IT’S ELVIS DAY

Today is Elvis Presley’s birthday, a date we never fail to celebrate here at Doc40. As time passes, though, it becomes hard once more to reiterate the impact of the man on both my life and world culture in the 20th century and after. Even with Elvis, the time comes when one starts to run short on new approaches to the celebration. I guess we could take this picture as something of a metaphor. I mean, there’s Elvis so way-cool on his Harley, but who the fuck are the two fat squares standing behind him? Conservative harbingers of the calories and compromises to come?

Click here for Elvis (and the legendary Boots Randolph)

The secret words are Thank You.

IF YOU COULD IMAGINE IT, THERE WAS A MAGAZINE ABOUT IT

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THE FROZDICK FAMILY

When Leni and Reni Frozdick had their peasant-costume threesome with Adolf, it raised more than a few eyebrows.

IS THIS THE DOC40 ADVICE COLUMN?

BATS DIE

I really don’t want to engage in End Times alarmism, if for no other reason than Christians who believe the Rapture is coming at any minute can be downright dangerous. The modern world, on the other hand, is becoming frighteningly like a stress-toxic pressure cooker with the seals about to blow. Bees, birds, and now bats are all dropping dead. This latest horror story comes from DTA.

"In February 2006 some 40 miles west of Albany, N.Y., a caver photographed hibernating bats with an unusual white substance on their muzzles. He noticed several dead bats. The following winter, bats behaving erratically, bats with white noses, and a few hundred dead bats in several caves came to the attention of New York Department of Environmental Conservation biologists, who documented white-nose syndrome in January 2007. More than a million hibernating bats have died since. Biologists with state and federal agencies and organizations across the country are still trying to find the answer to this deadly mystery. We have found sick, dying and dead bats in unprecedented numbers in and around caves and mines from New Hampshire to Tennessee. In some hibernacula, 90 to 100 percent of the bats are dying. While they are in the hibernacula, affected bats often have white fungus on their muzzles and other parts of their bodies. They may have low body fat. These bats often move to cold parts of the hibernacula, fly during the day and during cold winter weather when the insects they feed upon are not available, and exhibit other uncharacteristic behavior. Despite the continuing search to find the source of this condition by numerous laboratories and state and federal biologists, the cause of the bat deaths remains unknown. A newly discovered cold-loving fungus, Geomyces destructans, invades the skin of bats. Scientists are exploring how the fungus acts and searching for a way to stop it." (Click here for more)

Click here for Bauhaus

The secret word is Extinct

CATS LIE

Research revels what has long been well known by those who live among them. Cats are deceitful creatures.

ScienceDaily (Jan. 4, 2011) — A cat regularly vomiting hairballs or refusing to eat probably isn't being finicky or otherwise "cat-like," despite what conventional wisdom might say. There is a good chance that the cat is acting sick because of the stress caused by changes in its environment, new research suggests. Healthy cats were just as likely as chronically ill cats to refuse food, vomit frequently and leave waste outside their litter box in response to changes in their routine, according to the Ohio State University study. Veterinary clinicians refer to these acts as sickness behaviors. (Click here for more)

A POWERFUL WEAPON AGAINST BOURGEOIS SOCIETY?

What the hell, just click here and find out for yourself. (Courtesy of Jon.)

DON'T YOU MISS THE 20TH CENTURY?

