Pictures from Across the Way

This seal, which forms an acrostic of V I T R I O L, would have been useful back when I blogged under that other old alias of mine.

The Enchanted Negro’s Head

Unrelated to the previous post…

Socialism!

When I awoke this morning, I crawled over to the computer to check the news. This has been my Saturday ritual for a long time now. So, when I opened up the old Huffington Post RSS feed and saw this fine bit of news, I finally saw the light!

All these years, I had been using the word “socialism” entirely incorrectly. I’d always thought that socialism meant, you know, “a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole.” That’s what I get for using those faulty liberal dictionaries! It is indeed fortunate that we have people like Steve King who can come along and set the record straight on this word by illustrating its proper use, as a word to denote anything that is opposed to one’s own personal beliefs!

I did some more research on the matter and found this:

Given all this new information, I have decided to expand upon my definition of socialism in at least the following ways (more to come as I can think of them):

• When a vending machine takes your money and doesn’t give you anything, that is socialism. Obviously a redistribution of wealth going on there. No wonder Coca-Cola uses red for the color of their cans!
• When a person on the highway cuts you off or passes you on the shoulder of the road… socialism! Obviously a godless socialist afraid of being put in front of a death panel for being late for one of his godless socialist indoctrination meetings.
• When any person disagrees with you… obvious socialism. Rabble-rousers and dissenters are trying to fool the American people with their satanic “facts” and “textbook definitions” and other vile LIEberal dreck. As Stephen Colbert so elegantly put it: “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”
• When any person agrees with you but doesn’t do so in a sentence that includes ACORN, SEIU, Ayers, Kenya, Marx, terrorists, birth certificates, the President hating the country he leads, the Antichrist, Hitler, Stalin, witch doctors, welfare queens, Rev. Wright, wives who hate the country their husbands lead, relatives who are illegal aliens, being friends with Ahmadinejad, being friends with Kim Jong-Il, being friends with Satan yet being atheist, and jack-booted thugs putting Grandma down when she stops contributing to society… if any of those elements are missing from the conversation, then, well… it’s not an automatic determination of socialism, but the person probably sympathizes with the left. At the very least, he’s a nigger-lover like Jimmy Carter.
• When a cashier gives you back incorrect change… socialism. That new liberal math will take away your hard-working white dollars and distribute it to LAZY PEOPLE, only LAZY PEOPLE, as anyone who doesn’t have the same job as you or the same lot in life as you is LAZY.

Thank you, Steve King, for showing me the error of my ways!

Dragon*Con 2009

Dragon*Con 2009. Whoo boy. Where to start.

For those who don’t know, Dragon*Con is an annual gathering of tens of thousands people in Atlanta to share their love of science fiction, fantasy, and other geeky endeavors. It is always over Labor Day weekend and it is always a spectacle to behold, as a good many of the attendees dress up as their favorite characters. There are lots of geek celebrities in attendance (like William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy) and tons of events, including concerts, parties, discussion panels, movie marathons, gaming marathons, and vendors selling all kinds of strange and wonderful things. There is so much stuff to see and do that it is distributed across four hotels downtown. It is, in short, a freak show par excellence.

For one thing, I am still somewhat shocked that I took the advice of an extremely enthusiastic (and nerdy) gay couple that I only met a few months prior and attend one of the nation’s largest geek conventions with them. I mean, I don’t generally do things like this. Anyone who knows me knows that I generally don’t go out of my way to go to large gatherings of people… especially when it costs money. But, I think at some point this past spring, I realized that I’m not getting any older, and that it’s always better to regret things you’ve done than to regret things you didn’t do, and nothing ventured nothing gained, and maybe a handful of other cliches too. So, why not? I mean, the worst that could happen would be that someone mugs me and murders me in some back alley of Atlanta… and that’s not terrible in the grand scheme of things. What did I have to lose?

Fortunately for me, I was neither mugged nor murdered. As a matter of fact, I had a surprisingly enjoyable time, in the company of people whom I have come to consider real friends. I felt like I fit in there among the geeks and the weirdos–it was lovely. There is so much that could be said about the trip, but so much that should probably remain unsaid in case certain parties ever stumble across the blog. Let’s just say that most of us spent the weekend in a blissed-out, boozed-out, sex-fueled haze, punctuated with pirates, vampires, steampunks, goths, furries, gamers, zombies, ninjas, elves, faeries, and other things too numerous to list. And while the debauchery might have made me feel like I was in college again, the games and characters that I saw made me feel like I was back in high school. This was the very best kind of nostalgia, coupled with a wondrous assemblage of things and people never even dreamed of previously.

