AY CARAMBA!

This came in from Delancey Place…
“By the estimate of journalist Philip Caputo, the most violent city in the world is not located in Afghanistan, Iraq or some Sub-Saharan African country, but across a river from the United States in Juarez, Mexico. And in the almost three years since President Felipe Calderón launched a war on drug cartels, some 14,000 people have been killed in the country of Mexico, and part of the country is effectively under martial law: "The U.S. government estimates that the cultivation and trafficking of illegal drugs directly employs 450,000 people in Mexico [out of 110 million people]. Unknown numbers of people, possibly in the millions, are indirectly linked to the drug industry, which has revenues estimated to be as high as $25 billion a year, exceeded only by Mexico's annual income from manufacturing and oil exports. Dr. Edgardo Buscaglia ... concluded in a recent report that 17 of Mexico's 31 states have become virtual narco-republics, where organized crime has infiltrated government, the courts, and the police so extensively that there is almost no way they can be cleaned up. The drug gangs have acquired a 'military capacity' that enables them to confront the army on an almost equal footing.”

I’m going to say this very quietly and very slowly because I’m hoarse from repeating it for more than four decades. “This is only caused by the illegality of recreational drugs in the United States."

The secret word is Tether

CLICK -- Ignorance is strength.

WHO IS THIS FAT FOOL?

The fat fool depicted is Mack Steven who appears the be some cousin-marrying hillbilly cat who has managed to eliminate both taste and shame from his work. Even by the notches on the Bible Belt this idiot is a holy prize. Click here for his classic Downward Road.

“Wake up, asshole, we’re almost out of drugs.”

SPACE OPERA (Fundamental)

NAZI PENGUINS GUARD THE SECRET ANTARCTIC ENTRANCE TO THE HOLLOW EARTH

I have a grave suspicion that I’ve spent the last few days hiding in alien fantasy from the incredibly depressing cable news reality. Of course, the spiral light over Norway was major and the Frozdick family has to keep on rocking, but, where maybe I should have been chronicling the disappearance of Barack Obama’s credibility and my dissolving dreams of sweeping FDR reforms, I’ve been avoiding the ugly hopelessness of the now. As it is, I can barely stand to watch healthcare in the USA circle the toilet bowl, and two wars aimlessly dragging on for no clearly defined purpose, with one in a theatre of operations that even Alexander the Great wouldn’t touch with rubber gloves. The world has plainly been handed back to Goldman Sachs who, in their myopic ultra-greed, cannot even grasp the basic principle that unless you pay the worker/consumers enough to buy the goddamned goods and services, money becomes an abstraction and vanishes in hyperinflation, and even their Blackwater guards won’t save the rich from the cannibal hordes.

The secret word is almost Despair. (But not quite.)

“ALL EXTREMITIES, ALL FILTH, ALL ILLEGAL ACTIVITIES -- SUCH COMPLETE CHAOS THAT EVEN LOVECRAFT'S MONSTERS WOULD BE FORCED TO MAKE A SANITY CHECK”

Our pal Jon has sent us a heads up on a place called 4chan. He wonders "Real cyberpunk or real bullshit?"

“They say the children are our future. But if 4chan is any indication of what they have in store for us, we are in for a very rough time indeed. For the blissfully innocent, 4chan is an image board -- a format copied from popular Japanese sites, it allows users to post text and images anonymously. The anonymous nature of the board, of course, allows users the courage to post everything from the most extreme pornography to death threats to the coordination of raids on public institutions. The site was started in 2003 by a kid named “moot” (then fifteen) who set up the site with his mom's credit card, and who has managed to keep it going with sporadic ad revenue from only the dodgiest, least scrupulous advertisers. (Improbably, moot was a top 100 finalist for Time magazine's “most influential person of the year” award for 2009.) 4chan and its sister sites, the other “Chans”—7chan, 420chan, 711chan, etc. al.—are the black hole of the Internet. They collect the worst that the Internet has to offer, a morass compounded from the ids of the world's adolescent shut-ins.” (Click here for more.)

AINA VASILEVSKIS – RIP

Aina Vasilevskis – my friend of some thirty plus years – was buried today in Dorsington Wood in Warwickshire.

CATTLE MUTILATION ALL OVER AGAIN

“What are you little grey bastards looking at?”

