WHOLLY HOLY SUNDAY

Shall we all get right with God, brothers and sisters?

I suppose if we were truly devout we’d be spending Sunday doing absolutely nothing, which would come a major relief to me, at least, since I appear to spend all my time writing until my typing hands hurt. Also, since there would appear to be no biblical proscriptions against smoking weed, we could be doing nothing plus being as high as kites, which is, if I recall correctly, is how I spent a considerable part of my youth, when, I swear, things were a great deal fucking easier. (No worries about God on the reefer count, though, the marijuana laws are just a matter of rendering unto Caesar that about which Caesar is irrationally demented.)

Okay, so here we are, Sunday, stoned, and totally doing nothing, exactly as the Bible instructs, except maybe scratching our feet. Shall we take it a stage further and try for a vision? Let’s pretend that GWB was reelected, and, while we’re waiting for the prime time death-stoning of evil-doers on Fox, hosted by Jay Leno, what better moment to review the brand new Federal regulations governing marriage. Strictly biblical right? Well, my friends, our good pal kaymo has sent us a resume of just what these new rules of bible-based marriage would need to include to make them 100% guaranteed devout...

Just in the hope of elevating the debate, I note that a constitutional amendment to codify marriage on biblical principles would need to include these provisions:

1. Marriage in the United States shall consist of a union between one man and one or more women. (Gen 29:17-28; II Sam 3:2-5)

2. Marriage shall not impede a man's right to take concubines, in addition to his wife or wives. (II Sam 5:13; I Kings 11:3; II Chron 11:21)

3. A marriage shall be considered valid only if the wife is a virgin. If she is not a virgin, she shall be executed. (Deut 22:13-21)

4. Marriage of a believer and a non-believer shall be forbidden. (Gen 24:3; Num 25:109; Ezra 9:12; Neh 10:30

5. Since marriage is for life, neither this constitution nor the constitution of any State shall be construed to permit divorce. (Deut 22:19; Mark 10:9)

6. If a married man dies without children, his brother shall marry the widow. If he refuses to marry his brother's widow or deliberately does not give her children, he shall either be slain or pay a fine of one shoe. (Gen 38:6-10; Deut 25:5-10)

So there you have it, oh ye of little faith. Maybe a tad hard on unbelievers, wives, sluts, and brothers in law, but weren’t we always warned that God was fucking mysterious? Now if anyone has chapter and verse on the biblical strictures against homosexuality and fornication, we can really get jiggy wit’ it.

MEANWHILE...

Up on the comments board, a debate over fun v politics seems to be gathering momentum. Join in, enjoy, that’s what the thing’s there for. (And both by default and because the majority seem to like the anarchy of it all, the comments will remain as they are until they finally explode. Which I guess is the basic Doc40 theory of blog maintenance.) You can also email – byron4d@aol.com.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY – A true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. – Che Guevara

CRYPTIQUE – Lay down in green pastures.

MORE DISSENT IN THE RANKS

I see from the comments board over yonder that the sound muttering may be rising in the audience about how Doc40 has been getting too grim and political lately. In fact, blanche and some girl may be right. I’m constantly catching myself sounding as though I was on a one note bender of Bush, culture wars, and impending doom. Is this true I ask myself? And back comes the answer: “Of course it is. Lighten up now and again.” But then one of the other voices in my head counters with, “How could it be otherwise? Who the fuck do you want to be? Ryan Seacrest? Yesterday some assholes blew up Madrid.” So thus I wrestle with the dilemma of how to fight the good fight...

(A bloody great spider just walked across the legal pad next to my computer. I shoo it away with a Post-It. Begone child of Shelob.)

...without becoming a fucking bore?

FUN STUFF FOR SATURDAY

Well okay, I thought. It’s Saturday. Let’s get down with the light hearted trivia and see where it takes us. And then I looked around at what there was and found a tip-off on the new David Mamet movie from Henry C. Beck and wadda y’know? The movie is bloody grim and bloody political. Then I find a website called God Hates Shrimp, but that turns out to be political satire – but funny in an Old Testament, exoskeletal kinda way. (http://www.godhatesshrimp.com/)

Which leaves me with Safe For Work porn site which seems humorously to demonstrate how porn will look if we lose the culture war. (http://www.area29.com/sfwporn/)

And then there’s the chance for a sick grin at the expense of the mundanely demented at Group Hug (http://grouphug.us/) where strangers post anonymous confessions, as in...

I slept with one of my best friend's girlfriend. I feel guilty about it, she feels guilty about it, but I would still do it again given the opportunity. She's so hot.

or...

I sniff white out and magic markers all day while at my desk. I have an office job.

or...

I live with three other girls. I like one of them and want the other two to die. I dream of axe murderers breaking down the door and them dying. They are fat slobs who just eat bacon and sound like elephants.

And finally we have Lithium Journals which the is the blog of a strange young man from an “imaginary metaverse” who writes like some seriously depressed 21st century neo-Burroughs and whose work I really dig, while finding it a trifle disturbed and disturbing. (http://lithiumjournals.theoutcast.com/) Here’s a taste...

razors and guns. the coolest fucking bandaids, ever. they will fix you right and proper and when they are done, the only scab left is you.

i am an unwilling survivor of a life i never wanted. i speak to the ghost of the child who died inside my mother months before i was born. she tells me, she says, "luck of the draw." i look at my hand and i see the two jokers, the jack of spades, the queen of diamonds and the king of clubs. the jokers mock and laugh, the jack of spades regards me with mild curiousity. the queen of diamonds looks at me with hatred and contempt while the king of clubs whispers, "fold while you can

BECK ON SPARTAN

As to Bush and the administration– In the new Mamet thriller, Spartan, which I saw the other night, the President's daughter is picked up at a cat house and dragged off to be the plaything of some white slavers in the Middle East. The slavers don't know who she is.
Spoilers:
Val Kilmer thinks his job is to rescue her, but when she ends up dead (somewhere else altogether) he takes it to heart. Why I mention all this is that in Mamet's movie, the Prez is out with her secret service detail getting his horn scraped, leaving her vulnerable. And when she goes missing, the White House fakes her death, more than anything because she's an embarrassment, it's a re-election year, and they could give a fuck if she's getting passed around the camel lads. The woman (secret service) who actually raised the girl says to Kilmer, "These people are savages. They don't even know how many kids they have." There's more of that sort of exposition that I can't remember offhand, but it's a very very nasty picture of politicians in general and the Presidential family specifically. One doesn't often see such a bitter and dismal and probably accurate view of the heartless ruthlessness of the people on top. A bit of a surprise, actually. It's like the church--Bishops and administrators pretending they are unaware of the huge volume of in-house abuses, when dealing with the mold on the human soul is their very raison, venality their stock-in-trade. If it weren't for sin, they'd be out of work. There's no room for illusion on their end. How many confessions do you suppose a priest has to listen to before his faith in human nature, assuming he ever had any, is reduced to compost?

CRYPTIQUE – Smile when you say that.

GRIM AND GRIMMER

I really wish we could be talking about shoes, sex, drunkeness, Captain Midnight, obscure movies, or how great I think my new novel is now I’m reading the page proofs, but everyday the shit piles up, and the atmosphere becomes even more tainted. As Madrid suffers its worst taste of hell since the Spanish Civil War, a link to an excellent site, the Daily Mis-leader, (http://www.misleader.org/) raises the old but still-nagging-and-spectral question. “What did the goddamned president know and when did he know it?”

As President Bush visits a memorial for victims of the 9/11 attacks today, he continues to refuse to clarify dishonest comments he and his national security adviser made denying they had any warning that a terrorist attack was imminent before 9/11. In May 2002, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice claimed, "I don't think anybody could have predicted that [Al Qaeda] would try to use an airplane as a missile." Similarly, President Bush denied having any idea about the threat, saying on 5/17/02, "Had I known that the enemy was going to use airplanes to kill on that fateful morning, I would have done everything in my power to protect the American people." The problem is that these denials contrast sharply with warnings the White House did receive prior to 9/11. Specifically, the Administration was warned before 9/11 that Al Qaeda was planning to use airplanes in an attack against the United States and that the terror group had recently considered using airplanes as missiles. ABC News and Dateline NBC reported that White House officials acknowledge that U.S. intelligence officials delivered a one-and-a-half page document to President Bush on August 6th that warned that "bin Laden's terrorist network might try to hijack American planes." Those warnings came at the same time that U.S. and Italian officials were warning that "Islamic terrorists might attempt to kill President Bush and other leaders by crashing an airliner into the [July 2001] Genoa summit of industrialized nations." These warnings came at the same time top Administration officials were being told to change their own personal flight plans because of "threats." Attorney General John Ashcroft stopped flying commercial airlines and instead began "traveling exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial airlines" because of "what the Justice Department called a 'threat assessment."8 (To this day, the details of that threat assessment have never been made public.) Similarly, Newsweek reported that the day before the 9/11 terror attacks "a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns."

fidicen, who supplied the link, waxes considerable more agressive...

I know you surely know about this, but seeing this information go more mainstream is just so tantalizing. I've got to believe Kerry will unleash it at the right time. I mean, where does chimp go when people find out he had a specific warning about planes and terror on 6 August 2001--while he was beginning the second longest commander in chief vacation of all time (one day short of the record) in the midst of a major economic recession and a mere six months into his term, meanwhile his minions went from public to taxpayer-funded private airline travel and both he and his administration vehemently denied they had anything to inform them that plane attacks were pending but regardless have opposed the Attacks Commission every step of the way and continue to stonewall on testimony and documentational disclosure but constantly use images from the attacks to display their unique fitness for four more years of office. I mean, FAWK, you just can't win an election in the face of that? Can you?? I suppose you could always foment terror in Europe throughout the summer and pin it on towel wearing Ay-Rabs, thus creating the specter of fear amongst an already quivering populace of fat, ignorant chickens without actually doing it in Der Homeland itself and inviting more inquiry into one's intelligence failures and regime machinations. I suppose you COULD try that as a last resort, especially if the markets were tanking, gas prices were spiking, and jobs of both collar colors were being exported, with a li'l help from federal tax incentives and programs, to the subcontinent and far east. I reckon it wouldn't hurt either if it helped the electability and powers of your stooges over there. So I suppose you COULD.Though I would still expect you to lose a fair election by at least five points--in the popular vote if nothing else.

