DID YOU KNOW THAT JAPAN HAS A 100 FLAVORS OF KIT KAT?

No, neither did I. The more esoteric include burned coffee-flavored, soy sauce, grilled potato, and sports drink. Why, I wonder, do we in the west have but one?

Click here for Bow Wow Wow

But click here for Johnny Otis and an historical perspective. (Plus a vintage car commercial)

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

Evel Frozdick started his show business career at a very tender age.

SPACE OPERA

GODDAMN! IT’S ANOTHER HOMOPHOBIC BEAUTY QUEEN

I thought we’d seem the last of this crap with that lip-gloss idiot Carrie Prejean, but Lauren Ashley is representing Beverly Hills in the Miss California pageant, and she goes further than even Prejean in her public homophobia by not only opposing gay marriage but hinting that gays should be “put to death.”.
“The Bible says that marriage is between a man and a woman. In Leviticus it says, ‘If man lies with mankind as he would lie with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall surely be put to death and their blood shall be upon them.’ The Bible is pretty black and white. I feel like God himself created mankind and he loves everyone, and he has the best for everyone. If he says that having sex with someone of your same gender is going to bring death upon you, that’s a pretty stern warning, and he knows more than we do about life.”
But Ashley – who claims she parties with Paris Hilton but is also a virgin – has the unmitigated gall to claim some of her friends are gay. Far be it from me to suggest that some of those friends go round and drown this Beverly hillbilly in her cement pond.

Click here for the Rolling Stones

The secret word is Smite

ELVIS HAS BREACHED SECURITY

What Orwell failed to anticipate was that the global police state would be a hopeless, tech-challenged, floudering cluster-fuck. The excellent Wendy sent us the following…

“In the name of improved security a hacker showed how a biometric passport issued in the name of long-dead rock 'n' roll king Elvis Presley could be cleared through an automated passport scanning system being tested at an international airport. Using a doctored passport at a self-serve passport machine, the hacker was cleared for travel after just a few seconds and a picture of the King himself appeared on the monitor's display.
Adam Laurie and Jeroen Van Beek, who call themselves "ethical hackers," say the exercise exposed how easy it is to fool a passport scanner with a fraudulent biometric chip. The Presley test was carried out at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport in September 2008 -- by Laurie and Van Beek -- to highlight potential security shortcomings. Passports, and the ability to fake them, are back in the spotlight after the apparent use of false documents during the gang assassination of a Hamas militant in Dubai in January.
Van Beek said: "What we did for that chip is create passport content for Elvis Presley and put it on a chip and sign it with our own key for a non-existent country. And a device that was used to read chips didn't check the country's signatures." (Click here for more.)

Now click here for Elvis

CRUMB FOR A DAY

Image sent by our good pal Roldo. Click here for R. Crumb official website.

AND NOW -- IN THE WORLD OF THE INSANE -- IT'S GLOW-IN-THE-DARK TOILET PAPER!

"Now you’ll always be able to find the toilet paper, even in the dark, with this new Glow in the Dark Toilet Paper! Perfect for power cuts, this groovy glowing loo roll means that if you don’t want to wake anyone up in your household by turning on the light, it’ll cast its green glow over your bathroom, so you can find your way around. Also – it’s Glow in the Dark Toilet Roll! Just when you thought everything that could be invented, has been, we can still surprise you." Click here if you really must.

DARK MATTER OF THE BRAIN

I knew it. I knew when I was draped over a couch doing absolutely nothing, I was still creating. As Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining forcibly points out, you don’t have to be typing to be writing. We may feel like blank slates, but our brains are still beavering away.

