Issue 203

News: The Results of my Roald Dahl reading.
It's been a strange, eventful semester, with problems ranging from having a Queeg-like professor in one class to having to take some time off for mental health reasons, but that's not what I want to talk about here. For a while, although I haven't actually written anything about it here, I decided to spend some of my spare time re-reading the 14 major children's books of Roald Dahl (excepting "The Vicar of Nibbleswicke", "The Gremlins", and "The Minpins,"), often on audiobook (to ensure a steady pace and some balance with my other reading queues), with supplements from printed books (with Quentin Blake's illustrations whenever possible; His books aren't the same without them). I started during some weekends reading/listening to some of the shorter books (7 of the books can easily fit on a single CD each, incidentally)

I may as well give some impressions of ten of the books I've read, with some of my opinions enclosed. If I didn't find one for the other four, just rest assured that it was because I didn't think of a catchy enough title for each of them:

#1) The best: Matilda.
This is not only my favourite book by Roald Dahl, but it may probably be my favourite kids' book, (sorry, Tom Sawyer, and Phantom Tollbooth). Maybe it's because of the fact that, apart from the neglectful parents, finding an understanding kindergarten teacher, stopping my cruel teachers through telekinesis, and, of course, the telekinesis, it's pretty much the story of my early life. But that's not just it. It's simple wish fulfillment fantasy which just happens to truly reach its apotheosis in this particular form. Dahl's writing for kids truly reaches its greatest level of refinement in this book, just as Hemingway's reached its own in "The Old Man and the Sea." It's a love letter to reading, and a story about child abuse which doesn't weigh itself down in sentimentality, horror, or just plain meanness to any real degree. If "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" is like his "Seven Samurai", "Matilda" is his "Ran."

#2) The worst: The Giraffe, The Pelly, and Me.
It was a tough call trying to choose between this and The Magic Finger, but the Magic Finger is merely short and unremarkable. I chose this because, even though this is one of those books he wrote that could fit on a single audiobook CD, it still feels like it's long as Hell. It's about a boy who meets up with a giraffe, pelican, and a monkey, and they start up a window-washing company. They wash a Lord's windows and they move in with him. That's it. It feels like Quentin Blake sent him a drawing of a boy standing next to a giraffe, a pelican on his head, and a monkey in the pelican's beak saying "The Ladderless Window Washing Company" and told him, "Write a story about that," and failing to do so, wrote this.

#3) The most overrated: The BFG.
Apart from the fact that the name recalls a weapon from "DOOM," the story doesn't really go anywhere for much of it, and, unlike some other books, it's not really that fun; it's just some explorations of human (and giant) nature that's not particularly deep. The BFG isn't particularly endearing, even with his dialect, and given that he's half the size of the other giants, his name "The big friendly giant" doesn't make much sense, and the climax of the "Story" includes the most inexplicable cameo by the Queen of England since Axe Cop and Light and Dark: The Adventures of Dark Yagami. The worst thing is that it seems to be his third most popular book, right behind Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Matilda.

#4) The Most Underrated: The Twits.
What can I say? It's simply a fun little book. Sure, Dahl might have used it as a way to vent his prejudice against bearded guys like me (and possibly another group he has been known to be prejudiced against), and sure, there's not much of a proper plot, and sure, the Twits have no redeeming qualities, but the book still remains a contender for the most fun I've ever had reading a book. The early, prank-centered section of the book is hilarious; especially listening to Simon Callow read the character of Mr. Twit, and it's simply amazing to see how the Twits are so mind-bogglingly stupid that the minute they return to see their furniture upside-down, they stay upside-down until they shrink into themselves. And, because Roald Dahl included a questionnaire for hairy-faced men in the early chapters, I'll answer it.
I wash my face twice a day, once after I wake up and once during my bath. I shampoo it during the bath. I don't use a hair dryer (unless you count a towel) or hair tonic, although I might consider it, and I trim it using scissors in a mirror.
 
#5) The most WTF: Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator.
The book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory hasn't held up as well as the movies, but I think a lot of the flaws I found in the book are directly tied to the fact that it contains a sequel hook for this book, and boy, is it a messed-up book with very little of the charm of its predecessor. But there's still quite a few things about this book that are just bizarre, and not in a good way. Like how the first half of the book seems to rip off two of Kubrick's films: (Dr. Strangelove and 2001). Or how Charlie's grandma is suddenly American. Or how, while they try to flesh out the grandparents, Dahl couldn't think of anything better than chew toy of the universe. Or how Willy Wonka has an elevator to "minus-land." Or...

#6) The Book I'm ashamed to admit I accidentally ripped off for a story: George's Marvelous Medicine.
The book itself is a pretty good short novel. A boy tries to fix his nasty grandmother by making her a new medicine made from all the medicines in the house. She grows to a gargantuan proportion and, in an attempt at replicating the effect, shrinks to nothingness. Where I come in is that, for my fiction tutoring class, I decided to rewrite a story I had written earlier which involved a girl who bludgeoned another girl to death with a turkey leg (I ripped off one of his more adult stories in the process, but that was intentional.) The book comes in because, after rewriting the story, one of the details I added included a scene where she tried to remove the blood from the kitchen floor using any chemicals which she thought might be useful, which is, incidentally, the M.O. that George uses when trying to create the Marvelous Medicine. My tutor complained about it (more on grounds that it might not end well: Bleach and ammonia create mustard gas), and I decided that, later, I would word it better when finishing it.

#7) The darkest book even by Roald Dahl's Standards: The Witches.
This is one of Dahl's longest works, but it's pretty dark even by the standards of Roald Dahl. Even in the case of Matilda, The Trunchbull is never shown to have killed a kid. She may have killed Miss Honey's dad, and she may cause permanent damage to kids for mild offenses, but she's never stated to have killed any kids. The witches, on the other hand, seem to live for killing kids. Hell, their plan essentially amounts to genocide of all kids.  And even then, when the protagonist gets turned into a mouse, he's never turned back. Unlike any of his other books, this doesn't really have a happy ending. The happiest thing about it comes when 500 witches (turned into mice) get decapitated. Not only that, but the protagonist's grandmother states that, as a mouse-boy,  he had less than ten years to live, and he's actually okay with this, because they're going to spend the next couple years doing one thing and one thing only: killin' witches.

#8) The best early draft of a film treatment masquerading as a fully-drafted novel: The Fantastic Mr. Fox.
This is one of his shorter works, and it's okay, but I don't remember reading the book as a kid, but I do have the DVD of the film. Reading the book, it just feels like a dry run for the film version. Wes Anderson evidently put a lot of meat on the bones of the script, from fleshing out the world to putting a lot more personality into the characters, and even giving it the ending that the book never had.

