THE ELVIS MOUSE

I suppose it was inevitable. (And could only trigger an impromptu Elvis Friday.)

“Hair samples of Elvis Presley, bought on eBay were sent to a gene sequencing lab to identify different behavioural traits (varied from sociability, athletic performance to obesity and addiction). Using this information, transgenic mice clones with parallel traits were produced. The genetically cloned models of Elvis (in this case) are tested in a collection of various contemporary scientific mouse model environments, simulating some of the significant biographical circumstances of his life.” (Click here for the whole weird story)

Click here for the uncloned Elvis

The secret words are Hillbilly and Cat

THE ELVIS ROLE MODEL

THE ELVIS PRAYER MAT

KITTEN CONSIDERS THE ELVIS MOUSE AS A THEOLOGICAL CONCEPT (or as lunch)

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

Curia Frozdick had a highly idiosyncratic approach to her practice of Satanism.

A HAND IN EVERY TILL

International bankers continue to act as though they own the planet and we are only pawns on their chessboard. No lessons are learned. No sentences are handed down. No executions are conducted the cellar. Fraud, larceny, and criminal incompetence continue unchecked. In recent weeks JP Morgan has been caught playing the same old billion dollar shell game. In the UK, customers of Nat West and RBS have been unable to access their own money after an unprecedented computer failure following the outsourcing of a creaking computer system to poorly trained and even more poorly paid technicians. And now Channel 4 News tells me that…

“A vast story has broken, concerning banking dishonesty on what the regulator, the FSA, calls a “serious, widespread and extended” scale. It has called the action misconduct, and fined Barclays, as have American regulators, which all adds up to £290m. In short, Barclays got the people who report their interest rates to the British Bankers Association (these are collated from all the major banks to fix the official Libor rate) to try and manipulate their rate. It’s one of the biggest scandals to hit the City of London and it speaks of extremely loose and even louche practices. The reporting from Barclays, according to the FSA, amounted to a straight lie. The bankers, on senior executives’ instructions (we’re not told any names) were simply told to understate the true level of interest to enable the bank to sustain trading profits. It’s all so bad, that the ever resistant Barclay’s boss, Bob Diamond, has finally given in on his huge bonus and accepted that he cannot claim it. The biggest question tonight, given that it is so widespread and so deep - why is this activity not regarded as fraud, and why is no-one being prosecuted?”

But the problem goes far deeper than even astronomical global racketeering and levels of greed that now covert sums of money that can only be abstractions. The Nobel economist Paul Krugman reports in the NY Times how bankers and their political lackeys are so busy looting the coffers and so dedicated to their notional games of impossible acquisition, they have abdicated any responsibility for an economic crisis that could lay waste to the developed world.  

“None of this should be happening. As in 1931, Western nations have the resources they need to avoid catastrophe, and indeed to restore prosperity — and we have the added advantage of knowing much more than our great-grandparents did about how depressions happen and how to end them. But knowledge and resources do no good if those who possess them refuse to use them. And that’s what seems to be happening. The fundamentals of the world economy aren’t, in themselves, all that scary; it’s the almost universal abdication of responsibility that fills me, and many other economists, with a growing sense of dread.”

The secret word is Suppurating

PUSHING CITIZENS TO EXTREMES

As governments seem wholly unwilling to bring criminal bankers to justice, angry and frightened citizens look to more drastic measures. I wouldn’t actually recommend extreme revenge. It’s probably illegal to suggest such things. 

Click here for Gene Vincent

POSTED WITHOUT COMMENT

DOC’S PAPERBACK CLASSIC #103

THE WORLD IS TOO COMPLICATED!

The world is too complicated! We cannot save it! I have no time! I turn your over to Henri the cat! Click here!