"Many neuroscientists have long assumed that much of the neural activity inside your head when at rest matches your subdued, somnolent mood. In this view, the activity in the resting brain represents nothing more than random noise, akin to the snowy pattern on the television screen when a station is not broadcasting. But recent analysis produced by neuroimaging technologies has revealed something quite remarkable: a great deal of meaningful activity is occurring in the brain when a person is sitting back and doing nothing at all. "It turns out that when your mind is at rest - when you are daydreaming quietly in a chair, say, [or] asleep in a bed or anesthetized for surgery - dispersed brain areas are chattering away to one another. And the energy consumed by this ever active messaging, known as the brain's default mode, is about 20 times that used by the brain when it responds consciously to an outside stimulus. Indeed, most things we do consciously, be it sitting down to eat dinner or making a speech, mark a departure from the baseline activity of the brain default mode. ..."Further analyses indicated that performing a particular task increases the brain's energy consumption by less than 5 percent of the underlying baseline activity. A large fraction of the overall activity - from 60 to 80 percent of all energy used by the brain - occurs in circuits unrelated to any external event. With a nod to our astronomer colleagues, our group came to call this intrinsic activity the brain's dark energy, a reference to the unseen energy that also represents the mass of most of the universe. Marcus E. Raichle, "The Brain's Dark Energy," Scientific American, March 2010

The secret word is Idle

IF THE NAZIS HAD WON WORLD WAR II WE’D NOT ONLY BE SPEAKING GERMAN BUT LOOKING AT SOME BIG UGLY-ASS ARCHITECTURE

I lifted this from Dark Roasted Blend…

“Hitler had Speer, his favoured architect, design plans for the rebuilding of Berlin. This was a monumental task in itself, to create Welthauptstadt ("World Capital") Germania, the new city, which would be the capital of German-dominated Europe. The photographs of the plans for Hitler's city survive to this day in the German federal archives. A grand boulevard, three miles in length, to be known as Prachtstrasse, ("Street of Magnificence") would run from north to south. A huge arch would be located at the southern end, which would be almost 400 feet high and able to fit Paris' Arc de Triomphe inside it. At the northern end would be the Volkshalle ("People's Hall"), an enormous domed building designed to be the centrepiece of the new Berlin. Based on the Pantheon in Rome, the Volkshalle would still be the largest enclosed space on the planet if it had ever been built. It would have been over 700 feet high and 800 feet in diameter, sixteen times larger than the dome of St. Peter's in the Vatican. Inside, there would have been space for 180,000 people and there is speculation that such a huge capacity could have caused the building to have its own weather system. In colder temperatures, the perspiration and breathing of so many people might actually precipitate and fall back to the ground, almost as indoor rain.”

How can you not love a building with its own weather?

Click here for The Beatles

ANOTHER BILLBOARD ON THE LOST HIGHWAY

“Yes,” the sniper replied, “but I blame the cheap Italian rifle.”

...AND ANOTHER WEIRD COMICBOOK

As exposed by Rex Morgan MD? WTF? Rex Morgan was a fictional.

CLICK (Guilty?)

NOW, MORE THAN EVER, WE MUST BEWARE THE FNORD

If you have fogotten as I had (but received a timely reminder from Boing Boing), or have yet to discover the depths of deception, Wikipedia provides us with a reminder…

“Fnord is the typographic representation of disinformation or irrelevant information intending to misdirect, with the implication of a worldwide conspiracy. The word was coined as a nonsensical term with religious undertones in the Discordian religious text Principia Discordia (1965) by Kerry Thornley and Greg Hill, but was popularized by The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975) of satirical conspiracy fiction novels by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. In these novels, the interjection "fnord" is given hypnotic power over the unenlightened. Under the Illuminati program, children in grade school are taught to be unable to consciously see the word "fnord". For the rest of their lives, every appearance of the word subconsciously generates a feeling of uneasiness and confusion, and prevents rational consideration of the subject. This results in a perpetual low-grade state of fear in the populace. The Government acts on the premise that a fearful populace keeps them in power. In the Shea/Wilson construct, fnords are scattered liberally in the text of newspapers and magazines, causing fear and anxiety in those following current events. However, there are no fnords in the advertisements, encouraging a consumerist society. It is implied in the books that fnord is not the actual word used for this task, but merely a substitute, since most readers would be unable to see the actual word.” (Click here for more.)

Now you know. There can be no further excuse for complacency.

