Everybody’s all excited about crystal skulls. Crystal skulls this, crystal skulls that.
I say, oh yeah?
Suck on that, future anthropologist.
(Content resumes tomorrow, or whenever Chris gets bored.)
Archive for May, 2008
A Brief Intermission: This Is The World We Live In (TQP #0015)
Posted in crystal skull, Diamond skull with tags Mayan Apocalypse Beach Party on May 21, 2008 by braakA Kernal of Truth (TQP0014)
Posted in Adam Lipschutz with tags Adam Lipschutz on May 20, 2008 by braakposted by Adam Lipschutz
I believe that any form of intentional deception is immoral, absolutely. I also believe that meticulousness is very important. Not in every facet of one’s personal life. For example, anybody who knows the exact number of pennies in their pocket has tendencies toward either savantism or derangement. However, there is a lot of mistruth that sneaks around the larger world, oblivious to the unmeticulous eye.
Aristotle once stated, “Man is by his nature a political creature.” At least that’s what I’m told. He never said it in English. He’s been dead for so long I dare say it can’t really be disproved that he ever said it at all. I have to assume that the book of quotations from which I pulled that gem sits at the end of an unbroken chain of truth for more then two thousand years.
But the origin of that quote isn’t as important as the quote itself. Man is by nature a political creature. All human action is motivated towards a goal. There is no such thing as pure altruism because a good deed leads to a positive sense of self-satisfaction. Again everything that is said is said towards some purpose. This is why I feel I must scrutinize the things people say. Lawyers and politicians are masters at using all kinds of serpent’s logic to trick people into betraying their highest values. It requires a meticulous eye to constantly scrutinize the rhetorical logic in all public discourse in order to keep these people truthful. If not for the meticulous eye these people would do all sorts of damage to the infrastructure of society. We must scrutinize everything that anyone says to us, ever, lest we allow untruth to proliferate.
Another group you have to watch out for is the advertising industry. They are the true masters of equivocation. I recently saw a commercial for Orville Redenbacher’s microwaveable popcorn where after showing an intense high speed montage of popcorn close-ups, Orville Redenbacher himself appeared and said, “You’ll like my popcorn better or my name isn’t Orville Redenbacher.”
This set me to thinking. These words cannot be factually true. Or can they? I thought I remembered hearing that Orville Redenbacher had died several years ago leaving his popcorn empire to his son. If you’re dead do you become legally separate from your name? But then I realized no, he was alive when he shot the commercial so there was a time period when he actually stated that the universal popularity of his popcorn was as certain as him being of woman born.
Actually, it turns out that his part of the commercial was shot a while ago, in 1965. It was the company’s first TV ad and part of the first batch of color television commercials. So as it stands, for more than thirty years he staked his very name on the notion that his popcorn is preferred by everyone, EVERYONE. If at least one person prefers another brand of popcorn than by his own rhetorical logic Orville Redenbacher is a dirty liar.
Well it just so happens that Orville Redenbacher brand popcorn has been the highest selling brand of popcorn for most of the years between 1965 and the present. However, during any specific year it has never received more than 44 percent of the total microwaveable popcorn market share. To be certain: something is rotten in the state of Iowa. It logically follows that at least one person must for some reason prefer some other kind of popcorn.
But maybe the whole thing is not actually a lie but a fiction. Maybe Orville Redenbacher’s real name is something like Herman Flemming and that the white suit was actually just rented for the commercial, and maybe that beard was attached by a string or something. Now thirty years later he would probably say (were he alive) “Big deal. You caught me. People aren’t going to stop buying my popcorn.” And of course he’s right, people were fooled and he won. Well, he didn’t win everything, but I’ll come to that before the end.
The truth actually is far worse then a fake name. It turns out the guy in the commercial was just an actor who went by the name Trent Mason. His name appears in a few off-Broadway playbills in the early sixties but he hadn’t really done a whole lot before his big Orville Redenbacher break. He signed a lifetime deal with them for a huge undisclosed sum which guaranteed the popcorn company sole rights to his likeness in perpetuity for his entire life.
This would not turn out to be for very long, as Trent Mason was killed in a tense high speed car wreck along the Miami Freeway on January 12 1969. His death revealed that Trent Mason was actually just a stage name, he was born Maxwell Tishkov. The IMDB of course has no information on any Maxwell Tishkov but I did learn that he attended MIT and wrote a ground breaking doctoral thesis on the subject of radio-active compression and release, which is available for viewing in both the MIT physics library and on file at the Massachusetts State Bureau of Public Records.
So how the hell did he wind up in a popcorn commercial? Well, it turns out that he met the true owner of Orville Redenbacher brand popcorn at a state fair in Iowa in 1960. Tishkov had not yet discovered acting, and the other was there investigating modern farming techniques for an agricultural compound that he had under construction in Kansas. They got to talking and shared a few ideas and he was so impressed with what young Maxwell had to say that he offered him a job supervising at his Kansas compound. The place ran about 19 years, but Maxwell had just barely seen it’s completion before being transferred to The Orville Redenbacher brand popcorn corporate office in New York City.
The first known appearance of Trent Mason is in a show called “Whirling Around The Top” by a theater troupe called Player Princes, in May 0f 1963. The few articles that I found about Player Princes say that they were known for pulling up members of the audience and giving them small roles in the show. I think it is likely that he was pulled up as an audience member and enjoyed it so much that he took to the theater. But that’s just a guess as his acting career was sadly short-lived.
Although. It is kind of a coincidence that listed number one on the list of Player Prices corporate sponsorship during the fifties and sixties is none other than Orville Redenbacher popcorn. Is it possible that Orville Redenbacher had been secretly grooming young physics whiz Maxwell Tishkov into being their corporate mascot?
I did some digging into the corporate history of Orville Redenbacher and it turns out that no one born by that name has ever owned the company. It was founded in 1902, by one Neville Foxchase, who lived his whole life in San Jose, California. He died in 1921 leaving the company to his son 22 year old son Edgar who immediately sold it to Intrepid Inc, a brokerage firm partnered at the time with Wells-Fargo. In 1954, the board of directors at Intrepid appointed a new CEO named Donald Filchick who immediately dissolved the partnership with Wells-Fargo and was able to negotiate the sole ownership of Orville Redenbacher where it remained for more than fifteen years.
