Another complaint

Complaint Living in a low crime town. That’s a complaint? Yeah. It is. Just look at the police log here: Cops respond to missing toilet paper in park rest room. Police investigate grafitti on napkin dispenser at rest area. Police seek man who left diner without paying bill  (these are from the actual police log). The list goes on and on. In itself of course living in a low crime town is a good thing. In itself. But over time the cops get antsy. They have new issue 9mm guns in cool black nylon holsters, they have squad cars with the latest computers and iPod type screens covering the entire dashboard. They have electronic equipment so new it still has the price  bar code on it. They are fully federal siren compliant. They wear combat boots. Their uniforms look like Special Forces duds. Their ears jut out with communication antennae. They have a high-speed internet connection in their belt buckles. They  are READY. That’s the big problem. These guys and girls have itchy fingers. Look at them sitting in their cars. They’re developing nervous tics, like pulling at their hair, biting their nails, twitching their eyes, pulling on earlobes. Listen, these hounds want to run. They watch all the big cop show shoot-outs on TV, the big fast adrenalin chases. They’re sniffing for fox. So the problem is this: turn without using your singal light and I swear to god almighty that a SWAT team and six-man K-9 unit will pull up out of the clear blue sky , surround your vehicle like you’re the new Clyde Barrow, and drag you the hell out onto the burning asphalt. Your signal light will be pulled out by the roots for evidence. Strobe lights will make the daylight look like a night time Fourth. Sirens will  blare on so many different levels it’ll sound like NORAD during a Russian nuke attack.  You’ll be tasered, cuffed and tasered again just for the thrill of it. Your neck will be stomped. The barrels of M-16s will be jammed up your auditory canals (and maybe one up your anal canal just for laughs). And about a dozen cops, including a couple of nasty German bow-wows, will piss on you just to show you are one owned piece of shit criminal.

Sir, step out of that vehicle now. Your left signal light has been found to be dysfunctional. We will not tell you again.

The pure deadly irony of it all

“The man who co-wrote the best-selling adventure travel guide 100 Things To Do Before You Die has died at the age of 47. Dave Freeman had visited half the places mentioned in his book whose recommendations included a voodoo pilgrimage to Haiti and running with bulls in Pamplona, Spain. He died after falling over at his home in Venice, California, and hitting his head.” Continue reading article at Mail-Online

It was certainly surprising that he died this way, falling at his own home, considering that he had put himself in so many dangerous situations, like running with the bulls for instance. Terrible story, but keep in mind that Irony can attack at any time. It sits there, out of sight, out of mind, searching for just the right ironic circumstance to strike. I’m talking about the evil side of irony, the one that sits on its haunches, drooling for a foolish knave–then unleashing it’s surprise! It’s like if you’ve been lovingly, gently taking care of stray dogs all your life and then, just like a ligntning bolt from up high, you’re struck and suddenly mauled to death by one of your dogs. That’s irony. That’s pure evil irony.  Is there any defense? Absolutely. I mean it’s not a sure thing of course but here’s what you can do. Take the dog example above. Never spend your life loving and caring for stray dogs, or any dog or pet. It’s an invitation to you know what. Don’t wait for the ironic headline: Pet Dogs Eat Brain of Loving Master. Here’s another example of an ironic attack: say you’re about to make what you’re anticipating to to be your 500th perfect parachute jump. Do not pre celebrate it. I repeat, do not precelerate it or make a big deal of it or talk about it or even mention that it’s your 500th. Because if you do then on that 500th jump your parachute will fail. Here’s the ironic headline that will accompnay it: Parachutist, Celebrating His 500th Perfect Jump, Dies When Chute Fails to Open. This is how it happens. You see how it works? Call it your 499th jump if you have to give it a damn number.  Because otherwise irony will hurtle down on you just as sure as if you didn’t even bother strapping on your chute when you jumped out the airplane door (in fact that would even be more ironic). Look, It’s the way of this cruel invisible beast. And like any beast, you never taunt or tease it. Always avoid ironic situations. Your life could depend on it.

