Click here for Any Way You Want Me
The secret word is Pelvic
Saturday, February 26, 2011
EVERYONE NEEDS A DAY OFF
Click here for Any Way You Want Me
The secret word is Pelvic
Friday, February 25, 2011
THIS MIGHT EXPLAIN A WHOLE LOT
When the psy-op spooks start going after already half demented Senators you know their war is in trouble.
“The U.S. Army illegally ordered a team of soldiers specializing in "psychological operations" to manipulate visiting American senators into providing more troops and funding for the war, Rolling Stone has learned – and when an officer tried to stop the operation, he was railroaded by military investigators. The orders came from the command of Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, a three-star general in charge of training Afghan troops – the linchpin of U.S. strategy in the war. Over a four-month period last year, a military cell devoted to what is known as "information operations" at Camp Eggers in Kabul was repeatedly pressured to target visiting senators and other VIPs who met with Caldwell. When the unit resisted the order, arguing that it violated U.S. laws prohibiting the use of propaganda against American citizens, it was subjected to a campaign of retaliation. My job in psy-ops is to play with people’s heads, to get the enemy to behave the way we want them to behave," says Lt. Colonel Michael Holmes, the leader of the IO unit, who received an official reprimand after bucking orders. "I’m prohibited from doing that to our own people. When you ask me to try to use these skills on senators and congressman, you’re crossing a line." The list of targeted visitors was long, according to interviews with members of the IO team and internal documents obtained by Rolling Stone. Those singled out in the campaign included senators John McCain, Joe Lieberman, Jack Reed, Al Franken and Carl Levin; Rep. Steve Israel of the House Appropriations Committee; Adm. Mike Mullen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the Czech ambassador to Afghanistan; the German interior minister, and a host of influential think-tank analysts.The incident offers an indication of just how desperate the U.S. command in Afghanistan is to spin American civilian leaders into supporting an increasingly unpopular war.” Click here for more
Click here for Count V
The secret word is Manchurian
Thursday, February 24, 2011
I SHOULDA BEEN THERE
Tom Morello and our good buddy Brother Wayne Kramer galvanize the troops in Wisconsin.
"On Monday night, Wisconsin’s week-long protest against Gov. Scott Walker got a soundtrack. Five thousand people squeezed into the Monona Terrace exhibition hall to hear Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and Wayne Kramer of the MC5 curse Walker’s plan to undercut public employee unions. Walker got called every name in the book – “motherfucker,” “asshole” – but the acoustic show was still overwhelmingly peaceful and positive. Morello and friends focused on marshaling the protesters’ energy for continued resistance to the budget bill that would strip away unions’ collective bargaining rights. The predominantly young crowd batted around balloons and waved signs, some with defiant messages and others with almost self-mocking jokes. (My favorite: “Scott Walker Eats Kittens.”) Union representatives began by speaking about the cause, but none of them more passionately than Morello, who came on next as the night’s MC. In bright orange T-shirt and cap, he made a direct connection with the Cheesehead throng, taking on their cause as his own. “This has been the most inspiring 24 hours of my life!” he said, to deafening cheers. “You have your hand on the wheel of history!” (Click here for more)
Meanwhile someone in the mainstream finally tells it like it is. But you can trust Paul Krugman. He has Nobel Prize.
"Last week, in the face of protest demonstrations against Wisconsin’s new union-busting governor, Scott Walker — demonstrations that continued through the weekend, with huge crowds on Saturday — Representative Paul Ryan made an unintentionally apt comparison: “It’s like Cairo has moved to Madison.” It wasn’t the smartest thing for Mr. Ryan to say, since he probably didn’t mean to compare Mr. Walker, a fellow Republican, to Hosni Mubarak. Or maybe he did — after all, quite a few prominent conservatives, including Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santorum, denounced the uprising in Egypt and insist that President Obama should have helped the Mubarak regime suppress it. In any case, however, Mr. Ryan was more right than he knew. For what’s happening in Wisconsin isn’t about the state budget, despite Mr. Walker’s pretense that he’s just trying to be fiscally responsible. It is, instead, about power. What Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin — and eventually, America — less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy. And that’s why anyone who believes that we need some counterweight to the political power of big money should be on the demonstrators’ side." (Click here for more)
Click here for Wayne
The secret word is definitely Oligarch
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
WE’RE MAD AS HELL AND…(YOU ALL KNOW THE REST)
Dare we hope that the poor, the exploited, the fucked-over are fighting back? Dare we hope for hope?
