Sunday, August 31, 2008

On the Anti-Christ and Other Time Wasters...

So when I'm at work, typing away and listening to music on my headphones (today it was all Clutch all the time - but I've really been digging Spiderbait lately - and that new Mugison is fantastic!) lots of things go through my mind. Rarely is it a day when the thoughts stick with me long enough to blog about them.

Because, really, who gives a shit about the things that wander through my brainpan while "10001110101" or "What Would a Wookie Do?" is playing?

1. But I was thinking today about the Anti-Christ and how some nutjobs out there are claiming that Obama may be the Son of Satan. And not the cool one:


But if I understand the mythology of this stupid-ass shit, we won't know the identity of the Anti-Christ until it's too late. And aren't there a bunch of false prophets to look out for, too? Like maybe "Christians" who go around calling people "Anti-Christs" perchance?

And even if Obama were the Anti-Christ, shouldn't real Christians be kind of backhandedly rooting for him/her to take power? I'm pretty sure Jesus can't come back until after the Anti-Christ has mucked things up good. So the quicker we get the Anti-Christ in power, the quicker Jesus can come clean things up, right?

Damn, people are stupid.

Anyway, anyone who thinks Obama is the Anti-Christ should be out rallying the Democratic voters, getting out the vote and all that, bussing people to polling places, etc.

2. Thinking about this crazy superstitous bullshit, of course, led me to thinking about how Christians are always reading and quoting the Old Testement. That kind of bugs me.

I mean, one of the main reasons the Jesus Myth was even thought up was to make a break from that crazy-ass "eye for an eye" "it's okay to own slaves" "can't touch a woman who's menstruating" "putting to death those who work on the Sabbath" and whatnot. Jesus' new Laws were pretty simple really.

Love each other. Forgive people who offend you. Don't cast a stone if you're not without sin. Pretty easy, forgiving, hippie kind of shit, you know?

I don't think anyone who quotes Old Testement Law about anything is a real Christian. They may actually be one of those "False Prophets" I mentioned earlier.

You know, if any of that crap was real.

But really, who gives a shit, anyway. It's all made up bullshit designed to keep poor people in their places, doing their shit jobs, living their shit lives, without making a fuss, because they'll be "rewarded" when they're dead.

Brilliant stuff, I admit, from a Social Control perspective.

Hell, Jesus was even all "pay your taxes and stop bitching" with that "render unto Caesar" routine.

3. I'm playing Fantasy Football in four different leagues this year. That's going to be a bitch to coordinate.

4. I really should buy a replacement battery for my MP3 player. I've had my Creative Labs Nomad Zen Xtra for years now. Surely newer batteries hold charges longer. Granted, this one still plays pretty continuously for around seven hours, but longer would be nice. Especially for when I work those full eight hour shifts (or longer).

I'd like to buy a new MP3 player, but I'm spoiled by having 40 Gig of hard drive space and don't want to go any lower. I'm already not able to carry everything I want on this thing.

80 Gig would be great.

5. I need a new watch. Well, I don't really need a new watch, but I'd like a new watch. My current watch (a Timex Ironman Datalink - it keeps all my phone numbers, email addresses, and birthdays) has a pretty crap band. The first one broke last year sometime, and now the new band has broken. And it's one of those plasticy-rubbery bands (resin, maybe?) that when it breaks, it literally snaps in two.

So I've been wearing my dress watch for the past few days. And it's nice and pretty, but has no alarms or any tricked out shit that makes me love it with all my geeky heart.

Don't get me wrong. I like it a lot. It's just not my everyday watch. I'm constantly worried I'll scratch it up.

Because of this, I've spent the past few evenings hunting for watches online. Again, I don't need one (I just need a new watchband), but I'd like a change.

I'll probably end up getting a Casio that's Solar powered and synced to the Atomic Clock in Colorado. But what I'd really like is this, the Tokyoflash Rogue:


Is that awesome or what? Not only does it look great, but no one else will be able to tell what time it is when they look at my watch.

It's expensive though. And I'm not sure why I wouldn't worry about scratching it up, when I worry about scratching up my dress watch that probably cost a lot less, but was still more expensive than I would have paid myself (it was a gift).

But damn, that Rogue is cool.

6. My fourth Fantasy Football draft is tonight. In about 20 minutes, in fact. I guess I should get going then.

Awesome. I Want To Try This Someday...

How to read a movie - Roger Ebert's Journal

This all began for me in about 1969, when I started teaching a film class in the University of Chicago's Fine Arts program. I knew a Chicago film critic, teacher and booker named John West, who lived in a wondrous apartment filled with film prints, projectors, books, posters and stills. "You know how football coaches use a stop-action 16mm projector to study game films?" he asked me. "You can use that approach to study films. Just pause the film and think about what you see. You ought to try it with your film class."


Saturday, August 30, 2008

Priceless...

Pasco man shootin' mad after Obama speech, authorities say

The man stood outside his RV, yelling and shooting a gun into the air. When Pasco sheriff's deputies confronted him, he ran inside and wouldn't come out.


