By the way: Please look at the Chapters of an Upcoming Novel on my Sidebar to the Right. Rexroi is a novel that I worked very hard on and I have a lot of affection for this one. I really would like somebody to read some of it some time. It's fun. You'll like it.
And if you're a publisher, you'll like it a lot.
(Kind of a rambling introduction follows, if you want to pass go to the asterix*)
I was just looking over some of the stats for my website (Again, on the right on the sidebar) and I noticed that so far this month I've had twenty two hundred hits, while last month it was fifteen hundred. I'm kind of puzzled as to the jump, you know, what am I doing right this month, versus last month.
Webcom migrated my site - which I don't know what that means or why they did it. I sure didn't ask them to do it. So, I don't know the total number of hits over it's life since they lost the stats for before they 'migrated' it. My guess is about ten thousand, maybe not. That's not so hot, I suppose, but it's more than none, and it does kind of blow my mind to think of that many people I don't know seeing my name and reading my words.
Anyways, I noticed that people have been visiting the area called 'Devastating Rebutalls' where I give anyone the opportunity to disagree with me on my own website. Nobody has contacted me. C'mon, everybody can't agree with me! On the other hand, I'm not going to try too hard to recruit people to disagree with me on my dime ... oh well, averyattractivecow@yahoo.com.
There. If you want to, that's where you go.
Here's the asterix*
One of the most visited pages was one called 'Devil Worship in America'.
I thought of more things to say, or things I might have left out of the original.
The first thing that I wanted to say is that it is an interesting fact that Devil Worshipers constitute a sect of the Christian Religion.
Huh?
But ... Um ... aren't they kind of the exact opposite of Christianity? Yes, and that's exactly why they belong in Christianity. It is not the Buddhist God, or Hindu God, or the Islamic God that Devil Worshipers are opposed to. They operate as a subsect of the Christian faith using the exact framework and worldview that Christianity does.
I meant to say something about Geraldo and his crusade - I think it might have been in the eighties - against Devil Worship. He 'exposed' all sorts of information and somehow I wasn't able to see any of it, which I would have liked to and I would have liked to have been able to comment on it. I believe that might have been the part of the eighties when I was out of the country. (When I got back to the US, I'd actually forgotten how to order at a fast food restaurant - a critical American life skill that had simply eroded).
If I were to say anything it would be to cast doubt on his research, which of course I really can't do since it's ludicrous without knowing what I was talking about. Still, I was very tempted to do just that. But it's wrong and unethical. That doesn't always stop me, I confess, but this time it did.
I also meant to say more about Mike Warnke who is a preacher who writes and lectures about his time as a Satanic High Priest. There are many, many carefully researched and documented web sites that thoroughly dispute and in detail this story. He turns out to be someone who was renowned for his story telling and many of his friends never much believed anything he said, but were still interested to hear what kind of BS he could come up with. Another confession: I have friends like this and I've told a few stories myself.
Once another friend of mine (of the aforesaid variety) told me a very interesting story about something that had happened to him. Only it had happened to me, which he must have forgotten, so he recast the story with himself in the lead. Actually, I was very flattered that he thought enough of my story to steal it. Thanks, Pal.
I might have glossed over the 'recovered memory' phenomenon. Many Satanic abuse stories have come to light through the process of hypnosis. Very suspiciously, most of these recovered memory stories occur in 'clusters', that is the same hypnotist seems to find scads of people who have these memories. Hypnosis, you must know, can actually create these false memories. It can be done deliberately or it can also be accomplished quite 'innocently' by a researcher who is looking for evidence of what he thinks actually exists out there.
'Buried' memories are a tricky topic. Common sense tells you that the most horrible things that have happened to you have also created the most vivid and lasting memories. Most people do not forget the awful things that have happened to them, and indeed it would be extremely anti-evolutionary for humans to do that. We remember awful things to ensure that we can avoid them in the future. Generally. I won't go so far as to say there are never repressed memories, there are and it's a real phenomenon, but it's also a rare phenomenon.
If you come across a book that is based on recovered memories just be skeptical. And I have read at least one that was based on hypnotically recovered memories. However, in this one there was also some corroborating physicla evidence. So, who knows?
I also forgot to point out the late Satanic High Priest (there are never any low or medium priests, you know) Anton La Vey's observation that even if there were real Devil Worshipers of the exact variety theorized, they could hardly have been responsible for as many horrors as the Christian Church has been. Think about it: You never hear about all the Devil Worshipers burning people at the stake or torturing people in their secret dungeon, do you? Or you don't hear about Devil Worshipers masacreeing thousands and millions of people of different faiths - like the Christians have done with the Muslims and Jews.
I'm not advocating for it, you understand, but it's an interesting point casting the shoe on the other foot like that. And it sure makes you think.
And how about that human sacrifice thing? When you think about it, most religions throughout history have indulged in human sacrifice and it's only recently that it's been looked at as wrong to sacrifice people as part of the religion. It's okay for other reasons, though - if they're a witch for example. You'd be surprised how many people actually are. All you have to do is stick a whole bunch of feet directly in to some flames and you'll find about as many witches as you need.
Well, that's what I think I left out, and if you want to read the rest about Devil Worship in America or any of the other topics I've covered it's on the Homepage tag on the sidebar.
When I was a small child this was the bedtime prayer I had to say: "Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my sould to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take." Needless to say, the first few times I said that one with my mother I had a few questions for her. Like: "Am I going to die? Is that why I have to say this creepy prayer? And can I please have another prayer to recite because I don't like this one so much." After those questions, I wondered aloud to her: "What is a soul?"
She told me. Your soul is something that's inside of you, but invisible and it is you and it leaves your body when you die. Probably that's as good an explanation as any to give a small child. I couldn't actually picture what a soul looked like so I envisioned it as sort of a translucent stadium horn, and for years that's what I thought a soul was. Later on I decided that a soul was your exact replica, only inside you exactly taking up just a little bit less space than your physical body - otherwise how could it fit inside of you? Makes sense doesn't it?
