Wednesday, November 25, 2009

HANGING IT UP FOR TURKEY DAY














I was going to press on, posting shit regardless, through this oddly inappropriate holiday. I was feeling unable to connect with even the concept of a holiday of excessive eating and drinking while I’m still trying to figure out if we’re in terminal freefall or what. But everyone seems to be heading home, and Facebook is choked by the idle, so what the decked hall? I can’t fight a massive native flightless bird, thus I leave you to the butterball orgy with some truce facts from Delancey Place, plus a puzzlement as to why there’s no real Thanksgiving music. (I mean, where is Elvis singing “Blue Turkey”?) Be seeing you.

“Author Tony Horwitz muses on the discovery of America after hearing from a Plymouth Rock tour guide named Claire that the most common question from tourists was why the date etched on the rock was 1620 instead of 1492: 'People think Columbus dropped off the Pilgrims and sailed home.' Claire had to patiently explain that Columbus's landing and the Pilgrims' arrival occurred a thousand miles and 128 years apart. ..."By the time the first English settled, other Europeans had already reached half of the forty-eight states that today make up the continental United States. One of the earliest arrivals was Giovanni da Verrazzano, who toured the Eastern Seaboard in 1524, almost a full century before the Pilgrims arrived. ... Even less remembered are the Portuguese pilots who steered Spanish ships along both coasts of the continent in the sixteenth century, probing upriver to Bangor, Maine, and all the way to Oregon. ... In 1542, Spanish conquistadors completed a reconnaissance of the continent's interior: scaling the Appalachians, rafting the Mississippi, peering down the Grand Canyon, and galloping as far inland as central Kansas. ..."The Spanish didn't just explore: they settled, from the Rio Grande to the Atlantic. Upon founding St. Augustine, the first European city on U.S. soil, the Spanish gave thanks and dined with Indians-fifty-six years before the Pilgrim Thanksgiving at Plymouth. ... Plymouth, it turned out, wasn't even the first English colony in New England. That distinction belonged to Fort St. George, in Popham, Maine. Nor were the Pilgrims the first to settle Massachusetts. In 1602, a band of English built a fort on the island of Cuttyhunk. They came, not for religious freedom, but to get rich from digging sassafras, a commodity prized in Europe as a cure for the clap. ..."The Pilgrims, and later, the Americans who pushed west from the Atlantic, didn't pioneer a virgin wilderness. They occupied a land long since transformed by European contact. ... Samoset, the first Indian the Pilgrims met at Plymouth, greeted the settlers in English. The first thing he asked for was beer." -- Tony Horwitz, A Voyage Long and Strange

The secret word is Cranberry

THE FROZDICK FAMILY WOULD LIKE TO REMIND YOU…


...just remember while you’re feasting – Soylent Green is people!

I TOLD YOU SHE WAS AN ALIEN


(Image supplied by Aeswiren)

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

KILLING THE BLUE PLANET


I suspect I am making an unseemly big deal about the return to reality. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it. Worse things exist in this world than Sarah Palin. (Although, sometimes as the she-alien moves, unbidden, across my TV screen, and Frank Rich validates the monster in the NYT, I find them hard to enumerate.) One of those worse things might well be today’s discovery that – while we freely accept the North Pole is rapidly turning into a salt water Slurpee – the South Pole is in much worse shape than we ever previously imagined…

“The East Antarctic icesheet, once seen as largely unaffected by global warming, has lost billions of tonnes of ice since 2006 and could boost sea levels in the future, according to a new study. Published Sunday in Nature Geoscience, the same study shows that the smaller but less stable West Antarctic icesheet is also shedding significant mass.
Scientists worry that rising global temperatures could trigger a rapid disintegration of West Antarctica, which holds enough frozen water to push up the global ocean watermark by about five metres (16 feet).”
(Click here for the whole story)

The secret word is Malfunction

DESPERATE FUN WITH POETRY #1


Awake.
Shake dreams from your hair
My pretty child, my sweet one.
Choose the day and choose the sign of your day
The day's divinity
First thing you see.
A vast radiant beach and cooled jeweled moon
Couples naked race down by it's quiet sideAnd we laugh like soft, mad children
Smug in the wooly cotton brains of infancy
The music and voices are all around us.
Choose they croon the Ancient OnesThe time has come again
Choose now, they croon
Beneath the moon
Beside an ancient lake

These are the first three stanzas of Jim Morrison’s “Ghost Dance.” They precede the bits about scattered Indians and the child’s eggshell mind, the ones we all should know. And this, below, is the last. It seems kinda apt to mood, aye?