THIS IS MIKEY. HE’S A TERRORIST

From The New York Times...
The Transportation Security Administration, under scrutiny after last month’s bombing attempt, has on its Web site a “mythbuster” that tries to reassure the public.
Myth: The No-Fly list includes an 8-year-old boy.
Buster: No 8-year-old is on a T.S.A. watch list.
“Meet Mikey Hicks,” said Najlah Feanny Hicks, introducing her 8-year-old son, a New Jersey Cub Scout and frequent traveler who has seldom boarded a plane without a hassle because he shares the name of a suspicious person. “It’s not a myth.” Michael Winston Hicks’s mother initially sensed trouble when he was a baby and she could not get a seat for him on their flight to Florida at an airport kiosk; airline officials explained that his name “was on the list,” she recalled. The first time he was patted down, at Newark Liberty International Airport, Mikey was 2. He cried. After years of long delays and waits for supervisors at every airport ticket counter, this year’s vacation to the Bahamas badly shook up the family. Mikey was frisked on the way there, then more aggressively on the way home.
“Up your arms, down your arms, up your crotch — someone is patting your 8-year-old down like he’s a criminal,” Mrs. Hicks recounted. “A terrorist can blow his underwear up and they don’t catch him. But my 8-year-old can’t walk through security without being frisked.” It is true that Mikey is not on the federal government’s “no-fly” list, which includes about 2,500 people, less than 10 percent of them from the United States. But his name appears to be among some 13,500 on the larger “selectee” list, which sets off a high level of security screening. At some point, someone named Michael Hicks made the Department of Homeland Security suspicious, and little Mikey is still paying the price. (His father, also named Michael Hicks, was stopped for the first time on the Bahamas trip.) Both lists are maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center, which includes the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They are given to the Transportation Security Administration, which in turn sends them to the airlines. A spokesman for the T.S.A., James Fotenos, said that as a rule, “there are no children on the no-fly or selectee lists,” but would not comment on Mikey’s situation specifically. Click here for more

Click here for the Rolling Stones

The secret word is Disorder

APOCALYPSE 2

Although the mainstream media is still mostly treating the falling birds and related phenomena as something of a joke, large numbers of our friends and neighbours are finding it highly disturbing. Click here for George Noury on his Coast To Coast radio show out of Las Vegas. And while you’re getting pissed off – or if you prefer your propaganda short and fragmented – click here.

THEY SAY IT TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE

GRATUITOUS DIANA DORS

(Well, I am back in England.)

WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?

I have no idea what’s going on here except that I have consumed (and created) more than enough science fiction to know that thousands of fish washing up dead and flocks of birds dropping from the sky is a extremely bad sign. In popular culture such occurrences are portents of something Biblical, extraterrestrial, or from the black helicopter shadowland. You can choose your personal favorite in evil omens. Me? I’m reserving judgment and waiting to see what happens next. Here’s a Huffpo round up of the news stories. It at least gives an idea of how many of these occurrences have occurred.

“Millions of dead fish surfaced in Maryland's Chesapeake Bay in the U.S., Tuesday, while similar unexplained mass fish deaths occurred across the world in Brazil and New Zealand. On Wednesday, 50 birds were found dead on a street in Sweden. The news come after recents reports of mysterious massive bird and fish deaths days prior in Arkansas and Louisiana. The Baltimore Sun reports that an estimated 2 million fish were found dead in the Chesapeake Bay, mostly adult spot with some juvenile croakers in the mix, as well. Maryland Department of the Environment spokesperson Dawn Stoltzfus says "cold-water stress" is believed to be the culprit. She told The Sun that similar large winter fish deaths were documented in 1976 and 1980.” Click here for more

Click here for The Band

The secret word is Creepy

Gerry Rafferty – RIP

THE CONSPIRACY CONGEALS

Click here for a video explanation forwarded by our good pal Helga LA that covers the New World Order/black helicopter school of paranoia. It accounts for the birds that came down in Arkansas but takes no account of the episodes in Sweden and elsewhere.

ABEL FERRARA’S GO GO TALES IS FINALLY SCREENED

The Abel Ferrara film Go Go Tales has finally been given a New York release after being shelved for almost three years. The Village Voice reported…

“A highly personal movie, Go Go Tales finds Ferrara in a frenzied yet pensive mode. Virtually the entire movie is set within the tawdry NYC confines of Ray Ruby’s Paradise, an institution that equally suggests an off–Wall Street titty bar and the magic theater from Steppenwolf (and was constructed for the movie in Rome’s Cinecittà studios). Paradise’s nonstop sweat-perfumed hubbub is immediately established with a blast of Archie Bell & the Drells to herald the contortions of a hula-hooping stripper. The beat goes on for some 90 minutes of choreographed pole-writhing, lap-dancing, and flamboyant backstage catastrophes—notably a tanning-bed fire—interspersed with the machinations of club proprietor and compulsive gambler Ray Ruby (up-for-anything Willem Dafoe) as he dodges his numerous creditors and schemes to game the Lotto.”

