“The book with no name”

The terrible and fatal consequences of masturbation described in the 1844 Paris edition of The Book With No Name.

Banana Republic elites have some fun with the masses

Hey, go AF One. I hate the masses too, so I applaud the Elites on their fun buzzing NYC a couple of days ago (that trailing F-16 really did the trick though). Listen it’s just good clean $300,000 fun from your Banana Republic ponzi boys.

Ponzi scheme hits the Bat cave

Is nothing sacred anymore? Only real American hero, Batman, a victim of Ponzi scheme. Alas, Bat cave garage sale.

Sad state of American chicken franchise

I’ll tell you what, America may be duped by the Wall St banks, Ponzi schemes and crooked politicians but when citizens can’t get take-out chicken you just know the revolution ain’t far down the road. Viva la Popeyes.

Bankers’ holiday Inc.

“I’d been working for the bank for about five weeks when I woke up on the balcony of a ski resort in the Swiss Alps. It was midnight and I was drunk. One of my fellow management trainees was urinating onto the skylight of the lobby below us; another was hurling wine glasses into the courtyard. Behind us, someone had stolen the hotel’s shoe-polishing machine and carried it into the room; there were a line of drunken bankers waiting to use it. Half of them were dripping wet, having gone swimming in all their clothes and been too drunk to remember to take them off. It took several more weeks of this before the bank considered us properly trained…” Read aticle here.

University as fossil

How long before the vast ponzi scheme of higher education (as we know it) completely collapses from its own top heaviness? “…The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors. In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings…” Read article here.

Where no man has gone before

“There are those who believe that somewhere in the vast blackness of space, about nine billion miles from the Sun, the first human is about to cross the boundary of our Solar System into interstellar space. His body, perfectly preserved, is frozen at –270 degrees C (–454ºF); his tiny capsule has been silently sailing away from the Earth at 18,000 mph (29,000km/h) for the last 45 years. He is the original lost cosmonaut, whose rocket went up and, instead of coming back down, just kept on going. It is the ultimate in Cold War legends: that at the dawn of the Space Age, in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, the Soviet Union had two space programmes, one a public programme, the other a ‘black’ one, in which far more daring and sometimes downright suicidal missions were attempted. It was assumed that Russia’s Black Ops, if they existed at all, would remain secret forever…” Read story here.

Note: One of the questions I have is, did our own banana republic also have a secret space program?

“Elements of Style” out of style?

Strunk and White’s's “Elements of Style” takes a beating lately, to wit… “Rereading Strunk and White on its 50th birthday is like meeting an old lover and realizing how much you’ve outgrown him. Things have changed, little book, and you have not, or not enough.” And “The simplistic don’t-do-this, don’t-write-that instructions offered in the book would not guarantee good writing if they were obeyed. Indeed, they are often violated in the very paragraphs that Strunk and White use to present them. The section warning against the passive, for example, is replete with passives. (And anyway, the passive is a perfectly useful and respectable type of clause; there is no merit in blanket warnings against it.)” And “I have been attacking Strunk and White for many years. On my blog, I have called it “that mangiest of stuffed owls,” “the bible of those who want to sneer at other people’s use of language without bothering to actually learn something about it themselves” and a ‘malign little compendium of bad advice.’ ” Read more of the assault at the “NY Times.”  I agree with the critics in the article above. It’s nice to have a starting point of style I suppose but I’ve reread the Elements recently and found it akin to petting a long dead wooly mammouth.

Bailed out wife’s sad new life

Writing anonymously, a bailed-out CEO’s wife complains about the ebbing of her shopping life:

“…I haven’t even looked at spring clothes; God forbid someone catches me out in something new. Keeping up with fashion seems somehow decadent in this new era, like getting Botox injections or catered dinners… If I buy a present for someone, I have the package sent to their home. I don’t want to be spotted climbing into a taxi, laden with Bergdorf Goodman shopping bags…”

Gee whiz, I wonder who this piece of whining fecal matter is?

Corrupt corporations, corrupt lawyers, corrupt judges and corrupt food

Hurry, spit out that corn. The future of food

Chiller Theatre April 2009

Flash…7 Campus Plaza, Parsippany, New Jersey

So I’m in the tent with the lower than b-stars of yesteryear, hasbeens, stillbeens and really never was beens and certainly never will bes (the game’s really over but no one told them yet–thank god for nostalgia). They’re seated like trained monkeys waiting for a treat. Most of the older ones don’t look a day over two hundred. Nevertheless their wrinkled hands are outstretched, Magic Marker in one for their signature, the other waiting for the reward for a lifetime of acting–twenty bucks for an autograph, includes ear to ear smile and handshake totaling ten seconds of time (photo  too with the actor’s sweaty withered hand on your shoulder best buddy style).  A couple of years ago I was at either Chiller or Monster Mania, also here in the Garden State, and in the tent they had Larry Hagman propped up in a school desk, the kind with the writing board on one side. He looked like some tall class prankster who had been sent to detention: Now Hagman, as punishment you will be forced to s it in that ridiculous chair meant for ten year olds and sign you name for these nice gawking people (though you will of course receive monetary remuneration).

Let’s see, there’s the incredible hulk guy Lou the Frig or something,…oh, there’s the guy who played Larry on “Threes Company” (my nephew has the DVDs for official signing). Somebody takes a picture catching every nuance of that withered face without paying. “Larry” takes it upon himself (evidently seeing himself as the guardian of the wilted stars) to castigate the young man. Holy shit my god man you took my once recognizable mug shot for free (well not his exact words). Seated next to him is some guy from a seventies TV show (and I swear if you give me a few more days I’ll finally come up with the name…Pat Harrington sound familiar?)