Addendum: A few more ironic newspaper headlines. Remember, this could be you:

Wife Finds Husband Cheating on Their 50th Wedding Anniversary and Shoots Him

Taxidermist Stuffs Himself to Death on Thanksgiving

Pig Turns on Butcher; Makes Bacon of Him

Window Washer Washed off Scaffold by Heavy Rain

Wearing Fat Suit, Man Drops Dead from Heart Attack

Vegetarian Chokes to Death on Meaty Carrot

Cowboy Stomped to Death by Boy Cow

Bottle Washer Dies From Gash by Broken Bottle

Egyptologist Dies In Fall From Pyramid

Mortician Murdered in Funeral Home

Suicide Bomber Surrenders, Then Accidentally Steps on Land Mine

Rare glimpse inside the criminal mind

American readers VS French readers–Winner? The French

Complain all you want about the French but Leslie S Lebl, writing in City Journal, makes it clear: “While Americans and their elected officials do everything they can to avoid even the appearance of critizing Islam or using such words as ‘Islamist,’ the French public seems to suffer from no such inhibitions, at least not in the area of fiction. For example, it has embraced Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal’s The Village of the German, a plainspoken masterpiece that boldy uncovers the affinities between Nazism and Islamism. In March, the novel won the RTL-Lire 2008 prize, which is awarded by a jury of 100 readers chosen by 20 bookstores throughout France. One wonders how an American readership might receive such a book…”

Compare this with the cowardly Random House decision to cancel publication of the Jewel of Medina (“a tale of love, lust, and intrigue in the prophet’s harem”). See previous post, Could provoke widespread “violence and death”–hey, but it’s only a novel Also check this video about the deadly fear factor concerning the Jewel book, with Laura Ingraham.

Chigurh VS Udo

After having watched the movie version of No Country for Old Men I tried to think of a character who was or had been at least as cold and insanely homicidal as Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), then I read a piece in the N.Y. Sun by Bruce Bennett about an actor, Richard Widmark, and his role in a 1947 movie called Kiss of Death. The character Widmark plays is described this way: “With his waxen features framed by a slouch hat and high collar, and emitting a blood-curdling, infantile nasal giggle, Widmark’s Udo [Tommy Udo, a mob hitman] is one of the most seductively abhorrent homicidal misanthropes ever committed to celluloid…” Anyway I didn’t get a chance to catch this old movie yet but here’s a clip from Youtube. Looks like Udo gives Chigurh a run for his money.

Ivan, Nikolai, and Boris

“…See that guy with a gold bracelet propping up the bar, with a blonde on each arm? That’s Ivan. See the guy at the corner table, puffing clouds of smoke while snapping instructions into his mobile phone? That’s Ivan’s mate, Nikolai. See the guy with bulging biceps squiring the blowsy redhead in the see-through shirt? That’s Ivan’s mate Nikolai’s minder, Boris. And, yes, that is a gun in his armpit, just above the tiger tattoo…” Continue reading this story.

Related stories: Ugliest tourists, Russian…discretion,

NOTE: My only prolonged encouter with a true Russian was a beautiful neighbor friend of my mom (who’s Swedish). I was friends with her son, who was my age, around eleven or so and I remember one day after I slept over she offered me hard-boiled eggs and vodka for breakfast. It wasn’t exactly Cap’n Crunch but it was pretty good.

The eyes have it: horizontal VS vertical

For some reason certain Olympic teams have seen fit to act in “schoolboy” fashion by making “slit-eyes.”

“Spain’s basketball team were the first [at least the first to be photographed]  to spark controversy at the start of the games when a photograph showing all 15 members pulling the skin around their eyes ran in a Spanish sports newspaper… Several days later another photograph emerged of fellow Olympic athletics, this time tennis players, making the same gesture apparently during an earlier sporting event in China … And …members of the Argentine women’s football team were the latest to be criticised after being photographed making the same crude impression of their Chinese counterparts” (from link above).

Argentine footballers (soccer players) have been photographed doing the same thing. There is also a second Spanish team caught mocking the Chinese racial feature.

To me this is just crude immature posturing. Certainly it’s insensitive. But I’m wondering, what if Chinese players were photographed making their eyes “rounded” by pulling the skin vertically? How would that be taken? I’ve never seen this. Has anyone? Would a Westerner be offended? Would it be automatically construed as a sign of Chinese racism? The ony difference I can think of is that Western people have had a history of blatant prejudice agaisnt the Chinese, and therefore such a gesture (from Europeans) sets the tone of our own pre-judgment.