So, after the big thingy over Norway – although we’re now being told it was a Russian missile test gone wrong – it would seem that cattle mutilation has started up again in the Midwest.

“There by the trough - past the locked gate a quarter-mile from U.S. 350 east of Hoehne - was the calf. Its front legs and torso were gone. Its back legs were hanging by hide to a shattered pelvis and a meatless backbone. [Rancher Tom] Miller thought a pack of coyotes had torn into the calf the night before.Then he saw the ears: sliced off the head in circular, surgical-like cuts. He noticed that there were no tracks. And no blood anywhere . . .” (Click here for more plus a very unpleasant picture.)

COSMIC WONDER TOY

But we can take a look at the nicer quadrants of the universe. I haven’t had time to really shake it down, but MrMR has sent us links to an amazing cosmic toy called The Chromoscope that enables users to look at various section of the heavens in a variety of wavelengths including those of normal light, X-ray, Heat, Hydrogen, Radio, and a bunch of other ways. He writes…

“Check out this incredible tool for viewing the heavens on many levels. That such a tool has been developed it amazing in itself, but more amazing to me is that it is just sitting out there in cyberland waiting for anyone to come by and play with it!”

Click here for a video introduction, and click here for the Chromoscope itself.

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

Minnesota Frozdick had a very unorthodox approach to the game of pool.

BIG WEIRDASS THING OVER NORWAY (“They’re here?")

I worked all night and rose at a highly unreasonable hour and the emails were already in. (The first came from the fabulous Wendy.) Yes my friends. A huge unearthly thingy has been hovering over Norway. If this is indeed the herald of the mothership or somesuch, I’m damned glad it’s Norway. I’d hate the first extraterrestrial encounter to be with hostile, born-again, lumpen fascists. The UK Daily Mail reported…

“A mysterious light display appearing over Norway last night has left thousands of residents in the north of the country baffled. Witnesses from Trøndelag to Finnmark compared the amazing sight to anything from a Russian rocket to a meteor or a shock wave - although no one appears to have mentioned UFOs yet. The phenomenon began when what appeared to be a blue light seemed to soar up from behind a mountain. It stopped mid-air, then began to circulate. Within seconds a giant spiral had covered the entire sky. Then a green-blue beam of light shot out from its centre - lasting for ten to twelve minutes before disappearing completely. The Norwegian Meteorological Institute was flooded with telephone calls after the light storm - which astronomers have said did not appear to have been connected to the aurora, or Northern Lights, so common in that area of the world. The mystery deepened tonight as Russia denied it had been conducting missile tests in the area. Fred Hansen, from Bø in Vesterålen, described the sight as 'like a big fireball that went around, with a great light around it again.' 'It spun and exploded in the sky,' Totto Eriksen from Tromsø told VG Nett. He spotted the lights as he walked his daughter Amalie to school. He said: 'We saw it from the Inner Harbor in Tromsø. It was absolutely fantastic. 'It almost looked like a rocket that spun around and around and then went diagonally down the heavens. 'It looked like the moon was coming over the mountain, but then came something completely different.” (Click here for more story and a video.)


Our pal Faux Smoke sent a link to VGTV in Norway for more video (Click here) and a article that he Google translated from Norweigan. (Click here.) He noted...

“What I find interesting about this article, was that one of the comments said to "look up Project Blue Beam", which I hadn't heard of, so I did... didn't find a whole lot, other than info about how the article on the subject had been deleted from wikipedia & a number of conspiracies involving nasa [or other agencies, governments, secret groups and various organizations, nasa just being the most popular and mainstream of them] implementing some sort of plan to dominate the globe and implement some sort of new world order via the manipulation of the minds and thoughts of the masses from outer space. I didn't read too thoroughly into any of the conspiracies, I've got finals this week and really don't have the time... Nonetheless, I figured that you, being a connoisseur of most things UFO & outer-space related, might find it interesting if nothing else.”

The sercret word is Encounter

ANOTHER IMAGE

DOC40 WAR ON CHRISTMAS SPECIAL OFFERS

"Now go away."

Thanks to our homeboy Joly, of WWWhatsup, we have a Doc40 free offer of I HATE CHRISTMAS buttons. All I need is to be sent a stamped and addressed envelope and I’ll mail them out. The only snag is that you have to email byron4d@msn.com to get the address. (I don’t give it out to bad company.)

