In Russia, accent speak for you: a panoply of picklesmells

Ya'lls:

How to shut up a conspiracy nut momentarily: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof#Science_and_other_uses

Dennis Hopper's shithoard is still up for sale:  http://gawker.com/5986447/there-are-two-days-and-20-hours-left-in-the-dennis-hopper-estate-sale?utm_campaign=socialflow_gawker_twitter&utm_source=gawker_twitter&utm_medium=socialflow

The best evidence that Bobby Flay isn't seen in the Patterson-Gimlin film of nineteen-and-eleventy-twelvty: http://www.bigfootencounters.com/files/mk_davis_pgf.gif

If Congress and the President keep putting band-aids on shotgun wounds...

Yakov Smirnoff will be able to do national tours again and preface every joke with: "In America... ." What a country!

Smolensk

WWW--Here are a couple of tracks from my music project, Smolensk. "Support" features the Gristleizer, a box co-created by industrial pioneers Throbbing Gristle. Enjoy (or don't). Let me know if it works or not. You might have to "friend" me on Myspace to listen to them or have a preexisting account.

http://music.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=music.singleplaylist&friendid=164391063

Fictional Newsflash: Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems" execs belatedly found in DC Madam's phone records, questions rage on

Grover's Mill, New Jersey--According to new findings from Blah-blah-blog--a watchdog website--a Mr. "John Bigbootay," "John Ya-Ya," and several other individuals curiously named "John," have been identified, tagged, and bagged by Blue Blazer regulars, Pinkie Carothers, and Buckaroo Banzai himself. CBN (Chemical-Biological-Nuclear) methodologies have been observed throughout the entire process without incident.

The Republican Party was evasive about the raid whose genesis came from small-time internet researchers, then forwarded to the federal government who tapped Team Banzai for the raid. The phone numbers were previously overlooked and disguised through unknown technological or biotechnological methods.

The Obama administration's Robert Gibbs has also offered no explanations in the matter, and it's unknown if the new president personally tapped Team Banzai as private contractors in the extraction operation, ostensibly within the purview of the INS. Sources close to the case affirm that President Obama was in direct contact with the president during the entire operation, and at every stage.

In recent years, there has been controversy surrounding the use of private contractors by the federal government in military and law enforcement operations, but constitutional experts are at a loss currently regarding jurisdiction. The illegal aliens will be housed at Guantanamo Bay until further scientific tests and a torture regimen have been conducted. Journalists have been unable to get a comment from President Obama on the matter.

Team Banzai is referring all questions about the raid of Yoyodyne's facilities to the Justice Department for further review by Attorney General Eric Holder. Red Lectroids are known to engage in torture, an act which is illegal under international and intergalactic law, as well as covered by the once secret interplanetary treaty at Trieste in 1949.

Yoyodyne has been the subject of numerous congressional committee and subcommittee investigations over the years covering anti-trust law, corruption, falsifying contract information, and allegations of treason and the ferrying of illegal aliens from one planet system to another without proper documentation.

Imaginary Corporations, by Adam Baulderstone

Ed.--This is a letter sent to me by a friend. It's not meant to be scientific, only observational. But the observations are excellent ones...

That whole interlocking grid of TV shows was pretty impressive. I remember the end of St Elsewhere from back in the day, but I had no idea it was connected to Homicide. It really gets baffling when you work Newhart into it as that whole series turned out to be an extended dream sequence from The Bob Newhart Show, and Mork was a character from a dream of Richie Cunningham from Happy Days.

I thought it was funny that the Doctor Who / Hitchhiker's Guide crossover I just mentioned to you came up in there, too.

They were limiting themselves to just TV shows, but I noticed a few connections that lead into other media. They mention the Weyland-Yutani Corporation as client of Wolfram and Hart, a satanic law firm in Angel and as a weapons manufacturer in Firefly, but it's original appearance is as "The Company" in Alien. It is never mentioned aloud, but the name and logo can be seen around the Nostromo and on beer cans. The name was invented by Ron Cobb, the designer of the Nostromo. He originally wanted to call it Leyland-Toyota, imagining it as a merging of British and Japanese businesses, but for legal reasons changed the name. In 1979, we hadn't reached the point where real companies were so eager to have their names in movies they would agree, even if the movie was just trying to make the point that their product was designed for morons, like Gatorade in Idiocracy. Weyand-Yutani is mentioned by name in Aliens but the logo has been made significantly blander in accordance with James Cameron's artistic vision.