Click here for small knitted creatures playing and singing “Walk Don’t Run” (sent by Zmyth)

The secret word is Invisible

BIG PHARMA FRAUD (Part 2)

Our pal Aeswiren follows his dispatch last Saturday with today’s news that not only is the pharmaceutical industry deceiving us and robbing us blind but may also be killing us to maintain its profits.

“Hundreds of people taking Avandia, a controversial diabetes medicine, needlessly suffer heart attacks and heart failure each month, according to confidential government reports that recommend the drug be removed from the market.
The reports, obtained by The New York Times, say that if every diabetic now taking Avandia were instead given a similar pill named Actos, about 500 heart attacks and 300 cases of heart failure would be averted every month because Avandia can hurt the heart. Avandia, intended to treat Type 2 diabetes, is known as rosiglitazone and was linked to 304 deaths during the third quarter of 2009.
“Rosiglitazone should be removed from the market,” one report, by Dr. David Graham and Dr. Kate Gelperin of the Food and Drug Administration, concludes. Both authors recommended that Avandia be withdrawn.
The internal F.D.A. reports are part of a fierce debate within the agency over what to do about Avandia, manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline. Some agency officials want the drug withdrawn because they believe there is a safer alternative; others insist that studies of the drug provide contradictory information and that Avandia should continue to be an option for doctors and patients. GlaxoSmithKline said that it had studied Avandia extensively and that “scientific evidence simply does not establish that Avandia increases” the risk of heart attacks.” (Click here for more.)

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

Gary Frozdick and his friend Simon were a big hit at costume parties.

A SIGN FOR THE TIMES #2

SPACE OPERA

SUNDAY AFTERNOON WITH FLYING SAUCERS

Sunday afternoon, stoned and comfortable, and outside the window the UFOs suddenly appear silently out of the sunset. This is the moment of full contact when the aliens themselves will finally reveal all, leaving zero-sum slack for doubt, discussion, or disinformation. We will know we are not alone and our neighbours in the quadrant will finally show their formally hidden and forbidden faces. The light of revelation will shine and all mysteries will be solved. Oh that it would happen. Wouldn’t it be nice? But it never does. It constantly remains a yearning, curious creation of imagination. Imaginings that, for the most part, are projections of highly human conditions. The one thing of which I am certain is that, if and when we ever do face the aliens, they will be quantum times more alien that our minds ever could have conjured.
Yesterday, however, I did receive no less then three emails on the subject of UFOs – and without any major event, like that big alien thingy showing up over Norway last year, to prompt them. Although hardly unprecedented, it was Jungian enough for me to realise I hadn’t been paying to much attention to the ET labyrinth of late. And I use the word labyrinth advisedly since UFO speculation and folklore extends philosphically from a tourist trap in Roswell, New Mexico, through golden New Age fantasies, to all encompassing interplanetary conspiracy theory, and is by no means simple. One link, from our pal Aeswiren, took me to the conspiracy end of the playing field where I found an imassioned plea to the President…

“It is time for a new Emancipation Declaration - one that frees all of humanity from the shackles of economic slavery that results from secret centralized power, corruption and global economic hegemony. The world will not find justice and peace so long as half of the world's population lives in poverty while the other half cannibalizes the Earth to maintain its standard of living. This dire situation can and must be transformed into a world of abundance, clean and plentiful energy and genuine sustainability. On this foundation, with these new sciences, technologies and a new consciousness, we can move forward as a people, united and in peace. Then and only then will we be welcome amongst the other civilizations of the cosmos.
That we are not alone in the universe is now a scientific given. That we have been visited already by advanced civilizations - whose interests here are likely ancient - is controversial. However, in my discussions with European, Vatican, Canadian and other leaders around the world, a growing consensus exists that we have been visited and the time for disclosing this information is long past due. More importantly, an appropriate diplomatic initiative is needed to communicate with these extraterrestrial visitors within a framework of universal peace, free from the past dominance of militarism and paranoia.
Insofar as upwards of 80% of the American people think that 'UFOs' are real, and that some aspect of the government is lying to them about it, continued secrecy redounds only to the benefit of the precious few who profit from such secrecy. This secrecy undermines the credibility of the US and other governments, and allows the cancer of unchecked covert power - forewarned by President Eisenhower in his last address to the nation - to metastasize throughout the world. It now threatens the very life of Earth.
Moreover, there exists a secret, 'unacknowledged' operation that has used very advanced electromagnetic weapon systems to track, target, and on occasion, but with increasing accuracy, down extraterrestrial vehicles. This reckless behavior constitutes an existential threat to all of mankind and must be reined in immediately.
The so-called MJ-12 or Majestic group that controls this subject operates without the consent of the people, or the oversight of the President and Congress. It functions as a transnational government unto itself, answerable to no one. All checks and balances have been obliterated. While as a governing entity it stands outside of the rule of law, its influence reaches into many governments, corporations, agencies, media and financial interests. Its corrupting influence is profound and, indeed, it has operated as a very powerful and embedded global RICO whose power to date remains unchecked.” (Click here for the whole thing.)

