Emptybottle.org: August 2002

Dear WonderChickenistas,

In a development predictable to anyone who's been doing this for a while, I've come to the conclusion that this game is not as much fun as once it was, so I think I'm going to take a wee break. I love each and every one of the few hundred folks who show up here every day to read the new stuff that tumbles out from the spin cycle in my brain, I really do, and I thank you for the recognition and the kindness and the pornographic haiku and the cheese-flavoured snacks. Especially the snacks.

But, like many before me, people better, smarter, stronger, faster, and possessed of bionic limbs that are just way out of my price bracket, I must take a wee break to fix - or at least pretend to fix, or make a stab at thinking about fixing, or maybe just drink enough to achieve the erroneous conviction that I've fixed - the semi-fictional but nonetheless distracting problems I keep finding in my life at the moment.

Not that the power, wonder, glory and sheer incoherence that is called WonderChicken is going away, precisely. I'll see you on the 'Filter, on the 'Pile, at the MonkeyHouse, and in your blog comments, when you least expect it. Ka-pow!

But I need a break, I think, from approval-seeking, to try and find something that's a little...meatier... to which I should devote my primary attention.

I'll be back, soon, no doubt.

Love (and peace, by crikey),

Chris

6:29 AM | 2 comments

4:35 AM | 9 comments

This online petition for the "Immediate and Total Repeal of the USA/Patriot ACT " has about 6000 signatures as I write this. It is open to all US residents.

6:38 AM | 7 comments and 1 trackback

There's this and then there's this. I'm too tired to care anymore. How stupid do they think we are?

1:08 AM | 3 comments

It tastes like one of those sad strange stories that one stumbles across occasionally on the web, and in real life too, by golly. Definitely the sort of thing that you'd research and write a long article about for some reputable magazine if you were so inclined, but since you're a blogger with an attention span of approximately six seconds (and unless you're Mike Golby and core dump tens of thousands of words a day) you don't.

Kitten Natividad appeared in such fine films as Tittilation, Tittilation 3, Big Busty 3, Bodacious Ta-Tas, Famous Ta-Tas, Best of Big Busty, Thanks for the Mammaries, Ten Years of Big Busts 2, Big Boob Lottery, Wild Wild Chest 3, The Double-D Avenger, and Fresh Tits of Bel-Air. One gets a sense of where she (or more convincingly the eeek! evil! Hollywood Movie Machine) perceived her primary talents to lie.

I see a long wistful but critical look, the magazine equivalent of Boogie Nights meets Almost Famous (isn't that how you're supposed to pitch stuff : "It's like X meets Y, with Tom Cruise as the lead! Come on, you gotta love that!"), at the titty-film industry of the Seventies. We're not talking gun-to-Linda's head hardcore Deep Throat nastiness, here, we're talking the campy (but equally reprehensible (or is it? you leave that to the reader, kimosabee!)) oeuvre of Russ Meyer and his brethren. Interviews with the aging thick-eyeglassed silk-kimono-clad Hugh Hefner wannabe lotharios, and some of the now-grandmothers who shook their moneymakers in blockbusters like Thanks for The Mammaries. A portrait of Kitten growing up in the fifties. Pop-psych pointers to the so-obvious traumas that led her to a life in the softcore industry.

Then, the kicker. After decades of paying the bills with her breasts, she undergoes a double mastectomy for treatment of breast cancer in October 1999. The piece is about surviving breast cancer, you see, and now it becomes clear that we're talking about more than just titty-films here. This is a piece about the equality of women, about empowerment, about not letting the bastards grind you down, about triumph in the face of adversity and sisterhood and all that good stuff! The crowd goes wild!

Finally, the oddball, unexpected clincher, of the sort that life provides to the observant, making truth once more (and by now it should be predictably) stranger than fiction : in 2001, two years after her double mastectomy, she reappears on the silver screen (or silver disc, probably) in The Double-D Avenger.