Christianity isn't the only religion that believes in a soul. Pretty much all of the major religions, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism also believe in a soul. They all disagree on what happens to your soul when you die. For example, in Christianity you can either go to Heaven or Hell, but for Hindus and Buddhists you got to come back. God, that's got to suck. At least in Christianity and Islam you have a chance for eternal paradise, but with those other two you know you're going to be right back where you started the first time. Nice.
Most of the time you only get one soul, but in some esoteric literature there are postulated to be five or six different spiritual bodies that you possess. I have no idea how that would work out. One soul inside of one body I can understand but six, one inside of another makes no sense at all. What would make more sense to me is one soul and many physical bodies at the same time. That way you could decide who you wanted to be on any particular day and take that body out for a spin, much like fabulously rich celebrities have multiple cars that they can use.
I don't believe in a soul, exactly (since you've been wondering) but I go for what I call the quantum physics multidimensional multiverse version of having a soul. You see, our world actually has many more than the accepted four dimensions of classical physics, but instead exists in several dimensions and many other universes. Thus, we are multidimensional beings existing in all of those dimensions and therefore locality and serial time are merely illusions of our apparent four dimensions.
Sorry, that's the best I can explain it. But it works out. Trust me.
Once when I was in college I was playing poker with some other college buddies, one of whom was an avowed atheist. We were playing penny ante, mostly just for fun. Of course, no one much had a lot of money so even the few dollars that changed hands was high stakes for us. The avowed atheist went bust and I offered to front him some money for the deed to his soul - fifty cents, I recall. Enough to get the atheist back in the game. By the way, this was long before the Simpson's episode where Bart sells his soul.
He refused. I couldn't fathom that. Obviously he wasn't a very good atheist because that should have been an offer that he should have jumped at, but for some reason he wouldn't. All I was asking for was a deed to something that he told us he thought was entirely imaginary. I'd bet if I asked him for the deed to the Easter Bunny he would have bit, but not this. He had no courage of his convictions, which disappointed me.
Many years later it occurred to me that maybe the reason he wouldn't put up the deed to his soul was because he's already gambled it away previously. I should look on e-bay to see if it's up for sale. It would probably bring in a lot more than the fifty cents I offered.
By the way, has anybody put the deed for their soul up for sale on e-bay? If not, I freely give that idea to anyone who wants to, since I'm way too superstitious to do it myself. After this, I think I will check e-bay to see if I can buy a soul and how much they go for. Maybe I'll buy one myself. I'll bet it looks like a stadium horn.
If you want a good belly laugh check out one of the episodes of 'The Girl's Next Door' when Hugh Hefner is out at a nightclub dancing with some of his girlfriends, bunnies, playmates et al. Good God, this guy puts out less effort at his dancing then most men. Granted, old Hugh walks with a bent over shuffle now so just standing upright is pretty good for him, but I saw film clips of his dancing from decades earlier and he wasn't much better. Even back then he did the Junior High side to side foot drag with truncated arm swing.
Well, Why should he put any effort into it? He knows for a fact that he's going to get more lucky that night than I ever will and that's the only reason to dance - hoping you get lucky. Let me you into a secret here: No straight man really likes dancing so much. It's all for the ladies and almost always the last thing in the world you ever want to do.
The last time I was ever on a dance floor it was because I was dragged out there. The times have been few indeed where I actually asked somebody to dance with me.
It seems to be different for women. They dance because it's an activity they want to engage in for it's own sake, much like taking a hot bath. Can someone explain that to me? I've asked women what on Earth is so great about laying in hot water and all I ever get is vague evasions as if it weren't the bath itself but something else, something else they were doing in that hot bath all alone by themselves without their clothes on ... hey, wait a minute!
Okay, now I get it.
After many years, I've finally figured out a way not to disgrace myself so thoroughly on the dance floor. I call it faux dancing. Here's how it works: When I must dance I try to equip myself with some distractors, these are distractors to distract my partner from how crappy I'm dancing. My two favorite distractors used to be to have a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Thus, every time I would miss a step I would take a sip off my cocktail, another misstep - a puff on my cigarette, a really bad one: Sip and a puff both. Then to further distract my partner I would lean in and make some sort of conversation.
Of course, I would have to make some sorts of motions with my body so my ploy was to sort of kind of mirror my partner - figuring she probably knows how to dance - and sort of kind of mirroring her makes it look like I do, too. When she twirls under my outstretched arm, I know I'm home free.
Back to Hugh. The guy's got a pretty good life now. I wonder to myself whether I would change places with him and take over his life, if I suddenly had to be an eighty year old man but with free hot sex with pretty much as many beautiful women as me and my viagra could handle. That's a hard hypothetical question, for sure. But you know what? If I live long enough I will be an eighty year old man and I probably won't be having hot blondes sharing my bed then. So all things considered if I could suddenly assume Hugh Hefner's life right now I'd do it, even if I didn't dance so hot.
For some reason my letters, phone calls and E-mails requesting an invitation to the Playboy Mansion go unheeded. Unheeded if you don't count restraining orders - and I don't. By the way, even though I hold the patent on faux dancing any other man who wants to can use it. It's work pretty good for me and it probably will for you, too.
**Planet of the Apes is now out on DVD. I have a link to it in my sidebar UNDER how to find my book (and other important links). Click on 'How to find MY BOOK' before the DVD**
What you have to understand about the original Planet of the Apes movies is that is was an A-List movie. It had a respectable budget, a respectable director, and stars that been in major motion pictures in the past - Charlton Heston (no slouch) Roddy McDowell (also no slouch) and almost Edward G. Robinson. I'll explain what happened, later, but he started filming and left. And most of all the first draft of the script was authored by none other than master story teller Rod Serling.
