Most importantly, I think, it’s good for giving access to things that we’re told we’re not allowed to see.

History is important and it’s relevant. Pretending things never happened doesn’t fix anything.

Also, art can be a product of its time and limited by the social constraints and ideas of its time and still be art. And art should never, ever be covered up.

(more…)

So over the course of my blogging career there have been many posts that have sat half written in draft form. Sometimes for months, sometimes never finished. Usually they end up forgotten and half written and never read. Here are three posts that I started writing at some point over the last year or so but never finished. I know that I’ll never get around to actually finishing whatever I was trying to say, so I may as well post what I’ve got for archival purposes.

In N’ Out Burger

I swear to Christ on his Jesus that if I don’t get some In N’ Out burger, like, really fucking soon, bad things are going to happen. There will be blood… oh yes, there will be blood.

I am sick… literally sick… of the lack of decent junk food in this god forsaken wasteland. It’s next to impossible to get a good fast food burger up here. They’ve got no middle ground. You’ve got A&W on one end of the spectrum, with their rectum flavored bullshit burgers and then on the other end you’ve got like, actual restaurant burgers like, Red Robin and Montanas and shit like that.

In between? Not much. There’s Wendys, but really, I don’t count Wendys. Wendys doesn’t count because who the fuck do they think they are making their hamburgers square? What kind of bullshit is that? Do they think they’re impressing people? Make that shit round!

Stupids. Besides, Wendys burgers taste homemade, and while it’s a refreshing change of pace, I can make a burger that tastes home made at home. And their fries taste like butt.

They’ve got ONE Burger King here and it honestly doesn’t taste like real Burger King. It’s somehow slimier and doesn’t taste right. And it doesn’t SMELL like Burger King, which sounds weird, but it makes a difference. I figured that out when we went to a BK in Washington and I was reminded of what it’s actually supposed to smell like. Like raw beef sizzling on a grill. That’s what Burger King smells like. The Burger King up here smells like a hamburger that someone dropped in a mop bucket… after someone just finished mopping the bathroom in a West Hollywood Popeyes Chicken.

Of course, there’s McDonalds. And there’s McDonalds and more McDonalds. There’s a McDonalds on every corner, just like in America.  And I frequent them more than I should. But I do so simply because there is no suitable alternative. I’m so fucking sick of McDonalds I fear I may go mad. McDonalds isn’t even really hamburgers. Yes, it’s fried ground beef in a bun with processed cheese… but it’s just… McDonalds. It’s like everything at McDonalds is made from the same McDonalds flavored paste like Soylent Green. I remember that we used to go to a Walmart that had a McDonalds in it that served Hot Dogs. Like, McWieners or something. I got one once. It tasted exactly like everything else at McDonalds.

When I first moved up here, one of the McDonalds here served pizza. Little individual pizzas. I knew I HAD to try that shit. And I did. And it tasted like McDonalds in a pizza shape. It was trippy.

I’m not just talking about a lack of burger places either. There’s no Taco Bell. No Carls Jr. No Bob’s Big Boy. No Jack In the Box. No Long John Silvers.

Yes, they have fish n’ chips here, and yes it’s delicious. It’s fantastic and I’m grateful for it. But you can’t eat fish n’ chips in the car on the way home from work. And I don’t always want to spend thirty bucks. Yes, it’s great, but it’s hardly convenient. And that’s what we’re talking about here. Convenience.

They’ve got some bullshit up here called White Spot. These people fucking LOVE White Spot. I don’t get it. White Spot is fucking weak. They serve burgers that taste like they were made in a school cafeteria for seven fucking bucks. The fries are bland and basic.

But these fuckers think White Spot is the best thing since Jesus rolled that rock back. I’d like to believe that they just don’t know any better, but I know they do. I don’t understand what’s wrong with these people. I really don’t. They’ve been to America. They know what they’re missing. They just CHOOSE not to get delicious food up here and are content to stick to their subpar Canadian bullshit.

Back to the issue at hand.

In N’ Out burger.

A few years ago, during my little emotional and mental breakdown that resulted in my living in California for three or four months, I ate at In N’ Out burger at least twice a week. It was a fortyfive minute drive home from work and In N’ Out was about fifteen minutes in the other direction, but I didn’t care. It was worth it. The drive through line was always at least ten minutes. I added almost a half an hour onto my drive home from work just to get those delicious burgers and fries. It was heaven.

In N’ Out Burger…

They’ve got the simplest menu you’re going to find at a fast food joint. It’s essentially “Burgers. Drinks. Shakes. Fries.” and that’s about it. That’s all you need to know. They’ve also got this crazy, cult like secret menu that was like, crafted by the Templar Knights or the Masons or some shit.

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My New Favorite Porn Star

I tend to rotate favorite porn stars on about a bi-yearly basis. For a while it was Rocco, but then he retired and then I think he’s back again, I don’t know. 

Either way, I got kind of tired of seeing pretty much the same movie over and over again. It started to get really routine and boring. I’ll certainly give Rocco the credit he’s due for reinventing porn, but I’ve outgrown him. Plus, I got tired of having to explain to people why my favorite porn star is a guy. I do still really respect him as a porn star. He was kind of one end of an  aspect of porn he helped popularize, and that dominates porn now. That kind of blatantly misogynistic, male superior porn. Rocco was on one end and Max Hardcore was on the other. Rocco had a way about him that was entirely contradictory to the style of porn that he was making, and that’s what made him interesting. He was very good at acting like he actually cared about the women that he was performing with, even when he was doing things that many people would consider incredibly degrading. There’s an air of “Hey, this is just the kinky stuff we’re into” about Rocco’s movies. Max Hardcore on the other hand does his best to make sure you know exactly what he thinks of the women he’s working with, to the degree that I don’t even watch his movies. Not because I’m offended, but because it goes beyond sexy and into some seriously dark shit that I’m not entirely comfortable exploring. Once a chick starts crying, the mood is pretty much killed for me. I just don’t need to see that. Especially if she’s crying because some gnarly, leathery old Hunter Thompson looking fuckhead in a cowboy hat is plowing her ass much more intensely than she expected. And the chicks pretending like they’re twelve is just… creepy.

But this post isn’t about Max Hardcore.

So yeah, I liked Rocco, but when I grew tired of him, I moved onto Belladonna.

I was way into Belladonna for a long while. She had a very different vibe to her than other porn stars I was familiar with. For one, she didn’t look like a porn star. She’s covered in tattoos, she has a big gap between her two front teeth (not like, missing teeth, just a space) and she wore her hair short. She was the total opposite of what the traditional porn star looked like. Best of all, she came across like she really enjoys what she does. There’s a part of me that still holds onto that myth that women in porn are these lonely girls who want to be “real” actresses and just got caught up in the dark and seedy world of porn. I don’t rationally believe that to be the case for mainstream porn, but on some level, I still feel kind of bad for female porn stars. On the surface I know that the porn industry doesn’t actually work that way. They don’t want anyone there who doesn’t want to be there. Porn is under way too much scrutiny to try and get away with exploiting anyone. And female porn stars are the ones who make the money. With the exception of a very select few, male porn stars don’t make shit. They’re a dime a dozen and can be replaced at the drop of a hat… and they rarely have to do anything except have a decent sized cock and the ability to cum on cue. It’s a thankless job, being a male porn star… unless you’re Rocco or Ron Jeremy or Peter North or John Stagliano or someone like that… and all of those guys make their real money behind the scenes. But a successful female porn star has it made, financially at least, provided they’re smart enough to manage their money correctly. Jenna Jameson is a multi-millionaire many, many times over. Marilyn Chambers is insanely rich, and she was only in like, five or six hardcore porno movies in the seventies and early eighties before retiring… and then her “come back” in the nineties. And those are just a couple of extreme examples. Porn can be an incredibly lucrative business for a woman if she’s got what it takes.

Anyway, back to Belladonna… aside from her interesting look and her apparent joy in her job, she also, surprisingly, fit quite well into this male dominant style of porn that’s been the trend. It was weird because she fit in on both sides of the equation. She was fully capable of being submissive for male dominated porn, but in the next scene, she played the male with another girl, and treated other female porn stars the same way that the guys were treating the women. And it worked incredibly well. It was hot. It worked so well that she went a good three or four years doing nothing but girl-girl porn, usually playing the dominant role.

Belladonna’s role in porn was almost like a feminist statement. It was like the old song “anything you can do I can do better” and it was true. Watching a Belladonna movie you’re struck with two very firm facts. Number one: she knows exactly what she’s doing and she enjoys it. And Number two: She’s in complete control of the situation she’s in. It isn’t a prima donna thing or a sense of entitlement… it was simply a matter of that she is was very good at what she does and she knew it, and everyone else knew it as well. She was respected by everyone involved. The people she was performing with, the people she working for and the people that worked for her. When Belladonna enters a porn set, you know that you’re about to be schooled on how to make a good porno movie. Every aspect of it. Which is, I’m sure, why she started her own production company and started writing and directing her own movies, sometimes not even appearing in them.

