d i z t o p i a

Another Airman Ready to "Cross Into The Blue"®

I'm off till Tuesday as my employer commemorates the zombie uprising of its patron voodoo-man, and then I'm off to Las Vegas, just like last year, for a round of guidebook research and overindulgence in buffets, cocktails, bargain basement blackjack, and bad shows. This trip should be good because it's shorter, as opposed to last year's 12-day marathon. Plus, the Girlfriend Attorney will be coming along, though she'll just spend the days lounging by the pool and swanning around the boutique shops while I scramble around reviewing crap hotels. Such are gender roles in our enlightened modern world.

I may do some vacation-blogging and Vegas-blogging whilst off the Man's clock, so stay tuned. Meantime here's some early and shallow link dumpage to masticate.

One must admire the intellectual rigor brought to bear in this site dedicated to destroying the Earth. (via)

Imprison your rage once more in the happy box with this online rake-able zen garden. Check out NASA video of hooverin' blobs of liquid in low-gravity conditions. This video for "All I Know" by hippity-hopster Rahzel begins with some highly disturbing adult-headed-baby imagery, and the tune is catchy too. Feed black meat to your inner mugwump by observing the William S. Burroughs-inspired "Ah Pook Is Here." Don Hertzfeldt is probably my favorite animator, and I doubt he approved this, but you can check out his first short, "Ah, L'Amour" ... then go and give him some love on his home Bitter Films site. And ask yourself why a just God would allow a fansite dedicated to art and fiction featuring deceased Simpsons character Maude Flanders? in German? (via)

Mark my words: pulsing anthropomorphic animal characters are becoming the signature style of net cartoons, as demonstrated in Fly Boy.

As exemplified ad nauseum by Saturday Night Live, sometimes parodies are so close to the bone that they inspire the same revulsion as their satirical inspiration. Manhattan Princess ISO Shoes, Soulmate! doesn't quite go over the line, but even though it's dead hilarious, there's only so much of its perky pinkness I can withstand ... (via)

Check out these awesome caskets with screened artwork on the outside (scroll to bottom).  Tasteful Air Force coffin depicted above. Didn't I see the more elegant models in the Metropolitan Museum of Art Gift Catalog? Where's the replica Tiffany glass, or with Monet's Water Lilies? (via)

Lastly, I give you the OmniTread, or as I like to call it, the PhalloBot. "Unique pneumatic control method allows simultaneous control of stiffness and joint angles." Hottttt. (via)

And a final late addition, simply because it's an issue we need to debate seriously as a nation: How many five-year-olds could you fight simultaneously, and win? (via)

328 Emo Bands Have Already Renamed Themselves "Persistent Vegetative State"

Not sure if I understand what these keep-Terri-Schiavo-alive demonstrators are getting at with this gesture. Are they gagged by life itself? Choking on life? Has the power of life robbed them of speech? Grimly ironic that these people (and there are many photos of them on Yahoo and elsewhere) are disciples of "The Cause USA," a Christiangelical organization which in addition to demonstrations also advocates ... fasting. I'll try to trim a few dozen years off my time burning in hellfire by discreetly pointing offstage at the feeding-tube joke, rather than making the joke outright.

There's nothing I can say about Schiavo that hundreds of others on all sides haven't already said better and with more authority and bigger exclamation points. It's a tragedy to be sure. All the objections to letting her die are (ostensibly) predicated on the fact that she left no living will, and thus we must presume she would want to be kept alive as a brain-damaged husk on the chance that she might someday be healed. Maybe that's true, but odds are it's not, and it's a near certainty we'll never know. But so what if we did? What if Schiavo had left a living will, asking that her life be terminated if she was beyond medical help? Would her personal desire to die then trump her value as a rhetorical asset to the culture of life? (I'm assuming here, absurdly, that her parents and others would not automatically contest any medical opinion stating that Schiavo is and always will be beyond recovery.) Wouldn't honoring such a living will be opening the door to elective and/or assisted suicide? I'm not familiar with how often this sort of thing happens -- that is, where a living will results in a brain-dead but otherwise viable person being taken off a feeding tube, as opposed to being disconnected from breathing apparatus, or ultimately dying because of a voluntary, pre-trauma do-not-resuscitate order.

