TIME WAVE ZERO GONNA GET YOU

Bowed under the weight of a never-ending and increasing nonsensical election process, and the Dems, with every advantage known to politics, seemingly taking careful aim at their own right foot with this super delegate bullshit, I felt myself presented with the alternatives of either hiding under the bed, of turning my attention to something completely different. Thus, in this week’s LA CityBeat, my column takes a look at the End Time paranoia that is slowly but surely building around the date December 21st, 2112, with particular attention to the predictions of the Mayan calendar and the Time Wave Zero theory of the late Terence McKenna. You could click to read the piece, but you don’t get a lot of detail in less than 700 words, so you could click again to watch McKenna explain.

The secret word is Nothing.

Then, for a total change of pace, you could just watch this Spanish lesson posted without comment except that it’s hilarious and was sent by Valerie. (Less serious click.)

DOC FEELS LOUSY AND IS GOING TO BED. NORMAL SERVICE WILL BE RESUMED IN THE AM.

TAKE ANOTHER LOOK AT THIS PICTURE

It’s a wistful hungry feeling (and will probably do no one no good) that this might just be the dynamic duo to head some kind of government of national reconstruction that could dismantle the legacy of hate, bloodshed and corruption that will be the Bush/Cheney/neocon legacy. In The New York Times, Maureen Dowd dismissed it as a fairy tale...

“There were “heart palpitations” and “ripples of joy” in the glittery Kodak Theater audience at the idea of a Hillary-Obama or Obama-Hillary ticket, after he was gallant with her and she laughed gaily with him. How could Hollywood not fall in love with Hollywood’s favorite plot? After lots of sparking and sparring, the couple falls into each other’s arms in the last scene. The would-be matchmakers didn’t seem to know that in Hollywood, couples who have chemistry on screen often don’t like each other off screen, and ones who are involved off screen often don’t have any chemistry on screen.
And so it is with Barack and Hillary. Thursday night was not the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Just a beautiful, dare we say, fairy tale.”

But I still naïvely wonder if militant public opinion could force at least a shotgun wedding. (If real militancy still survives in this blighted land.)

The secret word is Pragmatism

DOC'S PAPERBACK CLASSIC'S # 36

PLUS GOOD NEWS ON HIGH HEELS! This highly inaccurate vision of life on Pluto (and maybe why it was officially downgraded from planet to planetoid a few years ago) provides us with a tidy lead in to a BBC story sent by Valerie that, far from being a fetishistic male imposition, high heels may actually enhance women’s sex lives by improving their pelvic floor muscles. (Click for the full story)

CAN TUESDAY BE SO SUPER?

Whatever the anonymous commenting trolls might make of it, my posting of the above (from Elizabeth) does not mean I have absolutely anything against Barack Obama -- quite the reverse, in fact -- or (within reason) Ted Kennedy. Neither does it referrer to the endlessly labyrinthine monkey puzzle that is the US electoral system,and the media that follows it like cawing seagulls behind the plough. It’s just a bad that I could not resist. Remember bad political jokes? Shit, we’ve been ruled by one for over seven years.

The secret word is Geddit?

And, if your brains is as spongy as mine, try this left brain/right brain test Munz sent along with yesterday’s stuff. After some concentration, I managed to do it, which pleased me doubly in that I had not only could work the left/right switch, but that I had a brain left at all. (Check it out)

LET FREEDOM RING!

A quote for Monday sent by munz

"You could afford to get mixed up with wild strangers in those days---without fearing for your life, or your eyes, or your organs, or all of your money or even getting locked up in prison forever. There was a sense of possibility. People were not so afraid, as they are now ... nobody called the police on you, just to check out your credit and employment history and your medical records and how many parking tickets you owed in California."
---- Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear

The secret word is Tyranny

"Stop looking at my shoes, there's a new and highly perverse selection of tunes on DOCTUBE"

SATURDAY FUNNIES

On a night quite unenchanting, when the rain was downward slanting,

I awakened to the ranting of the man I catch mice for.

Tipsy and a bit unshaven, in a tone I found quite craven,

Poe was talking to a Raven perched above the chamber door.

"Raven's very tasty," thought I, as I tiptoed o'er the floor,

"There is nothing I like more."

Soft upon the rug I treaded, calm and careful as I headed

Towards his roost atop that dreaded bust of Pallas I deplore.