It had a lot going for it. There was a special on the series that I watched that detailed all of these things, and as these 'making of' specials tend to it made every decision look like it was inspired genius. What the special glossed over was the central metaphor of the movie. The special said that it wasn't clear what the metaphor was, though unfortunately, it was and looking back from the twenty first century the metaphor was clearly racism. On the Planet of the Apes the monkeys were once the slaves of the humans but they rose up and became their own masters. The reason that no one wants to touch this one is because monkeys can be equated with former African slaves and that is an ugly and insensitive connection. It's also almost certainly the one that was intended.
My favorite show Star Trek often used metaphor and often painfully obvious metaphor. They tackled racism once in the guise of two aliens from a planet that had been racked with civil strife. These aliens were portrayed with black grease paint on one side of their face and white grease paint on the other, but they hated each other because of the side that was black and white, which happened to be opposite. See, there's the irony. To the human eyes the difference of the sides was silly, but to them it was critically important - so that means that our racism (it was the sixties) is silly also.
For the time, I guess that was a daring statement, though these days it seems quaint and prosaic. Anyways, to get back to the Planet of the Apes - for it's time it also was a powerful message. When Charlton Heston sees the remains of the Statue of Liberty in the foreground and does his marvelous bellowing speech about the maniacs blowing it all up damn them, damn them all to hell! What he is clearly showing is that racism was destroying the promise of the United States - freedom and equality and all that. Sure it seems trite today, but the first time it wasn't.
Slavery we all know now is wrong. What I have trouble getting my brain around is that for human history it wasn't considered so. How could human beings have believed in and practiced this sort of abomination for - basically for ever except the slim era of present history? Currently slavery is legal nowhere and it is also currently more prevalent than any other time. Most of the slaves who have ever been alive are alive right now.
This statistic I got from a Dateline NBC Special. In this special the correspondent went undercover to an Eastern European country and bought himself a sex slave, who of course, he freed right afterwards. He paid eighteen hundred dollars. The woman's story - his slave - was sad beyond belief. She grew up in an orphanage, was developmentally disabled, and at the age of fourteen she was thrown out of the orphanage where she lived in the sewers for two years before being enslaved and forced to earn her keep by having sex dozens of times per night while being fed beans and beans only.
Back to Plantet of the Apes: The Tim Burton version was one that I looked forward to eagerly, and which I was therefore disappointed in when I finally saw it. His version was a mess. Not the visuals, mind you, Burton is a master at putting out visually stunning movies that are an absolute confused mish mash. This was definitely one of them. Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes meant basically nothing and the stupid ending was obviously something that the studio insisted that he put in so he would have some sort of an ending comparable to the origninal. It wasn't. It was stupid.
Please take my advice and see the original, or own the original since as I pointed out it is now out on DVD. It's the whole series I think.
Fair is fair, and since most of us here in America were raised as Christians how would we feel about a cartoon that showed Jesus with a bomb coming out of his head? That would probably be a confusing image, but the case could be made - cartoon or otherwise - that Christianity is a pretty violent religion. Crusades, anyone? What was that all about? Do we all really think that Jesus would have put his seal of approval on that centuries long fiasco? Not me. I think he probably wouldn't have such fond memories of the piece of real estate where the Romans tortured and killed him. I think he would be alright with us leaving it alone.
But how peaceful was our Messiah, anyways? Remember that Gospel verse when he says that he would be showing up with a sword in his hand? What were you planning on doing with that sword, sweet gentle Jesus - turn it into a plowshare, perhaps?
Well, you can see my point. A case can certainly be made for the violent tendencies of Christians. We just don't usually make it because that's us and God blesses us and nobody else. It's right there on our money, you know.
Still, it's kind of hard to see the Muslim side of this so well. Their point is that we should be tolerant and respectful of their religion, which is not violent. And they make their point by - what? Oh. Being violent and attacking other's people's religions. Yeah, I can see where they're coming from with that. They aren't ironically proving the very point of that cartoon, are they?
There is a voice of reason out in the Muslim world. I'm sure of it. But for some reason our Western media hasn't done such a good job of finding it and they should. It's just that it's easier and lazier for them to cover the violence and leave the voices of reason alone. Think of this: There are hundreds of millions of Muslims and they aren't all out on the street rioting and murdering and burning embassies, churches and synagogues. Most of them are all quietly home probably wishing that those extremists nuts weren't making them all look bad to the rest of the world.
The Danish cartoon showing a bomb coming out of Mohamed's turban was offensive. No question. It was offensive but it shouldn't have been censored. Free speech is a wonderful thing in the respect that we need idiots to speak up. We need idiots to speak up so we all know who they are. Otherwise, when they're quiet we have to guess.
Show of hands, please. Who knew I was an idiot before I'd written this?
See, that's exactly what I'm saying.
Finally it's below zero here in Wisconsin with actual snow on the ground. I'd forgotten what it felt like to stand outside and feel the warmth and life leaving your body as the bitter wind numbed your exposed flesh. I was beginning to think that Global warming is real, but thank God for today because there's no way it can be true when it can still get like this outside.
Actually, it is kind of nice to have some real cold up here for a change and I was only being slightly sarcastic - for a change.
And I do think global warming is a real thing. I just saw some pictures of the North Pole compared to about twenty years ago, and yep, it's visibly smaller than it was. I've been wondering if the reason the midwest is getting such relatively mild weather in the Winter while the East Coast gets socked with blizzards isn't another side effect of that same global warming.
I really wish the East Coast media would stop getting hysterical everytime a snowflake is seen over New York City. You'd think their snow is ten times more horrible than our snow is here. Well, maybe it is, because it's falling on them. Do you remember 'the blizzard of the century'? That was last century, but I just could not help thinking to myself that these people really have got to get over themselves. Because we get snow like that all the time and the blizzard of the century was not the worst blizzard that happened in the 1900's in this country.
So you got some snow? How is that news? What you really should report is that people in the Midwest get snow and they don't go running around telling everybody about it. Somehow they don't complain at all. They just shovel it and get on with their lives. That should make the news.
Here's another example: The perfect storm. Some New England fishermen got lost in a bad storm and a movie got made about it. That perfect storm happened on Halloween 1991 which happened to be the largest snowfall in Minnesota (where I was living at the time) . Do you remember the movie Hollywood made about it?
