Hey, I'm nominated!

Over at the Koufax Awards, I'm nominated!

Of course, I nominated myself, and I can't possibly win, so, you know, sic gloria transit mundi, or something.

But, still, it's a link. Maybe a few more people will read my stuff.

Next year I nominate my pictorial commentary on the Alito confirmation, Full Court Press. THEN we'll see.

The best defense

Everywhere I go on the poli-blogs lately, people are prating on and on about these Danish cartoons and the resultant protests.

Apparently, Muslims are offended because some newspaper printed some pictorial editorial satires/parodies of Muhammed, and then some other newspapers reprinted them, to make some point about freedom of expression. And because these Muslims are offended, there are Danish flags being burned and embassies being attacked and I don’t know what the hell all else.

Which leads me to the following thought:

Being offended isn’t the same thing as being right. Nor is it the same thing as being hurt, or damaged.


This is a concept I've been mulling over more and more lately. Over the past ten or twenty years, it seems to me, I hear about people being offended all the time, by every conceivable action, group, opinion, or individual behavior, every time I get out of bed, or even sleep in. Liberals, conservatives, men, women, gays, straights, Christians, Wiccans, Moslems, Republicans, Democrats, Seventh Day Adventists, rock stars, Harry Potter fans, movie critics, blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asians, cat owners and dog owners, members of Greenpeace, hurricane victims, cattle ranchers, sheep herders, monarchists, pet shop owners, comic book fans, dairy farmers, Arabs, Jews, fat kids, skinny kids, kids who climb on rocks… everybody is offended by something, and everything offends somebody.

Jesus fucking Christ.

What a bunch of babies you people have turned into.

Look, I get offended, too. But being offended is not the same thing as being damaged or harmed. If you’re damaged or harmed through the negligence or the active malice of others, then, yes, you’ve got a legitimate grievance and you can expect some kind of redress to your injuries. But offense is not an injury. Offense is personal, and subjective, and pretty much always a group effort. Somebody does something you find offensive, and you choose to be offended by it.

You are not required to take offense simply because someone says “yo mama is a skank but Lord she gives good head”. You need not take offense from someone burning your country’s flag, or insinuating that your personal hero is a jackass. It is not mandatory that you be offended when someone advises you that you’re ugly and whoever dresses you in the morning has no fashion sense.

In short, offense is never compulsory. When you are offended by something, you decide to be offended, and you need to own that, and deal with it, and then move on past it. Offense is not an entitlement, and it does not lead to one. The fact that you are offended may be important to you, and to the people who love you, but it does not, and should not, mean jack shit to any rational structure of ethics or civil jurisprudence or criminal justice system.

If you’re driving by someone’s house and you see some sort of holiday display that you find offensive, well, fine, you find it offensive. You can talk to your friends about it. You can vent about it on your blog. You can write a letter to the editor about it. You can organize a boycott of this person’s business, I guess, if you really feel that strongly about it, and I suppose you can even write your Congressman about it, and maybe you even have a right to go up and ring that person’s doorbell and advise them of your offense at their woefully benighted sense of aesthetics, although that last strikes me as starting to stretch your ‘rights’ in the matter beyond all sense or ration.

What you cannot do is threaten them with violence, or invade their property and wreck their shit, or stage violent demonstrations, or do anything else with the intent to coerce this person into behaving in a manner you find less offensive. I say again: offense is not injury, it is not harm, and you have no reasonable expectation of being able to live your life free of offensive and/or provocative stimuli. It is simply ridiculous to think otherwise.

And yet, so many many people do these days. So many people simply head straight to “Well, that pisses me off, so I’m going to fuck someone up for it”. The witless and easily offended, who feel entitled to live in a world where everything they encounter is something they agree with and/or find comforting, fly into frenzies of hatred and maniacal viciousness whenever they are even mildly vexed by something. The clothes someone is wearing, their hairstyle, their politics. What the local public school is teaching our kids. The fact that sodomy is no longer illegal in Texas. Whether that guy sitting at the bus stop has a job or not. What the person across the cafeteria is eating right now. Something. Anything. If someone is doing something somewhere, someone else is offended by it.

Being offended by stuff is fine, or at least, understandable. Being offended by shit we don’t like is, unfortunately, part of human nature. I get offended by things, too. However, you can’t expect the cops to arrest everyone who offends you, nor should you assume that your Congressman is going to sponsor legislature that will make the thing that offends you illegal. You certainly can’t go out and do violence to the person who is committing the behavior you find offensive.

To give us credit, I think most modern human beings are now aware, however grudgingly, that personal offense at someone else’s non-harmful behavior does not entitle them to take any action or reprisal against that person. Unfortunately, those who wish to take violent offense, and who are certain that they have an absolute right to live in a world where no one and nothing ever troubles them in the slightest, often cloak their personal sense of affront behind some organized cause. Religion is a wonderful way to justify acting out against the shit that pisses you off, because it’s not just that faggots/war protesters/liberals/feminazis/dope smoking animal rights whackos offend YOU, oh no. Your Holy Scripture, whatever it may be, makes it absolutely and irrefutably clear (albeit, perhaps, in archaic, poetic, allusory and ultimately near-entirely subjective terms) that these things and people that offend you so gravely also offend God. And, while, of course, offending you may not be any sort of crime, nonetheless, offending God is reprehensible, intolerable, unacceptable, and Must Be Met Head On For The Sake Of All That Is Good, Decent, Proper, And Right.

There are non-secular causes that are wonderful for justifying, and even criminalizing, the things that offend us deeply, as well. National Security is a wonderful phrase to use to justify locking up people whose behavior and opinions offend us. The War On Terror is tailor made for lending authority to our sense of infuriation at all those goddam commie symp anarchists who keep saying nasty things about the President.

In the end, it comes down to this: if you think you have a right to take violent action against those who offend you, or to legislate against the things that offend you, then you have decided to live in a world where other people have the same right to respond similarly when you offend them… as you surely will, with such an insanely judgemental, provincial, narrowminded, pigheaded, arrogant, and irrationally biased attitude.

Me, I offend people way too much with my big mouth to want to live in a world where it is considered acceptable to respond violently to such things. I prefer to tolerate things I find offensive (as long as they cause me no actual harm), with the understanding that a similar tolerance will be extended to my offensive behavior in return.

However, I have no doubt there are many people in the world who will find that viewpoint very offensive, and who will be certain that I should be arrested, sued, or simply beaten for setting it forth.

Alternities

Nate and Supergirlfriend have recently explored what might be going on with 5 different alternate timeline versions of themselves. It's a cool idea, so let's rock with it.

Here are five probable Alternate Highlanders, although chances are, in their particular segments of spacetime, they never actually called themselves Highlander:

1. Standing on a street corner in Syracuse in a soiled institutional bathrobe and old, frayed bunny slippers singing 'O dem happy feet' tunelessly and endlessly, strumming a stringless ukelele as he regales the shuffling streams of passers-by, all of whom pull up their nearly identical top coats, reflexively making sure their WE LOVE PRESIDENT FOR LIFE RONNIE buttons are prominently displayed to the lamp post cameras. If you peer closely, beneath his greying, overgrown bangs, you can see the faint, dimpled scar from the lobotomy they did on him back in 1983, after one of his college roommates, a noted Young Reagublican, reported him to the NSA as a subversive. In this bleak alternate reality, he is one of the few living individuals who is truly happy.

