When you grow up in the far north in Canada, if you're at all curious about the world and the people in it, you can't wait to get out. As soon as you're able, you head out to the big city, for work or school or whatever you can get. It isn't such a different story from kids growing up in the boonies anywhere, where it's Montana or Gangwon-do in Korea, western New South Wales or the Cyclades.

I grew up, for the years that counted at least, in Fort Saint James, British Columbia. During those years -- the early 70's to the early 80's -- it was the End of The Road. Vanderhoof was the asshole of the world and we were forty miles up it, we said, recycling that old standby. The paved highway ended in the Fort, and to go further north meant logging roads and endless washboard and pothole gravel, dusty in summer, solid ice in winter, and slicker than snot the rest of the time. There were a couple of reservations further up there, and a few scattered fishing lodges and mines and logging camps. Wilderness, though, for the most part. Endless dense forest carpetting mountains, nap worn smooth in spots by crystal-clear cold lakes and rivers. Germanson Landing. Takla Landing. Leo Creek. Deese Lake. I'd like to say I hunted bear in these places wearing nothing but a breechclout and bowie knife, but with parents who were grappling with living on the frontier after moving from southern Ontario and a little shellshocked by family tragedy, the names of these tiny, isolated places were almost as exotic to me as Tokyo or Timbuktu. We didn't stray too far.

But our own tiny town of 2500 or so was frontier enough for anyone, and, in what feels all these decades later like a deliberate, considered balance to the more bookish side of my nature, but was probably just imposed on me by the environment, I spent a lot of my time outdoors. In the summer especially, I'd spend 5 or 6 hours a day just behind our house swimming in the cold runoff-fed waters of Stuart Lake, or buckling on my first-gen Sony Walkman and riding my bicycle further and further out along the limited network of paved roads that snaked out along it, or to the south towards Vanderhoof, or the 10 or 15 kilometers north to the saw mills, after which the asphalt just stopped. Looking for something.

The trees never ended. The trees were everywhere. There were some things, growing up, that seemed limitless in their supply, overabundant, somehow both comforting and a little obnoxious in their insistence on being a part of every experience you could have: the trees, the water, and the snow. Nobody, or at least no young people that I knew, ever entertained for a moment the possibility that these things weren't eternal, perpetual, guaranteed. We were ants on a golf course, surrounded by plenty, living the good life, and occasionally cursing the sprinklers.

For my part, I was one of those young people -- and by no means was I in the majority -- who couldn't wait to get out, and once out, stayed. But I was also in a minority of the escapees, I think, in that I loved the place, even before I left. I'd read enough science fiction as a preteen to know that the dystopian extrapolations of scorched and dusty futures were based on the lives that people in more populous and less resource-blessed places were living already. I wasn't all that keen to hunker down or bunker up.

I was afraid in a weirdly longing way of the nukes we assumed would soon be sailing along gravity's rainbow, even if I was confident that up there in the North we'd be relatively unscathed by the coming armageddon. But I loved the sulphurous mineral rich town water that stained porcelain orange. I loved the thunderstorms that rolled in from the west over the 60 kilometre expanse of the lake, the bloodsplash summer forest fire sunsets, the northern lights you could almost hear, the way the hip-deep powdery snow creaked and puffed when the temperature got down to 40 below zero and your eyelashes began to freeze together. I loved the dusty evergreen smell of the trees and the rocks when we climbed up Mount Pope under flawless blue skies, I loved skindiving out to the drop-off in the lake, where the water, clear as air, grew dark and frightening, and my lungs felt ready to burst as I tried again and again to see what was down there, every minute irrationally terrified remembering the stories of giant sturgeon that had been pulled from those depths in decades past. I loved riding out on the lake in boats, and even riding on the river, even though that's where my younger brother had died, in that fast dark water, when I was 6 years old. I loved blizzards and whiteouts, and waking up in the morning to see drifts of fresh snow that reached the roof of our house in beautiful mathematical arcs. I loved standing in our cold kitchen in my robe in the winter mornings before school while my mom made me breakfast, over the floor grate as the furnace blew hot air up my legs. I loved when the spring came and the roads and streets shed their dirty ice shells, and I could once again hop on my bicycle and prowl the streets, nose in the air smelling that good spring smell, hoping that maybe I'd see the girl I was in love with, but almost never seeing her. I loved the brief melancholy autumn smell of wet leaves in the freezing rain.

I didn't fit in very well in many ways, though I tried, and once I began to drink -- the official sport of Northern BC -- it became much easier, and much as there were many people I loved and still love in that place, in some ways it was the place itself that made the greatest mark on me. I am and always will be someone who loves things green and blue and clean, and a smalltown boy who hauls out his big-city credentials and plays the global nomad urban expat sophisticate with a little reluctance.

I've been an expatriate most of the last 20 years and I'll probably never live there again, but it will always be a huge part of who I am.

The reason our little town has existed and more or less thrived in the last century or so, though it was the first capital of British Columbia back in the fur trading goldrush days of the 19th century, has been the forestry industry. It's a beautiful place, and tourists do come, but the lumber mills have always, at least in the last few lifetimes, provided something like 80% of the jobs, and powered an even larger component of the overall economy. It has been the same story for most of the small towns in the region. I worked in the mills too, bitching and moaning and drinking away the bruises, during my summer vacations from UBC, back in the 80's. Taught me the value of hard work, and how much I don't really care for it.

All that's coming to an end. The trees are dying, and with them, the towns. It's the pine beetle, you see. Just tiny little bugs. Nothing so dramatic as bombs or storms or ice caps melting away.

People like to debate the phenomenon of global climate change as if it were an academic issue. People who don't live in the path of the huang-sa dust storms that sweep in out of China to blanket Korea every spring, and get worse with each passing year, people who aren't in Central British Columbia watching 85% of the pine trees die off, and with the trees, the futures of their children. People whose health or livelihood isn't directly affected.

But then again, those British Columbians aren't entirely blameless, unlike the poor Koreans (and me) who are sucking down heavy metal-laden dust that we had no part in creating. While noting that the pine beetles are a natural part of the ecosystem, Canadian ecosuperhero (at least for my generation) David Suzuki blames forest fire suppression, clearcutting (and subsequent replanting), global warming. The first two can be laid directly at the feet of the folks who live there, whether they like to admit it or not.

The global warming part is textbook: to put it simply, as I understand it, warmer winters means reduced insect die off in the coldest part of the year, which means more of the little buggers the following season, and warmer temperatures the rest of the year means they spread further.

Forest fire suppression breaks the necessary cycle of old growth die off and renewal.

Clearcutting means huge areas are effectively denuded, and replanting with a single species of tree means a lack of biodiversity in the new forest, green as it may appear.

The bugs have rushed in as a result, and whole region is in very big trouble.

In the 6 years leading up to 2007 130,000 square kilometres of pine forest have been destroyed by the beetles. To put that number in perspective, that's the area of the country of England, or about one and a half times the area of South Korea. It's an armageddon all right, but not the kind that gave me nightmares when I was a teenager.

The irony to all this is that the massive die off of pines (and the infestation is moving to spruce, apparently) means, according to some researchers, that the forests of BC will no longer act as a carbon sink for the earth's atmosphere, but by 2020 will become a carbon source, making the problems even worse. It wouldn't be excesssive to describe this as a calamity. An area the size of a small country will be filled with standing kindling, which means forest fires will rage on a scale never before seen -- imagine, again, the entire country of England aflame for a sense of the scale involved.

