In one nostril and out the other.

Apparently if you snort some kind of "brain chemical" you don't have to sleep anymore. I guess the inventors of this miracle product have never heard of coke, speed, or Jolt Cola before. I remember when I was thirteen my friends and I used to buy a 24 pack of Dr. Pepper and drink the whole case while we threw random garbage and pieces of wood onto our gasoline-fueled bonfire. Then in a caffeine and sugar haze of insanity, my friend Blake decided it would be a good idea to put on a freakish mask of an old toothless man and climb onto his roof to terrify his young step brothers. Unfortunately for these two kids they had a skylight, and woke up to a terrifying moonlight creature banging on the glass with glee. The kids promptly screamed loud enough to wake the neighbors and saturated their mattresses with urine. The point of my story is, getting amped off of legal shit isn't always a good way to go.

Leisure Time

I'm not out assassinating political leaders because I have blog wars and and a level 60 Night Elf wizard to entertain me.

I think the main point Dan is making is that us Americans are attempting to deliver the wrong American social tradition to foreign countries. We shouldn't be trying to export democracy...blowing up opposition is obviously not the short track to that goal, and Iraq is like a bunch of diahrettic 3 year-olds in a McDonald's ball pit; there's just shit everywhere and it's gonna be a bitch to clean up. Well I say we fed those damn kids the wrong food! They're only 3, we can't expect them to be discerning eaters.
We should be exporting the great American tradition of leisure time, or as we at the Monstro like to say, the art of a "hard sit." Assassinations and IEDs would all but cease is we were distributing XBox Live! accounts like we were distributing food and medicine. Why the hell is Condoleeza Rice visiting Pakistan and Iran? She is scary as hell. Hire a part-time actor serving steaks in Hollywood to put on a Master Chief suit and have him stomp around Baghdad handing out Xboxes and that guy will have every militant for miles diving in front of bullets to ensure that the poor sap in the suit stays alive to deliver more 360's.

Blog War?

We are in a blog war with Sam Johnson's Glider Bison blog? Is that some sort of fucking joke? Being an ex-improv guy I should know jokes, and that must, I dare say, must be some sort of fucking joke. Let's talk about Sam Johnson, mainly his fucking unending and unquenchable desire to eat massive amounts of dick.

Getting challenged to a blog war by someone who lives off the raw flesh of nature's most cunning beast is like someone trying to beat Tesla and Einstein's lovechild (Rube Goldberg) in a goddam science fair.

See any dick around? well watch out cuz ol' Sammy J will be rarin' 'round the corner with a mouthful of slobber soon to be filled with cock. Know someone with a cock who doesn't want it anymore? Great, put him near Sam Johnson so he can chew it straight up. Guy loves his cock, ram it down his throat, guy has no gag reflex, genetically bred for loving ze cauck.

On a totally unrelated and shockingly more appropriate note I was using some Preparation H yesterday and read on the label to ask your doctor about using it if you suffer from depression.

Excuse me what the fuck??!?!?

My only thought on that is that if you are already clinically depressed, knowing you need to put gel on your ass so it doesn't itch/burn might put you over the top. People are so afraid of being sued, it's amazing.

I miss the days when I had the brain power to post like Dan just did. Poop.

Bhutto

I don't usually get up in arms about anything outside the 2-3 meters of space that follows me wherever I go, but FUCK! Sometimes a story sticks with you, and when it reaches its tragic conclusion you want to kick God in the balls.

Benazir Bhutto, 54 year old Pakistani populist movement leader AND WOMAN, was murdered today at an election rally. I could comment on the conspiratorial nature of current Pakistani "President" Pervez Musharraf, but instead I think I will summarize with a poorly put together visual aid:

attempted assassination of political enemy (Oct.) - fails - declare martial law - suspend democracy and elections

attempted assassination of political enemy (Dec.) - SUCCESS! - repeal martial law - allow elections to continue

If you need some explanation, chew on this obtuse statement: the perp is usually the one who stands to profit the most.

Say what you will about the tenets of modern American democracy, at least a majority of the country solves its problems without violence--and with a few exceptions this holds even truer for the national political sphere. We have extremists too, and it's a benefit of conservatism that most right-wing nuts were taught early to repeat, "I may disagree with your opinions, but I will defend to the death your right to speak them." This is something that is often lacking from your left-wing nuts repertoire of cliches because s/he knows they're* right and doesn't care what you think.

