Issue 202

News: Definite Hiatus in Updates.
You may notice that in the past eight months, I only posted four times. One post every two months. Now, it looks like I'm going to have to do some definite changes in when I update. As I mentioned earlier, I'm currently enrolled in Columbia College Chicago. Now, my workload is even heavier than usual. Right now, I have several stories that I need to write, a big creative essay on Crime and Punishment, a presentation on Bret Easton Ellis, a full-length one act play, and an essay on art in the Weimar Republic. As a result, I have decided to put this blog on an indefinite hiatus until the semester is over, and I will most likely put it back on when school comes back in September, even if my workload will be lighter than it is now. I simply cannot update the blog with any regularity with all this happening. I apologise to all the people following my blog, all five of you. But now that I've got that out of the way, I'd like to write the reviews for two films I've wanted to see.

The Adventures of Tintin: I've been a big fan of the Tintin series for years, and I've been excited to see it come out for a long time. Let me put it this way, while I was in my first semester in Fall 2008, this film was being shot. It only came out in December 2011, and I waited all that time to see it. How was it? It was pretty good. Even the motion capture looked pretty good. Spielberg fulfilled the promise to make it look like the characters were "real people, but real Herge people." And speaking of the characters, the acting is incredible. Jamie Bell's Tintin in particular is better than I could have imagined, he even manages to say the phrase "Great snakes!" with conviction I didn't know was possible. Surprisingly, Nick Frost and Simon Pegg voice Thomson and Thompson, but, despite the pair starring in one of my favourite comedies, Hot Fuzz, their performance didn't play that up too much. The plot is based on two albums, Crab with the Golden Claws, and The Secret of the Unicorn, and the script really does its hardest to streamline the two into one consolidated story, and even though it ends on a sequel hook, which I normally hate, it is justified because the sequel is definitely being made now. There were a few things I didn't really like about it: 1) Why does the model of the Unicorn catch Tintin's eye? In the original, he thinks it would be a good gift for Haddock, but since they don't meet until halfway through the movie, why? 2) The plan to steal the third model of the Unicorn is just insane: the model is displayed under bulletproof glass in direct sunlight (Just look at The Last Supper to see the impact of sunlight on valuable art), and so they hire Bianca Castafiore to perform with the ship behind her so it can shatter when she reaches a high note (while it's possible [if hard] to do this for regular glass, it really can't be done for Bulletproof glass.) This would be a miinor quibble, but considering that Herge did his damnedest to research his stories, it just seems out of place. 3) Why doesn't Bianca Castafiore sing her trademark "Jewel Aria"? Or are they saving that for the sequel?

We Need to Talk About Kevin: This book really is the story not of Kevin Khatchadourian, the school shooter, but of his mother Eva, and if you had any doubts about that reading the book, watch the movie. It's her show; Tilda Swinton stars and gives an amazing performance, and, in the scenes that are supposed to be set in the "present-day," she works so masterfully with silence that if The Artist spawns a new wave of silent films, she should definitely make a career with that. The major problem I have with the movie is its amazingly slow pacing; the first scene has what can only be called a "Ragu orgy," and, due to its relatively non-linear structure, it takes about ten minutes before anything identifiable from the novel is on screen. When I say the structure is non-linear, I mean it goes between two plots; one set in the "present-day," where Eva has to cope with her life after the loss of her family (original to the film), and the other dealing with how her son turned into a killer. While a lot of incidents were cut out, it's still fairly easy to piece the events together, although reading the book may help. The cast is pretty good, except for John C. Reilly. He's way too much of a nonentity in this film to be believable as Kevin's "favourite" parent.

Tract Review: Global Warming: Jack decides to take on Global Warming. He spends half the tract ridiculing scientists who predicted catastrophes, and then decides that they're actually right, at least in that the world is ending, but at least Jack doesn't make the mistake of setting any dates. Highlights: someone who looks like Al Gore with a pencil-thin moustache insults his TV audience; in the latest display of Jack actually being knowledgable about secular culture, the cast of Young Frankenstein causes global warming; Jack's remarks about Nostradamus show that he apparently didn't watch television in 1999 (going by the Pinky and the Brain clones in The Awful Truth, he might have been upset by the show's cancellation the previous year); polar bears and vultures coexisting peacefully; a teamster broke into the wrong protest; in the biggest "WTF" moment Jack has brought to us since "Moving on Up," he claims that climatologists pray to the Mayan gods and Gaia (represented by a Venus of Willendorf, pixellated for your protection); some people of different religions share their incoherent opinions of Christ (like he "had a devil" or "was queer"); and God is responsible for global warming because he's a sociopath with no more regard for his followers than Alexander DeLarge.

Link: Another site that dissects Chick Tracts.

And now, the next 25 in my list of life lessons.