2. Sitting behind an expensive Apple computer in a cluttered home office somewhere, wearily pecking out the last couple of script pages for ULTIMATE TEAM AMERICA #78, while ignoring the constantly ringing phone and the intermittent sounds of anguished editors recording messages on his answering machine that are all about deadlines and schedules and something to do with the great new artist they've found for the strip, a guy named William Hung who, swear to God, draws like a young Frank Miller crossed with a late era Bill Sinkiewicz, as inked by a drunken Howard Chaykin. This particular version of Highlander likes him some Jack Daniels; it's the only thing that gets him through his days lately. But at least his old buddy Jeff Webb is still alive in this reality; he lives in the house across the street, putting out a new issue of his massively popular indie comic NEW TOMORROW every six months or so, and reveling in a frankly hedonistic lifestyle with his groupies the rest of the time.

3. Rotting in a premature grave, after I broke through the ice and drowned at the age of 8. Every man on that transport died. I wasn't there to save them, because my older brother George wasn't there to save me. No, wait. I'm starting again.

3. Having been sent off to military school at an early age by my exasperated mum, I grow up strong, straight and disciplined and, still heavily influenced by the science fiction I was drawn to in childhood, I enter NASA's training program and become an astronaut. Eagle eyed, I spot the almost fatal flaw that would have led to the Challenger explosion, and as mission commander on the early 2003 Columbia mission, I do a perilous space walk during re-entry to jury rig a rough but workable tile-patch and get my ship down safely with all aboard alive and well. Lauded as an international hero, I bask in the admiration of millions, and perhaps foolishly, allow an old college buddy to talk me into running for President. After I win, I appoint him my Chief of Staff, and spend my entire two terms surfing porn on White House computers, doing interns and Prez groupies, and playing Magic: the Gathering with Vice President Jeff Webb, while my Chief of Staff Kurt Busiek surreptiously turns America into a corporate controlled police state.

4. Hey now, I'm a rock star. I can't sing, can't dance, and don't know how to play an instrument, but in this odd slice of alternity, a few monumentally lucky breaks have negated all of that and landed me repeatedly on the cover of the Rolling Stone. My band, Glowing Plastic Jesus, has won more Grammies and sold more albums than the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Huey Lewis and the News, and Elton John combined, mostly on the strength of my poignant, iconoclastic, and very nearly incoherent lyrics. Mariah Carey is one of my back up singers and my love bitch. I do a lot of coke, and am filled with existential despair, because, as you'd expect, Mariah just won't swallow no matter how much I beg. I hate this life.

5. I'm a very successful televangelist, having learned early to use my gift for gab and potential electronic charisma to exploit the gullibility of the ignorant Christian faithful. My carefully cultivated public persona as a 'reasonable fundamentalist' leads to frequent appearances on The O'Reilly Factor, Hardball, and Face The Nation, and I am in line for a high cabinet post, or perhaps the Vice Presidency, in the first Jeb Administration. I spend a lot of time behind bullet proof glass, surrounded by bodyguards, wondering if any of them have been bought off by Dick Cheney yet, who wants me dead so badly he can constantly taste it in the back of his mouth, like copper, or semen.

What can I say? The real, pathetic truth is, on every alternate reality, even if there are an infinity of them, I'm miserable and lonely, trapped in a tiny cinder block duplex with a lousy job in the hell that is Zephyrhills, FL, friendless and twitching on the edge of just giving up, hocking all my HeroClix, and using the proceeds to buy a cheap handgun so I can go on a homicidal rampage at work the next day, doing my best to take out the half dozen people I hate the most just before hopefully committing suicide by cop. The cops in Zephyrhills are so incompetent that I may well live through it, though, which is the only thought that keeps that last fraying cord of sanity from snapping... yet.

The fact is, only on this timeline, where SuperGirlfriend and the SuperKids have saved me from a hell on Earth worse than death, am I even remotely happy. This is, truly, the best of all possible worlds.

Our house is a very very very fine house

With Tippy in the yard... life used to be so hard...

Okay, two posts back I mentioned our wonderful snowman, Tippy. SuperGirlfriend borrowed a digital camera and took a pic of him, and as it turns out, it's a lovely pic of our very lovely house, as well. So, enjoy.


Here's a close up of Tippy the Snowman himself. Yes, we have the only inebriated snowman in all of River City. One good thaw, though, and we'll have to rename him Melty. Dig him while you can.

Okay, put the snow shovels down. It's just an expression.

Oh, in a note that only Mike Norton will enjoy, Tippy's shoe button eyes? The bottoms of HeroClix dials. The rookie Aurora and Sunfire, I believe, without the figs.

This post is short enough that I didn't truncate it, so ignore the hyperbolic link below.

Score!

I mentioned, back in my Christmas post, just how well the case of Indy clix I bought for Super Drama Teen worked out... I'd hoped she might pick up one Unique Hellboy, since I was pretty sure she'd have been willing to trade it to Super Dependable Teen, who is a HUGE Hellboy fan. Instead, she snared two of them... a pretty good catch, since the Unique Hellboy is about the most expensive piece in the entire Indy set. Prices vary from one shop to another, but generally, if you order one from a place like IconsUSA or Gathering Ground, you can expect to pay something between $15 and $20 for one.


These prices are slightly inflated over the reality that is Ebay. After the game we played Saturday, Super Drama Teen broached the subject of just how much the Unique Hellboy was worth. I went out on Ebay to take a look, and advised her from what I could see, while it sold for the prices I've quoted above at various shops, on Ebay it looked like she could rely on getting at least $10 for it. I advised her, however, that if she could put together a complete Hellboy REV, to sell as a package along with the Unique, she might well get $20 to $30.

After going back and forth on that for a while, talking about the relative pros and cons of going the Ebay route, she finally just decided to sell me the fig for $10 cash in hand. So everybody's happy... she gets some money without hassing around with auctions and Ebay fees and packages and mailing stuff and the uncertainty of an open bidding process, and I get a Unique Hellboy. Yay!

The graphic doesn't really do the fig justice, by the way; it's actually MUCH nicer looking when you're looking at the real thing.

Snowy Saturday

Every once in a while, you get a keeper.

HeroClix, snowball fights and snowman building, hot chocolate, grocery shopping, and laundry... all with my favorite people in the world, SuperGirlfriend and the SuperKids.

Linear time is almost certainly an odd perceptual illusion created by the way our rather slow protein brains process sensory input. At least a few quantum physicists believe that there is no duration, no past, no future -- there is only an eternal now, in which everything that has ever happened, and that ever will happen, is actually happening, continuously, all around us, all the time.

It's possible that's true, and that individual consciousness, along with yesterday, today, and tomorrow, are simply chimeras created by the peculiar manner in which we perceive and process the information all around us. Perhaps we are all each other, all the time, and the rest of the universe, too, and our invidividual selves are merely fractal points amidst the vast infinitely faceted crystal that is reality.

Maybe we really know everything, all the time... we just choose not to remember it, to make our lives bearable. Maybe the illusion of other entities we create by subdividing our own consciousness and by limiting our own perceptual array is all that makes eternal existence as the only consciousness in a self aware reality bearable.