“The uprising that swept Tunisia, Egypt, and parts of Europe is showing signs of blossoming across the United States. In Wisconsin, public employees and their supporters are drawing the line at Governor Scott Walker’s plan to eliminate collective bargaining and unilaterally cut benefits. School teachers, university students, firefighters, and others descended on the capital in the tens of thousands, and even the Superbowl champion Green Bay Packers have weighed in against the bill. Protests against similar anti-union measures are ramping up in Ohio. Meanwhile, another protest movement aimed at protecting the poor and middle class is in the works. Cities around the country are preparing for a February 26 Day of Action, “targeting corporate tax dodgers.” The strategy picks up on the UK Uncut campaign, begun when a group at a London pub—a firefighter, a nurse, a student, and others—came up with an idea that is part flash mob, part sit-in. In an article published in the Nation, reporter Johann Hari tells the story of the group’s frustration about government cutbacks. If Vodafone, one corporation with a huge back-tax bill, paid up, the cutbacks wouldn’t be needed. The group spread the word over social media, and held loud, impolite demonstrations. The idea quickly went viral, and flash mobs/sit-ins materialized at retail outlets across Britain, shutting many of them down.” (Click here for more)
Since Bob’s been taken down, click here for Bruce.
The secret word is Mutiny
Monday, February 21, 2011
WE’RE NOT JOKING
The temptation has always been to treat the right of the Republican Party and the followers of Glenn Beck as something of an absurd joke – small minded, small town, fatuous, uneducated buffoons. Unfortunately, since they took control of the House in the midterm elections it has become increasing clear that there’s nothing funny about them at all. Evidence like this open letter from MoveOn.org that catalogues their current assault on women’s rights indicates that they are very vicious and very dangerous.
1) Republicans not only want to reduce women's access to abortion care, they're actually trying to redefine rape. After a major backlash, they promised to stop. But they haven't.
2) A state legislator in Georgia wants to change the legal term for victims of rape, stalking, and domestic violence to "accuser." But victims of other less gendered crimes, like burglary, would remain "victims."
3) In South Dakota, Republicans proposed a bill that could make it legal to murder a doctor who provides abortion care. (Yep, for real.)
4) Republicans want to cut nearly a billion dollars of food and other aid to low-income pregnant women, mothers, babies, and kids.
5) In Congress, Republicans have proposed a bill that would let hospitals allow a woman to die rather than perform an abortion necessary to save her life.
6) Maryland Republicans ended all county money for a low-income kids' preschool program. Why? No need, they said. Women should really be home with the kids, not out working.
7) And at the federal level, Republicans want to cut that same program, Head Start, by $1 billion. That means over 200,000 kids could lose their spots in preschool.
8) Two-thirds of the elderly poor are women, and Republicans are taking aim at them too. A spending bill would cut funding for employment services, meals, and housing for senior citizens.
9) Congress voted yesterday on a Republican amendment to cut all federal funding from Planned Parenthood health centers, one of the most trusted providers of basic health care and family planning in our country.
10) And if that wasn't enough, Republicans are pushing to eliminate all funds for the only federal family planning program. (For humans. But Republican Dan Burton has a bill to provide contraception for wild horses. You can't make this stuff up).
Click here for Frank Zappa
The secret word is Foul
Jay Landesman – RIP
WE’RE STILL NOT JOKING
I’d also like to think this Reborn shit was funny but I really fear it’s diseased. I will say no more. Click here for My Fake Baby.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
SUNDAY BREAKFAST
When I got back to England, my eating habits went on a Billy Bunter/Just William nostalgia binge. Treacle tart, black pudding, pie & mash, you name it. If I’d liked when I was four, I tried it one more time, but not everything was as I remembered it. Tizer, for instance, was disgusting, and now tasted wholly unfit for adult consumption. One thing that stayed with me, whoever, was a return to Weetabix. Weetabix is hard to find in California. You have to resort to Canadian imports sold at Brit expat specialist food stores. Also, in LA, my choice of cereals had grown close to degenerate. I was starting too many days with something called Reese's Puffs that, made from chocolate and peanut butter, could be eaten straight from the box without the benefit of milk or spoon. I felt that a Weetabix breakfast some kind of return to healthy nutrition if only by my own warped criteria. Weetabix was also soggy and when you’ve logged as many hungover morning as I have, it’s hard to be a fan of crispy cereals. Indeed, I was feeling quite pleased with myself until, on late night TV, I caught Russell Brand at Hackney Empire during which he did a bit on Weetabix as the food of the hideously impoverished. Is this a universal belief, or just a Brand fabrication? After the recent abuse I engendered by my brief defection from Marmite to Vegemite, I don’t need another cultural breakfast faux pas.