I’m very glad I went and I have now become something of a Dragon*Con evangelist. Knowing the tastes of my other friends, I know that they would have a blast, and I would very much like to show them the wonderful and strange place that is downtown Atlanta over Labor Day weekend.

I’ll leave you with a bit of music by the Crüxshadows, a goth/darkwave band that is a perennial favorite at the ‘Con. I heard this song throughout the weekend as we ventured through the lower reaches of the Atlanta Marriott, so in my mind it became the default theme song for my first ‘Con experience. And yes, I admit it: I think the lead singer Rogue is cute. I’ve always had a thing for the goth boys.

He Bite Me

One-Panel Comics: The Real Story

One of my friends recently forwarded the below comic strip to me and asked: is this anything?

On first glance, it appeared to be simply an inept one-panel “comic” attempting to make some vague statement about the Boy Scouts, the Salvation Army, the ACLU, and/or Walt Whitman. But looks can be deceiving! Surely, I thought, surely the intellectual giant who had created this work had some kind of goal in creating it. After a great deal of introspection, it occurred to me that my initial impression, that this was indeed a comic, was flawed. When those premises are removed, then the image makes a great deal more sense, and the thematic elements involved paint a clear picture that the author had an epic narrative in mind. So now, I will attempt to offer up my interpretation of the narrative of this non-comic:

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

Many years ago, on his deathbed, Walt Whitman stared up into the sky and pleaded for more time on earth. God, in reviewing His records of Walt’s life, wrote the man off as a reckless sodomite of the highest (or perhaps lowest) caliber, and the Deity balked at the request. But Jesus, ever the hippy in the family, reminded God that there was one point in Walt’s life when he had been “born-again” in a small backwoods church, causing God to facepalm and sigh loudy.

“But I want to destroy him!” said God.

“Well, you can’t, technically,” said Jesus. “Isn’t there something else you could do?”

“I have an idea!” said Saint Sergius. He proposed transforming Walt Whitman into into a magical fairy and letting him be reborn on the Earth, where he would be free to frolic and roam amongst the mortals, which were his true love anyway. (Sergius was always a little fruity.)

“That’s awesome,” said God. “He gets to avoid Hell on a technicality, and I don’t have to put up with his hippy ass running naked up and down the golden streets of paradise.” They all had a Good Laugh and, with a wiggle of His nose, God made it so.

As Walt passed from death to life in the blink of an eye, he was transformed into a three-foot-tall being sporting moth-like wings. Beside him, a glowing wand lay on the ground. As he slowly opened his eyes for the first time, the shining stick caught his eye. He immediately reached for it and looked it over.

“Hmm… this looks like a magic wand…” he said to himself, swatting it about. Suddenly, a bolt of lightning flew from the tip and incinerated a tree.

“Oh shit, said the newly-reborn fairy. Instinctively his wings fluttered a bit… he hadn’t noticed them before, and it was only now that he realized that he had the appendages. He reached back behind himself and felt the papery, leathery appendages. A distinct sense of shock passed through him, and for the first time since he awoke, he realized that he had not a single clue who he was. He looked around furtively until he spotted a pond nearby, and he raced over to it.

Looking into the water, the fairy, completely oblivious to the fact that he was once Walt Whitman, saw himself and stood motionless, his mouth agape. He held up his hands and looked intently at them, turning his hands over slowly as he attempted to make out what exactly he was. On his right hand, he spotted a small, red scar at the base of his thumb. In small letters that appeared to have been cut with the point of a knife was the word ‘ACLU.’

“ACLU?” the fairy asked. He did not remember that, when he was Walt Whitman, he had fallen for a virile youth named Adam Campbell, with whom he had a tempestuous relationship. One evening, in a drunken haze, Adam had taken his pocketknife and carved ‘ACLU’ on his elder lover’s hand, so that he would always know that “Adam Campbell Loves U”. None of those memories were intact, so the fairy was left to puzzle over the significance of the scar.

“Perhaps this is my name,” the fairy thought, and the more he thought about it, the more it made sense. A strange name… a strange body… a wand that could incinerate trees… he realized he could only be a fairy. With a newfound identity, Aclu left the pond and walked back over to where he’d dropped the wand.

Picking it up, he looked it over again. “I wonder how you work this thing…” he thought. Pointing it and brandishing it, Aclu concentrated hard on something that he wanted to manifest. At that time, Aclu wanted to manifest a unicorn. Unexpectedly, a bolt of yellow energy flew from the tip of the wand, and in a puff of pink smoke, there stood before Aclu a giant, hairy monstrosity, clad in a red apron and holding bells in each hand. The creature appeared to resemble an ape of some sort, except his face was contorted in some unfathomable, indescribeable way. For the life of him, Aclu didn’t know what the hell he had just manifested.

