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 183

News/Review: In Defense of The Searchers.
Recently, I was browsing TVTropes when I stumbled upon a page for reviews of John Ford's classic "The Searchers." The only review of it was negative, but there were just too many wrong points in that review for me to accept it. The first paragraph focuses on the portrayal of the Comanche nation. After making a good point about how their sole motivation for taking Debbie seemed to be to rape some white women, he made a mention about how he didn't like that they were so incompetent after that incident. It should be noted that at that point in the Indian wars when the film was set, the Comanches were clearly losing, and most of them had already been sent to reservations. And besides, they kept a woman captive for five years; they clearly had to have been doing something right. He goes on to complain some more about the portrayal of the Indians (I really have to ask: was he really expecting something like Dances with Wolves in 1956? It was certainly a fair portrayal for its day)even though, the fact is, that John Ford makes it perfectly clear that their actions are driven by a general hatred of the white man because, well, they tended to be no more likable than John Wayne's character Ethan Edwards was. Which brings him to the next point; he seems to think that Ethan is like every other character John Wayne played. Funny, I don't remember Tom Doniphon trying to desecrate Liberty Valance's corpse on the off-chance that it would hurt him in the afterlife, and I don't remember Sean Thornton giving Will Danaher rabbit-punches during their famous Donnybrook in the same way that Ethan shoots at retreating enemies in this film. And while the "Look" subplot definitely hasn't aged very well, it is certainly an oversimplification to compare Martin to Tonto, especially since, while Tonto was effectively the Lone Ranger's loyal slave, MArtin has several moments where he calls out Ethan on his behavior (like when he tries to kill Debbie, who has gone native.) The reviewer seems to miss the depth of the characters, apparently seeing the main conflict of the film as being Ethan vs. Comanches, and missing the point that, clearly, there are unlikable people on every side of a conflict, and Ethan and Scar both fit the bill for their societies very well. However, he seems to have not noticed that the conflict that is given more screen time is clearly the conflict between Martin and Ethan, with Martin acting as Humphrey van Weyden to Ethan's Wolf Larsen. The fact is, that this film is not even really about the rescue of a woman from the Indians. It is, in essence, a film about how revenge shapes the nature of our minds.

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 177

News: An Alternate View of Aldo Raine.
As I mentioned earlier, I have become increasingly immersed in the life of this autistic manchild by the name of Christian W. Chandler and his crappy webcomic. By this point, I am less horrified by what I see than I was. What I didn't mention was that he claims to be part Native-American, noting that, especially in the south, where he is from, having Native ancestry was often cover for having Black ancestry (apparently the one-drop rule didn't apply to the native folk.) This immediately got me to thinking about somebody from a movie I had seen a year ago who claimed to be of Native American ancestry, Aldo Raine from Inglorious Basterds. In addition, he has a scar on his neck that is supposed to be rope burn (this is not so easy to see in the film itself, but it is much easier to see in publicity shoots and the cover of the one-disc edition,) and the published script implies that Raine was the survivor of a lynching. So my theory is that the people in his hometown of Maynardville, TN, discovered he was partially black, and attempted to lynch him for a crime he (considering his brutality in the film) might have actually committed, but by some freak accident, survived, and turned his anger towards the bigotry of his region, and after it became clear that the American Army was going to fight them, their international equivalents, The Nazis. And, as soon as he realized that the Army would be less unkind towards both being mixed-race and the sociopathic behavior Raine clearly harbored, he fit in like a glove, and he rose through the ranks. And knowing Quentin Tarantino, I'm fairly certain that Fritz Lang's anti-lynching film Fury somehow fits in, but I don't know where.

Film Idea of the Day: N/A.

Film Review of the Day: My Sister's Keeper. I managed to get this movie recently, and I have to say that the idea is certainly an interesting one, and, indeed, seems somewhat Randian in its plot: a child is born pretty much as spare parts for her leukemic sister, and eventually has enough and files for medical emancipation, seeming to recall the interesting things of Ayn Rand's novels, namely the triumph of the individual over the demands of altruism, without the romantic plot tumors or fighting collectivism from a collective. What I really liked about the film was its ending, and especially how different it turned out to be from its original novel. In both, the well sister got medical emancipation, but in the original novel, according to TVTropes, she immediately got killed by a bus and had her kidneys donated anyway. However, in the film, it turned out that the sick sister actually masterminded the plan for the well sister to apply for emancipation to let her mother finally know she had had enough and wanted an end to all the suffering, and so, it turns out that both sisters get the suffering to stop on both ends, and even their hard-ass of a mother ends up lightening up in the end, as seen as when they go to Montana. Unfortunately, a lot of the movie, particularly the parts which didn't have to do with the major plot (read: the flashbacks) I just couldn't relate to.

