Ahoi,

New user (e:wwebby) has a lovely user icon that reminded me of one of the little gems I found on the internet. Yes, my lovelies, Edward Gorey presents an original teleplay of the infamous Star Trek episode "The Trouble with Tribbles.

enjoy

(e:Jim) is the freakin' BEST!

Just out of no where, for the heck of it, he gets me two books on how to teach leftist politics in the classroom. Just so show he cares. I am so happy.

Soon I will be diving into "Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom" by Bell 'ZOMG I LOVE HER!!' Hooks. and "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" by Paulo Freire: whom I have never read but always read about, like Dewey or Foucalt but less opaque.

I am so happy this weekend. I can't wait to get my hands on these suckers. He shall have to be repaid with a fancy dinner and some sweet, sweet lovin'.

My uncle James has been my hero since I cast off childhoods diapers for grander things. He lives at the tip of long island and I live at the tip of western New York, opposite sides of the same state which is much larger in the driving than one would think of the state. Well, I had a chat with him on the phone tonight and it made me supper giddy!

You see, my uncle went to school for history, like me, and so we both get really worked up talking about the finer points of the Hapsburg monarchy in the latter part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Well, he has become a sinophile of late and was very happy to hear I was taking a graduate class on Chinese history.

Well, he was in Beijing as a guest lecturer at a law school. While in China he was invited to a large, formal dinner party. He was the guest of honor and was, kind of, set up on a date with a Manchu princess. The Manchu's are the people of northern China and are a different ethnic group from Han Chinese: the largest group. They ruled all over all of China under the Qing dynasty from 1648 until the Empire was overthrown in 1911.

He and she were having chat. He asked her how she was a princes. She said she is royalty through a relation to an emperor. "Oh," he asked "which one?" and idly she told him Kangxi. Now, being related to Kangxi for a Chinese is like being related to Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt for an American. He is a big deal, considered one of the best Emperors ever.

My uncle made a face like he couldn't believe what he was hearing. "Do you know Kangxi?" the princess asked. He said 'of course, every school boy in America knows of the great Kangxi!" But it got better.

He also said that no American wants to learn to speak Japanese because we all believe that in 20 years everyone in Japan will be speaking Chinese. Japan will be referred to on our maps as 'East China' well, considering little acts like killing every man, woman, and child in a city of 45,000 south of Manchuko at the beginning of WWII by the Japanese my uncle was loved by them! He was made an honorary descendent of a famous Chinese general.

I love that man.

I wanted to post my reply to Jim's 'how did you find estrip' thing in its own post because I have nothing better to talk about and I am inching my way towards having 100+ posts! YA for frivolous demarcations of worth! Gotta Catch 'em All!

    I was living in a tiny apartment on the fault line between the nice west side and the horrible west side. My kitchen was the largest room in the house, and the most useless room. The linoleum floor and the drafty windows made sure that the floor was cold in the months with no t-shirt weather.
    The most obnoxious feature of that kitchen was the sink. On top it was all aluminum, new and flashy, the sort of think that keeps you from checking underneath it before signing a lease. I had many problems with my life while I lived in that apartment. I love of whiskey and opium would turn out to be lesser problems than the perpetual leak from that sink. Leaking, leaking, always leaking like 16 year old cock in the woman's department.
    As it leaked it collected into a old brown plastic bucket, cracked from the years of wet and dray, bleach and vomit. It was a storied bucket, epics are written in some indecipherable language into it's chewed corners, in the filth stuck to the chalk outline of where a price tag used to be. Well, the drip, drip sound continued and was then accompanied by the sound of water overflowing.
    I kneeled down on that cold December floor and opened the cabinet to dump out the grey, viscous fluid in the tub. And that is when I saw them. Little KGB agents.

The had been bread by Kremlin scientists to fit between the walls of heads of state's homes. To use their tiny stature to go where no man could. Thy had been waiting for years for a response from the Premier with nothing. Too small to leave and travel home they were stranded. The Cold War ended, the Soviet Union fell. And they were forgotten.

I would bring them food and vodka. We would try and talk but they spoke no English, peculiar as they were spies. Mostly we would laugh and nod our heads as we ate and drank. But when we were done I would see them hide their sadness behind a stoic face and close the cabinet door. I am sure they saw the same face on me.

Seeing them like that would make me feel helpless, a bug on a windshield. To cheer myself up I would masturbate. Estrip wasn't the porn-acopia I was looking for, but it makes me not think about the men stranded in my old kitchen.




anyway, that is my story. It is all true, every word. I have already sent it over to MGM and my team of lawyers and super villains are already talking about merchandising, including pitching this to Six Flags to be made into a ride. They tell me a part of it will actually submerge the rider under a pool of whiskey for three whole minutes! See you there.

.. I would find this video more awesome than it actually is; which is pretty awesome. If you can't taste the Donie Darko flava then you never saw the movie. And if you haven't you can hear some Bjork production qualities. Delicious.

Enjoy

Hello,

This is directed to the TV execs who surely read this journal regularly. I wanted to tell you my brilliant idea that will turn TV from the cultural dinosaur is has become into the cutting edge of entertainment.