From Alien, there is the obvious leap to Predator 2. You could lead in to comics by way of DC's Batman vs. Predator or the execrable Aliens vs.Superman, possibly the worst-conceived crossover ever, but I'm going to go with Predator vs. Judge Dredd, not that it is much better, but Judge Dredd teamed up with a time traveling Johnny Alpha. And who doesn't want to see Strontium Dog as the distant future of Homicide.

Of course once you've entered comics almost everything bleeds into everything else, especially when you toss Top 10 and League of Extraordinary Gentleman into the mix, so this is all a little to easy. The real danger is if the Munch Meme breaks into the world of comics all that interconnection could allow it to expand exponentially in only a matter of issues. In no time at all racks will be overflowing with Munch: GCPD and Judge Munch comics.

That's as far as I want to go down the Weyland-Yutani path. There is another corporate client of Wolfram and Hart you might remember: Yoyodyne. They also identify it as the builder of the run down bus depot where The John Larroquette Show is set, as well as a contactor building starships for Starfleet in Star Trek: the Next Generation. But if you delve deeper, Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems appears in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai across the Eighth Dimension, as a company infiltrated by the Red Lectroids, aliens that landed in 1939 at Grover's Mill in New Jersey (5 minutes from my sister's house right by an excellent Indian restaurant), using Orson Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast as a diversion.

A sequel was written, Buckaroo Banzai against the World Crime League, in which the hero Buckaroo Banzai and his Hong Kong Cavaliers are assisted by a trucker named Jack Burton. But, despite picking up a dedicated following amongst nerds, the movie tanked, being released in 1984 against Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Ghostbusters andStar Trek III (two Yoyodyne related movies in one summer!), and the sequel went unmade. W.D. Richter instead went to work writing Big Trouble In Little China.

But all this is just a detour from the true origin of Yoyodyne: Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, V., and Vineland in which it is a thinly-veiled version of the real-world Rocketdyne Corporation, a company formed in the wake of WWII to reverse-engineer Nazi rocket technology, specifically the V-2 rocket, whose parabolic path would give Gravity's Rainbow its title and primary theme.

Much like comics, once you've hit Pynchon you can tie pretty much anything in. For instance, William Gibson took one line from Gravity's Rainbow, a description of a mirrored wall, and used it word for word in Neuromancer. I'd quote it but I don't have a copy ofNeuromancer and it could take me a few days to find In Gravity's Rainbow. Pynchon paid him back by taking a TV worshiping trailer park cult that Gibson created in Virtual Lightand used it in Vineland.

Vineland also contains Eddie Enrico and his Hong Kong Hotshots an obvious reference to Buckaroo Banzai and his Hong Kong Cavaliers. To highlight the reference he also mentions Ramon Raquello on the same page. Raquello was the fictitious bandleader whose show was interrupted by Orson Welles to bring news of the landing at Grover's Mill.

There is some debate as to whether Yoyodyne was spread through nerd culture directly by Pynchon's work or through Buckaroo Banzai. In the case of Star Trek it seems someone there is a Pynchon fan as unlikely as it might seem. Episode 523(!) of Deep Space Nine involves various conspiracies swirling around the auction of an ancient baseball card of Willie Mays. Oddly both Pynchon and Mays were born on May 8, and in Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon obliquely calls baseball, "A sport also well-spidered with suggestions of the sinister."

With all these new revelations about the Homicide Universe, it makes me wonder about Crosetti's "suicide." Just what did he find out about the Lincoln assassination?...

Shameless plug #2: Smolensk, my musical project and (other--beat you) hobby

WWW--Here's a link to a couple of tracks I did recently. Free, and more to come, enjoy. All rights reserved. I wrote them, you didn't. Yes, I took the name from a line of dialogue from Buckaroo Banzai.

SmolensK: http://apps.facebook.com/ilike/artist/Smolensk

Coming soon...