Imagine that.

And companies that practiced unsustainable clearcutting, and the successive governments that allowed it? A special circle of hell will hopefully be reserved for those bastards. You know, if you believe in that sort of thing.

Have a look at this, to get an idea what those greedy f--kers have done to my home, and to our collective heritage over the past few decades. First, what the forests around my hometown (it's at the tip of Stuart Lake, there, center left) looked like in 1973, not long after my family moved there. Unbroken green, punctuated only by the blue of the northern lakes, and some farmland around Vanderhoof, down there at the lower left.

Now have a look at the same area in 1999. See the clearcuts? See what 'stewardship of the resource' has meant? See the spots, like some kind of mange, some horrific skin disease? Good job, you scum. You've burned your own house down around your ears. Thanks, American owners of Canadian forestry companies! You've screwed us again.

I have nothing against forestry. I have nothing against logging. It has been the lifeblood of the community that made me who I am, and supported people I know and love (and some I don't care for so much, I admit.)

What I can't and couldn't ever ignore, yeah, even while I was sweeping up the damp rich sawdust for fifteen bucks an hour, is the ways in which it has been pursued. And now, finally, the bats are coming home to roost, and it will be decades before the province and the industry recovers. Next time, maybe, they'll do it right. If there is enough fossil fuel left to do it, and any communities left to work there.

So what's happening on the ground? Two years ago, when I last visited Canada, I drove a rented car from Vancouver the 1100km north to Fort Saint James. There were stretches of a hundred kilometres and more where every tree that lined the highway on either side, once stately and evergreen and immutable, was the dull reddish brown of standing deadwood. It was a terrible thing to see. My mother, who was mayor of Fort Saint James for 14 years and still lives there, painted a pretty gloomy picture when we last talked. Of the 4 lumber mills that have provided most of the economic steam to run the community for decades, two are out of business, and one, run by the native community, is limping along with about 50 employees. Young families are leaving in droves. Real estate prices are plummeting, and houses are standing empty. Last year was one of the best ever for tourism, and that will hopefully never change, but other towns in less beautiful areas are in the process of drying up and blowing away.

Trees take decades to grow in Northern British Columbia. The good times are not going to come back any time soon.

I don't pay much attention to goings-on in Canada. I don't know how much attention is being paid to this. I suppose people are too worried about the coming real estate bust in the cities. I suppose the economic boom and environmental nightmare of the oil sands in Alberta offers some distraction. I don't know. But what I am sure about is that my hometown is dying.

I have mixed feelings.

The forests will come back. The forestry industry and government will, we can only hope, learn some lessons. People will relocate -- Canada is a nation of migrants -- and towns will shrink and maybe disappear. It's probably just wishful thinking, but it would be nice to think that things will shift toward a real attitude of sustainability and stewardship.

No matter how it all plays out, a lot of people will be hurt in the process. It takes a lot of good to outweigh the pain that the end of a way of life brings.

It's happening all over the world. They say change is good. They say a lot of stuff.

Update: The news is that a local (-ish) company has taken over the largest mill in Fort Saint James, the one that closed a year ago. They are aware and resigned to the fact that they will lose money for a good while, but they are focused on the long-term. This is fantastic news for the town -- it means hundreds of jobs, and means the town will not dry up and blow away. Other towns may not be so lucky, but I am gratified that my hometown at least seems to be looking at a stay of execution.

Here's a pretty word cloud, in celebration:

3:19 PM | 11 comments and 1 trackback

You know what? I'm a little weary of hearing about your conferences, your camps, your cozy cash-on-the-barrelhead confabs.

I don't want to know what web-shaking new thoughts percolated through the sponsored-by-Starbuck's IRC backchannel while some Internet Smellovision™ rep droned and powerpointed onstage. I don't really need to see more Flickr pictures of grinning gaggles of bloggers glistening with teraflopsweat, a little too eager to prove that they socialize in other venues besides World of Warcraft.

Don't try and tell me that 'business weblogs' or 'the business of weblogs' are anything but business. Go ahead and do your business. Make your money: we've all got to. Convene with your peers and drive your value propositions down the ROI highway. It's all good. We're lucky if we can make a living doing something we love. But if what you do and what you say in this shared textual space of ours is about selling something, then it's about selling something. Don't bullshit us. Lines blur; everything gets a price tag slapped on it.

I'm not looking at your ads, and there's no way I'm clicking them, unless I'm right-clicking on them to add them to my Adblock list, and I'm cursing you for making me go through that small tribulation.

Then my nose opens up and the fingers begin to flex when I read again how you were talking to that netfamous guy about this other well-known weblog guy, because that's what famous internet guys do -- they network. They do it publicly, and dignify it by calling it 'conversation'. Networking obviates the need for latex gloves while giving a socialmedia reacharound.

Conversation as intercourse. Intercourse as commerce. You know somebody's getting f--ked. I think it might be us. Ad copy tattoed on our lover's forehead, and we're so inured to it that we don't even notice anymore. We're trying to make love in the middle of the marketplace, but we're just getting screwed.

Conferences are where salesmen go. Because that's what salesmen do -- they network. They sell. They place ads where we'll see them, so they can sell us something. Salespeople. Salespersons, I guess. Salors and salestresses. They sell. Lomans, not shamans.

We've got the salesman archetype etched into the cultural DNA by now -- we see cheap suit a little sad, a little desperate, the armpit-stained Flying Dutchman of the strip malls. We hear faux-friendly NLP-creepy patter, we cringe, even if we're not sure why. Salesman selling something at us makes our sphincters tighten in a pre-fight-or-flight reflex. Does mine, anyway. And thanks at least in part to the blithely worshipful way that your average blogjockey has of beating the bones together at the foot of the Google Monolith, Adsense has infiltrated our online culture, has made slightly sad dry-haired Holiday Inn revenants of all of us, trapped in a coach seat next to some guy trying to sell us some shit we don't need, waiting to get a word in edgewise so we can sell him some shit he doesn't want.

My god, it's full of ads! Ads by Goooooooooogle. There's something hidden in that inviting string of 'ooooooooooo's waiting to be teased out by a modern day steganographic Nostradamus. While making his 'o' face.

(Yeah, I flog Dreamhost here, and I run Adsense on one of my other sites. I've become as guilty of this sort of whoring as the next poor rube. I'm squatting as deep in the shit as you are, pants around my ankles, 'raising the level of discourse'.)

But look: all of the conference references, all the logrolling backscratching insular techmeme circlejerk, all of the third-column index page stacks packed with the javascripty fruit of the Adsensorium, the 120-pixel hello-surfer come-ons... well, it's enough already.

'But wonderchicken, my cranky friend,' you may well object. 'If you don't like it, just stop reading it! Nobody's holding your feet to the fire here. Let those who can and want to spend their time and money sitting in threadworn conference centres with others of their adoptive sept and clan do so, and do not begrudge them their participation in the Monetary Blogdustrial Complex. It is an Engine of The New Economy! It is a bitwork bulwark against the Old Media Hegemony, from which we can together launch our Social Media Enfilade! A rising tide of advertising and self-promotion lifts all boats! We need the evangelists and the shills to Get The Word Out! The Long Tail will always be there wagging the Big Dogs, rich strata of abandoned and automated weblogs, linkfarms and pr0n, and lonely people bellowing out across the virtual rooftops to their audiences of search bots, googlenauts and bemused relatives. The human experience, made hyperlinked. Google will index it all, and get rich on the carrion-clicks that it sells to the office cubicle fools who Aren't Us! It's a Brand® New Day!'