You close out the piece with a wry observation from Kitten herself on the curves that life throws you, and fade to textual black.

[lifted from d/blog]

7:33 PM | 1 Comment

Mike points me to Douglas Ord's piece 'It Weren't Just Hockey', a timely link indeed for me, coming as it does hard on the heels of the recent Daypop-fueled kafuffle over Canuck Robert MacDougall's rant about America. I think it illuminates quite ably some of the anger and resentment many Canadians feel towards America, by dwelling on the specifics of some events of which I was only vaguely aware. Much as the "Canada sux, d00d!" meme has taken over among the Youth Of America, fueled mostly, I think, by the Blame Canada! silliness in the South Park movie, lifted out of context and taken at face value, there seems to be little awareness in America of the reciprocal strength of real ill-will in many parts of Canadian society towards the 800-pound gorilla to the south. And if conjoined siblings are at odds, to a degree where some sort of ritualized catharsis is necessary, what of the rest of the world?

But the Toronto - New York series had an especially nasty edge, with the question widely asked as to whether hockey had reached a new low.

The series went a full seven games, & was ultimately won by the Maple Leafs on home ice, four games to three.

It also featured bizarre anomalies.

Among them was persistent booing of the Canadian national anthem in New York, even as the US national anthem was cheered in Toronto.

The booing in New York only got louder as the series went on, notwithstanding that the night before the series began on April 18th, four Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan had been killed, & eight wounded, by a laser-guided bomb dropped by a US F-16 fighter plane.

[image found at the 'pile]

In fact the entire period of the series, from April 18th to 30th, was one of confused national mourning in Canada, on account of the killing of the four soldiers, who were the first Canadian combat casualties in nearly fifty years, & who were victims of the US Air Force.

Nevertheless, it has now emerged that for the sixth game of the series, & the last in New York, the audience there did more than just loudly boo the Canadian national anthem.

According to Bruce Arthur in the May 2nd National Post, a paper I don't much like but that sometimes has interesting tidbits, the opera student who had sung both national anthems in Toronto for an earlier game got a surprise when he arrived in New York for the sixth one:

"Days after being cheered as he sang the Canadian and American anthems before an NHL playoff game in Toronto, Robert Pomakov watched, horrified, as unruly New York hockey fans burned his Canadian flag in the parking lot of Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum.

"Mr. Pomakov, an opera singer, saw both his Canadian and his Toronto Maple Leaf flags torn from his car and set on fire by a crowd chanting 'USA! USA!' in the moments before Sunday's Game 6 between the Leafs and the New York Islanders.

"'We lost four of our soldiers and they were basically defending these idiots,' an outraged Mr. Pomakov said. "If patriotism is what drives these people and their ignorance, then I am ashamed to have our soldiers defending them... There's a line that needs to be drawn, and this was just so far across."

What Pomakov did not mention, of course, was that the Canadian soldiers were not just killed while implicitly defending American citizens from "terrorist attack." They were killed by an American fighter pilot, and are the only Canadians to be killed, or even wounded, in the war in Afghanistan.

Nor, it should be noted, did the American mob shout "New York! New York!" or "Islanders! Islanders!" while burning the Canadian flag.

Instead they chanted "USA! USA!".

This being the chant which accompanied George W. Bush's first visit to the ruins of the World Trade Centre in that same New York City, & which has become the semi-official vocal accompaniment to the "war on terror."

[more...]

8:35 PM | 6 comments

If for some reason you're not reading cursor.org each and every ever-lovin' day, well, I respectfully recommend that you start. Knowledge is power. Stoke the fires of your righteous resentment, then get the heck out there and try and make a difference, you big silly, you!

Or not. It's your call. I'm just sayin'.

Also, this, I like.

And : I want one of these. I'd love to see peoples' faces as I arachno-commute to the university every morning driving that sucker... Almost enough to make me want to move back to my sh-tty little logging-industry hometown. Almost.