Please allow me to imitate a liberal and use Bhutto's death (just for a moment) to forward my own politics. I've always wondered why people's reactions to political events (in 3rd world countries) are destructive. We never seem to do this. I think it's because we have alternative ways to vent aggression. I just set nine fire traps around a sleeping dragon and killed it. Although it was in a fantasy world, I was deceptive and used fire bombs...essentially. If I didn't have shit to do, I'd probably be out turning over cars and burning office furniture at every opportunity too. In conclusion fuck Jack Thompson.

Benazir Bhutto's assassination speaks strongly about the dictator's fear of symbolism. Whoever the fuck killed her feared her. A 54 year old woman who spoke at rallies. Come on! Whether the killer feared her political sway in an upcoming election or had the even more absurd fear of "the outspoken, independent woman," make no mistake, it was fear that drove them. It was also absurd.

Who is afraid in this NEW war on/of terror? It still seems like the same old type of war. Two sides misunderstand the other. Each side takes turns killing each other. Each fears what the other side stands for or represents.

Eat Animals Raw

There is nothing I like more, with about a dozen exceptions, than eating raw the flesh of nature's beasts. A week ago my family was fixing chioppino (a sort of fisherman's stew thing) and I insisted on tasting each element before its cooking began. As former roommate Jeffrey Bernstein can testify, I am consumed with the desire to eat an entire steak raw. Whenever possible I will eat at sushi restaurants, ideally eschewing accouterments and eating only the fish. In the last 1 week, I have eaten raw oysters three times.



I have a lot of friends and acquaintances who will not eat a raw beast, especially not an oyster. This is a shame. Sometimes, like in the case of the dozen exceptions mentioned above, one has to do things that in polite company seem unpleasant or inappropriate, in order to maximize fun.

To quote the Old Dirty Bastard: "Ooh Baby, I like it raw. Ooh Baby, I like it raw."

Blog Wars?

Apparently some heathen barbarians from across the Great Alps have donned their bear skins and whittled new clubs out of winter evergreens in a attempt to cross the Pass in the dead of winter to surprise the bastion of civility and human accomplishment that is The Monstro with some kind of surprise raid. Accoriding the the anger-filled cave etchings found over on Glider Bison, The Monstro has been called to arms and the whole while we have been sitting, sipping tea, and inventing things like geometry while the Glider Bisonites are struggling with the simple concepts behind agriculture. From what I can gather for the barbarian ramblings, The Monstro has been engaged in a "Blog War" which despite being the most advanced civilization on the great globe I cannot exactly figure out how to fight. Our geometers have crafted giants siege engines that can launch boulders hundreds of yards. We have horsemen from the Red Desert that can ride the like wind. We have cannoneers from the colonies and flying machines from the canals of Venice. The great army of The Monstro numbers in the millions and our technology is limitless, but somehow Glider Bison has managed to engage us in a war that we do not know how to fight.

The Bisonites attempted in some form to dictate rules of engagement, but never sent an emissary to our courts, never once engaged in civilized preparation, never once even declared war. They simply posted the decree on their own grounds and waited, patiently, for war to come to them. We Monstronauts are not warlike. We are imperialistic maybe, but we are not bloodythirsty. We march when we see gain. We never are simply sporting for a good fight.

Since the Glider Bison decree went unheeded for a long month and the deadline is coming to a pass without the Generals knowing we would march to battle, I believe the only civilized action is to postpone. The Monstro armies will prepare, and will meet the Bisonites on the field of battle in the next month. Their rules will stand, but their men will fall.

Until that day,

Ur-Chancellor Ozymandias III

sad shit

My dad happened to be born on Christmas Eve so I spend the night celebrating a meal with family like any good WASP. At the end of the night tonight I was driving my great aunt back to her house and cruised by a Target store. It was about 9pm on fucking Christmas Eve and there were at least 30 cars in the lot. I swear if I hadn't had to drop an 88 year old woman off at her house I would have rolled into that Target to witness some sad sad shit. Maybe next year.