Heady stuff okay? Although I have a few doubts about full disclosure. Do we really want Palin’s ilk and fans clued in on the real deal? Or the more hysterical Muslim fundamentals? Could their already stretched and threadbare sanities and pre-existing rage survive the obvious collapse and final disproving of their patriarchal sheep-herding gods? But it’s Sunday. Too lazy to debate. I did, though, take a walk around YouTube to look at what there was in the way of UFOs, and I’ll leave you with a couple of links, while I go back to the window in the faint hope the saucers might still show.

Click here for compilation of NASA UFO footage

Click here for another compilation of varied plausiblity

Now click here for Joe Meek

The secret initials are EBE

MARILYN SEZ...

“Jack had it all figured out with the aliens, but then the bad guys shot him.”

A SIGN FOR THE TIMES #1

BIG PHARMA FRAUD

Our pal Aeswiren sent is this highly disturbing story. He writes, “nobody has the slightest idea what the current crop of "pacifier" drugs will do to people long term. Then again, nobody has much of an idea of what a lot of "natural" products will do. The thing that's amazing is how silent the news media are about this, even though stories like this have been coming for decades.”

“It's being called the largest research fraud in medical history. Dr. Scott Reuben, a former member of Pfizer's speakers' bureau, has agreed to plead guilty to faking dozens of research studies that were published in medical journals. Now being reported across the mainstream media is the fact that Dr. Reuben accepted a $75,000 grant from Pfizer to study Celebrex in 2005. His research, which was published in a medical journal, has since been quoted by hundreds of other doctors and researchers as "proof" that Celebrex helped reduce pain during post-surgical recovery. There's only one problem with all this: No patients were ever enrolled in the study! Dr. Scott Reuben, it turns out, faked the entire study and got it published anyway. It wasn't the first study faked by Dr. Reuben: He also faked study data on Bextra and Vioxx drugs, reports the Wall Street Journal. As a result of Dr. Reuben's faked studies, the peer-reviewed medical journal Anesthesia & Analgesia was forced to retract 10 "scientific" papers authored by Reuben. After being caught fabricating research for Big Pharma, Dr. Reuben has reportedly signed a plea agreement that will require him to return $420,000 that he received from drug companies. He also faces up to a 10-year prison sentence and a $250,000 fine.” (Click here for more.)

The secret word is Prescription

Click here for Bo Diddley
Or click here for The New York Dolls

THE CLAUSEWITZ CULT

Without Clausewitz there would have been no Hitler and without Hitler there would be no History Channel. Take it from me as recovering military historian (and also a Brit and a one-time pal of Lemmy) there’s always been something a little creepy (especially when coupled with the infiltration of the US Army and Airforce by Christian Fundamentalists) about the American fascination with German militarism, when, as Tom Clancy once put it. “the German military hasn't won a war since 1871." For me it was just a sneaking concern, but then I discovered William J. Astore had written a whole essay on the subject.