And maybe, if all that's true, we know we have to surround ourselves with dull days, frustrations, displeasures, and annoyances -- because without such things, the very rare good days that we, as God, dole out to ourselves would be meaningless.

Whatever the case, yesterday was a keeper.

An early afternoon HeroClix battle with the older two SuperKids was a joy. I didn't win, but after Super Dependable Teen's small JLA squad (experienced Icons Superman, veteran Hypertime Flash, veteran Icons Wonder Woman, and veteran Hypertime Plastic Man) and my original Avengers line up (rookie IC Hulk, vet CT Thor, Unique IC Wasp, AW Anthony Stark base with the Unique Golden Iron Man fig on it, and my Atom subbing in as Ant-Man) managed to polish off Super Drama Teen's gang of Indy goobers (Unique Hellboy, Unique Judge Death, Vet Shi, vet Johnny Alpha, Unique Hecate), we went back to slapping each other around, as was only fitting when the JLA meets the Avengers anywhere in the multiverse. We'd each taken some losses along the way (Iron Man took two early shots from Superman's heat vision that had sent him reeling into retreat; he was finally taken out when Hecate mind controlled Ant-Man and Ant-Man whacked his old avenging buddy from behind, most likely, I'm thinking, by sending some army ants in through Iron Man's helmet slits to take him out. Then Wonder Woman, tired of the Wasp buzzing around distributing Incapacitation tokens along with a few clicks of damage via her Stunning Blow feat, came charging across the new AW map Mike Norton had just gifted me with and swatted the dizzy young heiress out of the air -- 5 clicks of damage, plus one for Charge, say hello to the Excedrin bottle Janet van Dyne.)

I would probably have won the game, having carefully used the Thunderbolts feat to give my original Avengers the JSA team ability, after which I was just as meticulous in making sure that the entire team was always in adjacency to each other, so they could all share Ant-Man's 20 defense. (Ant-Man would have been using his ant armies to swarm the Avengers' opponents, keeping them off balance and allowing his allies to have a very high relative defense, of course.) What undid me was the Disbanded Battlefield Condition coming out of our random BC deck and sticking around for half the game. Even so, the bout eventually came down to a somewhat chewed up Ant-Man going up against a rather beat down Flash. As you'd expect, Hank Pym, for all his smarts, wasn't a match for super-speed.

But still, it was a lovely and enjoyable game. Superman unwisely gave the Hulk one good solid five click shot early in the game, putting ol' Green-genes onto his best click (12 AV, four damage with Battle Fury, 17 defense with Invulnerability) and I nurtured that click carefully and used the fig to distribute some serious pain before he finally went down. (To this end -- getting a figure to, and keeping it on, one particular click on its dial, I cannot recommend a shared 20 Defense Value enough.) Iron Man was on his last click for much of the game and the 20 defense he had for many rounds also kept him in it; I used his end dial Outwit to good effect, too, until he finally got knocked out.

After that, we went outside to enjoy the snow. Snowballs flew like insults in the blogosphere, and everyone got thoroughly pelted. Then we built a snowman, who is currently leaning drunkenly so far to the left or right (depending on where you are standing to look at him) that it amazes me he hasn't toppled over yet. Then it was back to the snowball battles. I discovered by direct experimentation that shouting "I am your king! I COMMAND you to cease your attacks and surrender!" in a goofy Monty Python accent works wonderfully as a snowball attractant.

Then we repaired back into the SuperFamily Secret Headquarters for some of SuperGirlfriend's wonderful hot chocolate. Ahhhhhh... snowball fights and snowman building with SuperGirlfriend and the SuperKids, followed by hot chocolate in the kitchen out of the snowman mugs I bought us all for Christmas... life don' ged much betta dan dis.

There was some domestic stuff in there too... grocery shopping with SuperGirlfriend and SuperAdorable Kid in the morning, while the older two SuperKids slept in, and then laundry with SuperGirlfriend late last evening, where a complete jackass with no social skills at all did his best to ruin our evening by sulking for hours about us taking up nine washers (hey, we have three kids, deal with it, berk). But my domestic bliss cannot be dispelled merely by some overgrown baby having a hissy fit because he had to use front loaders to do his own laundry.

A few more chores on the list for today, and then, tomorrow, I start on ten hour days at work... which won't be fun while I'm working them, but the extra day off to spend with SG and the kids will be vastly appreciated all the way around.

Oh, a tip of the ancient katana (as well as my heartfelt thanks) go out to Mike Norton, for the package of clix and the map he sent along to me last week, as well as recent plugs on his blog in regard to this one. I also want to thank everyone who has responded to my recent invitation. Hopefully, that will step up the interaction level on the blog now that comment moderation won't be a factor for many of you.

SuperGirlfriend and SuperAdorable Kid are in the kitchen making monkey bread, and Super Drama Teen is in the back bedroom playing KNIGHTS OF THE OLD REPUBLIC on my X-box. Time to go see what kind of trouble I can get in. (Okay, actually, I'm just going to make the bed and grab a shower, but everyone likes to sound like a bad ass when they can...)

Sweet sweet liquor eases the pain

The entry below was originally written back on September 6, 2002. Some of the references will be dated. Still, I think it's one of the best things I've ever written, and I'm happy to reproduce it now.

William Burton, the sanest blogger I've yet encountered, has this to say for himself:

Doc Nebula made the point in an email that alcohol is unique in its ability to turn the mind off and let us stop thinking for a while and that this makes it uniquely attractive to people who want to drown their sorrows. He goes on to add:

Personally, I don't think there's anything out there, no matter what we legalize, that will replace booze, because I don't think there's anything out there that represses the higher reasoning center as well as booze does. Booze also lowers inhibitions, which people really like a lot. Of course, inhibitions are the very warp and woof of civilized behavior, but people get really sick of being civilized. Which is probably why as soon as a particular culture starts accruing a lot of laws and customs and taboos, they also learn to distill hard liquor.

He could very well be right. Maybe alcohol does have some unique property that makes it more attractive as an intoxicant than anything else around. If this is true, then we can't assume that legalization would cause drug addictions in the same numbers as we have alcoholics (and it would be pretty safe to assume that it wouldn't).

Now, you can already figure that I deeply admire anyone who quotes me in public and then says agreeable things afterward. However, I deeply admired William Burton and his brilliant fucking blog from the moment I first encountered it, and you should too. And since attention from a great blog requires at least more than the usual bare minimum slack-off effort I put into these things, I actually did some research. To wit:

http://www.howstuffworks.com/alcohol4.htm actually tells us the following:

Cerebral Cortex

The cerebral cortex is the highest portion of the brain. The cortex processes information from your senses, does your "thought" processing and consciousness (in combination with a structure called the basal ganglia), initiates most voluntary muscle movements and influences lower-order brain centers. In the cortex, alcohol does the following:

Depresses the behavioral inhibitory centers - The person becomes more talkative, more self-confident and less socially inhibited.

Slows down the processing of information from the senses - The person has trouble seeing, hearing, smelling, touching and tasting; also, the threshold for pain is raised.

Inhibits thought processes - The person does not use good judgement or think clearly.