1. Korn will never top “Daddy.”
2. If I ever do get Jeremy Irons to sing a song entitled “You're f***ing a mutant,” there will be thousands of comments asking “Is this 2008?”
3. As Gabriel Byrne has shown, plate armour is not a good contraceptive.
4. If the question is “A or B,” the answer is “Yes.”
5. Nobody makes wicker toilets.
6. God does not hate lamp.
7. Given that in its original context, it is a prelude to both mass murder and the breakup of the people getting married, there are few pieces of music less suited for being played at weddings than Wagner's Bridal Chorus.
8. Except for “And I Will Always Love You.”
9. Just because you don't believe in God doesn't mean you can't become a minister and be legally entitled to add the title Rev. to your name.
10. There is actually a dance song where one of the moves is “sleep!”
11. My name is not Mr. B. Elzebub.
12. Nobody really listens to each other, and they probably never did.
13. There is no such thing as a homeless-sexual.
14. A Day at the Races did not predict the Rwandan genocide.
15. So many great works of art could have been averted if the characters had any goddamn sense.
16. No more digging up Billy Mays' grave without bringing a Necronomicon ex Mortis.
17. Until cannibalism is made legal, veal is the next best thing.
18. Many films could be improved with the addition of a character with a talking body part.
19. If you can't make the connection between Air Force One and the Air Force, you have no business writing political thrillers.
20. Sam Shepherd learned to fly a plane for The Right Stuff, and also learned to survive while riding on the plane's roof during a supersonic flight.
21. Satan does not answer to the name “The one whose little path would make me sad.”
22. No bucket list is complete without a major societal taboo.
23. The Insane Clown Posse was more fun when they were just rapping about over-the-top sex and violence and not just being idiots.
24. For the man who is seeking the affections of the 12-year old cancer girl: I would strongly suggest you get the help you need. I'm not that messed up. At least, I hope not.
25. It is better to be a fool than to be a Lear.

Issue 201

News: The Ten Best Books of (the many I read in the second half of) 2011.
Well, it's been a total of two months since I last posted, so I've decided that I'll write another list of books: this time, I'll cover the ones I thought were the best I read in the last six months of last year. Admittedly, the selection pool this time is much shallower than last time; I've had much less time to actually read, due to my new life in Columbia: I've had to turn in a 5-page story every week for four months, so I had much less leisure time to just read. For what it's worth, in my reading queues, I have two books which I hope could put into the next year's queue: The History of Love by Nichole Krauss, and The Life of Pi by Yann Martel.

10. I am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to Be Your Class President by Josh Lieb.
For some reason, I wound up getting interested in this book during the summer even though I didn't get it in the previous year plus it was out. Anyway, when I was in Door County, I actually found a copy of the book in a bookstore in Bailey's Harbor. When it finally came up in my reading queue, I wound up enjoying it, as I knew I would; in the way Josh Lieb portrays his main character as being dim to everyone else, but is, in reality, an evil genius, he recalls, of all people, Jim Thompson's Lou Ford, the sheriff who seems a bit slow on the uptake, but is, in reality, a genius prone to going off on tangents related to people who are obscure to the target audience (well, at least more teenagers know who Captain Beefheart is than pulp fiction readers in the 1950s knew who Emil Kraeplin was.) The reason I put it so low on the list? The ending. In the end, instead of giving a speech explaining why the main character wants people to vote for him, he goes off on a big speech talking about how he's realised that all elections are just one big popularity contest. True as that may be, Josh Lieb has been building up a big climax, and all we get is this speech? This has to be the most disappointing ending to a book that I've ever read.

9. Silas Marner by George Eliot
I first read this book when I was a kid who loved the way Wishbone did it, but for whatever reason, I decided to revisit the book in October. I must admit that the big reason that this book made the list at all was because it was there for me at the right time: around the time I rediscovered it, I had to find a way to make a photo-roman: a selection of images that tells a story, and I was at an impasse; my previous two assignments were difficult enough, but to add to that, I had to create a big story; I decided to create a very loose adaptation of this book. Silas was a private accountant, Eppie was a dog, and Silas did end up getting his money back.

8. The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson.
A couple years ago, I saw a film called The Men Who Stare at Goats, and, as it turned out, it was based on a true story chronicled by a journalist named Jon Ronson. Recently, he wrote another book, in an area I find very interesting: mental illness. He wrote this relatively short book about psychopathy, and looked in a lot of places; from old psychological experiments, to Bob Hare and his split with the psychiatric community, to a young McMurphy type who is a psychopath, to the Scientologists who want him freed to possibly psychopathic CEOs to 9/11 Truthers who claim to be the Messiah. He ends up with more questions than answers, but even still, it is very informative.

7. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
I have a great variety of sources that I consult to see just what books I should put into my reading queue, and one of them is from the Art of Manliness, which has a list of 100 books every man should read. I've read 72 of them, and one of them is Into the Wild. What I found truly interesting about this book is the fact that Krakauer is able to spin the tragic story of Christopher McCandless in a way that is somehow both detached and sympathetic; Krakauer, as an outdoorsman who would, a couple years later, climb Everest, can definitely feel what McCandless sought in the Alaskan wilderness, but, at the same time, he knew that he was a fool for trying with so few supplies.