1:47 AM | 5 comments

Have you ever been caught out in the middle of the night in a park with a runny bum and a convulsing bowel, had to squat and squirt like a beast behind a bush somewhere, and in lieu of paper or leaves or pretty much anything that could be profitably employed for the wiping of the soiled starfish, come up with the brilliant idea of dragging your bum along the dewy grass a bit (learned from the childhood observation of your dog 'Boomer' when he had worms) to clean off any klingons?

No, me neither. I was just checking.

6:30 AM | 6 comments

Today's Metafilter must-read : cultural relativism and Lisbon architecture, amongst other things.

Edit : Also, I finally managed to articulate what annoys me about conversations about 'blogging and journalism'. My usual Philosophy 101 maunderings, and I may well be talking crap, as usual, but I think it makes some sense.

8:42 PM

Neatly wrapped for your convenience : Tom from plasticbag.org has gone plumb loco, collected most of the pieces that started online, were hoiked and slapped into necessarily design-free dead-tree pages in the book "We've Got Blog" (thus, in the absence of bells and whistles, helping this observer to clarify his private thoughts about who can and who can't write their way out of a paper bag), but are still to be found floating around in the InTArWeb aether, and smacked 'em down into one nice clean list of links.

A most laudable public service. And essential reading for those still getting up to speed on this whole Blog Thing. Thanks, Tom.

Edit : I particularly like this, since it fits in so well with my angry young man grumpy old curmudgeon thang.

2:53 AM

If you haven't had enough of America bashing, peruse this and this, and get back to me. For the record, I'm in almost complete agreement with the authors of these pieces, and wonder how much longer it can go on before the American people wake up and rise up.

6:52 PM | 10 comments

I've said it before, and prompted by this unexpected piddling on my pompadour, I'll say it again. I don't hate Korea. What I loathe with a white-hot ass-blistering passion is stupidity and greed and cruelty and incompetence and unfairness and a host of other things that people do all the goddamned time, all around the goddamned world. If I lived in Burkina Faso (in the city with the most euphonious name, Ouagadougou), I'd be complaining about the Ouagadougouns. If I lived back in Canada, I'd be railing against the cretin up the street and the f--kwits in the government there. It is in my nature to kick against the pricks. The fact that those pricks surrounding me are Korean, as an outgrowth of the fact that I live in Korea, is merely an accident of geography.

8:06 AM | 14 comments

Japanese researchers have found film footage in Pyongyang indicating the United States conducted germ warfare against China and North Korea during the Korean War.

Pretzelboy, of course, would never mention America's role in the proliferation of this kind of evil while stumbling over the phonetically-spelled gradeschool-bully scripts his handlers have him mouth.

The wiggly lines emanating from my eyes indicate rage, contempt and hatred.

Edit : Now let me get this straight. Iraq's use of gas has been repeatedly cited by President Bush and by his national security advisor as justification for ''regime change'' in Iraq. But the New York Times is quoting 'senior military officers' as saying that "there was a covert U.S. program during the Reagan administration to provide Iraq with battle planning assistance at a time when intelligence agencies knew Iraqi commanders would use chemical weapons in waging the decisive battles of the Iran-Iraq war".

That's funny, isn't it? Speaking of "regime change"....

9:08 PM | 8 comments

See, even Godzilla doesn't know what these asshat lawyers are talking about! And one thing my old grandpappy always told me was "Son, if Godzilla don't know what you're talkin' about, nobody will." Truer words have rarely been spoken.

11:03 PM | 3 comments

You know that Young Ones episode where Vyvyan stomps around repeatedly hitting himself in the forehead with a large piece of wood, chanting 'bored bored bored bored'?

Yeah, like that, with this. At the moment.

Must be time for another redesign.

7:31 PM | 16 comments

You know that book I mentioned that I was writing a while ago? No? Ah well, bear with me.