However. No one who had ever been born with the name Donald Filchick signed those papers or ever served as a CEO for the now extinct Intrepid Inc. Donald Filchick was also a nom de plume. Do you know who actually owned The Orville Redenbacher Popcorn Company from 1954-1969? Ernst Stavro Blofeld. The fiendish arch criminal responsible for the make-up compact filled with a doomsday virus and the diamond powered death laser from outer-space. The man declared by the great James Bond to be the single most dangerous human being on the planet, owned Orville Redenbacher for almost two decades.
The reason he lost control of the company was because he had been secretly using Tishkov’s research in Kansas to engineer a popcorn kernel that could transport a form of highly potent radioactive plutonium. His plan was to buy the first commercial during the break between the first and second quarters of that year’s Super Bowl. He chose this time because, according to MIT’s groundbreaking “Snacking and American Leisure Study” of 1978, it was by far the peak moment of annual microwave popcorn usage in the United States. I couldn’t find his exact demands but if they were met he would play a commercial telling everyone to not make popcorn, otherwise he would show a regular popcorn commercial and cause Americans to nuke the country.
Luckily, James Bond arrived and stopped him by airing his own commercial after the first quarter ended, after which he raided the Kansas compound with gunfire and explosions. In the aftermath, Blofeld disappeared, Intrepid folded up and ownership of Orville Redenbacher defaulted back to Wells Fargo. Joe Namath went on to achieve the first major improbable Super Bowl upset when his Jets beat the Colts 16-7.
In 1974 Wells Fargo sold the company to a man named Christopher Leland who for the purposes of appearance legally changed his name to Orville Clarence Redenbacher. He died in 1995 in his Jacuzzi at his home in Coranado, California. According to Wikipedia his official cause of death is a heart attack. To this day the Orville Redenbacher Popcorn Company manufactures over fifteen different varieties of high-selling microwaveable popcorn, and only one variety of nuclear plutonium popcorn. Everything about that day in 1969, with the exception of Joe Namath, has been hushed up by the governments.
Crystal Skull Apocalypse, Supplementary (TQP0013)
Posted in Braak with tags Mayan Apocalypse Beach Party, Pyramidiots on May 19, 2008 by braak
posted by Chris Braak
For your edification, here‘s a link to the Wikipedia entry about the Mayan long-count calendar. Because their calendar was round, it was going to have to run out of days eventually. The same way the regular, Gregorian calendar resets every time we get to December 31st, or we count past a year ending in “9″.
I am fascinated by these things, because I wonder now if universities have to pay someone to be on Wikipedia all the time, watching pages about the Mayan Calendar or the Masons or what have you, and quickly erasing whatever crazy shit people try and put into them.
And for fuck’s sake, if the Mayans were so smart, how come they’re dead?
That’s a serious question–if their magic calendar could predict an apocalypse that was three thousand years away, how come it couldn’t predict that they were building all their temples on their only arable soil? If the Mayans were descended from aliens with space ships and laser-guns and god-damn quartz crystal robotic head quantum storage units, how come they never got around to inventing the WHEEL?
Huh? How come, crazy guys? HOW COME?
EDIT: Here is a link to a handy chart enabling future SciFi specials to determine whether or not they’ve assembled a crack team of experts, or an expert team of crackpots. Here’s a clue: count how many of your experts are balding hippies with ponytails, and add it to the number that have outlandish beards. Does this comprise more than half of the people on your panel? If so, then you have made a terrible mistake.
Mayan Crystal Skull Apocalypse (TQP0012)
Posted in Braak with tags Braak, Mayan Apocalypse Beach Party, Pyramidiots on May 19, 2008 by braakposted by Chris Braak
Last night, I watched a television show on the SciFi Channel about Mayan Crystal Skulls. The Crystal Skulls are a fancy new age phenomenon, and are to be featured in the new Indiana Jones movie, so I guess that SciFi thought it’d be cool if folks wanted to learn about them and their terrible secrets.
Here, wait, let me get a picture.
There we go. Man, I love a good crystal skull. So, anyway, this show, The Mysteries of the Crystal Skulls, was the most amazingly retarded thing I’ve ever seen in my life. This is saying something, because I remember, in my youth, watching specials about Atlantis, and the Chupacabra, and the Tunguska Blast, and none of them were as ridiculous as this.
The SciFi Channel apparently convened a panel of “experts”–four fifty-year-old men with either a) outlandish beards, or b) that kind of gray ponytail that you make when your hairline is receding but you grow the rest of your hair long. They have jobs like, “Author,” “Lecturer,” “Explorer.”
These guys provide commentary while Bill Holdman, Man of Action (you know he’s a man of action because the narrator said so, and then they cut to a scene of Bill Holdman doing karate), chooses locations APPARENTLY AT RANDOM from the life of a South American explorer from the thirties, and tries to find more crystal skulls.
The explanations get gradually more insane. The narrator begins by telling us, “Some scientists don’t believe in the power of the crystal skulls”–cleverly covering their asses in anticipation of the insane delusions they’re about to foist on us–”But all the experts we spoke with believe that the crystal skulls are artifacts of an advanced Mayan civilization, and the general consensus is that there are thirteen crystal skulls…” That’s, “the general consensus” of the experts that they spoke with–not the general consensus of people who know what the fuck they’re talking about.
One of these characters tries to explain the skull. “The theory may sound far-fetched, at first,” he says, and this is misleading, because it implies that the more you hear about it, the LESS far-fetched it will sound, “But the crystal skulls are made from quartz, which is what we make our modern microchips from. Imagine how much information is stored on a microchip–now, think of how much information could be stored in a crystal skull.” Which is crazy, because beaches are made out of quartz, too, and all they store is sand crabs and used heroin needles.
Oh, here’s the guy, Chris Morton. You can’t really see his ponytail in this picture.
I wish that this was outlandish as it gets. But it’s NOT. Somehow, the Crystal Skulls have become the lynchpin upon which crazy men hang their crazy theories.