Quote of the Day: "Your definition is narrow; life insisting on life’s viewpoint, when alternatives exist."
______________Dr. Manhattan on the point of view of the mother in My Sister's Keeeper.

Link of the Day: A song I think should have ended the movie, and could have even lightened the mood, and would still be fitting.

Issue 172

News: My Five Least Favorite Books.
Here is the impetus for writing this book: recently, my worplace decided to pose us in the position of the Last Supper, and I decided to portray Judas (although it turned out to be more of a combination of Peter's position with Judas' elbow, oddly enough), and it came out that some members of the crew actually believed that the figure to Jesus' immediate right was Mary Magdalene, and I ended up blowing up at the person who talked about it. After that, I was browsing TVTropes and stumbled upon their page for the Turner Diaries. I knew then that the next blog entry I wrote had to be about the worst books of all time. So, here's my top five, and, astonishingly to some, Jane Austen's works are not on this list, because, while I do dislike them with a passion, their major flaw is that they are utterly dull to anybody with a Y chromosome, and not facepalmingly stupid.
5. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.
Well, the title bucks art historical convention and calls Leonardo simply "Da Vinci", even though it's not his actual surname. It's all downhill from there, with regards to historical accuracy. Just to take one example: The vessel for holding the wine is actually in the picture, but it's not the gilded and bejewled common cup of legend; they're all individual glasses that could have been used by anybody in that time period. Admittedly you can only see it if you're looking at an ultra-high-quality picture, but once you did, Teabing's claim that the Grail is in the picture in the form of Mary Magdalene (actually John the apostle, incidentally, and has been identified as such for many years before most of the other disciples in the picture). For a book that claims to be 99% accurate, I am not impressed.
4. Twilight by Stephanie Meyers.
I am almost certain that somewhere in the Middle East, there are some people who will use this book as an argument against giving women education. In essence, you have a woman who is driven to stalking the one person who doesn't love bomb her as soon as she moves to her new town. And it turns out that he's a vampire, which to Stephanie Meyer, seems to entail simply drinking goat's blood, being androgynous, and sparkling in the sunlight [Well, I'm okay with toying with the symptoms of vampirism, like with Cassidy in Preacher, but narrowing it down to those three?], and worst of all, the vampire has graduated from High School literally dozens of times. WHY IN PLUPERFECT HELL WOULD HE NOT JUST PASS FOR YOUNG ADULT FOR THE REST OF HIS LIFE? HONESTLY!
3. Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard.
Well, in either book or movie forms, this has to be one of the worst tales in any medium, and there are enough plot holes in either form to fill the Royal Albert Hall. While general consensus is that the book is much better, I admit that I stray from the consensus here for several reasons.
A) John Travolta's Terl is way too entertaining.
B) In the books, the climax is literally 1/3 of the way through. The film's climax, as muddled as it is, is at least in its proper place near the end, probaBLY because it was supposed to be the first half of one long movie.
C) Blatant Ethnic Stereotyping. That is all.
D) Johnny is even more questionable. Johnny is considered a hero after vanquishing the evil Psychlos by destroying their planet, except that, in the book, they're only evil due to another race's mind control. Nobody rethinks Johnny's motives.
TIE:
1A) Left Behind. I've done enough on this subject. I don't need to run over why this is on my list.
1B) The Turner Diaries by William Luther Pierce.
Surprisingly, Pierce is probably the most competent writer on the list. However, what he does to merit the lowest position is to write what is probably the most evil novel I've ever read, especially since it's apparently supposed to double as a how-to guide for a White revolution. What truly astonishes me is that Pierce goes into how crime and punishment under the Order would work after they take Southern California, and it's astonishingly brutal: apparently the only punishment for any crime, whether commited by or against whites (for instance, owning a restaurant that serves all races) is summary execution. This is presented as unambiguously good, even though it's clear that they're clearly worse than The System could ever be. Somebody should probably write a book about how a real-world government would face such an insurrection.