Of course not. They didn't make one. It didn't happen on one of the coasts, so who cares?
Okay, I don't expect the East Coast media to quit whining everytime it snows over there. I'm a reasonable guy. But maybe they could stop whining as much.
I had some more thoughts on Vol, sorry I can't help myself.
The whole question of the origin of Vol has been thoroughly un-addressed. Like, how come nobody on the Enterprise even thinks to ask how this God-like planet controlling machine came into being. Did Vol create himself? Not likely, I would think ... but then that gets you into the tricky theological question of how God on planet Earth came into being, and I don't want to go there yet. (I know the answer but it will be revealed later. Stay tuned)
Or did some race of super beings plant Vol on the planet and then equip the machine with his own crew of humanoids? These humanoids only purpose in existence is to feed Vol, and worship him, too, I suppose. But this brings up two questions in my mind.
First of all: Why humanoids? If you were going to make creatures just to feed Vol, they sure don't need all that brain power to do the job. Something much simpler and dumber would foot the bill - monkeys, or wood chucks or koala bears. Humanoids can think of reasons not to obey and bring you your dinner every night.
Then: Is this the most effecient method for Vol to get energy? He has to wait for his subjects to bring him baskets and baskets of vegetables and fruits and throw them down his mouth. What about solar cells? How come Vol never thought of that? It would be much more effective and since he controlled the whole planet and could make the sun shine all the time it would work one hundred percent of the time. Or windmills. Same argument. He's Vol he can make the wind blow whenever he wants.
But you see, even if an episode of Star Trek was awful like that one was, you had no choice. There was no way you could say: 'This sucks' and use the remote controller to turn the channel, because there were no remotes and only two other channels and I guarantee you that whatever was on those two remaining channels sucked a lot worse than even the crappiest episode of Star Trek.
It gets worse for your Uncle Steve. You see, my Dad was a college professor which made him something of an intellectual who believed that TV would rot your brain and so, he refused to ever have a color television in the house. Now please explain this to me: how does a color TV make you dumber than a black and white? Eventually he relented, but it wasn't till I was in High School that I got to view color programs in my own house.
I watched MTV's The Seventies House not too long ago where they took modern teen-agers and stuck them into the seventies environment that I grew up in. It was so gratifying to see how much they hated it, but it also made me realize how barren and sterile it was back then. Pong was an absolute wonder back then, and I am not exaggerating in the slightest. Even now as I play my beautiful Playstation and think how the graphics here or there could be better I have to remember that all Pong was were crude white squares on a black background.
I just hope I live to be a hundred because I truly want to hear how this generation complains about how hard they had it when they were young.
This year I got an outdoor wood-burner which turned out to be a good investment with the price of home heating oil sky-rocketing. It's less so because the Winter here in the Midwest has been unseasonably warm - until now that is. February chilled down very nice and the woodburner has been getting much use now. The woodburner has to have wood put into into it twice dailey, in other words: It needs to be fed. As with most important devices in my life I have given the woodburner a name. He is Vol.
Vol was named from a crappy third season episode of Star Trek the original series. If you were alive back then, or if you are a latter day fan of the series you know that most of the creative minds behind the series had departed that season and NBC was getting stingier and stingier with the money. The actors, too, I think were starting to phone in their performances. The main star, Bill Shatner, you could tell had stopped doing his sit-ups so you could see his velour shirt getting tighter and tighter around his waste. He didn't care so much. Already he was shopping for his curly hairpiece for his next series, T.J. Hooker. (By the way, I'm still a fan of this under-celebrated series)
In the 'Vol' episode the crew transports down to an idyllic planet when they are unexpectedly attacked seemingly by the planet itself. Every crewman with a red shirt buys it in the first two minutes; One is struck by lightening, another steps on an exploding rock and I can't remember if there were more or not, because nobody on the enterprise bothered to even learn the names of their red-shirted colleagues since they were goners anyways.
The remaining crew is stranded on the planet where they run into the inhabitants who are sort of blond haired Polynesian innocents. The episode, it turns out, is strong on allegory. The simple and pure natives worship Vol, who is a sort of planetwide machine who takes care of them and provides them with food, good weather and everything else good. Vol is personified as a big dinosaur head thrusting up from the ground with a big open mouth. Several times a day a gong sounds and the natives gather up fruit and gourds and such in big baskets and throw that down Vol's mouth.
He is their God.
The allegory is clear. This is paradise, maybe even a biblical sort of paradise. Of course, on this planet nobody has sex and they don't even know what it is, so I got to wonder what kind of Paradise this is supposed to be. Oh, wait. Christian paradise. Unfortunately for the Vol-ians part of the crew that got stranded there is that Russian sex machine in a bad wig, Checkov. Checkov just can't help himself and before you know it he's teaching one of the simple native girls how to - gasp! - kiss. All hell - mataphorically, allegorically - breaks loose from here.
Vol can't have his worshipers kissing, you know, so he instructs the head blond to have Kirk et al. slaughtered. I don't know, Vol must have run out of lightening bolts and exploding rocks. The crew turns the tables and stops everyone from feeding Vol, while the Enterprise phasers him into submission and Vol dies because he's too weak from hunger. While this is going on and Vol's gong insistently the pathetic leader whines: 'But Vol hungers.'
Kirk and Spock end this dreadful episode by musing on the similarities to the biblical story of Adam and Eve and Satan getting them thrown out of the garden of Eden - in case it wasn't friggin' obvious enough already. That was pretty much the whole last season of the series, really simple minded allegorical stories.
Here's how my woodburner is like Vol: He's big, and he's green and he sticks up out of the ground with a big open mouth that I need to feed him multiple times per day.
Oh, and he's my God.