Yeah, I know. But I felt like I needed to launch a barbaric yawp into the aether, because I miss it sometimes. And these things can be bad for you if you just let them build up inside. Hi Dave!

5:16 PM | 5 comments and 1 trackback

Now, I usually do make a token attempt not to follow up one mock-apoplectic rant with even more negativity and waving of the stiff central digit, but sometimes resistance is futile.

I wish this was satire.

Or maybe I don't. One of the things that keeps me from losing my sense of humour these days, from metaphorically climbing the clocktower and metaphorically mowing down some motherf--kers, is that reality continues to gear up, rev up, and blow the ad-decaled doors off of satire and parody and all those other words whose meanings I'm a little fuzzy on. You don't have to dig very deep to bring up some rich, loamy laughs.

Those of us who like to tell a funny joke once in a while (and some do it better than others) to keep the eyeball pressure down so that goo doesn't start jetting out in waxy spurts all over our kith and kin, we're hard-pressed to say much that tops the news of the day, though. Flipping on CNN for a few minutes yields more black-souled yucks than when we try and fail to wax Swiftian, let alone wax Brazilian. There's no payoff, and nothing's sadder than a failed Swifty.

Well, OK, dead babies are maybe sadder. I'm playing this fast and loose, as usual.

Anyway, this was supoosed to be one of my usual curmudgeonly contrarian screeds that veers from quixotacular tilting at the capitalist machine, to random cursing and mumbling, to alienating and insulting my weblog comrades, so I'd best get on with it.

In case you didn't follow the link, Blogonomics is a conference dedicated to the lofty goal of cashing in on weblogs, on board a cruise ship from Florida to Cozumel. You couldn't make this up. I couldn't, at least.

Check it out: they've even hidden the fine print at the bottom of this page by making it almost the same babyshit colour as the background. Oooh, that's clever! Very business-y! Tells us a little about who they're pandering to, too.

Screw Blogonomics in its speedo-clad afterdeck-hottub authentic-voiced bum.

Better yet, somebody take up a collection, and get me and Rageboy and on this f--king boat, load us up with speed, rye and cigarettes (or some coffee for Mr Boy, I suppose, since I seem to recall he's left the Joy of Intoxication behind), and let us write open some new blogholes for these people.

That'd be some kind of fun. And hell, even if the Quintana Roo coast has been thrashed to a Jose Cuervo-flavoured pulp, we can still make a few bucks off it, right? It's only business, after all.

Update: for some very much related thoughts that aren't just ranty wordplay, go read Dave, who has said what I would like to about the background to this with, as always, more light and less heat than I throw off.

5:53 PM | 6 comments and 1 trackback

Weblog people love to jerk off into the Google Kleenex™ (still in beta), rub the resultant mess all over their faces, then post about it on their sites. They're putting the Goo into Google at thousands of litres per second. They'd pile on and collectively hump it into a smoking hole in the ground if they could find enough holes to plug with their techno-weiners (or grind its G-pelvis to dust, if they're she-geeks, I suppose).

Investors love the Goo as well. If they got in on the ground floor, they've made enough money that they just don't give a shit what's going on in the dungeons beneath the Googleplex. "Hell, the cafeteria lunches are legendary, and the corporate motto is "Don't be evil", right? Look at that stock price! We're too busy running around naked with bouquets of rolled-up dollar bills sticking out of our asses to worry about details!"

Advertisers, the whoring undead scum that take everything they touch and convert it to shit, they're nuts-deep in the Goo. After all, Google is an advertising company first and foremost, now. If it's not the world's biggest trader of weapons of shit conversion, it's certainly the most exciting. "The eyeballs! The delicious sweet tangy eyeballs, filled with goo! Let a thousand text-ads bloom!"

Hell, I use its services a hundred times a day, literally. There's wonderchicken goo in the bucket, too.

We live in a world where the country that calls itself the Champion of Freedom and Democracy tortures prisoners in an archipelago of secret prisons. Where the evil dimwit homunculus known inexplicably as the Leader of The Free World unapologetically claims the right to spy on the communications of his own citizens. A squinting faux-cowboy weasel who launches his hobbyhorse war in Iraq on lies, grudges, and incompetence one day, sells it as crusade for Freedom, then turns around, drops and mouths the potent rhinohorn-stiffened economic cock of the Chinese the next. Don't get the wrong idea, though. It's manly, Texas-style dong-wrangling. It's realpolitik.

And it's enough to make your head spin. Rather than green vomit, though, words fountain out, splash and drip down the walls.

But hang on: the plot -- convoluted and far-fetched as it already is -- thickens. The Freedom Through Torture (Liberty Through Surveillance Department) gang wants Google to disclose information about its users. Google says "No way, we're like totally not evil!" Almost the very next day, as they used to say in the fairy tales, Google then turns around and says "Hey, we're totally going to censor search results in China, though! It's not all that evil, right?" Are you seeing a pattern here, too?

Google is full of shit. The fact that they're not the only ones does not excuse them.

And though there are a few weblog people out there saying "My little revenue-goo stream is not worth throwing in with this kind of thing," the river of Goo shows little sign of drying up. Same thing goes for the investors, not surprisingly, and the marketing shit-alchemists know there's no such thing as bad publicity.

So Andrew McLaughlin, who is Google's Senior Policy Counsel, whatever that means, says:

Noted Large and Smart weblogger David Weinberger, who is indeed Smart, and Large in the sense that he is one of the brighter sources of light in our in our texty netherworld, and casts a long shadow in the cashosphere that has attached itself limpetlike to us over the past couple of years, well, he gives Google a bit of a pass, though he admits to 'being torn' in face of McLaughlin's justification. Well, OK. It's true that nothing is black and white. Grey is the new black.

In classic wonderchicken style, I'm entirely untorn, though.

Andrew McLaughlin is also full of shit. That's no surprise -- he's a lawyer, right? But his artless waffle tastes a lot like Bush's pet lawyer, Alberto Gonzales, helping to justify torture. But you know, only some torture. "Waterboarding, sleep deprivation, 'stress positions', psychological cruelty? Evil? Well, less evil than thumbscrews, castration, disemboweling, stuff like that, right? We're totally all about the freedom and the democracy!"

Again:

What's inconsistent with Google's corporate motto -- remember, it's "Don't be evil!" -- is being evil, you asshole. Remember #6, from the 'ten things': "You can make money without doing evil." This isn't rocket science, and David Weinberger notwithstanding, it's not complicated.

Google is a company, and more significantly an advertising company, and that means that the truth is that nothing can come in the way of whoring itself out for a sleazy but necessary buck or two. You have to keep your investors happy. It's evil to get down on your knees in the filth and suck that cock in the back alley, then stab the guy and steal his wallet. It's less evil to just drain the goo and let him stagger away. Yay! Everyone's a winner, and you can rest easy, at least after you've scored some smack to keep the demon at bay. You have to keep your dealer happy. Not to mention your pimp.