#9) The most Jarring book in the Roald Dahl canon: The Enormous Crocodile.
Unlike the other 14 books I read, it's not really as much an illustrated novel or even a short story. It's really a picture book more than anything else. Its plot is simple: a crocodile wants to eat a child, and whenever it tries, whatever animals he's told of his plan try to stop him. An elephant then decides to throw him into the sun. It's repetitive and its darkness isn't really couched in humour, like his other books. Huh.

#10) The most fitting end to a career: Esio Trot.
This isn't one of his best works. It's not even as dark as some of the other books, and its story is simple, but in the end, it has a certain charm that isn't found in one of his other books. A man falls in love with a woman whose tortoise won't grow. So he slowly replaces him with other tortoises until she's satisfied and they marry. And then, the original tortoise starts to grow when given to a new owner. Somehow, it has its charms, and it all works. I might have put it in the most underrated spot, but where would I have put the Twits if I did? I wound up liking it so much that I seriously considered bringing it into my last tutoring session and reading from it.

Tract Review: Why Should I? Because Rondo Hatton won't leave you alone until he tells you about God's plan for your life, and spend more time on what he plans to do for your life if you don't accept God now.

Issue 200

There will be four parts to this piece. The first part will be a response to something I've recently discovered, the second part of this will be the latest installment of my list of favourite books, and, as a breather, I will include a review of Jack Chick's latest tract, and the next 25 in my list of life lessons

Part 1: William Lane Craig.
You may not know this guy's name, but apparently, he's considered a leading evangelical theologian. Granted, he's not responsible for any bestsellers on the order of Rick Warren's Purpose-driven life, people have recommended his writings to me in the hopes that I would believe in God again. From what I've heard, he's as well-respected as C.S. Lewis. I recently discovered that he wrote an Op-Ed piece on the morality of the accounts of genocide that are described in Exodus. He actually defended the genocide of neighboring tribes because, in his words, "the death of these children was actually their salvation." This is not a paraphrase. This was not taken out of some crucial context where Lane Craig almost immediately shoots down this strawman. If you copy those words into Google, and click "I'm feeling lucky," you will get the article in question, and there's a very good chance that you will be as shocked by this as I was. Even the Lutherans who made my formative years a living Hell at least had enough sense to know that there's something very wrong with that argument. And it gets better. In his view, it was okay to kill the Caananites because they were guilty of disobeying God's laws, and were basically bad people. When you kill innocent people (like babies or other children), they go to Heaven. From this, I must ask: when isn't it morally right to kill people? I must reiterate that William Lane Craig is not just some wild-eyed Fred Phelps wannabe who goes around the country spreading a gospel of hate, shouting down everyone he sees as being hell-bound reprobate just because they're not him or his extended family. This man is a well-read, well-published, sophisticated modern theologian that people accuse atheists of ignoring because it's more fun to pick on the whackos. Given the fact that he's fond of claiming that the existence of "objective moral values" proves the existence of God, I must ask where are the objective moral values in his own values system? He says that, if there is no God, everything is permitted, but with God, at least murder is permitted. I'd like to close this with a link to a song by John Lennon. It's not Imagine, but it's from the same album and it expresses my views of this man's moral system.

