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Death of a Salesman

Paul Harvey has died, aged 90.  Shown here reading the 10 Commandments from rubbings he himself did from the actual stone tablets before they were smashed to bits, Mr. Harvey was proof of one of the most irritating and useless parts of the American Dream: You can be an empty huckster who steals from others and schills unashamedly your whole life and still be successful.  It was a great-uncle of mine who brought to my attention that Mr. Harvey had lifted his whole schtick from Sportscaster Bill Stern, and it took Mr. Frank DeFord's writings to inadevertantly remind me of that some years later.

My first memories of Paul Harvey were hearing him do his twisty little stories about notable figures, usually while riding in my grandfather's car, and staring out the window.  I could not believe that most people could not figure these things out before they got to the end, and then, with the benefit of age, could not believe most people didn't just already know this shit.  In later years, my opinion about Mr. Harvey would solidify a bit, due to the crap on the Stihl Chainsaw video we had in 1996, and then later even further.  Anyone curious about Mr. Harvey's political affiliation need only review his list of subs who did the show in his absence: Fred Dalton Thompson, Mitt Romney, & Mike Huckabee.  Huckabee played his into his own touchy-feeley talk show, too.

Mr. Harvey passed away while listening to the sound of his own voice on Bose Wave speakers, and lying on a Select Comfort mattress.  At least he had the decency to do it after the CPAC was done - can you imagine the litany of saccharine crap we'd have had to endure?

And now you know...

Non-Organized Thoughts

There is rain slapping against the eaves and windowpanes which is rumored to be turning to snow later on today.  I don't know if I believe the bit about the snow, but if the temperature does the plunge down the well it did yesterday, this would be a possibility.  The weather is not stopping the obviously horny birds outside my bedroom windows from experimenting with their new pick-up lines, but it is keeping the staff of the medical rehab center - they of the cavernous mouths, loud stories, cigarettes and raucous laughter - closer to the building, and I'll take the birds over those noisy sons of bitches any old day of the week and especially Saturday morning.

The kids are otherwise occupied on the couch with dolls & games and a movie while Daddy steals some quiet time before the weekend really gets underway.  Mom's in the woods since Thursday night reflecting on tolerance and changing public school education, and we won't see her 'til Sunday night.  So it is we three, filling time and doing chores.  February wrecked our house.  With so much going on, only the necessaries got done, and everything else got steam-shoveled into piles of "I'll deal with that later."  Later is now, as I have had an assful of this, and will not put up with the mess any more.  I mean, I had a good time in February (for the most part) but I'm glad February of 2009 is now a thing of the past.  Birmingham, with a Mother-In-Law visit and Civil Rights Heritage Tour, Chattanooga, with the marvelous B&B, Aquarium visit, and assessing my Grandmother's condition, C out for two weekends, 2 hockey games, Read-A-Thon, Valentine's stuff for two kids, Max's music performance - basically, we've been on the run since the Super Bowl.  March has Spring Break in it, so that's something to look forward to.  That, and Watchmen.  And Lyla's wedding.  She'll understand that I mentioned Watchmen first.  We're cool like that.

This week has been stupid in terms of emotional content - one work conflict that has boiled down into a Turkish coffee-like tarry mass of immaturity and hypocrisy and the overflow from that into various personal interactions coupled with my own ersatz seasonal affect disorder issues resulting from the shite weather and the proximity of Jonathan's birthday.  Which I'm not even really sure is the case - I think I feel sad and blame it on that, or possibly, it gets me subconciously and I only eventually realize it.  There's also the possibility that I'm just coming down from the high of all the shit we did this month.  That stuff I just mentioned.

Reactions from you required on this paragraph: Is an apology a ritualized part of our social contract with each other - one of the things that we say to prove to one another that we are civilized and we can behave in the future, part of the obligation and responsibility of being an adult, or is it part and parcel of actually being sorry about a thing, simply the verbal expression of an actual feeling?  If you cop out on me and pick "both," you must explain yourself.