Anyway here are related questions that I believe are unanswerable: if we pinch our eyes shut are we insulting dead people? If we cover our eyes with dark glasses are we mocking the blind (especially while holding a cane)? If we close one eye are we ridiculing, er…one-eyed people? If we fill our eyes with tears are we mocking the sad? If we feign crow’s feet around our eyes are we scorning those who are middle-aging?

Unfortunately intent is everything, but intent can rarely be known.

China’s crooked teeth

There are swimmers, javalin throwers, divers, cartwheelers, ball throwers and assorted other athletes–all the usual ingredients of competition you’ve seen before. What’s different in this Olympics venue is that it takes place in a big bird’s nest of illusion. I’m not talking so much about the fact that some of the fireworks were CGI, or that one of the main attractions of the opening was a “beautiful” nine-year old girl lip syncing to the voice of an “ugly” seven year old girl (kept behind the curtain because of crooked teeth),  or that citizens have been told to walk about with smiling faces, though sometimes that illusion is difficult to maintain. Cerhard Heiber of the IOC (Int. Olympic Committee) complained that the police and military patrolling the arena have “stony faces….that they look sinister.”

What I’m talking about is the fakery inherent in the Chinese advertisement–the one that projects the illusion of normal society.  By normal I mean the kind of society…well, like American society which, with all its problems, is by anyone’s standards a normal society of everyday life. There are all kinds of conflicting opinons readily available on internet screens or TV, radio and movies or books and newspapers, even bilboards, and flyers left under your windshield wipers. Normal society is that which tolerates a broad variity of human activity and views, even hatreds (as long as they’re not violent), body images (fat to bulimic, straight teeth or crooked teeth), and sexuality (gay or straight), smiling or unsmiling (even downright grimacing), hero worship and anti-hero worship. Normalcy includes traditions, quackeries, and moral challenges and protests. It also includes rules and regulations about safety in cars and food and medical care. It includes an umbrella of normalizing laws such as habeus corpus, and responsibilities, such as jury duty and seat-belt wearing .

Is this normal? Undesirables sent to torture camps so they won’t be seen by Western news media during the games. “…these camps are being used to imprison  -  without trial or legal representation  -  people that the regime wants the world to believe do not exist amid the miracle of modern China. From street children, hawkers, the homeless and prostitutes, to the mentally ill, black migrants, and gays caught in public bathhouses, the camps on the outskirts of the city started filling up with Beijing’s ‘undesirables’ last year as part of the Chinese regime’s determination to present what it sees as an acceptable face to the world.”

And what can you make of this (reported in the TimesOnline)? “Government officials swept thousands of migrant workers out of Beijing – the very people who built the stadium, at least 10 of them paying with their lives. Police arrested hundreds of provincial petitioners who sought justice in the capital and sent at least 58 to labour camps for ‘reeducation’. The sick were told that routine surgery was cancelled in every hospital and officials shut some psychiatric patients inside their wards…”

An even more gruesome manisfestation of this kind of behavior is using sports arenas to shoot criminals in front of cheering crowds, or using mobile “death vans,” which inject prisoners–many of whom are merely charged with a crime, without any proof– with poison, then remove their organs for sale. Evidently these busses crisscross the country for harvesting sessions, sort of like tractor combines in Kansas wheat fields.

China fears its own people, even at sporting events. Why were there so many empty seats at events at the Games ? “…according to Chinese internet users…it is the result of a policy to prevent the gathering of large and possibly uncontrollable crowds” which perhaps might remind people of the frolicking pro-democratic Tiananmen square students. China has a virtual army of internet police, making sure its citizens keystroke within a politically and socially filtered digital world.* As reported last year, well in advance of the Games, digital police officers–one male and one female dressed in uniforms and saluting– “will begin visible patrols on Chinese Internet sites to warn surfers they are being monitored…on the look out for websites…that incite secession, promote superstition, gambling, fraud and pornography…” among other things of course. (Read more.)

All countries have corruption (that’s normal), including the United States, but in China it’s built into the very fabric of society, from government officials down to the peasants. To those in  the know in China it really wasn’t a surprise that during the recent earthquake some 7000 classrooms disintegrated, killing 10,000 students. The construction integrity was cheated, and that charts from a long line of officials ( let’s all hope the Bird’s Nest outlasts the games).

Another example. Take public food preperation.  Now Public points out that during “the last year before the olympics, for the first time in the history of China, food safety rules for restaurants and eateries were put into place.  Do you suppose there is a Western style inspection and enforcement system now in place to support these new rules and laws?  Think again….”