Click here for the trailer. The heads up came from Dangerous Minds

DON'T YOU MISS THE 20TH CENTURY?

BIG BROTHER JUST GOT BIGGER

All the better to watch you with…

“In ancient times, Gorgon was a mythical Greek creature whose unblinking eyes turned to stone those who beheld them. In modern times, Gorgon may be one of the military's most valuable new tools. This winter, the Air Force is set to deploy to Afghanistan what it says is a revolutionary airborne surveillance system called Gorgon Stare, which will be able to transmit live video images of physical movement across an entire town. The system, made up of nine video cameras mounted on a remotely piloted aircraft, can transmit live images to soldiers on the ground or to analysts tracking enemy movements. It can send up to 65 different images to different users; by contrast, Air Force drones today shoot video from a single camera over a "soda straw" area the size of a building or two. With the new tool, analysts will no longer have to guess where to point the camera, said Maj. Gen. James O. Poss, the Air Force's assistant deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. "Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we're looking at, and we can see everything." Click here for more

The secret word is Hide

BUT…

Now you can get a drone of your own.

ALTHOUGH YOU DON’T HAVE TO WORRY…

The world is about to end anyway. (Word from Doug the Bass)

“RALEIGH, N.C. – If there had been time, Marie Exley would have liked to start a family. Instead, the 32-year-old Army veteran has less than six months left, which she'll spend spreading a stark warning: Judgment Day is almost here. Exley is part of a movement of Christians loosely organized by radio broadcasts and websites, independent of churches and convinced by their reading of the Bible that the end of the world will begin May 21, 2011. To get the word out, they're using billboards and bus stop benches, traveling caravans of RVs and volunteers passing out pamphlets on street corners. Cities from Bridgeport, Conn., to Little Rock, Ark., now have billboards with the ominous message, and mission groups are traveling through Latin America and Africa to spread the news outside the U.S. "A lot of people might think, 'The end's coming, let's go party,'" said Exley, a veteran of two deployments in Iraq. "But we're commanded by God to warn people. I wish I could just be like everybody else, but it's so much better to know that when the end comes, you'll be safe." Click here for more

Click here for Blind Willie Johnson

A TRUE TESTIMONIAL

Our good friend Jon of Poetry Is For Assholes sent the following…

“I have a friend, a former bad boy. He used to sell rolls of bennies at the truck stops on 1-99 in the fifties. From there he went on to buying bulk methedrine from pharmaceutical warehouses and selling it to the San Francisco Hells Angels. His amphetamine fueled story went on for some years after that. He's not that guy any more. In fact, he counsels street schizophrenic addicts. Consequently he follows the literature, popular and professional, on street drugs. I dropped by his apartment this morning and he pulled out a copy of "Speedfreak". He showed it to me and said, "This is a really interesting book. Have you ever heard of this guy? " As a speedfreak from back in the day he says you got it right. I thought you might like the words of appreciation. By the way, did you know that if you spray bug spray on an old window screen and let it dry, you can scrape it off in powder form, snort it or shoot it and get "high"? That's the kind of shit his clients do when they can't afford good drugs.”

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

After a couple of drinks, Lola Frozdick was a fun date.

I NEITHER LIKE NOR TRUST POLITICIANS BUT IN HER CASE I MIGHT MAKE AN EXCEPTION

Brazil’s first female President, Dilma Rousseff has been sworn into office. She is a former Marxist guerilla who was imprisoned and tortured during the brutal military dictatorship in the 1970s after she was involved in a series of bank robberies. “That at times this tough path made me value and love life much more. It gave me, more than anything else, courage to confront even bigger challenges. It’s with this courage that I’m going to govern Brazil.”