6. Like Water For Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
I have a book recommendation service online and, for a couple months, the program had decided to put this in my recommendations list. I decided to give it a miss until I decided to listen to the audiobook, and I was quite impressed, although if not for the fact that I had been assigned another multi-generational Latin American woman family saga (Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban) made me realise how good it was. The characters are interesting, a lot's at stake, and the plot was interesting.

5. Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
I'd been thinking of reading this book for a while, and when I decided to actually get it, I was really amazed. I had read three of Garcia Marquez' books this year (the other two being Memories of my Melancholy Whores and One Hundred Years of Soliutude), but this is really his best work. It's no wonder that the year after he had this published, he got the Nobel Literature Prize. In fact, I am seriously considering, if I ever end up as a filmmaker, adapting this into a film, and not just any film, a Spaghetti Western. The deconstruction of conservative values and unsympathetic main characters do seem like they would work well with the genre.

3 and 4. Look Me In the Eye by John Elder Robison, and Born on a Blue Day by Daniel Tammet.
The Autism Spectrum: its forms are legion. That's one thing that really makes autism spectrum disorders interesting to me (apart from the fact that I have one), and certainly what makes reading about Autism Spectrum Disorders interesting; it can have very different effects on the lives of different people. For instance, in John Robison's story, he wound up as a high school dropout who made a living working on electronics and touring with KISS. Meanwhile, there's Daniel Tammet; he has a savant syndrome, and broke the world record for reciting the digits of pi, and runs a language learning software. And then, there's Christian Weston Chandler, and the less said about him the better. As for the books, on the one hand, it's easier for me to identify with Robison (no doubt due to the fact that Tammet is both gay and Christian, and I can't see the point to memorising pi to several thousand digits when 39 digits is enough to calculate the circumference of a circle the size of the known universe with a margin of error the size of a hydrogen atom.) On the other hand, Tammet does have an extremely clear and concise writing style that does the job of describing what goes on in his head extremely well.

2. The Essential Schopenhauer by Arthur Schopenhauer.
I think I've mentioned before that I consider Arthur Schopenhauer to be my favourite philosopher. If I haven't, well, now you know. There's not much material that's new to me; indeed, there's quite a bit of overlap with Penguin's Essays and Aphorisms. But the fact is that there's not a lot of Schopenhauer's writing that's publicly available in book form (at least not in a form that you don't have to pay far out the ass for), but this is definitely one of the better compilations.

1. The Instructions by Adam Levin.
It's a book I've been wanting to read for a while, primarily because the sheer size of its paperback edition struck me. But then, I looked into the plot synopsis. In essence, it's sort of like Lindsay Anderson's If, if that were set in a  Chicago-area primary school. And the idea of a revolutionary drama set in a public school is an idea I have long considered toying with, but after reading this book, I know that I can find a way to make such a story work without having the story remind one too much of Columbine.

Chick Tract Review: Here Comes the Judge. So, it looks like Jack's come full circle. In one of his early tracts, he put a "Here Come de Judge" reference (which shows how long he's been in the game), and now it's the title of his latest tract. It's a really incoherent tale of corruption. A judge hires a man killed for reasons never fully explained, and frames his wife on both murder and drug charges. For some reason, the governor has a guy put a hit out on the judge through video monitors. It's like The Wire, but even less coherent. But then, the judge's butler goes into his hospital room and talks to him about Jesus, including the bit about Revelation. After being rebuffed, the judge finally gets killed.  Overall, it's a goddamn mess of a tract.

1. You, too, can be a rebel with neither a cause nor an effect.
2. Never take anything the Ultimate Warrior says seriously.
3. There is no such thing as a “Siamese Pecker.” Nor should there be.
4. Just because Debbie Gibson and Tiffany have made a movie together does not mean they'll finally make the video of them going gay that Bill Hicks suggested they do 20 years ago.
5. Just because Bill Hicks' material has aged better than any comedian who dealt with topical issues 20 years ago has any right to doesn't mean that he is a physical manifestation of some God.
6. It is too late to seek out Billy Mays and have gay sex with him.
7. If David Icke is right and the world is secretly ruled by lizard men, they must be headquartered in Los Angeles.
8. Some people apparently can sleep without showing any signs of life.
9. People tend to take the news that you have a history of going into fugue states and threatening people's lives pretty well.
10. Regardless of what Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon may imply, The Chinese are still subject to the laws of gravity.
11. No self-respecting American film studio will ever pick up a film made in Esperanto, specifically designed to make as little sense as humanly possible entitled Death To America, no matter how steeped in cinematic history the script may be.
12. Charlize Theron is the only real African-American star in the film business today.
13. Telling white people who have done good things for you that they are a credit to their race will not get them to think critically about race relations.
14. If Trent Reznor can win a Grammy for singing a song about fisting, who knows how long it'll be before necrophilia becomes mainstream.
15. Film was at its best in the 1970s.
16. Happiness is smoking hashish out of a human skull.
17. The platform of the Republican Party is not “The Gun is Good, the Penis is Evil.”
18. Back up your hard drive.
19. It is, in fact, possible for an author to completely screw up even the most basic aspects of Earthly existence.
20. It is still possible for a thirty-year old Jewish Princess to become the very embodiment of lolicon.
21. Just because something really absurd happened in real life doesn't make it automatically believable fiction.
22. Owning a Hutu machete is not braggable.
23. Somdomy of the dead stall be the whole of the lawr!
24. Sometimes, theatre directors really just don't care.
25. To some people, any sentence spoken in German is indistinguishable from the words “Sieg Heil!”