Review of the Day: Since I recently finished reading the first four books of Hubert Selby Jr, one of my favorite writers, I decided to review his books.
Last Exit to Brooklyn. I read about the book in Junior year of high school, but couldn't make it past Tralala, but eventually I made it to the end last summer. It was actually pretty good. Admittedly, I'm not sure whether it should count as a novel or a collection of short stories, but, either way, it's one of Selby's best.
The Room. This is the book I finished reading recently. In fact, it is even more brutal than Last Exit was. In fact, Selby himself couldn't read it after writing it. If you thought a teenaged prostitute getting gang-raped by a dozen drunken sailors was brutal, you haven't seen anything yet.
The Demon. Well, this is his most subtle work of the four I read, less overtly terrifying and more subtle, explaining the motives behind Harry White's increasing evil in scenes less overt than his previous terms.
Requiem for a Dream. Well, Darren Aronofsky got the essence of the story, and a lot of the little things in the novel down to their essence in 100 minutes, but the novel is much less emotionally satisfying, and I think that, in this case, not giving the audience much closure is best, since it's probably best for the reader to imagine what is happening in the end.

Issue 169

News/ Review: Billy the White Nationalist.
I have recently been a big reader of a website called the Bad Webcomics Wiki (I have linked to it a few Issues ago). It, as the title implies, is a catalog of reviews of some of the worst webcomics in existence. Ranging from genuinely awful works (like Shredded Moose), to works that are not so much awful as polarizing (like Megatokyo [a successful, if sentimental, webcomic] or Concession, that webcomic about the mouse who is made to think that he is molesting children due to a brain tumor, which I think is okay if you're in the market for something as insane as, say, All-Star Batman and Robin), and a few works which barely qualify as webcomics (from a series of photos of a guy with a chalkboard, to the collected works of Jack Chick.) What is generally considered to be the single worst webcomic around the web is a series called Billy The Heretic. What would you guess it's about from that title? A boy criticizing the Christian society around him, like Moral Orel, except more overt? Well, no. The blurb for it states that it is about the author's life as a Christian boy raised by Jewish parents. So you'd think that a comic like that would be shamelessly sentimental, and that's the reason it's so reviled, right? No. It is, in fact, blatant Anti-Semitic propoganda. I mean, sure, there's one or two strips in its archive (Surprisingly, the comic seems to have been around from time immemorial, but with less than 50 strips total) that will appeal to people who don't sleep with a copy of Mein Kampf under their pillows, but the vast majority of the strips seem like the kind of thing that Eric Cartman would have written. In fact, in the second strip, he calls his sister Mona (the only character besides Billy to have a name), a "rat with glasses." Yeah, that's right. He's recycling the characterization by the Nazis of the Jews as vermin. In fact, the entire point of the comic can be summarized as "Jews are evil", with a few strips of quibbling about points of the Holocaust as a substitutes for jokes (Yes, we know that Auschwitz is in Poland. It's still accurate to refer to it as "German" because it was operated by the Nazi government at a time when the state of Poland didn't even exist.) The characters are flat, and don't even have names, except for the sister, the art is atrocious, But the real kicker is his FAQ page, in which Billy states that he is sympathetic to the white nationalist movement. Now, let me explain why the idea of White Nationalism is idiotic; We shall set aside, for the moment, that the term is, simply put, an attempt by Racists to look more respectable, and like "Intelligent Design", it fools nobody. The fact is, that, simply put, White people do not constitute one nation; they occupy several nations that have a long history of quarreling with each other, and have several different languages, and even a few separate alphabets. If a people cannot at least share a common alphabet, they cease to be considered an ethnicity. For the record, It is worth noting that there was some debate as to which ethnicities counted as white a little over a century ago. In fact, the Irish and Italians were often counted as "not white" at the turn of the previous century. In short, as attempted PR makeovers go, it is as obvious as they come.

Band Name of the Day: n/a.

