:39:00.000-07:00

Okay, this is a little disgusting. Buttons has been sick for the last couple of days, sneezing, coughing, feverish, etc. Very sad. Poor lil' Buttons. But in the process, she's managed to do this:

My friends, I give you a wastebasket filled to the brim with almost nothing but snot-covered kleenex. (Actually, snot-covered toilet paper; we're not fancy folk).

More than slightly nauseating (sorry, Richie...shoulda put up a warning), and the problem is, how do I get rid of it? I mean, really, would you want to pick up a wastebasket full of sickness-causing microbes and shake 'em up by pouring 'em into a garbage bag?

And, hmm, I have to wonder if all those germs are feeding off each other, breeding, creating strains of supergerms that are gonna get all jostled up when I go to dump the can, come running up my arms, do suicide plunges into eyes/nose/mouth, infest my delicate insides, breed in great multitudes, create fever, mucous, cold sores, pus, puke, the turboshits, before spilling out of my assorted orifi and spreading like bad rumors, slowly but surely destroying the populace of this polite, quiet town.

Bah.

Anybody got any ideas? I can hear Buttons blowing fresh snot, even from here...

2004-09-21T21:36:00.000-07:00

And now, just for the sheer...fun of it, I present:

Psycho James as the child of Chuckie & Bride of Chuckie. That's actually pretty appropriate. And he was very excited to pose for the pic. As I'm sure you can see.

Wheee.

2004-09-21T21:15:00.000-07:00

Ah, Elvis. The venerable Mr. Costello has posted an anti-anti-piracy rant on his new CD. Check it out here. Y'know, it occasionally seems that Elvis is entirely more punk rock than all the kids he was being anti-punk-rock against, back in the day.

Yeah, untangle that one and get back to me, dissenters.

(Thanks to BoingBoing for this one)

2004-09-21T20:53:00.000-07:00

Jr. spent some time throwing words at the UN today. Here're a few of my fave excerpts (Full text is here, so you can see what I'm taking out of context). MikE!, this is a long one, but pay attention. There's some good snide commentary in here:

We know that free peoples embrace progress in life instead of becoming the recruits for murderous ideologies.

Like "spreading democracy in the Middle East," right? Over 1,000 dead U.S. soldiers in Iraq, who died in the killing of thousands of Iraqis. To be sure, the U.S. troops were only shooting back...but only after they shot first.

This month in Beslan, we saw once again how the terrorists measure their success: in the death of the innocent and in the pain of grieving families. Svetlana Dzebisov was held hostage, along with her son and her nephew. Her nephew did not survive. She recently visited the cemetery and saw what she called the little graves. She said, "I understand that there is evil in the world, but what have these little creatures done?"

Not a fucking thing. What do you suppose that all the Chechan kids, oppressed by the Russian army who WON'T LEAVE CHECHNYA, did to deserve a military occupation for the sake of (can you guess?) an oil pipeline? Terrorists are awful, vile, despicable people, but they started off as normal folks who'd had enough and started to fight back with the limited weapons at their disposal. Which is to say, nobody blows themselves up on a crowded sidewalk as their FIRST resort.

Btw, all you FIGHT CLUB fans who hate terrorists? What the FUCK do you think the Space Monkeys were?

We're determined to destroy terror networks wherever they operate...

When we're not creating them in, say, Iraq.

...and the United States is grateful to every nation that is helping to seize terrorist assets, track down their operatives, and disrupt their plans.

Pet peeve here, but the rest of the world has been fighting terrorism for a loooooooong time. The U.S. is Johnny-Come-Lately to this one, but our government seems intent on presenting the idea that the rest of the world is just sitting on its collective ass, waiting around to help big 'ol 'Murrica leap into action. We've got such a damned ego. Just kills me.

Defending our ideals is vital, but it is not enough.

"Enough" appears to be to squash some of those ideals in favor of replacing them with the values of the conservative Right.

