Yoga Is Evil
"It gets really spooky," says one of this nation's most revered intellectuals.
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November 30, 2007
Atheists
From Reuters:
"Pope Benedict, in a new encyclical released on Friday, said atheism was responsible for some of the "greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice" in history. . . "It is no accident that this idea has led to the greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice," the Pope said. Such a concept was grounded in "intrinsic falsity".Ah yes, the great atheist crusades -- all the atheist wars -- what a bunch of violent SOBs.
Classy!
Have I mentioned that advertiser fealty in journalism is a forty-pound cannonball launched into the face of truth? Even when it comes to writing game reviews. From Kotaku:"We've heard an unsettling rumor today from an anonymous tipster that longtime game reviewer Jeff Gerstmann from Gamespot has been let go. That wouldn't necessarily be newsworthy, but the conditions under which he was allegedly dismissed were. According to the source, Gerstmann was fired "on the spot" due to advertiser pressure for his review of Eidos' Kane & Lynch: Dead Men. A visit to Gamespot shows that the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 game has taken over the site very prominently, with backgrounds and multiple banner ads all pitching Kane & Lynch. Allegedly, publisher Eidos "took issue with the review and threatened to pull its ad campaign."
Classy!
November 29, 2007
The Joker
Can an actor I always thought was kind of a mediocre pretty boy who belonged in teen romance flicks tackle one of the most interesting characters ever created (assuming we're talking Frank Miller)? I have no idea. After watching Hayden Christensen (who I think is comparable) turn Anakin Skywalker into a one-dimensial sniveling shitheel, I'm not particularly optimistic.
As an aside I just saw No Country For Old Men, and the Coens created one of the creepiest villains ever put on film. The Joker, as he's supposed to be written, should make that guy look like Fred Rogers.
Blade Runner Meets The Dentist
More than a little creepy Japanese robot used to train would be dentists. From Pinktentacle:
"Simroid, a robotic dental patient with an eerily realistic appearance, has been spotted at the 2007 International Robot Exhibition in Tokyo. Designed primarily as a training tool for dentists, the fembot patient can follow spoken instructions, closely monitor a dentist’s performance during mock treatments, and react in a human-like way to mouth pain. Because Simroid’s realistic appearance and behavior motivate people to treat her like a human being, as opposed to an object, she helps dental trainees learn how to better communicate with patients."
Jason Hackenwerth
Balloon sculptures by Jason Hackenwerth. (via)
The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks
I've never accepted "the meme" that you need to blog in a very focused niche in order to be "successful" because as a person whose "fulfilled" by a cup of good coffee and a patch of sunshine, I've never really given a shit about "being successful." But as the Internet grows, it's important to note just how "niche" bloggers feel they need to be. Today I discovered this gem, which is dedicated to the use of "unnecessary" quotation marks.
November 28, 2007
Back To Work
I'm back from Austin (where I learned the difference between "gig 'em" and "hook 'em"), and I'm headed back to work.
Whoops
"US forces mistakenly killed at least a dozen road construction workers in air strikes in eastern Afghanistan, Afghan officials said today.As many as 14 engineers and labourers were killed in the incident on Monday in Nuristan province, which officials blamed on faulty intelligence, possibly fed out by the Taliban.
The workers, who had been contracted by the US military to build a road in the mountainous province, were sleeping in their tents when they were killed, according to Sayed Noorullah Jalili, director of the road construction company Amerifa.
"All of our poor workers have been killed," Jalili said. "I don't think the Americans were targeting our people. I'm sure it's the enemy of the Afghans who gave the Americans this wrong information."
I'm the kind of crazy mother fucker who thinks you should know who you're killing before you kill them.
Badass Bible Verses
The Bible: book of love.
November 19, 2007
Sesame Street Too Hardcore For Modern Tots
From The Consumerist
:
"The producers of Sesame Street have slapped volumes 1 & 2 of the eternally running children's show with the following warning: "These early 'Sesame Street' episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today's preschool child." Why? Cookie Monster carries a pipe in one recurring parody—and then eats it. Oscar the Grouch is too grouchy and mean. And in the first episode, a grown man—Gordon—asks a little girl to come home with him for milk and cookies... and she does!
Shane Willis
MC Mechanic -- an homage to M.C. Escher. (via)
November 16, 2007
Matthew Klane, Doug Rogers
Two shots from last weekend's High Watermark Salon, which is something put on every two months or so by our friend and poet Lori Anderson Moseman. Like myself, Lori was hit hard by last year's flooding, and turned their second residence into a church for art. Well, a church for art with great food and two of the coolest dogs ever born.
The top shot is of Albany poet and Flim Forum Press co-editor Matthew Klane, who performed MK Ultra, a hypnotic ode to cult and conspiracy. The bottom is a piss-poor shot of Doug Rogers, who, along with his accordion, probably played the best music I've heard all year.