Alcohol also affects the cerebellum, the limbic system, the hypothalamus, and the pituitary gland, but all that basically goes to physical coordination and sexual function. What I’m interested in here is what alcohol does to a person’s mental peformance, as opposed to what the various other common and popular recreational drugs do. Does what I offhandedly threw at William, and he so cordially reproduced, hold water? Let’s find out:

http://www.nida.nih.gov/MOM/TG/momtg-marijuana.html tells us:

THC, the main active ingredient in marijuana, binds to and activates specific receptors, known as cannabinoid receptors.

By activating these receptors, THC interferes with the normal functioning of the cerebellum, the part of the brain most responsible for balance, posture, and coordination of movement.

The hippocampus, which is involved with memory formation, also contains many cannabinoid receptors.

Marijuana also affects receptors in brain areas and structures responsible for sensory perception. Marijuana interferes with the receiving of sensory messages (for example, touch, sight, hearing, taste, and smell) in the cerebral cortex. … Marijuana activates cannabinoid receptors in these various areas of the cerebrum and results in the brain misinterpreting the nerve impulses from the different sense organs.


Interesting. http://www.nida.nih.gov/MOM/TG/momtg-opiates.html tells us:

Two important effects produced by opiates, such as morphine, are pleasure (or reward) and pain relief. The brain itself also produces substances known as endorphins that activate the opiate receptors. Research indicates that endorphins are involved in many things, including respiration, nausea, vomiting, pain modulation, and hormonal regulation.

Within the reward system, the morphine activates opiate receptors in the VTA, nucleus accumbens, and cerebral cortex (refer to the Introduction for information on the reward system). Research suggests that stimulation of opiate receptors by morphine results in feelings of reward and activates the pleasure circuit by causing greater amounts of dopamine to be released within the nucleus accumbens. This causes an intense euphoria, or rush, that lasts only briefly and is followed by a few hours of a relaxed, contented state. This excessive release of dopamine and stimulation of the reward system can lead to addiction.

Opiates also act directly on the respiratory center in the brainstem, where they cause a slowdown in activity. This results in a decrease in breathing rate. Excessive amounts of an opiate, like heroin, can cause the respiratory centers to shut down breathing altogether. When someone overdoses on heroin, it is the action of heroin in the brainstem respiratory centers that can cause the person to stop breathing and die.

Following up on this, we come to http://www.nida.nih.gov/MOM/TG/momtg-hallucinogens.html , which tells us:

Because serotonin has a role in many of the brain's functions, activation of its receptors by LSD produces widespread effects, including rapid emotional swings, and altered perceptions, and if taken in a large enough dose, delusions and visual hallucinations.

PCP, which is not a true hallucinogen, can affect many neurotransmitter systems. It interferes with the functioning of the neurotransmitter glutamate, which is found in neurons throughout the brain. Like many other drugs, it also causes dopamine to be released from neurons into the synapse.

And then, there’s http://www.nida.nih.gov/MOM/TG/momtg-stimulants.html from which we learn:

Cocaine has also been found to specifically affect the prefrontal cortex and amygdala, which are involved in aspects of memory and learning. The amygdala has been linked to emotional aspects of memory [about methamphetemines] It produces its effects by causing dopamine and norepinephrine to be released into the synapse in several areas of the brain, including the nucleus accumbens, prefrontal cortex, and the striatum, a brain area involved in movement.

And last but not least, let’s not leave out the only drug in the world that may be nearly as prevalently abused (at least, in the last five or six centuries), as alcohol, by turning to http://www.nida.nih.gov/MOM/TG/momtg-nicotine.html for the following fun facts:

Regular nicotine use causes changes in both the number of cholinergic receptors and the sensitivity of these receptors to nicotine and acetylcholine. … Recently, research has shown that nicotine also stimulates the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain's pleasure circuit... This release of dopamine is similar to that seen for other drugs of abuse, such as heroin and cocaine, and is thought to underlie the pleasurable sensations experienced by many smokers.

Okay. Now what does all that mean? (And bear in mind, I’m a temporary clerical worker, a wannabe writer, and a former English major who dropped out, so my analysis/summation may be flawed):

Well, it seems to mean that all that stuff I tossed off to William based on just vague general bullshit impressions I had floating around in my brain, was actually correct. To wit:

Every drug that is readily abused affects the brain in some way, and since the cerebral cortex is extremely important to our day to day functioning as sentient human beings, and the brain is very complex, many of them seem to impact the functioning of the cerebral cortex in some way. However, from what I can see, above, only alcohol goes immediately to work on the cerebral cortext, and only alcohol shuts it down in a nearly comprehensive fashion. Marijuana specifically affects sensory interpreters in the cerebral cortext, causing perceptual data to become confused ("oh, man, I can hear your shirt, turn it down"), and the opiates cause endorphins and dopamine (pleasure chemicals) to be generated throughout the brain, including in the cerebral cortext. Yet alcohol is the only drug listed here that goes right to work with a big ol' hammer on our center of higher reasoning and judgement.

Now let’s think about that for a second. I’m well aware that I have a tendency to make sweeping statements often only backed up by my own vague notions gathered from a lifetime spent reading trash and watching movies/TV. I have no degrees, have written no learned papers (nor have I read very frickin’ many). Nonetheless, it seems to me to be inarguable that alcohol, not only through its nearly universal presence among every currently extant human culture, but through very nearly every historically recorded human culture as well, has to be the most universally manufactured and (ab)used intoxicant chemical known to man.

I mean, yes, nicotine, hell, right up through 1980, nicotine was being inhaled by very nearly every American man, woman, and child in the history of the nation, and its use world wide is extraordinary and extensive. But since the health impacts of nicotine have been discovered, nicotine use has declined drastically (at least, in U.S. markets). Not so for alcohol. Alcohol is now just as much a cultural fixture as it has ever been. More studies have been done and public awareness as to alcohol addiction, and so called alcohol abuse, have been raised to unprecedented heights, but still, the overwhelming majority of adults, and in industrialized areas outside the U.S., children, imbibe some alcohol, usually daily. And I put a ‘so called’ in front of the phrase 'alcohol abuse' not because I don’t believe in the idea that alcohol can be abused, but because I’m not at all convinced that in point of fact, there is a proper use for alcohol (other than as a cleaner, I mean). It’s a toxin, after all. I'm not at all sure we're supposed to be ingesting it for any healthy, rational purpose.

But let’s look at the other stuff. Heroin is popular, certainly, but I think I’m safe in saying that less than a majority of the world’s population takes heroin, and less than a majority would, even if it were legal and freely available on every streetcorner. The same is true for pretty much every other recreational drug on the list. Make all that stuff legal and as freely available as chocolate and still, I think less than half the population would ever take any of it.

On the other hand, even in places where alcohol is illegal, a VAST majority of the population ingests it, generally on a daily basis.

Colin Wilson, in his amazing tome A Criminal History of Mankind provides horrific descriptions, taken from actual contemporary accounts, of what happened when the first distilled liquor, gin, was introduced to Europe and eventually made its way to England, back in the 17th Century.

By 1688, the English working classes were alcohol starved. The consumption of gin rose steadily, from half a million gallons around 1690 to three and a half million by 1727 and -- by the middle of the century -- to nineteen million gallons.

The result was a crime wave... crimes to obtain money for gin became as common as crimes to obtain money for drugs in our own society. Quite suddenly, England was virtually in a state of war with criminals...

