A few numbers

April 16, 2002 / / No Comments

US defense budget (fiscal 2003) : US$379.3 billion
Amount to be withheld from UN Population Fund : US$34 million
Ratio : 11,155/1
Potential consequences, according to UNFPA officials, of The Resident’s decision to withhold last year’s UNFPA funds and to zero out the agency in fiscal 2003 : 2 million unwanted pregnancies, 800,000 induced abortions, 4,700 maternal deaths, 77,000 infant and child deaths.
Happy fun! Good times, beautiful people! Keep on rockin’ in the Free World!

Not For Dinner

April 16, 2002 / / No Comments
Stinky, but delicious.
A quarter-page ad on page 3 of today’s Korea Herald. Because it’s too hard to read in my scan, I note that the return address for the coupon is in Kent, England.
It’s time once again to pull out my by-now-standard response :
“How about a nice steaming cup of shut the f–k up?”
Ah, that felt good.

Kill

April 16, 2002 / / 5 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, 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.

The Siren Call of Crap

April 15, 2002 / / 3 Comments

You ever get that feeling when it’s like your brain is wrapped in wet towels? Dirty, warm, wet towels? Where you start a sentence, then trail off after a word or two because the expenditure of effort you predict will be necessary to actually complete it is way beyond what seems possible? Where ideas and plans, schemes and dreams, file in serried ranks through your mind, but it’s like watching a New Year’s Day parade while dozing on the sofa with a debilitating hangover and a sweaty scalp – the grandeur of it all is reduced to fuzzy snapshots, and you can’t seem to do much more than watch as they move slowly out of reach. You ever feel like what you have done isn’t all that sh-t hot, and what you’ve got planned will never come to fruition? Ever wish that some relatives would die, and leave you some goddamn money, so you could get off the treadmill, and then feel guilty about it? Have you ever gone a few days without bathing, ’cause sometimes you like the stank? Ever wish that you could actually focus your intellect on something worthwhile, but get pulled inevitably, irresistably, by the siren call of crap, and waste yet another day?
Ever piss and moan and whine in public, rather than get off your ass and actually do something?
Uhh, yeah. I have.

The Big Lebowski Random Quote Generator

April 14, 2002 / / 2 Comments

lebowski.jpgNihilist 1: Vee vant zat money, Lebowski.
Nihilist 2: You think veer kidding und making mit de funny stuff?
I was somewhere wandering around penniless when The Big Lebowski came out, so I didn’t have a chance to see it. Over the next six months or so, about half a dozen old friends felt compelled, independently, to say : “Hey, Bosco! The Coen Brothers made a movie about you! You see it yet?”
Which I can see, now, to a degree, as I have been known at times to exude a long-haired, unkempt, pleasantly befuddled, dissipated-Jeff-Bridges aura. I do enjoy a cocktail or two from time to time. And Wacky Adventures™ are, after all, my stock in trade.
But have to come clean – I don’t smoke dope, I loathe bowling, and I’ve never had a ‘caucasian’.
[Muchas, like, gracias, Speedysnail]

Moveable Type Rocks

April 14, 2002 / / 6 Comments

I’ve got to say, the more I play with this thing, the more I like it. It’s powerful, flexible, and easy as pie for a semi-geek like myself to customize.
I draw your attention to two new features over on the sidebar to the right : a list of the five most recently-commented upon entries, and a list of all the blog categories, with a post-count beside each. I played a bit fast and loose with the categories when I imported from Blogger, but they’re relatively accurate, for the most part. Please feel free to waste hours of your precious time perusing the archives – there’s some stinky crap in there, but there’s some Good Eatin’ too, if I do say so myself.

We're On The Road And We're Gunning For The Buddha

April 13, 2002 / / 2 Comments

I read Mike’s latest : well, OK, inebriated as I am at the moment, I skimmed Mike’s latest, and I f–king give up.
I know it’s not a competition, but I Live To Win (though I’ll deny that if you quote me), and to be honest, there’s simply no way I’m going to be able to kick Mike’s ass, bloggishly speaking. Through sheer quality, and undeniable volume, he’s winning the Blog Primaries.
This is a major setback for me, wonderchicken fans, and I recommend that if you have any love for me, if you’ve ever had any love for me or plan to have some love for me in the future, even if only a little guilty tingle down there under the kitchen table, if you have any desire whatsoever to see the Solid Family Values of The WonderChicken prevail, I ask to you to consider the removal, yea, the bloggy occupation of the territory of this South African bodhisattva – I implore you, I beg you, I COMMAND YOU, click your tight little inter-buns over to Mike’s blog and abuse him mercilessly! Talk some sh-t! Quote bad poetry! Make references to Things Semitic and suggest that he Doesn’t Like Them! Abuse the man until he resorts to linking to random Daypop Top 40 transients with a textual arched-eyebrow, with a hipster-goof mock-sarcastic word or two, until he winds up posting the results of the latest “Which Star Trek Voyager Character Are You?” quiz, until he abandons the long-form post forever and begins to exhibit all the outward symptoms of a terminal speed-freak, which is the behavioural lot of those approaching the terminal stages of webloggerdom.
Fly, my pretties, fly!

You Know Who You Are

April 13, 2002 / / No Comments

An aside to that annoying bastard (you know who you are) who made me nearly blow a gasket recently when he described Daddy Bush’s incursion in the Gulf a dozen years ago as a justified battle of Good Versus Evil, a righteous mobilization to displace “Saddam Hussein, who was, uhhh, like, a new Hitler” : read this, you clueless propaganda-lapping dipsh-t. And this too, if your attention span can manage it.
Thanks to OnePotMeal for the timely facts, some of which I’d forgotten. Non-dipsh-ts may wish to read his next post, which is marvellous in a completely different way.