Google doesn't need to be in China. There are other search engines, domestic and international. The absence of Google is not going to suddenly deprive those poor Chinese citizens -- the ones looking over their shoulder to see if the government is watching -- of the ability to find information about washing machines and condoms. The only reason Google 'needs' to be there is the money. The sweet, filthy, repressive, execution-happy, police state money. Google wants growth, because that's what investors want. Growth. Not the metastatic cancer cauliflower kind of growth either -- they want those graphs pointing skyward, proud and erectile. They want to get in to China, build a foothold. And they'll do evil to get that market share.

But there's no actual need. No need to get down in the filthy alley in front of the Chinese government. Let Baidu have the money. Let someone else do it. You can make money without doing evil.

"Removing search results is inconsistent with Google's mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission."

Let there be no confusion. Google's mission is to make money. And holy crap, those Chinese have got some money these days.

Words have meanings. We've never been at war with Oceania. f--k you, Google.

[Update, long long after the fact (June 07 2006)] : 'We were evil, Google founder admits.' The 'it's only business' apologists can commence to sucking my balls..... now.

11:13 AM | 20 comments and 2 trackbacks.

I'm sicker than a gut-shot monkey on the set of a Russ Meyer titty-spectacular, I'm boreder than a glory-hole sander at Bar Sinister in Amsterdam, I'm queasier than Buzz Aldrin chokin' down the buzzcut nitrogen punishment in orbit.

Whatever. I've been infected by self-important look-at-me wanktards* spurting their goofy podcast jism all over the blogobucket, so I got hammered and recorded my last post for posterity.

DOWNLOAD AND READ ALONG WITH THE WONDERCHICKEN (or die) [5Mb], MOTHERBASTERS!

*of which I am one, or else why would I do this?

Update: My old good friend the mighty Bearman

has taken the audio and backed it with some of his superb piano playing. The web is so damn cool. Thanks, man!

11:19 PM | 14 comments and 2 trackbacks.

I've been writing these long screeds then changing my mind, stopping and starting and just generally mucking up my state of exquisite zen rage by second-guessing myself and revising.

Revising is just plain evil.

So here, in no particular order, are the hard black slippery cores of the three pieces I'm probably not going to end up writing.

To the Bush Administration (and ever single last one of you Yank bastards who voted for them) :

Go f--k yourselves.

To Korean men, one in five of whom (according to the Korean Institute of Criminology) purchase sex four times a month (thus making it a US$21 billion dollar industry, worth 4.1% of GDP) :

Go f--k yourselves.

To the whorebloggers intent on monetarizing this virtual place of ours (and thus turning it into a sea of sh-t) :

Go f--k yourselves.

There. That feels better.

2:32 PM | 10 comments

Rudy Giuliani. Rudy f--kin' Giuliani. I caught the last 10 minutes or so of his horrifying public deep-throat of his paymasters in the Fellato-drome as I was shovelling down my lunchtime bibimbap this afternoon. In the way of a good journalist -- which of course we know all bloggers aspire to be, with 'blog is to journalism as waffle iron is to pita bread' our battle cry -- I'm going to pretend that I watched the whole thing with rapt attention, rather than with one eye while I mixed a big dollop of gochu-jang into my rice.

What kind of man could this unhinged bastard be? That he actually believes the kinds of things he said, up there with his naked face hanging out, boggles the mind. It would seem, unlike the president whose steaming sidewalk turds he unhinged his jaw to gobble up -- whether in the name of tribal solidarity, or clean streets, or merely because we live in a world where public fabrication in the name of self-preservation trumps the lives of thousands, I don't know -- that he's not merely a stupid man. How could he possibly justify the audacity of the warispeace platitudes and outright howlers he lobbed out over the heads of the assembled herd animals in the pit? Most of the assembled groundlings, interestingly, appeared to be a little bemused and confused as they milled and mooed that there was a distinct absence onstage of naked Iraqis chained to the pillars or homos cruficied and bloody in front of the stars-and-stripes. Is it possible that the fog of bullsh-t that was emanating from this opportunist f--k up on stage was choking them, too? Perhaps not, but I'm eternally the optimist.

Really? Did you really do that, Rudy? And how, for the rest of your life, will be you able to live it down, if you actually did?

To Giuliani's credit, perhaps, was the look in his piggy little eyes as he limped his way through his clumsy litany of weasel-sh-t doubletalk. You could see it, if you looked closely: 'Help me!' his eyes seemed to be saying, while his mouth continued to force words out around the mechanically-reclaimed Republican meat that was occluding it. 'Let me the hell out of here! I've sold my soul and made a foul, demonic joke of my integrity, and the price wasn't high enough! There's no way back from this, and I'm nuts-deep in the toothy maw of the beast!'

But f--k him. He made his choice. He's a force for evil now, whether or not he ever was anything but. He's on the side of America! The! Great! America! Mom and apple pie! America! Freedom and equality for some! America! Commerce is honour! America! Hurry up and get those ovens finished, so we can get this Final Solution thing underway! America the proud torturers! America! With us or against us!

I have mentioned before that I'm against you, right, America?

Just so we're clear.

3:49 PM | 9 comments

My mission to annoy and alienate as many Very Important Bloggers as possible (for street cred, daddy-o!) continues apace. The hum from the hive rises threateningly when it is disturbed. The sound soothes me. I step back, then, drawn by the hypnotic throb of the multitude, step forward again and take another f--king whack at it.

No, really. I like to be liked, honest, but I'd rather truth-tell than ass-kiss. Be a lot easier if I had a clue what the truth was. Still, I'm not a-gonna pucker up, either way.

Looks like I picked the wrong month to stop sniffing glue.

10:44 PM | 10 comments and 4 trackbacks.

The theme today is: poo.

You know, some days it's almost enough† to make one want to pick up an automatic weapon (you know, at the Gun-o-tron™ vending machine down on the corner) and start mowing down motherf--kers. The only problem with that, though, is that any motherf--kers you might in fact mow down, were you in a mowing mood, wouldn't be the Bad People, they'd just be poor ordinary sh-t-blinded slobs like you or me, lied to, marketing-besotted, diaper-slinging members of demographic groups, and there's no joy or sense in that. None at all. And, you know, killing folks is baaaad, mmkay?

So it's down to trying with every breath one takes to fight the sh-tweasels in the boardrooms and situation rooms. Laughing at them, passing over the worthless crap they try so goddamn hard to sell you. Thwarting them, and believing nothing they or their turd-fellating father-figure-worshipping infantile apologists tell you. Not as cathartic certainly, and dangerously curmudgeony-enhancing, but it'll have to do.

(And f--k that neck-flexing opportunist Howard Dean too, while I'm at it, just in case you think I'm just on an anti-Bush-te tear again. The American system is so deeply and completely f--king rotten that there is little doubt that, like Clinton before him, he's just another poo-pellet washed up on the shore of the vast open sewer that is American politics. I'd almost prefer Bush won the election next year, as the blind, bumbling, lockstep stupidity of him and his corporate-coprophile posse would do more to hasten the decline and fall of the good ol' US of A than anything else, and spur the kind of catastrophic, revolutionary change that may be the only option left to save that fading republic. I'm afraid there is very little hope, friends, and what little may be left is disappearing fast. Their lies are ascendant; they own your ass outright (and they're making the final payments on mine). Emigrate while you still can, and start sending money back to fund the revolution.)

