Public Service Announcement

May 18, 2003 / / 3 Comments

Though most people know of them already, I’m sure : like The Memory Hole, the deliberately unbloglike UnderReported is a good way to try and keep track of the sh-tstorm of lies and propaganda howling around our heads, as of course is the excellent and more weblogesque cursor.org. These sites invite you to draw your own conclusions, an invitation we too rarely receive these days.
Though undeniably entertaining, reading the ranting of bloggers is less rewarding, perhaps. Your mileage, as they say, may vary. Which is not to say that I’m going to stop ranting any time soon, but rather to note that you, dear reader, should most assuredly take it for what it is worth, which is bugger-all other than a bit of (hopefully) amusing wordplay.
It must be said, too, that there are times when one has to stand back and point, with some small measure of humility, at some of the diamond-bullet stuff bloggers are pulling out of their hats, ranty or otherwise, like this little juxtapotato from a certain maniacal South African down the block :

“These despicable acts were committed by killers whose only faith is hate and the United States will find the killers and they will learn the meaning of American justice. Anytime anybody attacks our homeland, or our fellow citizens, we will be on the hunt. We will bring them to justice. Just ask the Taliban.”
– George W. Bush, President of the United States, Indiana, May 13th, 2003
“We had a great day… We killed a lot of people.”
– Sgt. Eric Schrumpf, Fifth Marine Regiment, March 29th, 2003

Killer Scum and Candid Camera

May 17, 2003 / / 7 Comments

“We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world – a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us. George W Bush does not speak for me or my son or my mother or my friends or the people I respect in this world.”
– Hunter S Thompson

Paul Theroux on Hunter S Thompson [via RobotWisdom]

What are the conservatives doing with all the money and power that used to belong to all of us? They are telling us to be absolutely terrified, and to run around in circles like chickens with their heads cut off. But they will save us. They are making us take off our shoes at airports. Can anybody here think of a more hilarious practical joke than that one?
Smile, America. You’re on Candid Camera.
And they have turned loose a myriad of our high-tech weapons, each one costing more than a hundred high schools, on a Third World country, in order to shock and awe human beings like us, like Adam and Eve, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.
The other day I asked former Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton what he thought of our great victory over Iraq, and he said, “Mohammed Ali versus Mr. Rogers.”
What are conservatives? They are people who will move heaven and earth, if they have to, who will ruin a company or a country or a planet, to prove to us and to themselves that they are superior to everybody else, except for their pals. They take good care of their pals, keep them out of jail – and so on.
– Kurt Vonnegut, in a lecture for the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut.
What has steadily, insidiously improved since then, of course, making humanist arguments almost irrelevant, is the technology. We must not be too distracted by the clunkiness of the means of surveillance current in Winston Smith’s era. In “our” 1984, after all, the integrated circuit chip was less than a decade old, and almost embarrassingly primitive next to the wonders of computer technology circa 2003, most notably the internet, a development that promises social control on a scale those quaint old 20th-century tyrants with their goofy moustaches could only dream about.
– Thomas Pynchon, in his new introduction to Orwell’s 1984.

Another Take

May 8, 2003 / / 6 Comments

Another very interesting take can be found here (from a writer new to me, which is always cool) on the whole SapirWhorf linguistic relativism conversation, one that I almost missed in my growing dependance on trackback to keep me up to date on who’s been saying what…
One of the best things for me that came out of this ongoing discussion has been finding a whole constellation of new and interesting voices that had something to say on some facet of the topic, in addition to my friends in the virtual neighbourhood. It’s been a pretty good week in blogaria for me.

Lost in Transit

May 6, 2003 / / 8 Comments

A while back I was asked if I would like to be a part of a group weblog written by expats from nations all over the bloody map, and I accepted, and promptly settled into a steady regimen of procrastination, as is my wont.
I broke my silence and posted a wee thing today. Hooray for me!
Hope you like it.
Edit : I also recently received an email about a TV pilot being produced for a show about blogging (‘Wow, lookit ‘im type, Martha! That fella must be some kinda geeenyus!’), which invited me to produce a short bit of video that summed up my webwork here. The only thing I could think of was a blurry closeup of a dew-beaded beer bottle with me chanting a stream of obscenities in the background, followed by a few kaleidoscopic seconds of semi-nekkid belly-slappin’ dancing.
Maybe I’ll just keep the video to myself, huh?

More Lies

May 1, 2003 / / 1 Comment

You are being lied to, clumsily. Redux.
My seething hatred of the American Junta still, you know, seethes. Occasionally it froths a bit, and it is known occasionally to erupt, after which it drips slowly down my leg. Most of the time, it merely simmers, on a low boil, until I see something like this, and, well, then I’m off and seething again.

“We were not lying,” a Bush administration official told ABC News. “But it was just a matter of emphasis.”

Why
Not
Go
f–k
Yourself?

you bullet-headed, baby-killing micro-phallused warwanktard, you

I might be lying to you too, of course, and in fact I probably am : but at least it’s moderately more artful than the cheesedick trailerpark celebrity faux-cathexis that serves for discourse on the tee-vee.