Jesus Christ, there’s Ahern from “F Troop.”  It’s a show I’ve seen on cable or Hulu a few times. Pretty funny.  He’s wearing that same hat from the show, only now he’s being really cool and has an arrow through it. That’s right Ahern, have fun with it;  it’ll all be over soon. There’s Christopher Atkins, still very youngish looking, from “The Blue Lagoon,” though he looks a bit out of place surrounded by blow up photos of himself in a loin cloth and holding hands with Brook Shields. There’s the Iron Sheik; the guy’s drooling on himself and ranting.

Goths by the tons are mostly dressed in black t-shirts with monster movie slogans and pictures of horror movies. Some walk around in full costume, Darth Vader, ghouls of various stripes. One woman is dressed in a long flowing blue felt robe carrying a plastic brain (I hope it’s plastic). Goth girls walk around in shorts and stockings with garters and high heels (of course all black). There are so many Goth breasts hanging out of  black leather halter tops it’s a show in itself. Everyone is exceedingly polite. You’re bumped into in the hall, or the Dealers Room, and everyone apologizes. Very civilized despite appearances. There’s a few b (or c or d) -grade horror movie girls here. You can tell them right away because they look like transvestites with gigantic silicon breasts bursting over their tops. They too are after their twenty bucks a shot (plus they’ll throw in one of those you-next-to-my-boobie photos).

The original “Night of the Living Dead” actors are here, along with director George Romero. These guys aren’t even d-listed anymore but they’re pulling in the bucks. The first time I tried to get in the room the line was too long; probably two hundred people waiting. Later that afternoon we tried again and got in, but therer was still a wait of twenty minutes or so.

Japanese horror and formula sci-fi movie titles are so predominant in the Dealers’ Room that you wonder if maybe the entire Japanese homeland isn’t making a horror movie after they get home late at night from the Tokyo office district.

Syd Haig isn’t here this year, though he was at the rival Monster Mania last year. But not to worry, there’s plenty of other d-listed ones here who at a big monster mash like this are the true stars anyway. People from the “Halloween” movies are present and accounted for.  I think that guy right there is Jason from “Friday the 13th.” The fifties’ Lois Lane (Noel Neill)  is here, very frail but very friendly.

I’m out in the hall using the men’s room and in walks the original Trek’s Chekhov. He looks small and lost like a little 70 year old kid who can’t reach the urinal. A guy comes up and shakes his hand and in a roundabout way asks for an autograph. Chekhov stands firm for his twenty bucks though (he’s probably been talking to Larry the Hag): No sir you must go to the table in the foyer (with Worf  from ST: TNG and a couple of other newer Trek guys).  Btw, a couple of years ago when  I went to Chiller I had the not-so-great honor of hearing Lou Albino wheezing and pissing up a storm in the stall next to me)….Later on…Good lord, there’s Mickey or something from the “Monkees”; across the way is Tony Curtis in a big white cowboy hat and white turtleneck; the guy’s racking up the twenties. I’m wondering if he still gets royalties from “Some Like It Hot.” But of course this being a horror movie festival for the most part, people are having him sign DVDs or pics of “The Boston Strangler.”

Chiller Theatre

Shhh, a reddit.com discussion forum in progress

*Instead of making posts about not submitting NSFW pics to the PICS subreddit, how about we just not upvote them so they don’t make it to the front page? (self.pics)…

svunt 1 pointif(reddit) reddit.vl['t1_c091unw'] = ['0 points', '1 point', '2 points' ]; 3 hours ago[+] (0 children)

*How about we all get jobs where we aren’t deathly afraid of getting fired for inadvertently having tits on our screen for the 0.3 seconds it takes to click the red X in the corner?…

*Instead of making posts about not submitting posts about not submitting NSFW pics to the PICS subreddit, you… fuck I yo dawg’ed and lost my train of thought…

jerryF 3 pointsif(reddit) reddit.vl['t1_c09166p'] = ['2 points', '3 points', '4 points' ]; 21 hours ago[+] (0 children)

*That’s right, you can just as easily find them again on your “disliked” page – no need to upvote…

*I wouldn’t have a problem if people wouldn’t choose NSFW thumbnails to put on those posts … they don’t even give us the opportunity to avoid them.As long as the thumbnail is SFW, i don’t care what subreddit they get posted to. But if the thumbnail is NSFW, it should be posted in /r/nsfw…

*The NSFW tag tells us.. simply.. not to open the link while you’re at work.. or at least to ensure nobody is behind you when you do.. simply not up-voting the submission doesn’t work…

Reddit discussion

Nye says nay to big night light in the sky

Sayeth Genesis 1:16: “God made two great lights — the greater light to govern the day [sun] and the lesser light [moon] to govern the night.”  Evidently the notion that the moon exudes its own light was severely put to the test when Bill Nye The Science Guy called that illuminated orb a mere reflector of the sun’s rays. It seems some in medieval Waco, Texas, however,  consider this sort of view highly ungodly, evideneced by the rush to the lecture hall’s exit doors. Time to pass the Kool Aid.

Extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of gullibility

Here is a good condensed article at eskeptic by Stephen Greenspan on the psychology of the Ponzi scheme (as well as schemes in general, like the nortorious Nigerian 419 scam). It’s based on Greenspan’s recent book “Annals of Gullibility”, which I guess it would be fair to say is a modern version of that famous 19th century book  “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” (one of my favorites). Like the older book many types of incredible schemes , along with what we can call their gullibilty factors, are written of. It’s utterly amazing what otherwise rational human beings have fallen for over the centuries, including the author, who recently suffered a big ouch: he was one of Bernard Madoff’s victims.