That started a six-hour standoff late Monday night between the man, whose name was not released, and authorities, Sheriff's Office spokesman Kevin Doll said.


SWAT team units arrived later and surrounded the RV, Doll said. As the situation entered the early hours of this morning, SWAT team members fired riot gas into the man's home. He still wouldn't come out, Doll said.


Finally, about 5 a.m., he exited his RV and was taken into custody.


The cause of his displeasure, according to Doll, was Michelle Obama's speech last night at the Democratic National Convention.


Doll said the man will undergo a psychological evaluation.


-- Nomaan Merchant, Times Staff Writer



Surely They Can't Win...

McCain's VP Wants Creationism Taught in School | Wired Science from Wired.com


According to Fordham Institute science education expert Lawrence Lerner, Palin's nomination is less worrisome in terms of education than the broad relationship of science and government.


"In the direct sense, vice presidents don't have much to do with what goes on in classrooms. But a person who's a creationist doesn't understand science and technology at all," said Lerner. "It doesn't bode well for science, and doesn't bode well for interaction between science and government."


Emphasis added.

Saturday, August 23, 2008

Biden is the VeePick?

That's cool, I guess.

Still waiting for my text message, though, at 8:45 Saturday morning, after reading about the pick last night before going to bed.

Grrrrr.

EDIT: Hmmm. Actually, the text was on my phone and claims to have been there since 3AM. Didn't get the email alert about the pick until nearly 10:30, though.

My Reviews: Week of August 22

Batman #679

Ghost Rider #26

Punisher #61

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

A Meme From SpaceCase...

I figured I'd go ahead and do this since I really should be doing other things.


What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded, but have you really read them? Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.


Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Monday, August 18, 2008

Oh Hell Yeah!

Warners whips up Banana Splits - Entertainment News, TV News, Media - Variety


Turner Animation’s Stu Snyder noted that the Splits have “been entertaining kids for years,” but the return of the property will capitalize on boomer nostalgia as well. “Go Bananas Your Way,” the new Splits album, is “intended to appeal to kids and parents,” according to the release.

But will it be as good as the original? I somehow doubt it.

MILFs? Seriously?

Muslim separtists raid two southern Philippine towns

Troops and local police are fighting intense gunbattles with more than 200 Moro Islamic Liberation Front rebels in the predominantly Christian town of Kolambugan in southern Lanao del Norte province.

I wonder if other Muslim separatists make fun of their name?


Sunday, August 17, 2008

Great News!

PUNISHER: WAR ZONE Is Still R-Rated!

I was worried that the rumors were true about the director being kicked out and the studio pushing for a PG-13 cut. Yeah! The exploding heads are in!

What are you looking at?

Hey! Marvel quoted me again...

CBR News: Danny Ketch returns in "Ghost Rider" #26

"Aaron writes this book with fearless swagger and his chin out," raves Paul Brian McCoy of ComicsBulletin.com. "The man can freaking write. His Blaze and Ghost Rider have definite anger issues and are driven like never before. I just can't get over the energy here."

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Appalling.

Ill and in Pain, Detainee Dies in U.S. Hands - NYTimes.com

In April, Mr. Ng began complaining of excruciating back pain. By mid-July, he could no longer walk or stand. And last Wednesday, two days after his 34th birthday, he died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a Rhode Island hospital, his spine fractured and his body riddled with cancer that had gone undiagnosed and untreated for months.

Mr. Ng’s death follows a succession of cases that have drawn Congressional scrutiny to complaints of inadequate medical care, human rights violations and a lack of oversight in immigration detention, a rapidly growing network of publicly and privately run jails where the government held more than 300,000 people in the last year while deciding whether to deport them.

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Fantastic Movie News, Part Two

David Lynch making new film with Jodorowsky

As odd a collaboration as Herzog and Lynch may be (and trust us, it's odd), even more unlikely comes the announcement that Lynch and Absurda will be working on a film with Alejandro Jodorowsky. Best known for his series of surreal, mind-bending Fando y Lis, El Topo and The Holy Mountain, Jodorowsky hasn't made a film since 1990. Jodorowsky certainly shares a lot more common ground with Lynch, but hearing of any new project by the Chilean 79-year-old is a bit incredible.

Jodorowsky's film will be the metaphysical gangster movie King Shot. Already guaranteed to be NC-17 (no surprise given his earlier works), the film features Marilyn Manson as a 300-year old pope and will star Nick Nolte.


Fantastic Movie News, Part One

Herzog, Lynch team up

CANNES - Werner Herzog and David Lynch are teaming for My Son, My Son, a horror-tinged murder drama based on a true story.


Herzog and his longtime assistant director Herbert Golder co-wrote the film, loosely based on the true story of a San Diego man who acts out a Sophocles play in his mind and kills his mother with a sword. The low-budget feature will flash back and forth from the murder scene to the disturbed man's story.