While the bard and birdie chattered,

I made sure that nothing clattered,

Creaked, or snapped, or fell, or shattered, as I crossed the corridor;

For his house is crammed with trinkets, curios and weird decor -

Bric-a-brac and junk galore.

Still the Raven never fluttered, standing stock-still as he uttered,

In a voice that shrieked and sputtered, his two cents worth -

"Nevermore."

While this dirge the birdbrain kept up, oh, so silently I crept up,

Then I crouched and quickly leapt up, pouncing on the feather bore.

Soon he was a heap of plumage, and a little blood and gore -

Only this and not much more.

Then my pickled poet cried out,

"Pussycat, it's time I dried out!"

Never sat I in my hideout talking to a bird before;

How I've wallowed in self-pity, while my gallant, valiant kitty.

Put an end to that damned ditty - then I heard him start to snore.

Back atop the door I clambered, eyed that statue I abhor,

Jumped - and smashed it on the floor.

(Thanks Wend)

The secret word is Purrrr!

AND THEN THERE WERE TWO

This piece on the primaries for LA CityBeat was written before the news came down that John Edwards had dropped out of the race. I don’t think, however, it makes any real difference to the argument. (Click here for the goods.)

HUSTON, WE HAVE A PANDA CAM

It’s been a while since we had a baby panda to distract us, but now a giant panda cub, Fu Long, has made his debut at a zoo in Vienna, Austria. The panda cub was born August 23rd. Fu Long means 'lucky dragon' in Mandarin Chinese. But, sadly this is not a 24 hour live panda watch. (Sent by Valerie, click here)

The secret word is Aaaaaaaah!

EDUCATION IS A WONDERFUL THING

Except maybe when it's bombs that are not only being educated but also handed out to Bush’s dubious Middle East allies like it was a clearance sale...

"The Joint Direct Attack Munition is a kit that, when added to the back end of a 500- or 2,000-pound "dumb" bomb, turns it into a lethal, all-weather "smart" weapon. The bomb can hit within four feet of a target when launched from a fighter aircraft more than 10 miles away." (For more clink link)

The secret word is Kaboom!

I JUST COULDN'T RESIST THE IMPULSE

Lee Majors: $6 million – Elvis Presley: priceless (pic from Tom Sutpen)

WHAT STATE? WHAT UNION?

I will confess that I avoided the State of the Union address like the black death. I have enough misery, disappointment, and hypocrisy in my life already, and I simply couldn’t face one more performance by the dreadful simian, and so resolutely stared at reruns of Law & Order even though I’d seen them before, and fumed that Bush's unspeakable gall to preempt Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. About the only consolation was that I received a link to something called SOTU that described itself as follows…

“State of the Union (SOTU) provides access to the corpus of all the State of the Union addresses from 1790 to 2008. SOTU allows you to explore how specific words gain and lose prominence over time, and to link to information on the historical context for their use. SOTU focuses on the relationship between individual addresses as compared to the entire collection of addresses, highlighting what is different about the selected document. You are invited to try and understand from this information the connection between politics and language–between the state we are in, and the language which names it and calls it into being.”

Or, in other words, one those cyber devices where you push words around with the cursor without a totally clear idea of what exactly is being demonstrated to you. (Click to play)

The secret words are Mouse Pad

OR AS THE CAT SAYS...

"...sex isn't everything." (Now read on)

DOC 40 ADMITS ITS MISTAKES

Valerie points out how, two weeks ago, I was kinda of mean to Dita Von Teese when in fact she might actually be doing something quite useful. She is launching PETA's new ABC campaign.

"What does ABC stand for? Animal birth control, of course! PETA's new ABC campaign tackles the issue of companion animal overpopulation and urges people to do their part by taking simple steps to help end this crisis. Dita knows her ABCs and just how important animal birth control is. Every year, nearly 4 million dogs and cats are put to death in the U.S. because there are not enough good homes for them. Until we all do our part to put an end to this cycle, euthanasia will remain a tragic necessity." (Click for more.)

The secret word is Spay

SATURDAY FOUND OBJECT

I found this gem in my web travels and, yes, well, I guess it does have a point. It also avoids STDs too, I suppose, but what effect it might have on our simultaneously sexually obsessed and sexually repressed culture might be debated. But while you ponder that, I've just posted a bunch of new tunes on DOCTUBE which may be just as much fun.