So I started writing this book a couple of weeks ago. Figured I'd do the Nanomowrimomo thing, or whatever the f--k it's called, and just barf out the story unadorned. The story that's been percolating around in my head for about 7 years now, the mostly-true-with-the-names-changed-to-protect-the-innocent tale of booze, madness, sex, drugs, and rock and roll on the high seas that those of you who know me In Real Life have heard me reminisce about when well-watered.

It's been a few years since I'd heard from or about any of the principles in the tale, and I'd pretty much given up hope of ever tracking any of them down, gilded-caged as I am here in Korea.

So who do I hear from yesterday after years of being 'long-lost'? One of my best friends on the planet, the mad bastard who more than any other helped me transform myself from an overcautious wannabe into a two-fisted beery swashbuckler, the guy who plays the starring role in my Nautical Tales Most Edifying, my brother by dint of shared joy and grief, Craig 'Pancho' Oliver.

So the book's back on the back burner, while life, happily, intercedes. But if I do finish the book, I hope and expect it will be richer and more rewarding for the reminiscences that me and my long lost amigo will be sharing over the next while.

Welcome back, mi hermano, even if you didn't feel as if you were lost.

1:45 AM | 5 comments

A tender and slightly melancholy Metafilter reminiscence in response to a completely puerile threadstarter from a new member, courtesy of tamim. The occasional astonishing comment like this, and the occasional great thread (of which there have been a few lately) always keep me coming back for more.

3:24 AM | 3 comments

Inspired by Shelley and Jonathan, who said :

I did about 3 minutes worth of research to bring you some lists of those prominent Americans who avoided military service but are now, unsurprisingly, waggling their thanato-erotic weenies around with the most vigor.

Here's a good list, and here, a more partisan one, but still informative.

A sampler :

I also noticed that one of the warbloggers with whom Bb has been debating (in an admirably reasonable, evenhanded fashion, I must admit), has said that the epithet 'warblogger' is no longer fashionable.

In light of this, and my strong suspicion that most if not all of these armchair wannabe warriors would detumesce and piss their pants the first time they saw a human corpse up close and personal, I'd like to submit for your consideration some possible new names for them :

Some of this, in a glass, with some soda.

Watch them be born, watch them die.

Repeat as necessary.

4:33 AM | 3 comments

Item 1 : An international human rights group files a lawsuit against the ExxonMobil oil company, accusing it of actively abetting human rights abuses in Indonesia, and complicity in the murder, torture and sexual abuse of the local population, including supplying the Indonesian military with equipment to dig mass graves, as well as building interrogation and torture centres.

Item 2 : The US State Department urges the federal court to dismiss the lawsuit and declares that pursuit of the case would hinder Washington's war on terror.

Item 3 : Top industry contributors to Bush/Cheney election campaign :

Item 4 : The Financial Times doesn't even attempt embroidery : "Washington says, the lawsuit could discourage foreign investment in Indonesia, particularly in the energy and mining industries. "

I am moved, as I have been at other times, to say f--k the Bush administration, f--k them in the eye with a dead donkey's wasabi-dipped dick. They are pure evil. I am daily more and more of the opinion that it is the responsibility of every ethical person, American or otherwise, to oppose these filthy bastards to the full extent of their powers, by every legal means at your disposal.

And as for you bloodthirsty little father-figure worshipping lickspittles collectively known as 'warbloggers'? Well, we all know the root cause of your infantile needs to invade, overwhelm and subjugate, don't we?

How's that for debate?

1:27 AM

Today's Required Reading

Absolutely fascinating post from Alex (which is in itself not unusual, but) : The Warre of All Against All. Go, read.

Bruce Sterling gives us some new metaphors to work with, better ones, I'd say : A Contrarian View of Open Source. Go, read.

7:53 PM

I forgot completely that I'd gotten drunk one evening recently (in an almost complete turnaround from my customary behaviour on an August evening, I assure you) and signed the old 'bottle up for Bloghot or Not.

But I saw the URL in my recent referrers doodad over there on the left no, no the other left, went to check it out, and holy crap on a delicious triscuit cracker, I'm rating pretty darn high!