“I've always been interested in the German military, especially the Wehrmacht of World War II. As a young boy, I recall building many models, not just German Panther and Tiger tanks, but famous Luftwaffe planes as well. And the German military, to my adolescent imagination, seemed admirably tough and aggressive: hard-fighting, thoroughly professional, hanging on against long odds, especially against the same hordes of "godless communists" that I knew we Americans were then facing down in the Cold War. As I began teaching military history to cadets at the Air Force Academy in 1990, I quickly became familiar with a flourishing "Cult of Clausewitz." So ubiquitous was Carl von Clausewitz and his book On War that it seemed as if we Americans had never produced our own military theorists. The American military's fascination with German military methods and modes of thinking raises many questions. In retrospect, what disturbs me most is that the military swallowed the Clausewitzian/German notion of war as a dialectical or creative art, one in which well-trained and highly-motivated leaders can impose their will on events. In this notional construct, war became not destructive, but constructive. It became not the last resort of kings, but the preferred recourse of "creative" warlords." (Click here for the whole thing)

THE 2010 DOC40 3D FESTIVAL (Final Day)

That’s all for this year folks. But keep the red and green glasses handy.

TOMORROW IS SUNDAY. DON’T FORGET YOUR BACON CUPCAKE

TUT THE GENETICALLY CHALLENGED

The case of King Tut could be even worse than the old Don Rickles insult, “that’s what happens when cousins marry.” Tut might have been what happens when siblings marry.

“King Tut may be seen as the golden boy of ancient Egypy today, but during his reign, Tutankhamun wasn't exactly a strapping sun god. Instead, a new DNA study says, King Tut was a frail pharaoh, beset by malaria and a bone disorder—his health possibly compromised by his newly discovered incestuous origins. The report is the first DNA study ever conducted with ancient Egyptian royal mummies. It apparently solves several mysteries surrounding King Tut, including how he died and who his parents were. "He was not a very strong pharaoh. He was not riding the chariots," said study team member Carsten Pusch, a geneticist at Germany's University of Tubingen. "Picture instead a frail, weak boy who had a bit of a club foot and who needed a cane to walk." Regarding the revelation that King Tut's mother and father were brother and sister, Pusch said, "Inbreeding is not an advantage for biological or genetic fitness. Normally the health and immune system are reduced and malformations increase." Click here for more.

Click here for Steve Martin

Click here for more on incest

CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED!!

Hey, I had a glowing, starred review in Publishers Weekly…

"Michael Moorcock's introduction describes this hallucinatory concoction of Farren's poetry, song lyrics, essays, short fiction and social commentary as a display case of his obsessions from demons to dope to the dangers and rewards of remaining alive in an increasingly berserk universe. In Enter the Swordmaid, vampire Victor Renquist encounters a woman with a sentient sword and gets a nightmarish glimpse into another dimension. The Voodoo Chile Experience is a psychedelic roller-coaster ride through extreme user fatal video gaming. Jailhouse Rock chronicles Farren's experiences in a Van Nuys jail during a major California earthquake. A 1975 comic book entitled Rock & Roll Madness shows an aging Elvis-like character becoming president. Farren is equal parts drug-crazed madman and poetic prophet, and his work both predates and transcends modern bizarro apocaliterature."

Click here for buyer information

The secret word is Buy

THE 2010 DOC40 3D FESTIVAL (Day 4)

SPACE OPERA

WHERE DO COSMIC RAYS COME FROM?

In case you were wondering…

“Cosmic rays are particles that streak through the universe at near-light speed, colliding with giant balls of gas. But their origins are shrouded in mystery. Now physicists have uncovered an important clue about where these superfast particles come from. Physicists used the Fermi telescope to examine how cosmic rays behave when they slam into giant balls of gas that are remnants from supernovas. Cosmic rays are mostly protons, and when they smash into these remnants, they are bounced around by magnetic fields and produce gamma rays.” (Click here for video and more.)

The secret word is Entropy

ANONYMOUS STRIKES AGAIN

Our pal Ed alerts us to this story. He writes, “There are plenty of anarchic groups that rely heavily (even solely) on tech to do their thing. Anonymous is a good current example. Here's one of their most recent actions: On previous occasions, such as their focused attacks on Scientology worldwide they rather lost momentum because a lot of the members took offence at them having a specific target. The original purpose of the group was to piss people off indiscriminately, not be specifically active against any one group.”