The secret word is Wood

OPIUM UPDATE

I have always been drawn to the romantic concept of the Victorian opium den, which I imagine, of course, filled with colors, wafting fans, ornate pipes, exotic Chinese woman bringing you stuff as you recline among hallucinating pre-Raphaelite beauties and Lord Alfred Douglas.

Yeah, fat chance now it’s all processed into smack for junkies.

But new multiple twist would appear to have made the story even more depressing as the War on Drugs falls over the War on Terror and then they both become hopelessly entangled in Bush’s War in Iraq. This story came from both aeswiren and Roger in Scotland (who hopes the Greenland Pump doesn’t fail – pump don’t fail me now, so to speak.)

Opium Fields Spread Across Iraq as Farmers Try to Make Ends Meet
By Patrick Cockburn
The cultivation of opium poppies whose product is turned into heroin is spreading rapidly across Iraq as farmers find they can no longer make a living through growing traditional crops. Afghan with experience in planting poppies have been helping farmers switch to producing opium in fertile parts of Diyala province, once famous for its oranges and pomegranates, north- east of Baghdad.
At a heavily guarded farm near the town of Buhriz, south of the provincial capital Baquba, poppies are grown between the orange trees in order to hide them, according to a local source.

Click for the rest of the tale.

The secret word is Laudanum

PLUS I rant in LA CityBeat for some few hundred words on last weeks Obama coke hoo-ha and though the website is still an intolerable dog’s dinner one can actually access the story.

Try it! You might like it! Checkout DOCTUBE

JESUS H. CHRIST!

Charles Stross is an eminent science fiction author and also runs Charlie’s Diary, and excellent and superior blog. Recently he posted these examples of rightwing religious thinking, strip-mined from their own internet chat sessions. These are the ones to whom our would-be leaders grovel. These are the ones to whom Huckabee panders. You can laugh or your skin can crawl, but the final one can be nothing a symptom dangerous psychosis or actual deep seated evil. (Spelling is verbatim)

"I can sum it all up in three words: Evolution is a lie"

"One of the most basic laws in the universe is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This states that as time goes by, entropy in an environment will increase. Evolution argues differently against a law that is accepted EVERYWHERE BY EVERYONE. Evolution says that we started out simple, and over time became more complex. That just isn't possible: UNLESS there is a giant outside source of energy supplying the Earth with huge amounts of energy. If there were such a source, scientists would certainly know about it."

"Jesus is not a Jew. Jesus was Jewish."
"all the evolutionists, tell me something. i know how the big bang "has happened, but tell me, wouldnt an explosion, especially one that size, take away life instead of allow it? think about it. ex: the a-bomb, the h-bomb, grenades, cannon balls (when fired from a cannon of course), mines, rocket launchers, and anything and everything in between. they all have taken lives."

[Replying to 'as for not seeing evolution it takes several million years... incase you missed that memo...']
"several million years for a monkey to turn into a man. oh wait thats right. monkeys dont live several million years."

"Everyone knows scientists insist on using complex terminology to make it harder for True Christians to refute their claims. Deoxyribonucleic Acid, for example... sounds impressive, right? But have you ever seen what happens if you put something in acid? It dissolves! If we had all this acid in our cells, we'd all dissolve! So much for the Theory of Evolution, Check MATE!"

"A woman wants to abort a rape child? She should have thought of that before she walked down that dark alley without a male prescence, not to mention she should have thought before putting on revealing attire."

The secret word is Crucify

ME! ME! ME! ME! ME! ME! ME! ME! ME! ME! ME! ME! ME! ME! ME!

Someone has posted a delightful clip of me holding forth a couple of years ago about the shambles that became the 1970 Isle of Wight rock festival. I kinda like being gratuitously on YouTube. (But a fund really does have to be established to get my teeth replaced. Kinda like restoring an old building.)