The secret number is 101

AND A COW IS IN THE KITCHEN

Click here for unusual Eddie Cochran

OBSERVED IN SANTA MONICA

(Image supplied by Doug the Bass) 

GRATUITOUS BARDOT, BIRKIN & CIGARETTE

KNOW THE ENEMY

Oft times I have complained there – probably ad nauseum – about how the War on Drugs has dragged on and on for more than my entire not inconsiderable lifetime to the detriment of all and the near destruction of Mexico and Columbia. In that time there has been no sign of compromise or even sanity. In a vicious vacuum devoid of all social and philosophical credibility, death and incarceration continue unabated to feed the funds and fantasies of darkest law enforcement, neo-fascist billionaire beer barons, screaming moron media and the politicians who ride it, plus the growing privatised prison industry. Michelle Leonhart is a senior DEA official. Watch this inane power-idiot in action. As our good pal Richard Metzger writes in Dangerous Minds…

“Why is someone as blinkered as Michelle Leonhart serving as a top DEA administrator? Her opinion about marijuana being as dangerous as other illegal drugs like heroin, crack, or meth hardly rises to the level of superstition let alone any kind of objective science.

This dumbass obviously has no idea what she is talking about. This is an infuriating display of complete idiocy and willful ignorance. Or else she’s just lying and stonewalling with the DEA party line, of course, but the “deer in the headlights” uncomprehending look on her face as she’s being grilled probably indicates that she’s being sincere. And stupid.”

Click here for the witless La Leonhart 

The secret word is Void

AND NOW A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR

Click here for Albert Collins

SEE HOW THE OTHER HALF…(Yes, it’s for real)

“I NEED TO TALK TO MY LAWYER”

SUNDAY BREAKFAST

Sorry friends. My brain hurts. I’ll leave you with this question and catch up with you all tomorrow.

If I was a Hun on my pony

Following my leader

To the rape and pillage the Roman Empire

Would I have been

In any way aware

I was a vassal of apocalypse

Terminating a culture

A system of supposed civilization

And ushering in Dark Ages

And centuries of war, pestilence, death,

And ignorance?

Or would I merely have viewed it

As just another day on the job?

Click here for The Beatles

The secret number is 451

MARILYN SEZ...

“Take twenty reds and call me in the morning.”

THE BANKER

There’s really nothing to say about this little gem from Bill Nighy except its hilarious and subversively on the money. Click here.

The secret word is Ruin

MARILYN SEZ…

“And for bankers who refuse to compromise, we have plenty of lampposts and lots of rope.”  

PURE EGO

A glowing review by the excellent Ben Graham of last Friday’s poetry show here in Brighton was posted on Facebook. One section, however, gave me cause for a certain old guard pause and posed three possible questions.

1) Have I been doing this for too long?

2) Have my visions become archaic?

3) Do I give a fuck?

“Farren links back to an era when outlaw giants like Burroughs, Thompson and Morrison still strode the earth, and rock n’ roll and outsider poetry were linked, along with wider and more amorphous notions of youth-as-rebel-culture and drugs-as-shamanic-tools, standing firm against the rapacious advances of the military-industrial greedheads and all who served them. Such an era may seem quaint and discredited now from our lonely 21st Century beachhead. And yet we at the Midsummer Poetry Ball still broadly advocate and stand behind such principles.” (Click here for the whole thing.)

So while I’m basking in the wonder of me, KUSF in San Francisco devoted an hpur show to the works of the Deviants plus side project like Tijuana Bible. (Click here for a listen)

And if all that wasn’t enough, here’s a clip of the Deviants’ D-Day show in Wolverhampton.

LOST IN TRANSLATION

POSTED WITHOUT COMMENT

GRATUITOUS CORNER

FULL SPEED TO THE DARK AGES

This essay by John Atcheson provides one more well considered confirmation that arrant and vicious stupidity has to be halted if any of us are to survive.