Here’s how it goes: obviously, the thirteen crystal skulls need to be brought together in order to prevent the Mayan apocalypse in 2012. We know that catastrophe is coming because the Mayans are actually descended from the Atlanteans (you can tell, because their ruined port cities look like old Phoenician port cities), and it was one of the Mayan apocalypses that destroyed Atlantean civilization. But! Atlantis was actually a colony from an alien civilization that was spread throughout the solar system–a civilization that was ALSO destroyed by a terrible cataclysm, leaving only the crystal skulls behind as remnants.
And how do we know all this? One of the experts used to consult 
for NASA (consult in what field? They don’t say. Skullography, maybe). He believes that CalTech scientists working at Area 51 were able to extract the secrets of the aliens from a robotic head that they FOUND ON THE MOON.
About an hour and fifteen minutes into the show, they do a bit with this little old lady who tells us about the guy that found the first skull: she says he bought it at an auction, which she has the records of. Also, the skull was made in the 19th century, using a diamond rotary saw, which you can tell if you look at it under a scanning electron microscope.
Whatever, old lady. Three minutes of this, and it’s time to get back to Bill Holdman, Man of Action, as he goes scuba diving (maybe there’s another skull underwater!), spelunking (maybe there’s a skull in this cave!), and hacking through the jungles of Belize (maybe there’s a skull in the jungle!).
Lester Holt–the narrator–tries to drive home how important it is that we find the skulls, because only they can prevent the Mayan apocalypse. (Whenever he says “apocalypse,” they cut to scenes of Bad Things–volcanoes, earthquakes, tanks pointing their cannons at things, dead cows covered in flies, etc…) Unfortunately, Bill Holdman, Man of Action, does not find any of the crystal skulls–primarily because of Belize’s stupid laws about digging up archaeological sites without a permit.
I guess this whole thing is just an illustration of how people can believe some dumb shit. Every piece of information that doesn’t involve the words “records” or “scanning electron microscope” is third-hand–from a report that a guy made about an experiment on the skull that someone did at Hewlett-Packard fifty years ago, but it was a secret so there aren’t any other records. Or else, from some mission that NASA undertook in the seventies, but it was also a secret AND the government is trying to hide it, so don’t expect to find any corroboration anywhere.
Also, apparently as long as you say, “according to legends,” you can make any outrageous claims that you want and not have to explain how you know (you don’t even have to say according to which legends, leaving the average layman to believe that “legends” constitute a single, consistent body of information that tells us accurately about Atlantis and the Chupacabra).
What’s the point of all this? I guess just that in thousands of years of human civilization, one thing remains constant: human beings like believing in things that are RETARDED.
Short Fiction Friday: "Bird" (TQP #0011)
Posted in Jeff Holland, Short Fiction with tags Jeff Holland, Short Fiction on May 16, 2008 by braakBy Jeff Holland
Bird flies up.
Bird flies down.
Bird looks around, wondering what it did wrong this time.
Bird looks up at branch, and starts the whole process all over again.
As Pete Seeley sat at his table in the food court of the mall, watching this bird winging back and forth between the tile and the decorative potted trees, he had to admit: it was a bit hypnotic.
There he sat. Neither the mystery paperback, nor the initially disappointing and now increasingly lukewarm plate of Chinese food on his tray had managed to keep his attention. Pete had, for the last few moments, completely forgotten them in favor of this curious display of nature gone screwy currently mesmerizing him.
What kind of bird was it, he wondered. Sparrow? Finch? Was there some point at which he had been required to learn to recognize different types of bird? Pete found himself wondering why his parents had never made him join the boy scouts.
No, he’d just have to sort this out on his own, without any special training.
Whatever this bird was, one thing was absolutely beyond debate: this sucker was as lost as a living thing could ever be.
The bird must have flown into the food court via the parking lot entrance, hunting for warmth. And then, just as sure as warmth was found, suddenly nothing made sense to it anymore.
Below its feet, no dirt, just tile.
But when it looked up, it probably thought, “What’s that? Something recognizable! Trees!”
“Trees in pots, decorating the food court – different thing,” Pete explained to the bird – out loud, he realized too late. Not quite the familiar territory the bird must have imagined.
It would fly up to one of the branches, get a better sense of its surroundings. But then, recognizing that its sense of place had been completely discombobulated, the bird would return to the food court tiles, for one more frustrated go at sussing this whole crazy problem out.
Of course, the bird did have a brain smaller than a chickpea, Pete reasoned. So really getting a handle on this situation might be a bit more than it was capable of.
Pete then remembered the phrase “bird-brained,” a concept that had been mostly relegated in his memory to Bugs Bunny cartoons, and suddenly felt bad about it. It wasn’t this creature’s fault that its head couldn’t carry a powerful giant brain like the one housed in Pete’s.
The brain currently cycling through “Loony Tunes” reruns.
Having “bird-brained” in his head unlocked a memory of the phrase “hare-brained,” and he briefly wondered if some similarly confused rabbit might make an appearance in the food court today. Pete actually caught himself turning to look, and then recognized this to be proof positive that must be a bit dim. Not bird-dim, or even rabbit-dim. But probably not a shining example of human brainpower, he accepted.
Still. A bird on its own, and then a rabbit wandering around? Pete uttered a minor chuckle at the thought. Eventually, he managed to shake all these amusing images off, and returned his attention to the bird.
And he realized this little bird was making him feel awful.
Here he was, making little jokes to himself. And meanwhile, that goofy, stupid little bird couldn’t possibly grasp what had happened to it. It just didn’t have the deductive capabilities to realize, “Ah. I am inside. Better find a door.”
It didn’t have concepts of “inside” or “door” that might save it.
This little bird’s predicament was just poking at Pete’s soul, and he didn’t exactly know why.
It wasn’t as if he could help the damn thing. Could he?
Well, sure, he could try. He could make a game effort of catching the poor bird with his hands, walking it outside and setting it free. But that would mean he’d have to make the attempt at getting his hands around it.
Which carried a whole new set of problems.
Most notably, he’d be seen by the other mall patrons, and yes, also mall security. And what would that look like?
It would look exactly like a 35-year-old man in a suit, trying like hell to catch a bird in a mall food court. So it was a near certainty that if he kept that effort up long enough, mall security would take a vested interest in him.
And Pete had noticed that some of those guards rode on Segways these days. Basically scooters, yeah…but really well-made scooters.