Took a poorly planned month off from buying comics in January (storyline fatigue) and apparently missed out on the beginnings of Dark Reign from Marvel in which the supervillians actually do run the Marvel Universe now.  In the wake of Secret Invasion, the Green fucking Goblin runs the country's major law enforcement machine, H.A.M.M.E.R.  (Difference between movie & comic Green Goblins?  Norman Osborn in the comics never smiles.  Ever.)  Whatever.  I can't imagine a better weekend to have a fat stack of new comics to read, and that includes some new/old ones that came from the 1113 Graybar collection - a tip of my non-existent hat to Peggy and David for that one.  Comics.  Especially right now when I've decided to stop reading the book I was on, Wolf Boy, due to the fact that I lived through the horrifying loss and resultant destruction of social units it details.  Depressing, and not useful.  I'm all about escapist literature right now.

Abby likes to take age-inappropriate board games out of boxes and decide for herself what the pieces should be for and how to play.  You just sit, and she'll explain it to you.  This is good for about twenty minutes.

Max is converted to the Church of Hockey now, specifically, the First Congregation of the Nashville Predators.  We saw two games this week, and the Preds won them both - first the mighty Blackhawks fell, and then the Coyotes.  Max yells and screams and gets into it, and has slept in his massively oversized Preds shirt the last four nights.  Abby likes watching the game, it seems, but could do with less noise.  My favorite moment: After the Preds beat Phoenix 4 to 1 Thursday night, Max turns on a mouthy Coyotes fan in his 50s who had been behind us the whole time (and whose criticism of the team kept bleeding into comments about the city and Southerners) and says, "In your face, guy!"  This probably proves everything the guy thought about us, but I could give a shit.  When your kid gets empowered on the heady mix of hockey, crowd adrenaline and jingoism and hands out a verbal smackdown to some jerkoff who was talking shit in your house - you feel proud.

Need to go - a co-worker is coming over to change my spark plugs and put a gasket on my car.  He's doing this to pay me back for nice stuff I would have done for him anyway, but he's good like that.

Watchmen: History, Etc.

For a few years every Summer, I would take a trip to Destin, Florida with my aunt, a female cousin, and my grandparents.  We stayed in a condominium that was either a timeshare, real estate investment or a tax write-off, I honestly couldn't say.  Everyone but me on these trips was a staunch Church of Christ person, so the fun was all wholesome.  Board games and movies and mini golf and airbrushed shirts, trips to the beach and smelling like chlorine for a week as you snacked on cold cuts and skim milk at the counter sitting on wicker everything and slept on a pad on the floor listening to people snore over your headphones and occasionally hearing the waves breaking against the beach not so far away.  Occasionally, I would sneak out, but there wasn't much to be had of Destin in the mid-eighties.  The clearest sky in my young world, and one girl, once.

In the summer of 1987, I showed up with two new books ensconsed in my luggage.  One was the Hitchhiker's Omnibus, all (at the time) three Hitchhiker's books by Douglas Adams, and the other was Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.  I was twelve years old, bored, and in Florida with revolutionary reading material.  That week in 1987 I bent my brain slightly.  Brains have memory, of course, and once bent, don't ever quite go back like they were.  LIke a lot of people, what I gleaned from my copy of Watchmen was a deeper understanding of comics history (thanks to the additional Charlton Comics material in the back), and a different expectation of what my comics ought to be like.  Thanks to Moore and Gibbons, I came to expect a little nihilism, frailty, and ego in my heroes.  I also became more discriminating about the artwork in my books, wanting everything to be as clean and detailed as Dave Gibbons drew it.  I also concluded then that Alan Moore was a genius.  (Only later would I qualify this, as you'll see.)  In short, Moore and Gibbons (along with Frank Miller's Dark Knight & Year One, and Claremont's X-Men) changed everything in terms of the literature that I was interested in.  Watchmen is a magnum opus in twelve issues, and the only comics that I've read that equal it (Ennis' Preacher, Ellis' Transmetropolitan among others) take five times that number of issues to accomplish.  Watchmen is so compact, so self-contained.  So round, so firm, so fully packed.  There are, I would argue, better hero comics than Watchmen, but they are subsequent to Watchmen's creation, and so therefore necessarily live in "the shadow of Manhattan," so to speak.

I have read Watchmen once a year since 1987.  At least.  So at bare minimum, I have been through the story twenty-two times.  While it's not fair to say that I notice something new every time I read it, I can say that I tend to read it a different way each time, and the book is strong enough to support that.  You can give weight to or completely disregard the Tales of the Black Freighter story, or the supplemental material - though both add depth.  You can read it as though any one of the main characters is central to the story, and it can be read as a straight superhero tale, or deconstructionist metaphor.  I have purchased four copies - the individual issues, a paperback which is now lost to the ages, a hardback slipcover version, and a second set of the individual issues which I eventually gave away.  I know I have bought at least ten copies of this for others.