“We are witnessing an epochal shift in our socio-political world.  We are de-evolving, hurtling headlong into a past that was defined by serfs and lords; by necromancy and superstition; by policies based on fiat, not facts. Much of what has made the modern world in general, and the United States in particular, a free and prosperous society comes directly from insights that arose during the Enlightenment. Too bad we’re chucking it all out and returning to the Dark Ages. Literally. Two main things distinguished the post Enlightenment world from the pre Enlightenment Dark Ages. First, Francis Bacon’s Novo Organum Scientiarum (The New Instrument of Science)introduced a new way of  understanding the world, in which empiricism, facts and … well … reality … defined what was real. It essentially outlined the scientific method:  observation and data collection, formulation of hypotheses, experiments designed to test hypotheses and elevation of these hypotheses to theories when data consistently supported them.  It was and is a system based on skepticism, and a relentless and methodical search for truth. 

It brought us advances and untold wealth and health.  From one-horse carts to automobiles to airplanes. From leaches and phrenology to penicillin and monoclonal antibodies.

Until recently. 

Now, we seek to operate by revealed truths, not reality.  Decrees from on high – often issued by an unholy alliance of religious fundamentalists, self-interested corporations, and greedy fat cats – are offered up as reality by rightwing politicians. For example, North Carolina law-makers recently passed legislation against sea level rise. A day later, the Virginia legislature required that references to global warming, climate change and sea level rise be excised from a proposed study on sea level rise. Last year, the Texas Department of Environmental Quality, which had commissioned a study on Galveston Bay, cut all references to sea level rise – the main point of the study. As Stephen Colbert so aptly put it: “If your science gives you results you don’t like, pass a law saying that the result is illegal Problem solved.”Click here for more

  

Click here for the Doctor

The secret word is Dementia

YES COMRADES IT’S THE KARL MARX CREDIT CARD (for real)

From each according to his credit score!

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

It took Lars Frozdick some time to talk the other three guys into taking part in the experiment but eventually they came on board.

GRATUITOUS PIG RACING

THE AUM NUKE

Here at Doc40 we love a good conspiracy theory, especially when it involves DIY nuclear weapons. Although I cultivated a morbid interest the Aum Shinrikyo death cult through the 1990s – they were the characters who, in 1995, loosed Sarin nerve gas in the Tokyo subway – I hadn’t heard this quite amazing story until I read about it in Bill Bryson’s book In a Sunburned Country…

“In January 1997, according to a report written in America by a Times re­porter, scientists were seriously investigating the possibility that a mysterious seismic dis­turbance in the remote Australian outback al­most four years earlier had been a nuclear explosion set off by members of the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo.

"It happens that at 11:03 p.m. local time on May 28, 1993, seismograph needles all over the Pacific region twitched and scribbled in response to a very large-scale disturbance near a place called Banjawarn Station in the Great Victoria Desert of Western Australia. Some long-distance truckers and prospec­tors, virtually the only people out in that lonely expanse, reported seeing a sudden flash in the sky and hearing or feeling the boom of a mighty but far-off explosion. One reported that a can of beer had danced off the table in his tent.

"The problem was that there was no obvi­ous explanation. The seismograph traces didn't fit the profile for an earthquake or mining explosion, and anyway the blast was 170 times more powerful than the most powerful mining explosion ever recorded in Western Australia. The shock was consistent with a large meteorite strike, but the impact would have blown a crater hundreds of feet in circumference, and no such crater could be found. The upshot is that scientists puz­zled over the incident for a day or two, then filed it away as an unexplained curiosity-- the sort of thing that presumably happens from time to time.

"Then in 1995 Aum Shinrikyo gained sud­den notoriety when it released extravagant quantities of the nerve gas sarin into the Tokyo subway system, killing twelve people. In the investigations that followed, it emerged that Aum's substantial holdings in­cluded a 500,000-acre desert property in Western Australia very near the site of the mystery event. There, authorities found a laboratory of unusual sophistication and focus, and evidence that cult members had been mining uranium. It separately emerged that Aum had recruited into its ranks two nuclear engineers from the for­mer Soviet Union. The group's avowed aim was the destruction of the world, and it ap­pears that the event in the desert may have been a dry run for blowing up Tokyo.”

Click here for Bob

The secret word is Roentgen

AND NOW A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR...