No, China is not a normal country, nothwithstanding the smiling faces blitz. So how will you know when it becomes normal? For one, not every one will be showing their pearly whites (which, let’s face it, is kind of creepy) and  for another, you’ll probably see girls with crooked teeth singing in front of the camera.

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If it worked for the Chinese before the Olympics than it will work in Denver. In preperation for the DNC convention in Denver the town’s cleaning up their homeless. Read more.

*Many, however, find an indirect way to protest, something that would pass through the filters–like naked pushups, for example.

The ugliest building in China

At first glance you can be forgiven for thinking this is a large Posturepedic® mattress. Actually it is a building called the Water Cube, even though it isn’t a cube and has no resemblance to water. It was built especially for the Olympics. I’ll grant you it looks pretty neat at night all lit up but during the glare of day it’s just a  big ugly mattress. In a couple of years springs are going to start popping up; cotton fiber’s going to shred and blow  in the wind. Give it five years and this monstrosity is going to be bulldozed into a landfill.

Presidential cortex

I wonder if this opinion of H.L.  Mencken’s, about the worthiness of President Grant’s intelligence, would be something like what he would’ve written about Bush:

“Intelligence has been commoner among American Presidents than high character, but Grant ran against the stream by having a sort of character without any visible intelligence whatever…dogged, devoted and dumb. In the White House he displayed an almost inconceivable stupidity. Whatever was palpably untrue convinced him instantly, and whatever was crooked seemed to him to be noble. If the American people could have kept him out of the presidency by prolonging the Civil War until 1877, it would have been an excellent investment…bad whiskey had transformed his cortex into a sort of soup.” Baltimore Evening Sun, 9/30/1931, quoted from A Second Mencken Chrestomathy.

About nine or ten years ago I was in a used book shop near Rutger’s University (over in New Brunswick, NJ) and came across an old green cloth two-volume set of The Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, probably from the late 19th century. I read them over the next couple of weeks in my spare time. Grant’s generalship was appalling, at least as I remember it. He used men as canon fodder. I don’t remember much in particular but it seemed in every battle he just threw men into the slaughter. It reminded me of when my brothers and I used to play army soldiers outside in the dirt. We had maybe a thousand plastic soldiers and hundreds of artillery pieces and tanks and stuff. We’d set them up in their positions and then throw stones at each other’s forces. They died by the hundreds. Sometimes we’d fire across each other’s lines with bb or cork guns; one time we even used cherry bombs. We threw burning wood onto the battle field. We ignited cans of hair spray like flame throwers. Fires engulfed the plastic pieces. Once, after a battle, one of our bike tires caught fire but, as the smoke cleared,  I still had all of two or three figures standing; the other side was completely down;–100% annihilated. Canons were turned upside down; many of the tanks were mere globs. A lot of the toy soldiers were melted from the intense heat. The whole yard smelled of plastic. So OK, mine was a Pyrrhic victory, granted, but it was still a victory . While I was reading I thought back to these wars we had. They reminded me of Grant’s generalship.

Corporate jargon: alive and well

“…I’m a market-leading provider of technology-enabled process-optimization tools to reduce and right-size inventory, improve forecast accuracy and service, optimize production resources, and reduce cycle time across the supply chain,” your new acquaintance intones.

Whoa, time to get out of here, you think. But you recover your social graces enough to look hopefully at his friend.

“Well,” the friend says, “I develop small-molecule, orally administered pharmacological chaperones for the treatment of human genetic diseases.”

“How interesting,” you lie, edging toward the door. “I’m sorry to run, but I just remembered I have to clean the cat boxes. Nice meeting you.” Continue reading article in the Philadelphia Enquirer.

Hasn’t anyone learned anything from Orwell’s Politics and the English Language or Stunk’s and White’s The Elements of Style?

Here’s another case of jargon that got out of hand:  “Company refuses to speak with mum about 7-yearold son’s faulty Superman suit  because it would “breach his data-protection-rights.”