Unfortunately, she seems to have lost a grip on what she’s doing. At least, that’s how it seems to me. She had a baby and shaved her head and got married and things just seemed to change. I’d like to think it’s a good thing… that maybe she’s just settling down a bit, but I know that’s not true. She’s still making movies and still very active in the business, but I get the feeling that she’s lost the inspiration for it. Reading her Myspace blog, I kind of get the feeling that her husband doesn’t treat her very well, and I think that’s also part of my disillusionment with her. Of course, I could be completely wrong, but either way, the magic is gone from Belladonna in my eyes, and I’ve moved on.

So who’s my favorite now? I’ve auditioned a few potentials, but Joanna Angel has won by a landslide.

In many ways, she’s like a much more user friendly version of Belladonna. She’s like a cross between Belladonna and like… Lady Aberlin from Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. She’s got the tats and the penchant for making more “alternative” porn. Like Belladonna, she doesn’t look like someone that should be in porn, and like Belladonna, she seems to have an intense love for her job, and she’s very good at it. Unlike Belladonna though, she never comes across as intimidating or untouchable.  She’s got a very “girl next door” vibe to her, providing you live next door to a tattoo parlor/dildo shop. And unlike Belladonna, there isn’t a sense of a dark undercurrent. Watching Belladonna’s movies, I always got the impression that she probably has some serious issues brewing behind those intense eyes. She seemed like she has much darker fantasies than anything I could ever handle, and while that was hot, it was also kind of scary as well. With Joanna Angel, it’s like she’s doing exactly what she enjoys and wants to do, and that’s it.

She comes across as totally approachable and cool. With Belladonna, I could never imagine sitting down and having a conversation with her. Not because I think she’s super important, but because she seems to live in a completely different world than I do. With Joanna Angel, it’s surprisingly easy to imagine getting coffee and talking about whatever movie we just saw or whatever book we recently read. There aren’t many porn stars I can say that about.

I think there are a couple of reasons for this. The first is that she’s Jewish, which is surprisingly incredibly rare in porn. At least in female performers. There are tons of Jews behind the scenes, but only a handful in front of the camera. Especially women. There are a few, and most of them are incredibly successful. Ron Jeremy is the obvious success story.  Randy West and Adam Glasser (Seymour Butts) are Jewish. But you could count the number of popular female Jewish porn stars on one hand. Jenna Jameson is apparently Jewish, though I’d have never guessed it. That goes to show that in the porn business, like in mainstream Hollywood, Jews seem to know what they’re doing.

It seems that the most successful people in the porn business are Jewish. It also should be mentioned that the most successful people in the porn business are people who had a good grasp on what they were selling and how to sell it. These are people who understand that porn is one of the biggest markets on earth, and that it will never, ever dry up.

Look at Ron Jeremy.

Well… maybe don’t look directly at him… but look at his career. Here’s a guy who dedicates his entire life to marketing  himself. He’s barely in porn movies anymore, but works behind the scenes and in other aspects of media. He’s a guy who spends almost all of his time selling himself as a product, and he’s been extremely successful because of it.

The same goes for Jenna Jameson. She’s arguably the most popular porn star in history. That’s not because she’s particularly attractive or amazing in her films. It’s because she understood very early in her career that she was a product and that she needed to market herself as such. She got in very early with her website and production company. She understood that if she wanted to be successful in this industry, she had to market herself the same way you would market a Corvette or a candy bar. She reached out beyond the porn world and garnered attention anywhere she could get it.

And she, like Ron Jeremy, looked at porn and then looked ahead in porn. She anticipated trends and was sure to be the first to ride them. She was smart about her career, and it worked out for her.

Now, does this have anything to do with the fact that she’s Jewish? The knee-jerk PC part of me that still hasn’t quite died yet wants to think no, but realistically, I think it does. It might come across as anti-Semitic to assume that someone is a good business person because they are Jewish, but I think that there is something to it. Some people, because of their culture, history and possibly even their genetic make up are sometimes inherently better at something than others. Is it racist to suggest that black people are better dancers than white people? Or better basketball players? I don’t think so. Yes, there are plenty of good white dancers and basketball players, but some things seem to come more naturally to some people than others. It’s just worked out that way.

Now, before I paint myself any further into the corner with the Jewish thing, I should probably get back to Joanna Angel.

Joanna anticipated a trend that has become particularly popular now, and she got in on the ground floor. That’s what’s being called “alt porn.” It’s porn with a kind of punk rock, almost pretentious sensibility, made extremely popular by the website Suicidegirls.com.  Belladonna really kind of got the ball rolling on that one, because she looks so drastically different from your typical porn star. She has a kind of punky vibe to her with the tattoos and the the spikey hair. But the attention on Belladonna seemed to focus a lot more on “what kind of crazy shit is she going to put in her ass this time?” rather than the style of porn she was making. It became about trying to top the extremity of whatever she’d done last.

With Joanna Angel, she seems to be comfortable letting other porn stars like Belladonna and Sasha Gray and Taylor Rain work out the extreme submissive aspect of porn and has focused her attention on creating a sort of middle ground between “extreme” porn, traditional porn and this “alt porn” style. For one thing, she’s taken the Suicide Girls format (which is essentially modern pinup and a Playboy-on-a-budget style photoshoots, with that punk style mixed in) and applied it to hardcore pornography. She’s very invested in the internet and blogging and keeping herself approachable and relatable. Fans of Joanna Angel know what kind of music she likes and what kind of movies she watches and books she reads. She doesn’t build herself up to be a fuckable Barbie doll or a porn celebrity. She keeps herself totally on the level with her fans. And her fans seem to be people who share a basic interest in the things she’s interested in outside of porn. Metal heads and movie geeks and book nerds. That’s on top of people who just like to watch her fuck.

Watching porn got to be pretty monotonous after a while. It was all just these interchangeable plastic women with big poofy blonde hair and the same goofy fuck faces. These are women who I don’t know anything about, nor do I care to know anything about them. I don’t know their names or where they’re from or what they’re interested in, because they don’t give any of that information up.

With Joanna Angel, I knew all of that stuff before I ever even watched one of her movies. I stumbled upon some pictures of her and thought she was interesting looking and started looking into who she was. By the time I actually watched one of her movies, I knew what music she liked and what she read and where she was from and what exactly she does in the porn industry. It was completely refreshing. It helps that we have a lot of shared interests. I mean, hell, one of her many tattoos is of a Kurt Vonnegut quote. It’s the line “So it goes” which was the line Kurt Vonnegut used repeatedly in Slaughter House 5 when someone died. How could I not get into that?

And she’s obviously got good taste in movies because of the parody porn movies she’s made. Rather than going with the obvious stuff like Edward Penishands and Forest Hump, she’s made movies like The XXXorcist and The Re-Penetrator (a parody of the movie The Re-Animator, which was based on an HP Lovecraft story.) That says it all right there. One of the things she’s tried to do is make “horror porn” which is an incredibly odd experience. I mean, watching a porno movie based on The Exorcist is just… weird. It’s weird and fun. It’s weird because, well… I’m not used to seeing people fuck while wearing Linda Blair Exorcist make up and puking pea-soup all over the place. I’m also not used to seeing priests performing “sexorcisms” and watching characters that are mother and daughter eat each other out. I might not be used to it, but damn if it’s not entertaining.

So aside from the tattoos and the style she brings to porn, the real draw is the personal level she interacts with her fans. That’s what really sells her. Watching a Joanna Angel movie is like watching a really hot friend getting fucked.

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The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

So I finished one of the few Stephen King books that I never got around to reading the other day. It was called The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. I never read it because it came out in that wave of really REALLY shitty Stephen King books in the late nineties. That wave of estrogen filled female centric books that I’m about 95% sure Tabatha wrote for him. Books like Gerald’s Game and Rose Madder, Bag of Bones and the incredibly girly forth Dark Tower book, where a story that was carrying on just fine as a killer post apocalyptic western and then abruptly changed into a crybaby fruity love story and a completely ridiculous Wizard of Oz thing that made absolutely no sense.

So yeah, when, around that time, he put out the book The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, I didn’t even bother. A story about a little girl lost in the woods? Pfft. Whatever.

But after reading Blaze and getting borderline obsessed with The Shining again (which I seem to do once a year or so) I was looking for something to read and picked it up.

It was surprisingly much better than I expected. It certainly wasn’t his best work, or even close to his best work, but it was halfway decent at least.

Something I hadn’t considered when I first rejected reading it, was that two of King’s strengths are writing about kids and his non-supernatural stories. And this book fit into both of those categories.

The story itself is incredibly simple. It really is a story about a girl lost in the woods, and pretty much just that. We follow around one character (a nine year old girl named Trisha McFarland as she veers off the path she’s walking with her mother and brother in the woods to take a leak, and then gets progressively more lost for the duration of the novel. There’s very little more than Trisha’s internal monologue through the whole thing. That’s the novels real strength.