Could he outrun a mall cop on a scooter? Yes, he assumed, he probably could. Not that he would try. He told himself that. Except that it was a complete lie, and he knew it.
If his options were A) getting escorted out of the mall by a 20-year-old in an ill-fitting uniform who was mounted on a rolling pogo stick, or B) hauling ass towards the Macy’s exit, then yeah. He was definitely going to try his hand at option B.
But his catlike ability to run at speeds exceeding 13 miles per hour – while no doubt impressive to some slower animals – would not by any means be useful in regards to his gestating plan to save a poor little bird from the Kafkaesque nightmare in which it had found itself trapped.
A mall cop on foot passed by Pete without paying him any attention. He didn’t seem to notice the bird, either. Which, Pete realized, kind of pissed him off. That kid was the police of the mall, for God’s sakes. Doesn’t that include its every patron, human or avian?
Pete glanced over at the bird again. It was back on the tiles, working the hell out of its little brain, trying all over again to figure out how to escape this baffling scenario.
This probably wasn’t going to work itself out anytime soon, Pete realized. And a quick check of his watch informed him that, yes, his lunch break was nearly over. If he was going to do anything, it would have to be now.
He spotted a janitor, and decided that while he, Pete Seeley, held virtually no power when it came to returning the baffled bird to its natural habitat…maybe this wasn’t new territory for the janitor, Maybe he had some ideas. Or, at least, a net.
“Excuse me,” Pete started, grinning bigger than he knew was necessary, but he wanted to appear friendly, dammit. “You see that bird over there?”
“Oh yeah,” the janitor said casually. “Yeah, he’s a long way from home, isn’t he?”
“Yeah, looks like. So what do you guys normally do in this kind of situation?”
“Nothin’,” the janitor answered simply, eying up a trash can and clearly wondering how long he’d have to keep talking to Pete before he could get back to his job.
But Pete was incredulous. “Nothing? You do nothing, whatsoever? Isn’t a bird in a food court, like, a health violation or something?”
“Yeah, I imagine. But they usually find their way out. Or…y’know.” He was already edging towards the trash can.
Pete grabbed the janitor’s arm, feigning casual, but guessing he was feigning if-you-make-a-noise-I’ll-kill-you much more convincingly. “What? What, ‘y’know’?” he asked, hearing just a bit of tension in his voice.
“Well, uh…they die,” the janitor answered, using the same tone one would use on an exceptionally stupid Kindergartner.
“Ah. Well…shit,” Pete summed up. In vocabulary far more adult than your average exceptionally stupid Kindergartener. So at least he had that to brag about.
“Yep,” the janitor said, wandering away purposefully.
Pete sat back down at his table, took a couple half-hearted stabs at his room-temperature Chinese, and then finally picked it up and stood again, dumping the tray in the trash.
The whole tray. He decided he was a bit mad at the janitor, and this was the only way Pete could think of to get back at him.
Then he looked back at the bird, wondering if maybe it had gotten comfortable with its new routine.
Bird flies up.
Bird flies down.
Bird looks around, wondering what it did wrong this time.
Pete had run out of options. He had no more plans or schemes. He couldn’t think of anything else to do. So he headed towards the exit, a bit sad, yes. But there was something else. He realized he was filled with an odd sense of pride in his own species. It’s a rare thing to feel pride at being human, he thought, as he pushed open the smudged steel and glass door that led out to the parking lot.
Lunatic as the notion probably was, he had to admit: It’s good to be People.
Call them what you will – psychotic apes, fleshy mouthbreathers, whatever – it’s a hell of a lot harder to accidentally trap them. Pete found comfort in the knowledge that if he ever found himself somewhere completely unfamiliar? It didn’t necessarily mean he was going to die there.
And some days, when you least expect it, that can be quite a warm feeling.
Pete Seeley opened up the door of the food court, held it open, and waited a few moments to see if maybe the bird would take the invitation to come outside. When it didn’t, Pete whispered, “Good luck, buddy,” and headed back to work.
Lifehouse Blues (TQP 0010)
Posted in crushing genius, Jeff Holland with tags crushing genius, Jeff Holland on May 15, 2008 by braakPosted by Jeff Holland
“Rock Band” is enthralling, because it lets people indulge their inner stadium-rocker.
My inner stadium-rocker, it seems, is Roger Daltrey.
It’s the scream, really. That completely cathartic throat-bust that announces your presence: you are here, you are alive, and you need other people to hear that. Love it. Feels good.
The Who’s “Who’s Next” will soon be offered as a full album download on the game. In preparation, I’ve been listening to it like an addict. It’s a brilliant record. Obviously. There aren’t a lot of songs like “Baba O’Reilly,” songs that elicit a desire to replay it as soon as the last chords play.
I like to get the history of things I fall in love with. And so this meant reading up on Lifehouse.
If you didn’t know, the most iconic songs on the album – among them, “Baba O’Reilly,” “Behind Blue Eyes,” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” – started as a science fiction rock opera Pete Townshend had been fiddling with. It’s about a rock concert that raises post-apocalyptic London up against the shackles of a totalitarian dictatorship that had kept the populace stultifyingly safe from toxic pollution by sticking them in lifespan-mimicking stasis suits.
The Matrix, by way of “Tommy.”
It isn’t a bad story, per se, but…even at the time, it wasn’t a super-fresh idea. It was okay sci-fi, but nothing groundbreaking.
Here’s what pushed it over the border into good, solid, bat-shit crazy territory.
I want to make sure I’m getting this just right, so I’m going to quote Wikipedia’s write-up (don’t laugh – when it comes to trivial crap, Wikipedia is the place to go):
“What Townshend was aiming to achieve in Lifehouse was to write music that could be adapted to reflect the personalities of the audience. To do this he wanted to adapt his newly acquired hardware, VCS3 and ARP synthesizers and a quadraphonic PA, to create a machine capable of generating and combining personal music themes written from computerized biographical data. Ultimately, these thematic components would merge to form a ‘universal chord.’ To help this process, The Who would encourage individuals to emerge from the audience and find a role in the music.”
Listen to that again. “A machine capable of generating and combining personal music themes written from computerized biographical data.”
This is not an idea Normal People come up with.
Townshend wanted that to happen for every concertgoer who came to any Lifehouse-related concert. To basically let them hear what their being sounded like as music.