J-7--Satire is a great balm for troubled times. If you're worried that some of my most prominent targets for a send-up are on the Left, just wait, Republican and prominent members of the Right are going to get theirs--and soon.

Next up: No, not "Buckaroo Banzai vs. the World Crime League," but a mini-play on Arianna Huffington, at this space. Well, not this exact space, but this site. Really. I mean it. This site, but not this space, not this post. Expect a bourgeois hoot for all.

Yakov Smirnoff and Rawstory's Laris Alexandrovna to wed ( a satire)

What a country:

"This is bigamy, I'm already married, and everyone's crazy except me," said the star journalist (or is it "Tsar journalist?) to the Russian, famous for telling fart-jokes about life in Soviet Union.

"Is big of you too," said the ex-Cold War asset, cribbing material from Marx...Groucho Marx. At least he has a cameo in Buckaroo Banzai, a movie that didn't grease his road to American citizenship that finally came in the form of a 1986 photo-op for the Reagan administration at the French-made Statue of Liberty.

"In Russia, wedding dress returns self to store, people so poor. In Russ--uh!" the bride cut him off, much to the relief of geriatric liberal tourists visiting Branson, Missouri, all three of them.

"You haven't lived in Russia for years...in Russia, in Russia! Is all you can say! In Russia--you are to be driving me insane in mad world. This Wall Street bailout is a coup d’état, everyone else crazy, especially Mistah Kurtz!" Her Pushkin and Conrad were showing, and the American Bastille was calling. Lewd, I know.

"Uh, in 'former Soviet Union,' only time people allowed to stand in line is on way to KGB headquarters and urinal, and urinal broken since Lenin died in 1924."

"Is no longer KGB--is FSB now stupid. Ach, life of poet is hard, and me with no dacha to run to," stated the would-be poetess, having once fallen into the reviled world of Madoff's NASDAQ and the whorish swamp of journalism where "gender-neuter person is wolf to gender-neuter person." Smirnoff went on (and on, and on...) with the usual: "In Russia--is 'polit-ical-ly correct'?--no one is old, even age stagnates because there is no money. Everyone is still young, even surviving members of Politburo. Last week, tractor go on strike in Smolensk."

"...That coup is now nearly complete and checkmate is all but unavoidable. We are in a crisis so dangerous that should these people succeed in their coup, your party affiliation will no longer matter, your American flag will be a nice collectible item of something that once was, and your version of God will be worshiped in secrecy because your freedoms will be owned by the few... ," came the perilous non sequitur from the bride.

"In Russia, we don't have coups anymore, is too expensive! Everyone just stay home and eat plaster, like in America now too," argued the groom with the Ukrainian bride. What a country. If you don't like it in Russia, you need to go to A'murka, pal. That'll learn ya.'


Postscript, 12.29.2008: I just keep knocking them out of the park. Larisa discovered this piece today and very charitably wrote a thumbs-ups on it! Thanks, Larue! She wrote that it was "paranoid" which I object to. My own opinion of her own journalism is very high, I think she's done and is doing very good work. But that doesn't change my opinion of the profession itself, it's a swamp, and hopefully she's cleaning some of it out with her stellar work.

That said, her hyperbole over the Wall Street bailout as a "coup" is most definitely paranoid when even the ruling class in America is going into meltdown, it was unwise and unwarranted. She wasn't alone in her alarmism back when a bailout was first proposed, and I don't believe her knowledge of history was good enough to be making such a bold and alarmist statement.

I should also add that she and I tussled during the Palfrey saga, and that she can take this satire as a kind of "apology." There's no point mentioning her recent sparring with another Huffpo columnist on the recent death of a GOP IT (computer tech) in what is definitely a case of strange timing. What I really protest is that Alexandrovna and others in journalism claim they have no agendas and that they tow-the-line of "professional objectivity," which is an insult to the intelligence of anyone with a pulse. But, a coup? That happened during the 1870s, we've been wage slaves to a kind of managerial Taylorism ever since.

We're watching the collapse of American capitalism, a reason for hope, and hardly a "coup," but the reverse. You miss these things when you don't have a good working knowledge of systems in crisis. Also, she bandies about statements on how people who disagree with her are "insane" quite a lot. She's not half-wrong, but welcome to the Internet. There it is.