Oh yeah, here's the nugget that set me off :

†No it's not, really. Gotta cut down on the coffee.

Thus endeth the rant.

11:59 AM | 2 comments

Language Hat points to this strangely timely article in the New York Times, which not only mentions the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but mentions it in the context of East Asian languages. How interesting, thinks I to myself, as I follow the link, hoping it will be germane to all the fascinating and erudite discussion in the neighbourhood that's sprung up around and taken off in a multitude of interesting directions from my brain dump last week.

In it are described the ideas of a certain William C. Hannas, "a linguist who speaks 12 languages and works as a senior officer at the Foreign Broadcast Information Service," author of a newly released book which claims that Asian science has suffered because the main Asian languages are written in "character-based rather than alphabetic" systems.

Not to get off on a rant here, but : in and of itself, this seems to me to be the most vile form of egregiously wrongheaded bullsh-t, and I suspect Mr Hannas is precisely the sort of person that I'd take great pleasure in pummelling until he whimpered like a frightened infant (a reaction that may reveal to some extent why I left academia many years ago, having dipped no more than a toe in its calm waters). But that's not the thing that bothered me.

The article states, presumably parrotting Mr Dipsh-t, that "Western specialists are better informed today [...and] now recognize that the writing systems of East Asia, including Chinese, Japanese and Korean, are "syllabaries," in which each character corresponds to a syllable of sound."

Now, I can't speak for written Japanese (for which I think this may in part be true, depending on which way of writing the language one chooses - Jonathon may be the better person in the immediate neighbourhood to address that), and I'm only semi-certain it is true as far as my knowledge goes for Chinese, but this is completely and laughably wrong in the case of Korean.

I've been promising for over a year now to write a piece about the Korean language and alphabet, and this may have me riled enough to actually do it.

"Mr. Hannas's logic goes like this: because East Asian writing systems lack the abstract features of alphabets, they hamper the kind of analytical and abstract thought necessary for scientific creativity," says the New York Times.

Replies the wonderchicken : Mr Hannas should take his head out of his ass, because having one's cranium so firmly lodged up one's rectum can hamper the kind of analytical and abstract thought necessary for actually making some f--king sense.

A googlesearch takes literally about 5 seconds to find a multitude of sites that describe hangul, the Korean alphabet, and make Mr Hannas look like the idiot (or at the very most gracious, 'mind-bogglingly poor researcher') he would seem to be.

What is also distressing to me is that Sapir-Whorf (to the weak formulation of which, as I've mentioned, I have a degree of sympathy) is being talked about in connection with such worthless, badly thought-out crypto-racist twaddle.

Here's a rude bit of English, sloppily and phonetically rendered into the Hangul alphabet in 5 letters and two syllables for Mr Hannas, sounding something like 'puhk kyu!'. Wonder if he'd be able to read it...

[Gah! I thought I had all my ranting out of my system for the week. Ah well.]

1:38 AM | 10 comments and 5 trackbacks.

So I heard some people are averting their eyes, avowing that they'll Blog No More about all the War and Death and Ugliness and Ickiness; telling us that they feel they must disengage from the angry and divisive back-and-forth bayonette to the guts wartalk flying back and forth across the blogosphere lately. It's just so taxing. Too much, too wild, too real, too damn disruptive to quiet contemplation and coffee consumption. The voices who shout out against war are all but indistinguishable in their stridency from the voices who cheer the Forces of Freedom, darn it! I thought all that fact-checking of their asses would be fun! It's all so easily parsed, too obvious - I know the forces of Good are the Forces of Evil, sometimes, silly, and the Evil Doers are still there, darn it, and the Doers of Good are semi-plus unbad, well, at least sometimes, and I weary of explaining it all to my loyal readers, and besides all this typing is making me tired already, especially when some random Googlenaut winds up at My Personal Website with a search for "America Number One" +pussy -cheeselogs and leaves a comment that makes me feel like my carefully chosen words are all pearls-before-swining themselves, and I just can't do it any more, I need to find my happy place....

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I'm thinking you can go f--k yourselves, you lame sh-tmorsels. Grab some anger [mp3 - 2Mb] and ride it into the dirt, or step the f--k back.

(If this is unfair to those who have made a firm stand against making a firm stand, well, tough sh-t is all I can say to you this evening, my friends.)

6:28 AM | 11 comments

[Note in Big Friendly Letters for the Intelligence Impaired : The piece below was recently reproduced in toto (which is intensely annoying in and of itself) at Indymedia by someone, and characterized as actually being in support of this corporatist misadventure of a war. It's not, damn it, and that might have been clear if my unknown copy-and-paster had actually bothered to read beyond the first paragraph, or scrolled down a post or two. Disappointing.]

--

You know, I'm starting to get behind this whole War thing. I feel it in my belly now, I feel the twist down deep in there, down where the root of my cock would be, if it had a root. I feel the warm throb with each heartbeat thrum and flash of ordnance.

It gets me hot.

I'm getting excited about the killing. I wasn't too thrilled with it at first, you know, cowardly america-hating lefty cheese-eating appeaser blowhard anti-warblogger f--kwit that I am. I was tremulous and girly, but now that the blood is flowing, and the guns are shouting their wordless chants, I'm starting to like it. I want to see more! I want the news to turn bad and then worse. I don't want your brave boys or mine to come home, wrapped in glory and squinting through a cake of Euphrates dust - I want them to stay and fight and die, for me, yes for me, and for glorious freedom. I want them to stand there arch-backed and unbowed in the sand with the grieving sun behind them - erect - and clutching a flagpole, with old glory streaming out behind. And then I want to see them blown to pieces.

I want a conflagration! Firestorms! God damn it, if it's war then let it be war! Let's rub our noses in it, roll in it like a dog in its puke, let's stare at ourselves red-eyed in the mirror and think about what we really are, and what we love, and who we fear. Let's take it to the next level! Let's roll! No pain no gain! Just do it! Semper fidelis! Give me the shrieks of the wounded, the gentle Protestant sobbing of heartbroken heartland mothers, and the keening of those strange burkha'd women gathered around the corpses of their sons, too.

I like this war. I want more of it. I want Iraqi Freedom now, and I want it without pickles or mustard, you minimum-wage retard. I want Iranian Freedom too, with some Freedom Fries on the side, and then I want some goddamned Korean Freedom, served up sizzlin' hot, with kimchi-fart afterburners switched on as the walls fall down around me. Free the world, George! Free us all! We want to be free! My huddled masses, they yearn for some down-home, Texas-style freedom! Freedom from care, freedom from want, freedom to shop, freedom from thought, freedom from life. Free us from our lives, America, free us all. Fight for peace, because peace is almost as good as freedom!

Void where prohibited by law.

4:34 AM | 10 comments

I usually cringe listening to prank call comedy, which seems to be a dominant form of humour these days, at least if you listen to net.comedy streams much. Easy, nasty funny, I guess, which is what folks seem to like.

Me, I've only made maybe two prank calls in my life. The last one was about a decade ago, with my buddy Rick, who died after the Bali bombing last year, and even then we were already way way too old for that sort of thing. When our random target *69'd us and yelled incoherently, we freaked out and left for the bar, like the weenerdogs we were. It was unforgiveably stupid, but it was a marvellous thing at the time. We took a certain pride in not acting our age. I still do.