Film Idea of the Day: A woman finds that she is beginning to develop some sort of Precognition towards the life of her increasingly effeminate son. In the end, after some DNA tests, it turns out that the mother and child are actually one and the same. This is apparently possible due to time travel and fully-effective sex changes.

Quote of the Day: Well; this.

Link of the Day: More on action Park

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 62

News: Six million is an understatement.
In case you haven't been reading the news, the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is heading a conference seeking to "review (read: deny) the Holocaust". Ahmadinejad himself called the Holocaust "A myth" around this time last year, as well as sponsoring a worldwide Holocaust editorial cartoon contest earlier this year, and as one can imagine from this statement, many of the people who were invited there were Holocaust Deniers, with one Israeli who was to speak out against Holocaust Denial denied an Iranian visa because of his Israeli citizenship, and six other token Jews (at least as I see it) from a group who, despite repudiating Ahmadinejad views on the Holocaust, shares his strong Anti-Zionist stance on Israel (which seems like sending Condoleeza Rice to a Klan rally to defend her race). Otherwise, besides those people, there were many infamous Holocaust deniers, like David Duke, Frederick Toben, and Richard Krege. One notable denier who wasn't invited due to his current trial in Germany was Ernst Zundel, the publisher of the infamous Pamphlet Did 6 Million Really Die?, the title of which was answered by me in the title of this essay you're reading right now. My stance is that there is way too much evidence for the existence of the Holocaust to deny it, with there being photographs, film evidence, documentation, and many living eyewitnesses to it, many of whom have preserved their stories on film, with thousands of them living in my hometown of Skokie. If the Holocaust were, in fact, false, one would think that at least one of them would have repudiated their stories (whch not a single one, to my knowledge, has.) In the end, the people at the conference decided to set up a foundation for Holocaust review to be headed in Tehran until they can get Headquarters in Berlin (which they will never get.)

Band Name of the Day: The Stoneless Cherries, from a song that Stephen Bishop (the Charming Guy in four John Landis films) sings in Animal House.

Film Idea of the Day: Power and Glory. The students of a college plan a War is Over rally in 1968 to Protest the war in Vietnam in a musical set to the songs of Phil Ochs.

Film Review of the Day: Georgy Girl. A surprisingly obscure British film with an only slightly less obscure Oscar-nominated theme song by the Seekers. This movie stars Lynn Redgrave as a homely woman named Georgina (aka Georgy or George) who strives to be like her roommate Meredith, a swinging woman of 1960's London who is also a Concert violinist. In the film Meredith and her boyfriend Jos have a child and she loses her affection for both in a short time, only to have both picked up by Georgy.

Quote of the Day: "Forgetting something is only to let them return in another form"
_____________Sigourney Weaver, The Village.

Link of the Day: The Bible Retold With Lego.

Issue 34

News: Historical Revisionism; Everybody's doing it! Even money-grubbing corporations!
Recently I saw an Episode of Drawn Together in which the character of Foxxy Love gets turned into a Racial Stereotype as a result of Radiation sickness. She is eventually taken away by a Political Correctness squad which takes away other stereotype cartoons and puts them away to be erased. At the End, One character equates these actions with Denying Slavery or The Holocaust (which a larger number of people actually do than one may think, even though it makes no sense to deny something which so many people experienced firsthand). After this I discovered that a Black-maid-style character had not only been removed from Fantasia, but basically Declared an "Un-Character" by Disney. A lot of films from the era also tend to be scrutinized by the public (like Birth of a Nation or Gone With the Wind or The Little Rascals) , although in most cases, the makers don't out and out deny their existence, just keep them relatively hidden. My point is that if one is offended at the way one was widely believed to be sixty plus years ago, then he should keep in mind that it is just history, nothing more. If one needs to truly be concerned about race relations today, one must try to worry about the way one race was thought of 60 years ago less than whether we can be able to coexist without race riots.

Band Name of the Day: Kirilov. It comes from the name of a character from Dostoevsky's "The Devils", picked because of the connection with Ginsberg, who was inspired to write "Howl" after meeting Carl Solomon, who introduced himself as Kirilov.

Film Idea of the Day: Million Dollar Bagel: Be True to Your Little House on the Prairie. This will be a film about Million Dollar Bagel (see Issue 31) running for president in the first ever US Presidential Recall, caused by the entire Cabinet falling under control of a madman.