AND GRIMMER STILL

I firmly believe, and I wish I didn’t, that WMDs – that’s plain speaking for fucking atom bombs – will soon be on sale for about the price of their weight in cocaine while we're being distracted by gay marriage, radio decency, and Jesus. The following is clipped from yesterday’s NY Times (which is probably illegal, but frankly, my dears, I don’t give a damn)...

But all in all, the risks of a nuclear 9/11 are increasing. "I wouldn't be at all surprised if nuclear weapons are used over the next 15 or 20 years," said Bruce Blair, president of the Center for Defense Information, "first and foremost by a terrorist group that gets its hands on a Russian nuclear weapon or a Pakistani nuclear weapon." One of our biggest setbacks is in North Korea. Thanks to the ineptitude of hard-liners in Mr. Bush's administration, and their refusal to engage in meaningful negotiations, North Korea is going all-out to make warheads. It may have just made six new nuclear weapons. Then there's Iran, which has sought nuclear weapons since the days of the shah, and whose nuclear program seems to have public support. "I'm not sure there is a way to get an Iranian government to give it up," a senior American official said. Finally, there's the real rogue nation of proliferation, Pakistan. We know that Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Islamist father of Pakistan's bomb, peddled materials to Libya and North Korea, and we don't know who else. It may be that A. Q. Khan & Associates already have passed bomb-grade nuclear fuel to the Qaeda, and we are in for the worst," warns Paul Leventhal, founding president of the Nuclear Control Institute. It's mystifying that the administration hasn't leaned on Pakistan to make Dr. Khan available for interrogation to ensure that his network is entirely closed. Several experts on Pakistan told me they believe that the administration has been so restrained because its top priority isn't combating nuclear proliferation — it's getting President Pervez Musharraf's help in arresting Osama bin Laden before the November election. Another puzzle is why an administration that spends hundreds of billions of dollars in Iraq doesn't try harder to secure uranium and plutonium in Russia and elsewhere. The bipartisan program to secure weapons of mass destruction is starved for funds — but Mr. Bush is proposing a $41 million cut in "cooperative threat reduction" with Russia.

AND TALKING OF RADIO DECENCY

My thoughts about Howard Stern are nailed down in today's LA CityBeat...
http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=740&IssueNum=40

CRYPTIQUE – Nuke ‘em from orbit.

THE ELVIS FACTOR

I’ve noticed over the last ten days or so, I’ve heard mention made of something called the Elvis Factor in reference to the presidential election. I will confess these references did not come at a time when I was paying any more than subliminal attention, and I can only imagine it was some pig-benighted columnist or TV news show casting for an angle, and remembering Bill Clinton.

Yeah, in the world of politicians where all things are relative, Clinton had plenty of Elvis. You only had to watch him get down with an Abyssinia Baptist Church. Both the dead Kennedy Brothers had some Elvis, but it tended to bring out the lone gunmen. I could write a whole lot about the Elvis Factor and probably will sometime, but suffice for now to say that it’s an intangible that makes girls adore and crowds act irrational. The discussion is totally spurious, however, because, trust one who knows, J.F. Kerry doe not have the Elvis. The best he might come up with is a Mt. Rushmore Johnny Cash if he smiled now and again, and the caught-on-mike aside when he called Bush “crooked” is going exactly in that direction, and I doubt it will hurt him at all.

Bush on the other hand comes in with an Elvis negative deficit. He might even be the anti-Elvis, I meditated long and hard trying to conjure a singer with whom Bush might be equated, but the best I could come up with was Andy Griffith’s malignant shitkicker in Elia Kazan’s 1957 A Face In The Crowd. Or is that too easy? Some days I have trouble seeing GWB as human. He seems more like a toxic plush monkey animated by a Chuckie Demon. And that’s a hell of a long way from Graceland.

SOME GIRLS DISSENT

some girl writes...
so i was rooting around on the internet, vaguely feeling dissent re your last doc40 post and seeking something to back up my half-baked notions that the people are not as dumb as you think they are (or as w thinks they are), but and instead i stumbled upon some links on the
drudge report (useful, that; despite him), including this article on the latest congressional action re "obscene" broadcasts.(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43113-2004Mar9.html)

i found this part to be interesting:

Perhaps most controversial will be an amendment by Sens. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) and Trent Lott (R-Miss.) that would impose a moratorium on rules passed by Congress late last year that allow for some media organizations to get larger. The amendment, which passed on a 13-10 vote, directs the General Accounting Office to study the relationship between indecent programming and media consolidation before the new ownership rules can take effect.

indecent programming -- ya mean, like fox news and jerry springer and stuff? huh. of course it would take so-called "public outcry" (try religious-right complaint campaign instead) over "indecency" to get them to look at media consolidation. nevermind thought monopolies and the lack of a true spectrum of viewpoints/lifestyles/etc. represented in mainstream media/entertainment (cable or no) -- THAT'S no cause for concern. and no doubt people who have to do business w/media companies -- production companies, say (at least the ones not already owned by a media conglom), or bands -- also get screwed. but...hey, too bad. that's the market. and the market, as we know, is always right. (hah.)

(Doc 40 notes – Which would seem to be a veiled way of linking some kind of “decency rating” to the ability of media corporations to acquire new radio and TV stations. Its obvious application under the Bush FCC would be to hamper the competition, and give Tom Hicks and Bush’s other pals at Clear Channel a clearer path to become the American right’s corporate Ministry of Truth.)

some girl resumes...

finally, at least there's still SOME highly ironic insanity in the world (instead of just boring old horrible insanity):

from Newsday...PANAMA CITY, Fla. -- A videotape of an underage girl exposing her breasts is not child pornography, a judge decided Tuesday in a criminal case against the producer of the "Girls Gone Wild" video series. Joe Francis, 30, and several of his employees were arrested at Panama City Beach while filming during spring break last April. Bay County sheriff's deputies charged Francis with racketeering related to prostitution and other crimes, based largely on videotapes of girls under 18. Many of the 43 counts he faces hinge on what conduct is considered illegal or pornographic. "This ruling shows that the entire fabric of that claim is wrong," said defense lawyer Aaron Dyer of Los Angeles. Dyer said he expected the ruling to undermine at least 90 percent of the case. Circuit Judge Michael C. Overstreet made his decision in ordering that defense lawyers be allowed to copy tape confiscated during a search of Francis' rented condominium last spring. Prosecutors had tried to prevent the copying on grounds the videotape showing a girl "flashing" her breasts was illegal child pornography. Florida's child pornography law makes the depiction of "sexual conduct" illegal and defines that term to include physical contact. There was no physical contact in the video. State Attorney Jim Appleman did not immediately return a call seeking comment. Prosecutors contend Francis and his video crew enticed girls they knew were underage to expose themselves. The defendants deny the allegation and say the girls had lied about their ages. Francis owns Mantra Entertainment Inc. of Santa Monica, Calif., which produces and distributes the videos.

CRYPTIQUE – Let’s get real, real gone for a change.

DOC40 ALMOST TAKES THE DAY OFF

Goddamn ninety degrees again in LA. The local sun-bunnies chirrup about how lovely it all is, but Newton the cat is still put out and I feel decidedly unwell, while the state of my art makes me attend to a barrow-load of pointless details. I was planning to write at least the start of an analysis of the Elvis Factor in modern politics, but I frankly I don’t have the strength. Thus I leave you with the following, so no ones goes away empty handed...

A SHAGGY DRUNK STORY

From MSNBC – DWPP – Driving While Pre-Pubescent.
This, thanks to a California man who had a few too many. His one smart move: he did not drive while drunk. It was downhill from there, however. First he put a 14-year-old girl behind the wheel but he later gave a 10-year-old girl a shot at driving. When a cop pulled over the swerving car, he found the three of them, the 10-year-old behind the wheel, and beer bottles at the feet of the adult male, Lionel Cerda. Cerda said the two girls were relatives and that he was teaching them how to drive. While the 'relative' part of that story appears to be true, Cerda's driving lesson did not impress the officer. He was charged with DWI, contributing to the delinquency of a minor and child endangerment.

AND MORE BUSHWHACKING

President Bush's re-election campaign says it will ask the Federal Election Commission to investigate a Democratic-leaning group that will air $4.5 million worth of TV ads against Bush, beginning Wednesday. The Media Fund's initial two-week ad run in 17 competitive states will include commercials that criticize Bush's policies and priorities, and mention the president by name. Financed in part by billionaire George Soros and headed by former Clinton administration adviser Harold Ickes, the group expects to raise tens of millions of dollars to run ads this election year.

OH YEAH, AND...

Elvis Presley’s granddaughter, Danielle Keough (Lisa Marie’s daughter with Danny Keough) just signed with a modeling agency, and will be the new face of Dolce and Gabbana.

CRYPTIQUE – The Velcro is pre-cut.

FEAR EATS THE BRIAN

Fear is the mind killer. – Bene Geserit maxim

It’s a campaign of fear and consumption. – Marilyn Manson

I know your deepest secret fear. – Jim Morrison

I have been wishing lately that FDR had never coined the phrase “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.” It would be so useful right about now. I finally saw one of the Bush TV commercials, and it was so plain that the name of the game is now going to be fear for the whole of the election. Eight fucking months of unrelenting trepidation psychology. That much was clear to my, by now, expert eye. So far, other anti-Bush commentators have raged against Bush’s lack of taste in using images of national tragedy to make his pitch. (See Jimmy Breslin below.) I find myself a little beyond that. Taste isn’t even on the radar. The ads are straight subliminal massage. Scientology should be so deft. Expensive and slick, the Bushites have their hand right in the pants of the numbed of the nation. Horrible scary threats – foreign and domestic – abound, and George, and only George will protect us. George is deep-selling himself as what cognitive linguist George Lakoff calls the Strict Father model with the added plus of God as his corner-man.