Henry Fielding reckoned that a hundred thousand people in London alone lived mainly on gin. Another observer stood outside a gin palace for three hours one evening and counted 1,411 people going in and out. These 'palaces' usually consisted of a shed, full of barrels of gin; the customers merely came to buy a pennysworth of gin, which explains the enormous number. Whole families, including father, mother, and children then sat on the pavement and drank themselves unconscious; with gin at a penny a quart, it was not difficult.

Fielding remarked that 'gin disqualifies them from any honest means to acquire it, at the same time that it removes sense of fear and shame and emboldens them to commit every wicked and dangerous enterprise'...
In short, gin very nearly destroyed the entire economy and almost completely wrecked the culture of Europe and England. Every member of the lower, working classes – men, women, children – exposed to the effects of gin did nothing but drink until they passed out. Upon regaining consciousness, they’d stagger out, do whatever they had to in order to secure enough money to buy more gin, then go back to one of the gin-stalls that flourished in nearly every doorway where a distillery or a distribution stand could be set up, buy more gin, and again, drink themselves into a stupor.

The accounts from the times are hellish. Adults sold themselves, or stole, or murdered, to get money. Parents sold their children, or rented them out as prostitutes; children themselves, once exposed to the distilled liquor, willingly sold themselves to raise gin money. It was, in fact, the gin induced crime frenzy that led to the establishment of the world's first organized police force, the Bow Street Runners (predecessors to England's 'bobbies'), organized in 1753 by the above quoted novelist and former magistrate Henry Fielding.

Opium, on the other hand, was once much more commonly abused than it is now, but it never attained the universality of gin, when gin was first introduced to the European populations. There were once opium dens in every slum in Europe and America, but only a minority of the poor and the disadvantaged tried opium, or became addicted to it. Each distillation/concentration of opium, and each new discovery as to yet another form of recreational mind altering substance, has certainly seen some popularity and success among the minority of the human population that craves to have its reality substantially altered, if only temporarily… but only alcohol has swept the world, and become the daily drug of choice for the vast majority.

I’m convinced that alcohol is, for some reason, THE drug of choice for humanity, and has been ever since mankind first started forming social units larger than an immediate family.

Many drugs, at least, in their raw, natural state, are far easier to manufacture than alcohol (some natural hallucinogens can simply be ingested as found in nature and provide quite a satisfactory ‘high’). And mankind has always sought, for whatever reason, to flee everyday consciousness. Yet despite the fact that various natural substances can provide more powerful effects than alcohol, for far less effort, mankind has always fermented pretty much anything that would ferment, into alcohol.

Looking, for the moment, at mind altering chemicals in general, they seem to me to break down into three broad categories:

The ones that make you happy, like opiates, which intensely stimulate the pleasure centers and chemicals manufactured by the brain, like dopamine and endorphins;

The ones that make you crazy, like marijuana (mildly), LSD, and PCP, by deranging your sensory perceptions and creating hallucinations;

And the one that makes you stupid: alcohol.

The rest of them affect various different areas of the brain chemistry, as well as the body, and in very specific ways, some of them impact the cerebral cortext. But alcohol is the only one that simply shuts down the cerebral cortext… the higher the dosage of alcohol, the quicker and more comprehensively you stop thinking, you lose your capacity for making rational judgements, for analysis, for logic.

The inevitable conclusion seems to be that less than a majority of humans desire artificial happiness enough to use drugs to get there (although I should caution that a whole lot of modern people ingest chocolate and caffein on a daily basis, so apparently we all, at least to some minor extent, have a desire to self medicate), and similarly, less than a majority are so bored with the world they perceive on a daily basis that they seek to derange their senses through chemicals. But a vast, vast majority wants to dull their perceptions of the world, and numb their higher reasoning faculties, and lower their own inhibitions. In short, the vast majority of sentient beings on this planet, for whatever reason, are not comfortable with their sentience. They don’t like to think. They need, or at least, greatly desire, to turn off their human brains on a daily basis, for at least a limited period of time.

Most other drugs either change the way the brain functions, or, in fact, amplify certain of its functions unnecessarily. Alcohol seems to be the only drug that shuts the higher reasoning centers of the brain down… and alcohol is the drug that nearly every human being who has ever walked the earth has used, pretty much as often as they can get away with it, for as far back as our history runs.

Even in Islamic countries, where violations of most other holy laws can lead to swift and barbarically cruel punishments, surreptitious alcohol consumption is mostly winked at. (This last observation may be false; it’s based entirely on perceptions I’ve gotten from various media sources, mostly fictional. If it’s not true – if getting caught drinking a beer in Saudi Arabia will get an Islamic man dragged out in the street and stoned to death, and if, in fact, the majority of the population of Islam-ruled countries live their day to day lives entirely or largely without any alcohol at all – then I apologize, and in fact, will readily admit that my thesis must somehow be wrong. Or, worse, since I consider Arabic/Islamic culture to be mostly pretty nuts, I might even have to admit that alcohol is a good thing and has some beneficial social effect. But until someone presents me with actual facts and figures from a reputable source, I’m going to assume that there is as thriving a black market for booze in Islamic nations as there was in America under Prohibition.)

The upshot seems to be: most people simply don’t like to think, and if it were possible for them to do so and still function within society, they’d just stop doing it.

Which, come to think of it, may explain how demagogues like Rush Limbaugh manage to become so popular.

Spoiler City

If you haven't read Infinite Crisis #4 or any of the more recent issues of Green Lantern -- eyes slideways, spud. I'll be chattin' them up, assuming I have sufficient time before I have to bolt for the bus stop.



I'm losing some faith in Geoff Johns. But maybe it's just that he's pouring it all into INFINITE CRISIS and doesn't have much left in the tank for GREEN LANTERN. That could be. All I know is, the last two issues of GREEN LANTERN have struck me as very lackluster, while INFINITE CRISIS continues to rock hard.

On GREEN LANTERN -- it may just be that GL is a concept where the traditional Golden/Silver Age secret identity makes little sense. I postulated in this Martian Vision entry that Green Lanterns might well wear masks as a symbol, to show the universe they protected that when they were in uniform, they were not individuals any more, but they represented something higher and greater... in other words, when you see the mask and the power ring, it's never personal, it's always business. And that makes sense to me. But why should a Green Lantern need a secret identity? They aren't vigilantes; they are law officers, appointed to their post by the oldest legitimate authority in the cosmos.

I've always thought Hal could have just been straight up with the world, including all his weird friends (the Innuit guy with the pastry-derived name, and that bitch on wheels he had the rotten judgement to be in love with, among others) about his other job. Yeah, he's got enemies, and yeah, sure, some of them might be dumb enough to go after one of his loved ones... once... but I doubt they'd have done it again, once they saw Power Ring Retribution in action. And overall, Green Lantern isn't just a superhero name or a secret ID... it's title, and it's a job. Hal could have been open about it. And who knows, that openness might have set him apart enough from the cookie cutter mold of DC's Silver Age pantheon so his book wouldn't have been in constant danger of cancellation.

I babble all this because it strikes me that what's wrong with Johns' current work on GL is all coming through the secret identity. About the only element I'm uncomfortable with in the current title is Hal's day job -- he's rejoined the Air Force, apparently for no other reason than to get to fly jets. And he doesn't even get to do that much; he shows up for a posted flight time but bam!, his new boss, an Air Force general who knows his secret identity, calls him up and sends GL on a mission instead.