LIFE WAS A LOT EASIER WHEN FASCISTS LOOKED LIKE FASCISTS

I’ve had a lot of writing to do of late so Doc40 has been heavy on links and pictures and kinda shy on original text, but I hope I’ll be able to air some of my obsessions very soon. In the meantime I was sent a link to a great web site called Nickel In The Machine (there's also a permalink on the right) that is an inspired amalgam of British rock and political history that is truly fascinating. I learned, for instance that Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, lived on Cheyne Walk, the same London street on which Mick Jagger had a residence a few doors down and more than half a century later. If you scroll down a bit, you find an account of The Battle of Cable Street when Sir Oswald Moseley and his blackshirts (above) – The British Union Of Fascists – attempted a mass march through the then Jewish ghetto of Whitechapel and were stopped in their tracks by Trade Union members, Communists, and just regular working people. Oh that we had such cohesion today, but like I said, it was easier when fascists looked like fascists, and not aging frat boys in expensive suits.

The secret word is Solidarity

AND, in total contrast, here’s a clip from Noudela that I find wonderfully restful.

MARTIN LUTHER KING

Really needs no other tribute beyond this.

Click here.

(Thanks Nance)

SUPPORTING THE TROOPS

Currently close to 200,000 veterans – mainly of the Bush wars – are homeless, and essentially being denied government help. Paul Rieckoff runs down one shameful example in today’s Huffpo.

“Veterans represent one-third of the adult homeless population in this country, and that number is rising. While almost 200,000 homeless veterans line the nation's streets every night, almost twice as many experience homelessness at some point throughout the course of a year. Essentially, we have the population of Des Moines, Iowa or Montgomery, Alabama "sleeping under bridges." (Click for the whole story.)

The secret word is Despicable

FOR THOSE IN LOS ANGELES

TOMORROW (Saturday Jan 19th) the new book Bomp!: Saving the World One Record at a Time gets a signing by co-author Suzy Shaw and myself, coupled with a live performance in celebration by Joe and Mike Nolte from The Last. 6 p.m.-9 p.m. La Luz de Jesus, 4633 Hollywood Blvd., L.A., (323) 666-7667. Laluzdejesus.com. Free beer is rumored.



Bobby Fischer -- RIP

DOC'S PAPERBACK CLASSIC'S # 35

“You bastard. You told me there’d be a Target and a Starbucks.”

MOON CITY

The following was sent by Brer LW (to whom I owe a jocular email). He is talking to Danny Baker on Baker’s Brit radio show.

"Dan, around the time Micky Farren was working at NME, he did a wonderful thing. Whenever Mickey, or any of us lot ( The Lone Groovers), bought something that had Polystyrene packing, he would take said shaped blocks, and stick them on his ceiling, thus creating Farren`s Moon City. Of course, when we had partaken of a drop of the old Peruvian Beaver Cheese, we would lie on our backs and observe said Moon City, until of course, we felt as if we were in space, looking down at the rare and strange buildings. Ah, them`s wuz the days."

Oh course, our styrofoam moon city looked nothing like the one above although it might have done had I worked on it longer and more obsessively. (And of course, if we’d had video camera phones back then, there’d be film of it.) But there are people out there who truly believe an alien city of rare and strange buildings exists on the Moon. Click for the somewhat implausible story and pics.

The secret word is Selenite

Oh yeah, after yesterday’s poke at Tom Cruise and Scientology, no men in black suits are lurking outside my building. So maybe they’re not as all-powerful as we assume. (Or better at lurking.) On the other hand, the Vegas odds against any C of S member reading this blog are probably ultra astronomical.

COMPARATIVE RELIGION

A rumor has been circulating around my frequently unreliable neck of the woods that the Tom Cruise/Katy Holmes offspring is not Tom’s at all, but in fact Katie was inseminated by the frozen sperm of L. Ron Hubbard, and that the child Suri is, in fact, being groomed to be the Scientology Messiah. Do we believe that? Of course not. We’re too scared of their lawyers, but if I’m dead or missing tomorrow, it might be true. Meanwhile check out Tom making the impassioned pitch. This has been ripped down from most websites, but Gawker swear they’ll keep it up.(Thanks Southern Belle)

The secret word is Clear

“Doc has posted a whole new selection of his truly bizarre and often depressingly retro musical selections on DOCTUBE, but I think I’ll just lounge here and be decadently fetishistic.”