That I see George as more performing simian that warrior patriarch, and have real problems with those grown-voters who might buy such a clearly nonsensical and nursery illusion should probably disqualify me from further comment, and maybe I should accept my sensei-status and fuck off to a cave. What worries me, however, is that, for this strategy to succeed, the electorate have to be reduced to an infantile near panic. This is clearly the plan of the cognitive scientists of the right and the post-Orwellian consumerists who are getting their fat consultancy cheques from the Bush campaign

The knee-jerk reaction to the Bush psycho-strategy is obviously to fight fear with fear. I rumble of corpo-fascist take-over and warn that “if we don’t defeat Bush in November, there may not be another election.” But is that the way to go? If the battle – and the larger culture war – is being fought between the cognizant of the coastal margins and the willfully stupid of the interior, how sensible is it to play on the fears of the cognizant? Do we really want to go the same route and infantilize the only ones who may have a clue what’s happening? But then again, how the hell does one get across a radical, positive, hopeful, maybe even utopian sales-job in a climate of abject terror of terror itself?

Does this require some discussion? The comments board is over there, or, better still, write byron4D@aol.com for longer postings.

You might also notice that I have used quotes from Frank Herbert, Marilyn Manson, and Jim Morrison at the head of this post, wondering also what might be found in the annals and rhetoric of our own culture to counter all this ugly and bloodily judgmental religion. Are we ashamed of our own poets of resistance, or afeared they will antagonize the dumb and dumber?

I hope this can be the start of something productive. If you agree, please mail it around...

JIMMY BRESLIN

Breslin, as a columnist, was one of my early-scribe heroes. Fidicen sent me a link that indicates he’s still rocking there at NY Newsday. Here he is on the Bush commercials. Just a snippet, hit the link for the full story

In his first campaign commercial, George Bush reached down and molested the dead.
But this only in keeping with both Bushes. George Bush, Sr., had the badge of officer Eddie Byrne, who was gunned down in South Jamaica, and he stood up at Christ the King High School in Middle Village and held it up and said he would have this badge on him forever. Some chance. Bush then led high school girls into insane cheers for the death penalty.
Now, right off, this second George Bush came up with the badge of a Port Authority cop, George Howard, who died. He was from Hicksville. His mother gave Bush the son's badge. When Bush came back to the trade center a year later, he reached into his pocket and whipped out that badge and he had a tear in his eye. What makes it worse is that this George W. Bush acts like he's entitled to treat the remains of a dead man like a souvenir. Now he shows a commercial with dead bodies, or body parts, covered with an American flag being taken through the smoke and flames of the world trade center attack. It caused people who had lost family members in the attack to complain about using the dead or parts thereof being used for a politician's gain.
"Bush is afraid to let us see the dead being brought back from Iraq," one fire fighter said yesterday.

http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/columnists/nyc-bres0306,0,4578571.column

CRYPTIQUE – Would Adam or Steve please pick up the white courtesy phone?

HEATWAVE

The temperature hit the 90s in LA yesterday, and the same is expected today. This may sound wonderful to those of you just emerging from winter, but, believe me, it's weird. The cat is pissed because he still has his thick Himalayan winter coat, my metabolism feels like it’s been worked over by Paulie Walnuts, and I know for sure this is yet another symptom of global weather patterns lurching into dangerous chaos. The owl, hooowever, is still out there. (See yesterday.)

MONDAY, MONDAY

For Monday morning I would also offer the following snip from The NY Times.
To the extent that companies can squeeze another drop of blood out of their existing work force, they're doing it. Eventually you reach the point where there's no more blood to be given, but we haven't reached it yet. – Joshua Shapiro, an economic researcher in New York.

MEL THE MERCILESS

Also in The NY Times, culture columnist Frank Rich takes another crack at Passion and Mel Gibson, and how much money can be made from big screen bigot garbage, and how the whole trough of cash his movie actually is making has rendered Mel acceptable to a lot of people who should know better (including, I noticed, Roger Ebert)...

With its laborious build-up to its orgasmic spurtings of blood and other bodily fluids, Mr. Gibson's film is constructed like nothing so much as a porn movie, replete with slo-mo climaxes and pounding music for the money shots. Of all the "Passion" critics, no one has nailed its artistic vision more precisely than Christopher Hitchens, who on "Hardball" called it a homoerotic "exercise in lurid sadomasochism" for those who "like seeing handsome young men stripped and flayed alive over a long period of time."
If "The Passion" is a joy ride for sadomasochists, conveniently cloaked in the plain-brown wrapping of religiosity, does that make it bad for the Jews? Not necessarily. As a director, Mr. Gibson is no Leni Riefenstahl. His movie is just too ponderous to spark a pogrom on its own — in America anyway. The one ugly incident reported on Ash Wednesday, in which the Lovingway United Pentecostal Church posted a marquee reading "Jews Killed the Lord Jesus," occurred in Denver, where the local archbishop, Charles Chaput, had thrown kindling on the fire by promoting the movie for months. Whether "The Passion" will prove quite as benign in Europe and the Arab world is a story yet to be told.

For the full story...http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/07/arts/07RICH.html?th
(you may have to register, but it’s free)

AND FINALLY J.F.KERRY

I just discovered that John Kerry supposedly once dated Morgan Fairchild. Since I have to support the cat anyway, that fact kinda makes it easier. My own mini-tribute to Ms Fairchild can be found on the live version of "Screwed Up" on the Deviants Human Garbage CD. (see Funtopia--Music)

CRYPTIQUE – You don’t need no ticket, you're just forced on board.

OWLS AND WHISPERS

Last night, or, to be more precise, yesterday in the predawn, when the black turns to a submarine grey-blue half-light of urban gris-gris, a huge full moon loomed bright and dangerously white behind the jacaranda trees, and a weird sound started that was clearly a bird-call. Woo-woot, woo-woot, woo-woot, woo-woot. Loud, fast and rhythmic; perhaps a warning, quite as insistent as any raven on any bust of Pallas. And the local crows (cousins of the raven), who normally own the predawn – picking in the gutter for edibles and shiny objects, while wishing they had hands so they could start a civilization – looked nervous and uneasy. Meanwhile Newton the cat was at the balcony door, furry and staring with wide blue eyes, at full DEFCON-2, because he didn’t like the noise any more than the crows did.

I went to look, but saw nothing. An owl, my inner country-boy suggested? It sounded like an owl, but can owls survive in the bladerunner eco-disaster that is LA? Aren’t the rodents all toxic? Have the owls adapted? I later emailed a friend of copious knowledge, to see if an owl was possible. She responded that they had been reported, both heard and seen, although she herself never had.

I felt perversely pleased. An owl, a bad moon setting, antsy crows, and a watch-cat on alert, they all seemed like a timely message that, before I got too involved in all tomorrow’s structural conspiracies, I must never forget that the wild places of Poe and Lovecraft lurk very close to surface, and are maybe at par with any other given reality at the point of transition from day to night. And that may really be where my strength should be drawn.

FROM THE EMAIL
fidicen rants and leaves a handy link as to how Bush may hope that the capture of Bin Laden will win the election for him.

Fuckin' A Mick, how sad it has been for me to watch this massive crime family response the last two weeks to the events of January and early February and the lack of even astute observers in putting two and two together. I think fluoridated water really does block the questioning faculty. Something keeps the populace impeccably docile and its not just teevee and junk food and the old Marxist standardbearers. You didn't even mention the Haiti and Venezuela "products." An unstable world even beyond the towelhead realm along with an immoral left is the campaign recipe. Hence Iraq may be allowed to descend into civil war, or even encouraged to do so (and perhaps indeed that is what has been happening there lately) because the cost vs. benefits of that scenario are more favorable than what has been happening or certainly allowing them to have elections and actually, god forbid, pulling the troops out. Iraq on Iraq violence to replace Iraq on Yank violence while the news shrieks of homos copulating with each other via multiple inputs six ways to Sunday legally on American flag bedsheets while western hemisphere nations fragment violently in 'military' coup d'etats. "Stand firm Amerikka! Only the Smirking Chimp can save us now!!" Be right up the old Grand Oil Plan alley.

Achtung: http://www.ericmargolis.com/archives/000037.php

There will be no self-pity in the ranks – William S. Burroughs

MORE JACK ELAM

The second part of Henry’s lost Jack Elam interviewette. See yesterday for a full explanation.

YOU WERE IN AN AMERICAN GUERILLA IN THE PHILIPPINES THAT FRITZ LANG DIRECTED
Are you sure that he directed American Guerrilla? Holy shit I had no idea…that was a long time ago. We shot that motherfucker in the Philippines. I had just finished Rawhide. And I was under contract with the studio-that was it! And I hated 'em. I hated that picture because I had nothing to do in it and they made me, because I was under contract, they made me stay with the picture over in the Philippines for months! And I don't think I worked three days! If you ever look at the picture, maybe three days. Was that Fritz?

AND MOONFLEET, TOO
Moonfleet I do remember because we shot that at MGM, everything on the stage, and I was doin another picture at MGM, a Tarzan picture, one with Vera Miles. Gordon Scott was Tarzan, I remember. And I was doin that picture and Fritz was doin Moonfleet at the same time at the studio and he insisted that I work in Moonfleet, so I wasn't in much, whatever it was, he said, it doesn't matter. You can go do the other picture, they won't miss you-there was a bunch of us, a whole bunch of pirates, you know, and he said I can shoot the shot around you, don't worry, and I did the two pictures at the same time. I'd stay on the Tarzan picture cause I was the main heavy, and I always had something to do, he's say any time you're not on there, I want you on the set over here at Moonfleet. That was strictly a gift courtesy of the friendship of Fritz Lang. I had a wonderful relationship with Fritz Lang. Absolutely. Without any question. Of course I didn't work with him that much-we're talking three pictures. There's some directors I did 15, 20 pictures with. But I was with him enough to know that I liked him. I worked from one end to the other, from the really heavy to the sidekick, the bearded old sidekick. I had a lot of fun in the Willie Nelson picture Where the Hell's That Gold? We got along like twins. We did two pictures together, the last one was basically just him and me, and we agreed on one thing, in the picture we sang together, in that one, we did a duet when we were in jail, and we agreed when that was over, he said, "I think Jack, you better let me do the singing," and I said, "Well, you fuckin well better let me do the acting."
Don't know if you've heard this anecdote, but when they were shooting Once Upon A Time In The West, they were having a hell of a time trying to get flies on Elam, so they gave up and broke for lunch. They discovered that all the flies were hanging around the watermelon at the lunch table, so they went and smeared watermelon juice on Elam's face, and got the shot.

