Church of Hell

I was cleaning out the memory of my phone, erasing my ‘Leonard Nimoy Sings Bilbo Baggins’ and ‘My Buddy Commercial’ ring tones, and also offloading all of the low grade and silly pictures I’d snapped over the last few months. The first one to catch my eye was a snap of a poster I took at a local burgers-and-trivia place that Stretch and I visit called Scorchers (always said with great flair and a slight lisp). This was a poster for an upcoming band night featuring self-styled ‘Cleveland’s Tribute to 80′s Hard Rock’, 1988.



I don’t even know where to begin.

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Well, the weather outside is frightful since it’s been snowing pretty badly for about 24 hours straight. Being on the lake, we have nothing to block it so the parking lot is pretty bad with the drifts completely blocking in cars. We were watching some people trying to tow out cars that were stuck and blocking any plows from getting through (and making it impossible for anyone to move their cars) when we saw the following:

I was wanting the Benny Hill music to play but I don’t have any video editing software installed. They were trying to tow a PT Cruiser and couldn’t get it moving, so they added a second truck to help tow the first truck which was towing the PT Cruiser. Amazingly, it worked!

I’ve been watching the RIAA sort of crash and burn (or at least trip and smolder) in what, as a consumer, appears to be the kind of blunders that dominate best selling books on business a scant few months after some major corporate upheaval (written in the ‘what-not-to-do’ flavor). It seems to me that the music industry wants to spin this whole decade like it was a war between the evil and smelly peer-to-peer-software wielding computer pirates and the Holy Knights of Musicdom, providers of the Healing Sounds of Peace for the worlds impoverished and diseased orphans, who are being systematically decimated by these wanton and gluttonous ne’er-do-well teenaged demons.

Bullshit.

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There two kinds of people, generally, who buy new gadgets, software, and hardware the moment it’s released. These people used to be called beta testers and they would be paid to use a product for a given amount of time, to try and break it and to return their criticisms to the design team so that improvements and fixes could be made before the product launched.

Companies realized that there were people breaking down the doors, so to speak, to become testers. These people would actually pay to play with products before anyone else had a chance to even see them. These people would actually pay more -much more in some cases – for an inferior, buggy product just for the bragging rights to say “I had it first”. These people are called early adopters.

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I saw this book the other day and had to snap a picture. If I was ‘The Artist Formerly Known as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince’, not only would I call my penis the ‘Purple Pirate’ but I would also have a little purple waistcoat and draw on a little mustache and eye patch. Then it’d be time to go hunt for booty!

Here’s an excerpt from a piece on alternet by a writer named John Dolan:

“…most of the hardcore academic progressives I’ve known have tin ears. Their sheer awfulness is adaptive within the academic ghetto, in the way that a lack of any olfactory ability is adaptive for carrion eaters; but it’s disastrous when they try to talk to people outside their guild.”

This guy’s article is right on and worth a read. Kerry did botch it, most of the inellectual Left (oxymoron?) sound like the adults in a Charlie Brown cartoon and we’re too busy looking for small bits of lint on our cumberbunds to successfully block those kicks to the groin the Neocons keep serving up.

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We are all aware, I’m sure, of the steamy rumors concerning Bruce Wayne and his ‘ward’, Dick Grayson, but they are, at most, just rumors – there is no concrete evidence supporting these claims.

We had no empirical evidence that our favorite cartoony-book house was promoting anal sex until recently, when they released the action-figure “The Weaponeer of Qward” from their latest spin-off, Crisis on Infinite Earths. I haven’t collected any comic books since I gave up on Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, Hard Boiled, Lenore and Kid Eternity a decade or two ago, and DC never really held a huge interest for me past some of the grittier stuff Warren Ellis and Frank Miller did (did they actually work for DC at any time?) but I always thought the million different cross-overs and spin-offs were nothing but a horrible attempt to squeeze more money out of their customers by killing off clones of their favorite characters. That is until I saw this action figure. All of those spin-offs and cross-overs are completely worth it as long as it leads us to have a major, family friendly company release a figurine that looks exactly like what I would expect someone to look like after having a large and non-lubricated object shoved directly up their ass. The long-sleeves-and-hot-pants are bad enough, but coupled with the raver sunglasses, the rectal-pain induced squat and the look of complete, utter shock, there’s not really any other viable explanations short of a completely bat-shit art director.

I just caught some articles on New Scientist’s web site about evolution. Usually, I would expect that an establishment touting itself as scientists and talking about evolution would be… well, rather tame and unoffensive, but New Scientist pulls no punches as they surgically dissect creationist myths about evolution. To wit:

“However, this “god of the gaps” argument is the logical equivalent of standing on a beach pointing to missing sections in a trail of footprints and claiming the creator must have flown between the gaps – even as incoming waves create more gaps in the trail, and even as the ordinary-looking person who made the footprints can be seen walking along in the distance. ”

This was in answer to people who say that, even if there is evidence of evolution, since we’ve got no way to travel back in time to see how we actually evolved, a god must have guided it. There’s much more well written, unapologetic and fact filled fun here.

Unless you’ve been under a rock, blithely rereading your bible and ignoring mass media, video game trends and reality, you are most likely aware that Grand Theft Auto IV, also known as GTA4 and ‘Satan’s metaphorical foot in the door of your child’s mind’ has been released in a hail of violence and cursing, mostly originating from the mouths of ‘moral’ right wing conservatives and religious nuts.

I saw an article asking why, because you can ‘get with’ a prostitute and then beat her with a bat instead of paying, the GTA4 production crew ‘hates’ women.

I played a little of this festering morass of moral decrepitude last night. My character beat up a few guys who were ganging up on the protagonist’s cousin, a loser who may actually have deserved said beating. There was a brief and gore-free knife fight. And I took a girl on a date bowling and again to a cabaret to watch a rather hilarious magician and singer. There was no disrespectful and abusive sex involved, sadly enough.

I fail to see the problem. (more…)

msnbc, font of unbiased knowledge and fair reporting, had the following story:

Hackers try to cause seizures on epilepsy site
Web forum bombarded with links to pages with rapidly flashing images

This story is offensive to me on quite a few levels. Let’s look at some of their ‘facts’ and how they present them:

• Computer hackers are criminals, motivated by greed, who are thieves and extortionists.
• Hackers used an exploit to deface the Epilepsy Foundations web site and insert malicious graphics that could cause seizures and migraines.
• Either enough people have placed cats into bags and thrown them over clotheslines to have created an adage that Paul Ferguson, a security researcher at antivirus software maker Trend Micro Inc., heard and casually used it in conversation or Paul Ferguson is a sick mother fucker.
• A similar hacker attack disabled text reader software for some blind and visually impaired people.

Lets break down some of these items and see exactly what’s underneath this bullshit they call journalism. (more…)