“Several Australian government websites were slowly recovering after the online prankster group Anonymous unleashed a massive distributed denial-of-service attack to protest the country’s evolution toward internet censorship. The group, which previously brought down Scientology’s websites has also undertaken a host of other online pranks. It dubbed the new attack “Operation Titstorm” to protest the government’s move to require the filtering of pornography that uses adult actors if they appear underage. Violent material targeting children is also to be censored. Anonymous past targets include uncool virtual worlds, an epilepsy message board and a Neo-Nazi webcaster.” Click here for a video and more.

Click here for Sex Pistols

BE A CARD-CARRYING RETRO RED

Print this out and impress your friends by convincing them you were once a diehard Communist, here’s your chance. Below is a blank membership card in the Workers’ Party of America, which was actually the above-ground unit of the Communist Party USA formed after its leadership was forced underground in the 1920s by the goon squad, also known as the Justice Department. Our pal Elf Hellion found this gem in the Kisseloff Collection.

DIG THE REBOP, DADDY

Click here, hepcats.

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

Waldo Frozdick had made sure that both he and his horse were ready for the apocalypse.

THE 2010 DOC40 3D FESTIVAL (Day 3)

When did you last see the Face on Mars in 3d?

LONELY KITTEN CAFE

This is something of a sad story…

“Cat cafés are huge in Japan right now. As the name suggests, these are coffee shops where cat lovers go to sip overpriced lattes and hang out with an adorable smoosh pile of kitties. In the past five years, exactly 79 such cafés have popped up all over Japan. What’s weird is that the café cats aren’t expensive pedigreed felines like Persians or those other ones with the funny bendy ears, they’re just the everyday mixed breeds you might find in the back lot of your local supermarket, cats who, in the immortal words of Brian Setzer, “slink down the alley, looking for a fight/Howling to the moonlight on a hot summer night.” Likewise, in the past few years, there’s been an explosion of photo books and DVDs featuring average-joe cats. If people are so fascinated by what are essentially domesticated alley cats, why don’t they just swoop one up from the legions of strays all over Japan and take them home? I’ll tell you why: because landlords in Japan are dicks. Thirty-eight-year-old Norimasa Hanada, the owner of Neko no mise (Shop of Cats), Tokyo’s first-ever cat café, explains the problem: “Most Japanese rental apartments prohibit pets. The only ones that allow them are condominium apartments for families. This means that young, single-dwelling workers in their 20s and 30s can’t even think about getting any pets, despite the fact that they’re stressed out and are seeking comfort and companionship of some kind.” (Click here for more.)

Click here for Gene Vincent

The secret words are Hello and Kitty

KEEP WATCHING THE SKIES

The invitation has been issued…

“You are officially invited to join the search for extraterrestrial life. And no, that doesn't mean you should head to Kansas and lie in a cornfield awaiting the mothership to scoop you up. All you have to do is log on to SETIquest.com which just went live. The website will make vast amounts of SETI data available to the public for the first time. It will also publish the SETI Institute's signal-detection algorithm as open source code, inviting brilliant coders and amateur techies to make it even better. "With available cloud storage and processing resources, we can provide digital signal processing experts and students with a lot of raw data … and invite them to develop new algorithms that can find other types of signals that we are now missing," the website explains. Even if you're not a coder, you can still take the opportunity to search for ET using nothing more than the naked eye. "Citizen scientists" can visually search the data for anything that looks suspiciously like something other than white noise. Should you spot something anomalous, alert the global community. If enough citizen scientists agree that something looks fishy, their collective concern will direct SETI's telescopes to zoom in on the questionable patch of sky.” Click here to join

And click here for Sun Ra

WANNA WATCH A ROBOT SOLVE RUBIK’S CUBE?

Yes, sisters and brothers, the Singularity is really on its way. Click here.

THE 2010 DOC40 3D FESTIVAL (Day 2)

HOW DID THE JOHN WAYNE NATION GET SO CHICKENSHIT?