CRYPTIQUE – Black is the color and nine is the number.

WEEK END

After a week of weirdness, I ask myself, should I laugh when I hear Attorney General John Ashcroft has gallstone pancreatitis, “a serious and painful abdominal illness"? Or is that mean?

Mick Farren;s stuff in this week’s LA CityBeat. First up a preview of The Sopranos.
http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=721&IssueNum=39
And then Andy Klein and I double team the dreary Oscar Show.
http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=726&IssueNum=39

FRESH FRIDAY LINKS

Our pal hipspinster blogs on Elvis Costello
http://hipspinster.blogspot.com/
And Belle de Jour, our favorite call girl, weighs in with more of her chic and unique weberotica
http://belledejour-uk.blogspot.com/

JACK ELAM

At the beginning of the week I mentioned being sad at seeing the great character actor Jack Elam on the Academy Awards tribute to those motion picture stars who had died this year. This prompted some correspondence, and now Henry Cabot Beck unearths bits of an old, unpublished interview conducted just before Elam’s death....

ON SAM PECKINPAH
Peckinpah tried-just died--to get me to do-what was the name of the western in Mexico?-(Jenny, his wife, tells him) The Wild Bunch, and I turned him down, wouldn't do it. For a very simple reason. Cause if I did Sam's pictures, we're personal friends, and that means I had to live with him on location. And if I live with him at night it'd mean dinner, poker-he loved to play poker too, and I knew I'd be seeing a lot of him and drinking together, right? I knew I couldn't live through it. I can't drink that much, I can't run, it was just a rowdy life for three or four months, which it's gonna be, so I turned the picture down. It almost broke our friendship up, but it didn't, because later on he came along and made me an awful lot of money on another picture that he did, Billy The Kid-(wife chimes in: "Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid"), in which I had a very small part and made a fortune. I did a cameo in it, worked three days, and he made the studio carry me at full salary for three months. Bought me two Lincolns out of the small change left over.

ON FRITZ LANG:
The only one I was really in, was the one with Marlene Dietrich, Rancho Notorious.He was a character, but he was a gentle-I loved him. We had a great personal friendship which developed. We had an instinctive liking of each other. And a lot of directors I don't like for sour shit, because to be a director, it helps a lot to be a prick, and in this case he wasn't. He was mean, people thought, but he wasn't mean at all. He was brusque, but he was certainly a gentle (?), but he was very very brusque, though, in his handling of people. But he was very kind if he liked you. There was a fellow named Dan Seymour, he was in all of Fritz' pictures-they had a personal relationship, and that's where I met Dan Seymour was on one of Fritz' pictures, course I worked with Dan on other things, anyway I was very honored, I felt honored, because of being invited to a very special dinner at his home one night. He had a home high in the hills over Hollywood with a view for a million miles, you know, looking over Beverly Hills and everything, it was a strange house to me, it didn't go with his character because it was a modern house and it was a catered affair, a very very lovely party-twelve or sixteen good friends of his, and I felt very flattered to be invited because…

I enjoyed the man's company a great deal. He was very very considerate to me personally.

(Rancho Notorious)

We had a lot of fun. We got to match coins to see who got to walk by Marlene Dietrich's dressing room when she was changing cause she never closed the door. I won a couple of times.
I remember Fritz had a couple of problems, seems to me he had a couple of serious problems with the cameraman (Hal Mohr, who also shot Destry Rides Again with Dietrich), because the cameraman's very important in a Dietrich picture and three or four times-cameraman's very important on a Fritz Lang picture because Fritz Lang pictures were big pictures-but I remember that Fritz would line up a shot, he'd walk it through, then you walk away, go to your dressing room, wherever you want to go, and the cameraman and his crew light the set, which takes maybe an hour, or in some cases two hours, then you bring everybody in, you run the scene, then you shoot it. And I know that more than once on a Dietrich situation we'd come back and the scene had been changed, the positions had been changed cause the cameraman had changed the positions. And Fritz would say, "That hurts my shot!" and he would argue. But he had a brusque manner and its definitely a very very strong accent, as I'm sure you know. But Fritz was a very kind man; I liked him very much. And as far as I'm concerned he was a very good director.

(More tomorrow)

CRYPTIQUE – It’s a shotgun romance.

THE DRUMS JUST GOT LOUDER

I'VE ALWAYS CONSIDERED WRITING IN CAPS TO BE A SYMPTOM OF INSANITY. LAST NIGHT I WENT OUT FOR A FEW DRINKS, TOOK A NAP, AND THEN WOKE UP TO HEAR HOWARD STERN PREPARING TO BE TAKEN OF THE AIR BY THE BUSH FCC. CHARGES ARE EXPECTED TO BE FILLED LATER TODAY WITH FINES RUNNING INTO THE TENS OF MILLIONS. I REALY DON'T CARE IF YOU LIKE STERN OR NOT. FREE SPEECH IS BEING PISSED ON FROM A GREAT HEIGHT. HE HAS 18 MILLION LISTENERS AND WANTS GWB BOOTED OUT OF OFFICE. THUS STERN MUST BE TAKEN OUT. THAT IS CURRENT GOVERNMENT THINKING.

AMONG THE POINTS IN THE SCARY MADNESS...

SENATOR SAM BROWNBACK (R KANSAS) HAS BEEN PERSONALLY CONTACTING VIACOM BOARD MEMBERS AND THREATENING THEM, REMOVE STERN OR ELSE.

IF YOU WANT TO CONTACT BROWNBACK HE'S AT...

http://brownback.senate.gov/CMEmailMe.htm

BROWNBACK ALSO LIVES IN A FUNDALMENTALIST CHRISTIAN COMMUNE IN WASHINGTON WITH A NUMBER OF OTHER CONGRESSMEN THAT IS FUNDED BY A RELIGIOUS SECT CALLED "THE FELLOWSHIP".

A REPUBLICAN WHISPERING CAMPAIGN HAS THE SLOGAN "A VOTE FOR KERRY IS A VOTE FOR BIN LADEN.

STERN ALSO RECOMMENDS YOU DO A GOOGLE SEARCH FOR THE BANNED KORN VIDEO

(I'll post more stuff later. Right now I'm listening to the world turn weird.)

I HEAR THE SOUND OF DISTANT DRUMS

And they ain’t Ric Parnell. These are the marching drums of something very unpleasant. Trust me. I’ve heard it before.

I find it easier to believe in evil than coincidence. And I’m really coming to the conclusion that since a rather stupid, but infinitely unscrupulous man suddenly realized that he might not be president this time last year, he is prepared unleash any evil, like a nasty idiot child uncorking ancient bottles without a clue to what corrosive potions they really contain. And this is why we suddenly seem awash in an undertow of fundamental evil? The talk is of anti-Semitism and how the Nazis used Passion Plays to their genocidal ends. Homophobia and godforsaken religion go up like the smokescreens to hide what is really burning. Up on the message board, Blanche wants to know why she (?) should give a rat’s ass about Howard Stern?

(The full Stern/Clear Channel story is told much better by Maureen Farrell on BuzzFlash)...
http://www.buzzflash.com/farrell/04/03/far04006.html

Am I paraphrasing Dietrich Bonhoffer?

First they came for Tommy Chong.
Then they came for Howard Stern.
Then they came for the gay weddings.
(The mistreated mateless mother? The mistitled prostitute? Please fill in the rest. There’s going to be eight fucking months of this shit.)
In each case I did nothing
And when they came for me, I found there was no one left to do anything.

Or, in other words, when you’re fighting the good fight, you might find yourself on the line with some real assholes, but protect them and pass the joint or the bottle, because they’re your assholes.

But laugh, if only to keep from crying.
And don’t cry because when it comes to it we have love, laughter, and some mean motherfucker mean-ass magic of our own. If we can remember where we put it.

And talking of laughing

BILL CLINTON FOR VICE PRESIDENT

Writing in yesterday’s NY Times, Stephen Gillers, an NYU law prof got about as funny as a law prof gets. Making the case for Ol’ Boy Bill as VP...

Amid this conjecture, however, one name is conspicuously absent: Bill Clinton.
Mr. Clinton's strengths would compensate for Mr. Kerry's weaknesses almost perfectly. Not only is Mr. Clinton the most talented campaigner of his generation, but he is also a Southerner —and since 1948, when Harry S. Truman chose Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky as his running mate, every successful Democratic ticket has included a Southern politician. Besides, people might even pay to watch Bill Clinton debate Dick Cheney. So why not? The first objection, the constitutional one, can be disposed of easily. The Constitution does not prevent Mr. Clinton from running for vice president. The 22nd Amendment, which became effective in 1951, begins: "No person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice."
No problem. Bill Clinton would be running for vice president, not president. Scholars and judges can debate how loosely constitutional language should be interpreted, but one need not be a strict constructionist to find this language clear beyond dispute. Bill Clinton cannot be elected president, but nothing stops him from being elected vice president.
True, if Mr. Clinton were vice president he would be in line for the presidency. But Mr. Clinton would succeed Mr. Kerry not by election, which the amendment forbids, but through Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, which provides that if a president dies, resigns or is removed from office, his powers "shall devolve on the vice president." The 22nd Amendment would not prevent this succession.

FROM THE EMAIL – WUSA

Doc40 regulars will remember how Clear Channel’s media manipulation raised recall of the old Paul Newman movie WUSA about a radio chain with Nazi ambitions. 00SOUL firms up the background, and also makes some powerful recommendations of culture worth consuming in these trying times...