Seinfeld

One reason I have always loved the Seinfeld show (I purchased the complete nine year set) is because it never worried about breaching, in a funny way, the social barriers of controversial subjects. In other words, the political correctness monster never managed to infect the scripts.  Generally, if you were going to publicly discuss a certain sensitive subject, let’s say ethnicity, then PCness required its own script. Seinfeld and his writers never submitted.  On Seinfeld you were fat, never weight-challenged. Witness the Chinese Woman (ethnic identity), for example, and The Couch (abortion issue), The Bubble Boy and The Lip Reader (the handicapped) , The Outing and The Cheever Letters (gay), The Old Man (aging). There is no doubt in my mind that Jerry Seinfeld, a clean comedian, was far more effective in promoting free speech than, say, George Carlin who usually got the credit simply because he used four-letter words, as if that was the essence of free speech. Far from the show “being about nothing,” it was about everything.

Immigration issue? Here’s Seinfeld’s closing monologue in The VISA:

“”I am for open immigration but that sign we have on the front of the Statue of Liberty, ‘Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses…’, can’t we just say, ‘Hey, the door’s open, we’ll take whoever you got.’? Do we have to specify the wretched refuse? I mean, why don’t we just say, ‘Give us the unhappy, the sad, the slow, the ugly, people that can’t drive, that they have trouble merging, if they can’t stay in their lane, if they don’t signal, they can’t parallel park, if they’re sneezing, if they’re stuffed up, if they’re clogged, if they have bad penmanship, don’t return calls, if they have dandruff, food between their teeth, if they have bad credit, if they have no credit, missed a spot shaving, in other words any dysfunctional defective slob that you can somehow cattle prod onto a wagon, send them over, we want ‘em.’ “

Prior to sleeping in a rundown Jeep…

“…her eyesight deteriorated rapidly as cataracts left her struggling to read street signs and unable to drive at night. She stopped raking in the money needed to keep up on the $10,000-a-month combined mortgages she was paying while supporting her husband, a guitarist… The houses foreclosed, one in September 2006, the other two months later. And, she said, her husband was found to have been living a double life as a cross-dressing meth addict… They are now divorced” Continue reading this depressing article, I used to be normal.

Could provoke widespeard “violence and death”–hey, but it’s only a novel

“…journalist Sherry Jones toiled weekends on a racy historical novel about Aisha, the young wife of the prophet Muhammad. Ms. Jones learned Arabic, studied scholarly works about Aisha’s life, and came to admire her protagonist as a woman of courage. When Random House bought her novel last year in a $100,000, two-book deal, she was ecstatic. This past spring, she began plans for an eight-city book tour after the Aug. 12 publication date of “The Jewel of Medina” — a tale of lust, love and intrigue in the prophet’s harem.” …Now , however, as Random House hides in the closet over offending Muslims, the deal has been squashed. What is was the name of the book? “The Jewel of Medina”

Random House evidently has been clued in pronto by an email prarie fire and now feels  ” there is a very real possibility of major danger for the building and staff and widespread violence… [it is] a declaration of war . . . explosive stuff . . . a national security issue….will be far more controversial than the satanic verses and the Danish cartoons. …the book should be withdrawn ASAP.”

Continue reading this article in The Wall Street Journal. Here’s another link to this story (here too…wait, also here). Ah, just what we need: here.

UPDATE: The Serbian connection

Now this is glorious entertainment

You have not experienced true entertainment, true TV…and even true love till you’ve indulged yourself mind body and soul into The Avengers–The Complete Emma Peel Megaset. When you get through don’t dispair, you can simply watch them again. And if for some weird reason you do finally–say after the first fifty times you’ve been through the set– get a little antsy there is the post Mrs Peel (Diana Rigg) collection, featuring, along side dapper John Steed, the very beautiful British agent Tara King ( Linda Thorson).

This set’s been out for about a year I think; I got impatient renting discs from Netflix so I finally bought the mega set, along with a set featuring Tara King.

“Real China”

“Another woman phoned me, her voice a quavering whisper, to say that she was in hiding – terrified that the police would snatch her from the street. Then came the text messages: ‘Today, between three and four thirty, two groups of us were handcuffed and forced into police cars with no number plates,’ read one. Another wrote: ‘They forced a group of us out the back door and into a waiting bus. Now I’ve been held illegally for forty hours.’” Continue reading report at Sky News.