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 168

Issue: More on Autism.
Upon further research, I managed to Harry Lime myself. Two issues ago, I said that even in a newborn, it would have to take 2000 vaccines for the amount of thimerosal in vaccines to kill it. I found out a few days later that, of all the vaccines that are given to kids before the age of six, only seasonal flu vaccines even contain it, and not all flu vaccines contain it. In short, by this point, thimerosal is even less of an actual threat to their children. I mention this A) Due to my need to correct myself, and B) Because there is actually a possible new treatment for autism that might possibly work. From what I've heard, there is supposed to be a drug, currently called STX-107, that is supposed to limit a receptor that the pharmacologist Mark Bear believes could cause autistic behavior in Fragile X syndrome. It certainly seems interesting, although, admittedly, there is no concrete evidence yet that it could actually generalize results to patients all over the autistic spectrum, or, for that matter, that it can actually work in humans, but it is nevertheless interesting news. This raises an important question; I have hyperlexia, which is on the autistic spectrum. I have been able to fake my way through the Neurotypical world. Given that the disorder gives me a unique perspective on the world, would I take drugs that limit it? All I can say is that given my habit of blacking out and sometimes freezing when reminded of my abusive old school, not being able to relate to people is probably the least of my mental problems.

Film Review of the Day: Stalag 17. Who would have thought that a movie about being held hostage by one of the three most evil regimes would be so... light-hearted? I'm honestly quite surprised that somebody managed to make such a lighthearted movie about Nazi camps with the memory of Auschwitz so fresh in many minds, but I suppose the fact that it's just a POW camp and not Treblinka certainly helps with the mood dissonance.

Quote of the Day: "If the vaccine companies are not listening to us, it's their f___ing fault that the diseases are coming back. They're making a product that's s___. It shouldn't be polio versus autism.”
_______________Jenny McCarthy. The mere fact that she actually prefers a disease that cripples and kills kids slowly to autism should say a lot.

Link of the Day: Jenny McCarthy's Body Count.

Tract Review: Going Down? Folks, I truly have no idea what is going on here. The first four pages chronicle a Western Story. I can only assume that it is supposed to be a Deadwood reference about four years too late. The story switches to Jim Backus watching said western, while his wife Susan Boyle complains about the swearing (nonexistent, I might add. Not even symbols.) They get into a car crash and call their pastor Patrick Swayze and berate him for telling him that Hell doesn't exist. After having nightmares about Jim, Susan, and John Waters (who makes no other appearance in the tract) welcoming him to Hell, he has nurse Judy Ken Sebben from Harvey Birdman introduce him to somebody who looks like either Jimmy Carter or my Grandpa, who makes him rededicate himself to Jesus Christ. Ladies and Gentlemen, even with his history of claiming that the Catholic Church is directly responsible for every evil on Earth since the Edict of Milan to making some tracts with baffling premises, this would probably be the crowning evidence that Jack has some serious mental problems. Read it here.

Issue 141

News: Review: This Godless Communism: Chapter 2.
When going through Chick Dissection, I went over the comments and discovered this comic about Communism (and the history thereof) from an old comic that was called This Godless Communism (as opposed to some other Godless Communism?). I'm not too into the history of the USSR that dominates Chapters 3-9, or the red scare-era propaganda dominating 1 and 10. However, I feel confident about my ability to dissect Chapter 2, focusing on the life of Marx. I must note that the writer doesn't get off to a good start with the sections on his early life. For instance, while he did end up changing colleges early on in his college career, he was not expelled from the first college, and probably not for the "strange ideas" that his father mentions. Later, the comic seems to put the blame on his thought (specifically religion) on his teacher G.W.F. Hegel. Specifically, the author blames Hegel for Marx's method on his abandonment of religion. Of course, his father himself was from a family rabbi who had converted from Judaism to Lutheranism, but never really took either religion seriously, leaning more towards deism. Also, Hegel, from what I could gleam from his writings, didn't seem too much like a materialist to me, and even had a large following among what we would now call "christian fundamentalists" in Germany, and the comic also fails to mention that his infatuation with Hegelianism ended fairly quickly. Surprisingly enough, after his spiritual "unawakening," he goes into a rant which is the closest thing that happens in the entire story to an explanation of what communism even is, and mentions that nobody has ever explained how eventually, under Marxist communism, the government would eventually cease to exist. Of course, perhaps it could be that when everybody is eventually happy under Marxism, there will be no need for a government because there would eventually be nothing for a government to do. Of course, it soon reverts to only talking about religious implications of Communism when they would have been talking about other aspects in real life. Finally, they talk about how he spent his final years working on "das kapital" failing to mention that he had been working on it on and off since he got the advance in 1844, and, from what I had heard, from my philosophy teacher, it was roughly 1/20th of what it was orignially planned to be by the time of his death. Well,even for a few-page-long religious tract in comic book form, it is still sort of accurate, even if it removes a lot of the things from his life which would eventually have it make any sort of sense in any sort of form, but for 1960, what do you expect?