Home of the brave? I don’t think so, pilgrim. Right now – despite a popular culture that still pays lip service to reckless courage – a frightening number of Americans seem to be in fear of fear itself, and are willing to suffer alarming levels of indignity, and sacrifice dangerous slices of liberty, in return for what can only be a spurious illusion of being safe. I had given this some thought and intended writing about it, but today I spotted this quote from Jack Gordon on Boing Boing…

“For two decades and counting, we citizens of the land of the free and the home of the brave have happily traded freedom for every scrap of bogus safety dangled before us. Indeed, we have devoted prodigious energy to inventing threats that demand the sacrifice of liberty, privacy and even basic human dignity. Blowing threats out of proportion is, of course, the stock in trade of TV news, whether the menace in question is a summer rainstorm or the distressing stains revealed when an investigative reporter shines ultraviolet light on a freshly laundered bed sheet at an upscale hotel. But television reflects its viewers' attitudes as well as shaping them, and clearly there exists a very large audience receptive to the never-ending theme: Life is meant, ever and always, to be safe--and you're not safe.” (Click here for the whole piece.)

Don’t get me wrong. I’m no hero. I’d have split from the Alamo on the second day after Santa Anna showed up. I have few pretentions to actual courage, but I do play the odds. I work on the principle that the chances are good I will come out of any given situation intact, but if, on the other hand, destiny has my number that’s just too bad. If I didn’t adopt this attitude of fatalism, it would be close impossible ever to step into an elevator, fly in a plane, ride in a car, ingest a narcotic, or chance a sexual encounter. Riding a motorcycle or walking in the inner city? Forget about it. I also do my level best not to have the posture of the victim. One does not want to be the limping gazelle on the outer edge of the herd when the hyenas are looking for lunch. What I don’t do is to place the slightest trust in cringing politicians (who tend to scurry to some bomb-proof bunker at the first sign of trouble), fascist officials, computer lists, or onerous and unworkable security systems to keep me from harm. I also don’t want to treat every swarthy male as a suspect and potential candidate for torture. I do note, however, how the last two wanna-be terror bombers on commercial airliners were, in fact, overcome by their plenty brave fellow passengers with no help from any professional security until the plane landed. Could it be that much of this fear is in the imagination of the media, or confined to the worshippers of Glenn Beck. In the same time that I found the Jack Gordon quote, this piece by Tom Engelhardt appeared on Common Dreams…

“The fear of terrorism has, by now, been institutionalized in our society -- quite literally so -- even if the thing we're afraid of has, on the scale of human problems, something of the will o' the wisp about it. For those who remember their Cold War fiction, it's more specter than SPECTRE. That fear has been embedded in what once was an un-American word, more easily associated with Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany: "homeland." It has replaced "country," "land," and "nation" in the language of the terror-mongers. "The homeland" is the place which terrorism, and nothing but terrorism, can violate. In 2002, that terror-embedded word got its own official government agency: the Department of Homeland Security, our second "defense" department, which has a 2010 budget of $39.4 billion (while overall "homeland security" spending in the 2010 budget reached $70.2 billion). Around it has grown up a little-attended-to homeland security complex with its own interests, businesses, associations, and lobbyists (including jostling crowds of ex-politicians and ex-government bureaucrats). As a result, more than eight years after 9/11, an amorphous state of mind has manifested itself in the actual state as a kind of Fear Inc. A number of factors have clearly gone into the creation of Fear Inc. and now insure that fear is the drug constantly shot into the American body politic." (Click here for the whole piece.)

Click here for Roy Orbison’s magnificent “Running Scared”

The secret word is Craven

THE BALLS OF BIG BROTHER

The picture was sent by Valerie who writes…

“This is RAF Menwith Hill, North Yorkshire and these golfball-like radomes are on a site owned by the UK government, but administrative and logistical responsibility for the world's largest electronic monitoring station lie with the US Air Force. International telecommunications, including telephone calls, faxes and emails, are intercepted and monitored at this site. Sensitive information is passed on to US government agencies and the UK's Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ. In 2007, the UK government agreed that the site could become part of the US missile defence system. And never trust those sheep.”

OSCAR?