A Departure From Our Heritage

I was reading an article in some dumbed-down-for-the-public science magazine that claimed a scientist had developed a drug to help people overcome their fears, like "fear of flying or fear of mice." I began contemplating these two fears. A fear of flying is somewhat understandable. We are descendants of apes, decidedly earth-bound creatures with the only exception being the green winged varietals found in classical cinema. Something deep in one of our many brain cotexes (do we have more than one cortex?) tells our body that getting on a plane could be bad news for the old survival instinct. So some people wig out. Understandable. But why are people afraid of fucking mice? They pose almost no threat to humans unless they shit in your food. But I have seen men scamper from the room at the sight of a mouse. I blame the Victorian era. If pomposity, frilly shirts, and man makeup had never entered our culture, then we would not be afraid of mice. Please excuse me if you are a Renaissance Faire aficionado, but your goddamn costumes are setting back the predatory instincts of humans. Please find a new hobby, like World of Warcraft or Halo 3.

A Partial List Of Movie Trailers That Have Made Me Cry In The Theatre

Jurassic Park II: The Lost World

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

We Are Marshall

Bad Boys II

The Matrix Revolutions

The Dark is Rising

27 Dresses

Constantine

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

Into the Wild

Phenomenon

A Series of Unfortunate Events

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Panic Room

August Rush

Powder

Literal poetry and other observations

When it's rainy out things get wet.
This wetness affects certain things, like paper, worse than others, umbrellas.
If you are walking into the rain it makes it harder to see, you have to squint
and the raincoat is only midly effective, at best.
But then the heavens say, don't take such things so lightly
and a very serious lightning bolt comes to life
coldy scientific, searching for a conductor,
no Yitzchak Perlman here, just the watery nature
of a man's body or a cold steel pole.

Then, a rainbow, to encourage drug use.


So clearly I was w(o)andering around and I made a mental list of things that blow my fucking mind. The criteria for this was greatly aided (as mentioned in prior long blog posts) by my lack of extensive scientific knowledge and was based around the simple principle that if I couldn't understand something and it was useful, it blew my fucking mind.

Eyes
Liver
Oceans (waves)
Rainbows (mainly double or triple ones)
desert mirages
traffic flow
muscle recovery/pain

The Golden Compass = The Anti-Christ

I am not going to preface this rant with any warning about the "spoilers" contained within. If you are the sort of person who gets upset when someone ruins the non-existing plot twists of a movie based on a children's book, then you have stumbled upon this blogue by mistake. Shame on you.

Yesterday I saw the film The Golden Compass. I had high hopes based on two factors: 1) My sister really likes the source material and has talked up the story
2) The trailer made me cry

Now, emotional instability issues aside, movie trailers have always had a special pull on my heartstrings. Maybe it's because, when all cynicism is laid aside, I want very badly to be moved by art and when you distill a 2 hour film down to a minute and a half, with any luck you can concentrate its emotional impact. In a coming post, I will share a partial list of movie trailers that have made me cry.

The Golden Compass is set in a fantastical world, much like our own except sillier. Instead of digital technology and slang, everyone speaks with fake-proper English accents and machines are all driven by shiny gilded gears and pulleys. And what looks like majik. The other key difference between our world and theirs is that in The Golden Compass, people's souls are not internal, but instead projected into the outside world as animal companions. Aside from giving the CG animators something to have fun with, this allows for the film's one Big Idea.

The conflict in the story arises when a girl goes on an adventure for No Reason and comes in contact with a group of Evil Old White Men called The Magistrate. They seem to represent the Catholic Church. The Magistrate wants to use Science to disconnect children from their animal companions, their souls. While the movie does a piss-poor job of explaining why anyone would construct an Evil Plan around something so silly, I have my own feelings on the matter.

The Church does not like the idea that people have a personal, direct relationship to their spirituality. By having a pet soul following you around, you are always aware of the interconnectedness of life and are probably less of a douchebag, although several villains in the film challenge this assumption. The Church wants people to rely on it for their spirituality. The Church does not want people to be able to worship on their own, to feel good about their own souls. Wait, am I talking about the real life Catholic Church or the movie Magistrate? A parallel!

The movie's conflict reminds me of that time the Catholic Church outlawed the identification of Saints by any party other than itself. Only the Church can tell you what is spiritual and what is not. The movie raises the question of autonomous faith. Is it appropriate for people to have that personal connection to the divine, or must Christopher Lee, in a wasteful two-line role, decide for us?