Band Name of the Day: Well, even in the several weeks it has been since I posted, the best I can do is "THe Young Hegelians." This definitely seems like the sort of name that only works if you're a bunch of university philosophy professors uniting for a one-off gig for the university.

Film Idea of the Day: None.

Film Review of the Day: The Departed. It is quite easily one of the best movies about a non-Italian Mafia (although to be fair, it is probably one of the only movies about a non-Italian mafia I have ever seen). Even there, it is still a good movie, certainly quite deserving of all the honors and awards it had thrust upon it.

Quote of the Day: "We know God exists. We have too many proofs." (ed: and virtually all of them have been shown to be flawed in some way.)
_______________ Anonymous non-Hegelian in the comic.

Link of the Day: This Godless Communism. Read it for yourself.

Issue 125

News: From Judy to J.D.
My Name is Derekaxe and I am a Wikiholic. I have been using wikipedia for roughly four or five years, and currently spend a few hours every day surfing it from page to page. It is probably the only place where a person can go from reading about Martin Bohrmann to Winnie-the-Pooh in three easy steps, the only intervening pages being Argentina and Latin. Here is an example of this, as I logged a few days ago: Judy Garland is a widely-recognized gay idol, as was Julie Andrews. One of Julie's more obscure early roles (certainly in comparison to her roles as Maria Von Trapp, Mary Poppins, and Victor/Victoria) was as Gertrude Lawrence. One of Lawrence's most famous roles was in a musical by Kurt Weill, who wrote many musicals including the Threepenny Opera, and Johnny Johnson, based on The Good Soldier Svejk. Svejk happened to be one of the earliest anti-war works of literature, preceded only by parts of The Red Badge of Courage. The Red Badge of Courage was later made into a film starring Audie Murphy, a famous soldier/actor who developed Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The change in names from "Shell Shock" to "PTSD" was chronicled in a comedy routine by George Carlin, whose comedy was often Misanthropic, a side effect of which is often reclusiveness, a quality which J.D. Salinger was infamous for.

Band Name of the Day: From Judy to J.D. sounds good again.

Film Idea of the Day: The Princess and the Powder. A princess from a small European monarchy visiting Chicago runs off with a journalist, and they tour the city, fall in love, and do every drug known to man and some of the larger primates.

Film Review of the Day: Blackboard Jungle. This film is about the trials and tribulations of a teacher trying to teach a bunch of unruly inner-city teacher, starting up an entire subgenre of films with varying degrees of schmaltziness and much of the same plot. Of course, despite this, this film is very gritty even today, and one can only imagine what it must have been like for audiences in 1955.

Quote of the Day: "He was a revolutionary, and a black man!" (unnecessary comma, apparently spoken by Ray Charles)
"I believe he was Buddha's Cousin"
"Jesus, the guy who was in a lot of movies"
"Didn't they cut off His head at a party? No Stupid! that was Jonah. Jesus wrote Bibles" (necessary comma omitted, and sentence starts with a lowercase letter.)
________Some answers to "Who is Jesus?" according to Jack Chick in his latest tract, although I'm sure that only the first one is held by actual people.

Link of the Day: Six Degrees of Wikipedia (If only I could have known that the only link I needed between Judy to J.D. was the article on Pleurisy).

Tract review: Who is He? This is simply another of Jack's "Christianity in a Nutshell" tracts which happen to not be too controversial or even have a story, although some peoples' answers to the question "Who is Jesus" in the tract are particularly bizarre.

Issue 101

News: Christianity is not a religion: Film at 11. Or Not.
Earlier in the week, Halloween happened. This meant that I'd reread selected Chick Tracts. One of those tracts was What's wrong with this picture? Upon rereading the tract I realized how much Jack seemed to be undermining all his work over the past half-century. Naturally there was some special pleading for Christianity. His argument for leaving his brand of Christianity alone was that it, in fact, was not a religion, but a "living relationship with Jesus". The next day, I read one of his newly released tracts and a similar claim was made. I decided to investigate his claim. As it turns out, the idea that Christianity is not a religion is a more common one than I thought, but seemed to be almost entirely confined to Evangelicals. Their claim wasn't entirely on the level, as it depended on a redefinition of religion, which they took to mean "anything which keeps one from getting eternal life in Jesus Christ". Curiously, Answers.com has several definitions, virtually all of them being covered by the definition "An ideology built around the worship of a deity." Clearly, mainstream science isn't the only mainstream source seen as a threat to their belief system. Now they're targeting Webster's. Since when did the Religious Right become PeTA?

Band Name of the Day: The Curse of Cain, from a fictional novel within a novel I'm writing.

Film Idea of the Day: To Myself and Others. A novel in short stories which I have already begun to write. A college-aged novelist has to put up with his idiotic roommates: His Highness Herb, King of all Stoners, and obnoxious pansexual dwarfboy Duke.