Film Review of the Day: I usually write reviews of films I saw recently which I like, but this time, I will write a review of a film I saw recently which I hate: Only You. There will be spoilers.
The film begins as a younger version of Marisa Tomei's character being told twice, once by ouija board, and a fortune teller, that her husband will be named Damon Bradley. Years later, she is a schoolteacher engaged to a doctor. One early scene shows her demonstrating how Plato said that man was cut in two because the Gods felt threatened as if she just had an epiphany she couldn't wait to tell the world, as the class looks on in Ben-Stein's-class-in-Ferris-Bueller-like boredom as she releases them for spring break. Nine days before the wedding, she gets a call from a man calling himself Damon Bradley from an Airport going on a trip to Venice. She immediately leaves for Venice and abruptly calls off the wedding in lieu of Following him. She looks all over Italy until she ultimately finds him in another airport. In between she meets two guys who claim to have that name, one of which she likes, but calls off the relationship when she learns that his name is not Damon Bradley, and a childhood friend claiming that he rigged the Ouija board and paid the Fortune teller $2 to say Damon Bradley would marry her. Damon Bradley was real, but just a jerk the friend knew in Baseball.
About the film I must say that I found it hard to believe that it came from the same director as Agnes of God and Soldier's Story. Also, because of its feel and at one point ripping it off, accents of Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn and all, it seems like an Audrey Hepburn film lost for 30-something years. Lost for good reason.

Quote of the Day: Two speeches by Noam Chomsky about the rudimentaries of Freedom of Speech: http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/articles/8010-free-expression.html, http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/articles/8102-right-to-say.html

Link of the Day: Bob from Weebl and Bob's Blog.

Issue 33

News: You support Affirmative Action? I never Knew you were a racist.
When do you think that Affirmative Action was first thought up with? The mid 60s? WRONG!! The truth is that Affirmative Action has always been around in America, although most of it is referred to now as "Discrimination." For most of America's history, most businesses favored White Heterosexual able-bodied men. This is, of course, discrimination. Come the Civil Rights movement, Minorities saw this and were not pleased and thought they should "Switch places" when they get jobs so that they were more likely to get jobs. Quite frankly, this makes about as much sense as saying that slavery was wrong because only Africans were slaves and that if it were the White men who were enslaved, it would be alright. In reality slavery was wrong because it is wrong to make another work for no money whatsoever. Another reason I do not agree with Affirmative action is because there should only be one kind of Discrimination in job application, and that is whether the applicant actually is qualified to do the job required of him/her. There is no reason that a business should hire the next x number of minorities, regardless of whether they qualify for the jobs they are applying for, just because the government tells them so. A current event that is sweeping colleges across the country is Affirmative Action bake sales, which sell baked goods for rates which vary depending on the buyer's sex and race. And no discussion about affirmative action in schools would be complete without my own discussion of my brush with Affirmative action. Late in my Grade Schoo Years, my class was told to take a Mathematics test and that the top five scorers in my class would go to a Mathematics bowl. I scored a 30 out of a possible 40 points, the highest in my class. Did I go to the Mathematics Bowl? NO!! I was told that I was not going there so the teacher could let her daughter, who scored average, if not very low on the test, perform in my stead. This concludes this discussion.

Band Name of the Day: Avril Seppuku. The name comes from this game I play wherein I listen to Avril Lavigne's song "Sk8er Boi" for as long as I can take it. My personal record is halfway through the second verse.

Film IDea: A traveling production of Inherit the Wind, which I saw at the Field Museum earlier today, gets ready for a trip to the Bible Belt, where it is met with much opposition. Christopher Guest Mockumentary style.

Review of the Day: Diabolical Cucumbers: The story of how the Beatles defeat many famous boy bands. It is very funny, especially for a Beatle fan and a hater of a lot of today's music. It is at www.angelfire.com/nc2/random3/Diabolical_cucumbers/DC.html

Quote of the day: “HERE ON RUM ISLAND WE DO NOT BELIEVE IN RUM!”
--Pokey the Penguin, “Welcome to Rum Island”

"In Meat-Space, Everybody is your Friend!"
--Pokey the Penguin, "Pokey and Meatspace"

Link of the Day: The site of the Aforementioned Pokey the Penguin.