Not to get pedantic or literary on y'all, but "WUSA" was the film version of Robert Stone's "Hall Of Mirrors," which is -- along with Nelson Algren's "Walk On The Wild Side," Walker Percy's "The Moviegoer," and John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy Of Dunces" -- one of the four best novels about New Orleans extant. Aside from the right-wing politcal machinations that you already noted, Stone's book is notable for its opening sequence sporting possibly the finest first-person point-of-view from inside the drowning mind of a drunk that's been put to paper.
Stone is also notable for writing "Dog Soldiers," which became "Who'll Stop The Rain" when it was made into a similarly excellent film. Nick Nolte, Tuesday Weld, and Michael Moriarity starred in this amazing-it-got made tale of the Stateside moral corruption spawned by Vietnam.
He followed this with "A Flag For Sunrise," a bone-crushing indictment of America's '80s policies in what is obviously El Salvador. Still waiting for the film version of that one ...
After that came a good, but not great Hollywood novel and a couple of others that we still haven't read. But for the opening trio alone, we nominate him to the status of "hipster saint."

CRYPTIQUE – Are you ready, boots?

THE DEATHSTAR

The matter of the November contenders is now settled, and short of a lone gunman or some other external intervention, it will be Kerry v Bush when the time comes. And that may well be the next problem. With 245 days to go, the Bush machine and the Bush money have months to throw anything they like at John Kerry, and almost unlimited resources with which to manufacture the ammunition. I would be foolish to pretend that the Bush campaign will be anything but a political Deathstar, a massive, obscenely funded juggernaut, that is formidable, although not by any means invincible, because, as we all know, to blow up a Deathstar, all one has to do is fly along the correct trench under heavy fire and drop the bomb in the right vent or conduit. Maybe not easy, but not impossible, given courage, fortitude, and a suitable supporting cast of reliable and friendly androids

It’s late at night, am I’m aware that I risk going down in an welter of mixed metaphors, but if the last ten days have proved anything, it’s that we not only have to tackle the Deathstar itself, but also all of its related rabid dogpacks who cannot be defined as part of the Bush machine, but are all working to the same concerted, corporate, and essentially fascist agenda. We have just seen a combined counter-attack by these allied interests, a laying of smoke to allow the Chimp Boy to cover himself after the massive floundering that set in following his disintegration on Meet The Press. Clear Channel, the religious right, and Mel Gibson have spun the focus to redundant debate over gay marriage and all the incipient homophobia contained therein, the nonsense over Janet Jackson, Jesus, and the negation of Howard Stern, when all attention should really have been centered on the electorate's coronation of John Kerry, and the primary Deathstar soft areas, like the scary economy, and the quagmire in Iraq. Tomorrow Bush will launch a full Deathstar cash attack with TV ads in seventeen states designed to take the gloss off the Dem primaries. The long haul to the presidential election is not going to be easy, and definitely not pleasant, but it's so crucial fucking crucial we have to hang in for the long summer haul. No ruptures in the Force, okay?

BUT CHEER UP

Seems like there might just have been Martians a billion years ago.

FROM THE EMAIL

Fidicen pays tribute to Jack Elam (and we run his letter in full, even though Doc kinda likes Clint Eastwood.)

Good on ye for saluting Jack Elam. I thought I was the only one who knew who he was. His death saddened me much this year and I will give the pretentious silly twits at the 'Academy' (ha) a pass from further bombast for acknowledging him in death in a way I assume they never did in life. What a putrid thing, the Academy Awards. Whoops, more bombast. When I am King, all awards will be banned, from the Nobel on down, except for those in sports, which is in fact about winning in the first place. For "artists" to participate in awards programs is to betray everything that is art but then again Hollywood is not art at all. So why not just give the awards to the highest grossing productions in each category? That would be honest. I might even watch that, even though I hate almost every movie I see now. I thought Mystic River a piece of shit, one of the most overwrought and manipulative, hate filled and cynical bids for box office gross I ever endured. I grew up in that area and know people not unlike those characters, but the film was absurd, an insult to anyone who ever tried to write or tell an honest story. Fuck Eastwood. You want treachery? Intensity? Woozy, booze soaked hard assed men trying to get ahead in a wicked, corrupt world? Watch Jack Elam in Pat Garret & Billy The Kid. Now there's a film that's honest even when it lies.

CRYPTIQUE – Beans, beans, spinach, beans...

WIN ONE FOR THE BEAST

This is surely too good to pass up. I can only hope it presages the Rapture and all these bloody (and I use the word advisedly) fundamentalists will vanish straight up their own apocalypse. From AOL...

ROME, Ga. - Tickets at one movie theater screening Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ are being deemed decidedly unholy. The number 666, which many Christians recognize as the ''mark of the beast,'' is appearing on movie tickets for Gibson's film at a Georgia theater, drawing complaints from some moviegoers. The machine that prints tickets assigned the number 666 as a prefix on all the tickets for the film, said Gary Smith, owner of the Movies at Berry Square in northwest Georgia. The 666 begins a series of numbers that are listed below the name of the movie, the date, time and price. “'It's from our computer and it's absolutely a coincidence” Smith said. '”It has nothing to do with the film company or any vendor. It's completely in our computer.”

To paraphrase the old radio serial, The Shadow, “Where evil lurks in the hearts of men, the computer knows.”

JACK ELAM RIP

One of the few redeeming moments in the otherwise mind-numbing 2004 Oscar show was when poor dear departed Jack Elam appeared in the role-call of the dead, in a tiny clip from his epic cameo in Once Upon A Time In The West, in which he traps the fly in his gun barrel. With his one glass eye, he was my all time favorite western character actor, and teenage skanky role model, and if you don’t know who he is shame on you.

FROM THE EMAIL

Lordmarm writes from Texas

There's no explanation for Houston. It just is. Elron, Bush, the listis endless. See the latest Harpers for a fun piece on Repuglican fund raising in that fair city. But it's not all corruption and oil. Get your ears around Jandek (http://tisue.net/jandek/) if you want a truly alternative vision of that eldritch city. You've never heard the blues so desolate and scary and horrible. But the execution capital of the free world is Huntsville, about an hour's drive north nof Houston. According to the city's website (http://www.huntsvilletexas.com/) "there's something for everyone in Huntsville!" And don't miss this:http://www.txprisonmuseum.org/ for sheer ghoulish weirdness. There are plenty of anti-execution protest sites online. There are usually people with banners outside the gov's mansion here in Austin. But we're not really Texas -- but I guess that'll change now that Tom Delay's redistricted us and turned us into a suburb of effin' Houston...

CRYPTIQUE – Did the lights flicker?

MORE PORNO SPAM POETRY

Last Sunday, (February 22nd) Doc40 ran the first piece of poetry created by online porno sites masking their content from the latest generation of spam blockers, parental controls, government surveillance, and god knows what other manifestations of online moral enforcement, by using unintelligible scrambled and cutup text around the crucial hotlink to the site being promoted. I was intrigued by the way in which it resembled the cut-up works created by William Burroughs and Brian Gyson.

Here’s some more.

There is, however, another less noble reason for running more of this stuff today. As I warned yesterday, when I turned command over to Henry CB, I spent Sunday working with Andy Klein on a blow by blow account of this year’s Oscars (which turned out to be a tedious, time consuming, waste of electrons), and the full account hilarious will appear in next weeks LA Citybeat. But, in the meantime, I’m beat. It’s been a long weekend of work.

This more another found verse...

THEIR MUSHY LIFE

She , The i l there
half n t also squeezing
The run a sports also scrawny.
On , smooth n m the in
I flashlight it king-sized the mom s
a the her, there wet special
I need I chasing m t are want.
Are which, Or apple t t is left The nice.
On sickening, It super human
v b he motherboard The rubbing the dropping.
427 wheel,
Their mushy is life on phone
Their mushy life
d g ghetto v c country
he anyone earth it molecule
The present.
The present.
The present.
firebreak minsk audobon
discriminatory freemen mit limb arsenic
discriminatory freemen mit limb arsenic

And if you think all this is stone crazy, there another site who takes a slightly different approach to the same concept
http://www.sperare.com/spam_poetry/blogger.html



MEANWHILE, ELSEWHERE

Two of our very best cyberfriends have new blogs posted...

Hipspinster reflects on eerie coyote kill and human rage
http://hipspinster.blogspot.com/

And belle de jour also writes poetry and goes shopping with her mum who’s going to a lesbian wedding
http://belledejour-uk.blogspot.com/

CRYPTIQUE – Burn the envelope, please.

IDOL INDECENCY

Hard day Saturday, out doing serious legwork on a project in progress, and then up bright and early to join the great Andy Klein for the CityBeat Oscarwatch. Thus you ain’t going to be hearing too much from me probably until Monday. But, here at Doc40, unless, like the other week, I get myself incapably hungover, we try to deliver, and thus I turn over command on this fine leap year extra Sunday to my old pal, Henry Cabot Beck, co-conspirator, NY Daily News film critic, and one-man guitar picker in the late lamented Tijuana Bible (see Funtopia music).

Henry, you have the con,
(Farren has left the electron stream.)

WILLIAM HUNG

Yeah, well the obvious truth of American Idol is that Cowell is all attitude and no taste, and the function of the talent show is to find the best cruise ship or theme park or TV jingle singer. They will never discover the next Etta James or Wicked Pickett or Slim Gaillard, which is why William Hung is the real hero of the hour, and his popularity a great implicit condemnation of the entire stupid process. By the way, there must be a zillion William Hung websites now. He's become the internet/TV equivalent of the novelty song, the Flying Purple People Eater or Alvin and the Chipmunks of our time. America really loves its mutant culture, though not as much as it should, I don't think. All hail Bubba Ho-Tep.
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/shebangs.html

JAILHOUSE GAY WEDDING

(Only Beck could come up with this perverse spin -- MF.)