Film Review of the Day: The Usual Suspects. Who is Keyser Soze? This film attempts to answer this question, through the eyes of a man with cerebral palsy who may or may not be Soze. This film gets big points from me if only for the fact that my hometown of Skokie is mentioned twice in the movie.

Quote of the Day: "I know more damn perverts, at schools and all, than anybody you ever met, and they're always being perverty when I'm around."
___________Holden Caulfield.

Link of the Day: None this week.

Tract Reviews: Where Did They Go? Jack talks about the Rapture.
Unforgiven. The first original Black Tract, a man gets into prison and becomes a muslim. His grandma decides to deconvert him, and fails. He gets burned into a pit of fire. Featuring Jack's most bizarre claim yet: "Muhammad was a Cracka!"

Issue 92

News: Dick Cheney says "War in Iraq was a bad idea".
I discovered a video from 1994, wherein Dick Cheney remarked that a war in Iraq would eventually become a quagmire. He remarks that, even after one takes out Saddam's government, there's not going to be too much stability, and that a war would in the end be not worth the amount of casualties. Of course, thirteen years later, what he said became true, and every American knew it. Every American, except for, ironically, Dick Cheney, who apparently changed his mind about an invasion of Iraq in 2002, a full two years after reaffirming his 1994 statements on Meet The Press. He managed to predict the future of the invasion of Iraq, but incredibly somehow managed to forego his own warnings and went with a plan to invade Iraq anyway in a quixotic quest to bring democracy to the middle east. At this point, I have not much else to say but that I needed a story and decided to go with this one.

Band Name of the Day: The Five Minus Four against Fighting. An answer to another "band" name.

Film Idea of the Day: A TV series about a family, including two very eccentric children (adults who still live with their parents). The main focus of the show is one of the "children", who was released into his parents' custody after harassing a telethon, and works primarily for a fledgeling Weekly World News-style tabloid called Trash News, and to a lesser extent, his sister with a flossing compulsion.

Film Review of the Day: The Shining. It's actually a great film. Nowhere near A Clockwork Orange, but still great. I must say that there was only one part that truly scared me. It wasn't the part with the ghostly twins, the "redrum", the halls filling with blood, Jack trying to kill his wife, the jarring shot of Jack frozen in the snow , or even the decomposing woman, but Shelly Duvall's face.

Quote of the Day: "I don't have low self-esteem. I have low esteem for everyone else."
__________Daria Morgendorffer.

Link of the Day: Breaking News: Jack T. Chick finally photographed.

Issue 82

News: Jack T. Chick v. Bart D. Ehrman
As you may know, I am a big fan of Jack T. Chick's insane works. One of them is a tract entitled "The Attack" about the events leading up to the King James Bible's publication. Recently, I also read Bart D. Ehrman's book Misquoting Jesus. In the book, Ehrman recounts the story of how one cannot truly tell what the originals of the Bible are anymore due to there being more derivations from the texts of the New Testament than there are words in it. He mainly writes about the New Testament. The main point of Jack's arguments is that the Catholic church actively tried to destroy the original texts of the Bible in the Textus Receptus (more on this later). I will compare Jack's claims with Ehrman's. Jack begins with a bad start by claiming that Puritans translated the KJV (it was, ironically created to supplant another Bible which supposedly had Puritanical undertones, since King James decided that they were heretics.) In the tract, there were claims that there were corrupt manuscripts in Alexandria, although while there were many manuscripts there, they were not the only ones, because there were many others in Byzantine and the west, although the Alexandian texts are in fact considered the closest to what may have actually happened due to their age being the oldest. Jack claims that St. Jerome used them for the Vulgate, although it is believed that he compared pre-existing translations with whatever Greek manuscripts he could find. Later, he mentions a "Council of Toulouse", where the Bible (presumably the "Textus Receptus") which outside of a few Fundie websites who are most likely either parroting what Jack says or improvising on what Jack says, I have been able to find no information. On this "Textus Receptus", it is claimed by Jack that this was the true word of God that The Church would destroy. The real Textus Receptus was the first publication of a complete edition of the Greek text of the New Testament, cobbled by Desiderius Erasmus from one or two greek manuscripts (and for Revelation, he translated parts of it back into Greek from the Vulgate). Jack claims that as a reaction to the publication of the Textus Receptus, the Church created the Jesuits to destroy all copies. This is, of course, ridiculous. Immediately after this panel, Jack shows the King of England (most likely Henry VIII, even if Jack's portrait looks nothing like him) rebelling against the Church's authority, obstensively due to his distrust of the Pope's authority, but in reality, he rebelled because the Pope wouldn't let him divorce his wife, and so he created his own church (The Church of England, which ironically, now forbids divorce), and after several more decades, the King James Bible was created from the Textus Receptus. Eventually, people resorted to diminishing its credibility with the Alexandrian texts. In the end, Jack admonishes the reader to check 1 John 5:7 to see if it makes the Trinity explicitly mentioned, as a litmus test to see if it is a "true version". Ironically, according to Ehrman, the first edition of the Textus Receptus itself did not contain it (because Erasmus found no manuscript with it), and was widely criticized for this reason. It was instated when a manuscript (created specifically for the occasion) was found with it. This concludes my rant.