“Umm…?” said Aclu, which was all it took to get the creature’s attention. The beast’s nostrils flared, and pure animalistic rage crossed over what had just been a face of endless confusion before. The creature raised both of his fists into the air, bellowing a most unnatural sound and shaking its bells violently. The din echoed over the mountain vale, making the outburst all the more terrifying, and was heard by picnickers as far as three miles away.

“GOD IS DEEEEEEEEEAD!” growled the monster, and with a strength unknown in this mortal coil, hurled one of its bells toward Aclu. The fairy barely had time to react, but did a barrel roll to avoid the projectile. Then, enraged that he had missed, the creature began galumphing toward Aclu.

Instinctively, Aclu the Fairy jumped into the air and began flapping his wings. Through sheer force of will, he began to inelegantly ascend. As the aproned demon approached, Aclu flapped as hard as he could, gaining a good bit of altitude until he was twenty feet into the air. The beast rang its remaining bell angrily while Aclu winged his way toward a nearby Southern yellow pine, where he perched on one of its higher branches. A million thoughts raced through Aclu’s head as he debated what should be done. Should he just leave? The creature seemed singularly obsessed with him and, even after twenty minutes of bellowing and multiple attacks on the tree, showed no sign of tiring out.

“I need someone who can take care of this creature,” Aclu thought. “Maybe I can scare up a knight… yes! I will call up Percival or Galahad one of the other Knights of the Round Table to dispatch this beast!” With newfound resolve, Aclu stuck his tongue out and pointed at the ground, about ten feet away from the monster. In another flash of pink smoke, a silhouette roughly the same size as the creature was visible. The beast, who had been ranting and raving the entire time, fell silent with this, perhaps realizing that he was dealing no mere bearded weirdo.

“My knight!” Aclu proclaimed, “fell this unholy beast and you shall be well rewarded!” Aclu and the beast both watched as the figure took one step foward–to their astonishment, a foot clad in a high-heeled shoe emerged from the billowing pink smoke.

Aclu sighed. “This is going to be harder than I thought.”

God laughed a hearty laugh, like a sea captain, and gave Saint Sergius a manly pat on the back. “Serge, I knew there was a reason I let you and your fudgepacker boyfriend up here!”

Sergius chuckled uneasily. “Yeah… haha… hey, there’s Jesus, I’m gonna go hang out with him now…”

“Cool beans,” said God, returning his attention to the fairy, the transvestite, and the sasquatch dueling in the Sierra Nevadas.

Recently Seen Over Alaska

The Health Care Debate.

I’ve been trying to keep up with the health care debate and, not surprisingly, it’s devolved into an ugly spectacle. On one hand, you have people ineligible for private insurance, as well as rational/caring people who are in favor of paying a little extra to ensure that everyone in the country has a health care option. On the other hand, you have an unholy alliance between the insurance companies, conservative partisan hacks who refuse to accept any idea put forth by the opposing party, and insane FOXNews readers who are afraid that the scary maybe-Kenyan is going to euthanize Grandma at the age of 65, confiscate her life’s savings, and use it to fund abortions for black/illegal immigrant welfare queens. Five bucks if you can guess which side is actually willing to be civil and debate the merits of the bill.

FOXNews lately has portrayed the White House as an Orwellian nightmare in the works–which is curious, because they never said anything to that effect when Bush introduced spying on private citizens as a valid terror-combating tactic, which would have been the very definition of Orwellian by the standards set forth in 1984. Because it was an idea put forth by Fearless Leader, in the name of FREEDOM, it was a de facto valid tactic and not open to debate. Now, when we have a leader in office who wants to ensure that all Americans have a choice when it comes to choosing health insurance, it’s a huge screaming hissy fit about socialism, marxism, communism, fascism, nazism, collectivism, and about every other -ism you can think of… being funded with your tax dollars!!!!11!!!!1! Every day has a new breathless headline about “populist rage against Obamacare” and other such jokes. You have to really dig to find out how conservative think tanks and organizations like the so-called “Americans For Prosperity” have been bussing people in to attend town hall meetings (not even in their own fucking districts) and proceed to shout, shove, and otherwise disrupt any attempt for members of Congress to talk about the bill and what it will really do. For these people, their minds are already made up–the maybe-Kenyan is actively working to destroy America by stealing everyone’s money and giving it to people who don’t deserve it.