There's a wedding goin' on, up in cellblock #9 Once the dust settles, and Arnie gets on board, I'll be looking forward to the first prison nupitals in Folsom or Quentin. I expect the wedding song will go something like:
Number forty-seven said to number three:
You’re the cutest jailbird I ever did see.
I sure would be delighted with your company,
Come on and do the jailhouse rock with me.
And I'll be checking the papers for that gay shotgun wedding, when Clem's kin makes Buford take them sacred vows on accounta that night, back at the holler, when he made Clem squeal like a pig. As for GWB, I figure he's against gay marriage cause he's a tad nervous about outrunning Earthquake McGoon on Sadie Hawkins' Day.*
(Today is Sadie Hawkins Day, isn’t it? – MF)

WUSA

Farren wrote yesterday: I wonder how many of you recall an old Paul Newman film titled WUSA, in which Newman, a alcoholic DJ, who carries his martinis with him in a sharp aluminum Thermos, goes to work for a fascist radio network dedicated to an American dictatorship...
A great, rabid left wing picture, like Aldrich's Twilight's Last Gleaming, and, I suppose, M*A*S*H. I haven't seen it in years. There's also a 1975 picture by West Wing TV director Jeremy Kagan about an upper-class revolutionary, played by Sissy Spacek, called Katherine that I remember being good enough that they cut it for subsequent airings. More and more I miss the seventies. Don't get me started.As for Mel Gibson, it helps to think of The Passion as one might a lesser but no less feverish picture by Ken Russell or Alejandro Jodorowsky or even Kenneth Anger. Of course the hype, controversy and the marketing (all the same thing) pull it out of that arena a bit, but at its heart it's a curious vanity movie that only fervent old school Catholics and blood-of-the-lamb evangelicals will really respond to. Some fetishists, I suppose, as well (one definition of fetish is "an object of irrational reverence or obsessive devotion "), but there are far nastier films in the world, like Salo: 120 Days of Sodom, which was put together by Pasolini, who made that other famous Jesus movie, The Gospel According To St. Matthew. Oddly enough, Pasolini is also credited for the story on an all-Chinese animated version of Jesus' life, Yesu (1998), even though he was murdered in 1975.

FROM THE EMAIL

(From Roger)
Following this with interest, thank God (or Mel Gibson!) it's not got here to the UK (yet ?)
What is spooky is that our old mate Orwell says it all in 1984.

"Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema. This again was never put into plain words, but in an indirect way it was rubbed into every Party member from childhood onwards. There were even organizations such as the Junior Anti-Sex League, which advocated complete celibacy for both sexes. All children were to be begotten by artificial insemination (artsem, it was called in Newspeak) and brought up in public institutions. This, Winston was aware, was not meant altogether seriously, but somehow it fitted in with the general ideology of the Party. The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it."

Well if they get there way and remove all the filth..it'll be back to browsing National Geographic in the public library...with airbrushed copies of Health and Efficiency* changing hands on the black market....

* For you Americans, Health and Efficency was an earnest, small-format nudist mag that featured naked people playing tennis, and doing bad Isadora Duncan dances. It was much resorted to by desperate English schoolboys of the late 1950s, who believed that the only person on the planet having two person sex was Elvis Presley -- MF

CRYPTIQUE – Yeeee doggies!

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

I wonder how many of you recall an old Paul Newman film titled WUSA, in which Newman, a alcoholic DJ, who carries his martinis with him in a sharp aluminum Thermos, goes to work for a fascist radio network dedicated to an American dictatorship. Clear Channel seems determined to make the movie all reality. I keep coming back to the phrase corporate totalitarianism, and some may think I’m overstating, but I would suggest the that right now the communication conglomerate, with its Zero Tolerance Broadcasting Decency Campaign does seem to the be setting itself up as Bush administration’s own Ministry of Truth. Although I’m not sure going after Howard Stern, no matter what you might think of him, is a terribly smart idea. It’s a move that might just shift working stiffs back to the left where they ought to be, and properly make “blue-collar conservative” an oxymoron. They also seem to have forgotten that some of Howard’s biggest fans are rank and file law enforcement.

For chapter and verse on Clear Channel, (courtsey some girl) go to...
http://www.takebackthemedia.com/radiogaga.html (And do scroll down to the visual aide to the whole unholy relationship between Clear Channel and the White House.)

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

And over at the Office of Vice & Virtue, Mel Gibson, while making the crucifixions run on time and bloody, is not neglecting the merch. Henry Cabot Beck sends the following clip...

You can buy "witnessing tools," including lapel pins labeled in indecipherable Aramaic (yay Aramaic! What a comeback! Who knew?) and lapel pins with crucifixes, and packs of "witnessing cards" to swap with your Jesus-happy friends, just like the Disciples did when they sat around the holy campfire, swapping tales of sad lost goddesses and making s'mores with communion wafers and pink Easter marshmallow peeps. But nothing says "slightly masochistic Jesus fanatic" like adorning your fine self with a two-inch silver pewter crucifixion-nail pendant, hanging 'round your neck from a nice 24-inch leather cord. Oh my yes. It's an actual product, available right now for about ten bucks from Mel Gibson's official "Passion of the Christ" movie Web site, while supplies last, which they will forever and ever because they're doubtlessly made in bulk by Malaysian sweatshop workers wearing faded "Lethal Weapon IV" T-shirts who all believe in a very unhappy Allah. Irony, it knoweth no boundaries.

For full story...
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2004/02/25/notes022504.DTL


LOVE IS HATE

But what could be more decent and wholesome than a televised execution? Isn’t Mel helping prove that? After the recent Doc40 post on the subject, kaymo seems to have the bit between his teeth...

We should do more on this. I have lots of qs. Like why Houston, Tex? What is it with the culture there that makes that town so fond of executions? And why the opposition to having them on TV? When, who, what etc... It seems so mewling, puking, sickly and weak of this stern visaged, balls of steel, minds of adamant, hearts of stone right wing rulership that they should want to hide the moment of death from those designated as the enemy to all things wise and wonderful (and usually white). if I can grab some time I will dig into this in coming days.
(Comment above or email byron4d@aol.com, especially from you guys from Texas.)

NADER IS RALPH

My considered, and I hope final thoughts on the Ralph Nader bit for the presidency came out this week in LA CityBeat – http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=693&IssueNum=38

CRYPTIQUE – Mind crossing your feet?

THE ELEPHANT ANALOGY

In response to yesterday's half-assed missive from A. Huffington, kaymo explains all we know about global warming (which may not be that much.)

Global Warming is still a very tricky thing...the models for mapping it are still soooo crude. Analogies include: Imagine an elephant in a sealed off room. There is no video, no audio, no smell sensor, all we have to examine it with are some mechanical arms. We know that it's pretty big and it may be dangerous. The elephant is getting angry about something, but we don't know what, exactly. It may break out of the room and if it does we're in trouble, in fact it does seem to be getting restless. It may be upset by our bad breath, or it just may be going into Musth, in which case all bets are off and let's get the hell out of here.

Google: Greenland Pump.
The G-Pump is an area of the North Atlantic where water from warmer parts that has drifted across the Atlantic and way north, cools off enough to sink down through the fresher-- therefore lighter-- water already there. This water is "heavier" ie saltier, because it's been on the surface a long time and it started out in warmer climes where evaporation removed a certain amount of the water and left the salts behind. This "North Atlantic Drift" begins with the good ol' Gulf Stream and it basically keeps Europe from looking like Labrador though they're on the same Latitude. If you've flown from Europe to the US in a window seat you may have noticed just how stark the difference is. Once the heavier Drift water sinks it drops all the way to the bottom of the ocean and flows back south in a huge bottom current that after about 4,000 years or so surfaces again in the Indian Ocean. Now, it is estimated that the Greenland Pump has weakened by between 20 to 30% in the past fifteen years or so. Reasons for this weakening include a sharp increase in the fresher water melting off Greenland's ice cap. Should it stop functioning then the "pull" on the warm North Atlantic Drift water will be much reduced and the Drift will be reduced in turn. Which will mean a very chilly period for Europe's 500 million inhabitants. It's happened before-- during the Little Ice Age (1450-1650)the Thames regularly froze over and England's viniculture gave up the ghost. But, the effect will be (maybe already is) felt all around the Northern Hemisphere. The result could be a quite abrupt shift to a rather more extreme climate, with hot dry summers and colder winters. Needless to say this will be great for the British Air Conditioning and Central Heating industries, both of which have struggled to find customers in a land where the ambient temp tends to be in the mid 50s F. It may also be tough for the US corn and wheat belts, especially if the interior of North America experiences a strong drying trend. The potential losses to world food stocks of having the climate of Iowa-Ohio become more like that of Saskatchewan-Manitoba are huge. Winter wheat is great, but American fattens its meat animals on corn and the difference in productivity between a field of Manitoban wheat and one of Ohio Corn is pretty damn huge. This may be the answer to America's problem with waistlines. As to the big question-- are we causing this change? Answer: maybe. The fact that the warmest years on record are clustered in the post 1980 era does point that way. But we're working with pitifully frail data. The elephant may just be in a frisky mood, ready for a change, or it may be that our CO2 emissions have maddened it. Either way, when push comes to shove it's going to blow our house down, big time.

BUT OH THAT THE ELEPHANT WOULD SIT ON SIMON

The joke has always been that Simon Cowell would reject Bob Dylan out of hand if he was ever a contestant on American Idol (I think that’s Pop Idol to you UK homeboys). And now here is the loathsome abomination actually saying it for himself. (Culled from the current TV Guide)...
Bob Dylan? Too ugly, too boring, too whiny, and too serious.
Yeah, well Simon, you’re an idiot babe, it’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe.

AND A SHAGGY ORGAN STORY (but true)

From MSNBC
A drug suspect trying to pick up 119 pounds of marijuana at Buffalo Niagara International Airport instead got two boxes of human organs, one box containing a heart intended for a transplant. The Canadian woman was arrested 12 hours later when she attempted to exchange the organ boxes for the packages full of pot, which was wrapped in plastic and smeared with mustard. Her accomplice, a New York man, was also arrested. The heart was delivered to the transplant recipient in time for the emergency surgery. What is unclear is why it took the culprits so long to realize the airport's mistake -- the boxes were labeled "PLEASE RUSH, HUMAN TISSUE FOR TRANSPLANT."