So it's official. The A-List can bite me†.

Heh.

[I realize that I haven't written a long rambling craptacular post on anything in quite a while, and that you kind, intelligent, and slightly demented Wonderchicken Irregulars out there are pining, no clamoring for more dammit more!, but, well, I'm trying to write a book. Really fast. (which makes this recent and excellent MeFi thread all the more amusing ) And it's (in the amusingly outdated vernacular of the recent bubblelicious fin de siecle) 'occupying mindshare' for me at the moment. I apologize profusely, but bear with me, I beg of you.

*begs*

Thankee.]

† I don't take this hotornot stuff seriously, duh, but them Listers Who Are A really can bite me. Take a big ol' bite of my bum, right here. *points*

Edit : I realize also that this sort of self-referential wankorama could be perceived as distasteful and beneath the elevated station to which I have winched myself, but I just don't care. Comedy? Comedy gold.

4:34 AM | 5 comments

Ladies and gentlemen, a new personal record. It's been 3 count'em 3 days since I checked this account.

5:40 AM | 5 comments

I read this right after this and this, and I wonder a little, you know?

Not that I'm sure that Bb's idea is one that will be workable, but crikey, Anil's little shave-and-a-haircut there looks like some semi-deft spinnage to me. 'course, I'm a great lover of conspiracy theories.

11:11 PM | 2 comments

I am feeling gigantically bummed today, left out of all the fun with CD swaps and MeFi/MonkeyMeets and such. What the f--k am I doing here in Korea, living my entire social life through a keyboard? Sometimes I just don't know.

Somebody want to give me a job sweeping floors or something, somewhere other than here? This place is starting to get to me...

10:03 PM | 5 comments

I found this on the site that dare not speak it's name. It's funny.

8:48 PM | 3 comments

I've never been good at mental multi-tasking, and I've got this other super-secret double-extra (yeah, whatever) thing I'm working on at the moment, and it's distracting me away from the posting of the amusing entries at the mighty Empty Bottle.

So go read the archives, my friends. As opposed to the chew-toy mastications of those purist 'weblog' wanktards, my old nocturnal emissions actually have some value beyond a pointer to the chronistic equivalent of Mahir or All Your (admittedly amusing) Base... hooo-hah!

No really, there's some f--king gold back there in the foothills, honest to cheese-topped goodness. Laugh, cry, wet your pants : it's the Disneyland of Weblogging! Lotta crap too, but Sturgeon's Law, nicht wahr?

6:04 AM

Following the lead of Jonathon, Mark and Shelley, I've done a bit of egogoogling to check out my rankings, and am well pleased with the results.

Despite my half-assed attempt to be somewhat anonymous here, a googlesearch on my surname brings up this site as #25. Interesting, but only mildly scary.

10:24 PM | 9 comments

Back in about '86 or so, the world paused for a moment in its orbit as the musical colossus known as Naked & Shameless spontaneously appeared, boozily clambered to the very apex of the Vancouver musical scene, and then flamed out and disappeared, all in the space of days, if not hours.

Well, what really happened is that my buddy Deviant, who was responsible for the creation and dismantling of various Vancouver bands of moderate success over the decade, decided that it'd be pretty damn cool to get me liquored up in his studio, record one of my infamous spontaneous rants, then put it to music.

Unfortunately, no matter how much Ouzo I swilled, sitting on the stool in front of the mike, it just wasn't spontaneous. Performance anxiety. I did force it a bit once the booze kicked in, and pulled some ranty stuff out of my ass, but the resulting track didn't meet the high standards we had anticipated, and after a few plays on CiTR, the UBC campus radio station ("all spaceship and satan music, all the time"), sank into history unremarked.

For the purposes of branding, though (we were ahead of our time, baby), I'd come up with the name 'Naked & Shameless' for our two-man band. Myself being Jim Naked, up there under the hot lights, baring my soul, and Deviant being Dave Shameless, the evil rocknroller exploiting my gentle drunken poetic weiner-talk to get chicks and stuff.