The arguments put forth by the opposition represent a vast, deep-seated, irrational fear that has shades of racial bigotry as well as just general selfishness and partisan idiocy. They argue that the maybe-Kenyan is going to put all these poor, defenseless insurance companies out of business with a plan that they can’t hope to compete with–but then with the same breath, say that the plan is utter shit and that “if it’s so good, WHY WON’T THE PRESIDENT AND MEMBERS OF CONGRESS USE IT HURR HURR HURRRRRRR *snort*”? Which is it? So good that it will bankrupt the private insurance industry, or so bad that no one wants it? (Of course, no answer other than “yer just one a them dern librals!”) When they talk of Obama “rewarding his base” and “providing healthcare to the lazy and undeserving”, the racial overtones are patently obvious, and are embarrassingly ignorant. And when “socialism” is tossed about like a dirty word, 90% of the people opposed to the President’s health care plan don’t even know what socialism actually entails.

Here’s what I have to say to these people:

• The current cost of health care is BANKRUPTING THE NATION. Something has to be done. Most people have a loose grasp of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (even if they don’t know it as such) and they will place paying for their health care and medicine as a higher priority than, say, buying a new blender. You can’t fucking rejuvenate a weak economy if no one has any money to spend on stuff–and don’t scream just cut taxes again either, because as soon as the government performs a tax cut, the insurance companies will just bump up their premiums to match, to ensure they still get the lion’s share of everyone’s budget. Umm, hello, they’ve been doing this shit for a long time and are some of the wealthiest businesses in the world–they know how to feed from the trough, and they feeding time comes, they know exactly when it occurs and how much is available.
• If you are really that opposed to government healthcare, fine, keep your insurance. Yes, you can do that! If you’d read the goddamned bill you’d know that. And if you keep your insurance, you might even find that your own insurance might actually improve somewhat if it has to now compete with a low-cost government option. But no one’s forcing you to switch insurance providers. If you’re happy with your insurance, fine–THIS BILL IS NOT FOR YOU. This bill is for those people who have no other options. Yes, this requires additional spending to fund–and if you are unhappy about the government spending money to take care of its citizens, then I suppose you’d have no problem giving back those Social Security checks you get, and not using your Medicare/Medicaid benefits either? Oh, you rely on those? Well then you are ALREADY GETTING GOVERNMENT HELP, so STFU.
• If you actually believe the government is going to ration healthcare and/or euthanize your loved ones and/or hand out abortions on demand like they’re appendectomies or something, then I would encourage you to actually read the bill. When you find the articles of the bill that mention those practicles, do let me know. Thanks.
• If you’re just too goddamned greedy to want everyone in the country to have a health care option, but you still go to church and consider yourself a decent person, then I would encourage you to take a long hard look through the religious book of your preference (doesn’t matter–Bible, Koran, Torah, Tao Te Ching… take your pick) and find those sections that talk about how it is preferable, when given the choice between helping someone in need and not doing so, that the best course of action is to do that which costs you the least. Yes, go on, look it up and tell me where it says that. And if your reply is “well, I’d rather help someone myself than to fork my money over to the government and let them choose who to help for me”… then that tells me that either a) you have selective sensitivity to the anguish of other human beings, or b) you intend to help someone not on the basis of what they need or how dire their situation is, but on who they are in relation to you. If the former’s the case, then I would encourage you to consider that most people don’t have the luxury of cherry-picking the ways in which they will suffer. If the latter’s the case, then you should realize that not everyone is going to have such a “buddy network” to back them up when they need it.
• If you think the government’s going to put the insurance companies out of business–oh, my God! You are totally right! I mean, look at how that great liberal, socialist, fascist United States Postal Service has completely undermined UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc.! Just completely run them into the ground–using your own taxpayer money to destroy capitalism! Those insurance companies don’t have a prayer!

I am not claiming that dissent should be silenced–most definitely, it does not. If there are valid reasons why the health care bill should not be passed, by all means air them, we won’t have another chance like this for a long time, and we’d better do it right. It’s a matter of life and death. But, if your line of reasoning is any of the following:

• Dumbocrats/libtards are dumb and stuff and can’t do anything right and I hate everything they stand for and they are enemies of FREEDOM!
• Everyone on the left HATES AMERICA and wants to DESTROY THE COUNTRY by bankrupting it and hand over our babies to be the slaves of the CHINESE!
• Obama is the ANTICHRIST and he’s trying to make the government look like a NOBLE INSTITUTION to legitimize his position and FOOL THE WORLD!
• Obama is a KENYAN and one of them LAZY ENTITLED N—–S who only want to take the dollars of good, Christian, hard-working white people and redistribute them to OTHER LAZY N—–S who DON’T DESERVE IT!
• This is all part of a plan by GEORGE SOROS to turn the country into a SOCIALIST WASTELAND using his pawn Obama because he HATES THE COUNTRY SO MUCH and is secretly working with the ILLUMINATI to take over the world with their pawns, one forged birth certificate at a time!

Then just shut up and go back to your marginalized hole, and stop acting like you represent the public as a whole.

Spanish Calculus

A real gem from Funny Exams.

OMG Noooooooo