Authoritarian Christian author dies

Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, the author of the Russian classics One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch and The Gulag Archipelago, has died in Moscow. I read One Day years ago, maybe sometime in the eighties, and was deeply disappointed in it. I remember being disappointed more than anything specific in the novel that i can remember now.  It had something to do with the novel being sort of– mild (by the way, it was published with the dictator Khrushchev’s personal blessing, which I suppose must’ve taken away the sting of it’s “message”). This was not Dante’s Inferno as I had expected it to be. After all, he was writing about prison life under the totalitarian monster Joseph Stalin (a guy worse than Ted Kennedy) and i expected to be riveted by an exciting chronicle of Pure Hell. I read the first volume of The Gulag too, but didn’t bother with the other two volumes. I think perhaps it had something to do with the translation. Russian to English always seems so heavy-handed, which is probably why I could never get into Doestovesky or Chekov or Tolstoy.

Not everything Solzhenitsyn wrote was unreadable; sometimes, notwithstanding translation, what he wrote was as pithy as anything you’d find on the subject: “It is precisely because our state [the Soviet Union], through sheer force of habit, tradition and inertia, continues to cling to this false doctrine, with all its tortuous aberrations, that it needs to put the dissenter behind bars.”

It’s a shame though that Solzhenitsyn didn’t see the “tortuous aberrations” of the religion he preached and hoped would supplant communism and capitalism. Solzhenitsyn was clearly a man of the 19th century; perhaps he went back to Peter the Great’s time.

Two divergent views of AS: Solzhenitsyn in Search of the Russia That Always Eluded Him and AS: A Bundle of Laughs. Here’s something else to read too–Solzhenitsyn’s Sinister Side

Cleavage etiquette

Considering all the analysis and comment that accompanied Hillary Clinton’s cleavage experiment during her presidential bid I think it’s high time now that we, including Ms Clinton,  practiced some sort of basic cleavage etiquette. Know the right time to display, and the right time to cover, know the right time to look and the right time to avert your eyes–good sense stuff like that. The following extract is from an important article on this subject.  “Because the cleavage is a sexual display, there are occasions when it is inappropriate. Receiving communion, supervising young offenders’ community projects and, especially, school sports day spring to mind. People (for which read other women) will assume you are desperate and looking to grab a man. So, cover up – unless, of course, you are desperate, and don’t mind being regarded by your flat-chested sisters as a scheming tart when all the fathers present are glued to your perky performance in the egg-and-spoon race, hot in anticipation of more than the egg bouncing out..” Continue reading article in the Times-Online.

Scanning “mourning and melancholia” with an fMRI machine

Now it’s medically official: “The dead never quite leave us; they return in dreams and reveries, they inhabit the pictures on our walls and lurk in our cell phones and disk drives…Every day you’re experiencing yearning for the deceased, looking for them in a crowd, or expecting them to come home.” Continue reading article.

Net of trolls

“Measured in terms of depravity, insularity and traffic-driven turnover, the culture of /b/ has little precedent. /b/ reads like the inside of a high-school bathroom stall, or an obscene telephone party line, or a blog with no posts and all comments filled with slang that you are too old to understand…” And what about lolz? “That’s …a quasi-thermodynamic exchange between the sensitive and the cruel: ‘You look for someone who is full of it, a real blowhard. Then you exploit their insecurities to get an insane amount of drama, laughs and lulz. Rules would be simple: 1. Do whatever it takes to get lulz. 2. Make sure the lulz is widely distributed. This will allow for more lulz to be made. 3. The game is never over until all the lulz have been had.’ ” Continue reading story about internet trolls in The NY TImes.

Madonna of Scotland

Motion, even bored foot shuffling and the low underlying cacophony of small talk evaporate in an instant. Look, it’s a bird, it’s plane–no, it’s a platinum-haired imitation of that purchased pure blood Princess Di (the one time Arch-Dukette of Mesopotamia, former bride of Charles the Snozzola, Emperor and Grand Ruler of the Holy Roman Empire).  It’s Madonna. Yes, Rock’s royal queen has now appeared in her Scottish castle for the guests to gaze upon, though of course it would be untoward of them, even of her own husband to be, the indubitable Master Ritchie (now dubbed by the press Sir Hanger On) to stare dirctly into her crafty orbs (though of course actually nothing more than dusty mid-western eyeballs). This is pure Self they are gazing upon. A self-made queen, a buyer of children, the new holder of the Cabala secrets (and it is rumored, of the Holy Grail itself, a gift from a Middle Eastern descendant of the Secret Society of the Secret Holders, honoring her status of fame and wealth).