Also, the movie sucked.

Kafka Komedy

It's been awhile since I've shat knowledge on the blogue. The Bad Fog of Loneliness has been disrupting my connectivity, you see. But as I emerge, observations begin to take shape:

Looney Tunes is wonderful.

The classic Wile E. Coyote set-up is the reversal of the joke formula, and for this it is beautiful. The set-up always involves Coyote procuring some sci-fi fantasy, like rocket skates, which he plans to use to capture Road Runner. For eating? For sex? A coyote getting rocket skates? This is absurd, the sort of thing that most jokes use as the punchline. But it gets scarier... the joke comes when the rocket skates malfunction and cause Coyote to fall down a cliff. You see, the joke comes from the Absurd resolving into Reality. This is quite similar to Kafka's classic short story The Metamorphosis, which begins with our protagonist, Gregor Samsa, discovering he's been turned into a giant verminous buggy thing. The story ends with everything going back to normal. Much like gravity overcoming Coyote's batshit schemes.

I'll be looking for more examples, in Looney Tunes, of the comic reversal. I think those tweekers were on to something...

Does Bill O'Reilly read comic books?

Something fun and happy happens to your brain when it gets saturated by modern media. It's this swirling amalgam of information, lies, advertisements, discussions, opinions, and fantasies that sometimes results in two or more totally unrelated subjects inexplicably sticking to each other and creating what kindergarten teachers like to call 'imaginative thinking.'
I have recently been dosing myself with choice YouTube clips of Bill O'Reilly rants courtesy of the folks over at Newshounds. On the surface, this man seems pretty crazy. But he's also sharp. It's obvious that to a certain extent he is aware of the persona that he is creating for himself. He has built up Bill O'Reilly and part of being Bill O'Reilly is behaving how Bill O'Reilly is supposed to behave. He has made himself into a national figure, but by doing so in the form of entertainment news, he's made himself into a character as well.
I was watching Bill O'Reilly clips simply for the sake of entertainment. I am entertained by Bill O'Reilly's belligerent behavior with his guests as well as his boneheaded opinions. I wouldn't watch Bill O'Reilly anymore if he stopped behaving like I expect him to behave. If he were to stop being his character and start being a 'real person,' I wouldn't watch him any more. Nobody watches Katie Couric clips online.
So Bill has created this big angry character. The opinionated, misogynistic, totalitarian news man. Not in search of THE truth, but HIS truth. The more I thought on this character that is Bill O'Reilly, I realized that it isn't even an original one. Bill O'Reilly, one of the most noticeable news figures in America, is a ripoff of a comic book.
J. Jonah Jameson is the head of the Daily Bugle, the newspaper from the famous comic book series Spider-Man. He's a loud egomaniac who runs the Daily Bugle with an iron fist. Jameson has a decidedly negative opinion of Spider-Man, and dedicates much of his time skewing facts and photographs to make Spider-Man appear as a villain to the general public. Jameson doesn't listen to anyone elses opinion on the matter. He's decided Spider-Man is a bad guy and tries to prove it, with or without the facts. Jameson is often portrayed stamping around his office smoking the stub of a cigar and ranting to his employees. Take the cigar away and Jameson could be a pretty good double for our good friend Bill.
I'm not necessarily insinuating that Bill O'Reilly was flipping through his Spider-Man collection and at that moment decided to make himself a media icon. I imagine the character of J. Jonah Jameson is itself of blend of others. What Bill O'Reilly did, and what Marvel comcis did, was take a recognizable persona and turn it into a compelling character that people love to hate. The crazy part is how popular the character is. J. Jonah Jameson has been in Amazing Spider-Man since the very first issue in 1963. Bill O'Reilly is one of the most recognized faces on television. For whatever reason, American culture is drawn towards this type of character.
Jameson is the perfect contrast for Spider-Man. As much as he tries to demonize Spidey, the hero ultimately shines all the brighter to the furious dismay of our angry news hothead. Perhaps Bill O'Reilly plays the same role. Maybe we need him spouting nonsense on TV because we need to hear that voice. We need someone shouting untruths to make us take stock of reality and define it for ourselves.