Either way, I guarantee that Congress will not go into emergency session, nor will the President fly in from Texas, to slap together a bill designed to make sure a man living in agonizing, incurable pain gets to go ahead and kill himself. Nor should they, any more than they should have gotten involved in this circus as it's currently playing out. It's unbelievable that so many staunch federalists are willing to throw all their political principles in the crapper because they've become ethically unhinged. It's exactly the sort of behavior the right has been accusing the left of propagating stealthily for years, i.e. using the power of the federal government to enforce morals at the individual level. For her sake, I hope that Terri Schiavo either is a total vegetable, or if not, I hope (perversely you might think) that she really does want to live. Because if she doesn't want to live now and never did in this condition, right now she's watching helplessly from the prison of her skull as her chance for escape evaporates in a furnace of political opportunism and tin-pan piousness. Speaking of which, check out this Biblical photo of Sen. Mel Martinez, R-FL, one of the fine fellows who pushed through the Senate bill that kicked the Schiavo case to federal court. Looks like he should be gazing down in severe judgment from the temple mount, which I guess he pretty much is.

Fear of Music

I'm going 100% digital, kids. No more CDs at all. You want to face true screeching horror? Examine my old CD collection, on the chopping/auction block. That's right. Three (3) Don Henley albums. Feel the burn.

It's well established that I have no musical taste. I have a thing for female pop stars with damaged hair. I go for shallow and faux-soulful nerd music. Occasionally I'm enticed by slightly (SLIGHTLY) grittier pop-rockers or jokey bands or ethnic crossover acts or alt-country or the more cerebral hip-hop. But as your eyes no doubt pop out of your head examining that list of crap, bear in mind that I've had all my CDs stolen or lost on two occasions, so this represents mostly the dregs. These were albums I listened to so rarely that they languished in the back of a cabinet somewhere, and thus did not disappear when the "good" stuff got jacked outta my car or when I left my CD case under an airplane seat, etc.

But back to my lack of musical taste. I have none. If I like something, I'll listen to it endlessly, repetitively, abusively. I can rotate among the same five albums for a year. Many of the artists whose music I like, I find personally repellent or borderline foolish (ahem Tori mmm-RRHHMM Amos). By the same token, some artists have personas so annoying to me that I can't be bothered to appreciate their near-unanimously recognized genius (e.g. Bob Dylan). This is crippling. Musical taste is likely the most accepted calling card of hipsterdom. I don't even have outre tastes or ironic tastes to fall back on. Nor really, really bad or vulgar taste like John Waters. Just boring, middlebrow, largely vanilla and moderately enthusiastic tastes. I can't even get too worked up about it, I'm so boring.

In addition to losing hipster credibility by having bad taste, I also lose blogger credibility, because music/band blogging takes up a lot of intellectual bandwidth out there. To my credit, I did just try to download the Arcade Fire album, but I assume they're so over by now. Maybe Franz Ferdinand? Killers? Am I too late, fellas?

But this is all happening not (only) because I decided to purge the evidence of my bad taste, but because I'm getting rid of physical music altogether. Now that I have everything on iTunes and -Pod, why should I keep the originals? I can't sustain an R. Crumb-like attachment to the objects themselves, as I don't care about disc "cover" art or liner notes. My total music "collection" takes up about 7.5 GB as data. Pathetic, yes indeed! It all fits with room to spare on my iPod, the computer, and two backup data DVDs. If I need to take music with me somewhere to play on a conventional CD player, I can just make such CDs in moments. If I really want to play music through the stereo again, I can just get one of those Airport hookups for the stereo and stream it over wirelessly. Similar plugs/workarounds can be had for car stereos. Why should I keep the plastic? To the landfill with ye, ye CDs, or to eBay, whoever will have ye.

And with the advent and tenacious Russian graymarket existence of my beloved allofmp3.com, new music can be had for about a dollar per album, and there's no testy copy protection to strip off as with iTunes. Sure, eventually the Russkies will be taken down by RIAA ninjas, but I believe the going price for music will eventually settle between iTunes's buck-a-song and allofmp3.com's buck-an-album. And that's fine. No more Dave Barry obsolescence gripes about having to throw out the CD player like you threw out the tape player or the 8-track or the turntable, and what now, whippersnapper? The new audio format is no format.