Like most of King’s stories that focus on kids (The Body and It stand out as the best examples. The Body, of course, was the basis of the film Stand By Me) The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is a fantastic example of a writer treating a child as a fully realized character. Rather than using kids as a prop or plot point, King actually treats them as real people with their own strengths and weaknesses. Trisha is both smart for her age and incredibly naive in the way a real child can be. She isn’t a miniature adult posing as a kid or a smart aleck know it all punk. She’s just a regular little girl desperately trying to deal with an incredibly difficult situation. She infuses her surroundings with the kind of imagination and semi-magical perception that only a child can do.

Reading this book you actually root for Trisha not only to make it out of the woods alive, but to do it by the strength of her character. She’s resourceful enough to keep barely scraping by, but she’s naive enough to make huge but understandable mistakes. As things get more and more intense for Trisha, she delves into reserves of strength that I believe most adults wouldn’t expect kids to have. People tend to forget that kids deal with a LOT of intense shit, and more often than not, they persevere. This story is in part a tribute to the resilience of childhood.

Huh…

Somewhat unrelated…

I just spent about two hours reading a shitload of Wikipedia entries about various Stephen King stories (which linked to entries about HP Lovecraft stories, movies based on King books, George Romero, EC Comics, Lord of the Flies and Edger Alan Poe among many other things… I get distracted so easily) and I just finished the entry about Creepshow. Remember how I posted about Joe Hill, Stephen King’s son who is now a successful writer himself?

Well, I just found out that he played the little kid in the wrap around story in Creepshow.

Neat.

Anyway…

Uh…

Oh yeah. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.

The book is also a pretty blatant religious story. Religion is a fairly common thread in most of King’s work. This time it’s almost a little TOO blatant. Trisha is obsessed (the way many little girls are) with her celebrity crush, Boston Red Sox closing pitcher Tom Gordon.

Trisha has issues with her faith in God. Her father believes in something he calls The Subaudible, which is basically a cold, unfeeling, indifferent force that encompasses everything. Trisha doesn’t really buy this, but as things start to get dicey for her, she tries various forms of praying to get out alive. None of this comforts her, but as she progresses through the story, her faith in her hero, Tom Gordon. As she starts to somewhat lose her mind in the woods, Tom Gordon begins to appear to her and keeps her company and guides her at crucial points. This is all well and good, I guess. It’s an interesting idea at least, that God shows up in whatever form you put your faith in. The choice of Tom Gordon is perfect for this both because of his (very real) signature move of pointing up at the sky after he saves a game, as well as the letters in his last name. By the end of the story, Trisha accepts Tom Gordon as her saviour, and subsequently, I guess, her faith in God in general.

If this aspect of the story had been slightly more subtle, I’d probably dig it a little more. It doesn’t feel like preaching or Christian Rock in novel form, but I think it could have been a little less obvious.

But whatever. It still worked alright.

I imagine that someone that doesn’t know or care anything about baseball (or even more specifically, the Red Sox, King’s favourite sports obsession) might get slightly bored by the reoccurring baseball theme. Being a Red Sox fan myself, it didn’t bother me at all, but I could see where someone who didn’t give a shit might not be able to relate.

One thing that did bother me was King’s need to insert the supernatural into a story that really didn’t need it. He tends to do that. Anyone who has read The Body can, I’m sure, remember scratching their heads when the boys are about to find the dead corpse of Ray Bowers and suddenly a massive fireball flies over their heads for no reason whatsoever and then is never mentioned again. I was like, twelve, when I read that story the first time and even then I was like “WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT?!”

In The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, in the last half of the story, she’s being stalked by some kind of beast in the woods. It’s very Lord of the Flies, and like Lord of the Flies, the beast turns out to be the evil within us all or some sort of silly bullshit like that. Either way, this thing is essentially The Devil and there’s a very forced confrontation at the end of the book. Again, like with most King books, the story is fine until the last five percent or so, when everything falls apart. Steve seems to have a real problem ending his books. It’s almost like he gets tired of writing and he just goes “And then… uh… like… God comes down and blows up Las Vegas and kills Randall Flagg and all the bad guys die and like, yeah, that’s it. The end.” or “

So I was at Walmart today buying birthday presents for Sandra. Her birthday is tomorrow. Yeah, that’s how I roll. Buying presents at Walmart the day before her birthday. I’m a P.I.M.P.

I was in the electronics section and this song was playing. The Bangles cover of Hazy Shade of Winter by Simon and Garfunkel. It’s fucking great. Even though parts of it sound like Enya or something. Not that I have anything against Enya. She has a job and she does it quite well.

As a matter of fact, there are certain moments in my life when I really fucking dig Enya. I don’t care what you think. For instance, if I’m doing some serious house cleaning. Playing Enya towards the very end of the cleaning process is very refreshing. Especially when you’re done, and like, go through and light some incense and candles and shit and the house is all clean and nice and peaceful and smells like a metaphysical book store. All of the DVDs are all organized and the computer desk is all clean and shit. It’s fantastic.

But only every once in a while. Like, a few times a year.

Now that I mention it, I should probably do a decent clean on this place. Like, one of those cleans where I rip everything off the shelf and actually put it in some sort of order and throw out the shit that I don’t need or pack it away or something. My desk is a fucking disaster right now.

Part of that is because I had to pull it away from the wall earlier today. At later today. And this evening.

One of the things I bought while I was out today was an amplifier for the cable. You see, the main cable outlet is in the bedroom for some stupid ass reason. Then it’s wired through the wall and spits out in the living room, split off of the outlet in the bedroom. Then THAT outlet is split again, one side going to the computer and the other running along the wall and around a couple corners for about twenty feet to the TV. Well, to the VCR and then to the TV.

As you can imagine, my cable reception is shit.

So I bought this amplifier and put it on the source outlet in the bedroom. The picture suddenly looked fantastic. Channels that we couldn’t even watch before were coming in crystal clear. Channels that we didn’t even notice were somewhat distorted before were suddenly pristine and almost superhuman.

But, unfortunately, it totally fucked up my internet. With the amplifier on there, the internet didn’t work. It took me a while to figure out why my internet suddenly didn’t work. I had to pull my desk out from the wall to get to where the cable comes in from bedroom to the living room and splits into the internet and cable for my TV. Now, you have to understand that I bought this desk at a government surplus sale. It’s fucking HUGE and it’s solid. Like, you could put up an entire model train set on this thing. I’m dreading when we have to move. Chance are I’ll just leave the desk last, and then go at it with an ax.

Now that I’m thinking about it, I’m not dreading it all. Chopping it up with an ax might be kind of fucking cool.

So yeah, I had to pull it out from the wall to dick with the cable outlet. Then I had to push it back. Then I had to pull it out again. Then push it back. And then pull it out again. Then push it back.

Tomorrow, when I pick up another coaxial cable from the dollar store, I’ll have to pull it out again.

My point is, that when I pulled it out, I found a million dusty and cobweb covered relics from the past few years.

Like my 2004 Elvira Calendar, which I can only assume fell back there sometime soon after 2005.

There were also a few action figures, a million CDs, a fair bit of garbage, some kind of squishy, sticky rubber scorpion among other random toys and a bunch of various computer components and cables and mouses and various other bullshit. I pulled a couple of interesting things out (like said Elvira calendar) and the rest of it? I pushed it right the fuck back there.

Out of sight, out of mind. That’s my motto.

One of the many wonderful and amazing things that I saw in California was a TV show called Meekcat Manor. I imagine you’ve probably seen it or heard of it. I had never seen it before. I got to watch three or four episodes in the evenings after Disneyland. I was hooked. It’s like, the best show in the history of anything. I got so friggin invested in these little fuckers. It’s like The Real World: Kalahari. It’s what happens when Meerkats stop being polite, and start getting real.

It’s on a channel called Animal Planet. I’ve also never seen this channel before. I was instantly sold on it. You see, I love The Discovery Channel. But mostly I just love the animal shows. This is like, a whole channel dedicated to Discovery Channel animal shows. It blew my mind. Of course, I don’t get Animal Planet up here in Suckada. I mean Canada. I’m sure it’s available on like, satellite or digital cable or something, but I don’t have those, so I blame Canada, and not my own cheapness and unwillingness to play assloads of money for better TV.

But yeah… it’s fucking awesome. And it’s narrated quite competently by Sean Aston of The Goonies fame.

That’s all I have to say for now. I rented a bajillion movies today. Five I believe that are supposed to come out on Tuesday. I don’t know if I’ll get to watch more than one or two.

Currently Listening: Bangels – Hazy Shade of Winter

Well… maybe.