GRATUITOUS PALLENBERG

(Image from HCB)

BECAUSE THE BIBLE TELLS ME SO

This is kinda long, but when our pals at Delancey Place dropped this clip from Timothy Beal’s book The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected  History of an Accidental Book into my inbox I was intrigued. Over the years I have listened to so many idiots spouting so much nonsense and using The Bible as the ultimate authority because it was supposedly written by their monotheist God (above). The truth now emerges that a large number of the aforementioned idiots and their ilk haven’t even read the damned book and are devoid of too many clues as to what they’re talking about. 

"According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 78 percent of all Americans say that the Bible is the 'word of God,' and almost half of those believe that, as such, 'it is to be taken literally, word for word.' Polling data from the Barna Group indicate that nearly half of all Americans agree that 'the Bible is totally accurate in all of its teachings' (88 percent of all 'born-again' Christians believe the same), and the Gal­lup Poll finds that 65 percent of all Americans believe that the Bible 'answers all or most of the basic questions of life.' These statements are shorthand descriptions of the idea of the Bible as God's magnum opus, the first and last word on who God is, who we are, why we're here, and where we go after this. ...  

"Yet ... recent polls and surveys offer these biblical revelations:

"Less than half of all adult Americans can name the first book of the Bible (Genesis, in Hebrew Bereshit) or the four Gospels of the New Testament (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John).

"More than 80 percent of born-again or evangelical Chris­tians believe that "God helps those who help themselves" is a Bible verse. ...

"More than half of graduating high school seniors guess that Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife, and one in ten adults believes that Joan of Arc was Noah's wife. (Those two must've been multiple-choice questions.)

"Almost two-thirds of Americans can't name at least five of the Ten Commandments. Some of these people, moreover, are outspoken promoters of them. Georgia representative Lynn Westmoreland, cosponsor of a bill to display the Ten Com­mandments in the chambers of the House of Representa­tives and Senate, could remember only three when Stephen Colbert asked him to recite them on The Colbert Report (Col­bert, who I hear teaches Sunday school at his church, would probably have done considerably better). ...

"Even among the majority of Christians who identify themselves strongly with the Bible, Bible reading is a rare activity. In a 2005 nationwide study of religious values, practices, and behaviors by Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion, more than half of those identifying themselves as 'Bible-believing' said they had not participated in any kind of Bible study or Sunday school program at all in the past month. ...

"While biblical literacy is about as low as it can get, Bible sales have been booming. The biggest Bible publishers in this highly competitive business guard their sales data closely, but reliable industry sources estimate that 2007 saw about 25 million Bibles sold, generating revenues of about $770 million in the United States alone. That was an in­crease of more than 26 percent since 2005, which saw U.S. sales of about $609 million. In fact, the Bible-publishing business has been enjoying a healthy compounded growth rate of close to 10 percent per year for several years. Even during the high point of economic crisis in late 2008, when other book sales were hurting badly, Bible sales continued to boom, with an estimated $823.5 million that year. ...

 "So biblical literacy is low to zip, even while biblical reverence remains high and Bible sales rise. What's going on? Could it be that biblical literacy is being replaced by biblical consumerism? In today's consumer culture, we are what we buy, wear, and carry. We identify ourselves by our patterns of con­sumer choices, by the market niches we buy into. It's gone beyond that post-Cartesian proof of existence, 'I shop, therefore I am.' Today, it's closer to 'I shop for what I am.' "    

Click here for Siouxsie and the Banshees

The secret word is Writ

KEEP WATCHING THE SKIES

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

Labia Frozdick generated her own subtitles.