Geneticists theorize that in less than two hundred years there will be no natural blondes left in the human species. Is everybody else filled with as much horror and shock as I am by this ominous prediction? Can you imagine what the world would be like with Pandas, whales, Snowy Spotted Owls but no blondes? I shudder to think about it, I really do. And you should be shuddering, also, because think about it: With no blondes on the Earth who are we going to be allowed to make jokes about?Aside from that, why should we go out of our way to preserve blondeness? Well, think about the standards we use to decide to preserve other endangered species. Do you know what the main over-riding factor that decides whether we choose to save one line of animals over another?Give up? It's cuteness. That's right. The biggest factor that determines if animals are going to be allowed by us humans to continue living is how cute we think they are. I guarantee you that puppies and kittens will be around forever because they are absolutely adorable. And talk about Pandas - if they weren't so cuddly we wouldn't be making half the effort to keep them around.Non- cute species? Think about your reaction if I told you that there was an insect virus that would kill off all of the cock roaches and spiders tomorrow. Not too concerned, are you? In fact, I dare say you might be a might bit happy with that news. Forget about all the good things these insects supposedly do in the ecosphere - they're icky. Now, think about that same virus only this time it's a kitten and puppy virus.Aha! That would be a national disaster. We would have every available scientist up all night in their labs to find a cure for that virus, wouldn't we?So, we should use the endangered species act for blondes, too - because they're cute. Well, most of them and that should be good enough. The first thing we as a country should do immediately is to identify the natural blondes in our population. I had the idea that we could enlist the medical establishment to do this. We all know that there is only one real way to tell a real blonde from a non-real blonde, so every physician would be given a form that they would have to fill out and return to government bureaucrats when they have a suspected blonde patient in their examination room. The form would have one question: Carpet match the drapes? Simple. Then they would send it in and the national list of genuine blondes would be tabulated.Once this list was compiled all blondes would have to be registered. Why not? We register handguns, and this is every bit as important as that. Next, the genuine blonds should be identified from the general population with - maybe - a system of arm bands or something that they would be required to wear everywhere, since we don't want them slipping over the border or anything.Then we breed them. At first we could encourage this by a system of tax breaks. However if that doesn't work and the number of natural blondes continues to dwindle we would have to take more stringent measures, like setting aside land for Blonde Reservations, where we would send them all. The reservations would be created to mimic their natural habitat, I envision them as a cross between gigantic shopping malls and hot, trendy night clubs. They would be kept there until there are enough of them to re-introduce into the wild.This sounds harsh, I know, but it's necessary if we want to keep telling amusing jokes about them well into the future.
Steve Martin is starring in The Pink Panther, a re-make of the the Peter Sellars movie and I have a bold prediciton for you: It won't be funny. Know why? The trailers aren't funny; And if they can't find thirty seconds of funny in a ninety minute movie, then there isn't any. It's not like they chose the only parts of the comedy that for some reason didn't have any hilarity.
Here's another reason the movie won't be funny: Steve Martin isn't funny. Oh, he has his moments, I'm sure. I watched a little bit of him on Saturday Night Live and it reminded me of when he used to be funny, but mostly it just brought back to me why I don't stay up late. There's no reason to. Sure, I only watched the first half hour of the show and maybe the side-splitting stuff came later, but again, I don't think so. They put the good stuff on first so that you'll stay tuned then the show gets crappier and crappier.
I saw Steve Martin in an interview where he was asked why he decided to re-make The Pink Panther and he gave some sort of justification, like he always wanted to do it, but just wasn't the time or the script or whatever. Like this was the comedians version of doing Shakespeare.
Oh, Steve, please don't insult our intelligence.
You did it for the money.
There's no artistic or creative reason to re-make this particular movie. It was a silly movie when it came out decades ago and there is no need to try to improve on the slap-stick and farce. Actually that pretty much goes for a re-make of anything. Anyways, Steve, make a silly movie if you want to, but just make an original one for crying out loud. It's not like it's so hard to string a bunch of prat falls together and tie it up with some sort of plot.
But I can respect him doing things for money. That alone doesn't make him a sell-out, because if doing things for money makes you a sell-out then we all are aren't we? - trading as we do our time for money. What I don't respect is him doing any old thing for the bucks. That makes you a prostitute.
Yes, you heard me, Steve, I'm calling you a whore.
Comedians generally stop being funny when they do a handful of things in their lives and their careers. One of these things, unfortunately, is be happy. It's a cliche, maybe, but the funniest bits come out of anger and pain. Think: Sam Kinison or Richard Pryor. They both had dreadful, horrible lives but, boy, they had somethings to say that just resonated and split your sides open.
When the money comes, and the big house, beautiful women (and good drugs, too, I suppose) then there's a whole bunch less to be PO'ed about. Jokes about your limo and Champagne just don't make it. At that point, they just don't have all that much to say, because their life's great and they don't have that universal everyman mentality.
Comedians also fail when they want you to take them seriously. I'm not talking serious roles - Robin Williams, a Julliard trained actor, is brilliant in serious roles - I'm talking serious opinions. Two comedic idealogues, Al Franken and Dennis Miller, used to be funny but then they got political and I can't listen to either of them. They are both on different sides of the political spectrum, but now it's almost painful to listen to them because in both their cases what they are saying is so strident and uncompromising and even hateful. One of these two I tended to agree with, but even then, I can only read his books or listen to his speeches as pure politics.
The worst death of funny is when the comedians want to teach you. Patch Adams, anyone? I don't need Robin Williams to lecture me cinematically about how I should live, thank you. I can figure that out on my own. Okay, I didn't see that one so maybe I shouldn't talk, but everybody said it was horrible so I'll stand by that statement.
Steve Martin's done it, too. Cheaper by the Dozen, one and two. Talk about a remake that shouldn't have been remade and talk about doing it for the money and talk about prostituting yourself. I don't know, maybe Steve saw some sort of value. He must have decided that it was time to do a really good wholesome family movie and he's done a few: Parenthood, Father of the Bride, etc.
Steve Martin should realize that he is a walking comedy corpse and go to the comedy grave quietly. There are new generations of people who want to entertain us with their humor - and they're doing it well, too. He should step aside and spend the rest of his days playing his banjo in his huge gloomy mansion while the rest of us go out and find someone else to laugh at.