The former is a fascinating and very cool guy -- whose chapbook The- Associated Press Deb currently has me digging into. His presentation style is fantastic -- he delivers the words rhythmically like water from an ancient spigot of knowledge -- directly onto the impatient instant gratification palate of his audience.
The latter is a former NYC actor, author, song writer and guitarist who told me he has no music out in circulation, something I suggested really needed fixing. His business was just brilliant, and if he would have had home-brewed CDs there to buy I would have bought three.
Two of the most interesting and friendly people I've probably met this year.
Have I mentioned my girlfriend, who fearlessly connects my broken, stubborn old synapses to the outside world, is like an intravenous injection of right-brain bliss? She's a divining rod for interesting art and amazing people. She's taking this Yankee to Austin next week....
A Simple Graph
Jesus?
November 14, 2007
A Correction
A real correction that the Associated Press ran yesterday:
"(11-13) 15:44 PST GAUHATI, India (AP) --In a Nov. 13 story, The Associated Press incorrectly reported that Paris Hilton was praised by conservationists for highlighting the problem of binge-drinking elephants in northeastern India. Lori Berk, a publicist for Hilton, said she never made any comments about helping drunken elephants in India."
I'm glad that's all sorted out.
November 13, 2007
Spread My Ashes At Disneyland, Honey
"Just this past Friday a Cast Member watching the security cameras noticed a woman in the back of a boat throwing a powdery substance into the lavishly decorated sets in the cavern scenes near the beginning of the ride. Even though Pirates is a 15 minute long ride, by the time the lady spreading the substance returned to the loading area Security had yet to arrive.The college age Cast Members operating the attraction knew that legally they were not supposed to detain anyone, and when they confronted her about what she was doing in the cameras she told them she was only throwing baby powder around. The woman quickly disappeared out the exit, never to be seen again, but she'd actually left more than baby powder all over the Pirates of the Caribbean.
Security and the police finally arrived, and the ride was shut down on a busy afternoon of a holiday weekend. The ash was identified by the Anaheim Police as cremated remains, and the custodial department found most of it all over the "Captain's Quarters" scene in the caverns. The woman had done a very thorough job of spreading the ash everywhere though, and after an hour of cleaning with the HEPA vacuums there was still work to be done. "
November 12, 2007
Menomena: Evil Bee
November 09, 2007
What Would Jesus Buy?
A new film coming up by Supersize Me's Morgan Spurlock:
The film features "Reverend BIlly," a minister of anti-consumerism created by Spurlock.
It's interesting to me that the most effective messengers of humanism and consumer advocacy these days are satirical characters. I've seen guys like Stephen Colbert do more good as artificial humans than real consumer advocates have done the last fifteen years.
I think that ties into my belief that consumer advocacy is undergoing a necessary radicalization in order to counter-balance corporate disinformation efforts. Were I an academic paid to pontificate I might expand painfully on this opinion ad nauseum.
However, given it's Friday and I'm just a blogger trying to make a measly living, I think I'll go have a Wolaver's IPA.
They're a Vermont brewer my girlfriend and I have fallen in love with.
Some tasty business, if you sinners are into that sort of thing.
City of Eggs
(Link
Dubya
Reuters photo series.
November 08, 2007
Writers Explain The Strike
The Writers Guild of America explains to overweight Americans why 24 is delayed.
I'm torn between solidarity and disinterest, given my writing gig requires I ceaselessly and thanklessly shit out a wall of content daily or face being replaced by a digg bobble. I'm pretty sure if dot-com tech writers decided to strike, we'd be replaced by a refurbished Tandy before we'd stowed our Eee PC in our rucksack.
Having watched poets struggle to so much as publish a chapbook that sells a handful of copies -- a world where you'd make a minimum of $31,879 a week for writing a soap opera is alien phrenology.
Stll, knowing how these companies operate, I'm all for artists getting what's owed. NBC Universal is the type of entity that would pay its artists in severed puppy heads and glass baubles, if they could pay lawmakers enough to turn the other cheek.
I still think you View writers are intellectually cancerous halfwits who wouldn't last five seconds in the two-way-communication, no-life insurance, 'what the fuck is a 401k' world inhabited by most writers...
But godspeed all the same!
November 07, 2007
Pilobolus
From the Pilobolus dance group.
Stephen Colbert Takes On Rick Berman (AKA Dr. Evil)
Anyone who listens to me ramble for more than ten minutes knows my least favorite human beings are PR flacks who pretend to be consumer advocates. These are the kind of people who call smoking cancer concerns anti-consumer "junk science" -- after being paid by the Tobacco industry to attack the truth.