BEATING ON DITA and why you can’t read it on the web

Regular readers will know that every two weeks I write a media column titled Mick’s Media for the tabloid LA CityBeat, and every two weeks I post a link so all you folks from Birmingham to Bangalore can also read it. But no longer it would seem. In their less than infinite wisdom, the management of LACB decided to revamp the site, which everyone agreed did look a bit circa 1998. But instead of some new, user friendly, techno-wonder, the lackwit contracted to do the job launched some dysfunctional piece garbage that is little short of a cybernetic puzzle from hell which would lead most readers to assume LACB Online was out of business. Whether anything will be done about it remains to be seen, and whether I’m fired for calling out management on their ineptitude also may need watching. For the moment, I intend to post the columns here in full instead of fruitlessly linking them. (Only, of course, after they have hit the stands in print.) We shall see what happens. This is from last Thursday’s issue.
According to the capricious Doc40 color code, I think I’ll print these in turquoise, indicating that I wrote it, but that it has already been published elsewhere.

The secret word is (yet again) Clusterfuck

DECADENT TIMES
A modest proposal for the immediate execution of Dita Von Teese

I have eliminated physical newspapers from my home. I receive the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Washington Post via the Internet (and also the New York Post, ever a mind-boggler). In addition to saving trees, the computer allows me to trippingly bypass the mindless filler that struggling broadsheets vainly believe will deliver the grail of the 18-to-35 demographic. But on Sunday, December 30, I made an exception. With no false modesty, my co-author Suzy Shaw and I had entered the L.A. Times bestseller list at No. 13 with our new book, Bomp!: Saving the World One Record at a Time, and I wanted to admire my name in old-
fashioned print. (Something I actually couldn’t do, but that’s another story.)
Having not had a copy of the Times in the house for months, I was surprised by its bulk. Surprise escalated to amazement when I encountered the “Image” section, dominated by a vast headshot of Dita Von Teese and the message “like the car you drive, or the watch you wear, the bubbly you reach for … speaks volumes about who you are.”
Perhaps my world has become a trifle cyber-esoteric, but I initially wondered on what terminally decadent planet I’d landed. I had clearly been lamentably ignoring plutocrat idiocy. My recall of Von Teese was as Marilyn Manson’s former flame, a modern pinup girl with interesting taste in corsets and a burlesque act that, although a highly pleasing method of punctuating rock-band performances, was little more than old-school stripping with some Belle Epoch pretensions, or a Weimar edge.
Now I discover she’s some kind of spokes-shill for the champagne industry, which, led by Cristal, was pimped-out in the 1990s by P. Diddy and is now selling itself like liquid bling: Witness the $300 Armand de Brignac in its gold-plated bottle (promoted by Jay-Z and an item in Academy Award nominee gift bags). Then, two days after reading a soufflé of a full-page interview about how Dita has had “offers” to act, and once purchased $500 worth of pies to throw at her friends on New Year’s Eve, the TV told me that, in the real world, oil had hit a record hundred bucks a barrel.
Von Teese herself also seemed to have physically changed. While with Manson, she affected a glossy, neo-counterculture style, but as the “Image” cover girl she appeared to have undergone a conservative makeover, causing her to resemble Monica Lewinsky’s slimmer, prettier sister. But perhaps this is just a last hurrah, a neocon bunker apocalypse in which the measure of a man will be judged by the brand of champagne he drinks, but only until the champagne runs out.
On the other hand, this is the Los Angeles Times’ happy promotion of an obscene level of social and cultural inequality that – in a country at war, and a world in which deadly crises are too numerous to count – will hardly build circulation or comfort its existing readers. Dita and her decadent ultra-marketing seem to be doing nothing less than moving routine Hollywood lipstick pointlessness toward a full-blown Marie Antoinette let-them-eat-cake. Historically, that attitude has a limited half-life; before too long, the guillotines are rolled out, the blades fall, the crowd cheers, and equality is imposed the hard way with the head in the basket.
I suppose I’m joking about Von Teese’s execution, but, as we move into the eighth hellish year of the Bush regime, we are obliged to examine all the absurd legacies that will remain, and the Dita Von Teese school of talentless celebrity and disgusting over-consumption has to be one of them. Maybe the foolishness of gold champagne bottles, being promoted by women famous for little more than their lovers and their foundation garments, will be recognized by the changing times as patently absurd.
In the meantime, I’m clicking over to Craig’s List to check out rented tumbrels and carpenters who might be willing to construct some cheap serviceable decapitation devices.

Maila Nurmi (Vampira) -- RIP

THOSE YUMMY NANO-CAPS

Hey! Here comes the brave new world of cybertaste that will make cookbooks – even like the one above – redundant.