HOWEVER…Doc40 is also doing a special Solstice AMAZING OFFER. Just stuff a US ten dollar bill in an envelope and we will send you both an I HATE CHRISTMAS pin and a signed copy of ZONES OF CHAOS. (That's almost six bucks off the cover price.) I know sending cash is risky, but WTF, if any are lost we’ll cover it. Screw Paypal. But again you need to email byron4d@msn.com to get the address.

PIN

SPACE OPERA

Here’s the promised Jack Kirby, but maybe it’s redundant if the aliens are really about to land in Norway.

WORST CASE SCENARIO

Back in the 1970’s, in paranoia movies like Three Days Of The Condor, the projected day when the oil ran out was also when civilization collapsed and the barbarians busted down the gates. With this ancient cultural toxin lodged firmly in my lizard mind, I was obviously dismayed when the latest email arrived from our highly informed pal Aeswiren

“This came in from Energy and Capital newsletter. While global warming is on many minds, we should also be thinking about the ongoing decline in oil production. Panic may be just a few months away. More than one-quarter of our crude production comes from just 20 oilfields. Most of these massive oil fields were discovered about 50 years ago. Another 50% of global oil supply comes from about 110 other fields, with the remaining production produced by approximately 70,000 smaller fields. The natural rate of decline in fields past their peak was approximately 9%. Of course, of those 20 largest oilfields, every one of them has passed their peak production. If you really want an idea of what can happen to these oil fields, look no further than the once-mighty Cantarell field in Mexico.
Discovered in 1976, the Cantarell field was the second largest oil producing field in the world at one point. In 2000, Pemex began injecting nitrogen into the field. Three years later, Cantarell was pumping out 2.1 million barrels per day.
Since then, the field has been in an out-of-control death spiral that nothing could stop. Production started to decline at a rate of 14% per year. Today, production has fallen to half a million barrels per day. The consequences will be even more drastic: Approximately 90% of Mexico's electricity generation is dependent on fossil fuels. Recently, the country's energy minister announced its goal to have 26% of its power-generation come from renewable sources. That may be little more than wishful thinking. Revenue from Pemex accounts for 40% of the country's budget.
It's only a matter of time before Mexico becomes a net oil importer. If so much of their budget is dependent on oil, how can they possibly afford it?”

ARE YOU READY?

In his autobiography We'll Be Here For The Rest of Our Lives, Paul Shaffer quotes verbatim the time-honored introduction by Danny Ray, James Brown's formidable master of ceremonies. ..

"Now, ladies and gentlemen, it is Star Time. Are you ready for Star Time? Thank you and thank you kindly. It is indeed a great pleasure to present to you at this particular time the artist nationally and internationally known as the hardest-working man in show business. Yes, he'll make your bladder splatter, he'll make your knees freeze and your liver quiver. The star of the show, Mr. Please Please himself, soul brother number one, Mr. Dynamite, the man with the crown ... James Brown and the Famous Flames.” (And click here for some fine, hard-working JB.)

ABSTINENCE MAKES THE HEART GROW

The stuff one can stumble across is nothing short of amazing. A catalogue of Christian merch? Damn me. And are these young woman modelling the God-wear the arm-waving, Christian-rock singing, Rapture-confident, Palin-boosting, sexually abstaining, wide-eyed youth that I have seen on those annoying CD commercials? Um, okay. But the look of them does rather enhance the scurrilous rumours that the abstinence movement has devianted to a weird ass postion in which Jesus is kinda okay with anal and oral, and only draws the line at actual, all-the-way, penetrating missionary fucking. But hell, what to I know? I’m damned to hell anyway.

SPACE OPERA

From the great Jack Kirby's Forever People. (And there may be another one tomorrow.)

WAITING FOR JUSTICE FOR A QUARTER OF A CENTURY

We remember 1984 mainly for George Orwell’s novel, or maybe for how Michael Jackson swept that year’s Grammies, or Tommy Cooper died of a massive heart attack live on live on TV, or that “Nightstalker” Richard Ramírez started his slay-spree, but how many of us remember Bhopal?