Part 2: The  best books of (the many I read in the first half of) 2011.
I tried, a few weeks ago to try to see if I could get a shortlist of books I could use to create my annual list of "The best books (of the many I read in) 20XX." Including the audiobooks I've been listening to, I must have been reading no less than 100 books over the course of the year. But the shortlist had no less than 40 books as I was starting it. As of right now, there's 47 books on it, including the book I'm reading right now, World War Z. So, I decided to divide the list into two parts divided at a rather convenient point: July 1, 2011. Granted, the first part of the shortlist was still rather ungainly (28 books), but I've still been able to whittle that down to a managable number. So, without further ado, here are the top 11 books I've read in the first half of 2011.
11. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
While the book's pacing is quite glacial, especially in comparison to the many film versions that have been obstensively based on this book, what really struck me about the book was the fact that it had a very different tone from the movies. The fact was that the book really has a great sense of tragedy that seems to be missing from the film version. Viktor Frankenstein tampers in God's domain by reanimating dead tissue and escapes responsibility by fleeing from his creation, and his monster, named Adam being the well-read (seriously; he reads Plutarch, Milton, and Goethe) monstrosity that he is, cannot be expected to be able to fit in society. Given how well-known the character of Adam is, the sheer amount that got lost in the sands of time is simply staggering. Since I've frequently mentioned the films, I should probably recommend the original 1931 James Whale film for its fame, the 1957 Hammer film for its thrills, the 1974 Mel Brooks film for its humor, the 1994 Ken Branaugh film for its fidelity (and its unintentional humor), and the Andy Warhol version for its utter insanity.
10. Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith
I have not bothered to read Seth Grahame-Smith's other works in the Pride and Prejudice with Zombies series. As a man who has a lot of stuff he'd like to read, and as a man who thinks that Mark Twain's assessment of Jane Austen was too nice (her wit is nonexistent; all praise of her character-building ability are rendered pointless when one reads Dostoevsky, whose novels routinely contain almost the entire spectrum of thought and behaviour; and everything else about her works is insufferable to the point where playing Russian Roulette seems like a be a valid, sanity-preserving alternative whenever my mother drags me to an adaptation of her works), reading those books just hasn't been that high a priority. With this book, however, I knew I had to read it, especially after Linkara gave a shout-out to the book in one of his reviews. I've been interested in Lincoln most of my life, especially after all the times I went to Springfield with my family and toured Lincoln's world. What's really impressive is how, not only is the plot interesting, the supernatural events are linked to the events of the real world in such a way that it's almost likely that there was a big coverup to hide the fact that vampires walked the Earth, but the fact is that Seth Grahame-Smith gets so much of the history correct. Granted, he may get the dynamics of slavery a little over-simplified, but in this regard, he's almost as good at historical fiction as George MacDonald Fraser was.
9. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
When I was a member of Newspeak Dictionary, I had somehow managed to get through several years on a board devoted to politics and dystopian literature without having read Brave New World, and only having read 1984 once. For whatever reason, in February, I decided to give it a look. It was really much better than I thought it would be, and Aldous Huxley is brilliant in the way he not only builds this world where humans are born through cloning, humans are conditioned to be sex-crazed from preschool age on, and art is limited to interactive pornography, he is also brilliant in the way he is able to link those with contemporary culture. Of course, on occasion, the book shows its age: Huxley refers to the interactive skin flicks as "feelies", no doubt as an analogue to "talkies," a term that was still in parlance when the book was written, in 1931, and even the music that Huxley talks about seems to be an extension of the big band music that was popular when the book was being written. He does, however, manage to pull off the "false protagonist" device pretty effectively, even if it's not as clear as it could be when Bernard stops becoming the main character and John does.
8. Barney Ross by Douglas Century.
When the Borders stores were closing, I decided to pick this book up. I was impressed with it. I wouldn't think that I would be interested in this story of a real-life boxer, but there was really a lot to be interested in: this nice Jewish boy from Chicago starts a career as a boxer, retires after a particularly bad loss, joins the War effort, fights in Guadalcanal, gets addicted to morphine, recovers with the help of Hashem, and even tries to advocate a relatively sane drug policy. For what it's worth, his grave is in the Rosemont Park Cemetery. I'll be sure to find a good pebble for his grave before I visit.
7. Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams.
Unlike every other item on this list, I had to read this play for an Intro to Drama class in Oakton. I'm now in the process of writing a big essay about it in another class at Columbia. Despite the fact that I read it for class, I really loved it to the extent that I had to include it on my list. Why? Because this play is composed in such a way that it's almost perfect. Why? Just read it.
6. The Visit by Freidrich Durrenmatt
All right, I must admit that, after calling one play "almost perfect," it does seem odd putting another play immediately above it, but just hear me out. Another book I bought when the Borders stores were closing, this play is really just one that really appeals to my sensibilities even more than Tennessee Williams' does; the play is a meditation on the nature of capitalism: a small town is in the throes of poverty when a favourite daughter comes back and offers the town $1 billion on the condition that they kill a man who wronged her in her childhood. How long does it take before the town finally kills them? How much is it possible for us to laugh at the way the townspeople try to deal with the offer? Durrenmatt is one of my favourite authors for two reason: one is that he's that rarest of creatures, a postwar German novelist who doesn't talk about the Nazis, and the second is that he's basically German's Kurt Vonnegut.
5. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
It's very hard for me to explain just why I love this book. The fact is that it covers a lot of subjects, and does all of it in this very wry sensibility. All I can ask is why do I not read more Vonnegut?
4. Popular Crime by Bill James.
I first read about this book in an issue of Wired that was lying about my workplace. What really struck me was the fact that not only was this guy attempting a truly far-reaching history of man's fascination with crime, but the fact that he had decided to create a scale of evidences that could establish guilt. I have had no interest in his previous work, since I don't care about sports (at least I don't care about the ones that involve balls), but this book I just had to get. I wasn't disappointed. His book covers 200 years, and, although he does often gloss over serial killers, he's only got 400 pages to cover. One thing that really did disappoint me was that he didn't include a full version of his checklist of the evidence that he kept talking about and applying to criminals. Perhaps the reason this was done was because he was a little uneasy about the consequences that applying the list to the modern justice system would be. After all, he created a scale where 100 points was guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and that was sort of like the old, medieval system, where one or two well-chosen pieces of evidence was incontrovertible proof of guilt. However, according to Bill James, even the most glaring smoking gun, DNA Evidence was only worth 80 points on a possible 100.
3. J.D. Salinger by Kenneth Slawenski.
I heard about this book soon after it came out. My parents checked it out of the college library for me, and I only got around to reading it by the time we took the train ride to New York. It's rather fitting that I spend much of the time going to New York reading about one of my favourite New York authors. With regards to the biography itself, it really does put a lot of Salinger's writings into their proper context. He even manages to summarise stories that were either unpublished, or stories that Salinger never bothered to put into book form. And, furthermore, it even puts what I did know of Salinger's life into an even better context. His habit of seclusion really made a lot of sense when you realised how much his life was ruined by paparazzi trying to intrude on it, much to the point where he actually gave out a red herring on the jacket cover of Franny and Zooey. Slawenski even made clear just why Salinger stopped publishing; after his Glass family stories were met with a collective cry of "They changed it, so now it sucks," he just got tired of it all and stopped publishing.
2. Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
I read this in audiobook form (mainly as a result of some speculation that one section of Thirty H's was a shoutout to the book) during the big blizzard that happened in February. Even without Jules Feiffer's illustrations, I loved this book. On the one hand, it's a book that's rather heavy-handed with its "learning can be fun" message, but, unlike a lot of pieces that are this heavy-handed, Norton Juster really does make this book really fun to read; its characters are zany personifications of different concepts, and words and numbers are things you can eat. And now there's going to be a 50th Anniversary edition published in hardcover and that's definitely something I'd like for Christmas or my birthday.
1. Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

This is just the single best novel I've read all year. You're probably aware of the novel's plot, you probably know how much wit is packed into it. Just go out and get it. I've already got two copies; one in paperback with an introduction by Jeffrey Eugenides, and one in hardcover that I got in a Barnes and Noble Leatherbound Classics edition.

Part 3: The Awful Truth (Tract Review)
And, once again, Jack Chick puts out his conspiracy theory of everything, and it's funny as all hell. From unintentional shout-outs to Pinky and the Brain, a scoffing Dudley Moore, he quickly goes into blaming Catholicism for all the world's woes (seriously; he believes that Islam, Communism, and Naziism were created by the Catholic Church to enslave the world). Perhaps most insanely, the Catholic Church apparently ordered the death of JFK because he chose the Constitution over Canon Law. I should probably do my own dissection of this tract, but I've currently got too much work at Columbia to try it.

Part 4:

1. Myxomatosis is not funny, except when it is.
2. Bruno Mars' “The Lazy Song” does not contain Insane Clown Posse levels of sex and violence.
3. Queering doesn't make the world work.
4. Catholic Priesting doesn't make the world work.
5. “Queer” is not a verb.
6. If not for prison rape, some people would never get laid.
7. Rape is never funny, except when males are the target.
8. If you are only attracted to men when they're unwilling, that still makes you bisexual.
9. U2 is the most overrated band on Earth.
10. The Zombie Apocalypse is the most viable political system known to man.
11. The Zombie Apocalypse will only work if the dead first rise in Colma, CA.
12. Calling yourself a lesbian trapped in a man's body does not entitle you to any of the benefits afforded to either gays or transsexuals.
13. This still applies no matter how many times you will admit to seeing D.E.B.S., But I'm a Cheerleader, or Heavenly Creatures, or how many times you've read Annie on My Mind.
14. Deutsche Kultur ist durch Amerikaner sehr interessant und unterschätzt.
15. Sam Shepherd once killed a man with his butt cheek power.
16. Some people really are that stupid.
17. Speaking with all the gentility that can be expected of an OxBridge professor can still be construed as rabid radicalism if the other guy disagrees with you.
18. “Fagpoles” is not recognised as a word by any reputable source.
19. Nobody who is easily offended or in any way surprised by the presence of the word “nigger” has any right to be reading novels about The South.
20. Cali is not short for Caligula.
21. Getting strung out on Heroin, listening to Joy Division, and throwing machetes at nothing in particular is no way to spend a Tuesday.
22. Even if you regularly get intimate with strippers of the same sex, flirt with same-sex coworkers and offer to marry a particularly butch one when Illinois legalises gay marriage, you can still consider yourself completely heterosexual if you occasionally go out with a boy you never look in the eye and align yourself with Team Jacob.
23. Sex and Death are both two things which happen only once in a lifetime.
24. Nothing improves the quality of one's music like dying.
25. Don't trust the judgment of anyone who seriously believes that the addition of an infant to one's life will solve any of their problems, with the possible exception of fertility.