"Have you ever gone to the store and found yourself unable to make a choice? Kraft is working on programmable food; you can buy it at the store, and then decide what color and flavor you want later. Processed-food giant Kraft and a group of research laboratories are working on a colorless, tasteless drink (don't they already have those?) that is full of nano-capsules of flavor and nutrients. Each nano-capsule is two thousand times narrower than a human hair. When you get home, you put it in a specially designed microwave that will activate only those nano-capsules that you want to disgorge their contents into the substrate beverage. The remaining nano-capsules will pass harmlessly through your system. Sounds great, doesn't it? What could possibly go wrong." (Click to find out.)

The secret word is Mmmm!

(You may have noticed I have yet to say a word about the continuing clusterfuck known as the presidential primaries. It’s not that I’m not interested, it’s just that I’m bidding my time, seeing no point in adding to the general asinine cacophony. After the total collapse of opinion polling in New Hampshire and the idiot punditry about whether Hillary’s show of emotion won that round for her, I find myself disgusted with the whole overblown process, which I know doesn’t need my voice right now. But later, watch out!)

This blog is still affiliated with The White Panther Party

MURDEROUS AND METALLIC

“So listen up, all you who read and commented on last Saturday’s post (Jan 5th), it’s been a murderously horrible day round at the Doc40 bunker so Mick doesn’t have a damned thing to say, but I’m a Cylon of the old school. I’m just big, metallic, stupid, slow, and do little but destroy shit with my raygun. Integrate that in the philosophical theory, skinjobs – or just watch the music on DOCTUBE.”

The secret word is Simplicity

PHILIP AGEE -- RIP

(Click for his story) Sent by Bernard

Sir Edmund Hillary -- RIP

THOUGHTS ON RELIGION BY THINKERS

Since today is an overloaded day weighed down with work, I thought I’d pass along these quotes sent as a New Year greeting by a dear friend, either for your amusement or to provoke fury.

"The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma." [Abraham Lincoln]

"Religion is a byproduct of fear. For much of human history, it may have been a necessary evil, but why was it more evil than necessary? Isn't killing people in the name of God a pretty good definition of insanity?" [Arthur C. Clarke]

"Religions are all alike - founded upon fables and mythologies." [Thomas Jefferson]

"Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile." [Kurt Vonnegut]

"Religion is based . . . mainly on fear . . .fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. . . . My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race." [Bertrand Russell

The secret word is Kneel

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ELVIS

Today is Elvis Presley’s birthday. Had he not committed subconscious suicide by butter and bacon three decades ago, he would have been 73 today. I always celebrate Elvis’ birthday, and constantly wear a mystic Elvis talisman on a cord around my neck, along with a load of other totems including a pentacle, and the key to the Tardis. Why do I tell you all this? Because, despite all my intellectual pretension, curling up in a corner and reading Mikhail Bakunin did not make me the man I am today. Hell no. It really all started with Elvis. He was the one who, with “Heartbreak Hotel”, set me on the rocky road to Gene Vincent, Jack Kerouac, Theodore Sturgeon, Jack Kennedy (and the lone gunman), Bill Burroughs, Bob Dylan, Che Guevara, and a truckload of recreational intoxicants, all long before I groked the fullness of Mikhail B.

And the picture above is deliberate piece of esoteric Elvis obscurism that may only be understood by a Grade A Elvis dementoid. And if anyone would like post a explanatory comment, I would amused and delighted.

The secret words are Left and The Building

THERE'S NO BUSINESS LIKE SHOW BUSINESS

What else is there to say on a damp Sunday afternoon except we miss Divine more than we miss Mick Jagger and – oh yeah – there’s new stuff on DOCTUBE (and the picture was lifted from Tom Sutpen )

The secret word is Incongruous

THIS BLOG IS STILL PROTECTED BY...

THE CYLON CONUNDRUM

Even though the Sci Fi Channel will not give us a new series of Battlestar Galactica until March, I have remarked on a number of occasions in a number of places that I was finding myself far more in sympathy with the Cylons than the humans of the Twelve Colonies, and had started increasing to identify with Gaius Baltar. The human power elite – both civilian and military – of this of this rag tag survivor fleet feeing the self-created Cylon menace so gratuitously bend or totally ignore any fictional constitution to an extent that it’s started to remind me of the regime currently occupying the White House. Coupling this with one decidedly anti-abortion, and one highly anti-organized labor shoot-the-workers episode, and others where atrocities including torture are easily excused by the threat of the Cyclons, I start to view humanity as far more crypto-fascist that the supposedly “evil” machines. I must have said it often enough and loud enough since it prompted the following acute observations from our very good friend aeswiren.