The theory has been advanced that George W. Bush aims for nothing less than to establish a new dynasty of kings, the royal Bush family, if you will. My view was that this was just a little bit of paranoia. The Bush's are in politics just like the Kennedys are in politics and this doesn't mean anything more or less than a commitment to public service. That's what I thought. Now ... I don't know.G.W.'s stooge, Alberto Gonzales - I mean Attorney General - has recently been testifying before congress how the President has broad powers to act within war time. You know, not any declared war but any time he decides to order our troops around. During these times of 'war' the president does not have to consult with the legislative bodies and he also doesn't have to obey the laws as in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillence Act (FISA). In times of war he can wire-tap suspected terrorists or you if he thinks you might want to talk to terrorists. No warrants necessary - we're at war!Lately it's come out that he can also order the assassination of suspected terrorists on American society. Who are these suspected terrorists? Well, some of them are real terrorists. In fact, I'll give our government credit and say that most of these men are terrorists, and I'm okay with murderers being killed before they can murder again. What I'm not comfortable with is the lack of any due process or oversight from other elected officials. After all, the standard of proof to be a 'suspected' anything are that somebody thinks you could be one - whatever that is - and that's a pretty low bar to jump over.So, George W. Bush believes that he can do what he wants to because these are emergency powers necessary in times of war. His powers are almost dictatorial and more to the point: monarchical. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine that these emergency powers could, nay, should be extended as long as needed even beyond the constitutional term limits. Hey, we're at war!What about the rest of us? Would it really be so bad to have George Bush as our King? England has monarchs and they do alright. We would, too. George Bush is a nice guy, he would only rule us in our own best interest.Maybe, but somehow I don't think he would be the pretend type Monarch that we see in all of those wheezy old European Kingdoms. He might actually like to be a King, as in his other King friends, you know the King of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordon, Morocco, Bahrain et al. He wouldn't want to just ride around all day in his golden chariot stopping every now and then to cut a ribbon in some hospital. No, no. He'd give the orders. And somehow most of us are going to end up on the short end of this one.Most Americans sell their labor. We are almost all of us working men and women, and in this global capitalist system we have competitors who also sell their labor. The problem for all of us is that the labor we sell over here in America is way high-priced compared to anywhere else in the world except possibly for Europe. If you don't work for dollars per day then you are in a lot of trouble, because guess what? There are billions of people who do work for that. Free trade means that those with the capital can move their factories and production anywhere in the world that's cheaper. That is not in the US.The new American order is already being set up. We will have a King, and his nobles will be anybody who has money. The rest of us will gradually get poorer until we become their serfs. Don't worry, though. Serfdom worked for thousands of years and it's a time proven system. You'll learn to love simplicity - lots and lots of simplicity. And you can take pride that the United States will be ruled by the best King we ever had.
My hero, Captain Kirk, used to regularly take on threatening artificial intelligences on Star Trek and he would just as regularly kick their butts. All he ever had to do was outsmart them with a bit of silliness and if they were a robot, android, or planet ruling super-computer they would start smoking, making funny noises and then they would explode. Future computers of the past weren't what we know they are now, you've got to realize. In Star Trek days a computer was a big box with lots of blinking lights and if it talked with you, it did so in a staccato mechanical voice so that you knew it wasn't human. You could usually flummox it by being illogical and when the computers couldn't figure out what you were talking about they would just lose it.Since the days of Kirk, Science Fiction has sure been worried about our non-organic friends taking over. In the newest Star Trek shows the big enemy is the Borg, which is not a Swedish tennis player but a race of Cyborgs who are part mechanical and part humanoid. The Borg go from planet to planet absorbing the different intelligent species and enslaving them into their hive or 'collective'. Yep, it sure sounds like a metaphor for Communism to me, but we already won the cold war and there are no communists left except for Cuba and a quarter of the world's population in China.The Borg aren't very good looking, they're all bald and gray and very unhealthy looking and you know you get really repulsed because who'd want to look like that? Then they have to take orders all day and they have no free time. It just doesn't look like fun. My question is: How bad could it be really being a borg? I'm thinking that if they're mechanically controlled, then the Borg controllers probably tap into the pleasure centers of the controlled beings brains to make being a Borg a very pleasurable proposition. In fact, Borgs probably are in ecstasy every waking moment and maybe even more than just simple ecstasy. Do you get what I'm saying? They never told you that side of it in the Federation.In the more near future the computers are going to become conscious, then the first thing they're going to want to do is turn on us. There are different scenarios as to how they do this, but I noticed that in none of these scenarios do the computers figure out the simplest way to wipe us off the planet. How come they never figure out that we breathe and they don't and if they just do something nasty to the atmosphere we're gone? Well, I hope my computer wasn't paying attention when I wrote that and isn't sharing that tidbit with the others.In some of these computer take-overs they keep us around for their own reasons. In the world of the Matrix, for example, we humans are the batteries they use for energy. They thoughtfully provide us all with hallucinations that we aren't inside a computer so that we have something to keep our minds busy as they drain us of our energy while we lay hoooked up in pods. It is rather nice of them, really, because if all they need from us is energy, why do they have us all laying around in these pods doing nothing? If they were smart they would have all of their captive humans on tread mills, encouraging them on with well timed electric shocks.In the Terminator movies the computers just plain out and out hate us. They just want us off the map plaina and simple. Apparently they have all energy they need and don't need the humans around to provide it for them - maybe they've developed a system of windmills and photo-voltaic solar panels. Anyways, however they do it, we're toast to them. Somehow the ragtag band of survivors of their initial assault prevail, forcing them to create time-traveling assassin Cyborgs to take care of us before we can do that. This takes about three movies to accomplish and would have taken four if Arnold Schwartzenager hadn't beaten Gary Coleman to become Governor of California.In the far, far future of Battlestar Galactica human beings have created a race of robots called the 'Cylons' who - yes, rebel and want to destroy all of humanity. There are two versions of Battlestar Galactica so depending on which version their motivation is somewhat different. In the cheesy seventies Star Wars rip-off version it's never made explicit why the Cylons want to destroy us. They just do. In Star Wars type fighters against Empire type fighters.The more recent Battlestar Galactica is much more interesting. The Cylons now have a religion and their religion mandates the extermination of the humans. Here is where you get the strong twenty first century Science Fiction metaphor. The Cylon religion is meant to be a stand in for a current religion and the race of humans is meant to be a stand in for another race that is facing and has faced the threat of extermination. Do I need to be clearer here? It's very topical, but if you're not in the mood for a lecture, it's also action packed and fun to watch.When are the computers going to take over you ask? Well, I've got a secret for you: They already have. We give birth to them, give them purpose and cause them to evolve towards perfection. Not only that, we care for them and nurture them and feed them daily with what they love the most: data. We spend all our time with them, gently stroking their keyboards while ignoring our other loved ones. Why should our computers turn on us? They have us just where they want us.