I learned to do my own laundry because my dad egregiously shrunk my Watchmen T-shirt, which bore the above design.  I wore an unblemished happy face button because my friend thought it was as ironic on my lapel as it was Eddie Blake's.  Because of Rorschach, I was compelled not only to find out more about the man who developed the ink blot test, but also to seek out and read Ditko's Question, who then became one of my favorite comic book heroes.  I read Blue Beetle because of Nite Owl, and collected comics edited by Joe Orlando because of Black Freighter.  I got a biography of Einstein because of the "watchmaker" comments, and bought music I might not otherwise have paid any attention to because of the references in the book.  I learned about Kitty Genovese from it.  Watchmen was a door into a lot of other knowledge and entertainment.

The movie comes out next week, and I have every confidence, based on what I have read from Zack Snyder and seen in the excellent previews, that it will be visually stunning and capture the essence of the world of alternate 1985, where Nixon is President and the fate of the world rests in the hands of madmen.  There's already stuff I see and hear that's not exactly like what I expected - but you have to roll with that.  Mos Def was a great Ford Prefect, and I didn't see that coming either.  If they screw it up, there will be no second chances.  There is no Watchmen II, no second act, or forty years of comics stories from which to pick and choose.  There's just this one solid 12-issue arc.  When I go the movies on the 6th (or more likely, midnight on the 5th) it will be one more chapter in comics fandom for me, but I recognize it as another opportunity for comics as a whole.  I hope that the movie is good enough that more people read the graphic novel and segue from there into other works by Moore and Gibbons, and also into great works by others.  We fanboys always hope that this next one will be the one that legitimizes the art form, that makes it more available and widespread.

I hold my breath until the sixth.  Hurm.

Kids In Boxes

There's this show that comes on public TV in the mornings before Martha Speaks that I often catch the tail end of as I throw the DVR onto channel 8 to make sure we don't miss all important morning talking dog show for Abby.  (I'm not a big fan of TV for kids generally, but there is good stuff on it, and if they gotta watch, I'm all for the morningtime viewing, since they're all flooby for an hour after they get up anyway.)  The show in question's called A Place of Our Own, and apparently it originates out of Georgia and is based on a Spanish language program which is very similar.  The show is a bunch of moms and child raising "professionals" sitting in a brightly colored studio which is meant to look like a bright and stimulating Kindergarten classroom and giving advice and tips about parenting.  As with any parenting media resource, some of it is quasi-useful, and some is a load of steaming crap.

I'm highly suspicious, for instance, of this morning's assertion that child cooperation can be taught to the very young by putting them in a box.  Don't misunderstand - it's a colorfully painted, fun sort of box, made to look like a house with a window and a door and such.  And I'm not running down the box as child's toy, either.  I loved boxes when I was a kid - rockets, forts, robot bodies.  I once made one into an "isolation booth."  I also got possibly the worst indoor injury of my childhood by using one as a luge on the carpeted steps at my grandparents' house.  However - at the end of the day, (or possibly just after nap and some apple juice) you're putting a bunch of kids in a box and expecting them to cooperate, socialize, and get along.

What if it turns into Survivor in there?  Or worse, some serious Lord of the Flies shit breaks out in the box?  What if the kids institute their own in-the-box government, and vote kids out of the box, or give them crap work because they drew short straw?  What if, in your weird, B.F. Skinner box experiment, the kids turn on each other, understanding that resources are limited, and cooperation goes out the window in favor of conservation of resources, King of the Box style?  Kids have the wild in them - I'm not at all sure boxing them up is wise if you want to foster cooperation.  Now, setting the box on fire (or possibly slowly flooding it) and making them escape - that might work for a cooperative effort, but then you also might just get scorched kids with Keds prints on their heads.  Either way, this box shit is dicey at best.

Seems to me like some parent's internal bullshit justification.  The attempt to fuse "I want to put my kids in a box" combined with "Hey, it's good for them" has led to this half-baked women waving a flashlight around and preaching child cooperation.  We should put her in a pretty box, and not let her out until she learns to cooperate with a bunch of toddlers.