Click here for the Stones' Rice Krispies commercial
The secret word is Bowl
Saturday, February 19, 2011
THE UNPLANNED FUTURE OF PERSONAL FANTASY AND THE FICTION IT WILL SPAWN
A couple of months ago, I rather glibly announced that I was commencing work on what would be the fifth in my series of Victor Renquist novels. At the time it was perfectly true and, for that matter, still is. The only thing I failed to mention, since I tend not to talk too publically about works in progress, is that I had chosen what proved to be a decidedly grandiose theme. The nephilim were returning to Earth to check on the 12000 year progress of their genetic seeding that had not only created humanity in the first place but also various strains of by-product sub-species of vampires and demons. The added kicker was that if, when they got here, they didn’t like what they found, they’ll erase the entire human experiment. It seemed like a damned fine idea at the time, Renquist had already faced Cthulhu, Merlin, Reptile men and nuke-wielding Nazis in the Hollow Earth, so why not go for broke and have my non-human hero confront the creator aliens. I still have no problem with the concept, but – despite all efforts to pretend otherwise – I just have to face the fact that damned book is threatening to turn into an epic in which Victor Renquist is only one of a number characters through whom we watch the panic and disorder as the nephilim are observed making their majestic way in from the outer rim of the solar system. (And if none of this makes any sense, I can only suggest that you pick up a couple of my novels and sample the ride.)
Then there was also the matter of the nephilim themselves. I found myself moving in part into a more abstract fiction mode based on a grand misunderstanding of string theory. If the nephilim were so very superior, advanced, and different, they must also occupy a very superior, advanced, and different universe. They cannot merely be bio-entities in metal ships. They mutate into something completely different slipping in and out of multiple realities and forcing me to use skills honed in previous works like Necrom and Jim Morrison’s Adventures In The Afterlife. The fear is, of course, that this is just the aging author attempting to braid the multiple threads of his fiction at risk of some Justice League of America clusterfuck in which an author tries to integrate all of his fantasies into some spurious Farren universe. I think I’m too smart to allow that to happen, but I have to admit the whole project is turning into quite a mind-snapper (and will scare the shit out of a publishing environment at a time when most are too timorous to risk anything but celebrity cookbooks.) But my hope is that it will be truly great provided I live to finish it.
Here are a couple of snippets. This one is from the POV of a minor entity in the Nephilim Oneness…
Clear of the membrane and over the bridge, the Oneness inflated and multiplied. It sluiced off the black matter now it was no longer required, streaming it from the gaping dorsal and anterior nacelles in dense clouds of blood-like quark-particles, that sparked at their instant of annihilation. New dark energy scoops extended. The creaking hull fought massive interior stress and grew rigid, rapidly thickened against the New Vacuum. Newtonian gearing ground upon itself, only partially lubricated. The unyielding grated on the more unyielding, while interior bulbs reacquired their fluids, and the primal glands inhaled and extended. Flow-valves regulated the paths of liquid tides and the bore-courses of bright super-cold vapors. Massive pistons thrust deep into their receiving cylinders. Cells defined themselves and units detached in autonomy. Flares in the whiteness reestablished motion in sweeps of swirling convection and flurries of carbon snow. Flesh recognized its own nakedness, and the isolate minds of the bio-entity multitude gravitated to their assigned stations.
And this is from the very different POV of Gideon Windermere, a character who previously appeared in the novel Necrom.
As if in confirmation, he noticed her lace panties were still on the coffee table, draped over some empty beer bottles, the contents of which they had used to chase the absinthe/tincture cocktails. He could not totally remember how the undergarment had arrived there. By the time they had reached the stage of shedding their clothes, they both been high as kites and mildly hallucinating. He picked up the wisp of lace, but then had no idea what to do with it, and dropped the panties on the floor. He was already feeling more warm and fuzzy than he had before, and he didn’t want to think about Lucinda. The FedEx box was waiting for him, and Gideon Windermere reluctantly picked up the switch blade with the mother-of-pearl handle from beside his computer and snapped it open. The switchblade was something of a good luck token. He had acquired it on drunken night in Paris while he was still a young man, and, against all odds it had stayed with him ever since. With the open blade, he got down on the floor beside the box, approaching it with the kind of caution usually reserved for bomb disposal.
Click here for Elvis Costello
The secret word is Phew
Friday, February 18, 2011
THE GREAT WHITE HORSE
I just love this. The idea of a huge white horse towering over the Kent countryside echoing the great white horses carved in prehistoric chalk hillsides is nothing short of magnificent and fills me with delight. It also sets me wondering how long it is intended to remain there. Is it designed forever, to survive and mystify the distant future like the Stonehenge or the Sphinx? (Of course, when I lived in the Lower Manhattan in the 1980s, I used to ask myself the same question about the towers of the World Trade Center.)