The secret word is Plausible

Anne Francis – RIP
Pete Postlethwaite – RIP

CHUCK COLLAPSES

From The Chicago Sun Times
“Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Famer Chuck Berry collapsed over his keyboards about an hour into his “Winter Dance” show before a standing-room only crowd Saturday night at the Congress Theater. The 84-year-old Berry’s head lay on a keyboard, and he didn’t move for a couple of minutes before he was helped off stage by three people shortly before 10:30 p.m. He returned 20 minutes later after most of the auditorium had cleared out. He tuned up his guitar and tried to play before telling the audience he had no strength. He then did a variation of his legendary duck walk off stage. A Chicago Fire Department ambulance was called to the theater on the Northwest Side, and emergency crews gave Berry a check-up at the scene, Fire Department Spokesman Joe Roccasalva said. But he said he “felt better” and signed a refusal for further medical treatment, Roccasalva said.
Berry flew into Chicago after performing two New Year’s Eve shows at B.B. King’s Blues Club and Grill in New York City. The St. Louis-based legend was having trouble connecting with his Chicago-based pick-up band all night. In a rare moment earlier in the show, Berry even cast aside his guitar and took over the keyboards to play “Let it Rock.” He performed his best-known hits like “Roll Over Beethoven” in slow, disjointed tempos and when he hit stride with more appropriate understated material like “Everyday I Have the Blues,” he stopped halfway through the song. The only tune he was able to muscle through was his 1972 novelty hit, “My Ding-A-Ling,” which featured a call and response with his adoring fans.”

It’s hard to know what to say about Chuck. On one hand he’s a mean, unlikable, old man who likes to denigrate his audiences, this women, even his own talent, not to mention the cheap pick-up bands and the embarrasment of “My Ding-A-Ling”. And yet, at the same time, he’s one of America’s greatest poets and composers and a virtuoso guitarist when he bothers.

Click here for Chuck in better times

NOW I’M IN THE UK I KINDA MISS STEPHEN COLBERT

SPACE OPERA

Dan and Mrs. Dare take their alien monkey on vacation.

SUNDAY BREAKFAST

One of the major changes in my emotional environment since I made it back to England is that I am no longer a thrall of the 24 hour cable news cycle. No more Keith Olbermann, no more Rachel Maddow, and certainly no more of Glenn Beck’s daily lunacy. I am now living in a place – with a very large TV – where the news is concise and to the point and comes from all over the world, and is not so completely dedicated to the latest in crypto fascist idiot-howling. Indeed, Brit TV seems very much the way I left it except there’s so much more including plenty to avoid. I am, however, at risk of becoming addicted to Eastenders, and Xmas telly was massively predictable – Lawrence of Arabia, The Man Who Would Be King, Dr Zhivago – David Lean, memories of empire, James Bond, Sean Bean as Sharp, and acres of Dr. Who. And then, on New Year’s Day there’s a Godfather marathon. But the news cannot be totally avoided and too much of it over the Yule has been dedicated to politicians round the globe telling the people who elected them that 2011 is not going to be a picnic – gruel for Sunday prole-breakfast – as though somehow it was our fault. But it isn’t our fault. I didn’t drive the economy into the ditch, motherfucker. That was you, aiding and abetting your corporate masters in any bizarre larceny they could get away with. And, meanwhile, in other news, bankers still pick up their obscene bonus cheques and attend masked balls like they were the fucking Doge of Venice. So – finally getting to the point – that’s when a Jack Daniel’s breakfast seems very damned appealing.

Click here for Lucinda Williams

The secret word is Oblivion

MARILYN SEZ...

“Maybe whiskey isn’t all he needs.”

MAYBE HE NEEDS FIREWORKS

Click here on a much more cheerful note for the London New Year’s Eve firework display sent by Helga LA. Truly amazing and damn the expense.

SMOKE IF YOU GOT ‘EM

(Lifted from Retrogasm)