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

a message to a certain class of people in let the dead bury the dead

I will be pushing this book into forever, if only casually. Other than Mr. Sibley and couple of others in it, you're going to have to buy the book to find out what I wrote about you, most of which is my opinion, the rest fact. Your hunches are correct: the fact that some of you are going to have to buy it to find out delights me to no end, fuck you very much. I'm not naming names here. You know who you are. My book aside, I hope you do for your own sake know who you are.

AP: "Jackson death was twittered, texted and Facebooked"

WWW/NYC--My, my, my...where to begin? I'm trying to understand why in this day and age it's necessary for everyone to tell each other what's going to come their way inevitably, especially by word-of-mouth. All your new-fashioned applications and flashing-lights are frightening to this American primitive, and lately, I've been seeing colored-dots without the usual chemical refreshments, causing anxieties over whether I'm epileptic or not.

In addition, we now seem to have three--count them, three--new verbs added to the English-lexicon, and nobody, I mean nobody, consulted Oxford University. The gall (Google it).

But it gets worse: Michael Jackson actually died many years ago and his brain was cryogenically-frozen and stored at a Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems complex so that future generations could listen to banal droning coming from a cybernetic being other than a Philip K. Dick Cheney or a Walt Disney. Hey, they needed something to blot-out the news coming out of the Middle East, and women with large, fake breasts weren't cutting it anymore...

Where were you when Kennedy died? Fuck that man--pfft!--Jacko died, and through the magic of technology we never asked for or needed, we could find out that it was so just moments after the LAPD's announcement--faster than microwaving a pizza, and just about as satisfying.

But wait, it's not all bells-and-whistles, and quit annoying me, asshole:

"Once you knew the news, there wasn't so much more to know - the rest is all comment," said media critic Jeff Jarvis. So, he said, maybe you'd go to your friends instead of the news: "You might care more what your friends say than some analyst."

Jarvis himself tweeted the moment he heard of the death: He noted that Iran's spiritual leader should be grateful to Jackson because the story wiped Iran off the day's news agenda.

"That was re-tweeted a lot," Jarvis said.

("Jackson death was twittered, texted and Facebooked," AP, 06.27.2009)

Thanks Mr. Jarvis! Wow! Empathy is great, don't get me wrong, but we're making a generation of twittering "Otakus" ( おたく/オタク) which is Japanese for dorks who are a storehouse of worthless data and information (people who never, ever, get laid, like me).

Are there any Otakus out there who are political junkies? That seems impossible considering the qualifiers. Now spit.

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?...