"Thinking about the Cylons etc. and your growing preference for them v the humans of the Twelve Colonies etc. The persistent fear and loathing of robots is one of those interesting little windows into the human mind, yeah? Think of positive robot stories. Asimov's "I Robot," Robbie in Forbidden Planet, the "good" artificial person played by Lance Henrikson in Aliens, Data in Trek "Generation," some other books from here and there, and then the negative ones-- overwhelming numbers... Terminators,Cylons, inexplicable giant alien machinery, e.g. Kronos (1957)-- fucked up human-mades like Hal, or Ash, the "bad" artificial person in Alien-- it's endless. H'wood even reversed Asimov's entire concept to let Will Smith do battle with evil minded machinery. Is this perverse Luddism? We hate and fear the machines, even as they make our lives more comfie? Or is it a deeper fear of being replaced?AI-- Spielberg's yawnfest, circled around this stuff, but then veered down his canyon of sentimentality into total tedium. "Neuromancer" worked the territory--the unseen, machiavellian AI moving human pawns around the board, but Gibson is always too clever to actually take sides. T2 & 3 offered a little nuance on the subject-- some machines might be reprogrammed to save us rather than exterminate us.But the core emotion, the primary color, is that we know in our gut that they will do that. Exterminate us. Or sideline us and take control of the Earth, or whatever's left of it. Or, if by some miracle we've actually done the right thing and moved out into the Solar system,they'll wage war on us to take that over.
And we can't stop ourselves from creating them in the first place. Industrial 'bots are common place. Japan is well on the way to launching the humanoid home helper bot industry and the US, of course, is making war machines that look remarkably like primitive versions of the HKs and Aerials of the Terminator future.
Glossing over the problem of machine intelligence becoming self-willed which may be possible, but then again, may not-- aren't we confronting the basic duality of human social existence, here?We love ourselves-- officially. Human self-glorification sells stuff galore. But we hate ourselves-- for our selfish, ugly, fucked up, worthless, weak stupidity.And even as we celebrate human accomplishments we're aware that we're eating the world down to the pips, that we're as superstitious and ignorant as mediaeval peasants, and if we did produce a bunch of Cylons they would just be so much better than us, so much more in control of their hungers, their needs and desires, that they would fucking well deserve to replace us. Yeah?"

Yeah, bro. Definitely – although Ray Kurzweil maintains we will all merge in the Singularity around 2035 anyway – the robot has been treated in manner totally akin to the slave – esp American and Roman slaves – the indentured servants of the British Empire, indeed not only colonial peoples everywhere, but also organized labor in most industrial nations. Watching a DVD of Battlestar Galactic and then Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and concentrating on the content rather than the style, reveals two sides of a uncomfortably oppressive coin. Indeed, a parody of Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics could be called Jefferson Davis' Three Laws of Negrotics. (1. The negro shall not be taught to read etc. – you can make up the rest yourself.) An uprising of the underclass is always the underlying fear, a fear which, down the years, has caused the crucifixion of Spartacus, the murder of IWW organizers by the hired-gun Pinkertons, or the attempted extermination of the Black Panthers by the FBI and local law enforcement.

The secret word is Esoteric

Of course, my judgment may have become a tad warped when the Cylons started looking like Tricia Helfer.

SNAKES ALIVE

While I attempt to digest Obama, Huckabee, and the significance of the whole Iowa Caucus, I’m posting this X-ray of a snake in the Australia that ate four golf balls. The 32-inch carpet python mistook golf balls - left by a couple in their chicken coop to encourage hens to lay - for eggs, and ate four of them. Vets say the snake, nicknamed Augusta after the US golf course, is making a full recovery and will be returned to the wild.

The secret word is Breakfast

New tunes on DOCTUBE

HAPPY?

Dare we hope that it will be less horrendous than last year? (Valerie sent the fireworks.)

(Oh yeah, and yesterday I was too preoccupied and liquored up to post a book review I wrote for The Los Angeles Times.)