Meanwhile, though in addition to the "real" CDs I'm auctioning (and note the low low price -- I don't put anything on eBay I'm not prepared to just write off), I've also got a stack of "backup" CDs made by myself or by friends after I lost the originals. These are audio CD-R replacement copies, so I can't sell them on eBay (technically piracy I suppose). About half are even still ensconced in the cases/liner notes for the original CDs. Regardless, their contents are now archived digitally, so what to do? Trash? Charity? Art project? Any ideas?

What the Good Books Said

Gather round for your weekly link-dump barfage. All I can say to you this morning is: sake. Urrrg. That's right. All the regular pubs and dives are jammed on St. Patrick's day, but you know what places aren't crowded on that night? Japanese restaurants. And they're so, so glad to see you.

Triumph the Insult Comic Dog does local Hawaii weather; even if not real, still excellent. To hell with being a fireman when you grow up ... I still wish I could have become Pyro Boy, who dances while exploding. CGI short film overload: Delivery, concerning a perspective shift worthy of Moebius; The Awakening of Consciousness, which goes in about ten different unexpected directions; and the cute and Stoogey Defective. And the Museum of Bad Art is just that, and I applaud their honesty. (via)

Que es mas Nacho? Nacho Vigalando that is, creator/star of the ingenious 7:35 in the Morning. In Spanish, though it doesn't matter. Recommended. Beyond that, what could be better than watching three cops get tasered? Watch 'em squeal! (via)

Hard to believe this could be true, but wonderfully cruel. Remember the home economics ritual of "caring" for a watermelon as if it was your baby? To hell with that. Try caring for an animated, screaming, twitching, crack baby doll! Perfect for that tween niece of yours who's considering experimenting with gateway drugs or voting Democrat. Eeeeyyyyikes. (via)

I'm mystified and compelled by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, who/which produces text-based Flash animation rants/stories/satires/whaaa? I recommend "Cunnilingus in North Korea" and "Dakota." And you really oughta read Jeff Johnson's "The Gino File," which better be drawing book-deal agents like flies to mustardy mutton. (via)

Who knows what to make of the darkly futuristic predictions of EPIC 2014? One word: Googlezon. And I really love the titillating uselessness of amaztype, used to automagically create today's banner image out of Amazon cover graphics. Go play. (via)

Welcome to Our New Non-Irish Minty Green Freshness

No really, I've been tinkering with this design change for about a week, and I had zero cognizance of the looming commemoration of the famous snake evictor. I wasn't even going to launch it till Friday, but then realized it was too perfect not to take advantage of this "holiday" as some would call it. So happy St. Patrick's Day to all you potato-eatin' micks anyway. I'll be swilling green-tinted crap American beer with the rest of my culturally insensitive countrymen tonight. Speaking of which, I speak of which from experience: you can get massively cheap beer by the keg if you hit the liquor stores after midnight of St. Patrick's Day, as they're looking to unload that green beer fast. I once saved a dying party singlehandedly with a $25 keg of green Coors Lite. If you can call that "saving" anything. Sure, half the keg was still there the next day, and the only thing worse than rancid beer mung by morning light is GREEN rancid beer mung, but I say again: $25.  God it was awful, but when it's that cheap, you have a moral obligation to ingest as much as possible.

Er, anyway, feel free to weigh in on this slick new look. And remember: green like healthy green tea, green like heaps of cash rolling in, green like the envy of other bloggers with lesser template-managin' skeelz. But not, intentionally, green like the Irish.

Shelob 2.0

Gotta run today, so all I can offer is Plustech's "walking forest machine." Check the videos. Sure, it's intended for the benign purpose of moving logs around in remote, rugged areas. But if I have anything to say about it, this beauty will be in the lead of my all-conquering spider-mech army. Soon. Soon.

The Banshee Factor

Everyone who knows me in the world of flesh knows I've become moderately obsessed with the banshee lifestyle. This began when I was home for the holidays and a pal mentioned that he'd cut back on his smoking, because recently he'd really been "smoking like a banshee." I assumed he meant "smoking like a chimney," but the idea of a vengeful spirit screeching around a cigarette -- perhaps stopping occasionally to hack and cough -- appealed to me. (As did "screaming like a chimney".)