They sleep like babies at night, too.
One of the greasiest of them is Rick Berman, with whom Stephen Colbert has a little fun:
Guffaw! Chortle! But the public still doesn't understand just how insidious these guys are.
They hide under the LIbertarian, pro-consumer, pro-freedom banner in order to excite people politically, but they're pure corporatist. Their goal is SOLELY to ensure that industry profits are not impacted in ANY fashion, be they by seat-belt and airbag laws or unionized labor. The entire consumer-advocacy front is an utter farce. Men like Berman are propaganda ministers for hire, nothing more.
If folks like Stanford Professor Larry Lessig truly wants to tackle corruption, the corporate America disinformation machine is where he needs to start.
One solution of course is a press that properly marginalizes these guys as paid public relations officers and not objective experts (or worse, consumer advocates).
Since we won't see that, another possibility is a law that says corporations, politicians and their litany of PR tendrils can participate in the public discourse in line with free-speech rights, but only as the sponsor with painfully clear notification of where funding originates.
Like faith-healers on TV who suck money from the nation's elderly, guys like Berman are the kind of vampire this country likes to overlook while pretending no real damage is done.
We've become a nation soaking in propaganda from swift-boat-veterans to fake consumer advocates, and someone other than a handful of academics and under-funded (real) consumer advocates needs to begin taking notice.
I keep coming back to the idea that there's a looming radicalization of the consumer advocacy movement that begins with the Consumerist and Stephen Colbert, and ends with real change. Maybe I'm just being optimistic.
I remember an interview with author Warren Ellis from several years ago, where he had this to say:
"There is such a thing as truth. Non-relative, unassailable, valuable truth. Do not let people relativise the concept of truth into vapour."That is precisely what men like Rick Berman are paid to do.
November 06, 2007
War is Fine. Porn is Evil.
As I've noted, I recently signed up for the American Family Association newsletter and have found it's probably the most entertaining thing in my inbox each month.
Whether they're trying to ban Walmart from selling Brokeback Mountain DVDs, or sweating heavily in their pastel suits because a cheeseburger ad has a breast in it, the family values crusaders are a great source of free entertainment.
Alternet notes that their latest crusade concerns the war(s). No, they're not bothered by the fact that countless civilians are dying. They're also non-plussed by the fact that 2007 was the bloodiest year on record in Iraq.
Their primary worry is that the troops are able to purchase Penthouse at army bases.
The AFA's Wikipedia entry should be updated: not too bothered by years of violent death, extreme institutional corruption and the raping of the poor, but becomes sheepish and whines like a child in the presence of an exposed vagina.
Steampunk Laptop
From the Steampunk workshop.
November 05, 2007
The Writers' Strike
From the Huffington Post:
"Film and TV writers prepared to go on strike Monday for the first time in two decades to break what has become a high-stakes stalemate with the world's largest media companies over profits from DVDs and programming on the Internet. . . During the 1988 writers strike, Letterman, then host of NBC's "Late Night," and longtime "Tonight Show" host Johnny Carson initially went off the air but later returned as the walkout dragged on for 22 weeks and cost the industry about $500 million. Daytime TV, including live talk shows such as "The View" and soap operas, which typically tape about a week's worth of shows in advance, would be next to feel the impact.Dear god, I'm sure the sophisticated logistics it will take to keep THE VIEW's savage creativity operating at peak intellectual capacity will be staggering.
We full time dot-com bloggers (I've been doing it for eight years now) would love to strike for such luxuries as direct deposit or yearly raises, if we weren't already a hair away from being replaced by a line of digg-style code and/or an overweight teenager from Akron willing to work for a free ham sandwich.
You Hollywood writers think you have it tough? Try writing every day on the Internet with an open comment section that invites the nation's most bat-shit insane housebound verbal pugilists to launch verbal diarrhea on your work. I've had death threats in real time for criticizing people's favorite graphics card manufacturer, while you were gabbing it up with the cast of As the World Turns. and lamenting that you're not getting additional YouTube revenue.
You folks in push media have it easy. Let me write the View for a few weeks. My first episode is already scripted out, and involves re-animating the corpse of the late Bill Hicks, and unleashing him on your panel of lobotomized mall victims for a full hour.
Eight Limbs
Harris Diamant
Ron Pippin
Ron Pippin engages in strange blend of taxidermy and mixed media/found object art. (via)
November 02, 2007
Stephane Halleux
Pneumatic Anatomica
Deviant Art user Freeny shows us what the inside of balloon animals consist of...
Jean Pierre Lepine
Because really, who doesn't need a $150 pen that looks like a combination roller skate, sex toy and torture device.
November 01, 2007
The Escapist: Zero Punctuation
I only just stumbled into these guys a few months ago. Some of the most amusing video game reviews in the business.