The only real reason Hal seems to even have a secret ID is that (a) it gives the writer another plot device to work around and (b) it gives Hal a shot at the character who is obviously intended to be his new romantic interest, a female top gun military pilot only known, to date, as Cowgirl. Yay. They take Carol Ferris off the table, which makes me cheer, and who do they put out there instead? Cowgirl. Yippee kai yay, motherfucker.

Most of the rest of the recent issues seems inventive enough. Johns is doing cool stuff with Hector Hammond and the Shark, tying these two apparently accidentally evolved GL villains together with some weird aliens who like doing this sort of thing to primitive beings. Yeah... I think it's just the secret ID stuff that's bugging me.

Now, as to INFINITE CRISIS #4:

Heh. What gets mopey useless dickhead Conner mad enough to fight? Earth-Prime Superboy kicked his dog! Yeah, that would piss me off, too.

Whoa! Every punk ass teen or former teen superhero in the world shows up to save Conner from getting the asswhipping he so richly deserves at the soon to be gore streaked hand of the clearly psychotic Earth-Prime Superboy. And then one of them (I have no idea what her name is, but Lord, I wish it had been Starfire) leaps into the fray, snarling insults, and -- CHRIST!!! HER BLOCK IS KNOCKED OFF! (Unlike Rock Em Sock Em Robots, though, I don't believe you can press it right back on again.) Man, we never saw this stuff in the Silver Age. Oh, God, why couldn't it have been Starfire?

Elsewhere in the book, Chemo wipes out Bludhaven Falls! I don't care. But jesus, if Modern Age means cold blooded murder (and I'm guessing it does) Johns is putting the pedal to the metal here.

"When a Luthor stands next to a Superman -- they will ALWAYS be at odds." Oh my yes.

You know, I've been waiting for a pre-Crisis Superboy to come back, tell Conner he's not Superboy, and kick his ass for him for what, fifteen, twenty years now? I suspect Johns knows a lot of us have been waiting for that... so this is what he gives us. Modern Age fans have nothing to bitch about; the whole purpose of this little riff is to force everyone in the audience to accept that Conner really IS Superboy. Nobody but Johns could have made me buy that... but he's doing it.

Booster is still trying to track down the new Blue Beetle. Those of us who read Kung Fu Monkey are already way ahead of the curve here, though.

A new Spectre. Nobody I've ever heard of. But he's, you know, ethnic, just like the new Blue Beetle. So that's... well... I guess it's cool. Actually, I don't care. I'm just glad it's not Hal any more.

Hmmm. You know, EP-Superboy actually killed quite a few people, towards the end of that brawl. And I don't know who ANY of them are.

They couldn't have killed ONE lousy New Teen Titan I recognized? Starfire? Cyborg? Raven? SOMEbody?

And... finally... WHAT an ending. Johns has managed to end EVERY issue of this miniseries so far in a way that makes you crazy to get the next issue. It's masterful.

Geez, I wish I could just pick this up as a TPB...

Yet another blast from the past

More stuff from old blog pages. But cool stuff, nonetheless. Holla!

A DRAMATIZATION FOR OUR VIEWING AUDIENCE AT HOME

George Bush, Jr., boy genius, stood proudly next to his latest amazing invention. He could barely contain himself, he was so excited!

“So, what’s all this then, Junior?” George Sr., one time All-American international espionage hero asked, beaming proudly at his brilliant son.

George Bush, Jr., whisked aside the drape covering his latest discovery with a showmanlike flourish! “Look, Dad!” the boy crowed proudly. “It’s my newest Model America!”

George Sr. bent over the table, staring in frank admiration at the intricate clockwork mechanism as it quietly purred away, gears and cogs and belts all churning smoothly together, a quietly prosperous hum suffusing his genius son’s lab-chamber. “Well, golly, son,” George Sr. exclaimed, “it’s a humdinger! What does it do?”

“It does everything, Pop!” George Jr. declared. “Look! Look at the domestic economic indices! Virtually no inflation! Stable prices! Jobs for every hard working man at high enough wages to allow every decent wife and mom to stay home and raise a family in the comfort and safety that God fearing working class Americans deserve! And low taxes too, because with those good, well paid jobs for everyone, there’s no need for wasteful social services like Welfare or Unemployment! And we won’t need any sort of health care plan, either…”

George Sr.’s eyes narrowed. “Damned socialized medicine!” he growled, his voice an authoritative bark.

“Yes sir, darned socialized medicine, we won’t need it!” George Jr. exulted. “Look at the GNP!” He waved to a bank of pistons pumping away smoothly and powerfully. “Everyone will have more than enough wages coming in to afford their own health care coverage!”

George Sr. tapped his pipe against his teeth thoughtfully. “But son,” he said, “you haven’t re-enabled that old Labor Union impulse engine, have you? Because while it does drive wages up, believe me, an organized work force is more trouble than it’s worth! And it cuts into corporate profits and management incentive bonuses – and without those, you don’t have an American Dream!”


“I knew you’d think that, Pop,” George Jr. allowed, “but no sir, if you check the circular file –“ Here the boy inventor kicked a metal wastecan beneath his workbench – “you’ll find that Labor Union impulse engine right where obsolete socialist ideas like that belong! No, there’s so much capital flowing through my Model America, we have high wage jobs for labor with no need for unionization, and plenty of money left over for management incentives! Plenty of profit! Why, there’s even more than enough to shift the entire tax burden to the shoulders of the working class where it belongs –“

“The heroic working class!” George Sr. said, eyes gleaming.

“Absolutely, Dad!” George Jr. agreed fervently. “And see?” He gestured to one entire section of obviously well lubricated, free spinning gearing. “That lets us put back in all the special loopholes in the tax code, to provide incentives for the wealthy tycoons and speculators that are so essential to the financial inspiration that keeps the stock market afloat!”

“Holy shit, son!” George Sr declared. “I mean, Great Scott! This is astonishing! But what in the world –“


“But that’s not all, Dad!” George Jr. said, waving his arms excitedly. “By golly, that’s not the half of it! Take a look at the foreign policy mechanisms!”

George Sr. narrowed his crafty eyes and fixed his gaze – the gaze of a seasoned Cold Warrior – on the section of gears and driving shafts his brilliant son was pointing out now. Then he blinked, his mouth falling open in astonishment!

“Great Leaping Laertes, son! That’s… that’s impossible!” The father’s eyes opened wide as he took it in. “Those compliance levels on the part of every other industrialized nation on the face of the Earth – how could that ever happen? Of course we know that America is always right, but you’d never get all those foreigners to agree!” George Sr. scowled suspiciously. “You’re not planning on using a military engine for this, are you? America has the finest military drivers in history but in a modern environment it’s not enough –“

“We only need the military at the start, dad,” George Jr. opined modestly, “just to give the whole thing its initial push start! And it’s a very minor investment – nothing a few companies of Special Forces can’t handle! In and out, easy as pie!”

“Well, by jingo, son, I have to say, it’s a good looking device!” George Sr said, whistling in admiration. “But I can’t imagine what your power source is. Some sort of strange X material? What could possibly run something as huge as this so smoothly? And for how long?”