“In December 1984, a cloud of poison gas escaped from the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal and went on to kill thousands of people. Twenty-five years later, the tragedy continues to dominate the lives of those who live in the city, as Allan Little discovered.
Swaraj Puri - urbane, eloquent, hospitable - tugs up a sleeve to reveal a series of little white scars on the inside of his left wrist. "I can't remember," he says, "how often they had to puncture the vein to measure the cyanide in my blood. It is amazing I'm still alive I suppose." Mr Puri was the police chief in the state of Madhya Pradesh that night. Roused from his bed after midnight, he made straight for the plant to find out what was going on with still no notion of the scale of the catastrophe that was being unleashed.
"In the control room there was only one official," he told me, "a very junior sort of a person. I asked him what had leaked and from where. He said he didn't know. Did he have any way to find out, I asked. He said no." Mr Puri climbed to the highest part of the plant that night. "It is probably what saved me,"
"The poisonous gas methyl isocyanate is heavier than air so, when it escaped from the plant, it settled in a dense cloud and moved silently through the poor neighbourhoods around the plant. "I could see," he said, "the black density of the poisonous cloud making its slow progress through the dimly lit streets." (Click here for more.)

Thanks to Valerie for the link.

The secret word is Criminal

LIBERALS WON’T SAVE YOUR ASS

I don’t mean to make reprinting Chris Hedges Monday columns from TruthDig a regular thing, but this one is just so damned right.

“Liberals are a useless lot. They talk about peace and do nothing to challenge our permanent war economy. They claim to support the working class, and vote for candidates that glibly defend the North American Free Trade Agreement. They insist they believe in welfare, the right to organize, universal health care and a host of other socially progressive causes, and will not risk stepping out of the mainstream to fight for them. The only talent they seem to possess is the ability to write abject, cloying letters to Barack Obama—as if he reads them—asking the president to come back to his “true” self. This sterile moral posturing, which is not only useless but humiliating, has made America’s liberal class an object of public derision.” (Click here for the rest.)

SPACE OPERA

DECADENT SUNDAY CONVERSATION

DRYDEN – I once knew this Uzbekian heroin dealer in Istanbul. He kept three king cobras in a glass tank like an aquarium. Big mean poisonous motherfuckers that'd kill you as soon as look at you. Always hissing and spreading their hoods, (gestures like a cobra spreading its hood) Son of a bitch used to hide all his dope and his money under the gravel in bottom of the tank. Figured that anyone trying to rip him off would never have the balls to stick their hand in the cobra tank.
MILNE – When the fuck were you in Istanbul?
DRYDEN doesn't look at MILNE.
MILNE (grins knowingly) – You were never in fucking Istanbul.
DRYDEN (shrugs) – Actually it was Trenton, New Jersey. The guy was some old time hippie asshole with a big beard, looked like Jerry Garcia with bulimia. I only said Istanbul to improve on the story. Shit always sounds better if you set it somewhere exotic, you know what I mean?
CHA-CHA – What you mean is that you're a fucking liar.
DRYDEN – I’m a weaver of lurid tales, kid.
MILNE – I’ll wager he wasn’t Uzbekian either.
(The phone rings, a European-style double ring.)

TO LIVE OUTSIDE THE LAW YOU MUST BE HONEST

Our pal Jon left a comment on Friday’s post "RIDE THAT DINOSAUR, ARYAN JESUS!" in which he used the word “antinomians.” I had no idea what that meant and checked with Wikipedia.

“Antinomianism or lawlessness in theology, is the idea that members of a particular religious group are under no obligation to obey the laws of ethics or morality, and that salvation is by predestination only. Antinomianism is the polar opposite of legalism, the notion that obedience to a code of religious law earns salvation. The term has become a point of contention among those opposed to religious authorities. Few groups or sects, outside of Christian Anarchism or Jewish anarchism, explicitly call themselves "antinomian", but the charge is often leveled by some Christian denominations against competing denominations, and for example, by the Jewish Encyclopedia against Paul of Tarsus. The Latin term Sola fide ("[by] faith alone") refers to the foundational Protestant belief in salvation through faith alone, a concept preached intensely by Martin Luther, but who was also an outspoken critic of antinomianism, for example his Against the Antinomians.”
In more modern times…
"George Orwell was a frequent user of “antinomian” in a secular (and always approving) sense. In his 1940 essay on Henry Miller, “Inside the Whale”, the word appears several times, including one in which he calls A.E. Housman a writer in “a blasphemous, antinomian, ‘cynical’ strain”, meaning defiant of arbitrary societal rules." (Click here for the whole thing.)