Obviously, the rest of the band and crew heard Townshend’s explanation, and responded the only way they could: “Wait…what? No, wait, I think I get…no…what?” And then they dismissed him as kindly as possible.
But you can’t dismiss Pete Townshend kindly, because he is a Genius, Dammit, and does not accept polite condescension lightly.
The lack of understanding of his grand, psycho-SF-rock-opera ideal reportedly sent Townshend into a deep, suicidal depression.
He shook it off just enough to do away with the narrative aspect of the songs and focus on reformatting them as the most amazing rock anthems humanly possible. And you would think that would be enough.
But Townshend’s inability to cope with the lack of acceptance of his Big Crazy Idea (which he has returned to multiple times) lingers with me.
Every “creative type” has been there. This massive, grand concept comes to us – likely while stoned – and it needs to be worked on Right Now! But then we sober up, get some perspective, and realize that maybe the idea wasn’t quite as staggeringly awesome as we had initially believed. And to keep our sanity, we move on.
But Pete Townshend was so despondent over the fact that 
nobody was digging his lunatic post-apocalyptic Woodstock story, and the accompanying transcendental-but-completely-impractical-digi-humanistic concert concept that came with it, that he wanted to die.
I find myself fascinated by that level of fanaticism for one’s own imagination. I’ve come up with stories that, for one reason or another, didn’t work anymore. When that happened, after a brief period of disappointment, I let them go. Which makes me realize I will never be a Genius, in the way Pete Townshend is.
Imagine being so in tune with an idea, that knowing nobody but you understood it was driving you mad. That reshaping those concepts as one of the greatest rock albums of all time was just a consolation prize, compared with what you had in mind.
This is the frustration usually claimed by supposed alien-abductees. For Pete Townshend, it was close enough. He recognized the potential to make music an experience that could change the shape of humanity, only to slowly but surely realize that he wouldn’t be able to birth those concepts into the world.
I’ve never had an idea that good, that important. And it actually makes me feel a little bit sad. Knowing that no concept, no character, no theme will ever break my heart to such an extreme extent. For a creative person, it’s a little bit disappointing to realize your limits.
But seeing how it affected one of the greatest songwriters of the 20th century, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.
What Hillary Clinton Needs to Do to Win the Nom
Posted in Braak, Politics, Teh Goofy with tags Braak, Politics on May 14, 2008 by braak
posted by Chris Braak
The general consensus is that Hillary Clinton will need to either a) win the remaining primaries with 91% of the popular vote, or b) claim the votes of superdelegates who will vote against their state’s popular vote.
These are not the only options.
With the Democratic Party’s newly instituted “Lightning Primaries,” values of delegates will be doubled. In addition, a secret, “Ultra-Delegate” has been selected from among the remaining delegates; whichever candidate claims him or her will have the choice of receiving sixteen bonus delegates, or a Pontiac Sebring Convertible.
If Hillary manages to secure the Ultra-Delegate, and claims the value of the bonus delegates, as well as win by a majority in the remaining primaries, she and Barack Obama will move on to the Eliminator. Obama remains the odds-on favorite in the Eliminator challenge, but if Hillary manages to complete the obstacle course with a time of three minutes, thirty seconds or less, she will be able to compete with Obama directly in the Joust for an additional 14 delegates.
Alternately, as long as she does not lose ground in the Kentucky, Oregon, Montana, and South Dakota primaries, Hillary will be able to compete in the Final Primary round. Here, she’ll be able to wager a percentage of her pledged delegates based on her knowledge of the chosen category (which is still undecided; experts anticipate the two likeliest choices as “American Jurisprudence,” and “Movies”). This won’t be a lock; she’ll need to wager enough that if she gets the answer right, and Obama gets it wrong, she’ll come out ahead, but not so much that if they both get it wrong she’ll drop out of the running.
Furthermore, every primary brings the two candidates closer to picking up one of the five Whammy Delegates—any one of which will neutralize all delegates won from states that end in the letter “A.” That is, unless a candidate manages to secure all five Whammy delegates (referred to by campaign strategists as “The Big Whammy Strategy”), in which case he or she will see their delegate values from all states that begin with the letter “N” doubled.
Fortunately, even if Hillary does not succeed in picking up the Democratic nomination, she will have the option of two excellent consolation prizes: a complete set of kitchen appliances (furnished by Kenmore), or a two-week, all-expenses-paid trip to Cabo San Lucas (provided by the Mexico Bureau of Tourism).
The Argentine Peter Pan TQP 0008
Posted in Anney E. J. Ryan with tags Anney E. J. Ryan on May 14, 2008 by braakChe Guevara has always been the adolescent’s hero. I remember seeing his face emblazoned across t-shirts and jackets in high school. It struck me as another label—like the anti-establishment Abercrombie and Fitch, and pretty lame.
A few years later, I caught the haunting sea-colored trailer for The Motorcycle Diaries and felt my spine stir. I watched the movie and loved it, more for the story than the history. Still, when I heard that the film misrepresented actual facts, I wanted to learn more about Che. I wanted to know the truth.
“The Motorcycle Diaries” shows Che as a twenty-something medical student, inspired to revolution by the poverty he sees across the continent of South America.
Despite the truth to this story, many historians disagree with this portrait, and describe a Che that’s more like Heinrich Himmler.
This is a bit of a stretch. Himmler grew up under a tyrannical father who taught him to hate himself, while Che came from a loving family. Himmler sought the military life; Che became a revolutionary because he came out of medical school and couldn’t find a job.
They shared a single characteristic—that of the gleeful murderer. Himmler assembled and oversaw the SS, while Che enthusiastically murdered thousands of boys and young men during the Cuban Revolution. In 1964, he declared to the UN with a bright smile, “There WILL be more executions!”
Humberto Fontova’s book, Exposing the Real Che Guevara: And the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him, is full of these bloody facts. He argues that today’s Che fans have been duped by the media, and don’t understand that he was violent.
I’m not sure about that. Kids know the truth about Che. They just don’t care. The night I googled his picture, I understood why.
“Oh my God,” I gasped. “Che Guevara was hot!”