Because we believe in human dignity, America and many nations have joined together to confront the evil of trafficking in human beings.

We still, however, are cool with giving tax breaks to multinational corporations who pay workers in underdeveloped countries slave wages so that we can buy DVD players with pocket change and Levi's that cost less than a pizza.

Because we believe in human dignity, we should take seriously the protection of life from exploitation under any pretext.

Unless, of course, there's an unjustified war to be fought. That most of the world protested. That can't, apparently, be won until thousands and thousands more poeple die. That's still cool.

I...urge all governments to affirm a basic ethical principle: no human life should ever be produced or destroyed for the benefit of another.

Excuse me for a moment, please. My bullshit detector just exploded.

...America and many nations have acted to lift the crushing burden of debt that limits the growth of developing economies and holds millions of people in poverty.

Somehow, this apparently wasn't a good idea for our own country.

No other system of government has done more to protect minorities, to secure the rights of labor, to raise the status of women, or to channel human energy to the pursuits of peace.

He's speaking, in general, of democracy. Notice how he doesn't specifically mention the U.S. or, more specifically, his own administration. Too easy a target for the Left, I figure.

As members of the United Nations, we all have a stake in the success of the world's newest democracies. [Iraq and Afghanistan]

Is a country actually a democracy when it's run by a puppet government, warlords are the only rule in many places, and any attempt at registering a vote results in massive bloodletting? Not to say that at some point Iraq, et al, won't necessarily become psuedo-Western-style democracies, but they aren't there yet, Jr., and just saying it's so isn't going to change that.

The U.N. and its member nations must respond to Prime Minister Allawi's requests and do more to help build an Iraq that is secure, democratic, federal and free.

Um...didn't they want to come in waaaay back before the "coalition of the willing" gave Iraq its "freedom" and got told to go fuck themselves? C'mon, who the hell's waffling now?

So a terrorist group associated with al Qaeda is now one of the main groups killing the innocent in Iraq today...

See? SEE!??! I TOLD you that Saddam Hussein bombed the World Trade Center!!!!

These two nation will be a model for the broader Middle East, a region where millions have been denied basic human rights and simple justice.

A region that has helped to make my family and the families of friends very wealthy, while busily denying basic human rights and simple justice.

This commitment to democratic reform is essential to resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict. Peace will not be achieved by Palestinian rulers who intimidate opposition, tolerate corruption, and maintain ties to terrorist groups. The long-suffering Palestinian people deserve better. They deserve true leaders, capable of creating and governing a free and peaceful Palestinian state.

If I'm reading this right, Jr. is putting the blame on the Palestinians lamentable situation on...the Palestinians. As opposed to the people who're killing them, taking their land, and walling them off from their jobs & ancestral farms. And that would be who? Jr's pals, the Israelis. Interesting how he doesn't mention them as having anything to do with the situation, huh?

Boy, won't that just make the Middle East SO eager to get on Jr's good side?

May God bless you.

Dude, seriously, do you even begin to understand how many people you just offended?

Once again, for real, Jr. has delivered a speech full of noble language, full of idealism, full of promise and hope, all the while pretending that he hasn't done the things he's done over the last four years. And, astoundingly, it's better than even money that he'll get the big chair again in November.

Goddamn. We really are stupid fucking people, y'know?

2004-09-12T13:25:00.000-07:00

Ahem.

Elephant polo. With transvestites:

Just in case your sunday was a bit too boring.

Cheers.

2004-09-06T19:38:00.000-07:00

Just when you thought conspicuous consumerism was done with:

The iPod goes for $300-$400. The holder (that kinda ugly, clunky gray thing in which the iPod pictured above is resting) goes for $149. Exclusive from 'The Smoking Man Collection' (that's that little logo embossed in the front corner there), not only does the iPod holder y'know, hold your iPod, it also "ships in high-quality wood and textile packaging", just to make sure that it's properly stored for its inclusion in your estate.