It isn't a completely new idea, just a new paradigm for you to work from. The concept is simple, just combine two shows into a brand new one. Now, I am not talking about the infamous Love Boat/Knight Rider episode. Nor am I talking about the Charlie's Angels/Murder She Wrote cross over. That is the stuff of fanfiction masturbation. No, this is a simple concept who's many permutations will only raise the bar.

Fear Factory/Design Star.

If you are unfamiliar with either show let me brief you. Fear Factor is a horrible abortion of a show in which people test their limits to see how gross an item they are willing to eat or torment they are willing to endure. It is like Jackass with a budget and sobriety, an appalling combination. Design Star is like American idol, but with designers instead of singers. Let me show you the genius.

Permutation #1: Master Class

In this one BDSM masters compete to come up with the most innovative, humiliating, non-dismembering but painful torment they can put their slaves through.
"I'm sorry master Steve, but hot-gluing your slaves face to an ostrich's butt was more comical than humiliating. Goodbye."
Best thing is you can recycle contestants. This weeks master is next weeks slave if he isn't clever enough. It will really add to the show.

A spin off could be to see which slave can take the most punishment.

Permutation #2: Your Last 15-Minutes of Fame

Engineers get fired up to end the lives of five terminally ill patients. The idea is to create the most glamorous, show stopping yet humane murder machine to end the suffering of someone in desperate need of death.
"Ya know Phil, I really thought we would have a law suit on our hands when I saw that you would be using both a rotisserie chicken oven and all that chop meat, but now I can't imagine dying any other way."

Permutation #3: Who Wants to Eat a Millionaire?

This is a bit more like Iron Chef, only the variation in secret ingredient would be the dead millionaire's former profession. Will it be Blue Blood pudding with Oil-money vinaigrette?

In anticipation of problems surrounding cannibalism I have already begun research and development on a soy-based millionaire called ToFukinRich.

So what do you say TV execs? Can I rescue you from irrelevance?

Want to see a British football team strip, get into the showers, lather up, and then play with their balls?

Well, what if you could learn about Testicular Cancer Prevention at the same time?

It is educating pornography for the British TV watching masses

To to do list for the weekend was kind of lofty, so I thought I would do a simple task to get my mind going. And that task was to save the world; you know, the sort of thing you do while sitting on the can or shaving your cat.

My plan is simple, effective, and will get you drunk ever weekend. That plan, is give everyone a giant plastic cup full of vodka.

I know, you are thinking to yourself 'why didn't I think of that?'. But that is how it goes with innovations that become the standard by which all innovations are judged.

You see, when I walk my dog I like to know that he is not going to get the shit cut out of him while walking. The dumb ass college kids, who do not think, like to get trashed on disgusting cheap beer and smash the bottles where ever they may while hunting poon-tang.

This angers me, and at first I wanted to poison their villages well, or turn their loved one into an exploding zombie. But just as Ghandi was not willing to unleash to cosmic dance of Shiva upon the British, so too must find a peaceful solution.

The deal is, you come to a city-run distribution center with your ID card and you get a giant plastic cup full of vodka. Inside that cup is more alcohol than the entire 12 pack of Milwaukee's Best that those dipshits break all over my neighborhood. There, you get drunk, you don't have to pay a friend to buy you your crappy beer (I'm looking at you Pabst Blue Ribbon), and you don't risk me chemically castrating you. This is what is known among people who hate being castrated as a 'win-win'.

So come on. You love to drink and you hate to have mutilated genitals. Wont you consider?

The sunny beaches of Capri, the well tanned sin of Rio, the underage in Thailand. What if you could take all these distant locations and put it into one experience greater than all of its components? What if you could do that right in your own back yard?

Yes, the future of vacation is now! Come see the exotic Minneapolis-St.Paul International Airport Men's bathroom. The same location where Senator/ex-Senator/wait-wait-wait-give-me-one-sec-to-decide-Senator Larry Craig tapped his toes into our hearts.

Don't believe me that it is a tourist location? Via Seattle's The Stranger check out this holiday snap



Reminds me of the time I went camping in that ditch where Ted Kennedy killed that hooker.

kisses,

-James

Howdy,

I was looking to expand my blues knowledge a year or so ago when I was reading about Blind Willy Johnson. As a kid his mother rubbed lye in his eyes to get revenge on his father. He did survive childhood and married. But died alone of exposure in a rotten shack he was living in.

Now, one of his songs is on the Voyager spacecraft, reaching further and further distances from the earth. Perhaps intelligent life will find Voyager and they will hear one of the most beautiful expressions of humanity when they do.

Voyager Golden Record has an online copy of what must be the greatest mix tape ever made. In addition to Blind Willy Johnson it has Hindi music, pan pipe recording from the Solomon Islands, Bach, Mozart, Chuck Berry. The recording is immense!

One of my favorite surprises was Javanese Gamelan music. I was familiar with this style from a Japanese performing art group Genioh Yamashirogumi who achieved international fame for doing the soundtrack to the movie Akira. They are also famous for teaching themselves how to program MOOG synthesizers to play notes beyond our 12-tone scale. I thought Gamelan wouldn't sound the same without an armada of crazy MOOGs enhancing the sound only to realize that it was all about the Gamelan. Here is a video of such a Gamelan group.



For a bigger show, this is a children's performance group. It is 9 minutes long, but so freakin good!



But check out that golden record. You will be happy you did.