The marketed Alberto Korda photo does the man no justice. If born in America today, he’d be on television, no doubt, a metrosexual menswear model in Vogue, best friends with Brad Pitt, and dating Natalie Portman. Those eyes! That smile! Gael Garcia Bernal and Benicio Del Toro are poor stand-ins for the real thing.
But the kids like him for another reason too.
About three years ago, Newsweek published a detailed study of the adolescent brain. Neurologists explained how at that stage, the prefrontal cortex-the part of the brain responsible for logic, decision-making, and emotion control—has not yet reached its full maturity. As the teenage brain grows, so does their penchant for high-risk behavior.
In other words, teens are biologically moved by their hearts, not their heads.
I can remember being sixteen, harboring a crush on Alex DeLarge of “Clockwork Orange.” Best friend Megan and I used to reenact the rape scene in my front yard, play-punching and kicking each other, while yelping, “Singing in the Rain.” To us, the scene was as hilarious as a Stooges episode—using violence to drum out the beat to a hokey song.
The same goes for Che. It’s easy for kids to ignore the facts, because for every murder, they believe that he did it with love in his heart, for the greater good of his people.
Kids also like Che because they look at him and see themselves—heart thumping, angry, senselessly driven by hope, dreaming wild and ballsy enough to try living out those dreams.
Even in his thirties and forties, Che’s behavior often mimicked that of a teenager. He refused to compromise with Castro’s regime, and the UN. He ran around the jungles of Bolivia with a small band of men, trying to recreate the Cuban revolution. To the well-liked Bolivian government, he must’ve looked like a big dumb kid, playing cops and robbers in the woods.
The truth about Che is that he never grew up. The rest of us do, and never feel that pure, unadulterated emotion again.
The Final Chapter, TQP 0007
Posted in Adam Lipschutz with tags Adam Lipschutz on May 13, 2008 by braakposted by Adam Lipschutz
(Author’s Note: I will not attempt to guess how history will judge me for beginning my career with this website with an entry titled, “The Final Chapter.” I will only offer the following remark: what is finality if not a prelude to a new beginning?)
[Editor’s Note: This is not really Adam’s final chapter]
Ok, so I am back online. I was offline for a while because the antics of some anonymous douchebag forced me to change most of my internet passwords. Determined not to have to change it again, I made my new password not only very difficult to guess, I also made it very difficult to type and I have only just now mastered it.
My password is not the only new thing in my life. I am on a brand new laptop that I am preeettttyyy sure I can afford to purchase. I also moved from Bryn Mawr to Manayunk. I had many adventures, the final chapter of which is described below, living in that strange incestuous house (I did not participate in anything incestuous first hand but it did happen in my house while I lived there). I announced that I was leaving six weeks before I was to move to Manayunk. During this time many debts were negotiated and settled, many unofficial transfers occurred and I decided not to try to keep the keys to this house. I like hanging on to keys. Assuming that nobody has changed their locks (and really why should they?) I have access to businesses and residences all over the world. But I looked at the kitchen, noting comprehensively how filthy we had allowed it to become, and hoped to never find a purpose to traipse back inside. So, I decided to leave the keys behind.
I will not miss the house, but I will miss the town of Bryn Mawr. Manayunk is very pretty to look at although the general vibe of the street traffic is rather more cosmopolitan than that of Bryn Mawr, and I find it very discomforting. I really feel I must be more on the ball because cars just zoom down Main Street with impunity, forcing me to have a real life or death understanding of when I am allowed to cross the street.
This was not something I worried so much about when I lived in Bryn Mawr. The streets were very easy navigable. My direction of movement in Bryn Mawr was never linked so closely to the possibility of some kind of horrible calamity. Not that there was never calamity in Bryn Mawr. There must have been, because that damn fire alarm kept going off. I lived right across the street from the fire station and as often as five times a day I would hear this shrill deafening doomsday alarm for two entire minutes. (Two minutes many not seem like that long when typed, but remember that two minutes is longer than the average Elvis tune.) It did not bother me so much when it was merely interrupting M.A.S.H. reruns so much as it did at eight o’clock on the Sunday morning after a double shift at the cafe.
In fact, it soon became clear to me that the fire station was the secret “catch” about why rent in the house was suspiciously low.
“Have you been telling roommate candidates about the fire station?” My girlfriend had asked me. They had been entertaining prospective replacements for me in the weeks nearing my departure. Oddly enough, finding a replacement was not my responsibility. Finding a replacement for the last person who had left was, which I did by finding Marc.
“Nobody told me about it.” I replied. This was true. I did not tell Marc about the fire station. It didn’t seem fair. Why should I hold any worse of a bargaining posture selling the place than the one who had sold it me? Adam insisted that I tell everyone that he was a stoner so that there would not be any surprises upon living with him. But not being forthright about the fire station apparently was not against the rules so I left it out.
“What if the new guy moves in and can’t take it anymore and has to move out? You have to tell people these things,” my girlfriend persisted.
“Nobody told me.” I repeated. It’s true that the fire station was just the most horrible disturbance, but still I honored my handshake lease with Emily from Craigslist until such time as fate pulled me someplace else. Again, I would not be at a relative disadvantage.
“It’s dishonest,” she lectured.
“Nobody told me.” I said firmly rooting my final position on the matter.
I actually did see a building on fire once, but I had been walking back to my home from a great distance and I didn’t hear the alarm go off, so I could never actually connect the alarm to any specific incident. It just seemed like this weird Sartre-esque torture device designed and placed there only to piss me off.
In the Summer I would close my window. This would make the noise bearable, but the heat excruciating. It was like some balance that I had to maintain to determine the exact level of severity with which to batter my each individual physical sense.
When I had first had the idea of moving to Manayunk proposed to me by my current roommate, I had carefully weighed the pros and cons of the change. I talked it over with my girlfriend and started laying out every way in which my life would change by making this move. There were a number of things to consider, and I wanted to be thorough.
I was not one half hour into this, when that damn alarm went off.
The move itself would not be very difficult—I don’t have very many possessions—but, for some reason, I wanted to make a clean break from Bryn Mawr; everything must be put back exactly the way it was before I had arrived. I would be sure to leave no food behind and had finished off everything that I had put in the fridge three days before I had moved out. Everything except for lasts night’s pizza, which was reheating in the oven for lunch.