This Jack Nicholson soundboard (Warning : may take approximately forever to load up if you're on dialup) almost makes me want to make some prank calls, though, even after our total failure to achieve comedy escape velocity that last time all those years ago.

Even though it's Pure Evil.

4:40 AM | 2 comments and 1 trackback

Thanks to the eternally irate Mr Golby for this little nugget.

Yes! Bless us, lord! Let's pray for our troops, pray for our politicians, pray that the bleeding hemorrhoids that have been plaguing us will disappear, let's pray that those pesky raghead pagan f--ks die in their thousands, let's pray that more war will stop war, let's pray that killing will put a cap on killing, let's pray that the sweet light crude manna will continue to pump through the fiscal veins of our great nation, let's pray that our god has a bigger dick than theirs, let's pray that the dazed halfwit apathetic scum that allowed us to take over the most powerful country in the world won't wake up and cut our throats like the vermin we are, let's pray goddamnit, let's pray the great game will continue, let's pray that jesus doesn't f--king come back and rip us from crotch to sternum like trout, let's pray, let's pray, let's get down on our knees and pray to something bigger, let's pray, let's pray our children don't have to do the same evil things we did, it's not our fault, god, please, it's not our fault, we're not bad people, we just did what we had to do, what we were told to do....

[Audio : Dead Kennedys - Kinky Sex Makes The World Go 'Round]

3:52 AM | 6 comments

I guess I should be blogging my tits off, here, proving to all those visitors from the bloggies that I'm The Hardest Working Blogger In Show Business, but f--k that noise.

I got me a bottle of cheap whiskey, it's Friday night and I'm on the elevator gooooooin' up. Leave me be.

All the kafuffle about this bloggie stuff makes me giggle like chrome-plated steam-powered giggling machine, though, I gotta tell ya. Go, look how worked up some people get about these silly things. [via OW™here] I don't know who these people are, but they really need a tall cool glass of perspective and soda.

Hey, you big boneheads! If you've got all that energy to spare, why not try getting worked up about the bumbling corporate turd masquerading as a president, sitting in the White House, chuckling like a waterhead, and jerking off over his (laminated, crayola-bright) plans for war, instead? Or the continuing determined erosion of your rights and privacy by his wingèd minions, maybe? Or even about the fight over copyright law, which is a massive wank as well, in this wonderchicken's opinion, but not nearly as gargantuan a waste of time as these awards. Save your vitriol for the things that merit it, kids.

And have a drink, on me.

Edit : Or if you're not the drinking type, amuse yourself by reading this semicoherent ramble from last week, which in light of this Bloggie nomination, is Ironic As f--k (now featuring Comedy Capitalization©).

Edit again : Or : what the ever-reasonable mathowie said.

4:19 AM | 5 comments

I was a little let down, as the taxi pushed through the rain into downtown Vancouver, at how little had changed. This feeling intensified over the next few days : other than a few new buildings scattered here and there, and a new colour scheme on the buses, it seemed to me as if nothing much had changed in Vancouver in the five years since I last set foot in the homeland. In fact, not much that I could see had changed in the 20 years since I first moved there as a thirst-bedeviled freshman.

After living in Korea, where the entire country reinvents itself every five years or so, and the one constant is change and ferment and fresh concrete flowering skyward fast as bamboo, it was a little disconcerting. I had never thought of Canada as...well, stodgy, until now.

But over the next couple of weeks there, I noticed that at least one significant thing had changed, other than the amount of grey hair on friends and family.

I had read that the drug companies were getting more aggressive with their carpet-bomb marketing in North America over the past few years. Read about the scattershot Ritalin-dosing of children, read about the emergence of the Prozac nation, read about the drug companies inventing 'female sexual dysfunction' in order to manufacture a market for more of their pills. But I wasn't prepared for the fact that there wasn't a single commercial break that I can recall on network TV over those couple of weeks that didn't have at least one drug advertisement. When did heartburn become 'acid reflux disease'? How many cold medicines do people actually need? 'I love my Tylenol PM'? How putrid is that? f--k you lady, why don't you try loving your children instead (yelled I at the television screen, much to the long-suffering chagrin of my lady love). There were ads flogging drugs for conditions I haven't even heard of, ads with happy grinning families running across manicured green parkland with their lassie-like dogs, free of the ravages of anal warts or whatever the hell had been plaguing them before Smithcline-Beecham showed up on the scene.

Now, I'm not one to claim, ever, that drugs in and of themselves are a bad thing. Better living through chemistry, say I. But I've always been more inclined to think that the body should be allowed to deal with minor illnesses on its own, and that drugs are better employed in the context of recreation than medication. Indefensible position perhaps, but I don't really give a sh-t. Unless I've got Ex-lax™ to ease the way, of course!

I also have a strong tendency to think that the habit of medicating for every minor complaint is a sign of weakness, and creates and fosters weakness, and weakness is bad. Weakness in mind or body invites the triumph of evil men, evil deeds and thoughts. But that's a whole other rant, perhaps.

So, anyway, unprepared as I was for the constant deafening barrage of druggy blandishments on the TV, I was substantially less prepared for the fact that half the f--king people I know are apparently now on SSRI's : you know, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Prozac™ and Zoloft™ and Paxil™ and I don't know what-all else. When did this happen? When did all these people decide that they couldn't handle their lives anymore without being constantly medicated? Or when did their drug company whore-doctors convince them of it?

Now, look, I know (based on extrapolation from what I've seen amongst friends and relatives recently) that probably half of the people reading this are on scrips for one of these drugs, too, and I don't want to antagonize or insult unduly. There are, certainly, some people for whom these 'miracle drugs' (given us by the gods) are a means by which they can live a normal life, overcome the ravages of aberrant brain chemistry, fight clinical depression.

But I've got to think that there are way too many folks out there who are just too goddamn lazy and irresponsible to take responsibility for their own mental states, just like there are too many people who think of themselves as victims, who blame their parents or their spouse for their problems, who refuse to take responsibility for their actions, who don't vote and then complain about the government they get (and so richly deserve), who drive an SUV because, hey, if I get into an accident, it's the other guy who'll get hurt, who dismiss concerns about environmental degradation with a wave of the hand and a demand for incontrovertible proof...

Sorry, I'm ranting again.

But hell, I've taken just about everything there is to take at one time or another, and I didn't do it to escape, I did it to explore. Hooray for me, right? Well, sure, why the hell not? I reckon that if your life is bad enough that you have to stay perpetually medicated, you need to change your life, change your doctor, get off the SSRIs, and get the hell out of the house. Find some people to drink a beer (yes, I see the irony) with and dance in the rain on a beach somewhere. Find someone new to have sex with, if that's your thing. Climb a mountain, sail a boat, or if you're too fat or lazy or poor to do that, find someone who loves doing it, and ask them about it, and watch their eyes as they describe the joy it gives them, and find something that makes you feel that joy too. Something other than chemicals.

You know, unless you really are f--ked up. In which case, pop those puppies like gummy bears, I say.

11:32 PM | 11 comments and 1 trackback

I thought I'd seen it all, here in my reeking little trash-heap slum of a neighbourhood.