Also available from this collection: a $75 card holder, a $120 12-slot CD holder, and a $90 pen plate, which is, of course, a flat hunk of aluminum which "is meant to display and store your most prized writing instruments." By which I'm assuming they do not mean your collection of Sharpies and two-dollar .01 drafting markers.

Y'know, Buttons says I'm about the sourest person she knows. With this kind of crap choking the good taste out of the planet, how could I not be?

Probably it for the night. Have a fun Tuesday, y'all.

2004-09-06T18:18:00.000-07:00

And since the day of the word appears to be TRON, here's a kinda fun light-cycle game. Frustrating, 'cause there seems to be a distinct "personality" to each of the computer-controlled bikes and they keep kicking my ass, but, again, that's kinda consistent with the movie, isn't it?

Make with the clicky, y'all.

2004-09-06T18:06:00.000-07:00

If you loved me, you'd buy this for me:

Up around $900 on eBay, but there's another for just around $500. Seriously, if you all wanna gang up and chip in on this one for like my birthday or something, you'd all be welcome @ my place for beers whenever you want. For real.

And I've already got a spot picked out for it.

And, y'know, it would drive Buttons out of her fucking mind. And that, really, is worth it right there...

Sorry that it's been a while. How's everyone doing?

2004-08-30T22:30:00.000-07:00

"Like any other gathering of people that might get out of control, I feel the need to lay down some ground rules. Pay attention. There will be a quiz later.

1. Have fun, but don't go doing shit that's going to hurt other people.

2. Do something genuinely nice for someone. I don't mean give to a beggar in the subway. That's a cheap and easy fix. Do something for someone you haven't talked to in a while. Go visit someone you might think is lonely. Give because you want to, not because you feel guilty. Trust me, the mood will strike you.

3. Do what the hell you feel like doing, but default to rule 1.

4. Call bullshit on things you think are total crap. Have no fear.

5. Respect one another enough to listen to one another. Fight only when there is a pit filled with Reverend J.D. approved oatmeal, mud or exotic oils.

6. Take care of yourself. Drink, smoke, eat what you will -- but take care of yourselves, for you are my flock and I need you to pay off my bar tab.

7. No one talks about fight club. "

A partial list of the ten commandments of the Church of the Super Awesome, which is, somewhere, inspired by the Saint of Killers. One for you MikE!, Gracia, Chris. Enjoy...

2004-08-30T21:47:00.000-07:00

ASHEVILLE -- Developers are assessing the damage after vandals used on-site construction equipment to ram into the shell of a Wal-Mart Supercenter in Asheville Friday night.

Michael Patterson, whose company is developing the site, said vandals entered the site and either found a key or hot-wired a dump truck and drove it into different areas of the building.

Initial estimates place the damage at $900,000, but Patterson said developers won't know the full tally on damage until contractors and engineers assess the structural damage

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAfuckers!

*Ahem*

Yeah, so Bloomberg's having RNC protestors clinked up left and right. Thank God for a man who knows just when to protect democracy, and when to flush the whole thing.

Wait.

Did he protect democracy at any point?

Um. Shit.

Never mind.

G'night.

2004-08-25T18:29:00.000-07:00

US Vice-President Dick Cheney has said he does not support a federal ban on gay marriage, apparently contradicting President George W Bush's stance.

Mr Cheney was addressing a campaign audience in Iowa that included his daughter, Mary, who is openly lesbian.

He said the issue of legalising gay unions should be settled by individual states rather than by Washington.

Now this is interesting, and it's got my conspiracy gland spurting. There've been all these rumors lately that Bush is gonna dump Dick at the RNC and make McCain his veep. And the White House AND McCain have been denying it out of hand, BUT, shit, check this out. Cheney openly breaking ranks with legislation that Bush has been promoting as being as essential to the American Way as the Iraq War and the PATRIOT act.