“A giant white horse has been chosen as a new £2m art commission for south east England dubbed "Angel of the South". The design, by former Turner Prize winner Mark Wallinger, was selected from a three-strong shortlist as part of the Ebbsfleet Landmark Project. His design for the public art commission will see a horse standing on all four hooves at 33 times life-size. Once built, it will dominate the north Kent landscape, standing as high as Nelson's Column at about 164ft (50m).” Click here for more and a video.
Click here for the Rolling Stones
The secret word is Shadowfax
OH PLEASE…
A video game based on The Great Gatsby with graphics that look like the goddamned Mario Brothers? Is this the future of fiction? I gotta tell you, as I contemplate the future of my own fiction this doesn’t help any. (But more of that in the next few days.)
Click here for the dire details.
Click here for the dire details.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
A COUP BY ANY OTHER NAME
While what I’ve seen of the world’s media have been hailing a “triumph of people-power in Egypt, a small-but-nagging internal voice has been pointing out reality may be closer to an old-fashioned military coup. Jim Lobe offers analysis…
“WASHINGTON - Four days after the stunning departure of Hosni Mubarak from the presidential palace in Cairo, analysts here are still trying to determine whether his ouster represents a revolution heralding the advent of democratic governance or a coup d'etat staged by the already-dominant military. Egypt's new military rulers have vowed to pave the way for a democratically-elected civilian government, but there is still no true way of knowing how they will disperse their new authority over the transition. (Gallo/Getty> Despite the media euphoria, scepticism among Egypt specialists about the military's intentions has been running pretty high here since Mubarak's resignation. Jon Alterman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, for example, warned the "rise of the Military Command Council (MCC)" could result in a "huge step backward", while Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA officer now with the neo-conservative Foundation for the Defence of Democracies, predicted that the army "will test to see how much autocracy (and wealth) it can keep in its hands." Click here for more
Click here for The Who
The secret word is Smokescreen
THE GEEK! THE MOTHERSHIP!
In the movie all I’d really ever seen was the lights, and shadowy spars, and thus I was fascinated to see this picture of the actual production model of the mothership from Close Encounters of the Third Kind now preserved in the National Air and Space Museum in Dulles Va.
Click here for The Captain
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
BACK OFF, DOG, I WAS FIRST
Which comes as fascinating news to me, especially as, for some time now, I have been spasmodically working on a collection of short stories about cats.
"It has often been said that the dog was the first animal domesticated by humans. The date of this has long been placed at 14,000 to 20,000 years before present. Recent analysis of mitochondrial DNA of dogs, wolves, and other canines show that dogs had actually split off from wolves 135,000 years ago. I propose that not only have paleontologists been mistaken about the date of the domestication of dogs, dogs were not even the first animals to be domesticated. This place of honor belongs to the ancestors of the common house cat, Felis catus. The cat was the first animal to be domesticated, more than 4 million years ago, long before the genus Homo evolved. And in fact it was the cat, or rather the loss of cats, that molded and shaped the evolution of Homo. (If “domestication” doesn’t sit well with you when applied to the relationship between a prehuman primate and a cat, think of it as a quasi-symbiotic relationship.) There are many unexplained matters in the early history of hominines. How could the australopithecines survive in Pliocene Africa? No tools for hunting, too small and weak to complete with other scavengers, teeth (in the gracile form) unadapted for plant eating, they seem to have been unable to even feed themselves. And the slow and small australopithecines would have been easy prey for the first large carnivore to come along. Where did they spend the night? In spite of their disadvantages, australopithecines managed to survive almost unchanged for 2 million years. How? And why did these survivors suddenly evolve into a new genus, Homo, just then the large carnivores were dying out? The answer to all these questions: the Pliocene Pussy Cat." (Click here for more)
The secret word is Hissy
LET THE FLYER BEWARE
I suppose Homeland Security on the take was inevitable, especially in New Jersey where “everything is legal as long as you don’t get caught.”
“A TSA supervisor stole money from passengers who went through his security checkpoint and accepted bribes and kickbacks from a colleague. Michael Arato, a supervisor at Newark Liberty Airport, admitted on Monday that he regularly took money from passengers during security screenings and deliberately targeted foreigners who could not speak much English. The 41-year-old, from Ewing, admitted in federal court that he permitted a worker he supervised to steal $10,000 to $30,000 in cash from traveller's bags over a 13-month period. During one recorded conversation, the two TSA agents discussed an on-going competition between them that involved stealing from passengers in the presence of their TSA supervisors. Another time, the pair discussed how they did not feel bad stealing from foreign passengers who were leaving the country with 'our money'.”