I’m a sucker for documentaries. Like most Americans, I’m typically too lazy to actually do my own research so I tend to believe whatever if fed to me. That’s why I’ve been so critical of documentary film makers over the last few years. It bums me out that people (myself included) just take things at face value without actually questioning the intentions and integrity of the person making the film. That’s why I hate Michael Moore so much… not because I disagree with the things he says (I do a lot of the time, but he says a lot of things I agree with as well) but because I disagree with the way he goes about saying them. He, like many documentary film makers these days, makes political propaganda, just as slanted and misleading as the line of bullshit the government gives us.

The particular little collection of clips and points is interesting to me though. If anything, it raises some questions.

Like most celebrities that commit suicide, it’s very hard to swallow that Hunter Thompson actually killed himself. I can’t say I was surprised when I heard the news, but I certainly didn’t expect it either. He seemed like too stubborn and weathered of a guy to actually end it himself.

But that comes back to the basic need of fans to not want to believe that their heroes would do such a thing. The sickening and depressing feeling that comes along with hearing the news that someone you respect has committed suicide isn’t just the sadness of their death, but the disappointment in having their image changed in your mind. It’s hard to be disappointed in a hero. It’s hard to believe that they gave up. Especially when you’re someone like me that has struggled with suicide in their life.

People need to believe that it just HAD to be something else. Michael Hutchence’s suicide was an accident. Kurt Cobain was murdered. Jimi Hendrix just partied too hard. And now Hunter S. Thompson was silenced by the government.

The Jimi Hendrix thing has always been a bit of a pet peeve for me. It’s just assumed the he was a druggie and took it too far. The man took a fist full of sleeping pills and washed it down with a bottle of wine. You don’t do that to get high. You do that to die.

As for Hunter… I don’t really doubt that Hunter died by his own hand. This thing did make me think about it though. If there was anyone in America that was going to get silenced by The Man, it was Hunter S. Thompson.

Arnold pushes for Universal Health Care

SACRAMENTO, Calif. – Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Monday proposed to extend health coverage to nearly all of California’s 6.5 million uninsured people, promising to spread the cost among businesses, individuals, hospitals, doctors, insurers and government.

The plan contains elements that are likely to provoke opposition from a wide range of powerful interests, including doctors, hospitals and insurers, as well as employers and unions. But it also contains incentives for each of them.

All children, regardless of their immigration status, would be covered through an expansion of the state and federal Healthy Families program.

“I don’t think it is a question or a debate if they ought to be covered. … The federal courts have made that decision — that no one can be turned away,” Schwarzenegger said. “The question really isn’t to treat them or not to treat them. The question really is how can you treat them in the most cost-effective way.”

Under Schwarzenegger’s plan, all Californians would be required to have insurance, although the poorest would be subsidized. Businesses with 10 or more employees would have to offer insurance to their workers or pay 4 percent of their payroll into a state fund. Smaller businesses would be exempt.

Also, insurers would no longer be allowed to deny coverage to people because of their medical problems.

Business groups and Republican legislators are likely to object to the extra costs imposed on businesses.

The state would subsidize the estimated 1.2 million poor people who do not currently qualify for state health coverage. They would be able to buy insurance through a state-run pool and would have to make a small contribution toward their premiums.

Schwarzenegger is betting that his plan will save $10 billion a year by cutting health care costs. He says the savings would offset the new fees he is asking doctors and hospitals to pay — 4 percent of revenue for hospitals and 2 percent for doctors.

The state also would increase what it pays doctors and hospitals through Medi-Cal, the state insurance plan for the poor.

The governor was supposed to give his address in person to a panel of health care officials. Instead, he spoke via video link since he is still recuperating from broken leg suffered in a skiing accident.

That’s like… huge! Awesome even. I don’t know if it will actually happen, but it would be cool if it did.

Gingrich: Imams should have been arrested

MANCHESTER, N.H., Dec. 16 (UPI) — Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told an audience in New Hampshire Muslim clerics pulled off a plane for praying should have been charged criminally.

Gingrich made the remark Friday night, as he delivered the keynote speech at the Manchester Republican City Committee Christmas dinner, the Manchester (N.H.) Union Leader reported.

“Those six people should have been arrested and prosecuted for pretending to be terrorists,” Gingrich said. “And the crew of the U.S. airplane should have been invited to the White House and congratulated for being correct in the protection of citizens.”

The imams, who had been attending a conference in Minneapolis, were pulled off a US Air flight to Phoenix after other passengers said they had been acting suspicious. They were questioned by the FBI for several hours and then released.

Their suspicious behavior apparently consisted of reports that they had prayed in Arabic and that they were not sitting together but had walked around to talk to each other.

Gingrich said last month the United States might have to accept new curbs of First Amendment rights to fight terrorism.

Did you know there’s a state called Maryland? I just saw someone talking about it on my friendslist. I had to look it up. I thought it was some kind of shit they made up. Mary-Land?! WTF?! Where the fuck is “Maryland” anyway? Probably somewhere near “Delaware” which is apparently a state as well, though I’ve never fucking heard of it until recently.

Fucking geography. It’s full of surprises.

This is from last year. The topic of shaved cootches came up and I didn’t feel like rewriting my feelings on it, so I’ll just recycle from an older post

starting…

here:
It’s weird that what’s natural now comes across as strange. I guess it’s similar to when you meet a chick who doesn’t shave her arm pits. It’s like “eww! What’s wrong with you?!”

The vagina has become the new arm pit.

I wonder if this is something that’s going to last a long time. I hope so. I just don’t like body hair in general. On women at least. I mean, I’m hairy like sasquatch, but hey, I’m a dude and dudes are supposed to be hairy. Plus, I’m a fat dude. A shaved down fat dude is just not a place that I want to be.

Now, why is the shaved vagina better than the hairy one?

Well, there’s a few different reasons on a few different levels. Here’s one of my theories:

Up until the last hundred years or so, western society has been unhealthy. The rate of death was high, the chances of survival was low. People were dying all over the place from disease and the elements. But, since the twenties or so, people have been doing pretty well for themselves in general. Medicine is good, the majority of people have food and a place to live.

Now, when I say “people” I’m talking about OUR society. America, Canada, most Europe. The wheelers and dealers of the world. The people that the majority of the internet is comprised of.

Anyway, over the last fifty years or so, the look of the “desirable” woman has become more and more unhealthy. We, as a culture, idolize unnaturally thin women. Women with either no breasts or massively fake breasts. The kind of breasts that do not imply breastfeeding. We’ve put women on pedestals who are not (by appearance) fit for bearing children. We’ve got these twigs who barely look capable of sustaining a menstrual cycle, much less an actual pregnancy.

Our plagues of choice has gone from TB and polio and bubonic plague to Syphilis and AIDS and HIV… sexually transmitted diseases that hinder sexual reproduction. Hell, even herpes, while for the most part is just a neusence to most people, can be fatal to newborn babies.

The world is pushing us towards infertility. Nature does not want us to reproduce in mass quantities. We’ve got erectile dysfunction and radiation and PCOS taking away more and more people’s ability to have children.

And the average white male’s ideal woman is a woman who, going by appearance, cannot have children.

Now look at your average black dude. What kind of woman, stereotypically, is he after? Larger women with larger, more natural breasts and child bearing hips. Women who look, well… healthy.

Black people have not had it nearly as comfortable as Anglo-Saxons over the last hundred years. In fact, I’d go so far as to say they’ve gotten a pretty shitty deal. Things have changed a fair bit, but it’s still not great.

I’m not pretending to know what it’s like to be a black man in this society, but I do know enough to say that I’m thankful that I’m a fairly privileged white man. Not because I have anything against black people, but because I’ve seen what black people go through, and the challenges they face in a white world. Just as I’m glad I’m not gay, I’m glad I’m not black. I got it pretty easy when the race cards were dealt.

(on a side note, I do wish I was black in that I can’t dance for shit and my rhymes are hella tired)

So, yeah, it makes sense, on that note, that the average black man is attracted to a healthier image of the female form than the average white dude.

THAT being said, we come back to shaved pussies.

Taking into consideration the theory I’ve put forth regarding our male culture’s tendencies to be attracted to women who cannot have children, it also makes sense that the attraction to hairless female genitals implies a subconscious desire to have sex with women who are not only unhealthy, but haven’t even hit puberty yet. I mean, you can’t really get less able to bear children than a person who hasn’t even started menstruating yet.

I’m not saying that men who are attracted to a shaved twat are pedophiles. I know I’m not and I don’t think that the implication is genuinely there… I believe it’s a subconscious fantasy.

I mean, I believe that the average dude is attracted to women whose look implies infertility… that doesn’t mean that he’s looking to fuck an incredibly sickly woman dying from uterine cancer or something.

I believe it’s an unconscious fantasy… an adornment. Some of the qualities of infertility are present in your average man’s ideal woman, but none of it is actualized.

Just like some of the qualities of youth are there, but the average guy isn’t looking to fuck a ten year old.

That’s my theory on the sort of instinctual reasons for the attraction to shaved female genitalia.