I was, as people who employ such phrases usually are, wrong. Walking back from the subway station this afternoon along the main street, I saw a young mother squatting with her girl-child (who was perhaps 3 or 4 years old, and thus past the age where using her as a meat animal is a viable option† any more) in the middle of the sidewalk.

The little girl's panties were around her ankles, and she was pissing. Like a little pink-clad racehorse.

Now, Koreans tend to be less prissy and self-conscious about the functions of elimination than us western folk (which is perhaps odd in light of all the other faux-christian pruderies they've saddled themselves with), and their earthiness is always refreshing to me, but it's a little beyond the f--king pale to encourage your children to drop their drawers and let fly all over the goddamned sidewalk, isn't it? Well, isn't it?

† No, I'm not suggesting they cook and eat infants here -- once in a while I just like to see if you're paying attention out there...

11:14 PM | 4 comments

Ahhh-hahahahha!

*breathes, wipes a tear*

Ooooh-hoooo. That was good.

By the way, I invented the weblog.

How do you like them apples?

5:37 PM | 12 comments and 2 trackbacks.

Re : this and this and this and other comments around the blogs -

Feel free to borrow and proudly display my little pseudo-blogsticker, if you're so inclined. Pissed-off people unite! The meek will inherit nothing!

5:41 PM | 4 comments

There's praise a'plenty. And some canny marketing too, methinks. Oh, yes. But I'll weigh in as well, since that's what it's all about, right? Here... We. Go!

How tedious is this, how perfunctory and lacking of any sense of the mad, wild spirit of creativity that is tearing through the souls of (fill in the names or pseudonyms of your favorite bloggers here)? Sorry, Meg, but this piece strikes me as soulless, by-the-numbers, and regrettably keen to dumb things down as much as possible, custom-designed for Big Media to understand and quote it. Calculated to be Just what the Market Wants. My ungracious guess is that it's just what the publishing industry would like to read, before the Blogroots -related book comes out. Antithetical to the spirit of what so many of us, you included, I thought, were doing...

(And almost as uninspiring as the radio appearance recently of another blog luminary, which, I've got to say, was one of the things that resulted in my lament a while back about how deeply I'm being disappointed of late by some people in the blogosphere for whom I've developed a sort of lame-o superheroesque respect.)

Take a breath.

If you people, you A-listers, you pioneers (and I bow in respect to the Old Blog Guard, but some just don't seem to get the New, in much the same way, ironically enough, that Old Media don't seem to get La Kottke or whatever archetypical high-traffic blogger that they happen to pick out of their very small grab-bag when a url is necessary for street-cred in their latest in-depth analysis), if you can't muster the juice to sing a soul-stirring song about this beautiful web of voices we're collectively weaving, then I suggest you step the hell back, and point your fingers to those of us who can summon the muse and weave the hymns that will bind the New Tribes together.

[Edit : I've just suddenly become aware that this piece was written for a Techo Journal, and that my guns-blazing attack may be Quixotacular. Nonetheless, I'll fight to the f--king death arguing that the defining aspects of my writing here (or Golby's or AKMA's or Shelley's or Jonathon's or Eeksy's or that of multitudes of others) are not Time Stamps or Permalinks. Lead, damn it, or get out of the way.]

6:27 AM | 15 comments

I'll think I'll stick to the Fart Jokes and Wacky Tales henceforth. Might be best to leave the Big Thinkin' to the Big Thinkers, yeah?

My tragic flaw is that I'm not clever enough to figure out if I'm being made fun of or not. And I hate like hell to be made fun of, ya know?

Edit : Like the big drunken boor that I pretend to be but secretly am (Mossman is really made of Moss, how boring is that?), I've sent abusive and angry messages to someone (psst..that'd be AKMA) because I thought I was being made fun of. My outrageous and pathetically demonstrative response arose in its entirety out of my sad and deeply personal unresolved childhood hurts. I apologize, sincerely, a thing I've been doing in response to blood I've drawn or hurt I've inflicted since I was a young man.

How many times can an apology be offered before it becomes a mantra? And how f--king sad is that?

I'm sorry, AKMA.

7:16 AM | 3 comments

A friendly suggestion : How about you take your 'moral clarity' and shove it up your ass, you simpleminded sack of sh-t? How's that for clarity? Might be immoral to use such words, might even be wrong to call the Most Powerful Man In The World a simpleminded sack of sh-t, but I've got to call a spade a spade, you know?

I realize of course that overwhelming evidence would indicate that the Resident couldn't string together a foreign policy more complicated than 'George not like, George hate, George kill', and that it would seem that most of the time ('Do you have blacks there too?') he's not even sure whether that's a horseshoe, a handgrenade or a crucifix he has jammed up his fundament, and further that the words he was reading in the passage quoted above were written by someone else.

Almost certainly that someone is not quite so simpleminded as Our Hero, and painfully aware that simple parables of White Hats and Black Hats will make Georgie clap his hands in glee and stop touching his penis quite so often, frantic as he is to reassure himself that it's actually there. That speechwriter, whether he believes the words he writes or not, dutifully churns out on demand these slightly-veiled calls for Blood! Murder! (and this year's top of the monkeykiller hit parade) Vengeance! that get the crowds on their feet.

You hasten the end of us all, and guarantee by raising the stakes the deaths of uncounted thousands, soon or later, when you put words like that in the mouth of the beady-eyed, murderous commander-in-thief, you speechwriting scum. People, simple common f--king people listen to that drivel, and believe it, and take up arms and kill after they hear it. God damn you to hell.

[Excised : A wish for the painful death of the speechwriter in question. I get carried away sometimes.]

Does that make me a bad person? Not to a utilitarian, perhaps.

(Edit : Even the Please Tell Me What To Do, Daddy brigades at MeFi are unimpressed, or silent. Rusty dreams a beautiful, optimistic, doomed dream, though, which is worth hoping for, at least.)

4:53 AM | 1 Comment

From an MSNBC handwringer about some trailerpark-special TV craptacular called "Beer Games" :

You reckon he meant to say that?

From the same article :

Does anyone edit these things? Who are these halfwits they're dredging up for quotes? What the hell is happening out there? Thank crikey I'm not a journalist, say I.