A modest proposal: quit thinking that with every exposure of corruption that something's going to come of it. This system's in free fall and the guardians of it are even going to protect a bozo like George W. Bush in order to preserve long-held power and privilege. "Inaccurate"? "Paranoid"? That would be the "Wall Street coup" theory, especially considering we're staring an almost fully nationalized economy in the eye--that's socialism, and I have no problems with that. That means a scaling-back of the power of the corporations. Oscar Wilde.

OK, there was an inaccuracy: she does own a dacha. I wasn't aware a satire was held to the same standards as a doctoral dissertation, but then, she tried to adhere the rules of journalism to me once, someone who assuredly has little respect for the profession as a profession. Still, better her than others...

Bush as Anti-Social Personality Type

Huffington Post--I gotta hand it to some of the regulars at Huffpo, they are a bright bunch (excluding the trolls). "Snowball" just made this observation on Bush, and it does seem to fit:

List of Antisocial Personality Disorder Traits: Sense of entitlement; Unremorseful; Apathetic to others; Unconscionable behavior; Blameful of others; Manipulative and conning; Affectively cold; Disparate understanding; Socially irresponsible; Disregardful of obligations; Nonconforming to norms; Irresponsible.

[W]hereas the DSM-IV "clinical" features of Antisocial Personality Disorder (with a person having at least three of these characteristics) are:

Clinical Symptoms for an Antisocial Personality Disorder Diagnosis[:]
1. Failure to conform to social norms [.]
2. Deceitfulness, manipulativeness [.]
3. Impulsivity, failure to plan ahead [.]
4. Irritability, aggressiveness.
5. Reckless disregard for the safety of self or others.
6. Consistent irresponsibility.
7. Lack of remorse after having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another person.

That about sums up the Chimperor.
By: Snowball on December 14, 2006 at 03:23pm

I would say that George W. Bush is a border-line of this type, while someone like Stalin or Hitler would be on the highest-end of the scale. But, this could describe most statesmen. It's a chilling-reality, but these traits are both why they are able to reach such heights in our political system, while conversely wrecking it.

The Moon landing & Tin-foil Hats

If you want to gauge how truly insane and moronic some Americans can be, just do a google search on "Moon landing conspiracy."

So contentious is the issue that the topic on Wikipedia is now blocked from editing. What idiocy! We have a President spying on most of us, three wars, and THIS is what 6% of us find most important?! Yes, according to a Gallup Poll in 1999, 89% of us believe that we landed on the moon in 1969-onwards, while 6% do not.

Amazing, and we know how they vote. I'm not giving any of the living-proponents of this crap theory any advertising, so here's the deadite who started it all: Bill Kaysing. Kaysing was generally a transient who worked a short time as a technical writer for Rocketdyne (like "Yo-Yo Dyne" from Buckaroo Banzai) until 1963, but was generally a bum who found a new way to make money. He could be called a former "disgruntled employee."

Fox News' overly-credulous 2001 special on this goofy conspiracy theory just goes without saying about the quality of their programming and of their viewers.

Some theories have Stanley Kubrick being part of the conspiracy, helping with the same effects he used in "2001: A Space Odyssey." But, it seems movies have probably played-a-hand in most of this.

In a brief scene in the James Bond thriller, "Diamonds are Forever" (1971, three years before Kaysing's book) there is the faking of a moonlanding! In 1978, the movie "Capricorn One" increased the popularity of this theory.

I saw Capricorn One when it was first released, and it is more relevant as an expression of post-Watergate cynicism towards the federal government than anything. Oh yeah, O.J.'s in it, nuff-said, it sucks.

Today, the tin-foil hat crew are rejoicing: NASA says it cannot-find the original master tapes of the video-feed from the first moonlanding. Big deal, we have copies from it, and I'm betting they locate them soon. It all reminds one of how much "aliens" from abduction accounts resemble aliens from bad 1950s B-movies. I'd chock-it-up to the fact that many people don't understand allegory and metaphor--they can only view the world, movies, books, words, as literal reality (like the Christian Bible). This makes them crazy, of course, and dangerously stupid. We now know the political results of this lack-of-consciousness. We saw it 60+ years-ago in Germany...