(Another one of the more tedious features of the Bryn Mawr house: for the entire 13 months that I had lived there, the kitchen had never been equipped with any kind of measuring device. It had made me quite good at measuring by estimation, but I also developed a bad habit of estimating everything in the kitchen. Whenever I reheated pizza I just kind of arbitrarily selected an oven temperature, flattened out the same aluminum that the pizza had been wrapped in and slid it under the pizza naked in the oven until it appeared to be done.)
There was more than just pizza that needed to be set straight. I owed books to two remote libraries, I had goodbyes to make and all kinds of other things that I had felt the need to finalize before I left. The books, I thought, might be due today, so I would no longer be able to hope that I would find some other purpose to be near the library and that I would have to make a special trip for it. It had to be done today and if I let it escape my mind without doing it, the idea may not come back in time to avoid late fees. It felt very much now or never on the matter of the library books. Also, Lauren (my girlfriend) wanted to watch The Wizard of Oz which I could rent at the nearby TLA store and on my way back from all of this I could stop by the movie theater and make some goodbyes there.
Now, I was accomplishing three things instead of simply walking to the library, and felt better about the outing.
I stepped out onto the porch and was welcomed to the outside by the fire station heralding my entrance onto the scene.
“Three more days,” I muttered silently to myself over the next two minutes.
I trudged toward the library when I noticed that guy. That guy had told me his name but I forget what it was and I am petty sure he is an alien. It had been more than half a year since I had stopped working at the cafe where he and I had talked at great length on numerous occasions. He seemed very disconnected and yet very conspicuous. He was unshaven and his clothing was very old and had been patched together in some kind of loud and haphazard motley. He and his girlfriend lived above the New Age grocery store.
Of course we had been talking less and less since the cafe closed but we still recognized each other, and shared an awkward sense of obligation to acknowledge it whenever we encountered each other on the street. I would not get that final uncomfortable pass from my alien friend, however. Instead, my attention was turned very briefly to a man who had suddenly reacted with an incredible start. I had been looking at him, for some reason sitting very still, facing me from the other side of the window of a Chinese restaurant on the side of the road. We had just made eye contact when I had suddenly thrown my arms on my head and shouted urgently. It was this that had startled the man out of his seat and I did it upon realizing that I had left the house with my pizza still in the oven.
Oh Christ, who knows how long I had been scouring my bedroom while my lunch shriveled into crumbs and ash. And, oh my god! Didn’t the fire alarm go off just as I was leaving the house? No no no no no. I had cursed the name of every moron that caused that thing to go off, I could never live with myself if I numbered among those responsible for such an unforgivable public disturbance. Images of my entire kitchen ablaze while fire fighters pointed and murmured about me swirled in my imagination as I raced back home. As I turned the corner, I discovered that the house was not on fire—at least, not on the outside. I braced myself for a kitchen filled with thick black smoke, but as fortune would have it the air was clear. Nothing, in fact, had changed since I left it to go upstairs.
I opened the oven ready to collect a heavy black lump of charred refuse, but it still looked like a slice of pizza. There were not even any visible burns, I noticed, while carefully prodding the pizza with my fingers. “Everything is okay,” I breathed, “The pizza still needs another minute.”
I calmly closed the oven door, leaving the pizza inside.
Goodbye, Bryn Mawr.
David Limbaugh’s Book Is Stupid TQP0006
Posted in Braak, Politics with tags Braak, God-damned Republicans on May 12, 2008 by braakposted by Chris Braak
Hello and welcome to my new feature, “Republicans Write Some Stupid Books, Part One: David Limbaugh’s book, Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity, Is Stupid, and David Limbaugh Is Probably a Tool.”
This was originally going to be a twelve-part series, addressing this book chapter-by-chapter, but in retrospect I think that no one would want to read that. Instead, I’m going to do Limbaugh’s first chapter this time, a chapter from someone else next time, as I try to prove my essential thesis.
I found this picture of Limbaugh and he’s pretty toolish-looking.
I don’t advise you to buy the book–I don’t think Limbaugh (who already HAS a career as a lawyer) deserves any money for it. In addition, it takes a particular kind of masochist to pay someone to put a nail through his foot or to piss in his eye, and even we Liberals can safely define that behavior as “extra-normal.”
Anyway. I just want to make one final thing clear, and then I’m jumping in. I am in NO WAY qualified to refute this text. David Limbaugh is a lawyer and everything, he’s a syndicated columnist (I’m just reading this stuff from his author’s bio), he’s Rush Limbaugh‘s brother. I have no tools at my disposal except for Google and what I am, for the sake of convenience, going to refer to as “my limitless kung-fu intellect.” I’ve got no fancy lawyer-degrees or a TV show or anything like that.
Now, to the task.
Part 1, the War for Our Public Schools, Chapter 1, Christianity Out, Part 1:
(this is completely Limbaugh’s taxonomy; I don’t know why his book needs such subdivisions)
Chapter 1 is basically about how the Federal Government, in the form of Public Schools, is attempting to wipe out all vestiges of Christianity from the public school arena, but NOT attempting to wipe out the vestiges of other religions or moralities. This, he argues, is hypocritical of them. To support this thesis, Limbaugh gives us a number of incidents in which people were, apparently unfairly, forced to compromise their religious beliefs while employed at or educated at public schools. He hasn’t mentioned anything about all of these people being Liberals or not, so I don’t know what their deal is.
For example, a District Court Judge in Texas ruled that the school prayer at graduation was not allowed to refer to any deity by name. Of course, Limbaugh says it like this: “Kent…decreed that any student uttering the word “Jesus” would be arrested and incarcerated for six months.” He then actually quotes the Judge later on–strangely, the quote picks up after the judge has said his thing about “Don’t even utter the word ‘Jesus.’”
You’ll notice, I’m sure, that there’s immediately a problem with the language here; judges issue rulings, they order, they don’t decree. And saying that “any student that utters the word ‘Jesus’ will be incarcerated for six months,” is a lot different from saying that “The school graduation prayer must not refer to any deity by name.”