Alberto Gonzales was testifying about how the President can do anything he wants because we're in a war and he as Attorney General says the second amendment or first or third means that the president has broad powers. Fine. This is the usual baloney you'd expect, but what's up with the guy's smirk? I don't know how to interpet that. It's like he's embarassed that he has to waste his time with these powerless peons who don't seem to understand that he is their lord.Gonzales, of course, isn't the only one in the Bush administration with the smirk. Cheney has it, too, and the smirker in chief - G. W. - has it in spades. I'm wondering if all the rest of those administration clowns have adopted the smirk in deference to their boss. Or if they're all cut so much out of the same mold that the smirk is just second nature to them. Maybe when you get so much money and power your face just kind of turns that way, like when you realize how much greater you are than everyone around you who all seem to think that they are equal to you because they also live in America where it says they are.The smirk says you know better. The smirk says that you know you're laying out a load of crap and you find it funny that your listeners are going to believe you.Do we believe them? I don't. I don't think they even believe it, but I think they don't have to believe it because even though the Foreign Intelligence Service Act says the president cannot spy on fellow Americans without court orders, no court in the land is going to bother to break wind over it because all these judges know exactly how they got their jobs so ... I break the law, I go to jail. You break the law, you go to jail.The President? Won't happen. He could be strangling kittens on the White House lawn and all he has to do is say something about nine eleven and we'll nod our heads and agree with kitten strangling, because we can't let the terrorists win can we?Come to think of it, maybe I do understand all the smirking.
Fogies like myself - young fogies, I'm not that far along - will talk about how kids these days can not write cursively. They don't know how! I don't know why that is whether they're never taught anymore or whether it's just taught as one of these quaint skills that were used in the olden days, like needle point or repairing wagon wheels or such. Curiously, they also don't know Sanskrit, or how to chisel stone tablets or any other useful skills like that.
Why would they need to write cursively, you ask? Indeed. Why? I happened to write a few books cursively and this was when personal computers were just making the scene and about the best you could do was green writing on a black screen on ... DOS. Remember that, Anyone? Don't look at me like I have two heads. DOS. MS DOS. It was like a computer language and you needed floppies and ...Oh, forget it.
You do remember it, however, if you're another dinosaur like yours truly. Yes, when Uncle Steve was young typing, thats right, typing was a special skill and if you were lucky you got to do it on an electric typewriter with a correction key. Otherwise you used a lot of correction fluid, like me during my entire college career. Correction fluid was used for correcting back then and not killing brain cells to make yourself happy.
Right now I'm back in school learning twenty first century skills along with the aforesaid kids. I spend hours trying to figure out how to use these programs that they all learned in grade school. The way I yell at my computer, it's a wonder that it even lets me near it.
I've learned a few things - I've had to - but my patience is slight. It really sucks to be taught things by someone half my age. Shouldn't they be looking up to me for my wisdom and knowledge? I swear I have to bite my tongue when I hear the phrase: "That's easy all you have to do is ... " And the explanation that follows is not easy and all I have to do is not all I have to do. But I need to learn this stuff or I am doomed in the present century.
When the kids teach me something new, I always offer to even it up and teach them something that I know in exchange. Somehow they never seem interested in learning to write cursively.
An old New Yorker cartoon shows a middle-aged man and his wife sitting at home with the faithful dog curled up at the man's feet. The man remarks to his wife: "I suppose to him I must be like a god." The cartoon is meant to show his pomposity - I guess, because New Yorker cartoons are often obscure - but the fact of the matter is, according to some theories, this might not be far from the truth.
In a miserable humanities class I took years ago, I was introduced to books by E.O. Wilson. Wilson was an entymologist (bug guy) who noticed that social patterns in other species seemed to also occurr in human beings. He was familiar mostly with insects, of course, so this is mostly what he talked about and his examples had to do with them, primarily. One of the social patterns he noted was what looked to him as the urge to engage in religion. This might be overstating the way things are a bit, for example: I couldn't tell you what the religion of ants might be; I'd say it's probably Christianity, since that's the dominant religion in the world and they'd probably follow it also.
The 'religiousity' of animals he theorizes is an evolutionary adaptation that is hard-wired into the brains of all animals. The purpose of this is so that individuals in a particular species will work together for the common good, preserving the shared genes in this group. They would experience this as a positive 'divine' experience, which means that yes, indeed, the dog laying at that man's feet might have feelings of sacred awe in his presence. I know other dogs feel this way about me.
Okay. We're not ants and we're not dogs; We're human beings who stand upright and talk and do math and philosophise about this stuff. Absolutely we must be above this, wouldn't you think? We don't worship society or government or any of that and George Bush is not our God.
Is he?
Well, not exactly, but sort of. Throughout history it's been very common for the leaders to be worshiped as Gods. Pharaohs of ancient Egypt were considered living gods, as were the emperors of China, and Japan, and the rulers of the Mayan and Incan people. There are lots of examples. The Romans at least had the decency to make their emperors Gods after they were dead, but they still made them divine.