Seriously, this is just weird. From the beginning, the two have acted as one (one being directed by Karl Rove, primarily), and suddenly, IN AN ELECTION YEAR AND ONLY A WEEK BEFORE THE CONVENTION, Cheney shoots his mouth off about something that strikes straight to the heart of Conservative America, and, more specifically, to the heart of the President he ostensibly serves under.

I've got nothing more than theory here, but, really kids...does this make any sense to you?

Hrrm.

2004-08-23T23:31:00.000-07:00

Uh...

Morlocks aside, how would YOU like to visit, even live hundreds of years in the future? There may be a way, and that is the purpose of The Time Travel Fund(tm).

Q: How does this work?
A: Current scientific theory states that Time Travel may be possible, however the technology is a long way off, perhaps hundreds of years in the future. Now, assume it does become possible in say, 500 years. As with any technology, Time Travel will get less expensive as time goes on. Just as the price of a VCR has dropped to less than $70 from the several hundred dollars it cost just ten years ago, Time Travel, once it becomes feasible, will initially be very expensive yet it will become more and more economical as time goes by.

Q: How does this help me?
A: The concept is that one day, it may be possible for people living far in the future to retrieve you from your current frame of reference (their past - your present) and bring you into the future (their present - your future.)

Q: Why would they want to?
A: That is the purpose of the fund. The simple answer is, we pay them to bring you into the future.

Yup. $10 to these folks gives you at least a shot at having some future goon show up, stuff you in a sack and drag you off to a dystopian future where you'll be forced to give up your organs to some exotic buffet and spend the rest of your life with a fifteen lb. heart-lung machine shoved in yer gullet, shooting mutants for sport and watching alien bestiality porn on the Internet.

Sounds like fun, no?

You can read the Member Agreement here. It's actually a pretty down-to-Earth thing. Even if this is nothing more than a scam, it's 1000% more entertaining than most of the crap on the web. (Thanks to FARK for this one)

2004-08-23T19:27:00.000-07:00

Reading Catch-22, and came across this passage on the way home:

"That's not what justice is," the colonel jeered, and he began pounding the table again with his big fat hand. "That' s what Karl Marx is. I'll tell you what justice is. Justice is a knee in the gut from the floor on the chin at night sneaky with a knife brought up down on the magazine of a battleship sandbagged underhanded in the dark without a word of warning. Garroting. That's what justice is when we've all got be tough enough and rough enough to fight Billy Petrolle. From the hip. Get it?"

I dunno. That scared me, really. The little speech seems contain a lot what's informing WAY too many people's sense of right and wrong lately. As though it's cool to throw away the slow, crawling progress we've made as a society for the quick, cathartic orgasm of mindless, spurting revenge. War is just too easy to suggest, and too hard to back out of, y'know? But that initial thrust...

...baby, that's heaven.

Right?

2004-08-22T10:14:00.000-07:00

Quite honestly, I'm not sure whether to be psyched or horrified:

FIGHT CLUB, the video game.

I'd like to just dis it out of hand, but I watched some of the E3 video and I have to admit that it looks pretty cool. Even a shot of Big Bob with his bitch tits and baggy sweatshirt. Now, why they've decided to market a five-year-old cult flick as a video game is behind my reasoning to comprehend, but I guess there's a lot of Chuck P. fans out there who double as video game nerds.

For release in October, 2004 -- Xbox & PS2. Probably worth at least a rental. MikE!, Richie, c'mon out for Thanksgiving and I'll beat your pixelated heads into the virtual cement. It'll be like old times in the Brass City, 'cept we can't wake up Buttons. She's a terror if you wake her up too early.

2004-08-19T23:32:00.000-07:00

Just this tonight:

Portraits of monkeys. Very professional & emotive portraits of monkeys. A whole page of 'em. This is mostly fer Buttons, but y'all can go click on over, if you'd like.

Personally, I think you should.