Sunday, August 10, 2008

Old News (but related to the previous entry)

Birth Control Foe To Head Family Planning, Bush Pick For Contraceptive Program Called Birth Control Part Of "Culture Of Death" - CBS News

Orr’s appointment, ironically, comes a week after a study by the World Health Organization and the Guttmacher Institute determined that in areas of the world where contraception was more widely available, such as Eastern Europe, abortion rates were lower than in other areas where birth control was not easily available.

If this is true, then this country is built on a solid foundation of Stupid...

Millions Who Had Abortions Don't Know It

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has drafted a rule that would call it abortion when a contraceptive prevents a fertilized egg from embedding itself in the uterine wall.


That's one of the ways many birth-control pills and intrauterine devices work. And if that's abortion, millions of women who didn't know they were pregnant -- who medically weren't pregnant -- have killed their unborn children.


No joke.


Folks within the federal health bureaucracy have drafted a rule that would give ``human being in utero'' status to the itty bitty zygote.

Kafka is Awesome!

Franz Kafka’s porn brought out of the closet - Times Online

A stash of explicit pornography to which Franz Kafka subscribed has emerged for the first time after being studiously ignored by scholars anxious to preserve the iconic writer's saintly image.

Very Nicely Done, Cracked.

» 5 Scientific Theories That Will Make Your Head Explode | Cracked.com

There are generally two types of science: first, there’s the type that makes computers work, allows us to ride around in metal boxes propelled by continuous explosion, and makes it so that milk doesn’t taste all gross. Then there’s the fringe science, the stuff that shoots up your nose like mathematical horseradish and dances a jig on your brain…or brane, as it were (that’s the nerdiest joke in the article, we promise). So kick off your work boots, put on your thought slippers, and prepare for a science course so mind-blowing, it’s written almost entirely in italics.

Friday, August 08, 2008

Marvel's Using My Words Again!

Skaar The Son Of Hulk Continues to Unleash His - Marvel.com News

They must be really searching for praise for this book, since my review wasn't exactly glowing, but was positive. And they sure had to cut it up to make it work. But at least the grammar is mostly correct this time.


Paul Brian McCoy of ComicsBulletin.com proclaims, "SKAAR: SON OF HULK is an interesting beast of a comic… I just want to recommend trying it and letting it breath and grow… It's sort of a barbarian story machine…The art works… It creates a very raw look that connects very effectively to the emotional core of the story."


Here's the original review, by the way: Skaar: Son of Hulk #2

Thursday, August 07, 2008

My Reviews: Week of August 8

Secret Invasion: Front Line #2

Eternals #3

Chicago Police Misconduct Round-Up

Cop demands free Starbucks coffee :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Chicago Crime

Officer Barbara Nevers is only the first officer listed in this article. There are 5 other officers fired for misconduct listed at the end. And what a variety of misconduct it is.

Sheesh.


Wow. Just... wow.

The Charleston Gazette - Latest News - Man tries to rob video store with Jello box

"He said he didn't expect them to have a lot of money, but decided to rob them anyway. He wanted some money for gasoline and cigarettes," James said. "It was really kind of silly. I don't know what the heck he was thinking."

Wednesday, August 06, 2008

MUST HAVE NOW!!!



This Time the Foot is the Real Deal - #6

DNA testing next on human foot found on North Olympic Peninsula beach

PORT ANGELES — Bones and flesh inside a black hiking sneaker found on a Strait of Juan de Fuca beach are the remains of a human foot, Seattle laboratory analysts said Monday.

That makes it similar to five athletic shoe-clad feet found on beaches in British Columbia in the past year.

It was also determined that the foot — like the five in Canada — had come off by itself, discounting the possibility that it might have been cut off.

Monday, August 04, 2008

But At Least He Didn't Cut Someone's Head Off...

Ah, to be old, mentally ill, and in prison...

In the Trenches: AJA Seminar Highlights | News | Correctional News

With mentally ill inmates taking up prison cells and hospitals facing bed-space shortages, mental health in prison and jail populations continues to be a major issue for corrections officials in terms of overcrowding, staffing, safety and security and recidivism.

More than 10 million adults are booked into U.S. jails each year and a recent Bureau of Justice Statistics study reported that an estimated 64 percent of local jail inmates have mental health issues.


The suicide rate among mentally ill inmates is double the rate of the general population, and the study reported that significant amounts of mentally ill jail inmates do not receive treatment during incarceration, while only 17 percent receive post-release treatment.


This deserves some thought and comment, but I'm off to work.

Maybe later.

Gone 10 Years, And Still the Best...

Wendy O. Williams and the Plasmatics - "The Damned"

Sunday, August 03, 2008

There's Something Strange Going On...

BBC NEWS | Europe | Gruesome crime shocks Greek isle

Police on the Greek island of Santorini have shot and injured a knifeman who decapitated his girlfriend and walked around the streets with her head.

Friday, August 01, 2008

Holy Crap!

Passenger 'beheaded, gutted' on Canadian bus

A man sleeping on a Greyhound bus as it rolled across the Canadian
Prairies was killed, gutted and decapitated by his seatmate as
horrified passengers fled to safety in the night, witnesses and police
said.