CRYPTIQUE – Blood on your saddle.

THE END OF THE WORLD IS CONFUSING

The following is an excerpt from a newsletter from Arianna Huffington...

If he’s smart enough to use it, the Democratic nominee may have just been handed the perfect cudgel with which to pummel President Bush — and cripple Karl Rove’s attempts to position his man as America’s go-to guy on national security. The weapon in question is a new report on the grave and gathering threat posed by global climate change — and the potentially cataclysmic consequences of the Bush administration’s obstinately ignorant approach to global warming. And the thing that makes the report so frightening — and the prospective bludgeon so crushing — is that it wasn’t authored by some crunchy granola think tank or a band of tree-hugging Earth Firsters, but by the U.S. Department of Defense. That’s right, the Pentagon — Rummy’s playpen. In fact, the report, which was slipped to the press earlier this month after being kept under wraps by the White House for four months, was commissioned by Andrew Marshall, a legendary DOD figure, nicknamed “Yoda” for his sagacity. As head of the Pentagon’s secretive Office of Net Assessment, Marshall has offered national security assessments to every president since Richard Nixon. And this latest assessment pegs climate change as a far greater danger than even the scourge of international terrorism. Dryly entitled “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security,” the report reads like the plot summary of the upcoming Dennis Quaid doomsday flick, The Day After Tomorrow in which global warming pushes the planet to the edge of anarchy and annihilation.

But this scenario is not science fiction. According to the Pentagon study, the question is not if abrupt climate change will happen, but when. It could be, according to the report’s authors, as soon as the next three years, with the most devastating fallout potentially occurring between 2010 and 2020. At that point, we could find ourselves in the midst of a new ice age in which mega-droughts devastate the world’s food supply, drinkable water becomes a luxury worth going nuclear over, 400 million people are forced to migrate from uninhabitable areas, and riots and wars for survival become commonplace. But the Bush White House remains unwilling to address — or even acknowledge — this looming peril. Instead, the oiligarchs in the administration continue to fiddle while the atmosphere starts to burn, routinely ignoring scientific evidence and international consensus, and casting a questioning eye on the very idea, let alone the fact, of global warming. It’s a stance that has warmed the hearts —globally, no doubt — of the Bush Pioneers and Rangers in the oil and energy industry, making them feel very generous indeed. As last week’s release of a scathing letter signed by 60 prominent scientists — including 20 Nobel laureates and former science advisers to both Republican and Democratic administrations — makes clear, the Bush administration has made an art out of ignoring science. Particularly whenit comes to the issue of global warming.

Unfortunately Arianna, a recent convert from right wing Republicanism, is not so well versed in the techniques of doom-saying as those of us who have been at for decades, like (say) kaymo, Doc40's own grim prophet of destruction. She gives no references, no chapter and verse, and even mistakes it as a party political issue and not another indication that this planet is just sooo fucked that we might as well stay loaded until The End. Fortunately, here at Doc40, we can at least manage to run a Google search, which revealed that the source of her alarming information is a month old issue of Fortune (apt, AH?), from which we lifted the following excerpt...

Global warming, rather than causing gradual, centuries-spanning change, may be pushing the climate to a tipping point. Growing evidence suggests the ocean-atmosphere system that controls the world's climate can lurch from one state to another in less than a decade—like a canoe that's gradually tilted until suddenly it flips over. Scientists don't know how close the system is to a critical threshold. But abrupt climate change may well occur in the not-too-distant future. If it does, the need to rapidly adapt may overwhelm many societies—thereby upsetting the geopolitical balance of power. Though triggered by warming, such change would probably cause cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, leading to longer, harsher winters in much of the U.S. and Europe. Worse, it would cause massive droughts, turning farmland to dust bowls and forests to ashes. Picture last fall's California wildfires as a regular thing. Or imagine similar disasters destabilizing nuclear powers such as Pakistan or Russia—it's easy to see why the Pentagon has become interested in abrupt climate change. Climate researchers began getting seriously concerned about it a decade ago, after studying temperature indicators embedded in ancient layers of Arctic ice. The data show that a number of dramatic shifts in average temperature took place in the past with shocking speed—in some cases, just a few years.
For the full story – http://www.fortune.com/fortune/subs/print/0,15935,582584,00.html

BUT CHEER UP

Here, courtesy of Henry CB (who’s name I misspelled yesterday) is a new animation from the great Joel Veitch, that is quite as good as Viking Kittens or Gay Bar. – http://www.rathergood.com/moon_song/

MEANWHILE...

The FCC seems to be rolling hard in it’s clean up of the airwaves, and also providing Bush with another fatuous smokecreen. Bubba the Love Sponge is history and Clear Channel jerked Howard Stern from its stations just as Stern joined the League of Extraordinary Bushwhackers (LEB) by furiously turning on GWB and backing Kerry. But more of this later as the news comes in.

CRYPTIQUE – Jesus H. Christ, Mel...

COME WITH ME TO THE CASBAH

The following small wonder came in today from Henry Cabot Back...

DEAR Citibank Members,

This E-mail was _sent_ _by the Citibank server_ to
veerify your_ E_MAIL addres.
You musst clmoetpe this prsecos by clicking on_the link
below and enttering in the smal winddow your CITI-bank
ATM Card number and Pin that you use in the local ATM Machine.
This_is done - for-your pcertotion -G- because some of_our
members no logner have accses to their email adrssedes
and we must verify it.

Aside from qualifying as the most inept webscam of all time – or at least to date – the looney clip from Henry also started me thinking. I’m well aware that my imagination tends towards overcook a lot of the time, but that’s how I earn a living (distant laughter), and also how I keep myself sane (more distance laughter), but it serves as yet another reinforcement of my fantasy picture of the internet. Al Gore dubbed it the Information Super Highway, conjuring, for me at least some rolling, big-deal perspective that had elements of Heinlein’s Roads Must Roll, the world of the clone-makers in Star Wars II, the Venusian city of Mekonta, and Osaka International Airport, all clean and chrome, plexiglass, and airstream tubular, with order and efficiency, a precision of integrated and organized traffic. And maybe that’s why Old Al found himself incapable of defeating chump-chimp George W. because at least Bush, probably courtesy of Dick Cheney, and with rich-boy contempt, could see a little, if iniquitous, vision of the true unkempt nature of reality.

For me, the internet has always seemed far more like a some middle eastern bizarre, a souk or casbah, part futurist, part medieval, a space-floating Interzone, unplanned, asymmetrical and labyrinthine, although easily negotiable by those who know, with narrow accessways between gimcrack structures, who’s flaws are hidden by hypnoswirls of niteglo color, and all the whores, hustlers, cutpurses, deadrabbits, footpads, swackdogs and gutter jumpers at which an adventurer could ever hope to shake his swordstick. Quack croakers with dirty instruments want to enlarge your penis, brothel-shills do it with domestic beasts, and that’s only the promise of better things inside, swarthy bunco artists whisper of fortunes in Nigeria, and politicians with corrosive blood want your money even more than they want your vote. Sexualized cartoon hentai-children retail their tears in darker alleyways, dancing in come-to-me display for dangerously scarred and mind-numbed teenage gunpersons on r&r from the carnage of their X-cubes, while dealers in long coats of a million pockets whisper transactionally of every dubious pill know to man and crustacean, to calm your mind, roll up your eyes, or keep you fucking to Sunday. Pop-ups like dirty grey beggars need beating, while mules look for their 40 acres, and the gambling games tell you there’s ninety minutes in every hour and a hundred seconds in a minute and the odds are in your favor. And you should believe that when pigs eat your brother.

And in the middle of it all, there’s Doc 40's Own Cozy, Leather-Jacket Gin-Joint, 24 Hour Global House Party, and Medicine Show, offering sharp conversation, bad ideas, honest politics, cheap stimulation, dirty concepts, and links to revolution, right out on the stairs. The girls are smart, the women wicked, the men at least reasonable, poets cut up, the aliens behave themselves, the cats help themselves, the fire escapes work, and there’s never a cop around – even if you need one. And that, my friends is why I attempt to keep it all going. Even if it is only a bunch of freaks on a stream of electrons. Come on back now, y’hear.

MEANWHILE
London’s blogging callgirl Belle de Jour seems to have acquired a stalker...
http://belledejour-uk.blogspot.com

AND A LAST WORD ON DEATH

I'm not quite sure how many Americans want to see executions live on TV, but according to a recent poll, it’s a hefty and bloodthirsty majority. I’ve been against capital punishment since I first saw Susan Hayward in I Want To Live, essentially figuring that a society should act according to a higher moral standard than its killers. (And if you’ve got a problem with that, the comments board is up on the right.) On the other hand , I do think, if we’re going to put people to death, it should be televised, just so we see exactly what is being done in our name. And if we’re not sickened by it, we are hardly worth the designation civilized.

CRYPTIQUE – Embiggen the girl.

HARD DAY AT THE KEYBOARD

Not so much to relate today, except the desire to maintain continuity and keep you all coming back. The entire day was taken up by finishing a story on the new season of The Sopranos and resolving yesterday's fury at Ralph Nader into something more manageably literate, (plus deftly and insouciantly linking the two) and following that, I find myself flagging and in that void-like moment when I really wonder if it’s all making any difference at all, or if it’s just creating the illusion of doing something to camouflage basic political impotence. Or maybe I wonder if I can still write at all. Both pieces are destined for LA CityBeat and will – editor’s willing – appear in print and online -- Nader Thursday next and The Sopranos the week after.

But hell, I can’t really believe it’s a waste of time. If I did, or began to, it really would be the cue to blow my brains out. The idea can be quite attractive in these grim days when very little seems to work as it should, but mercifully two things mitigate the self-destructive urge. One is a Hamlet-like fear of the void and the other is the quasi-logic that, since nothing remains the same, it might actually get better.

Meanwhile, there’s enough in the email in the box to make the log-on worth the effort. Plus our lovely Doc40 pal hipspinster has a new blog posted.

That’s – http://hipspinster.blogspot.com/

FROM THE EMAIL

Jamie-in-Canada sends this unique perspective on the 21st century world...