But, then again, honestly, does ANYONE like picking hair out of their teeth?

I don’t

So… it’s the big anniversary .The five. Five years ago a hell of a lot of Americans died.

I’m not cynical about it, nor am I insensitive about it. I’m also not really broken up about it. I’m sure it helps that I’m not watching TV right now, and on my friends list I only saw maybe four or five posts about it, even though I expected more. If it hadn’t been all over TV, I wouldn’t have even thought about it. Which would have been fine with me.

It was a tragedy, sure, absolutely. It was a terrible thing that happened. I’m not convinced that we need to be SAD about it today, but whatever. People need what they need.

Something that’s bothering me though…

Am I the only one completely appalled by what CNN is doing right now?

CNN is replaying their day of broadcasting, unedited, from Sep 11, 01. They’re just going to replay it as though it were happening today and this is the news we’re getting.

Am I alone in finding that totally fucked up? I’m all for paying your respects and “never forgetting” and mourning or whatever people need to do. But do we REALLY need to try and recreate that morning again? Are there people that feel like it’s a good idea to sit there and watch seven hours of reporters crying and footage of the planes hitting over and over and over and people jumping out of windows and buildings falling down onto people? Is that really a good idea?

Let’s put this into a more relatable perspective. Let’s take it from a national tragedy to a more personal, family tragedy. Suppose that a member of your family, I don’t know, your mom or your brother or your daughter, was in the front yard, minding their own business playing or doing yard work or something, and a gang of people come along, you don’t know who they are at the time, and rapes and murders  this person. Let’s call this person Rebecca, just to give them a name. So Rebecca gets raped and murdered viciously, and four or five people happen to be outside with video cameras, filming family shit or maybe taking a video of the damage to their car from some fender-bender. Either way, they’re outside with cameras and they tape this event. There are way too many people raping and murdering Rebecca to actually try and stop them from doing it. The deed is done and it’s been videotaped.

Grandpa sees all of this as it’s happening. He’s freaked out. He runs across the street either to get away from the mob or to go and fight the mob, and he’s struck by a car and killed. This is also videotaped.

During and after these events, the people with the cameras are also talking to members of your family. They’ve captured the worst moments in your family’s life. They have tapes of you crying, screaming, on your knees begging God to take it back and make everything okay again. It’s all on tape.

Now let’s say that a year goes by. The cops still haven’t caught the members of this gang. Maybe one or two people on the sidelines, but the MAIN guys who really did the damage are still at large.  The cops tell you “we’re still looking for the people who did this to you.”

Another year goes by, and another. By this time, the cops have pretty much given up on finding the people responsible for what happened to Rebecca and Grandpa. But what they have done is go next door to the house NEXT to the one where those people used to live, and they’ve raided and destroyed THAT house. It kind of made you feel better but not really, because no one who had anything to do with the murder of your beloved Rebecca has been found or dealt with.

What’s even worse is that the people who did this to you keep sending you letters and video tapes saying “We’re going to do it again!” and the cops STILL haven’t found them and they’re not really trying. They’re much more interested in blowing up this house next door, because they heard that it might be a crack house. They haven’t found any crack there yet, nor have they found the fixings for crack, but damnit, they just KNOW it’s there.

But again, you don’t really care about that, because they’ve all but stopped looking for the people actually responsible years ago.

Now it’s five years later. You’re family has done a pretty good job healing from this. It still hurts like a motherfucker, but you’re able to get dressed and go to work and laugh at funny movies and not think about it every minute of every day. In fact, at this point, it’s pretty well relegated to the back of your mind. It’s still there, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not something that particularly upsets you every time you think about it. It was a terrible thing that happened and you’re still hurt as hell about it and still pissed about it, but it certainly isn’t the center of your universe anymore. You’ve managed to get your life back from the grief for the most part.

The hunt for the “real killers” has been called off in favor of a turf war with the real killers next door neighbor. The real killers are still sending out messages periodically, but you’ve pretty much learned to turn that out. Mostly because you know nothing is getting done about it.

The healing process has been an extremely difficult one, but it’s worked. You’ve moved on.

Now, five years later, one member of your family comes in and reminds you that it’s the five year anniversary of the brutal slaying of Rebecca and Grandpa. You say “Well damn. We should have a moment of silence or something.” And that person says “Wait, I have a better idea. Let’s watch the video tapes from that day, ALL day. Over and over and over again. Let’s watch the tapes of Rebecca being raped and murdered. Let’s watch the tape of Grandpa being hit by that car and dragged a hundred feet across the asphalt, wound up in someone’s axle. Let’s watch the footage of us crying and sobbing and confused. Let’s try and relive that day as much as we possibly can. That seems like a real fitting way to pay tribute to Rebecca and Grandpa. Oh, and I’ve edited some commercials into it.”

If that was me, I’d be like “Fuck YOU right in the neck.” And I’d karate that motherfucker in the face.

That’s how I feel about CNN rerunning their broadcast day from Sep 11.

Fuck that right in the neck.

You know what I hate?

I hate it on MTV Cribs when it’s at the end of the segment and the person showing their house is all like “Now get the fuck out of here and stop bothering me!”

Dude, you’re a dickhead. You agreed to be on the show. Don’t get all fucking uppity and bothered. I know you’re kidding, but it’s not fucking funny and it makes me hate you. You’re in that nice house with your fucking Enzo and Bently and cage full of pitbulls because your fans put you there. Now you’ve been given an opportunity to show off all of the shit you’ve got that you don’t deserve and you’re gonna act BOTHERED about it? Fuck you dude.

So my girl Storm went home. That’s alright. I wish she could have made to the top three. I wish she could have at least made it farther that than fucking under developed fetus looking mother fucker Lukas with his eyes two far apart. You who that mother fucker looks like? He looks like fucking Gollum from the Lord of the Rings movies. Fuck Lukas and fuck his ugly, no talent having piece of shit face. I hate him and I wish he was dead. That cocky bastard sings his own half assed rip off sounds like everything on the radio right now original song AGAIN last night? Nobody wants to hear your retarded “original“ song.

God I fucking hate him.

Yes, I have Storm injustice induced rage.

But she’s better off not winning. I’ve said that before.

BTW, her rendition of Wish You Were Here should have bought her at least another week. That was fucking beautiful. Much better than that Nazi Marty Casey’s lame version last season.

What’s up with that show? Did they only buy the rights to two Pink Floyd songs or what? I’ve heard Wish You Were Here like fifty times over the two seasons of Rock Star. That and Fortune’s version of Money which was… alright. I wanna hear a Pink Floyd song I haven’t heard fifty million times. Do fucking Pigs from Animals or do One of my Turns. That’d rock EVERYONE’S socks. Don’t get me wrong, Wish You Were Here is a great song and all… but it’s a LITTLE over played.

So now I’m gunning for Toby to take the whole thing home.

Dilana needs to do Sonic Reducer to completely redeem herself. She won’t, but she should. I’ve always thought that sound would sound good with a chick singing.

Back to how much I hate Lukas…

One of the many things I hate about Lukas is the fact that he’s Canadian. It’s not that I hate Canadians… it’s just a strike against him that I can exploit when I talk about how much I hate about him. It also means that because I LIVE in Canada I have to hear about this fucktard like he’s fucking John Lennon or something anytime anyone is talking about Rock Star.

FUCK!

Okay, so, as anyone reading my journal for any length of time knows… I have issues with Canada. It’s not just the horrible TV or the fact that Canadians don’t seem to have any concept of the general rules of driving, official or unspoken. It’s not just the fact that I can’t get all of my trashy American fast food or get a goddamned Stouffers French Bread Pizza or real Spaghetti-Os or regular old fashioned pizza pepperoni in the supermarket for that matter. It’s not only the fact that you can’t get a fucking M&M Blizzard at Dairy Queen. The problem is that it’s not home. I’ve been living here for like, eight years or something. That’s a long long fucking time. I’ve been living here for almost a third of my life… but it still doesn’t feel like home. I feel like I don’t have a home and I resent the fuck out of it.

If I were to get hit by a truck this afternoon and I went to the hospital and was only a couple hours away from dead and they asked me where I wanted to be buried… I wouldn’t know what to tell them. It sure as shit wouldn’t be here, but then… where? Sacramento? Fuck that. Fuck Sacramento. I don’t be buried there. Some asshole would probably vandalize my grave. And not in a badass Jim Morrison sort of way. Someone would break my headstone and then spray paint “I eat cock” on it. Southern California? Fuck that place too. Maybe if I lived there, but I don’t. I don’t wanna be shipped down to California just so I can be buried in my homeland where no one would come and visit me and like, put shit on my grave and shit. That’s kind of weak. I don’t wanna be buried up in the mountains where my mom lives, because fuck that place too. I love my family and all, but I don’t wanna be buried fucking Grizzly Flats or Placerville or something when I only lived there for like, three months. Fuck that too.