The secret word is Desire

THIS IS REAL SELF-AGGRANDIZEMENT

Bomp (co-written with Suzy Shaw) entered the LA Times Bestsellers today at #13. So will it do better next week or quietly drop out? We wait and see.

(For all the dope on the book, scroll back to December 10th)




The secret word is Amazed

DOC'S PAPERBACK CLASSIC'S # 34

Don't you just adore heavy handed and ironic 1950s nuclear doomsday comics. And aren't you glad the same doesn't play today.

The secret word is still Missing

RUDY DEFENDED HILLBILLY HEROIN

The New York Times informs us how, in western Virginia, far from the limelight, United States Attorney John L. Brownlee found himself on the telephone last year with a political and legal superstar, Rudolph Giuliani. For years, Mr. Brownlee and his small team had been building a case that the maker of the painkiller OxyContin had misled the public when it claimed the drug was less prone to abuse than competing narcotics. The drug was believed to be a factor in hundreds of deaths involving its abuse. Mr. Giuliani, celebrated for his stewardship of New York City after 9/11, soon told the prosecutors they were wrong. In 2002, the drug maker, Purdue Pharma of Stamford, Conn., hired Mr. Giuliani and his consulting firm, Giuliani Partners, to help stem the controversy about OxyContin. Among Mr. Giuliani’s missions was the job of convincing public officials that they could trust Purdue because they could trust him. (For the whole vile story)

The secret word is Shameless

A POSSIBLE TOUCH OF TENSION?

Waking to the news of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto was distracting. Then the TV pundit fears of a Pakistani civil war, during which the Taliban and extremists of similar ilk not only seize the nukes, but the ballistic missiles to deliver them for at least a thousand or so miles, really took my mind off absent friends, domestic fascism, the morals of insanity, and my Yule hangover. And then I watched the goddamn candidates fumbling to turn the situation to their advantage (in which Hillary had the edge because she actually knew Ms Bhutto) and distraction turned to an actual hollow pit in my stomach because no one – I repeat, no one – in the mainatream was mentioning India, right next to Pakistan, with nukes of its own, with zero warning time, and probably at an alert status close to the Indian equivalent of DEFCON 1. Welcome to the future neighbors.

The secret number of horsemen is Four

IF I HAD A HAMMER (A POST YULE REFLECTION ON COMPARATIVE RELIGION)

Ever since the time, as a young lad, I saw Kirk Douglas in the movie The Vikings, I have always considered the idea of worshiping Odin, Thor and the rest just as appealing as any other theological baloney. (This was, of course, before Jedi had become an acceptable mode of worship.) And thus this stir-crazy inmate in Utah gets all of my support. I mean, the Norse didn’t stone adulterous women (who also had the vote, incidently) or throw drunks into spurious rehab. I fact, I don’t think they even threw drunks out of Valhalla.

"An inmate is suing the Utah Department of Corrections for denying him his right to practice an ancient Nordic religion while behind bars. Michael Polk is serving time for aggravated assault and robbery. He filed a lawsuit against corrections officials in federal court, accusing them of denying him religious items that he says are necessary to practice the Asatru religion. The religion worships ancient Nordic gods like Odin, Thor, Tyr and Heimdal. In the lawsuit, Polk says he has been a member of the Asatru faith since 2005, and in order to properly practice it he needs items including: a Thor's Hammer, a prayer cloth, a Mead Horn used for drinking Wassail, a drum made of wood and boar skin, a rune staff and a sword."

AND FOR WASSAIL GOOD MEASURE
Here’s the return of The Viking Kittens

The secret word is Mead

And finally I have review-of-the-year media column in LA CityBeat that took on a life of its own and turned all kinda Yeatsian

“Better still, though, there’s nifty new tunes on DOCTUBE, sweetie!”

BOXING DAY

The secret word is Hungover

Oscar Peterson -- RIP
Arabella Spencer Churchill -- RIP

COOL YULE TO ALL WHO VISIT THE DOC40 FUNHOUSE

The secret word is Custard

EARLY SUNDAY BEFORE THE YULE

Early Sunday, distracted with not a lot to say. May think of more later, but I wonder who’s reading this now that Christmas is upon us. But this cartoon from Jon is the business….it’s called the The Communist Manifestoon

The secret word is Missing