Issue 199

Note; Posting Frequency. Remember what it was like earlier? I used to post every Sunday. By the time I graduated from High School, I had posted only about three times a month. Soon it dwindled to two posts a month. Come 2011, it came down to one post a month. Now, due to my work at Columbia College, I'm somewhat surprised at the fact that I'd be able to do the one post a month. I write three 3-5 page papers every week, and I often have a major project's due date hanging over my head. If a month goes by where I don't post, dark lord forbid, don't be too surprised. Now, on to another of my rants...

News: Wanna totally lose faith in humanity? Since I started my work at Columbia, I've discovered a few stories that catch my radar. One story was about a Dutch shipbuilder who has been trying to show that the Bible is literally true by trying to build a life-sized model of Noah's Ark and taking a massive amount of measures just to make it seaworthy, including having it towed by smaller boats. Another is that, after 18 years in jail, the West Memphis 3 have finally gotten released, but only after releasing a statement that said that the prosecutor had a lot of damning evidence against them, even though, in real life, the best the prosecutor could do was that they listened to Metallica, dressed in black, and dabbled in paganism, all of which, to an extent, are qualities that apply to me. However, there's one thing that really makes my blood boil that I recently discovered: Josef Mengele Fangirls. Yes, you read that right. There are girls who are getting all hot over a Nazi War Criminal who created medical experiments so unspeakably disturbing that it even makes me wince. And yet, all over Deviantart, there are people who make fanart that makes him look like a cute little boy and photoshopped photos of him saying things like "I (heart) JM" that just serve as a place for his fangirls to drool over this monster. I can understand if there's art of him saying "Trust your doktor" with him grinning like Jack Nicholson. That's actually somewhat amusing in a Dead baby sort of way. What really disturbs me about all this is that it doesn't seem like these are just white supremacists who would deny the reality of Mengele's crimes against humanity. These seem, by all accounts, to be just normal people who seem to have a crush on a guy who liked to sew Jewish twins together. Suddenly, the mentality of Twilight fans seems less unsettling. And so, I leave you with a Bill Hicks quote:

"You know, we're f***ed up here. I tell you, Satan's gonna have no trouble taking over here 'cause all the women are gonna say: "What a cute butt." "He's Satan!" "You don't know him like I do." "He's the Prince of Darkness!" "I can change him." And I bet that's true, man. I wouldn't give Satan a snowball's chance in Hell against a woman's ego."

Film Idea: I had a dream. And it included a remake of David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers that is more utterly unhinged than the original, and in the roles that Jeremy Irons and Jeremy Irons originated, the Olsen Twins.

Link of the Day: The home of the most insightful and disturbing look into George Lucas' Star Wars Prequel Trilogy.

Meditations of Dirkus Aurelius: 51. Human relationships are often more trouble than they're worth.
52. Blood Drive workers are pretty blasé about the prospect of being a pawn in a Catholic Church-sponsored hoax.
53. The more the list goes on, the probability that anybody understands all the references I put in the first time dwindles.
54. The Doctor Clown Club will not allow you to base your clown persona on John Wayne Gacy.
55. The Doctor Clown Club will not allow you to base your clown persona on either member of the Insane Clown Posse
56. The Doctor Clown Club will not allow you to base your clown persona on Pennywise.
57. The Doctor Clown Club will not even allow you to base your clown persona on Mr. Jelly from Psychoville.
58. Audiences are not ready for a story where several plot lines hinge on an act of bestiality.
59. Do not talk about the Armenian genocide with a Turkish man.
60. Whistling Shania Twain's “Man! I Feel Like a Woman” does give away too much of the plot of The Wasp Factory.
61. Tom Waits will never get back to me about my numerous requests for him to cover “Barbie Girl” on his next album, whenver it comes out.
62. If whittling down a film idea to a few sentences, “This leads to sex” should not be the second one.
63. You cannot have sex with everything in the universe, so don't try to do so.
64. Justin Bieber is, in fact, male.
65. Colin Firth will never willingly strap a chainsaw to his groin and go hog wild in a movie.
66. Too few people appreciate singers with deep voices.
67. Sex in a car going over 90 miles an hour is just asking for trouble.
68. Sex with a car going over 90 miles an hour will not end well.
69. The number 69 is not, in and of itself, funny.
70. James Bond likes his martinis with vodka. He has also been pistol-whipped enough times that, if he was real, he would be brain-damaged. This link should be investigated further.
71. Even when we do get to the point of cloning humans, it will still take a long time to get people to have sex with their own clones.
72. The Bible does not tell you to smoke lots of pot.
73. I should not expect to have a piece of paper saying “Harry locked his mother in the closet” stay taped to the linen closet long just because my mother had a Jane Austen quote painted to the bathroom wall.
74. This applies even if the closet is too small to fit anyone in it and has no lock.
75. Religion doesn't change people. It just makes them more of the same person they already were.