Employing the universally recognized and unquestionably authoritative journalistic tool known as the Google search, one can see that "like a banshee" enjoys a vivacious cultural currency. However, my nic-fit buddy is hardly the only one with some confusions about what the banshee ingredient means to any particular expression. Since banshees were traditionally female spirits that wailed under the windows of the dying in Ireland, the traditional slang usage describes someone screaming or wailing or shrieking or making a lot of noise.

But we Americans aren't going to be limited by some stodgy auditory sense of bansheedom. Our banshees think and live outside the banshee box. In addition to all kinds of noisemaking, the search above finds banshees laughing, snowing, fucking, having a fine motor, peeing and sweating, driving, scoring, appealing, blowing, reading, dancing, swearing, writing, and even voting, and so on for another 10,000 pages. That's after I tried to eliminate every noise-related search term, and yes, should you actually bother to click on any of those, find the damn banshee mention your own damn self.

Often it's obvious the similar-sounding "like a bandit" was really meant; but, while skilled at thievery, bandits don't have nearly the cachet of banshees when it comes to infusing anything with a sense of rabid excess. It's obvious that whatever banshees may do, they do it to the utmost. OED mandarin MIchael Quinion has a short bit about the banshee phenom, though his reference only dates its metastasizing into universal American slang to 1976. That seems a little shallow to me, research-wise, so maybe ol' Mike Q needs to buckle down and etymologize like a banshee. I myself have a schedule meeting to attend this afternoon ... normally dullsville, but I plan to banshee-fy the proceedings, and if that involves piercing screams, I'll just be giving voice to what everyone there feels on the inside.

Hate Is the New Love

Here is the plan. (1) Daily postings once again, at least on weekdays, and (2) more essayistic crap, less gee-whiz-lookit-th'-funny-links crap. Of course, I'll probably continue the Friday link dumps ... despite being ignored by most regulars, they bring in swarms of lurkers. Blind, slavering, Olsen-twin-seeking swarms. Not that the navel-gazing material won't be just as frivolous and trite as ever, but it's actually easier to do stream of consciousness than hew to a particular gag. Plus, I'm sick of googling for photos of waffles or jetpacks or snakes with shoes, etc. From now on, relevance will get even more questionable, perhaps even moving beyond the realm of questioning entirely and back into certainty. And the savings will be passed on to you. I might even get around to tearing up this tediously institutional page design.

Right now I'm questioning my inherent love of attack. Just this very afternoon, I resisted the ideal opportunity to be perfectly, incandescently cruel to someone I didn't know. To be honest I was thrilled with the prospect. Even as I read the object of my derision -- perhaps I'll link to it if conditions warrant -- all kinds of lines of assault formed in my brain like a shimmering 3D schematic. Little dots and arrows surged, charged, cut, shredded. It would be beautiful. It would be surgical and yet messy and gorgeous. And it would have been all the more glorious because it would happen in a venue that, at that moment, was suffused with fellowship and forgiveness. The underhanded maliciousness of my response would be magnified by the sweet air of companionability it destroyed (or attempted to destroy). I shit you not: my pulse increased at the prospect. If this wasn't a sexual response, it was definitely rooted in and/or heavily stimulating some very primitive reptile brain instincts, which somehow had a direct line to the rhetorical centers.

Anyone who knows me knows that I love to argue. But maybe even more, I love the rare chance one gets to just blast somebody or something with no regrets or restraints. Admit it: There's a wonderful, righteous pleasure in slapping down someone who (you feel) deserves it, with no consequential consequences. I haven't indulged that tendency much on this very blog, and maybe I should. If not here, where? Especially when my words shall live forever in search engine caches and come back to haunt me one day? You do know that "chris m" is a pseudonym, right? Any resemblance to any "chris m" living or dead is purely coincidental. That chris m is a nice boy who loves his mother and never said anything bad about the government or your mother or what your mother did with the government.

So what stopped me from venting today? I can still feel the joyful rage endorphins. It woulda been good clean fun. I don't think it's maturity, which few could accuse me of. Nor second thoughts or better judgment. Nor even respect for others, though I do respect others, even some of the others involved in the venue mentioned. The sad fact is -- and we're going really deep here -- I think I decided that it would be best, absolutely best, if I just responded with a very small gibe, just a tiny little bit of naughtiness, in the hopes that it elicited a more scathing and particular response, which would then leave me free to really open up the floodgates of bile. Sort of like when the action hero pointedly turns his back on the mostly defeated villain, knowing full well there's a loaded gun lying around, and then when the punk goes for the gun, THEN Clint E. can whirl around and righteously ventilate the bastard. And this post in particular is part of that strategy, though I only recognize that in retrospect.