2004-08-17T10:14:00.000-07:00

2004-08-17T09:51:00.000-07:00

I asked Mr. Morales in a telephone conversation to tell me what criminal activity had taken place.

"I can't talk about that," he said.

I asked if all the people interrogated were black.

"Well, mainly it was a black neighborhood we were looking at - yes,'' he said.

He also said, "Most of them were elderly."

When I asked why, he said, "That's just the people we selected out of a random sample to interview."

Back in the bad old days, some decades ago, when Southern whites used every imaginable form of chicanery to prevent blacks from voting, blacks often fought back by creating voters leagues, which were organizations that helped to register, educate and encourage black voters. It became a tradition that continues in many places, including Florida, today.

Not surprisingly, many of the elderly black voters who found themselves face to face with state police officers in Orlando are members of the Orlando League of Voters, which has been very successful in mobilizing the city's black vote.

Scary Bob Herbert editorial about yet more voter shenanigans in Florida. I'm wondering if going after Fl's black population is less about making sure the vote goes their way (I mean, c'mon, what are the odds that it won't, what with rigged felons' lists & easily hacked voting machines), but more about getting blacks the hell outta Floreeda once and for all. Maybe I'm taking the myopic, Northeastern "Florida-can-break-off-and-float-down-to-the-equator-for-all-I-give-a-fuck" viewpoint, but it seems to me that ever since slavery was abolished & the minimum wage installed, the ruling elite of Fla has had less & less of a desire for its black populace. Maybe all this shit is just the concentrated push to convince 'em all to move to Georgia or something.

Hmm.

2004-08-13T09:21:00.000-07:00

Okay, getting back to the John McCain-MLK birthday thing referenced a few days ago (good quote, MikE!). Apparently, McCain initially voted against the measure as a fed holiday, then recanted, reversed, and supported it when it was put forth as a state holiday. Quoted as saying:

"In 1983, when I was brand-new in the Congress, I voted against the recognition of Dr. Martin Luther King. That was a mistake, OK? And later I had the chance to ... help fight for ... the recognition of Dr. Martin Luther King as a holiday in my state." (Link to the Salon.com article in which he's quoted...towards the bottom).

Additionally, according to the Washington Post:

• Voted to cut off federal assistance to public schools that prohibit prayer in school.

• Voted to strike provisions of the Racial Justice Act that would prohibit the death sentence in state and federal cases if a defendant could prove with statistical or other evidence that the race of the victim played a role in sentencing.

• Voted against a 1996 bill to prohibit job discrimination based on sexual orientation.

• Voted against measures to increase the minimum wage, against a woman's right to choose, and with Bush 91 percent of the time last year.

So, yeah, I dunno. He might've changed his mind 'cause he realized he was being a dickhead, or he might have changed his mind 'cause he knew that an anti-civil rights vote would bite him in the ass years later when he was running for a higher office. The quote above is referenced off how Barry Goldwater regretted his anti-civil rights vote (indeed, Goldwater is viewed, so far as I know, as pretty much just a high-profile bigot), and how McCain was trying to avoid it. Kinda smells like straight-up politics to me. It might be time to write off ol' Scarface as just another piece of totalitarian shit.

2004-08-13T09:06:00.000-07:00

SEATTLE - Beachgoers in West Seattle got an ugly shock.

Hundreds of hypodermic needles, washed ashore in the afternoon high tide Thursday. It forced the closure of that section of beach until the Seattle/King County Health Department decides it's safe to go back in the water.

The needles washed up right where kids playing in the water could find them.

"And then I picked it up with my own bare hands," said Dagney Lansdowne, 7. "Then I went to my mom and said, 'look mommy, a needle'."

Only really interesting 'cause Mom & I were there just yesterday. The article goes on to say that the needles were unused & capped, so it's not really that big a deal...but, still. Something creepy about floating needles. Like little plastic sharks. Or big plastic mosquitos. Or medium-sized plastic hummingbirds. Without wings.

Right.