Our pal HCB informs us that actor Emilio Fernandez – who played General Mapache in Sam Pekinpah’s The Wild Bunch – was the model for the naked guy with the sword that is the Academy Award statue. (This may be the full extent of Doc40’s Oscar coverage. I hate award shows.)

THE 2010 DOC40 3D FESTIVAL

The primary snag in all this is that you have to find your own red and green glasses. It would be nice be able to supply you all with official pairs, specially designed and printed for the event, (available through 7-11?) but alas, here on Doc40, where the anarchist dream has come true a little early and money had been all but abolished, such things are not possible. Thus it was with the secret decoder ring and thus it is with the glasses. It shouldn’t be too hard to find a pair, though. I have a whole bunch of them that I’ve saved over the years – if I could just remember where I’ve carefully stashed them.

More tomorrow...

I'M FUNNY HOW, I MEAN FUNNY LIKE I'M A CLOWN, I AMUSE YOU? I MAKE YOU LAUGH?

I’m posting Frank Rich’s excellent analysis of the dangers of Sarah Palin partly because it needs to be posted and partly to stick it in a small way to The New York Times, the online edition of which has suddenly reappeared in my inbox after vanishing for a month or so while they wanted me to pay for it or something.

“Liberals had a blast mocking Sarah Palin last weekend when she was caught addressing the Tea Party Converntion with a cheat sheet scrawled on her hand.Even the president's press secretary, Robert Gibbs, couldn't resist getting into the act and treated a White House briefing to a Palin gag of his own. Yet the laughter rang hollow. You had to wonder if Palin, who is nothing if not cunning, had sprung a trap. She knows all too well that the more the so-called elites lampoon her, the more she cements her cred with the third of the country that is her base. Her hand hieroglyphics may not have been speaking aids but bait. If so, mission accomplished. Her sleight of hand gave the anti-Palin chorus another prod to deride her as an empty-headed, subliterate clown, and her fans another cue to rally. The only problem is that the serious import of Palin's overriding political message got lost in this distracting sideshow. That message has the power to upend the Obama presidency - even if Palin, with her record low approval ratings, never gets anywhere near the White House.” (Click here for the rest.)

The only problem is that she is an empty-headed, subliterate clown but simultaneously greedy and devious. That’s why she's so beloved by the mindless mob.

Click here for Nico

The secret word is Epsilons

THE DOCTOR v ATTILA THE HEN

And still in the dimension of Lady Megalomaniacs of the Far Right, both Hipspinster and Wendy sent me links to the story of how Dr. Who attempted a Time Lord overthrow of Margaret Thatcher.

“She battled the Argentine army abroad and the unions at home. But Margaret Thatcher never knew she was also under attack from outer space. Left-wing scriptwriters hired by the BBC during the 1980s tried to inspire a 'Tardis revolution' by using Doctor Who as propaganda to undermine the Tory prime minister. In one serial they caricatured her as a vicious and egotistical alien ruler who banned outward displays of unhappiness among her downtrodden people and used a secret police to oppress dissidents. Former actors and writers on the show admitted yesterday that there was also thinly veiled support for the miners' strike and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament." (Click here for the rest of the story, and click here for another version from the shocked Brit mainstream.)

Dale Hawkins -- RIP

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

Bunny Frozdick worked hard on her implausibility.

CLICK! (You are a person of interest.)

RING IN THE YEAR OF THE TIGER

Yes, my friends, the Year of the Tiger falls upon us. Let us pray that we are the tigers and not the tethered goats, and that we can take this mountain by strategy. After yesterday’s ire – and seeing how it’s Sunday – I don’t have a lot to say but here are three neat videos for the New Year. Be lucky, all of you, everywhere.

Click here for a neat video of Tigers (from Aeswiren) plus how they evolved.

Click here for “A Brief History of Just About Everything”

Click here for K. D. Lang singing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”

The secret words are Hopey and Changey

MARILYN SEZ…

“I may be a dead blonde, but I have a tiger to protect me.”

And click here for bonus Marilyn video. (lifted from Nickel In The Machine)

SPACE OPERA SPECIAL

Click here for Star Trek as you have never seen it juxta-positioned.