Aren’t you glad we got that settled?

The secret word is Learnin’

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

Siegfried Frozdick wore a nice clean white shirt to the meeting.

CAT POETRY

The inclusion of the poem by Finn the cat in last yesterday’s post generated enough email to make me think that I should throw Doc40 open to other feline poets. Send email submissions to byron4d@msn.com and I will post them. The rules are simple.

The work must be spontaneously generated. Placing the cat on the computer keys would be a breach of honor.

The poem must be accompanied by the cat’s name, a short biography, and a picture. (And don’t make it larger than around 150 kb.)

FORTY YEARS AGO TODAY

That’s back in the day when J. Edgar Hoover had death squads, and the FBI and local peace officers decided to exterminate the Black Panther Party with the most extreme prejudice, and we wondered who they’d get to after that. So how much has the shit changed in four decades? Don’t look at me, motherfucker. I just report the news…

“Today marks the 40th anniversary of the death of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. On December 4th, 1969, Chicago police raided Fred Hampton's apartment and shot and killed him in his bed. He was just 21 years old. Black Panther leader Mark Clark was also killed in the raid. While authorities claimed the Panthers had opened fire on the police who were there to serve a search warrant for weapons, evidence later emerged that told a very different story: That the FBI, the Cook County State's Attorney's office and the Chicago police conspired to assassinate Fred Hampton. We speak with attorney Jeffrey Hass, author of "The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther.” (Click here for more.)

The secret word is Solidarity

MAYBE WE AREN’T AS BAD AS WE THINK WE ARE

I suppose, as a deviant anarcho-syndicalist at heart, I have to believe in an innate human capacity for charity and cooperation otherwise what’s the fucking point? But having said that, I then find myself beset by snarling Hobbesians who a totally convinced that even the most minor societal breakdown will result in a hell-on-earth outbreak of looting, burning, rape, pillage, and cannibalism among the underclass – in fact just like the lying and wholly fiction news reports that Fox beamed of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Happily, a recent study (sent by our pal Peromyscus) shows that is not the case and that humans are predisposed actually to get along, at least until society’s pliers grip them. Even cooperation still seems part of the natural order. These Londoners sheltering from Nazi bombers in a tube (subway) station during the World War II blitz are sleeping. Not ripping off hunks of each other’s flesh by the light of barbarian fires. On the other hand, they might have been singing Vera Lynn* songs earlier, and that’s a whole other story and also why we needed to invent rock & roll.

“What is the essence of human nature? Flawed, say many theologians. Vicious and addicted to warfare, wrote Hobbes. Selfish and in need of considerable improvement, think many parents. But biologists are beginning to form a generally sunnier view of humankind. Their conclusions are derived in part from testing very young children, and partly from comparing human children with those of chimpanzees, hoping that the differences will point to what is distinctively human. The somewhat surprising answer at which some biologists have arrived is that babies are innately sociable and helpful to others. Of course every animal must to some extent be selfish to survive. But the biologists also see in humans a natural willingness to help. The helping behavior seems to be innate because it appears so early and before many parents start teaching children the rules of polite behavior.” (Click here for more.)

And now click here for Vera Lynn* and some damn fine Spitfires in flight. (It’s schoolboy Biggles-wallowing, but what the hell?)

PERFORMANCE PIECE

Finn the cat has taken to draping himself over the keyboards of my computers. In the spirit of Uncle Bill Burroughs we are treating what appears on the screen as found poetry. This is Finn's First Work….

“feeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrmn 4,eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]16666666666666666666666666666666666333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333330000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000099999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999993.
3 eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee32\”

So buy a copy of my new book Zones Of Chaos (Click here to know all.)

RIDE THAT DINOSAUR, ARYAN JESUS!