Issue 198

News: My Mensis Horribilis. Things have not been easy for me since my family and I got back from Door County. A few days after we left for our yearly 2-week vacation in Door County, we heard reports about flooding around where I lived. The woman who was house-sitting for us at the time claimed that our house was not affected. However, it turned out that she only said that because she couldn't actually access the house itself. We arrived to find an odd smell coming from the basement, and we managed to find that the carpet was moist, there was mold on the walls and that some boxes of magazines that I had put on the floor had gotten damaged. Fortunately, I managed to get them all into the attic and I managed to save them all, with nary a sign of mold on any of them. That said, it seems like at least one magazine is M.I.A.: A 2005 issue of Guitar Player with Paul McCartney on the cover, which leads to another unfortunate thing that happened: It turned out that on August 1, we had two important things happening the same day that we had to go downtown for, but with all that was going on, we could do neither: One was to go to my orientation for Columbia College and the other was to go to the Paul McCartney concert that was happening at Wrigley Field. We had to reschedule the orientation (they had a last-ditch orientation date on the 29th, and I managed to get a class schedule put together in the meantime), and I had to miss out on seeing Paul McCartney live for the fourth time in my life. Given that, in all likelihood, I would have been dragged to the Chicago Diner (a place of which I have made my views abundantly clear a few blog entries ago), I think it might not be as bad as I thought it would be. Later, we had to move everything that was in the basement into the POD that we had rented specifically for the occasion. It was difficult directing a crew of six on the right way to clear the basement, and it was shocking to see them removing the carpet and large parts of the walls, and it was even more difficult getting everything in the pod by myself. Of course, even getting the basement in a condition where we could clear the pod was difficult, considering my mother's changing ideas on how to paint the floor, and the paint company's apparently giving two different shades of blue the same name. At one point, I managed to get a DVD copy of the play of mine that had been performed while I was in Wisconsin, and while I must say that the cops did pretty well, the homeless man somehow managed to think that the character was supposed to be a leprechaun. I have since revised this play in the hopes that this mistake is never repeated. Then, after all that was done, two things managed to break down. The first was my clothes dryer, which was fixed easily enough by a repairman, and then the second was my laptop: I accidentally dropped it and, while at first, it seemed to be fine (even if my internet browser did stall occasionally), it kept asking for a diskcheck, and so, I decided to do it. The diskcheck wound up going on for almost two days and, by the end of it, Windows managed to stop working completely on the computer, and we had to remove the hard drive. At work, some guys that Dad worked with claimed that nothing could be removed from it, but, as of now, he has managed to move my emails, my bookmarks, my MP3s, and my documents (although I haven't uploaded the former two on my backup laptop), and even though he has yet to get several folders, (the downloads [which contains the complete Ricky Gervais show podcasts], the pictures, and the videos) off the hard drive yet, this means that, unlike what I feared, the new feature I had put on the blog will not be stopped after just one installment. I honestly hope that, in the next few days, Dad can get everything else off of the hard drive that needs to be taken off it. Film Review: The Guard. This is the film debut of John Martin McDonagh, the brother of Martin McDonagh, a playwright/film director whom I think may be one of the greatest living playwrights (certainly one of the best under 50), and the film is still in very much the same style as his brother's work: Irishmen curse up a storm and commit violence. Hilarity and Tragedy ensue. In this case, Brendan Gleeson (Harry Potter's Mad-Eye Moody) plays a sleazy cop with a tendency to steal from dead people (his opening scene has him raiding the pockets of the victim of a car crash for a tab of LSD), play arcade games instead of working, and taking days off to have sex with hookers. He is paired with a straight-laced FBI agent (played by Don Cheadle) to capture the drug smugglers who (we eventually find out) killed his partner. Meanwhile, despite having a subplot about the lead character's mother dying, the movie is actually quite hilarious. One scene in particular had me in stitches; on Gleeson's day off, Cheadle sets off to Connamera on his own to question the locals. Nobody told him that in Connamera, nobody speaks English, and he doesn't speak any Gaelic. In a moment of desperation, he actually questions a horse whether he saw anything or not. Meditations of Dirkus Aurelius Part II: 26.Just because there are no laws on the books against necrophilia doesn't mean that you are immune from getting stuck with some charge. 27.I cannot convince anyone that any incident that I do not wish to hear about is a dream. 28.Any film that has two girls snogging automatically has one redeeming feature. 29.Filling an artificial vagina with hair chafes like hell. 30.Australians do not need you to remind you that every living thing on the island can kill you, the sheep included. 31.There are better things to make fun of the Mormons for than long underwear. 32.Renee Zellweger is, in fact, female. 33.“Try the cock, you know where it's been,” is not one of the ten commandments. 34.It takes hard work to create a Black Ops squad to do things that make no sense whatsoever. 35.Sam Shephard is the Chuck Norris of American Playwrights. 36.The more improbable the deed, the less likely you are to be punished. 37.The thin breadknife in the basement is not a machete. 38.If crossdressing, please try to make as little sense as possible. 39.“Fuck Robots, dahl-ink” is not a good slogan for anything. 40.More of this is true than you want to know. 41.If we take the time to get to know them, we would all find a lot of reasons to hate everyone else. 42.Nobody knows who Alexander Nevsky is, so try to not reference him too much. 43.Fish are not a lethal weapon when used on dry land. 44.Unless otherwise noted, all bishops will be presumed to believe in God. 45.Having a big pecker is not necessarily a good thing. 46.Anything that makes my mother uneasy is automatically a good thing. 47.Mentioning Richard Gere's Breathless in front of a film buff may be hazardous for your health. 48.Just because I can legally perform marriages doesn't necessarily mean I have to approve of them. 49.Lesson #2 still applies even if it's put in a phial with the directions to the nearest sperm bank attached to it. 50.Americans do not tend to get British spelling.

Issue 187

News: The Beat Books of (the many I read in) 2010.
Well, I've seen a few more films in theaters than I did last year. All things noted, however, I read a lot of books in the last year. How many, you may ask? Well, my original shortlist for this one happened to be 25 books. It took a while for me to be able to narrow it down to ten. And here's just the ten I felt were the best I had read, and no, none of them had been published in 2010.

10. Flashman by George MacDonald Fraser.
For the benefit of all of you who don't know, Harry Paget Flashman was the bully in the Victorian schoolboy's novel Tom Brown's Schooldays. This novel covers his life in the years after being expelled from Rugby school for drunkenness, wherein he joins the army and manages to gain some clout by shooting the top off a bottle (by complete accident), and gaining a heroic reputation (culminating in meeting Queen Victoria) in India despite being a total coward. The thing that really interested me was that it was apparently so historically accurate that, upon publication, several reviewers (particularly Americans) assumed that they were genuine. It's the first in a series of twelve novels, and I have yet to read the other eleven, but I can only expect more of the same.

9. If Chins Could Kill by Bruce Campbell.
On the prodding of a classmate in my recent film class, I decided to read this book. I hesitated, because of the fact that I never went in for the "private lives of the stars" sort of books. However, unlike most of the stars who've had books written about them, Bruce, at least at first, had a pretty hands-on role in the making of many of the films. He includes a setup for some of the camera tricks devised for the Evil Dead movies and even a recipe for blood used in the original. The classmate who recommended this to me also suggested I try and make that fake blood and see if it's edible, but I haven't. That said, considering that all the ingredients are edible, I think it is, but doubt that it would be appetising.

8. Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson.
This movie is probably one of the most frequently adapted novels in history, but, surprisingly, very few of those adaptations even bothered to take the original plot structure from the original. The more I looked into the adaptations, I found only two filmed versions that kept the original idea: 1971's I Monster, which changed the protagonist's names, and the Wishbone adaptation that squished the story into 15 minutes and made the main character a dog. And by main character, I mean Gabriel Utterson, who is, for some reason, left out of almost every adaptation. Why? After all, it's a perfectly good idea to let the audience figure out what had happened slowly, and at least make an effort of making it seem like the fact that Jekyll and Hyde are the same person was a twist. The fact that so many adaptations decided to establish early on that Jekyll and Hyde are one and the same is just as idiotic an idea as making a version of The Sixth Sense where everybody knows up front that the Bruce Willis character is supposed to be a ghost. Of course, like with Flashman, I had read this on audiobook, and there were some flaws with both of them: With Flashman, the footnotes were not read (the ones which reinforced the massive amount of research Fraser put into them), and for this one, the narrator mispronounced Jekyll's name. As much as I like Spencer Tracy, I blame him (and his 1940 film of the book) for the popular mispronunciation of Jekyll as Jeck-ull. According to Stevenson, it was Jee-kull. Rant over, on to book 7.

7. The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran and the Dhammapada.
What else is there to say about The Prophet? Behind Lao-Tsu, Shakespeare, and King David, this book is one of the most-read collections of poetry in recorded history. And, the fact is, his musings on the condition of living still hold up pretty well. He has succeeded in becoming timeless. I also include the Dhammapada in the same category because its subject is the same as the Prophet, but it was written by an actual religious figure. In short, it's probably one of the most solid-seeming religious texts, in my opinion.

6. Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris.
Well, this is a book about the making of a great man, namely, Theodore Roosevelt. This is the first part of a three-volume biography of Roosevelt, and this volume covers his life from birth to getting the news that President McKinley got assassinated, and it's surprising the amount of positions he managed to get before the age of 42, from published author, to secretary of the Navy, to war hero, to NYPD Commissioner, to personification of masculinity. I read Theodore Rex, the second volume, and I didn't find it as interesting as the first volume, and I have yet to read the last volume, Colonel Roosevelt, (due to wanting to get paperback edition to match my copies of the first two).

5. Angels in America by Tony Kushner.
The plot of this play is very hard to summarise: When I told my dad about it, I only managed to cover the subplot about Prior Walter. Indeed, much of the plot could be accurately be described as "gay guys talking about politics." Surprisingly, despite all of this, it manages to work as the most epic work written for the stage since Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung. Why? You'll just have to read it, or, possibly, watch the HBO miniseries based on the play, to find out.

4. The Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgman.
I discovered this book based to TVTropes due to its being categorised as a "weird american thing." In essence, this book is an almanac of completely made-up facts (in fact, many of the facts given are half-true). Considering the complete insanity of many of the facts (things like otters being called lobsters and being driven to extinction by new lobsters, or an escalating war of strange precipitation between Milwaukee and Richmond, VA) makes one wonder about the kind of world in which it is true. This is, once again, the first in a projected trilogy, and only the first two published yet. I have just started to read the second book, and it's actually a worthy successor to the original.

3. Autobiography of Malcolm X.
Due to the intricacies of my reading queue, I waited a while to start to read this book, but when I actually managed to get into reading this book, I was surprised by the conversational style of this book. The tone of the book seemed almost exactly like I was having a conversation with the man himself, and it really felt like what you'd expect when you talked with an orator. And I even managed to gain more insight into the beliefs of the nation of Islam, and even the bizarre nature of the genetics that the story of Yakub and the creation of the other races (other than Black). The afterword by the ghostwriter Alex Haley even gave more insight into the man's life and the book's creation.

2. The Ice Man by Philip Carlo.
For a while, I was on a big kick of reading books about hitmen, in the hopes that I could create a hitman story of my own. It didn't work out. Along with the two books written by Joey Black (an actual hitman), this work formed the non-fiction part of my research (I really wished I could find more non-fiction books focusing on the lives of hitmen, but there you go.) This book is about a man named Richard Kuklinski who claimed to have killed over 300 people and worked for all of New York's five families (since he wasn't Italian, he couldn't "get made" into any one family). The fact is, that, despite many questions that have been raised about the veracity of many of Kuklinski's claims, it's actually a very compelling story, and even on this level, it's still a must-read. Surprisingly, despite the fact that this is the story of a career killer who talked about killing people with no discernible emotion, this actually contains one of the most touching scenes I've ever read: while meeting his second wife's family, they take him to a Thanksgiving dinner, and Richard, for the first time, manages to discover for the first time, the phenomenon of being loved unconditionally by a family (his own was abusive, and his father even killed his own son Florian.) Naturally, this shift in tone does not last long.

1. Requiem For a Dream by Hubert Selby Jr.
Yes, Hubert Selby is one of my favourite authors, and I read his four major novels, and, apart from Last Exit to Brooklyn, this is probably his best known novel. It's also one of the most disturbing novels ever written (but surprisingly, not even the most disturbing one written by Selby, that honour going to The Room), and, especially in this book, the bizarre nature of his typography (ridiculously huge indentations for paragraphs and replacing apostrophes with slash marks) enhances the disturbing mood created by his books by disorienting his reader, so that, if the acts being described don't disturb the reader, the confusion will ensure that his novel has a profound effect on the reader. The movie only concentrates the 300-page novel into a 100-minute film, and very effectively, I may add.

Film Idea of the Day: The keyboardist for a band ends up falling in love with an angel. This love forces him and his bandmates into a battle between them and the forces of the Almighty. The plot is, in essence Scott Pilgrim meets His Dark Materials, and should ideally include satire that covers everything from religion to the Twilight saga to eagle feather law.

Film Review of the Day: Black Swan. Like the film version of Requiem for a Dream, this was directed by Darren Aronofsky. Although I haven't been keeping abreast of his career since Requiem, it did seem like a big stylistic leap between the editing-driven, visceral Requiem and the surreal horror of Black Swan. That said, he did apparently release two films between Requiem and Black Swan, but I haven't seen them. Despite not being what I would have expected from the man who made Requiem for a Dream, and the subject matter (Ballet) not being something I'm particularly interested in, it was quite good. It really helps that there was a scene in which the two main dancers have sex with each other. Hot girl on girl action does tend to improve a movie, at least in my estimation.

Quote of the Day: "When a prosecutor loses a case, do you think he's happy that an innocent man walks free? No, they're angry that they've lost a chance at the governor's mansion."
_____________Hubert Selby Jr., The Room (actually a paraphrase of something in that book. If I were able to find the correct words, I would have posted them.) Food for thought for anybody who watches Nancy Grace regularly.

Link of the Day: My Film Teacher's Blog.

