The War on Thanksgiving

Thing to be thankful for this year: that you're not this crazy. Unless you're one of our intermittent wingnut visitors, in which case all bets are off.

HOW purple is the prose in Vampire Hunter D (the first book, at least)?

THIS purple:

"If he can escape from there with naught but a sword and the power of his own limbs, I shall devote myself to him body and soul. By the eternal life and ten thousand bloody years of the history of the Nobility, I swear I love him--I love the Vampire Hunter D."

[...]

"However," the Count continued, "should he survive and you meet him again, what will you do should he spurn your affections?"

Larmica responded in a heartbeat. Flames of joy rose from her body. Her eyes glittered wildly but were moist with hot tears, her crimson lips parted slightly, and her slick tongue licked along her lips as if it possessed a will of its own. "In that case, I will deal the deathblow to him without fail. I shall rip out his heart and lop off his head. And then he shall truly be mine. And I shall be his. I will taste the sweet blood as it seeps from his wounds, and after I have kissed his pale and withered lips, I shall tear open my own breast and let the hot blood of the Nobility course down his gaping throat."

I'm willing to bet that there's nothing this awesome in Twilight.

The Boxer and Her Prey

The Mammoth

When God looked upon His creation, He saw that something was missing, and so He created the Mammoth. So delighted was He with the concept, that He created the African Mammoth, the Armenian Mammoth, the Columbian Mammoth, the Pygmy Mammoth, the Imperial Mammoth, the Jeffersonian Mammoth, the Steppe Mammoth, the Southern Mammoth, the South African Mammoth, the Woolly Mammoth, the Sardinian Dwarf Mammoth, and the Songhua River Mammoth. He also created spin-off species such as the Mastodon. He sprinkled them throughout the world, and then He sat back and admired His handiwork.

The Mammoth, truly, was Good. It foraged through the forests and the plains of the world, its trunk gently swaying back and forth, foraging and eating of the Earth's plants. God was pleased with the Mammoth.

However, then God became angry, in large part because man was slaying the mighty Mammoth. So He sent a flood, so as to send a clear, unambiguous message about the importance of Mammoth preservation.

However, God is not immune to ironic plot twists, and the Mammoth was destroyed by the flood, in spite of His clear injunction to save a supply of them on a boat. The Mammoths were too big, except for the dwarf Mammoths, and they were overlooked, owing to their being dwarfs.

God was very sad, but He tried to recreate the Mammoth. Unfortunately, His memory was imperfect, and He could not quite recall the exact blueprints. Nonetheless, He tried, and the result was the Elephant, African and Asian.

God likes the Elephant well enough. Does He like them as much as the long-lost Mammoth? This I cannot tell you, for who can fathom the mind of God? There is, however, a precedent, and to be on the safe side of divine wrath, I would strongly recommend leaving the Elephant in peace. We know what happens to those who do not remember history.

Important wingnutty update!

That's right--IMPORTANT. You may or may not remember this post in which I posted a classic example of the utter semiotic breakdown that we are seeing more and more of lately amongst wingnuttia. If you don't, you should check it out--it's pretty mind-boggling. At any rate, the wingnut responds!

I just found your posting after a suggestion by a friend to do a search on my name.

After reading your response to my June letter posted in the Sun-Gazette, I had a hearty laugh!

As a typical liberal, you did not address the substance of my letter, but instead foisted all sorts of foul language my way.

Now, I have nothing against foul language and can dish it with the best, however, it would have been nice to have a coherent thought from you on the subject at hand.

But I forget, you are a liberal and, as such, are incapable of coherent thoughts. You do excel at emotional outbursts, nevertheless.

Thanks for the laughs and I look forward to more vitriol posted here as it is great entertainment.

Erik Latranyi

I would like to welcome Mr. Latranyi with open arms to this blog. Hopefully he'll grace us with more inchoate, free-associative fever dreams coherent thoughts in the very near future.

This ought to be interesting.

There have been plenty of Presidential campaigns whose platforms figuratively consisted of nothing more than hackneyed, faux-clever bumper sticker slogans, but for the first time, we may see an instance where this is literally the case.

Christine de Pizan reviews Going Rogue*

I started to read it and went on for a little while. Because the subject seemed to me not very pleasant for people who do not enjoy lies, and of no use in developing virtue or manners, given its lack of integrity in diction and theme, and after browsing here and there and reading the end, I put it down in order to turn my attention to more elevated and useful study.
--The Book of the City of Ladies

*Okay, so this joke would work with any piece of right-wing hackwork. But we're being topical!

Why I Am Not A Capitalist

Via Balloon Juice, this:

The number of Americans who lack dependable access to adequate food shot up last year to 49 million, the largest number since the government has been keeping track, according to a government report released Monday that shows particularly steep increases in food scarcity among families with children.

In 2008, the report found, nearly 17 million children -- more than one in five across the United States -- were living in households in which food at times ran short, up from slightly more than 12 million children the year before. And the number of children who sometimes were outright hungry rose from nearly 700,000 to almost 1.1 million.

Among people of of all ages, nearly 15 percent last year did not consistently have adequate food, compared with about 11 percent in 2007, the greatest deterioration in access to food during a single year in the history of the report.