You have been lied to, and it’s a lovely feeling, that they should still care enough to try, isn’t it? But they’re clearly not trying very hard. Or they’re trying their damnedest, but they are so ham-handed, half-witted, blinded by hubris, too busy slapping each other on the back while carefully wiping the faeces off each other’s dicks after the latest washingtonian clusterf–k that they actually think the dog-and-pony show is fooling people.
Of course, inside the borders of their mighty nation, they’d be right, to a surprising extent. Pity, that.
You are being lied to, clumsily.
But you knew that already, didn’t you?
OK, I’m done. That should hold me for week or so.
Edit : No, I was wrong. One more thing.

Threads

April 29, 2003 / / 1 Comment

I think last time I did something like this, some random Googlenaut accused me of self-indulgent wankery, to which, if memory serves, my reply was ‘And?’
Some interesting thoughts are swirling around my little romp through language theory the other day : Jonathon, Steve, Tom, Jeff, Stu, Dorothea (apologies as always if I missed anyone), and of course the folks who were kind enough to drop a comment or two inthread. Many things to think about, but I may well have exceeded my Deep Thought quota for the month already…

Social Software

April 28, 2003 / / No Comments

(*ducking to avoid flames*)
re : this.
I’ll be more interested after the fine people involved have read and digested the implications of the complete archives (skipping the ‘hoo hoo I’m a funny boy aren’t I’ stuff where appropriate) here.
That is all.

Keep The Bird Burning

April 23, 2003 / / 6 Comments






Jonathon is organizing a campaign to help Shelley – who’s got her back to the wall financially at the moment – keep weblogging. To lose her voice would diminish us all… if you offered to kick some money into a ‘save the wonderchicken’ fund, which I didn’t end up needing, you might consider dropping it into a ‘save the Burningbird’ fund instead. It would be a Good Thing To Do.

I AM THE GREATEST!

April 20, 2003 / / 4 Comments

Last week every second thread at the ‘filter seemed to have at least one mention of Neal Pollack, and how he’s tastier than pre-sliced cheese and better looking than that guy on the infomercial, you know, the one with the hair, and may or may not be America’s Greatest Living Writer. Me, I had no idea who this guy was.
So using the all the tools at my command, at great personal risk and expense, and by the grace of GOD, I tracked down his own Personal Website.
And he’s a pretty funny f–ker, you know?

Stop The Madness, Darn It

April 14, 2003 / / 6 Comments

Now I know the Patriot Act (quite possibly to be extended indefinitely, is the word on the streets) is Bad, and the Bend Over And Feel Our Power Act (also known as Patriot II – The Second Coming) is Worse, but this, friends and neighbours, this is Insupportable.

In Fairfax, VA to be precise. The police there have decided that getting drunk in a bar is an arrestable offense worth enforcing. You don’t have to be starting trouble, getting in a fight, or climbing behind a wheel — the simple act of drinking in a bar gives them enough probable cause to harass and subject you to tests. And if you actually have the gall to have more than a couple beers while in that bar, you’re going to jail and getting fixed up with a nice criminal record.
[more…]

Courtesy of the excellent Modern Drunkard Magazine.

Wet Noodling

April 10, 2003 / / 6 Comments

Gary Hart, as everyone knows by now, has his very own weblog thingy. This in and of itself is moderately interesting, I suppose. An indication to the starry-eyed that Blogging Really Does Matter (*cough*bullsh-t*cough*), a sign to the less credulous that political PR fluffsters are working every damn angle they can (possibly having studied the RagingCow Episode and powerpointed up a clever way to avoid the halfwit faux-hip clankers that fell like blue-ice jet-toilet turdmeteors in the wake of that one). I stopped by Gary’s site for the first time today, and was…uh, underwhelmed.
If this is the kind of rhetoric we can expect from the defanged and image-managed yawnocrats that roam free-range across the political landscape in America these days, we may well be in deeper sh-t than we think. Ten out of ten for linking to Metafilter on the blogroll, Gary, but minus several million for meaningless, pandering empty-talk like this :

Bruce asked what kind of non-violent cause or causes might unite America and why Democrats have not proposed it. I can suggest at least three: homeland security, energy security, and national productivity. Americans should be enlisted in an urgent national effort to secure our neighborhoods against terrorist attacks. We can volunteer for training in emergency medical response in case of mass casualties and assume auxiliary police and fire duties. Our people would also rally around a national project to make us sufficiently energy efficient that no American need die for foreign oil in the future. And we can all participate in shifting our economy from one of consumption to one of saving, investment, and productivity.

Yeah, right, that’s it. And, as a wise man once said, monkeys will fly out of my butt.
That said, though, this entry is somewhat less tepid, and briefly fans aglow that deeply buried spark of hope I still carry around in the skull of a goat (wait, no, that was Quest For Fire, wasn’t it?) that all is not lost.