There she is, Madonna at the top of the stairs, as still-born and fake as her wax Self in Madame Trousseau’s bar and grill. She stands above the crowd, which is still staring up in a daze (as royal castle protocol requires). Bugles sound, the kind an American–a Michigan Ciccone American–might have seen in an old movie or maybe heard at the race track or had described in church as the type they used at the Gates of Heaven to usher in the freshly Holy-watered. An announcer in a black tux then recites, in Scottish brogue, the liturgy: all hail Madonna of Scotland, begat from and begat from and begat from  (in tune with a long Biblical-like begatting list) and begat in spirt from the kilted Mackintosh Clan of Old that once ruled the castle before the time when only tasteless crude horse-faced Rock & Rollers could afford such historic places.

One can clearly see now why she gave up her last name Ciccone. It is not Royal. Sounds like something from a Jersey City street, too much like the character in the video she created in I’m Keeping My Baby. Then she descends, as she must; she can’t stand there forever basking in dozens of prostrate eyes.  As she moves downward her face is bathed in special imported soft light (which makes her skin look as soft as a baby’s behind). The custom- fitted Earthen peasants have moved back some now from the bottom of the stairs, forming a u-shape around where she will descend to their level (but physically only).

A prearranged hand is held out to her on her last riser. She takes it with just a touch (very classy). She addresses the gathering: Welcome to Scotland. Her voice almost cracks, so intense is the moment. She perhaps is about to parlay her Scottish royalty into a real brogue–”lads and lassies”–but wisely decides against it before even parting her lips. Welcome to Scotland, my dear and trusted [irony here] guests.

We can imagine the library, perhaps located in one of the castle’s wings on the way to the formal dining area where shelf upon shelf is not stocked with books but with the fourth world children she’s purchased, many of whom were taken in the dead of night by her sordid agents (we can imagine the children struggling in the nets held from long wooden handles). There, crouched on the various shelves like assorted flora and fauna, they are on display for her visitors. They are not in jars of course, but their breathing is very light, their blinking cautiously controlled, for Madonna has ordered them to remain as motionless as possible till after the fawners have left and praised her humanity. This is her perfect moment.

San Francisco as Calcutta

NY Columnist Ralph Peters describes his tour of San Francisco and finds it wanting. Its homeless population gives him the distinct feel that he’s in refuse-teeming Calcutta. And Calcutta is ugly; ergo, San Francisco is ugly. “The greatest difference between the two isn’t the greater wealth of San Francisco, but the sense of the homeless as fellow human beings in Calcutta. From its asylum policies for violent illegal immigrants to its dog-biscuit “generosity” to the homeless, San Francisco’s a city of ethically oblivious hypocrites: 6,377 homeless, 776,733 heartless…As I walked the streets in the light of day, foreign tourists dodged the meandering, muttering homeless. I was ashamed of the image those visitors would take home..” Continue reading story  in the NY Post.

Of course San Francisco’s public arena is not one-dimensional. And we might refer to this second part of the post as San Francisco NOT as Calcutta. Take a look at this creepy public festival (Up Your Alley) in the heart of the city. Caution: this two-part photographic chronicle from Zombietime of a street sex fair is extremely sexually explicit, so you will first come to a disclaimer at the link.

The bubonics

“Outside a Muslim shrine in this dusty Pakistani city, a “rat woman” with a tiny head sits on a filthy mattress and takes money from worshippers who cling to an ancient fertility rite. Nadia, 25, is one of hundreds of young microcephalics — people born with small skulls and protruding noses and ears because of a genetic mutation — who can be found on the streets of Gujrat, in central Punjab province.  Officials say many of them have been sold off by their families to begging mafias, who exploit a tradition that the ‘rat children’ are sacred offerings to Shah Daula, the shrine’s 17th century Sufi saint…” Continue reading The Rat People of Pakistan.

Doing naked pushups for the internet

“The current fad in China for push-ups is not inspired by the approach of the Olympic Games; nor is it part of a campaign to improve physical fitness. In a country that employs a vast bureaucracy to monitor all types of internet activity and where posting a comment critical of the authorities can land you in re-education camp, people have to choose their words very carefully. So they resort to euphemisms to evade the cyber spies and skirt the automated keyword blocking tools which the Chinese authorities use to keep tabs on the online world. When a Chinese blogger says I’m just doing push-ups”, it’s actually a roundabout about way of attacking the regime without risking retribution’ “… Continue reading article.

An analysis of internet filtering.