Meanwhile, we have a tiny, elite group of investment bankers who are so psychotically wealthy they make the court of Louis XVI look like pikers. This state of affairs is the dictionary definition of "obscene," and anyone who can possibly defend it is far too fucked in the head to reason with. "BUT THEY EARNED IT!" a thousand libertarians scream in unison. "Even if that were true, so fucking what?" respond all the non-evil/insane people. Unfortunately, it looks like we're a bit outnumbered. What a terrible country this is--what Deleuze and Guattari would call a cancerous body without organs.

UPDATE: An example the kind of monster with whom you can't argue.

Credit where it's due...

...I may not be interested in Boom!'s focus on lame Disney superhero crossovers, but in addition to the lameness, WDC&S 700 apparently includes a new William Van Horn story. I'm not the world's hugest Van Horn fan, but he's able to bring the charm on a semi-consistent basis. Worth three bucks, anyway.

Gotta love the Catholic Church!

Spoiled, whiny, four-year-olds:

WASHINGTON — The fight over a proposed same-sex marriage law here heated up this week as the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington said that if the law passed, the church would cut its social service programs that help residents with adoption, homelessness and health care.

I'm pretty sure that's what Jesus would have done.

Games you must play: Small Worlds

The AVClub's "Sawbuck Gamer" is a column highlighting cheap/free videogames--mostly flash games. It's a great feature, and it's made me realize that if you want to see people actually doing conceptually interesting things with the concept of gaming--actually pushing the boundaries beyond the usual "bigger, flashier" business--flash gaming is definitely the way to go. There aren't too many genuinely idiosyncratic auteurs in commercial gaming--Tim Schafer and Shigesato Itoi are the names that come to mind--both because of a general lack of imagination and because of commercial restraints. When people suffer from neither of these problems, the results can be breathtaking. As in Small Worlds, which is just...stunning. You need to play it: there's no "challenge" in the traditional sense, you can finish it in a half hour--but if there's ever been a commercial game this simultaneously gorgeous, horrifying, and heartbreaking, I sure don't know about it. I know that may make me sound like a pretentious goon, but this game is really, really something. You will NOT feel that your time was wasted.

Duck Comics: "Bubbleweight Champ"

An unbelievably dispiriting story.

Here's what I think.

I think war is wrong. I have ethical objections to murdering thousands of people or millions of people. Therefore, every military spending bill needs to include an amendment stating that none of the money allocated therein will be used in the initiation or perpetuation of such a war. I know some people disagree with me, but the idea that MY TAX DOLLARS should go to something that I find objectionable, even if it's not necessarily "illegal," per se, is unacceptable. I think Congress would agree with this line of reasoning.

Almost certainly the greatest videogame plot ever

Hell, no "almost" about it.

Sparkstacular!

As you know, I'm a huge fan of Sparks--why wouldn't I be a fan of America's Greatest Rock Band? I say that and you think I'm being facetious, but Sparks is one of those bands of whom it seems difficult to be a casual fan--most of us quickly fall into obsession. I certainly did, and to commemorate the release this week of their twenty-second album (twenty-third if you count the unreleased first album), I wanted to do something special on this blog.

Given that we have the internets, I probably don't need to say much by way of introduction. Look them up on youtube. Basically, Sparks were Halfnelson for their first two albums. Then, they became Sparks, under which name they've gone through many stylistic iterations. The band basically consists of brothers Ron and Russell Mael--Ron writes extremely idiosyncratic lyrics which Russell sings, often in an acquired-taste falsetto powerful enough to reduce zombies to dust. Russell's persona is loose and goofy; Ron's is standing very still and scowling a lot (and sometimes tapdancing).

So how about this: I am going to review every Sparks album, including a handful of bootlegs/rarities. I don't claim that my reviews are super-insightful, but there are a lot of them. So let's plunge in, shall we? KERPOW!

Election comment

Well, Issue 3 passed--Ohioans behaved like stupid, short-sighted assholes. As expected. When you live in a society this diseased, it's hard to be too surprised.

Of course, that's much less bad than the fact that hate won out in Maine. I know that the demographics are on our side and that with time justice will prevail (assuming we don't wipe ourselves out first), but that doesn't make the transient victories of lying, demagoguing hatemongerers any more palatable. It is simply beyond grotesque that, of all groups, gays' rights are only temporary, and can just be rescinded if you can get enough quivering, dimwitted sacks of shit scared enough. As has been pointed out many times, if AA civil rights had been left up to The People, they would've been pushed back a good twenty years anyway. Nauseating.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: there are times when, ambivalent atheist that I am, I really wish America had actual Christian values.

At least NY-23 provided some much-needed comic relief.

Shorter This Week's South Park

"As rich, white, straight jackasses, we are highly qualified to dictate what disadvantaged groups are allowed to find offensive."

Why do I even watch this show? Because it's funny sometimes, I guess. But holy SHIT, this week's episode was the most asinine fucking thing I've ever seen. WAY WAY WAY worse than last week's. Thanks for providing an extra excuse for high school assholes to heap abuse on closeted gay kids, you stupid fucking shitheads.