I mean, ideally I wouldn’t be buried at all. Cemeteries are a stupid ass waste of space. I mean, I get it… I get the whole grieving process for the people who love me and all that, but really… do I need to take up real estate till the end of time? I don’t think so. If I’m gonna do that, I’d rather have like, a building erected to house my body somewhere that’s NOT a cemetery. But I don’t want that. I wanna be cryogenically frozen. Hell yeah. Cause I don’t want to fucking die. I talk a lot of shit about suicide and all of that, but that’s got a lot more to do with ending pain than wanting to die. Ideally, if I could die, I’d want to die and then wake up with everything fucking better. I don’t really want to DIE like… FOREVER. I just want to not have to deal with all of this mental bullshit I’m dealing with, on top of the regular bullshit that everyone deals with. Fucking freeze my ass and wake me up in thirty years when you’ve found a cure for “getting hit by a truck” and then everything will be hunky dory.

But I’m not going to be cryogenically frozen. I’ve accepted that. It’s expensive and like, I don’t think anyone really knows how to go about getting that done. I’d probably end up in someone’s deep freezer somewhere and that’s just not dignified. Joe all balled up and hard and frosty in a freezer. I’d be naked too, which would be embarrassing. Especially since it’s cold a freezer. Anyone who happened to look in at me would be like “Jesus, Joe didn’t have much in the way of cock.” And I’d be dead so I wouldn’t be able to say “IT’S CAUSE IT’S COLD HERE! FUCKER!”

So yeah, I don’t want to be buried here in Canada, but I have no idea where I do want to lay to rest, so I guess I’d leave that up to Sandra, and she’d probably fucking bury me here and I’d spend eternity in heaven bitching constantly about how even in death I’m trapped in fucking Canada.

And yes, I’d be in heaven. I don’t believe in heaven, but I do believe that if heaven DOES exist, I’m fucking going. If there is a heaven, they’ve be up there going “Dude, we HELLA need to get Joe up here. This place fucking SUCKS without Joe.” And I’d come rambling up the stairway and be like “WAZZUP~!!~???” and they’d be like “JOE!!” and I’d be like “BRING ON THE KALUHA AND BITCHES, BEEYOTCH!” and they’d be like “welcome home” and I’d be like “so what’s up with this place?” and they’d be like “up here you can fucking do whatever you want and nobody gives a shit. If you wanna dick around on the internet and fucking watch movies and eat popcorn and read magazine and fucking play PS2 all day, you CAN.” And I’d be like “But I can do that at home.” And they’d say “but can you do that and not get shit from people about it?” and I’d be like “no” and they’d be like “We WANT you to do that up here” and I’d be like “This IS heaven!” and then they’d say “If you wanna go have sex with someone, it’s TOTALLY cool! And they’re into it! And everyone’s into it! And no one’s going to give you shit about it!” and I’ll be like “What about my wife?” and they’ll be like “She’s not here!” and I’ll be like “But I’ll miss her” and they’ll say “Joe, she’ll be here eventually, and guess what!?” and I’ll be like “what?” and they’ll say “She can play Playstation and fuck whoever she wants whenever she wants too!” and I’ll be like “but she won’t want that.” And they’ll say “Then she can like, fucking scrapbook and watch Gilmore Girls or something” and I’ll be like “Righteous. She’ll like that.” And they’ll be like “Look, here comes Jim Morrison and Marilyn Monroe. They’re gonna show you how to party fucking HEAVEN style, for real.” And I’ll be like “Sign my ass UP for this shit.”

Was I talking about something at some point?

Oh yeah, Canada.

So because I don’t feel like this place is home, I resent the shit out of it. I resent it and I hate it. It’s a fucking beautiful country and the people are fucking friendly and they’ve got FREE HEALTH CARE and really, it’s fantastic fucking place to live. But I resent it. I resent because I can’t leave. I can’t just up and leave.

And you’re saying “Why DON’T you just leave if you hate it so much?”

Well here’s why. It cost a fucking LOT of money to get up here. A lot. Sandra and I “dated” for six years or so, long distance. I worked in a fucking movie theater. Sandra was in school. We couldn’t exactly afford to do what we did. But it was love and all that shit so we did it, and I’m glad we did. But we racked up a SHITLOAD of debt getting me up here. Flights and phone bills and immigration all of that bullshit added up REAL quick. I couldn’t work for two years once I got up here. THAT cost a lot of fucking money.

And for some reason my finger just started bleeding for no reason whatsoever. BRB.

Alright, band aid-age applied. This shit hurts like a bastard. I hate mystery blood.

Anyway…

I’d love to just up and move back to the States. I’d love to be able to go down there and say “hey, I’ve got a kick ass job and I can support my wife and live comfortably” but I can’t. I owe a lot of big companies a lot of fucking money.

Don’t get me wrong, we’re getting by. We’re trying to pay shit down and we’re able to do our thing fairly comfortably up here. But we’re certainly not in a position to try and start fresh anywhere. And unless something substantial changes, it’s gonna be a while before we can.

When I came up here I was all like “Yeah, I’ll probably stay here for like, a year and then we’ll move down to the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

SHYEAH! RIGHT!

So that’s why I resent Canada. It’s nothing that Canada has actually DONE to me. It’s got nothing to do with Sandra either. It’s just the position I’m in. I nitpick about little shit like bad driving and bad TV and the lack of access to all of my favorite garbage that I love in the states, but really, I just resent the fuck out of the fact that I’m trapped here. I’m trapped here and I’m paying for it. I spent a fuck load of money building a cell and locking myself in it, and now that I’m here I fucking hate it.

But…

BUT…

Canada isn’t openly and proudly violating my basic rights. They aren’t listening to my phone calls. They aren’t admitting that they’ve got secret CIA torture prisons.

I just heard about this shit. Bush came out and said “Oh yeah, we’ve totally got secret CIA torture prisons.” WHAT THE FUCK?! Ya know, Guantanamo Bay is bad enough. That’s the prison that they publicly had where they are holding (and torturing) people without charging them with anything. I’d hate to think about what’s going on in the “secret” CIA prisons.

What the fuck is wrong with America? Okay, so we’re not the most popular country in the world. Okay, so went to war under false pretenses and killed a whole shit load of people (our own included) for reasons they can’t even explain, much less prove. Okay, so our government is spying on us. Our country is fifty years behind the rest of the civilized world in regards to “family values.” Okay, so we’re fucking religious extremists masquerading as a democracy. Okay, so we’re the most powerful country on earth, and we got there by killing our way to the top. Okay, so we’re SO proud of our civil liberties but we can’t even take care of our own people. Okay, so we spend BILLIONS of dollars destroying another country and killing thousands people when we can’t even take care of our own people.

BUT…

At least we don’t torture people.

OH WAIT!

YES WE FUCKING DO!

Jesus Christ!

Do you remember when they cut that reporter’s head off? And like, people lost their fucking minds. Understandably, mind you. It was a fucked, terribly that happened. That one chick… the soldier chick… who was captured and raped and tortured. What was her name? Lynch. Jessica Lynch. That shit happened and it was like “OMG these people are fucking ANIMALS! They’re backwards evil torturing sons of bitchs!”

Um…

Yeah, we fucking do that. We torture and humiliate and rape “Suspected terrorists.”

Guess what. You bring a goddamn bottle of Gatorade onto a plane and YOU’RE a suspected terrorist. That title is MEANINGLESS. Anyone can be a “suspected terrorist.”

And they’re the fucking monsters and we’re the heroes?!

Dude, something is fucking WRONG here.

Okay, so I’m not going off on the war. We could be here for days talking about that shit and I just don’t have the energy or motivation for it. What I’m talking about is fucking hypocrisy. We act like we’re the moral center of the world and we do a lot of the same fucked up shit that we’re fighting against to other people. We blow up hospitals and civilians and kids. We torture and rape people. We enlist soldiers on suicide missions. That whole fucking war is a suicide mission. We tell people to go and kill and be killed for the glory of our moral high ground. They call it Jihad. We call it Freedom and it’s the same fucking thing.

Jesus…

Okay, so yeah, Canada. I resent having to live here. It’s got a lot more to do with my hang-ups than any real problems with the country itself. They take care of their people here. They give everyone health care. They let treat adults like adults and let them marry who they want. They don’t really care if you wanna sit in your house and smoke pot all day, just so long as you’re not fucking with anyone else while you do it. They don’t go around the world killing people when they don’t have to. They’re over all pretty fucking laid back. Most problems I have with Canada are superficial petty bullshit like driving and entertainment and convenience. When it comes down to serious shit, Canada not that bad. They’ve got retarded politicians up here and a picture in the queen in the airport, which is kind of gay, but whatever. I can get past that.

I still fucking hate Lukas Rossi.

And Nickelback.

And Avril.

And please… do not get me wrong. I love America. I fucking LOVE America. I love living there. If I had my choice, I’d spend the rest of my life in a big house in the hills outside of Los Angeles.