Band Name of the Day: The Anglican Fundamentalists. From a routine by Eddie Izzard on "Church of England Fundamentalism".

Film Idea of the Day: A road movie about an early-tewnty-something member of the Illinois State legislature and a political journalism student learning about politics journeying to Springfield to go see the legislature in session, with the former going on his first time, and the student learning from him. A more political Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Review of the Day: It's been a while since I've appraised a television series.
Black Books. A british series about a misanthropic bookstore owner named Bernard Black infamous for his hygeine and rudeness towards customers and his assistant Manny. This has to be the funniest British series I have stumbled upon in a while, even if only two of the three seasons (or series, as the Brits say) are currently on DVD.
Azumanga Daioh. As one can infer from the seemingly incomprehensible title, it is an anime and Manga series. It is, unlike most anime series, set in a Japanese public school, and centered around the personalities of 7 female students and 3 teachers in the school. Even among those who don't normally consider themselves otaku (Japanese for "anime geeks"), it is very funny, if you can get the references to Japanese culture that are explained in the fansubs of the anime and, to a lesser extent, in the manga.

Quote of the Day: "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I did an original sin. I poked a badger with a spoon."
"Say five Hail Mary's and six Hello Dolly's!"
__________________Eddie Izzard.

Link of the Day: Type in the words and let the singers (everybody from Bobby Hatfield to Nick Drake to Jim Morrison to Chris Isaak) sing them.

Issue 73

News: Harry Potter is not satanic.
This year will mark the end of the Harry Potter books franchise with the seventh book: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. One incredible rumour that has been going around about the series is that it was written for the express purpose of converting innocent kids to Satanism. Views like this can be found in the film Jesus Camp, where Becky Fisher rants about Harry Potter, claiming that "In Old Testament times He'd have been Put to DEATH!!" and in the Chick tract "The Nervous Witch", two young women are lured into Wicca (read: Jack's version of the same kind of witchcraft that the 1692 residents of Salem were killing themselves over.) Of course, upon looking at the evidence, it should be obvious that such rumours are totally false. According to Snopes.com, the rumours started with an article from The Onion (which is one of the most obviously satirical news sources on the planet) which stated that Satanism among children was on the rise due to the books, even claiming that High Priest Egan of the First Church of Satan in Salem, MS (the High priest of the FCOS is really named Allee and it is not centered in Massachussets) called Harry a "Godsend for their cause". Of course, the irony of a Satanist calling anything a "godsend" should have clued fundamentalists in even if The Onion's reputation was unknown to them. Instead, they not only believed that the story was true, but also cited it as proof that their claims are true, even adding several fake statistics, including that since 1995, the membership of the church of Satan. Of course, they often include several other statistics, like that 40 thousand children get killed yearly as part of Halloween celebrations every year, and that number is equivalent to how many people in general are murdered in this country in three years. Indeed, I'm not really sure that they know there is a difference between devil worship and Satanism. There is, and I intend to explain it later on. If anything, people should be worried about whether adults can distinguish the fantasy of Rowling's work from reality, because the kids clearly can.

Band Name of the Day: Lady Godiva's Operation: From A severely underrated song by the Velvet Underground.

Film Reviews of the Day: The Two Lolitas. I recently saw the two film versions of Lolita, Kubrick's version from 1962 and Adrian Lyne's 1997 version. I found both enjoyable as films, even though Lyne was more faithful to Nabokov's original story. Of course, this can be blamed on the Production Code, which, while on its last legs, was still in effect and would not let a truly faithful adaptation appear onscreen, consequently the entire incest plotline of the film is muted very much. Naturally, since the 1997 version wasn't tied down by the Code, it could afford to be faithful to the book, but it may have been too faithful for its own good, because it deleted many of the subtleties of the book. However, one can view Kubrick's version as the one Humbert would have casted (as Lolita was saddled with a very attractive [albeit older than specified in the book] actress, and her mother was saddled with Shelly Winters, who is decidedly less so.)

Quote of the Day: "I'm Carl Sagan. Just how old is our planet? Scientists believe that it's four HUNDREDS AND HUNDREDS OF YEARS OLD!! Scientists have determined that the universe was created by a GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOODbig bang. If you look at the bones of a JAY-ZUZnosaurus rex, it's clear by the use of carbon dating that MOUNTAIN DEW IS THE BEST SODA EVAR (sic) MADE!"
____________Carl Sagan in "Cosmos: Edited for Rednecks" from Family Guy: Airport '07.

Link of the Day: The collected Coast to Coast AM calls of an insane fundamentalist named J.C. Webster.
And here are their transcripts.