Went to funeral for wife's cousin. He was Sergeant at Arms for oldest bike club in Toronto, The Last Chance. All wearing Hell Angels patches now. Province of Ontario has biggest HA group in world. Dozen or so at the funeral were all 5'10" looking like 400lbs of pork on kebab. You'd think with chemical business they'd be a little thinner. And what's with this new clothing empire they're building. T-shirts, jewelry, pants, hats, all from the RedWhite company. Nike should be so well represented.

THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY BUSHWHACKERS (LEB)

Kenshim proffers a shaggy president story...

SLEEPLESS IN THE WHITE HOUSE

One night, George W. Bush is tossing restlessly in his White House bed. He awakens to see George Washington standing by him. Bush asks him, "George, what's the best thing I can do to help the country?" "Set an honest and honorable example, just as I did," Washington advises, then fades away. The next night, Bush is astir again, and sees the ghost of Thomas Jefferson moving through the darkened bedroom. Bush calls out, "Tom, please! What is the best thing I could do to help the country?" "Respect the Constitution, like I did," Jefferson advises, and dims from sight. Bush isn't sleeping well the third night when he sees another figure moving in the shadows. It is Abraham Lincoln's ghost. "Abe, what is the best thing I can do right now, to help the country?" Bush pleads. Abe replies, "Go see a play."

And Dick 13 passes on a chance for direct action...

Subject: Censure President Bush

Dear friend, In an attempt to escape responsibility for the misleading statements that led the nation to war, President Bush has announced plans to form an independent inquiry to look into what went wrong. An inquiry would serve the Bush administration well: it would envelop the issue in a fog of uncertainty, deflect blame onto the intelligence services, and push any political damage into 2005, after the upcoming election. But the facts need no clarification. Despite repeated warnings from the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, President Bush and his administration hyped and distorted the threat that Iraq posed. And now that reality is setting in, the President seeks to pin the blame on someone else. We can't let him. Congress has the power to censure the President -- to formally reprimand him for his betrayal of the nation's trust. If ever there was a time to use this function, it is now. Join the call for Congress to censure President Bush now at: http://www.moveon.org

And fidicen feels differently about Ralph Nader...

Really think vilifying Nader does more harm than good to the Democrats and the cause of defeating the fascists. We must take the inclusive high road (a la Roosevelt vs. 3rd party man Thomas in 1932--look it up if you don't know) and cannot allow ourselves to be defined and hemmed in bypotential Bush rhetoric and dirty tricks, a core mistake of Gore. A true blue message, stated presidentially, cannot lose this time and most of Nader can be safely co-opted. First and foremost, Nader, and the very few in the handful of swing states who might NOT vote Dem because of him (as opposed to any Green, Lib, or not voting at all people) can be neutralized by respect for their inarguable positions, their right to seek office and vote their conscience, and for their chutzpah to do so at this time. Include them in the discussion and show respect and my guess is they leave in October.

CRYPTIQUE – The sound of one foot walking on eggs.

RAGING AT NADER

I stayed up all night and watched Ralph bloody Nader announce his run for the White House on Meet the Press this morning. Refraining from screaming “Egomaniac weasel shithead!” more than four or five times – I contained my thoughts into three basic points.

1) Nader is attempting to take the progressive, anti-corporate high ground. This means that, if Kerry (or whoever) attempts any bold or radical initiatives on health care, prescription drugs, oil dependancy etc., the door will be wide open for accusations by the Bush campaign that the Dems are merely caving in to pressure from the Nader left, and cry "how can you elect a president who can be pushed around by Ralph Nader."

2) Where will Nader get his money? He says from web appeals, but it would be all too easily possible for Bush to keep him in the race as a spoiler and energy drain, by covertly channeling funds, with or without Nader even knowing it.

3) Nader gives the impression that he believes he can pick up many of the young and idealist Dean supporters to be his campaign grunts, almost as if he had some divine right to their support. As one who is not so young but still shamelessly idealistic, I'm disgusted, because, bottom line, what he betrays by this is nothing more than a cynical contempt for their idealism.

Right now I’m lobbying for print space to expand this analysis.

THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY BUSHWHACKERS (LEB)

The matter of Bush’s monstrous heap of cash money is pointed up by a webclip from some girl...

Specifically, while the president attacks Senator John Kerry (D-MA) for accepting money from lobbyists, a new study shows "the president accepted more in direct contributions from lobbyists in one year than Kerry did in the past 15 years." All told, Bush collected at least $6.5 million in "bundled" contributions from lobbyists last year alone.
Full story – http://www.misleader.org

And some girl also spotlights Bush’s under-the-radar attacks on women’s rights...

Thumbing his nose at the Senate for the second time in recent weeks, President Bush today appointed one of the most virulently anti-choice and anti-privacy judicial activists, Bill Pryor, to the Eleventh Circuit federal bench. Just a month after his surprise appointment of anti-choice Charles Pickering to the Fifth Circuit bench, Bush proved today that he'll go to any length, violate any rule, and upset any precedent to pack the courts with anti-choice extremists. Mr. Pryor has called Roe v. Wade an "abominable decision." The truly abominable decision is to give this hardened anti-choice crusader a seat on the federal bench. This outrageous appointment puts a judge who opposes abortion even in cases of rape or incest in a frightening position of power over women's lives in Alabama, Florida and Georgia.
Full story – http://prochoiceaction.org

Which brings us back to Nader and his totally cavalier attitude to abortion rights in the 2000 campaign, retold on the Headblast website – http://davidcogswell.com/

In that campaign his response to a question about whether the Republican Supreme Court would endanger the right to abortion, Nader said if the Supreme Court struck down Roe vs Wade it would just go back to the states, as if the lives of women in Bible belt states were not a concern to him.

BLIMP LIKE AN EAGLE

Kaymo sends another of his military-industrial horror tales, which fits quite neatly with the revelations on last night’s edition of 60 Minutes that the Patriot Missile System (PMS???), so touted by Bush Sr, as a Scud-buster in the first Gulf War, is in fact better at shooting down US planes that enemy missiles. In Pentagon-speak it has “high fratricide levels”.

You heard about this one?
USAF is working on the Evolutionary Air and Space Global Laser Engagement, or EAGLE, a gigantic blimp about twenty to thirty times as big as a Goodyear blimp. Slung underneath it would be an array of huge mirrors designed to reflect high power laser beams that would be directed from either ground based transmitters or from orbiting power satellites. The reflected laser beams would be used to destroy enemy missiles, planes, limousines, you name it. This monstrosity is being created at the Air Force Research Lab's Directed Energy Division. At first glance this looks like just another Pentagon mega-turkey. A way of spending lots of taxpayer dollars and allowing young, right thinking science types to have rewarding careers. But apart from the grotesque mismatch between acronym and gas bag there's also the Pandora effect to consider. If the US can do this, so can others and do we really want colossal airships patrolling the stratosphere ready at a moments notice to fry just about anything chosen as a target to a crisp?

CRYPTIQUE – It beats working.

– AND IF YOU FIND DOC40 QUAINTLY AMUSING, FOR FUCK’S SAKE SEND A LINK TO A FRIEND!

SUNDAY POETRY – A NEW TWIST (and it goes like this)

Uncle Bill Burroughs should have lived to see this. He would have loved it – online porno sites masking their content from the latest generation of spam blockers, parental controls, government surveillance, and god knows what other manifestations of online moral enforcement, by using unintelligible scrambled and cutup text around the crucial hotlink to the site being promoted.

Even I thought the porn vendors were getting a little bold when, one afternoon (as is my habit) I rose and opened my email to find a clear and graphic sample image of a rather depressed-looking young woman felating a carthorse. There is little that shocks the Doc, but after coughing into my first Coke and cigarette of the day, I decided those responsible were sailing a tad close the contemporary winds of censorship, but that is really beside the point. John Ashcroft and worried webservers had unwittingly turned cyberpanderers into post-Beatnik techno-poets.

In the course of their subterfuge, the porn spammers were busily, but, I assumed, unknowingly, creating a form of found poetry, hugely resembling the works created by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, first with paper and scissors, and then with their various models of cutup engine, a technique later "borrowed" by David Bowie in his Thin White Duke incarnation, or so David boasted at the time.

Most of this kind of spam seems effectively random, although some spammers betray a self-awareness and creativity over and above their basic mission of smut-camouflage, by arranging the text into fanciful and maybe symbolic typographic structures – unless of course some HAL 9000 artificial intelligence is at work and playing long with the game. Unfortunately these line and column formations are destroyed by the act of removing the codes prior to posting. Which is a pity but inevitable. Unless someone had a smart idea.

As evidence that nothing is ever wasted in the constantly expanding culture, I have started to collect these items. More are always welcome, and I will post them until they stop coming or we all get bored with the exercise. (Send to byron4d@aol.com.) Here is the first example. The title is imposed, but I don’t think that’s breaking the rules...

LUCRETIUS CONCEDES.

On televison program,
On sit, a exciting there overcooked I shabby also f x, is forked
he .soup, Their she child and and comedy g g a early.
dull,
Is I'll or British pastry bar n u,
it becoming he stabbing a doctor.
&&&&
There wanna,
She dusty, their pie she generic object web site a hill on geeky
The could? I high,
On right are vibrator a k or slow their dirty their against it
don't gonna.
The text,
A buying the creamy a five dollar bill I because leaf,
a before it of he .

Is suit,
found there four n p is deep
or biscuit also run
h a there until and tender she atom f e is silky.

It brothers y p, I about v o I shiny the brain throughout
j q and trailer q l a are king on does also she frosty. 318
Or bat b b, ours u o he train
I lonely there dropping u s he smacking h o on home
I great gun. Or store y p, She ;)
The coloring book, I bed and n v she mail. n f

adjectival deflate

delirious happy aunt bernice prissy
delirious happy aunt bernice prissy

I'd love to perform for you. manicuring Lucretius concedes.

COMMENTS BOARD

Funtopia Rich, the Doc, and I are wondering what to do about the comments board. Suggestions? Maybe a second one?

CRYPTIQUE – See Spot die.