PS:
I found a video of a chick singing Sonic Reducer.

So I watched another episode of Masters of Horror. Again, as much as it pains me to do so, I must thank Mick Garris for having the idea for this show.

The one I watched tonight was called Dance of the Dead. I have a zip file of the entire first season, and I picked this one to burn and watch simply because of the title. I guess I was hoping that it was a George Romero episode. It wasn’t, but that’s okay. It was a Tobe Hooper episode.

Now, I’m not the hugest Tobe Hooper fan. He’s disappointed me more times than he’s impressed me. Sure, Texas Chainsaw Massacre is legendary and one of my favorites, but that was pretty much the extent of his importance in the film industry. Poltergeist was pretty decent, but the rumor is that there was a lot more Spielberg in that film than Tobe. I believe that, if only because it FELT like a Spielberg film, and I’ve yet to see anything else that Tobe Hooper’s done that felt even remotely like Poltergeist.

But this isn’t a “slam Tobe Hooper” post. It’s a “praise Masters of Horror” post.

Here’s the thing about this episode: It wasn’t great. It wasn’t a great short film or a particularly scary episode of a TV show. It was pretty goofy. The directing was amateurish (felt like Tobe Hooper aping Oliver Stone, who was aping Martin Scorsese) and the characters were highly lacking.

But here’s the thing: I love the fact that Tobe had the forum to do it. That’s what’s great about the concept of this show. It’s a place where a film maker can experiment and try things and work out the kind of movie that they can’t (or aren’t willing) to make in the film industry. It’s a free pass to do whatever the hell they want to do.

There are obviously no limitations on content, Takashi Miike’s episode showed that. You can have as much nudity and violence and sex and fucked up situations as you can imagine. That’s a very liberating and downright fun position to be in.

The story of this particular episode is as follows: There has been some kind of major war on American soil. The aftermath is anarchy and chaos. People are still trying to live normal lives, but the disaffected and demented youth have taken over. Murder and rape is rampant and people can’t leave their houses out of fear of violence. It’s essentially a modern version of the world that A Clockwork Orange takes place in. We follow a young innocent girl as she delves into the dark side of the youth movement and hooks up with this dude and his friends as they go to a club called “Club Doom” to watch a kind of snuff show. Apparently, during the aforementioned war, a type of chemical warfare was used that caused the people affected to die, but remain animated in a ridged and zombie like state. In the show at the club, they take people who are already dead and inject them with the same chemical, reanimating them. Then they jab them with cattle prods to make them dance. It’s a pretty fucked up concept.

That’s the gist of the story. There’s more to it, but that’s basically all you need to know before seeing the episode for yourself.

What I loved about watching it was the fact that it was able to be made at all. The episode was based on a short story by Richard Matheson (which I’ve found online. I haven’t read it yet, but here it is, if you’re interested) and adapted for TV by his son. It’s not a story that could have been stretched into an entire film. It was tailor made for a short film.

The fact that this show exists, not only to bring short films like this to the public, but to have them delivered by (as the title implies) by genuine masters of horror, makes me giddy. It warms my heart to imagine someone saying to Tobe Hooper “here’s some money. Go do whatever the fuck you want to do. The only rules are that it has to be scary and it has to be under an hour.” That’s fucking cool. I don’t care that the end result was average. It’s just badass that it even exists at all.

And really, the inclusion of Robert Englund in ANYTHING is enough to put a big grin on my face and my ass in a seat.

I just hope that other film makers can follow Takashi Miike’s footsteps. You’ve got the opportunity, no questions asked, to do whatever sick, twisted, fucked up thing you can imagine. Take advantage of it. I don’t know if Tobe Hooper’s mind is fucked up enough to pull off anything quite on the level of depravity of Miike, but I think it is. He either doesn’t have the chops or the will to do what Miike does.

Because that’s really what it comes down to; the will to do what the other guy won’t, just like Verbal Kent said.

I believe that pretty much anyone who’s into horror movies enough to make a career out of them has got to have a pretty twisted imagination. I know I do. I could come up with the kind of sadistic and fucked up shit that Miike does. I just don’t have the will to put them on paper. I don’t (or won’t) feel right writing those sorts of things down. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not capable of imagining them.

I wrote a vampire script (that’s a lie. I wrote 40 pages of a vampire script and then never finished it) that has a particularly violent opening scene. I’ve always felt that it was TOO violent. Maybe I should tone it down. Maybe I should cut it out entirely.

But it’s nothing compared to what it COULD be. I could write shit that people would want to put me in jail for. I could have had fifteen minutes of the most demented, sadistic, deranged shit imaginable. But I don’t. I don’t because I worry about the marketability of my script. I don’t have the free pass that these lucky bastards have.

Sure, if you’re Takashi Miike and you live in Japan and make movies for a Japanese audience, you can do that sort of thing. But in America there’s a self imposed censorship. Sure, you CAN make a movie about whatever you want, but if it’s something that’s too violent or (GOD FORBID!) too sexual, the all mighty MPAA will deem your film dirty and inappropriate for the fragile American psyche. They’ll call it “NC17” or “X” rated. Then movie theaters won’t play it. Al and Tipper Gore will call it smut and tell people to boycott your movie. Your movie won’t be seen in the theater, and will be relegated to home video with little to no marketing.

Either that, or you will be forced to cut out “offensive” material and resubmit a cleaned up and sanitized version of your work. You have to get comfortable with the fact that, unless you want your film to be a financial failure, you will have to compromise on content.

And, as you know, films that are financial failures ruin careers.

So, when I’m writing a script, I have to keep that in mind. So I don’t go all out on my violent opening to my vampire movie. I push it as far as I think I can get away with and then curb it. Just assume avoid that whole process from the beginning.

It sucks, but it’s the way things are.

BUT this format, the Pay Cable TV format, provides a loophole in that whole mess. On pay cable, you can have Ralphie getting dismembered on camera (but not before getting fucked in the ass with a dildo) on The Sopranos. You can have the girls on Sex in the City freely talking about waxing their pussies and giving head.

And you can have Takashi Miike doing the same thing he does in Japan, on American TV. There are no boundaries on pay cable. It’s a beautiful thing.

My point in all of this is that I hope that the people making this show, Masters of Horror, will take advantage of this freedom. I really do. Sure, they don’t have the budget, but all of the best horror films come from a constricted budget.

Now, I’m going to get a couple more episodes burning and then go to sleep, because it’s three in the morning and I’m friggin tired.

#1. They have these commercials on up here in Canada. It’s like these “Know your heritage” commercials. They’re really annoying and bug the shit out of me. The most recent one features a little story about this chick in Canada back in the 1800s

I assume it was for the war of 1812, because Canadians are really proud of the fact that they “KICKED AMERICA’S ASS IN THE WAR OF 1812!!”

I didn’t really pay much attention during the commercial because I usually tune them out.

Anyway, so this chick happened to overhear the American generals discussing how they were going to march in and take some part of Canada. So she books it back to Canada and tells em that the Americans are coming and they get all ready for the war, and apparently, they won.

Now, I don’t know dick about history. They don’t really teach American kids about wars that American DIDN’T win. Also, I didn’t really pay attention in school. That still doesn’t stop me from getting pissed off when I hear Canadians like, clinking their beer mugs together and toasting the fact that Canada wasn’t completely crushed by America in the War of 1812.

It’s funny because like… let’s see how that war would play out NOW.

America would be sleeping, passed out in bed from a night of drinking and playing touch football in the back yard. America would then fart and roll over. The next morning America would wake up with a wicked hang over and a feeling like there was something small insignificant lodged in its back. It would say “was someone eating pizza in my bed? I think there’s a piece of crust stuck to my back” and then America would pick that crust out and say “Oh… that’s not crust. That’s Canada”

The end.

So yeah, my original point is that the commercial is playing this chick up to be a hero. I looked at my wife (who is Canadian btw) and shook my head, disappointed. I said to her “Can you imagine what a better world this would be if that sneaky bitch hadn’t stuck her nose where it didn’t belong?”

Okay, yeah, Canada has a couple of alright things going for it. Canada’s legalized gay marriage and all but legalized pot. That’s pretty decent. Canada also didn’t participate in this joke of a war. That’s pretty cool.

But that’s not enough to make up for millions of acres of sucktitude and nonLong John Silversness.

#2. When I play Hitman on the PS2, I play it through twice. The first time I play, I go through it how you’re supposed to. I sneak around and make all of my kills stealthy and undetected. I only kill my targets and I get in and out as quickly and quietly as possible.

Then the second time around, I take a difference approach. I call this approach the “leave no witnesses” mode or, “Bloodbath” for short.

That essentially consists of going through the level with my trusty shotgun and systematically killing every living thing on the level. There is no sneaking around or disguises or making sure I’m not caught on camera. I just walk into the room and start shooting everyone I see.