“That’s just it, Dad,” George Jr said, growing serious. “We do need a big supply of the special power source this model requires. But as it turns out, one of your old enemies happens to be sitting on a huge stockpile of it! Enough to last forever! Or at least through my second and third and fourth terms, and then Li’l Jeb’s four terms, and by then the twins will be old enough --!”

George Jr took a deep breath and wiped his brow, visibly taking a grip on himself. “But never mind that right now, Dad, there’s enough there to last forever! And it’s my intention to take it away from that evil prick who is currently sitting on it, and put it to the service of freedom and democracy!”

George Sr. grew serious as well, his hawklike gaze hooded, his features brooding. “Good heavens, son, you can’t mean –“

George Jr. nodded grimly. “I sure do, Dad! It’s time America paid a call on the Butcher of Baghdad! The resources we need to maintain truth, justice and the American way – and to spread those values across the globe – are all right there! He’s standing in the way of freedom! He’s jeopardizing our entire way of life! And he can’t be allowed to continue!”

-- from George Bush Jr. and his Petroleum Powered Panacea, Boy’s Adventure Books, 2002

A blast from the past

No time to blog, but here's something I found while idly wandering through a past blog page. It was on one of my 'secret blog pages', so only about three people have read it prior to this, I believe.

October 30 2002

Nobody likes poor people.

The largest part of my current job -- a temp assignment that has been going on for two years now -- is typing City Council minutes. That means I sit at a computer and listen to the tapes of City Council meetings, and then boil all that stuff down to a few paragraphs of standard boilerplate like 'There was a brief discussion amongst Council regarding the best way to quietly exterminate Tampa's homeless population and sell their bodies to medical science, after which the following action was taken:

Motion: (Kervorkian-Himmler) That the Legal Department be directed to prepare a Special Ordinance implementing a Special Policy towards Tampa's homeless population. Motion carried.'

Yeah, I'm being very heavily ironic. Our City Council prefers to simply ignore the homeless (even when they're insisting on coming to Council and directly addressing Council asking for help), and they'd never go on the record with a motion like that.

Yet other stuff does go on the record. For example:

Last week our Mayor got up in front of Council and extolled the virtues, once more, of his major redevelopment plan for downtown. One of the big things Mayor Greco, along with our City Council, has been trying to do for most of a decade is get people to live downtown. They regard a stable residential base in the downtown area as the key driver to an economic resurgence there... if there are people living there, then businesses will move into downtown to service that population, which makes the rents go up, which raises the tax base, and, you know, All Will Be Well.

But, as I said at the top, nobody likes poor people, and one can never see that more clearly than when Dick Greco and Tampa's City Council are talking... nay, True Believer, practically salivating... into microphones on the record about their plans for redeveloping downtown with new residential projects.

One of Dick Greco's favorite phrases when he talks about this stuff is 'market price'. Another is 'market driven'. In modern day American politicalese this basically translates as 'this will not be low income housing, folks'.

'Market price', in Tampa's burgeoning yuppie real estate market, means a several thousand s.f. housing unit priced in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. It does not mean apartments, regardless of how gated or exclusive or lease restricted those apartments might be, because ultimately, renters do not pay the same sort of property taxes as homeowners, and anyway, no matter how hard you try, you can never be sure you're going to keep the shiftless element entirely out of transitory housing. No, this means condos, whose prices will start around $110,000, and scale upward from there to the half million dollar range.

In other words, Tampa doesn't want any poor people living downtown.

In point of fact, Tampa doesn't want any poor people living within its city limits, period. Given its druthers, Tampa (or its ruling elite, elected and non-elected, anyway) would really prefer that everyone living in Tampa own real estate, rather than rent it, drive Jaguars and BMWs rather than riding the bus, and eat all their meals in expensive restaurants, rather than fast food places or, god forbid, actually staying home to cook.

Tampa understands that it needs the poor to wash the dishes and bus the tables in its fancy restaurants, to wax and detail its Jaguars and BMWs, and to man the counters at its countless filling stations, and will grudgingly admit that there are a great many other jobs out there in the service area that Tampa's preferred residential base would never want to do that the poor are just made for, but if Tampa had its way, all the poor would live over in Brandon or Riverside and they'd all carpool to work in rented Volkswagon vans... or they'd ride on a bus system fully subsidized by the fare box (so the affluent class wouldn't have to be vexed by having their taxes diverted into something they themselves wouldn't be caught dead using), and if that meant that the average minimum wage worker in Tampa was paying $11 a day to get to and from work, well, shit, that's just a little less money they can spend on illegal drugs, right?

Admittedly, there's another layer to all this that those who don't live here in the New South will need to have explicated. Down here, you can't simply talk about income brackets... or rather, you can, and you do, but that's not all you're talking about. When Tampa's Mayor and Tampa's City Council smile and nod like bobble-head dolls at a proposal to create 'market price' residential space in downtown, they're not simply subtly saying 'we don't want no PO' FOLKS down here', what they're actually saying is, 'we don't want no BLACK FOLKS down here'.

It's a bit more complex than that, I grant you. These days, 'BLACK FOLKS' also includes most brown folks, regardless of actual ethnicity. And, of course, it's not ENTIRELY racist, because white folks who can't afford to mortgage a $125,000 condo are also clearly excluded (that would be me) while black & brown folks who have, somehow, managed to put together enough scratch to make those kind of monthly payments are certainly welcome.

(That last may not actually be true; oddly, black and brown folks, even when they have good jobs and good credit ratings, seem to have difficulty finding mortgage providers down here in the New South. And they also often have trouble with the Local Civic Association Application Process. Whereas I, if I could only come across a suitcase stuffed with illicit drug money, could buy any house anywhere in Tampa with no questions asked, and the local Civic Associations would bake me a cake, too.)

Everybody hates the poor, but no one wants to do anything about poverty. Better jobs at better wages? Educational opportunity? Vocational training? Accessible, livable, affordable housing near the better jobs? Decent public transportation for those who can't afford to keep cars on the road? Fuck that noise, that shit costs the working taxpayer money! Buy a fuckin' Lotto ticket like everyone else, you loser, and in the meantime, cook me my damned McNuggets and shut the hell up.

Of course it's much more complex than this. Our current model of government on every level is one that seeks to 'partner' with private industry. In this particular case, the major financial backer of the downtown renovation is Bank of America, and it's nice of them to step up, too. Yet you can't expect a corporate entity like Bank of America to pony up millions of dollars in investment fees if they're not going to make a healthy profit somewhere down the road, and therefore, it goes without saying that any kind of new commercial development space, be it residential, office, industrial or retail, is going to be at 'market price'.

This is the problem that occurs when government becomes a 'partner' with private enterprise. Profit becomes the major driver, and there is no actual profit in helping people. No one in their right mind wants to market housing to the poor. (In fact, down here, no affluent businessman wants to market anything to the poor. People would far rather have 1 affluent client/customer than 100 poor clients/customers, because the affluent fellow is better behaved.)

Government is not supposed to be about making profits, it's supposed to be about making the world a better place for its entire constituency... or, at least, the majority of its constituency. Yet as long as government continues to give tax breaks to its wealthiest constituents, it will continue to be cash strapped; as long as it continues to be cash strapped it will continue to have to 'partner' with private industry to get anything done, and as long as it has to partner with private industry, its programs and products will end up primarily benefitting the affluent who aren't paying much in the way of taxes to start with.

