Free

[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.]
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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.

Reruns

I said this, before :

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, ethnically cleanse. If there are any women left alive, don’t forget to rape them, and rape them hard. Slitting their throats after you’ve spilled your filthy warrior seed is optional, but recommended. Kill! Lay waste! Wreak havoc! Defend the honour of your people, sink your hands deep into the warm entrails of those you would destroy as they cough out their last curse! Kill!

Just hurry it up, already. I’m waiting to dance on your unmarked graves, you cheeseheads.

…
I’m too f–king weary to get as worked up as I was when I wrote that little rant about some-f–king-war or other, so transliterate if you must, my friends. Turgid, purple and mildly embarrassing, sure, but better than nothing, right?
Better than embarrassed, embattled, uncertain silence. Better than a sad and defeated realization that no matter how intense the outrage born from a meaningless commitment to steer one’s course by what seems ethical and right, the stupidity and hatred and killing will just keep rolling on.
Let’s Roll™!

On Second Thought

Thanks for the help with the redesign candidate a few days ago, friends, but true to contrarian form (well predicted by Fishrush), I think I like this brand spanking new idea I’ve been fiddling with even better. Even though it looks best on IE (transparency is a wanky but purty) and at resolutions higher than 800×600, it still looks reasonable on the latest Mozilla and doesn’t totally derange Opera, at least.
That said, I may well change my mind again tomorrow, but it’s bedtime for now and my eyes hurt. Comments are welcome as always. But please keep in mind that this is an early prototypy thing, and I am aware that it imposes some limitations as a result of design decisions (like supporting 800×600). I’ll probably end up just implementing the skinning doodad I was working on a few months ago as monica suggested, so you’ll be able to choose your (persistent between sessions, with cookies) look and feel thanks to the Magic of PHP, this current design included.

Please Stay Tuned

Nameserver changes will mean that the ‘bottle may well go dark for a while, along with my kind and generous host Burningbird, and Farrago, too, while DNS propagation magically does its thing.
Catch ya on the flipside, daddy-o.

Wacky Hijinx

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.

Fiddle-farting around

I’ve been farting around with a sorta-new design, and your comments are welcome. Gooder, worserer? Look weird with your 5 year old browser?
I’ve done some checking with the latest Mozilla, Opera and IE versions, and it looks OK, but I’m too damn lazy to do much else. If it’s egregiously broken on your browser/OS combination, I’d hate love to hear about it, though. After having been patted on the head from a number of places around the web for this current design (which was never intended to be, like, flashy or anything, but was just what came out of my head when I was thinking about what I wanted the ‘bottle to look like), I’m hesitant to slap up something that blows or sucks or otherwise moves air about in an unpleasant fashion.
But I feel the need for a spring cleaning.
Thank you for your kind patronage.
(Edit : Also, as some small compensation for your debugging assistance, I offer you this, which is way cool, if you like stuff like that. I do.)