Sadly, I also recognize that what this anger-fishing may gain for me in causus belli, it decreases the street-cred factor I'd get for a totally unprovoked and unwarranted attack, however spiteful. There's a loss of flair in the reasonably nasty rebut, as opposed to the ambush. But maybe that perception is part of my Love of Evil. Obviously I'd prefer to be feared and despised than loved and respected. Must be spending too much time with academic types. Only the lawyers I know still try to convince me of mankind's essential decency.

The Answer's Not All That's Going to Come Loudly

I'm not sure why I keep posting these, but SH keeps sending them, and I cannot turn away ... today's shipment of the damned contained covers from "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis," companion series to Dobie's TV show.

I was only vaguely aware of this program as a child, and that only because it contained a protagonist with shiny white hair and an unsettling pre-island version of Gilligan. But many of these covers depict Dobie as a rampaging, sinister pussy hound. I mean, just look at his face!

This was the kind of teenager for whose misuse Rohypnol was invented. Fortunately we have a stockpile of equally worthless links to replace this disturbing image with other disturbing images.

Now that HBO's "Deadwood" is back, you'll be pleased to know that they're posting admirably high fucks-per-minute rates once again. And as someone who has in my time sported a coif at least as impressive, I had a lot of sympathy for the victims Trapped in Malcom Gladwell's Hair. And yes, ho hum, juvenile, and so on, but haven't you always wondered about Batman's boner?

More Successory parodies, for comics geeks only; plus, the new and absolutely essential Bacontarian, the blog about bacon. (via)

While I'm sure they're more comfortable, there's also just something insidiousuly demeaning about special toilets for fat people. I dearly love and am frightened by this exceptional new basketball scoring technique, just in time for March Madness. And enjoy this voicemail left by an office drone making excuses for being late, which morphs into his gleeful play-by-play of an accident he witnesses and the subsequent beatdown. (via)

Yet another Worth100 photochop contest, this one featuring inappropriately combined movie posters. (via)

Get ready, brainless muscle car movie fans! It's 3 3ast 3 3urious! Pronounce that, boyeeee! Alternatively, purchase this self-immolating Bible to impress the kids with unexpected proximity to Jesus fire. Quench your thirst for nerd knowledge by learning the true origins of Batman and Superman. Pet owners: Try EZ Spurt, because dogs love the taste of hot white cheddar! (Good luck trying to un-see that image, sports fans.) Giving the wikis a run for their non-money is Uncyclopedia, a non-resource of non-information. In ye olde gamez department, consider Micro Life, your typical benevolent germ-god sim; or perhaps you'd prefer Ninja Cupid, where a half-nude shadow warrior turns his weapons of death to the ends of hygienic tween molestation; or the divertingly pointless "Video Return: The Game," which pits angry roommates against each other in the most primal of roommate battles. The highly prolific and thoroughly disturbed Salad Fingers guy has produced "A Black and White Cartoon About Roof Tiling," which should be enough to make you reach for Mr. Jim Beam a little early this afternoon. If there's one thing I believe very strongly, it's that firearms safety instructors should not shoot themselves in class, but what do I know. Lastly, here's a Spike Jonez commercial for Addidas that makes me wish I could just buy the commercial, not the sneakers. (via)

Two words guaranteed to draw a respectable family crowd: amputee wrestling! (via)

And to close: I know I have said this more than once, but this truly is one of the worst things ever posted here. I present to you EZ Catch Harvester, or as I like to call it, the Chick'n Vac. Watch the video. Then try to convince yourself that science really hasn't gone too far.

I Have Called a Truce in My Feud with 50 Cent

It's time to stop the hating. Despite the fact that 50 Cent kicked me out of the G-Unit right in the middle of produciton on the "Niggaz Wit Staplazz (Feat. MC Swingline)" video, the bad feelings and negativity are behind us. I admit I was moved to reconcile by Fitty's burying the hatchet with The Game, proving that as of now, you can hate neither the playa nor The Game. This just had to be, yo, for the sake of our families and our fans. Peace. (But don't think this means every lil bitch gets a pass. It's still on between you and me, Ja Rule, you x-ed out mofo.)