Going All Memepool on Your Ass

April 13, 2002 / / No Comments

Art. Nature. Blues. Play more spaceship and Satan music! Monsters. Travel. World’s Best Bars. Return of the stubbie. Sex with Chickens. f–k Microsoft. Sleep Sex. 800 lashes! weblog.f–k.org. confused, disorganized and maddeningly tiring to read. Mmmm Gyros! Indestructible sandwich plus muscle-building pill = well, who f–king cares, really?
This weblogging sh-t gets tiresome, you know. Never gonna do that again.
*goes back to whatever it was he was doing before*
(Uhhh – read the above as stream-of-link-consciousness, I guess. Puts me in mind of my first trip to London at 22, sleeping on sweatsoaked foam mattresses on the floor of a gymnasium for a quid a night, wandering the streets in a boggled, eyes-wide and mind-racing haze, gobsmacked, with my taciturn-but-dependable university buddy Stiffy more or less trailing along, me spewing random stream of consciousness poetry as we walked, wheeling to look at him every once in a while and say ‘write that down!’, only half in jest (You think I’m arrogant now, you shoulda know me then!), returning at night, after 10 or 20 kilometres of diesel-fume footsore random dogsh-t wandering, back to the King’s Cross Youth Club or whatever the f–k it was called, and bedding down on the foam mats we pulled out of the closet near our Finnish poor-but-happy temporary road-buddies, Sockhead and Son, listening to the proprietor of the flophouse-gym scream ‘yoo fookin’ coont!’ at whoever was annoying him that evening. But, as I say so many times, that’s a story for another day, perhaps…)

Surrounded By Beauty

April 13, 2002 / / 1 Comment

There are some great writers around the virtual neighbourhood, and this man is one of them. I recommend you visit him daily…His latest gave me an erection. What higher praise can a wonderchicken give for a writer’s work?
None, I tell you! None! Well, other than offering to buy the author a beer. That too, is wonderchicken kudo-giving most emphatic. Eeksy-peeksy, I owe you one.

I'm writing Japanese, I think I'm writing Japanese, I really think so!

April 12, 2002 / / No Comments

Many thanks to Jonathon for a fascinating essay on writing and reading in Japanese. In tribute, though my corresponding knowledge of the Korean language is dwarfed by his knowledge of Japanese, I hope to offer a mini-essay on the simple elegance of the Korean alphabet. Soon.
I find it revealing (although perhaps because it seems so obvious, it’s also facile and misleading) to contrast the Byzantine complexities of written Japanese with the simplicity and directness of Korean, and muse on the corresponding characters of the peoples.
More on this later.

Japanese Women Walking

April 11, 2002 / / No Comments

Platforms, baby!Via Visible Darkness, an interesting mental journey, begun, as it were, with a single step, as all journeys are. Worth your time, whether or not you’ve any abiding interest in gender equality issues, or Japanese women, or their shoes.

“Can one assume that the mostly domestic position of Japanese women in their society influences the way they walk? Maybe, since the political unconscious is precisely that, unconscious, when Japanese women walk with their feet pointing to the inside – to uchi – they are marking with their bodies the space of the traditional Japan –the time when the men went out and the women stayed in. Of course, there is no proof that such time ever existed. Most likely, someone can object, what I am trying to do here is orientalize the Japanese, and find in the feet of the women, in the way they walk, a kind of last bastion of old Japan, a sign of the exotic. And yet, it is possible to suspect that, since the traditional Japan – whether it ever existed, or has just been imagined–is becoming more and more distant from the actual conditions of daily life of the majority of the people, the position of women’s feet may also be marking a renewed choice for pleasures located before, beneath, or beyond the regulations of the cutthroat corporate world occupied by men.” [more…]

Malacca Rattan?

April 11, 2002 / / 3 Comments

This comment was left recently by B. Rai, in reference to a half-remembered post I made some time ago at Metafilter which mentioned the amusing and odd TV commercials for Malacca Rattan :

Hello there,
I just did a google search on the old Rattan To Go ads and I’m afraid to say that you seem to be the sole authority for info on this on the net. Only four results were found, and I read your comments on metafilter.com. I’m glad such a television treasure has not been forgotton!
I am an ex-pat Vancouverite living in London and working in animation. I saw these ads when I was a kid, but strangely they’ve stuck in my mind. The reason I’m writing is because I remembered this ad a while back and am basing a sitcom character on Blue Mancune, the star of the ad, who I believe lives in Vancouver. Unfortunately I cannot fully remember the lyrics to the tune. I’ve got:
Malacca for the money
Wicker for the show
——– to get ready baby
Rattan, to go
I’m trying to finish a script and this is driving me nuts. Any help at all would be greatly appreciated.
Many Thanks,
B. Rai

I can’t remember, but perhaps there are some other Vancouverites-of-the-80’s who can. Leave a comment if you can help, and perhaps the mystery lyric can be unearthed!
Tangentially, it pleases me greatly to be the sole authority on the net for something.

Almost There

April 10, 2002 / / 10 Comments

OK, the newish layout is live. With IE 6 it looks like crap at 800 by 600, and is still a little wonky at 1024 by 768, but my brain hurts, and I need a break.
Please let me know if the new layout is killing your browser. It would be much appreciated. Thanks.

Better to have loved and lost…

April 10, 2002 / / 3 Comments

This thread at Mefi is worth following. Unfortunately, I am way too drunk at the moment to add anything worth saying to it, or process adequately what’s being said, but I’m also sober enough to want to bookmark it to read tomorrow when I’m more coherent. Please enjoy the words. Linky-dinky.