But, even if Limbaugh is maybe exaggerating the language that this judge used (the man was a Texan, after all, but still no mention as to whether or not he was a Liberal Texan, which would probably be a fact stranger than the ruling), he goes on to point out that this was not an isolated incident. He cites FIVE other examples from a variety of states in which students were “forbidden” (Limbaugh’s word; I wasn’t actually party to the conversation, so I don’t know if the orders were as ominous as he makes them sound) to discuss Jesus.
Actually, wait. One of these incidents was when Connecticut law enforcement officials threatened to arrest a man for corrupting the morals of a minor if they could prove that he passed out religious tracts to students. Again, I’m quoting Limbaugh almost directly–no threat to arrest a “student” or a “teacher.” Just a man who was, apparently, passing out religious tracts to students at public schools. Frankly, I don’t really care what the guy’s religion is, if a random man is hanging out at my kids’ school and offering to “show them his ‘tract’ “, I’d kind of prefer that he was arrested.
Likewise, these other incidents aren’t actually about demoniacal black-robed judges threatening to arrest students for loving Jesus, either; they’re about teachers who “rebuke” students for talking about Jesus during school. So, I guess there are TWO incidents of judges “bearing down” on religion. Except, one of them was the police bearing down on a creepy guy. So, this judge in Texas was an isolated incident.
You can see how this argument is shaping up to be water-tight.
I know what you’re thinking, because I was thinking the same thing myself. “Shouldn’t religion, which is essentially a person’s private business, not be discussed at school? I mean, it’s not as though these teachers were targeting Christians and then ALLOWING heathen Muslim talk, or anything.”
Limbaugh has us covered though. He tells us not to kid ourselves, “…while the court’s language was nominally directed toward prayers of all religions, in reality it was targeted solely at Christian prayer, because it was the only kind at issue.”
This is what he said, and it is, technically, correct. The judge said, “Hey, don’t you talk about any kind of prayers at school,” and he said it specifically to stop Christians from doing it, because they were the only ones who were. I’m not precisely sure where the hypocrisy comes in–maybe the judge should have sent a special note around to all the Texan Hindus saying, “Hey, I know that we specifically said in our court order not to say anything during the prayer about The Great God Sheba [also banned by the judge; I'm assuming the Great God Sheba is a hilarious conflation of the Hindu deity Shiva and the Queen of Sheba] but we just wanted to say, seriously, don’t say anything about him.”
It’s not enough that the language prohibited Jews from praying as well as Christians, what was necessary was that we IMPORT some Jews, demand that they pray to whatever weird goat-god they worship, and THEN tell them to stop?
[DISCLAIMER: I know the Jews don't worship Baphomet. I'm not sure that David Limbaugh knows, though.]
Let me put this another way. Say you came into my house, and tried to take my pants. And I decreed that everyone was forbidden to take any article of clothing from my house, but especially, hey, you, with my pants. Am I being harsher on you, the pants-thief, than I am on the fictional shirt-thief, because no one is actually stealing my shirt? Am I some kind of hypocrite for prohibiting the theft of all items of clothing, simply because you’re trying to take my pants?
The alternatives, of course, are that I specifically prohibit you from taking my pants, and say nothing else about the rest of my clothes, but that really would be unfair. What’s so special about my pants, anyway? Why shouldn’t my shirt be verboten? Or, I could also say nothing, and let you get away with my pants. But I think we all know where that’s going.
So, we move on from here–I want to point out that this is where some of the confusion comes in for me. Limbaugh groups the teachers who tell the students not to talk about Jesus in schools with the judge, and makes them separate from the teachers who are being picked on by the administration for being Christian. He talks about these guys in the paragraph later.
I can see what his problem is. Looked at one way, the way he presents it, what you’ve got on the one hand is a bunch of teachers who are picking on students for loving Jesus, and on the other hand, a school administration that is picking on teachers for loving Jesus. Two symbols of authority who say, “Stop saying Jesus all the time!” Absent are any case examples in which either a) teachers prohibited students from talking about Allah or our new friend Sheba, or b) teachers FAILED to prohibit students from talking about Allah, Buddha, Sheba, et al.
This doesn’t really prove anything. To go back to my pants example, if your girlfriend told you that whenever I saw a man stealing pants from my house, I kicked him in the testicles, you could not rightly assume that I was prejudiced against pants-thieves. Your girlfriend didn’t tell you that I wasn’t kicking shirt-thieves, too; maybe I am. You didn’t ask, anyway. Dick.
In any case, we can also look at this issue another way: the fact that some teachers are being picked on by the administration (for posting up their protests of the Gay Pride Parade on the school’s official bulletin board, for instance, a board in which Limbaugh is quick to point out allowed the posting of other “items”–he fails to mention the content of those items; I’m going to go out on a limb and assume they were ACTUAL SCHOOL BUSINESS, and this excepted them from the heinous discrimination) is an indication that some teachers ARE Christian, and are trying to tell people about their Christian values.
This is the other hand: here, you have some teachers who aren’t Christian, or, if they are, don’t think you should talk about it in school. AND you have some teachers who ARE Christian, and DO think you should talk about it in school. Yeah, this anti-Christian behavior is a god-damn epidemic.
I want to point out also that one of the examples, one in which the NEA subjected teachers who requested that their mandatory union dues be paid to a charity instead of the Union’s liberal political causes to an “invasive questionnaire” doesn’t really make much sense. I mean, firstly, NEA here is the “National Education Association.” It’s a union, not actually the government. It’s liberal by definition, so actually just *paying* your dues technically means you’re supporting a liberal cause. I’m not saying unions should be allowed to subject people to invasive questionnaires–frankly, I’m not altogether certain what that means, anyway. Are the questionnaires being inserted rectally? Orally? Surgically? Regardless, I don’t feel that it’s appropriate that anyone have a questionnaire shoved up their ass for any reason.
But the point is, the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, something which IS run by the Federal Government, recognized the behavior as being discriminatory and then stopped it. Yes, you read that right. Christianity is in danger of being flushed from our national psyche because a Federal commission successfully protected the rights of teachers to be Christian. Damn you, Big Government!
Chapter 1 goes on, but, frankly, this isn’t a great format for long discursion, and sweet slippery fuck this Limbaugh is long-winded. It’s almost as though he’s trying to add up ten thousand bad examples into one good example—a task that’s either malicious or retarded.
You’ll have to figure that one out for me.