Issue 28

News: Big Daddy: The Rebuttal.
Inspired by an article at "The Jack T. Chick Museum of Fine Art" site, I will write my own rebuttal to the Tract "Big Daddy." In the first panel, the identifiably Jewish Teacher (Let's call him Mr. Roth) asks who in his new class believes in evolution. I doubt this happens in real life, because the teachers most likely assume that the students believe. Another scene just after shows the teacher becoming very angry at the Creationist Aryan boy, who could pass for "Hitler Youth Poster boy"(Let's Call him Ken), who remains calm. In the real world, it would most likely be the Ken who is angry at the challenging of his world. The rest of the tract focuses on "Mr. Roth" unsuccessful attempts to refute "Ken". His first challenge is about how only Micro-Evolution (among 5 other kinds) has been proven by science. Needless to say, Creationism has not been proven, but in fact disproved, by scientists. Later, he mentions the many "Pre-Homo sapiens" species of human. He first tackles Lucy, whom he believes that most experts believe is merely a chimp. Actually, all scientists tend to acknowledge her human status. Then he talks about Heidelberg man, who has, according to Chick, a very human-like jaw. Its existence has not been disputed by anyone else. Next is Nebraska man, who was built up from a tooth which turned out to be from a peccary. What he doesn't mention is that it never was considered to be a human ancestor ever, and was proven to not be so 5 years after its discovery. Then comes Piltdown man, whom was created from a modern ape's jawbone. It was the British Museum, evolutionists, who disproved the piltdown man. After this come the Peking Man. Chick Claims that all evidence of the discovery has disappeared. That is only partially true; While the bones were taken sometime during world war 2, there were casts made before they were stolen, and people are still studying them today. Then the Neanderthal, whom Jack Chick claims to be from one arthritic Frenchman, come from a lot of skeletons, some with arthritis and some without. Then There's new guinea man, which Chick claims to be a disproved step in evolution, obstensively 5,000 years old. Oddly enough, he was never considered to be anything but a 5000 year old man. Then come the cro-magnons, whom Jack fails to see the difference from Homo Sapiens. Of course, they are 4% larger. Finally comes Modern Man, whom Jack only says "This genius thinks he came from a monkey." After this, "Mr. Roth" mentions that the Coccyx is vestigial. "Ken" proves him wrong with the closest thing that he comes to anger in the entire tract. While he is right, there are other vestigial organs in the human body, like the Appendix, and (for men) the nipples. Finally, "Ken" asks "Mr. Roth" what the binding force of the atom is. After "Mr. Roth" says Gluons, "Ken" says just as quickly that they are a myth, saying that they have never been seen or measured (Oddly enough, they have), and because of this, nobody knows how the atom is kept together, but the Bible. He Quotes a Bible Verse out of context to say that Jesus is the binding force of the Atom. If you are dumb enough to believe this bullshirt, then become a Hindu, because most of the 3 million gods in the Hindu pantheon have 6 arms, and even then, they would be frustrated with anything more complex than a carbon atom, and moving even further away from any sane kind of organized religion, Neil from the Young Ones could even do a better job than the pantheon, for at least 30 seconds or so in the second episode "Oil" in which he is granted 12 hands. His stopping point: one Magnesuim atom. "Mr. Roth" becomes a creationist, and quits his job. The tract ends with the students reacting to the debate and "Ken" leaping at the chance to witness to the students.

Band Name of the Day: New Guinea Man. See above for explanation.

Film idea of the Day: Anthem 2256. After a nuclear war in 2101 AD, America is taken over by Christian fundamentalists who turn it into a Christian version of Saudi Arabia. 151 years later in 2256 AJ (The Calendar is pushed back to Christ's real date of birth, so it's 2252 AD), a man discovers a Black box of 10 LPs: Back in Black, Dark Side of the Moon, Led Zeppelin IV, Rumours, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Pet Sounds, smiley Smile, Highway 61 revisited, and Bridge over troubled Water. He, his wife, another couple, and a widower friend form a forbidden rock band. Eventually the government finds out, and they are sentenced to death by stoning. Just as the sentence is to be carried out, France invades and changes America back. The leaders wind up sentenced to death by hanging, and the band becomes a group of world heroes.

Film Review of the Day: Saved! This film is about a girl in a Christian fundamentalist environment (Jena Malone), who tries to have convert her gay boyfriend by having sex with her, and she gets pregnant, and he is not cured. As she starts to doubt her faith, her friends (played by Mandy Moore, among other people), turn against her. There is also a subplot about Moore's Brother (played by Maculay Culkin, in his return to the silver screen) trying to distance herself from his abusive sister with a relationship with Jewish bad girl, obstensively a stripper. This film will very likely be a big influence on my radio station film.

Quote of the Day: Hillary Faye (Mandy Moore): Mary, Turn away from Satan! Jesus loves you.
Mary (Jena Malone): You don't know the first thing about love.
Hillary Faye: I am filled with Christ's love!
(she throws a Bible at her)
Hillary Faye: You are just jealous of my success in the Lord!
Mary: This is not a weapon, you idiot.
______ From Saved! , the aforereviewed film. In this scene Hillary Faye tried to exorcise Mary.

Link of the Day: www.idrewthis.com
This is a webcomic about the author, an eagle, and their commentary on American society today. I previously mentioned a cartoon about intelligent falling on this blog, now, here's the entire thing. Enjoy.