That part was good.

Wisely, though, with our first track sucking so heinously, we decided to shelve the project.

Fast forward to a few years ago, and Deviant, who has been living in Chicago and whom I haven't seen for almost a decade, has restarted Naked and Shameless, with cousin Buck Naked replacing the dearly departed Jim. Buck can actually sing, and play. This is a good thing.

Why am I telling you all this? Besides the usual 'I'm so goddamn hip I can't see over my own pelvis' stuff, mostly 'cause I remembered that N&S have an mp3.com page with some fun songs on, which I've been listening to this evening as I get slowly plastered, and they're currently on tour, and will be playing one of our favorite Vancouver haunts this weekend, the Railway Club.

(The serendipitous thing here being that through completely random chaotic f--king weirdness, one of the owners of the Railway Club, Roger Trentenero, since deceased (murdered on his boat not long after I'd decamped, so to speak, at Playa Los Cocos, by hammer flung headward by his 16-year old Costa Rican girlfriend, is the story that I heard), was the owner of the first sailboat I crewed aboard in the Sea of Cortez, approximately midway, temporally speaking, between then and now...but that, as I find myself saying all too often, is a tale for another day.)

Drinking Song #16 is the one dedicated to me poor old Jim Naked. It's funny, but not my favorite. C'est la vie.

If you do go have a listen to any of their stuff, don't miss "Lawrence (Head of Lettuce)". A true story from our UBC days. Not even the names have been changed to protect the guilty. Rock'n'roll verité, man.

3:40 AM | 7 comments

It'll be my birthday in about 3 hours, Korea time. I will officially be old enough to know better, while continuing to be too dumb to care.

But that hasn't stopped me so far, so I think I'll just carry on as usual, noting the gray hairs appearing in the skateboarder-goatee, but reacting to them with a hearty woo-hoo rather than a weedy boo-hoo. This, my friends, is the secret to my success, longevity, and general all-around air of worldly incoherence.

So happy birthday to me. Have a drink for me, won't you? I'll be sure to return the favour when your next birthday rolls around...

4:19 AM | 34 comments and 3 trackbacks.

Fishrush has done some rooting through the archives, and come up with some very interesting evidence pointing to Eli Chanticleer as the inventor of the weblogging machine, and the man responsible for loosing this plague upon the world.
Circumstantial evidence linking the identity of Mr Chanticleer to a certain well-known Miraculous Fowl should be examined with care, as there are clear indications in the ebb and flow of the blogospheric aether that the game is afoot, and impostors and pretenders are weaving a web of lies to trap the unwary and credulous.

Exercise caution, my weblogging friends. These are dangerous times.

10:02 PM | 1 Comment

She's dirty all right, but no more so than the rest of the corrupt scumbags who run this circle-jerk cesspool of privilege.

She was rejected because she's a woman, pure and simple.

f--kwits. Asshats. Crapclowns. I f--king loathe these self-satisfied, centre-of-everyone's universe Korean men, and I loathe Korean politicians, who are not coincidentally almost without exception male, with a special nauseated red-eyed hatred that makes my head hum like a generator. Line these wrinkly old upper-caste cocksuckers up against a wall and mow them down, say I. The greedy old boys' networks in this country will guarantee that it remains the sh-thole that it is for anyone who's not part of their cadre. Slaves and their overlords, right down the line. The threadbare whip of Confucianism coupled with the half-understood yoke of transplanted Christianity keeping the poor poor and the rich rich, and anyone who's not a high-born male in a position of eternal subservience.

f--k 'em.

5:25 AM | 8 comments

It reminds me, at this early stage, of a hardboiled Chandleresque quantum-physics detective novel (yeah, before Dirk Gently) that me and a couple of guys I lived with in university were writing (and erasing) in installments on the messageboard of my dorm room. That was fun, and so is this.

But I had no idea what to do with Bea Arthur suddenly appearing...

2:25 AM | 4 comments