12:00 AM

I swear by all that's holy, by the sweet unsucked nipples of the mother of jesus, by the small but nonetheless annoyingly itchy watery little bumpy things on the sides of my fingers, by the lords of the underworld and Timmy too, by gum, by gemorrah, by sodom and moloch, by the dirty diapers of the baby jesus, by Aunt Jemima and her god-blessed pancakes, by all the prime numbers up to and including 29, by land (one) by sea (two), by the funniest number that exists (fourteen), in the name of the whiskey and the beers and the holy smokes, by the SUVs and the Naderites, by chimptacular presidents and semi-masticated pretzels, by the barney and the rubble and the smoking crater, by the inescapable haiku and the inevitable goatsex, by the fat guy and the troll, by the pedant and the pederast, by the vegetarians, the vegans the omnicores the omnivores the omniwhores the carnivores and the single cry in the dark of a lone drunken chicken begging to be eaten, just a f--king nibble you bastards, by the Portuguese scribblers, the Australian nutjobs, the Yankee heroes and the dismemberment of thousand-headed Purusha, by the subtle, supersensuous spiritual essence which pervades all space, by the mythical tortoise which upholds the earth, by the shrimplike scent of my swinging dad-balls, by the sacred and inextinguishable fires of the Magi which alone remain to illumine the horizon, by the dirty little chuckle, the self-referential injoke, by the ineluctable modality of the f--king boneheaded, by the end of this post it'll be time for another beer, by the oft-licked nuts of Cerberus, the three-headed watchdog at the gates of Hell, by good intentions, bad intentions, simple misdirection, sleight-of-hand and honest-to-goodness magic, by the great big ball of thread beside the chest of drawers, by the time I figure it out I'll be dead, by the sweet sweet liquor, by the weed and the hash, by the speed and the coke, by the dimethyl goddamn tryptamine, by the wind and the waves, by the quiet talks on the beach and the naked dancing on the rooftop, by the unreachable goal and the short-term workaround, by the self-obsession and the reaching out to a friend, by the pastoral idyll and the urban hubbub, by the purple steaming mess that spills out onto the pavement as I die, by the husker and the du, by the #006699 and the #CCCC00, by the Math and the Owie, by the wife, the horse and the moustache, by all that's holy :

I've been here before. Archiving. Yeah. That's it.

5:38 AM | 6 comments

Now, before I even begin, I must preface this little mousy-squeaky post, this whisper of uncertainty and doubt and anti-communitarianism that will hopefully go unnoticed and unremarked, this little strung-together line of characters drunkenly hunt-and-pecked out late in the evening on a day in which I found that for some reason my IQ unexpectedly and inexplicably dropped about 40 points or so, I must introduce this with the admission that I've had a drink or two. This should not be a surprise to you, dear reader.

But : lately, repeatedly, and consistently, I've found my InTarWeb HerOes, the men (and yes, most, well, OK, pretty much all of my real leftover-from-Spiderman-pajamas heroes, at least on this IntArWeB thing, are men) for whom in the last while, since I've become interested in what's happening out amongst the Magesticallanic Clouds Of Bits, I have come to have respect and to like and perhaps wish to emulate, imitate, celebrate or alternately crush like bugs (being as it is the eternal and everlasting man-desire, no sh-t Dick Tracy, to destroy and supplant the alpha-male bing bang boom) -

...take a breath, wonderchicken...

those fine gentlemen have disappointed me, badly. You slack bastards. Icons, idols, they're leaving me colder than an arctic char's ass (and I don't even know if fish have asses, but carry on my wayward son carry on) of late. Need I explain why? No! f--k that. I'm just venting here, and the fridge is calling.

I'm going to drink a few more beers, and watch Waking Life again. This post may well disappear when I wake up tomorrow.

Well, whatever. Nevermind.

6:09 AM | 3 comments

I woke up several times during the night last night, and each and every time, as I swam up into semi-consciousness, a phrase was running unbidden through my head : "pepperoni zamboni".

In some sort of Field-Of-Dreams-Close-Encounters-esque fit of compulsive behaviour, the first thing I did this morning was whip up this quick and dirty pic, which comes reasonably close to reproducing the mental image that accompanied the phrase.

I couldn't make this stuff up, folks.

7:40 PM | 6 comments

f--k the 'A-list'. f--k 'em in the eyeball with Adolph Hitler's wasabi-dipped dick.

Thank you ladies and gentlemen, and good night.

(Edit : I kid because I love. No, really.)

4:40 AM | 9 comments

This Metafilter thread has put me into an old well-worn groove wherein, despite many thoughts ignited and roman-candle launched across the night sky, I keep circling back inexorably to a conviction that people are evil, and that we are all circling the bowl waiting for that terminal clean-up flush, and so, before I get too terribly worked-up about it, I just move on.

Edit : Yes, I know :

"People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

1:18 AM | 6 comments

Exhibit The First
Exhibit The Second

A Rant, in One-Part Harmony.

See me feel me touch me heal me. Wasn't that what the Burning Sun God sang, all falsetto fakery? It's really all in the way the words are said or sung or screamed, rather than the actual words you choose, isn't it? I am content. I am content. See what I'm sayin', there, folks? Not what you deliver, but the delivery itself!

Shuffling, whether off the mortal coil, or into the spotlight, it's the motion, not the meat, mama. The medium ain't worth a rat's posterior. The eye is drawn to motion - 'don't move or he'll see us' is whispered child's-voice breathlessly in a technicolour dream of Monsters Under The Bed.

Shoot the messenger, or wait until the marathon man Phidippides collapses of his own accord, it's all the same to me. Amp up that pure sweet white-noise signal. "These ones go to 11!" Don't talk to me about Signal versus Noise - the noise is the signal. The carrier wave carrying itself. Not amplitude, but frequency modulation.

It's not the Message, by golly, it's the Carrier.

Go go gadget fugue state!

Comedy comma improv. The native indian aboriginal american whatever the hell we're supposed to call those poor bastards these days (racist sacks of redneck dung, amongst drooling cadres of whom I spent my formative years, referred to them as 'chugs'), anywaywhatevernevermind, the tribe that lived for a few thousand years in the area in which I grew up in Northern British Columbia before us white devils arrived, the Nikozliautin the Pintce and the Nakraztli, are collectively referred to as the 'Carrier Tribe'. This name arose from their custom in which a widow was obliged to carry the cremated remains of her husband on her back for three years after his demise.

Just think of that. Three years of carrying that dust and those bones.

Exeunt omnes, with sackcloth and ashes for damn sure.

All that you see, all that you eat, all you excrete (sucker that I am for scatalogical humour, one of my favorite moments of the late lamented Family Guy is when the son, Chris (ain't that a kicker), stares intently at a chocolate bar before gleefully declaiming in his oddly-timbred voice : "I'm going to turn you into poo!" and taking a bite), and so on a la U2 ripping off Pink Floyd : it's content, baby. And we are all just containers : conduits, conductors, conspirators. In this I am content.

Now gimme that money, 'fore I smack you up!

6:11 AM | 5 comments

You know what pisses me off right at this particular moment? Using words to confuse the point, to play the goddamn shell game, to obfuscate rather than clarify.

There are a few around the neighbourhood who weave sky-piercing towers of words, intricately knitted and syntactically exciting, that leave me cold. I'm impressed by the erudition, by the verbal pyrotechics (and I used to blow sh-t up for a living, briefly, so I oughta know), but I learn nothing after reading what is said except how clever-clever the author of those words is.

If you can't make a window onto something for yourself or for someone else by what you write you're masturbating. My advice is that you do it in private, Big Shooter. Play with the language, sure, but keep your hands above the table.

So saith the wonderchicken.

(Edit : And if anyone should think this pronouncement has anything to do with the latest sh-tfight in MeTa, in the interests of practicing what I preach, I say clearly : it doesn't.)

7:13 AM | 3 comments

KILL

KILL!

KILL!

You f--king primates. Kill each other until you're all dead, grind each other's bones to make your bread. Swing the infants by their heels and shatter their tiny skulls on the doorjambs of your hovels. Kill! Hate! Let it never end! Swear blood feuds, and carry on the senseless slaughter of your fathers' fathers, and their thick-fingered simian fathers, too. Bathe in the blood of your enemies, before they have a chance to caper like children in arterial gouts of yours. Cleanse the world of your hated foes, yes, that's it, ethnical