What a Wonderful World

This performance is from this Tuesday night past, at Max's school. The whole thing was meant to be kind of a Valentine's-related Love-In type thing, so many of the songs centered around the love of various things. Most of the kids are in red - Max is in green because he's in costume - in a previous song/skit, he played one of the teachers, to great laughter and later acclaim.  In this, the whole gaggle of them is singing one of my favorite songs.

"What a Wonderful World" is an easy song to like.  Lots of people like it.  The Great Satchmo is the man, and his version is the one I hear underneath whatever version is being sung.  I also think that's true of a lot of people.  It's special to me because my friend Jonathan and I used to drive around town singing it at the top of our collective lungs - sometimes meaning it, and sometimes for comedic effect.  It became a shared signature song, and one that sometimes take people off guard.  When the song is done correctly, like any song, it can catch you at your core with its inherent truth.  Max's first name is Jonathan - he is named for my cherished friend.  Practice singing this with him (yes, I can sing) while walking up to the school was pretty powerful - listening to the whole of the 2nd grade belting it out, especially around a minute, when half of them run off with it for a couple of lines, is a fun, joyful experience.  And fun, joyful experiences, after all, are what this blog is for.

Max sings here - and ONLY on this song - like he's been picked to do another We Are the World.  He's reminding himself of his notes, he's way into it, and he's acting a little, too.  What a freakin' ham the kid is.  I love that kid.

Snuggie Graph

more charts

I don't think I would have thought this was nearly so funny if I hadn't gotten one for my grandmother for Christmas.

Boxhead

This is my new favorite game.

I've had a somewhat difficult and busy couple of weeks, so it happened last Sunday that I sat down in front of my computer and Googled "shooting games."  Most of the shooting games I find on the web are teh suck, mostly because they're too complicated, or require skill to enjoy.  When I want to shoot stuff, I want to shoot stuff.  And I want it to explode or bleed, and I want the controls to be easy, and the game to be hard, and increasingly so, the longer I play.  I'm not concerned with great graphics or "realism," or complex gaming structures.  I have shit to do and no time to really spend with games.  I want to be playing, and playing well, in a minute or less, or it's not worth it, and I move on.  If I don't move on, well - I have an addictive personality, and you'll have me for life, as long as you stay interesting.

Which brings me to Boxhead, and its various incarnations.  The Boxhead games are great, because they meet all of the above criteria AND they have entertainingly rendered characters, all of whom are square.  They die bloody deaths, and I inevitably lose.  It feels kind of uncomfortable saying something like "the nihilism of the thing is liberating," but that happens to be true, so I will go ahead and say that the nihilism of the thing is liberating.  The More Rooms Castle part of the game is my favorite section to revisit.  You move from pistol to Uzi to shotgun to exploding barrels to grenades to fake walls to rocket launchers and mines and inevitably, a railgun, for my buddy JB.

So stop reading this and go kill some boxhead zombies.

The Peanut Gallery

I'm thinking of renaming this blog "Cavalcade of Assholes," since that's what my entries seem to do lately - highlight one asshole after another.  Or I could call it "Revue of Fuckwit Stars."  Or, "Cavalcade Revue of Fuckwit Asshole Stars."  Yup, that's the one.  Now, I can breathe.

Stewart Parnell, president of the Peanut Corporation of America, "Processor of the World's Finest Salmonella," is beyond the normal douchebaggery and cantankerous malingering we normally see in the American business world, he is like a villainous company owner from a Hollywood movie, or perhaps the drug-addled hallucinations of some authors.  He is responsible for the recent outbreak of salmonella, which has sickened many and killed nine.  If someone killed nine people you knew, you'd be upset.  You'd be Charles Bronson, Frank Castle upset.  Apparently Stewie did it for a greasy buck; he was concerned about overhead and, as his emails quote, "$$$$$."  "Fuck 'em if they can't take a little salmonella," he was quoted as having bellowed on the factory floor while snapping his goober festooned suspenders and clutching double fistfuls of greenbacks, "it'll toughen them up."  When asked about the certain repercussions this would have on children, avid consumers of peanut products, Stewart responded with mockery; "Awww, mommie and daddie are upset about the wittle kids who get sickie?  HA-HAHAHAHAHAHA!"  He then dashed up the stairs to his private office overlooking the factory floor to draw the black curtains and rape the bones of George Washington Carver.  Because he was drunk with power and looking to get away with stuff.