Click here for a weird mix of the Wilburys
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
IN YOUR GUT YOU KNOW SHE'S WRONG
Click here for something European the Christians are really going the hate.
The secret word is Hosanna
VALENTINE’S AFTERMATH
In all of the Valentine debris left over on the web from yesterday these carnivorous kittens on World of Wonder must get honorable mention.
Click here for Nico
Monday, February 14, 2011
JURASSIC LOVE
On Valentines Day I bring no hearts and flowers (heart broken, flowers wilted, what else do y’all want?) but I do pose an interesting question of what might be called erotic paleontology. How did the Stegosaurus ever manage to fuck?
“Figuring out how Stegosaurus even could have mated is a prickly subject. Females were just as well-armored as males, and it is unlikely that males mounted the females from the back. A different technique was necessary. Perhaps they angled so that they faced belly to belly, some have guessed, or maybe, as suggested by Timothy Isles in a recent paper, males faced away from standing females and backed up (a rather tricky maneuver!). The simplest technique yet proposed is that the female lay down on her side and the male approached standing up, thereby avoiding all those plates and spikes. However the Stegosaurus pair accomplished the feat, though, it was most likely brief—only as long as was needed for the exchange of genetic material. All that energy and effort, from growing ornaments to impressing a prospective mate, just for a few fleeting moments to continue the life of the species.” Click here for more
Click here for Buddy Holly
The secret word is Arrow
RAND MOVIE PROMISES TO BE A DOG
“Well, they’ve released the trailer for the first part of a projected trilogy based on Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged. It’s taken over 50 years for the story to get from the page to the screen and from the looks of this, perhaps things were best left that way! Angelina Jolie, Charlize Theron, Julia Roberts, Anne Hathaway have all been touted at one time or another to portray Rand’s heroine, Dagny Taggart. Russell Crowe and Brad Pitt have both been bandied about to play the novel’s world-stopping hero, John Galt. So who got these roles of a lifetime, ultimately? Some chick you’ve never heard of and a dude who was on Beverly Hills 90210 and Highlander: The Raven! (He also happens to be the trilogy’s director, bless his heart). This looks about as good as one of the Left Behind movies. Perhaps that’s fitting.” Click here for the trailer.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
SUNDAY BREAKFAST
Although I am now busily recovering from the first assault by my new UK micro-ecology, I have spent that last few days surviving on a diet of on a diet of soup, Tuc crackers, Vegemite and ginger ale, which can hardly be described as Rabelaisian. A side effect of this limited nourishment is that I’ve been having the most vivid fever dreams of the full English fry-up and as soon as I feel fit enough I will be sitting in a café ordering a the culinary equivalent of Russian roulette for a self-induced heart attack. (And yes, I have switched brand loyalty from Marmite to Vegemite. It’s all to do with consistency and spreadability. Does that make me a class traitor?)
Click here for Joe Brown and the Bruvvers
The secret word is Lard
ELECTRIC CONFESSION
Last Sunday – before I was so virally interrupted – I mention a 1989 novel of mine titled The Armageddon Crazy in which, under a Fundamentalist Christian theocracy, holograms of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse cause mass panic. The same story also featured electronic confession booths that were supposed to be routed straight to God, but in fact were hooked into the secret police. Seemingly all things predicted must come true these days, as our pal Joly reports…
“Even for the most ardent Catholic, it can sometimes be tricky making the time to confess your sins. So the Church, as part of a new technology-friendly push, has now approved an iPhone app that lets busy Catholics admit their wrongdoings while on the move. Selling for $1.99, "Confession: A Roman Catholic App" was developed as an aid "for those who frequent the sacrament and those who wish to return," according to Little iApps, the firm behind the idea. Its makers insist it is not a replacement for confessing in person with a priest, but instead helps to keep track of all the evil things you have done since the last time you confessed by ticking off some of the most common failings. Deviants get the opportunity to add their own, bespoke, sins as they go.” Click here for more.
Joly also included some apt commentary by Lauren Weinstein…
“With word that the Catholic Church has now endorsed a “confession app for iPhones and related devices, two trains of thought immediately occur to me. First to mind is the potential law enforcement bonanza whenever searching for Catholic criminals, especially in states like California where the California Supreme Court has recently granted authorities access to smartphones and other devices' contents without even needing a search warrant. [Update: February 10, 2011: The Vatican has now effectively banned the app, stating that "under no circumstances is it possible to confess by iPhone." Their full wording suggests that Android and other platforms are also excluded. Priests the world over sigh in relief.]” Click here for more and also apt video clips
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