Quite by accident, I came across a blog called Snake Oil that appears to delight in the excesses of the evangelical. Its stock in trade is images like the one above, and quotes like this one from serial killer Donald “Pee Wee” Gaskins…
“I have walked the same path as God, by taking lives and making others afraid, I became God's equal. Through killing others, I became my own master. Through my own power I come to my own redemption.”
I do try to restrain my prejudices against God-fearing, Rapture-anticipating, Jesus-fans. Really I do. As far as I’m concerned, folks can believe any arrant crap they like as long as I don’t have to listen to it. Unfortunately the bloody faithful are incapable, by the very definition of their faith, of keeping anything to themselves. They bomb women’s health clinics, they destructively interfere with the lives of thousands of their fellow Americans. They carry guns to healthcare rallies, and become the devoutly unquestioning tools of the most baleful neo-fascism. The even support deep and evil shit like the death penalty for gays in Uganda.
I am all too aware that they are out their, 400 pounds, living on bio-engineered meat and processed corn syrup, watching reality TV and The 700 Hundred Club. They are ones who make the political career of Sarah Palin possible, who, in turn, is just a ignorant shill for totalitarian corporate capitalism, and the money being poured into her ambition is really being spent to achieve a ultimate goal of sidelining democracy as a powerless sideshow. But I also wonder, what will happen to all these slug-soft worthless and delusionary fools when that same totalitarian corporate capitalism has no more use to them? HAL 9000 will doubtless turn off the life support.

The secret word is Prey

BUT MAYBE THEY AREN’T SO BAD

I mean, here’s a nice t-shirt requesting prayers for the president. Or so it seems until you actually look up Psalm 109:8, and discover that the text reads – “Let his days be few; and let another take his office. Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.” In other words it’s a biblical call for assassination. These people disgust me.

SPACE OPERA

If I just had the time to think up a proper title, figure out a plot, write a libretto and score, and raise a few million bucks to mount a full scale production, I could have a wonderful Broadway show and win tons of Tonys and be the toast of the town. (Who shot you, Dutch?)

ARMED BANKERS FEAR THE WRATH OF MOB

This just in from Bloomberg columnist Alice Schroeder. She reports that…

“Goldman Sachs vampires are loading up on handguns to defend themselves against popular uprising. “"I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit," said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.” (Lifted from Boing Boing.)

The secret word is Bunker

A SUGGESTION

This gold customized .45 caliber Colt 1911 – with the gilded engraving that looks so much like cash money – should be just the defensive ticket for any nervous Master of the Universe. Even though it’s been in use for almost a century, the 1911 is the perfect prole-stopper and was the favored side-arm of (among others) Mike Hammer, Sonny Crockett, the Phantom, the Spirit, the Shadow, Nick Fury, Walker, Pike Bishop and the rest of The Wild Bunch. It’s ideal piece to persuade the poor that poverty is just God’s way of chiding their stupidity and laziness.

MARS ATTRACTS

Our friends at the Bangalore Film Society sent this link to an amazing War Of The Worlds all-you-ever-might-need-to-know website. Click here.

Sadly, our pal Doctor of the BFS has been in what appears to be a fairly serious auto accident and we all wish him well.

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

Even by the family’s exceptionally flexible standards, F9C7 Frozdick was considered odd.

COMMERCIAL

“Without my Bennies, I would never have bombed Dresden.”

MARILYN SMOKED DOPE?

“Who? Me?”

While Marilyn has been on a protracted, but maybe much needed, furlough from her multi-dimensional Doc40 adventures, it turns out that maybe the blonde goddess was a stoner. Our pal Mark Haspam has already alerted us in a comment on yesterday’s “THEY SHALL NOT PASS” post in which he reports …

“A silent home movie allegedly showing Hollywood icon Marilyn Monroe smoking marijuana has surfaced, retrieved from an attic some 50 years after it was filmed. The reel-to-reel silent, color film was recently purchased by collector Keya Morgan for $275,000 from the person who took the film, who has asked to remain anonymous. Morgan and the person who shot the film gave Reuters permission to use a minute of footage from the four minutes of Monroe on camera. According to Morgan, the footage shows a personal side of the tragic actress, rarely seen by the public after she achieved stardom. The copyright of the image will be put up for sale on eBay later this week, Morgan said. The claim that Monroe was smoking marijuana came from the photographer, who spoke only on condition of anonymity."

Click here for the clip (but you might have to verify your age.) The rare image was supplied by the marvellous Valerie. A similar BBC report comes from our homegirl Hipspinster. Click here.

The secret word is Muggles

IS THIS WOMAN PART OF THE CONSPIRACY?