Despite the melodrama of the above United States Congressman (Greg Walden, R-OR) holding his prop jar of Communist Peanut Butter ("I have here in my hand, a jar...") wrapped in police tape, this Parnell fucker is a criminal, and one looking to cover his own legume-scented posterior.  Nine people are dead over this thing, and he gets up in front of the world and pleads the fifth like it's all he knows.  If not for his emails, we'd not know how bad this man is.  Anyway, I kind of like a fusion of punishments for this guy - something between Congressman Walden's suggestion and the killer from Seven; Parnell ingests his own products, a gun pressed to the back of his selfish goddamn head, until the salmonella kills him with wracking abdominal pain and bleeding, or he fucking bursts, like a peanut pinata.

UPDATE from 2-13-09!  HAH!  The announcement today that Peanut Corporation of America is filing for bankruptcy!!!  Now, this could be viewed as a shameless attempt and corporate rearrangement which seeks to dodge eventual responsibility by hiding behind a giant stack of Chapters 7 & 11, but we here at the Squidbag choose to view this as an extension of our power, having written the above vitriolic entry about the scumbag Parnell only last night.  Body count, motherfuckers!  First the Poet, then the Princess, now the Boss Peanut! HAH!!

(If that last part is nonsensical or tasteless to you, I don't care.)

Parking Lot Party

For those of you wasting your time attempting to determine the bell curve of my particular internal morality, I give you this, just after the sleazeball kiddie porn peddler above.  Exhibit B, (which I remembered was at the Smoking Gun when I was there looking at Pervo the Pen Pusher up there) is George Bartusek, whose only crime, at least to my mind, is not finding a more appropriate location than a Publix parking lot in Florida to kick back, smoke some Pall Malls, eat a couple of peanut butter cups, and have sex with his two blow up dolls. 

Study that picture.  To me, the most alarming thing in it is that bungee cord hanging from the rearview.  Sex with dolls is one thing.  Sex with dolls in a public place - well, that's another thing entirely, but sex with non-consenting, bound and restrained dolls?  You go too far, Mr. Bartusek.  For shame. 

A couple of really funny things about this police report: George's hair.  You gotta start there.  Assuming the dolls didn't muss it in the throes of inflatable latex passion, it always looks like this.  Less money spent on dolls, slightly more on haircuts, might be a good rule for the Bartusek household.  Second would have to be the assertion on his part that he's headed to Target to "buy some clothes for his dolls."  What, the crotchless blue bikini isn't working for you anymore?  And all this is while he's got a three-inch slice cut down the front of his shorts.  Finally, I find the real estate ads in the backseat pretty funny.  He's looking to find someplace nice where he and the Helium Twins can settle down, so they don't have to do it in parking lots anymore, and Johnny Law jumps in and accuses him of indecency.

They could have had a future together, those three.

The FOX News Standard

The FOX News standard apparently says that it's okay to hire a douchebag like 29-year-old Aaron Burns, who was once busted in college for having literally thousands of kiddie porn files on his computer and who once served three years probation for "distributing child porn" on the Internet.  I guess they were just trying to be "fair and balanced" in their assessment of the KIDDIE PORN DISTRIBUTOR AARON BURNS.  Now, he's being busted again - one of the guys Fox News sent to follow Hillary around was apparently toting a bunch of lewd shit on his laptop, including images and video of the sexual abuse of girls as young as five.  Go read the police report at the Smoking Gun, it's fucking disgusting.  Then, I would encourage you to become creative, evoke the Inquisition, drag out your old metal albums, and let us together create in our imaginations the proper punishment for a completely degenerate fuckwit like Aaron Burns.  Let us fill his anus with gunpowder and light it, let us cover him in bacon grease and stake him out for bears.  You tell me.

If you're still watching Fox News after this, you are supporting an organization who hired a scumbag who yanks off to kiddie porn and sends it to other people.  Somebody who likes watching a little girl get sodomized.  He'd done it before and he did it again, and there's no fucking way in hell they didn't know.  So fuck Aaron Burns, fuck Fox News, and fuck you if you watch this empty of values fucking channel.