Tract Reviews: Uninvited. Jack Chick returns to the subject of AIDS, and makes claims that should be obviously false to anybody who has studied AIDS since the name was adopted in 1983. There are facts that should be obvious to anybody with two brain cells to rub together that Jack ignores. Here are some of them, for the benefit of anybody who doesn't want to read this tract.

*AIDS is no longer quite the Death Sentence it once was. If identified early enough, it can be kept in control with anti-retroviral drugs. I could just be talking about being HIV positive, though.
*If a six-year-old girl gets raped and left for dead, shouldn't she have had more extreme problems to worry about than possibly becoming a lesbian? Even disregarding physical problems, shouldn't she be scared that it could have happened again, thus ruining her trust for other people for at least several decades?
*Come to think of it, while it would be an oversimplification to state that homosexuality is wholly genetic, there's very significant evidence of genetic influence in sexual orientation. And it certainly does not come about just because they got molested as kids.
*AIDS does not just happen to gay people. In fact, there's also a significant amount of people who got it from heterosexual contact.

I really wish I didn't have to say these facts, but apparently, I do.

Shout out: Another guy has started to follow the blog, his name is life.experienced.

Issue 182

News: This news item made me laugh more than any in recent times.
Folks, it's been a long time since I last updated this blog, and there's been a lot of news, and I think the best news in that time is Barack Obama officially declaring Operation Iraqi Freedom finished, leading to the eventual end of the war, actually doing something that contradicts my image of him as being a big letdown of a president. However, one other story I've found interesting has broken through recently; 39 grand-nephews of Adolf Hitler have been located, and their DNA has been analyzed. It has long been noted that Hitler fell far short of the "Aryan" ideal of blonde, blue-eyed supermen, but one result has been surprising: he had a rare gene called Haplogroup E1b1b1, that is most common among North Africans, and, (this is the kicker) Jews. So, in essence, Adolf Hitler, the man who probably made the most headway in the attempts to destroy the Jews, was, in fact, probably Jewish, and not only Jewish, but also possibly Black. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAAHAH!!!!! Surprisingly, the rumors that he was partly Jewish were long circulating that allegedly, Hitler's paternal grandfather was Jewish, but those rumors are believed to be just that among historians, and, of course, Hitler wouldn't have been accepted as a Jew, since the descent is maternal. However, if the information in the article is true, there must have been some Jewish blood somewhere along the line.

Film Idea of the Day: Pore Jud is Laiv (sic). Some time void opens up in the world of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma, and several characters are transported to the era when the film based on their lives is touring on the roadshow circuit. Several other contemporary films (the only ones I can think of right now being Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and The Searchers) suffer a similar phenomenon and eventually split into factions led by Jud and Curly (both from Oklahoma!,) and both are portrayed as anti-heroes, taking their characterizations in the film (as a lovesick drunk who may possibly be a serial killer, and the man who tries to get him to kill himself over a picnic basket.) I hope to give them something larger to fight about than a woman's affection if all the assorted companies that hold the copyrights will allow this Massively Multiplayer Crossover Event to exist.

Review of the Day: Downfall. Yes, this is the movie from which all the "Angry Hitler" clips came, and I'm probably one of the few people who was inspired to watch the movie due to the clips, and I still have to admit that, while it is one in a long line of German "scar films" that deal with the legacy of totalitarianism in their country, or countries, it is different in that, for the first time, Hitler himself is portrayed in a German movie as a human being and not a bogeyman lurking in the shadows. Don't get me wrong, even in this movie the Fuhrer is beyond pity (especially since he not only brags about the genocide he's committed, but also suggests a scorched-earth policy with regards to his own people), but in doing so, it ultimately reminds the audience that, as human as Hitler was, he was ultimately a truly degraded specimen, especially in those last days.

Link of the Day: Come on, you knew this one had to come.

Quote: "Your challenge is to write crossover fanfiction combining Chronicles of Narnia and World War II. The story should use a secret government plot as a plot device!"
_______________The Terrible Crossover Fanfiction Idea Generator, apparently unaware that Pan's Labytinth Already exists.

Tract Review: Stinky. An extremely dull Halloween tract, this one is mainly notable for being yet another incident of obvious self-promotion on Jack's part, with two kids being saved by a Chick Tract, and Satan going ballistic due to one smuggled into Hell.

Issue 132

News: Regarding OJ: The People Can Now Have it both ways!
As I'm sure we all remember, Footballer OJ Simpson was arrested 14 years ago on suspicion of murdering his wife and a house guest. Of course, after a year's worth of creating media circuses, and further dividing the races in America, with some claiming he was framed by a racist conspiracy (something I'm sure has happened in the recent past to many, but not to O.J.), and some just deciding he was guilty. But an eighth of a century later, he stole some memorabilia from a Vegas sports museum, but recently, he was finally found guilty. He may not have admitted to having done most of the things he was charged for, but the stealing of memorabilia that he has admitted to would probably give him enough prison time to get him in jail for a long enough time that it is reasonable that he will spend the rest of his life in jail, and the other crimes he's been found guilty for make this scenario more or less certain. And now, it looks like people who think he didn't kill those people can think he didn't, and those who think he did can finally see him end up in jail for the rest of his natural life.

Band Name of the Day: Crazy pSychos of America. Why not?

Film Idea of the Day: A set of novellas, all unified by the fact that a main character is a princess in situations that couldn't be farther than
*A novella which is best described as Roman Holiday meets Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, with a princess visiting Chicago runs off with a journalist, and they both fall in love, tour Chicago, and do massive amounts of drugs.
*A film director is doing a film based on the story of a girl who discovers she is really the next in line to a monarchy, and slowly goes mad while making it, turning it into something more bizarre than anybody could have imagined.

Film Review of the Day: Preacher. I recently discovered this comic book series, and it is actually quite interesting. A preacher is possessed by the progeny of an angel and a demon, and then is driven, along with his reconciled ex-girlfriend and an Irish vampire, to literally find God, and try to demand an explanation for what has happened. This series has many similar themes to the His Dark Materials trilogy, and probably would have ended up with a more popular adaptation than Golden Compass seems to have been so far.

Quote of the Day: "Every Virtue has its contemptible literature"
_______________Celine.

Link of the Day: A website about Skepticism.