A city rises from the sea
I had a splitting headache
From which the future's made

Click here for the video.

GRATUITOUS BARDOT


THIS BLOG IS STILL PROTECTED BY...


Monday, November 23, 2009

PART OF THE PROBLEM



Part of the problem is that immediately I adjust my set, this woman will appear. She is becoming inescapable in any situation involving electricity and a screen. The unwanted corporate inanities that appear during the morning boot-up were already discussing whether this Newsweek cover was “sexist.” And I found myself murmuring “Who gives a fuck. She stood still for the fucking picture, and she wants to be our fucking President. Unless Newsweek has adopted Fox-style fakery, she owns her own ass. The real question is who in their right mind would allow this She-Thing-From-The-Warp-of-Evil access to nuclear weapons?” How say you, neighbors? Sexist or reptilian, like the 1983 version of V? Maybe we culture-up an attack rumor that Palin is a pageant-disguised extraterrestrial? Is the nation so insane such a tale might find traction? Nazi flying saucers over Alaska? But a short hop from the deep Draco fissures of Tibet. A scenario starts to unfold, but I fear it is too complex, even for the History Channel and certainly for Glenn Beck who will never graduate from the FEMA Camp.

The secret word is Vril

BUT THE AZTECS HAD A SOLUTION


Sometimes the reentry to dire reality from a Sunday on the lam isn’t easy. When part of the cure for what ails me comes from those dispensaries with green crosses that call themselves “caregivers” here in SoCal, and are spreading with the alarming alacrity of Starbucks in yesteryear, even the focusing of my eyes requires a certain effort of will and a degree of voluntary thought. Yes, 21st century reefer is stronger than 1960’s reefer, but shut up about it. We like it that way. Having said that, I must also note that the Aztecs were sufficiently fucked up for centuries during which they forgot to invent the wheel in any other functional form except the yo-yo. (The image is from the lovely and talented Valerie.)

Click here for The Ramones, in sequence they follow The Three Stooges.

SPACE OPERA


The fat lady is, at the very least, clearing her throat.

Sunday, November 22, 2009

SUNDAY ON THE LAM FROM REALITY


The God Particles had raised a pyramid for the purpose of worship, constructed from the dead eyes of burned out media receivers. The nano-thralls were in the bloodstream. We tingled as they commenced the full reconstruction. All too soon the membrane would be compromised and humanity would merge sufficiently with the other/nether so we would wholly cease to signify as an independent entity. Siegfried was definitely doomed, but that hardly mattered any more to anyone but Siegfried. Velma verged on happy. The bites of conversant data were now being delivered in progressively more minute package. They would no longer hold complex concepts or even sustain sub-erotica. For Velma this was a relief. The bastions no longer vibrated and congealed into slow organic decay. They were instantly bypassed and erased from recall functions. The crucial remaining question was simply if it was safe to approach the pyramid? Or was this merely another phase of the entrapment. Maybe we had no remaining rights to be read to us. On the other hand, was it safe to remain where we were, and not to approach the pyramid? Previous God Particles had not taken kindly to rejection. Indeed, they had flamed with the rage of neglected courtesans, burning all before them into pink and black ash, and insisting it was the price of failure. We survivors had to face the fact. We didn’t have the price of failure between us. We barely had enough for a round of drinks. Our options had run out. We approached the pyramid. But we approached it slowly. And with care.

A secret word would not
Make Sense

SUNDAY ON THE LAM FROM REALITY 2


In a similar time space, the young women discovered that the product of a mating between narcissism and zero-ethic opulence increasingly emerged as a spawn of recreational homicide.

Click here for The Three Stooges, but in sequence, please.

SUNDAY ON THE LAM FROM REALITY 3


Although technically an alien, even Superman sought the tactile relief of public humiliation in acts of voluntary subjugation that were both invert and abject. He claimed it was part of his assimilation into the culture of his adopted species, and that, on Krypton, it was mandatory. Of course, in the matter of the latter, he was lying.

THE FROZDICK FAMILY









Brunhilde Frozdick was the first to notice the camera.