I really like what veteran writer Chris Hedges has to say, but that doesn’t mean I always agree or endorse. In this piece, he complains that we are being distracted from the abyss by trivia…

“Will Tiger Woods finally talk to the police? Who will replace Oprah? (Not that Oprah can ever be replaced, of course.) And will Michaele and Tareq Salahi, the couple who crashed President Barack Obama's first state dinner, command the hundreds of thousands of dollars they want for an exclusive television interview? Can Levi Johnston, father of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's grandson, get his wish to be a contestant on "Dancing With the Stars"? The chatter that passes for news, the gossip that is peddled by the windbags on the airwaves, the noise that drowns out rational discourse, and the timidity and cowardice of what is left of the newspaper industry reflect our flight into collective insanity. We stand on the cusp of one of the most seismic and disturbing dislocations in human history, one that is radically reconfiguring our economy as it is the environment, and our obsessions revolve around the trivial and the absurd.” (Click here for more.)

Okay, he’s probably right, but here at Doc40 – where we pride ourselves on being part of the solution – we rejoice in the madness of the trivial and absurd. Today alone we have Marilyn, Katy, Daleks, and the War on Christmas. In a time when bread is scarce and the circuses suck, it’s the only guard against combat fatigue in the good fight. The Skip Williamson image below is old, but it says it all. (And BTW Cynthia Heimel seems to think Michaele Salahi is a hooker.)

AIN’T THAT THE TRUTH?

NUDE WITH DALEK

Way back in May of 2007, we posted a picture of actress Katy Manning posing naked in boots with a Dalek. At the time it was a thing of modest (or maybe immodest) fun, but since that time, it has taken hundreds – if not thousands – of hits from people with no interest in Doc40 who have been Googling Katy and her evil-robot companion. Well, guess what? Here’s another shot from what has to be the same photo shoot that I happened across while trolling the fringes of the Dr Who universe/time-curve. Grubby fanboys of Planet Earth, start your search engines.

THE WAR ON CHRISTMAS

The buttons are coming. Stay tuned.

THEY SHALL NOT PASS

THE WAR ON CHRISTMAS STARTS HERE. For years now, the manipulators of the right – O’Reilly, Hannity, more lately Glenn Beck and all their banshee companions have, each December, been trumping up crap about a liberal-commie War On Christmas, but here in 2009, I figure we need one. Now we have Walmart shoppers trampling each other to death in some Hobbesian gift-apocalypse the whole Yule concept has to be very seriously revised. Way back in 1986, I wrote in the old (honest, pre-Lacey) Village Voice…

“It's around this time of year that I'm profoundly glad that I'm not a parent. How do you explain to a TV-soaked brat that all he's getting is a rather small clockwork robot and that there is no way, short of starving through January and February, that the family can spring for the sev­en-foot-long, fully operational G.I. Joe aircraft carrier? There’s a sense of being trapped. You start to feel that even if you went so far as to hide out in the hills, a red red robin would insist on bob bobbing along as a yule re­minder. A simple trip to the supermarket continues the numbing propaganda holly motif. The people on the sidewalk all seen more determined than you are in their will to jollity. It's all too easy to become convinced, like my friend the rummy, that ev­eryone else is as loving and giving as the Cosby family and that you're the only one stifling a humbug. A flip through Decem­ber's Playboy can give a man the impression that there are women out there who give their boyfriends gift-wrapped motorcycles. How come I have to be satisfied with a lousy bottle of after-shave? The only respite is Elvis Presley singing “Blue Christmas.” At least someone once copped to seasonal misery.”

And this was in the middle of greed-is-good, Manhattan affluence. How much worse will it be today here in the 21st century zombie depression? Okay, so celebrate the solstice, Odin, Elvis*, Cthulhu, General Zod**, the Universal Mind, Diana the Huntress or just the simple Return of The Light. (And heaven only knows we could use a bit of light returning to this miasma.) Eat, drink, fart, fall over, but enough with the terminal death-dealing consumerism. We will talk more about this.

The secret word is Ixnay

*Click here for an added Elvis moment.

**Click here for an added General Zod moment.

FROM THE WHAT-MORE-DO-YOU-NEED-TO-KNOW? ARCHIVE

Although I have no independent confirmation, I believe this was the conclusion of negotiations for the Nazi/Zeta Reticuli bioengineering project that would ultimately bring us Sarah Palin. (Image lifted from Adam Gorightly.)