The benefits of this method are that, as the name suggests, there are no witnesses, and that, well, it’s a hell of a lot more fun. The only time I ever do change out of my sweet Hitman suit is if there’s a cooler outfit to put on… like, on one level of Hitman: Blood Money, there is an “Executioner costume” that’s basically like this sweet WWI outfit and makes you look that much crazier while you’re running through the level killing everyone with a shotgun.

I tend to use the shotgun for all of the guards and cops and badguys… guys that can shoot me back. Then, once all that’s left are innocent bystanders, I break out the really evil weapons… like the hammer or the hedge clippers.

This very well may be a sign of serious mental illness. That wouldn’t be anything new though.

#3. I hate soccer. I also refuse to call it football. Why? Cause Football is Football. And soccer is gay.

I don’t like games where there’s so much damned kicking involved. Can’t touch the ball with your hands? Fuck that. Our hands are what separate us from monkeys. Our hands are what define us as human beings. While the rest of the world is content to play a game that monkeys and ostriches can play, I’ll take games that show our dominance over the rest of the animal kingdom. Games like baseball and real football. I refuse to play games that a dolphin can play. Fuck dolphins and fuck soccer.

#4. I have no interest in learning anything about the rest of the world. People in Canada take great pride in their worldly knowledge (as compared to the worldly knowledge of America) and they use that to feel superior to Americans.

I don’t need that and neither does the rest of America. When I first met my wife and she told me she was from Canada, I said “What the fuck is a Canada?”

What Canada and the rest of the world don’t understand is that Americans don’t NEED to know about the rest of the world. You see, the entire rest of the world could disappear. Every other country on earth could suddenly sink into the ocean and America would be alright. America is, theoretically, a completely self sufficient entity. Sure, it wouldn’t be easy, but it could be done. No other country on earth can claim that. Every other country NEEDS other countries to survive. American doesn’t. Everything an American could ever possibly want or need is IN America. We could build a thousand foot wall around America and live comfortably for eternity while the rest of the world cries and wallows in the misery of life without us. I’d like to see France or England or CANADA try and claim that.

If someone thinks they’re superior to me because they know all about Japan or Holland or some other lame ass place, I can chuckle softly to myself and proclaim “FUCK ALL Y’ALL!” and start building my wall.

AND, if there ever WAS something that America actually needed that another country had, guess what? We’d fucking TAKE it from you. Why? Cause that’s how we roll.

#5. My first reaction when I see another country succeed at something is “pfft. WHATEVER!”

Why? Because America can do it better. OR, if America CAN’T do it better, it’s simply because America doesn’t WANT to do it better. Probably because it’s gay. For instance, Canada and Russia are better at playing hockey than America. Why? Because hockey is gay. It’s soccer on skates, and we’ve already established that soccer is gay.

Building cars? Okay, sure, Japan and Italy and Germany can build more efficient cars than us… but are they COOLER than our cars? I don’t think so!

Other countries have a better health care system… but do other countries have a MCDONALDS IN THE HOSPITAL?! I DON’T THINK SO!

Though, I do think that universal healthcare might be something to think about in the states. But shut up.

#6. When I watch the news and I see news about some disaster in another country I’m like “BORING!” and find Family Guy or something else more entertaining to watch. If I see a disaster in the US, I light a candle.

#7. When I see someone on TV or in a movie driving on the left side of the road, I think to myself “what are you, retarded?” and then when I realize that it’s because people in the country where that person is actually drive on the wrong side of the road, I then think to myself “That country is retarded”

#8. When people talk about the tragedy of the America being built on the land of the native peoples or whatever, I think to myself “pfft. Fuck those backwards ass Indians.”

It won’t be easy to find a lot of people, even Americans, who are comfortable saying that. We (well, not me, but a lot of Americans) have this false guilt over taking the land our country was founded on from the Natives. But good luck finding someone who’d be willing to give their house over to a Native American now. Sure, a lot of Americans will ACT like they feel guilty about it, but they sure as shit won’t do anything about it. Nor should they. There was a war and they lost. Sucks to be them.

#9. I’m fat. Not only am I a fat guy, but I’m a fat guy because I like my food processed and fried. I like piles of processed cheese and meat from animals that I don’t care about. I like food that’s soaked in animal fat and chemicals. I like my pasta from a can and my fast food super-sized. I like a free toy with my meal. I like to go to 7-11 and get a Mtn. Dew that’s in an insulated plastic cup bigger than my head. I like to eat hotdogs filled with meat that I don’t even know what animal it came from. I like to eat food without even getting out of my car. I like to eat hamburgers with more than one fried beef patty. Preferably with processed American cheese. I like to eat fried mozzarella sticks and Freedom fries cooked in animal fat.

I also like to change the name of foods that have the word French into foods called Freedom. Not for political reasons, but because France sucks. I’ll have freedom fries and some freedom toast and freedom onion soup.

I also don’t like to exercise. Why? Cause my attention span is WAY too short for that. The ONLY way I’ll exercise is if I can watch TV while I do it. And that generally still isn’t enough. I wouldn’t say it’s because I’m lazy. It’s just that I don’t have enough of an interest in it.

#10. Last but not least: When I go into a restaurant and I order iced tea, what I want is brewed hot tea on ice. With sugar in it. What I don’t want is that disgusting, Kool-Aid shit that people in Canada drink and call iced tea. What the fuck is wrong with you people?!

Listen. I know America has its problems. I don’t agree with everything America does. But there isn’t anywhere else on the world I’d rather live.

Yes, I live in Canada, but every day I pray for a way out. Seriously. I love America. I think it’s the greatest country on Earth. Sure, it was founded by pirates and bullies and psychopaths and religious fanatics, but so what? They got the job done. They made this country the amazing place it is today. On behalf of my country, I regret nothing.

Except maybe the religious fanatics. I wish they’d toned that down a bit.

Oh, and the current war in Iraq.

And Vietnam.

Oh sweet Jesus.

Borat: The Movie

Hobbies: Ping Pong. Disco Dance. Sun Bathe.

My sister: She is #4 prostitute in ALL of Kazakhstan. NICE!

Borat’s Official Site

The wait… is… unbearable.

Almost as bad as the wait for Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny

Man, if I was ever going to kill someone, this is the way I’d do it!

http://cbs2.com/topstories/local_story_141023454.html

Freddy Krueger’s Nightmare On Hollywood Boulevard

Man Dressed As Horror Movie Character Stabs Homeless Man

(CBS) LOS ANGELES It was a nightmare on Hollywood Boulevard.

“We thought all the characters on Hollywood Boulevard had props made of plastic, but this guy’s hands were made of real metal,” Ballas said.

Fucking SWEET!

Not that I am pro-killing people… but still! Fucking sweet!

TAKE THAT SHIT HOMELESS MOTHERFUCKER! Serves him right. Being homeless and all.

in other creepy, costumed news:

I MUST HAVE THIS!

Burger King Mask
If I had that mask, I would recreate the scene in Leon where Gary Oldman is killing Natalie Portman’s family… except I’d be WEARING THE MASK!

In fact, I would recreate every cool scene in every movie ever. The scene Scarface where Frank is begging Tony for his life. The scene in Boogie Nights where Alfred Molina is smoking crack and playing Russian Roulette with himself. The Christopher Walken/Dennis Hopper torture scene in True Romance

Oh… it would be ON!

if Disneyland is the most awesome amusement park on earth (and it is) then “Crazy Amputees Rubbing Their Gross Nubbins on Your Face Land” is probably the shittiest.

So this one has been very… challenging. Mostly because I’ve been going against all of my normal instincts to draw all over the place, and I’ve been instead methodically drawing from left to right. This is because I’m tired of constantly having to adjust how I’m holding my hand so as to not smudge stuff that I’ve drawn on the right side of the page.

Up to this point, I’ve always drawn my outline and then fleshed out parts of the picture based on a pattern I’ve developed… drawing the dark areas and then working and shading lighter, and then from there going in and making my highlights and sharpening up lines and things. It’s the way I’ve done it for as long as I can remember.

But then I’ve got that problem of smudging my paper. The solution seemed simple but has been challenging in execution. I’m trying to draw the picture entirely moving left to right. I’m trying to get everything on the left side done completely in sections, working my way over to the right.

It’s been very hard, but also kind of therapeutic. I find that I tend to get bored with drawings before I’m finished with them. I either start to feel like it’s not turning out and discard it, or I start getting excited about the next one I’m going to draw and rush through the one I’m working on.

This way I’m forced to finish, because I have no idea how the rest of the picture is going to turn out. I know that I’m happy with what I’ve got so far as I’m working my way over. I can see it starting to turn out, but I’m not trying to see the final product through what I’ve got already, because there’s still so much outline left on the page.

Anyway, I’m rambling. This is where I was at a few days ago, and I’m going to upload tonight’s work after this one.

here’s the previous Work in Progress: Dixie Chicks WIP 1