Duck Comics: "Cave of the Winds"

This one was by request--requests being just one of the MANY benefits enjoyed by subscribers to the exclusive Duck Comics Revue Premium.

A "poem" I "wrote"

It's about the fragmentary, isolated nature of postmodern life.

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Enjoy your thirty pieces of silver, Reid!

Yeah, I know--it's crazily irrational to expect sports teams--let alone football teams--to behave in any kind of ethical manner if it might jeopardize their prospects of winning. But the fact remains: the Eagles traded away Donovan McNabb because it was allegedly time to move on and, we were assured, they had ABSOLUTE FAITH in Kevin Kolb to take up starting-quarterback duties. And now--after starting for ONE HALF of ONE GAME, bam, he's back on the bench in favor of Michael Vick. Some "faith," eh? No, his play in that brief span was not fantastic, but allow me to point out that there was hardly any of it. It's some serious bullshit to put him in that position and give him no chance to improve. And really, Reid just straight-up lied to him, assuring everyone over and over that his position was totally secure until suddenly, whoops, psych! He would have every right to just be incredibly pissed off right now.

And even from a purely pragmatic standpoint: yeah, okay, Vick is, right now, a better quarterback. But the team's still not Superb Owl quality here, people. I mean, only beating the flippin' Lions 35-32? What's that about? Who do you think you're fooling? Nothing substantial would have been lost by giving Kolb a full season to develop. But nooooo...goddamn soulless professional sports jerkheads.

My only wish right now is this: that Kolb goes to some other team, develops into an élite quarterback, and wins a WHOLE BUNCH of Superb Owls. 'Twould serve us bloody well right.

...and if, by some bizarre fluke, the Eagles DO win it all with Vick, I'll still be cheering my head off, because I'm a totally despicable hypocrite.

ESPN's Bill Simmons acts like a total dick for no obvious reason except that he's a total dick.

UPDATED BELOW

Is he always like this? I don't read the column on a regular basis or anything, but as he's making his NFL predictions for the week, Bill Simmons also takes the opportunity to engage in some jarring, inexplicable, out-of-nowhere misogyny:

My favorite random subplot of the preseason: when the Vikings watched Tarvaris Jackson and Sage Rosenfels practice for a few weeks, then sent Jared Allen, Ryan Longwell and Steve Hutchinson to Mississippi to beg Brett Favre to come back … and a devastated Jackson had to meet with the media and say diplomatic things like, "I felt I was the best prepared. I felt confident I was going to be the starter. But I understand the situation." This is reason No. 5,718 why women could never play professional football. If Jackson were female and Favre got injured in Thursday's Saints game, we'd have this exchange on the sideline:

--Brad Childress: "OK, T-Jack, just go out there and run the offense, we can win this."
--T-Jack (crying): "Oh, now you want me? Why don't you ask Brett to win it for you?!?!?!? Why don't you ask your little whore!!!!!!!????????"

Um...what? It's hard to know how to react to something like this. Is there some context that would somehow magically make this less asinine? It doesn't have anything to do with anything else in the column, as far as I can see. Bill Simmons apparently just wanted it to be known what irrational, hyperemotional bitches women are compared to the stoic, manly men of the NFL. Using what I can only assume is meant to be humor. Sports in general may have something of a boys'-club mentality, but good lord.

It's actually hard to even be offended by this, because it's so obviously, blatantly inappropriate that you almost can't believe the guy actually wrote it. But I'm kind of managing it. Seriously, Bill, fuck you. Am I to assume that most of Simmons' predominantly male audience just sees something like this and chuckles along? If so, we're in even deeper shit than I had imagined.

UPDATE: So I initially saw this in a link from Lawyers Guns and Money that was making an unrelated point. I pointed out the above in comments, and other commenters confirmed that yeah, Simmons is pretty much always like this. You know...I always think I'm hardbitten and cynical, and then something like this comes along and shows me that all that time I was actually adorably naïve without knowing it. What a twist!

It's one thing to accept that the media contains implicit sexist/misogynistic narratives; it's quite another to accept that a high-profile sportswriter can punctuate his columns with regular "bitches suck lol amiriteguys?"s without anyone raising an eyebrow. I mean, I guess because of my incredulity I'm reacting to this more strongly than maybe I otherwise would, but regardless: what a fucking prick. I mean, yeah, MSNBC--the allegedly-"liberal" network--has an honest-to-god Neo-Nazi as a regular commentator, but while this is definitely some bullshit, ol' Bat-Puke Cannon pretty well keeps his more repellent views to himself in that venue, as far as I can tell. Whereas this--I mean, goddamn, is this the image that ESPN wants to project? WTFuck, people. Double-You. Tee. Fuck.

9/11: Get the fuck over it.