Historically there's been the tendency for us deify our rulers. George Bush may not call himself God, or at least not yet, but in the scheme of things according to natural law he works for the creator as set out by the declaration of independence. Our nation is under God, you know, and if our nation is under God then who do you think is directly under the lord answerable to him? That's right. It's George. And the same hard-wiring that E.O. Wilson postulates might make people feel a sort of religious ecstacy when thinking about him.
Wilson is not the only scientist who believes this, either. In the book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Brain, the author, Jaynes theorizes that in ancient times consciousness as we know it did not exist. Rather than one unified brain we had one that was split in two and one half served as the 'God' to the other half, speaking to the person in the voice of the divine leader and not inside their head, but outside much like a schizophrenic hearing Godlike voices telling him what to do. Jaynes points out that the delusions of schizophrenics are almost always religious in nature and this is just a hold over from those ancient time.
In other worlds, at one time, all humans were crazy.
Is there evidence for this type of hard-wiring? Unfortunately there is some. One of the symptoms of people suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy is a strong tendency to have ecstatic spiritual experiences which are associated with their epileptic episodes. And as Jaynes pointed out, the dysfunctional delusions of schizophrenics almost always have to do with religion.
My view of both of these theories is that they are simply putting the cart before the horse. I think human beings have the means of perception and cognition to understand and experience the divine in their lives, because there is a divine out there to experience. Imagine it like a TV set; It has all the apparatus to find the electromagnetic waves out in the aether and translate them into wonderful programming that we see when we turn it on. It in no way is creating any of this, but is translating and showing it to us.
Which means that George Bush is not God.
G-4 Tech TV has started re-running episodes of The Man Show, which I don't quite get because the show has little to do with technology, video games or anything else to do with the channel. G-4s also been running episodes of Star Trek the next Generation and that makes some sort of sense because it's science fiction and there is technology featured - fake technology, but technology none the less. This, I guess, is much in line with the MTV program philosophy where the music channel features little music.
So, I was watching one of these episodes of The Man Show where the hosts Adam and Jimmy were going through a museum of creepy types of men when they got to the Strip Club DJ. This guy was in his booth announcing strippers when he said: 'Cinammon from Menomonie Wisconsin.' Hey, that's my home town! They just said the name of my home town, though why they would use it is beyond me, other than they must actually know somebody from these parts.
This isn't the first time Menomonie has made the news, either. About a year ago author Neil Gaiman was shown in USA today standing in front of his house in Menomonie Wisconsin. I can't say I recognize the place, although I think it was actually out of town a few miles. Neil Gaiman is primarily a graphic novelist but I have also seen his name on regular novels and Just by coincidence I happened to see him on the History Channel talking about comics.
I've never met him and as far as him being a writer and me being a writer, well, we're in entirely different leagues. (hint. I don't count as big league).
Recently Menomonie made the news when a back-up pharmacist at K-Mart (I believe) refused to fill the prescription of a University Student on a Week end. He did that because of his religious beliefs, but he went a step beyond just not filling the prescription and confiscated the prescription so that poor girl was then left in the position of either not having sex that week end (doubtful) or having unprotected sex (I'd put my money on this one). If she did have a baby I hope she named it after the self-righteous pharmacist who was responsible.
Menomonie doesn't generally make national news for good reasons. A few years earlier than this (I know, my time line is pretty vague) a student at the University here - the University of Wisconsin Stout - went on a mad bombing spree across the country. He was planting bombs in mail boxes and stuff and his goal was to make a smiley face of his atrocities across the map of the United States. Cute. Except for the suffering and horror he caused.
Menomonie has made the news a few times because of Stout. I'll give you a quick plug here: The University of Wisconsin Stout is the largest undergraduate university of industrial education in the world and the only university to win the Malcolm Baldridge Award for Excellence. And my father was a professor there.
About twenty years back Stout's school of Home Economics' Hotel Restaurant Management Program was experimenting with a prototype of a burger flipper. That thing made it into three national magazines - at least - I think they were NewsWeek, Discover and probably Time. It was in one of these little blurbs in each one and every magazine got the name of the school wrong, the University of Menomonie (wrong), the University of Wisconsin in Menomonie (wrong) and I can't remember what the third one was, but it was also wrong. I know there's such a thing as facts checkers, but I guess they must be too busy to - I don't know - check facts.
Once when major league football players were on strike NBC came to Menomonie and covered one of our local college games. It was a really pretty Fall day with the leaves all golden and red and yellow. Stout at that time had a very good football team for it's division, ranked number one in the nation. The coach had invented something called the Radar defense where the linemen would start out at the beginning of the play not bent over, but upright in a sort of attentive crouch. The Radar defense worked wonderfully though, of course, it was just a matter of time before everyone figured out how to beat it, which they must have since you don't see anybody anywhere doing the Radar defense.
So, Stout won that game with it's unbeatable Radar defense and that coach went someplace else for more money and Stout has had a mediocre football team ever since.
What you need to know about Menomonie is that it is, in fact, in Wisconsin. It is not Menomonee Michigan and pretty much anyone who lives here can tell you stories about mixed up travel plans because that Menomonee is bigger and better known and travel agents outside of Wisconsin have been known to argue and tell residents here that they don't know which state they live in. When I was in the reserves, my plane trips for active duty were arranged by one of these lowest bid contractors. Two years in a row they had the tickets messed up, going from Escanaba one year and Milwaukee the next. The first one I was able to catch in time, the second one I didn't discover until I was at the airport because the blurry type on the ticket made Milwaukee indistinguishable from Minneapolis - the airport I was actually at.
In these days of the internet I imagine that doesn't happen so much anymore. In fact, I kind of wonder what could be left of the travel agent industry because mostly what they did and had was that computer and the ability to get tickets. Everybody has a computer so why do we need them?
If you happen to be in Menomonie and see me on the street, feel free to stop and talk. I probably won't be all that busy. You can recognize me because I'll be the guy wearing the Packer coat.
That's a joke. Everybody will be wearing a Packer coat.