GRATUITOUS BARDOT

THE DECREPIT WARRIOR POET IS AT IT AGAIN

The write up reads…

"Legendary writer, singer and provocateur Mick Farren is due to perform a one-off spoken word show in Brighton this Friday (June 15th). Farren will headline the Midsummer Poetry Ball at Brighton’s 100-capacity Westhill Hall, reading from his recently-published collection of verse, Black Dogs Circling (Sea Urchin Editions), among other work. The counter-culture veteran will be backed for the occasion by guitarist Andy Colquhoun and percussionist Jaki Windmill, both current members of Farren’s recently-reactivated proto-punk freak band the Deviants." (Click here for more)

Tickets are just £4.00 and the really good news is that you can bring in your own booze. (And the post code is BN1 3PS)

BUT THE REST OF THE DAY MAY POSE SOMETHING OF A COSMIC CONUNDRUM

Click here for The Tornadoes

The secret word is Brane

GRATUITOUS LATEX

SUNDAY BREAKFAST

Whatever today’s repast might have been, it wasn’t preceded by a lude or a mandy. Mandrax in the UK, Quaaludes in the US, they made you horny, cosily stupid and the world turned very slowly and every casual contact was beautiful. They were adored by tattooed love boys, party girls, and Elvis Presley. And, many a morn, if it hadn’t been for the coke, you might next have risen from the bed, and even then it was only to stagger out for a wobble and if one wobbled in the direction of some alcohol the God Lord save us all. Wikipedia rather stiffly recalls…

“Quaaludes became increasingly popular as a recreational drug in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The drug was used during sexual activity because of heightened sensitivity and lowered inhibition coupled with relaxation and euphoria. The drug was often used by people who went to glam rock clubs in the early 1970s and at discos in the late 1970s. (One slang term for Quaaludes was disco biscuits.)” 

The drug was methaqualone and its vogue was sadly short if intense. It was just too much fun for the authoritarian squares. The global drug enforcement industry leaned heavily on the big pharm to simply stop making ludes and mandies. Big pharm instantly caved despite the popularity of the product. The seductive white pills just plain vanished. Bootlegs are manufactured in Mexico but they were powdery rubbish. Large sections of hedonist/airhead drug culture were bereft and distraught. Some expressed their distress by becoming full blown junkies. I joked in my 2001 novel Darklost that Robert Evans had the very last Quaalude on the planet in his private safe,  

“Gene Haislip, the former head of the Chemical Control Division of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), told the PBS documentary program Frontline: “we beat 'em.” By contacting governments around the world and manufacturers of Quaaludes, the DEA convinced them to halt production. Haislip said “we eliminated the problem.”

Bah!

Click here for David

The secret word is Stumble

MARILYN SEZ

“I’ll take twenty!” 

AND SINCE WE’RE TALKING METHAQUALONE LET’S POST ANOTHER TERRY RODGERS ORGY

GRATUITOUS EMMA PEEL (after)

(see last Friday)

AYN RAND WAS A SPEEDFREAK (Shock! Horror!)

I had assumed Ayn Rand was merely dangerous and maybe self-obsessed to the point of psychosis. As it turns out – and according to Robert Anton Wilson in his book Cosmic Trigger Vol II -- she was consistently loaded to the gills on amphetamine…

“The first new dogmatism I embraced after rejecting the Marxist BS (belief system) was Ayn Rand’s philosophy (not yet called Objectivism in those days.) _The Fountainhead_ had exactly the appeal for me that it has retained, decade after decade, with alienated adolescents of all ages. (The average youthful reader of _Thus Spake Zarathustra_ decides he is the Superman, and the average youthful Randroid decides she is an Alienated Super Genius.) Like most Randroids, I went around for a few years mindlessly parroting all the Rand dogma and imagining I was an ‘individualist.’

“Some years later, after becoming a published writer, I actually was invited to meet Ayn Rand once. (I was ‘summoned to the Presence,’ as Arlen said.) I confessed my doubts about certain Rand dogmas and was Cast Out Into the Darkness forever to wail and gnash my teeth in the Realm of Thud. It was weird. I thought the Trots and Catholic priests were dogmatic, but Ayn Rand made both groups look like models of tolerance by comparison. “I thought she was a clinical paranoid. It was nearly 30 years later that I found out Rand was merely on Speed all the time, which creates an effect so much like paranoia that even trained clinicians cannot always tell the difference, and some even claim there is no difference.”

Click here for Motorhead (I wrote the lyrics to this, BTW)

The secret word is Bomber