I wouldn't presume to say anything to people who actually lost loved ones on that day, but for the rest of us, seriously--ya'll motherfuckers need to suck it the fuck up. Actually, I would contend that people who lost loved ones (like these women) are actually much more likely to have processed the events in a healthy matter, because they have an obvious, direct, personal stake in it. Whereas the rest of us...? It's the difference between Freud's concepts of "mourning" and "melancholia"--with the former, you know what you've lost and it hurts but you're able to work through it and open yourself up again to further experience; whereas with the latter, you can't really make sense of what you've lost, and so you can't move on; you just endlessly reiterate your grief. This is obviously not healthy, especially since in this case the feeling manifests itself as a combination of extreme xenophobia and a feeling of perpetual victimhood.

This shock that we feel is understandable to an extent, since compared to most countries, we haven't experienced much seemingly-inexplicable, alien violence; and when we do it clashes with our image of ourselves as the most awesome, wonderfulest country EVAH. Nonetheless, after a time wallowing endlessly in self-pity just feels grotesque, especially under the circumstances: we repaid the deaths of three thousand innocents by killing hundreds of thousands of innocents. And somehow, we're still supposed to have the right and how-dare-you-question-it to see ourselves as innocent victims, pure-as-the-driven-snow? Does not compute.

"As a band, we kind of pride ourselves on a certain amount of illegitimacy"

Hey, whaddaya know, a new Sparks review!

Posted Without Comment: The "I'm Twelve!" edition

Right-wing nihilism

Following up on yesterday's laff-fest, we have this shithead preacher and his Qu'ran burning.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – A Christian minister vowed Tuesday to go ahead with plans to burn copies of the Qur'an to protest the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks despite warnings from the White House and the top U.S. general in Afghanistan that doing so would endanger American troops overseas.

[...]

Jones told the AP in a phone interview that he is also concerned but wonders how many times the U.S. can back down.

"We think it's time to turn the tables, and instead of possibly blaming us for what could happen, we put the blame where it belongs — on the people who would do it," he said. "And maybe instead of addressing us, we should address radical Islam and send a very clear warning that they are not to retaliate in any form."

Um...support the troops?

Let's be very clear about this: Mr. Jones hopes that his provocations will be used as a pretext for violence by Muslim extremists so as to vindicate his racist views about Muslims in general and justify further anti-Muslim violence. Of course, ensconced safely in his nice, suburban existence, he doesn't have to worry about personally being targeted for his actions, but US soldiers overseas? The possibility of them being hurt or killed because of his actions isn't a bug; it's a feature.

Are Americans the worst people on the planet? If not, it certainly ain't for lack of effort.

Our scenic little trip to Hell continues apace.

So someone had the bright idea to visit youropenbook--a site that allows you to search the facebook statuses of everyone who hasn't manually increased his or her privacy settings--and search for the misspelled keyword "mosk." The result was a flood of racist, anti-Constitution invective from a wide variety of awful, semi-literate people. Mr. Destructo documents some of these in a truly epic blog post. My favorite: some illiterate (even by their standards) pounds out the following hateful gibberish:

Obama has agreed with the muslim race these passed couple of weeks and the muslims are goin to be building a mosk (a muslim church) next to GROUND ZERO where they knocked down our twin tours. And on the sign of the church its goin to say in the muslim language "WE CONQUERED". That just tells u there that Obama is a MUSLIM. . I think we should nuke them all over there and turn there air green. Comment if u agree.

But that's not all: apparently worried that he might not have entirely cemented his position as the quintessential Ugly American, it transpires that in his "favorite books" section, he also wrote, simply: "Reading Is Gay." Il n'y a pas de mot.

The thing is, "father forgive them, for they know not what they do" is sufficient to sort of rationalize such people, even if appalled, incredulous laughter is more cathartic. But here's the other thing: there are plenty of republicans who are perfectly literate, and who don't think of themselves as racist goons who hate the First Amendment. And yet, they are going to vote for teabagger candidates in November, in spite of the full knowledge that their candidates' MAIN BASE consists of people like the "reading is gay" guy. Sure, some of them, like Beck and Gingrich, are just irredeemably evil people, but I'm pretty sure they aren't all so deeply cynical. In fact, I doubt that the thought "you know, if I'm aligning myself with such self-evidently monstrous creatures, I must be doing something wrong" will ever even cross their minds. And here is where the analysis ends, because I'm just stymied. I honestly don't know what one can possibly say about people like that, apart from being pretty sure that it's not anything good.

Duck Comics: "The Mines of King Solomon"

Just a reg'ler ol' stone-cold classic.

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New Chick Tract

A Halloween special! Not as adorable as "First Blood," but it DOES feature a cute little demon named "Stinky" who has a great Halloween.



I sometimes have the sneaking suspicion that the Chickster is keenly aware of the potential for high camp in his work and can't resist flirting with these impulses a little.

Megacorporations need to cater to my needs more effectively.

So I had been looking forward to seeing apple introduce a new line of ipods touch. I thought that once they increased the memory beyond 64gb--which really isn't enough for me--I might pick one up, so as to be able to fit more music and, hooray, games! But now the new model is revealed, and...there is no memory upgrade. So nuts to you, apple.