Issue 123

News: And Now... The Rest of the Story.
In 1952, Betty Falco was finishing up a divorce from her husband, and at the same time, she was having an affair with a man named Joe. Eventually she got pregnant with his love child. and yet her divorce wasn't final. Back in those days, women who got pregnant outside of wedlock were made outcasts and social pariahs, and one can only imagine what she must have felt as a not only a woman pregnant outside of wedlock, but a divorcee as well, which had the same social effects. When Joe found out about the pregnancy, he said that there was only one thing to do: get rid of it. This was twenty years before the decision of Roe vs. Wad, so abortion wasn't legal. There were only two things to do: Follow his instruction and get an abortion, thus breaking the law and possibly affecting her future fertility, or disobey him and have the baby. A few months later, she finally gave birth to her baby and named him Richard. He was immediately put up for adoption and a week later, was adopted by a couple; two hardware store owners named the Berkowitzes, and they gave him the name David, in homage to the great Israelite king. And the circumstances around these events led to David Berkowitz doing the one thing he would end up becoming famous for: The Son of Sam murders. And Now You Know... The Rest of the Story.
(The preceding piece is a lampoon of the style of Paul Harvey.)

Band Name of the day: Johnny At The Fair.

Film Idea of the Day: A juvenile delinquent is put in charge of a play in return for a suspended sentence for an ever-growing list of crimes.

Film Review of the Day: Even Cowgirls Get The Blues (The Book and the Movie). Recently I managed to both read the entire book and watch the movie. The plot starts out simply enough, as the story of a woman with large thumbs who becomes a hitchhiker, but it eventually gets more complicated, involving such diverse topics as politics, religion, sexuality, enviromentalism, and drug use. In the end, I must say that the film, as good as it is, does, in the end, fail to capture the book's eclectic glory, although, to be fair, it would certainly be hard to put this book into film form, although the film's creators do try hard and ultimately do the best they can. The novel itself must be, in my opinion, one of the best novels of the 1970s, and certianly one of the best comic novels of all time.

Quote of the Day: "All of us are freaks in one way or another. Try being born a male Russian Countess into a white, middle class, Baptist family in Mississippi, and you'll see what I mean."
___________________________________The Countess, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.

Link of the Day: Snopes: A site for all those urbam myths you've heard, and some about emails you may have recieved. I'm surprised I've gone this far without linking here.

Issue 44: Special Fourth of July Edition!!!!

News: Stomping a misconception about our founding fathers.
In Honor of Independence Day, I would like to effectively stomp out a misconception propagated by conservatives and outspoken religious folk; All the founding fathers were God-Fearing Christians. This is of course, not true. One person in particular, Thomas Jefferson, the writer of the Declaration of Independence, and "reason for the season", was frequently accused of being an Atheist in his own time. While he wasn't an atheist, per se, he was a deist, which was at the time, the closest thing that was socially acceptable in the 18th Century (Deism saying that there was a creator of the universe, but that that creator ceased to be relavent after creation, and often that Jesus was a great moral teacher, but not the Son of God), and with that in mind, he created a book which he called "The Jefferson Bible", which was essentially a secularized version of the Gospels. Many people, when informed of this, say that he wrote it as an introduction to the Bible to prosceletyze to Indians. I doubt this, because it leaves out what is possibly the most important part and the part most relevant to Christianity; The Resurrection, choosing to end it with Jesus' Burial. Also, he refused to issue official proclamations for official days of prayer, as his predecessors did. Come to think of it, there were several quotations which go on record as being against the Church, including "In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.", which came from an 1815 letter to a friend and recently used in an issue of "I Drew This", as well as another, longe quote which is in the quotes section for your reading pleasure.

Band Name of the Day: Gangrenous Hand. This came on yesterday's edition of the Steve Dahl Show. I don't exactly remember the context, but I do remmeber that it was mentioned that Gangrenous Hand would make a good band name.

Film Idea: More of a play Idea about a family who houses two cousins; One a freethinker and one an Evangelist. This is loosely based on Jack T. Chick's A Solution to the Marriage Mess, albeit with an equally strong freethinking cousin as well as the evangelist staying with the family.

Film Review: Captains Courageous. This Film adaption of Rudyard Kipling's novel, which surprisingly, steers away from the frequently Imperialistic themes in many of his works, is the story of a spoiled brat whose life is saved by a group of fishermen who managed to turn the kid into a mature young man, who barely seems to be what he was before. This film manages to become the best film adaption of Kipling I have ever seen.

Quote of the Day: " I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature.....Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burned, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion?To make half the world fools and half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the world."
_______________Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia.

Link of the day: A site to show where you stand on the political Compass. I stand (-2.38, -5.95)

Issue 36

News: Oswald alone? I doubt it.
November 22, 1963. A day which will live in infamy. Just before 12:30 PM (Central time), The president was killed. Later that day, a man named Oswald was arrested in connection with these events. A few days later another man killed the assassin. But was the version we are told to believe actually true? I believe that there were a number of factors which helped contribute to the assassination, mostly coming from the government. One major thing was the fact that the person who had the most to gain was LBJ, because he would wind up with the presidency, and it was known that he was going to be dropped from the vice-presidential ballot in the next election. Another thing to note was that even in 1963, we had troops in Vietnam, although we were only there for a police action at that point, and Kennedy intended to get the USA out of Vietnam starting 1965, before it became the atrocity it eventually did become. Johnson, however, escalated US conflict in Vietnam by the time Kennedy had intended to bring the boys home. Of course, there is also one other thing to note: Jack ruby, the assassin's assassin, worked for the FBI for several years as an informant. My take on Oswald's assassination was that the Secret Service decided to kill Oswald to ensure that Oswald would not blab the conspiracy to the public, in their signature combination of Ruthless Psychopathy and Calculating Precision. But on to the actual incident. At the scene of the crime, there was a bullet which was the only one claimed to be found at the crime scene with virtually no sign of having been shot (blood, human tissue, thread) except it had been slightly bent. I wouldn't be surprised if Oswald was an assassin, but not the only one. But of course, I could be wrong. Maybe the bullet did go in through Kennedy's throat, and change direction and go into Conolly's Shoulder.

Band Name: Oombaoojiebaseo (See http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/55133 for more information. )

Film idea of the day: A film which is part narrative of the life of a civil servant in the government, part conspiracy theory. The former definitely not based on a true story.

Film Review of the day: The Thrill of it All. Another Jewison (his third film reviewed here) Classic starring Doris Day and James Garner. In it, Doris plays a housewife who tells the story about how a brand of soap got her daughter clean during a dinner with the executive of the company who created it, and winds up doing a commercial and becoming their company's spokeswoman, while her doctor husband counsels a pregnant woman during that same period of time. During this time, the husband gets jealous of his wife making more money, even filling their pool (which they gain through the course of the movie) with soap suds in anger, but they ultimately make up when they both have to deliver the pregnant woman's baby. Normally, I don't find Doris Day's movies to be truly worthy of review here, but this one is so funny that I just had to write.

Quote of the Day: "My name is beverly Boyer and I'm a pig."
________ Doris Day, The Thrill of it All. (From her first commercial in the film.)

Link of the Day: A site which effectively mirrors my abortion views.