(What the affluent are paying for, in the end, is the condos that the government has brokered the deal to put up in the downtown area in the first place. However, in the meantime, the poor, who aren't going to get to live downtown, are the primary payers of the salaries of the government folks who are putting in 60 hour work weeks brokering these deals, that will revitalize a downtown that most of the taxpayers won't ever get to actually reside in, or in any way benefit from.)

Government needs to stop partnering with the affluent and start taxing the living fuck out of them... and then building people like me some affordable apartments, and funding a decent public transit system, and jacking up the minimum wage, and implementing a workable universal health care system.

Of course, none of this is going to happen any time soon, but it's not my fault. I voted for Ralph.

* * * *

Heh. Yes. A registered Florida voter, and yes, I did vote for Ralph Nader in the 2000 elections. So, yes, it's all MY fault. And you people thought I was powerless...

...AND THE SUPER-HORSE YOU RODE IN ON

In previous articles, we've looked at the strange sexual hijinx surrounding Superman, Batman, and various other superheroic icons of the early 1960s, and we even gave a passing glance to Superman's adorable little teenage cousin from Krypton, Supergirl. Now I think it's time to take a closer look at the Last Daughter of Doomed Krypton, and a couple of her more deeply disturbed relationships:


Superman & Supergirl -

That's right, you non-comics geeks, you read it here first. Much though you may wish I'm making it up, the June 1962 issue of Action Comics (#289) made it pretty explicitly clear that Superman, the Man of Steel, is warm for the form of his barely nubile jailbait cousin, Supergirl. (And let's be clear, here; Supergirl's origin story in ACTION COMICS #252 tells us quite explicitly that Supergirl's father is the brother of Superman's father, so they are first cousins by blood, related in exactly the same way as you are to that total babe of a first cousin you used to practice making out with and caught total hell for from your and his/her parents when they walked in on you when you were 12... like they never did it when they were kids, the hypocrites).

Of course, there are some states of our fine Union where first cousins can legally marry and even gestate together (and I think Florida may well be one of them) but incest isn't the only issue here. (There's some fine wordplay potential in the phrase 'State of the Union' as combined with the concept of regional laws allowing first cousins to marry, but it's early and I'm too tired to come up with it. Sorry.) All through the 1950s and 1960s, National's super-characters were pretty much frozen in age. Superman, in fact, remained thirty-something from 1939 on up through the late 1960s, when someone declared he was 29 (an age he remained at until around 1985), and Supergirl, while her age was never really specified, was pretty clearly around 13 or 14 years old in her debut, and in the manner of comic books, she remained pretty much that age for most of a decade, until the early 1970s, when abruptly she was old enough to go to college (an age she remained, apparently, until 1985, when she died heroically during the pretty much appalling CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS).

So even if the whole kissin' cousins thing doesn't trouble you overly, let's keep in mind that ACTION #289, in which Superman offhandedly remarks that he "could only marry a lovable superwoman like [Supergirl]", and then sighs heavily as he mentions that 'unfortunately', Kryptonian law forbids first cousins to marry (yeah, buddy, Metropolis law, too), Superman is basically making a pretty direct pass at a 14 year old.


Between this and all the super-powerful jewelry Supes kept giving to Jimmy Olsen all through the Silver Age, you really have to wonder exactly what weird lizards were living in The Head of Steel. You also have to wonder why neither Superman nor Supergirl ever happens to mention what Kryptonian law thinks about a 30 something year old man putting the wood to a vulnerable, dependent 14 year old girl, but maybe Krypton is like Colorado, where you can legally have sex with a 12 year old as long as you marry her first. (This is actually true; and I think it's true in Georgia, too.)

Now Supergirl, perhaps thrown into a panic attack by the notion of her groaty dirty old perv of a cousin hauling her into the coat-room at the next Legion of Superheroes reunion and feeling her up thoroughly, instantly decides, in the manner of meddling female relatives since time immemorial, that Superman desperately needs to get himself a non-Kryptonian date, and lickety damned split, too. Since the Silver Age super-types could pretty casually travel in time, she first lures Superman back to Ancient Greece in the hopes he might get a raging woody for Helen of Troy. When that doesn't work, she apparently reasons that if Clark likes her, he must prefer blondes, so she then gets him to fly into 2972, where their future pals the Legion of Superheroes have grown up into adults, so she can try to fix him up with the now fully mature Saturn Woman. (Supergirl just doesn't seem to understand that Superman likes 'em young, or she'd have sicc'ed him on the 14 year old Saturn Girl back in 2962. But then, I'm sure she loves her cousin and she's doubtless trying hard to give him the benefit of the doubt.)

Supergirl's plan seems to work at first, as Saturn Woman and Superman commence to mug it up quite steamily underneath the mistletoe... only to be embarrassed when Lightning Man (hey, I don't make up these names) comes roaring out of the next room to demand what the hell Superman thinks he's doing, making out with his wife for twenty minutes, druidic herb sprig or no frickin' druidic herb sprig. (A better question might have been exactly what the married Saturn Woman was doing playing tonsil hockey with the Metropolis Marvel for nearly half an hour, but Lightning Man never asked that, I suppose because the defense "Well, if Superman wants to stick his tongue down my throat, what can I do to stop him" is pretty irrefutable... plus, Saturn Woman has telepathic powers, and if I were married to her I'd try pretty hard not to piss her off overmuch, too.)

It's about this time that Superman makes his rueful confession regarding how he could only ever really marry someone like his sweet little cousin (good thing Lana and Lois aren't around listening to THAT or they'd just jump off the Daily Planet building in despair) and so, Kara (Supergirl's real name, non-comics fans) then proceeds to try to get Superman shacked up with her final candidate... a totally hot blonde super powered chick who lives on a distant planet and who is pretty much a dead ringer for, as the story notes, Supergirl herself, with a few more years of maturing secondary sex characteristics under (and over) her belt.

This particular candidate, Luma Lynai, Superwoman for her entire world, does indeed fall madly in love with Superman, and he with her, while Supergirl clenches her hands together next to her cheeks and beams at the success of her wily manipulations, in which she has finally managed to get her older cousin fixed up with a woman who, well, looks pretty much exactly like his younger cousin, albeit with somewhat larger boobs. (And yes, the phrase 'what the HELL were the editors and writers THINKING' does indeed leap firmly to mind at this point.)

However, the romance is eventually thwarted because Luma Lynai can't live under a yellow sun (she SAYS the radiation will slowly kill her, but I think she just doesn't like the color it turns her hair) and naturally, Superman, being a complete control freak who always has to be the master of his own domain, can't even consider moving to HER place.

At the end of our reasonably twisted tale, having utterly failed to successfully foist her randy old cousin off on some other unwitting dupe, Supergirl decides to 'let him handle his own love life from now on', a phrase I myself tend to think is probably a pretty straightforward euphemism for 'fine, then, if he doesn't like any of the girls I found for him, the sonofabitch can just jerk off!'. Which, when you think of it, brings a whole new meaning to the term 'Fortress of Solitude'.

However, it should be noted that if Supergirl occasionally decided to give her poor horny old cuz the occasional mercy hand or blow job while they were both all alone in their insanely isolated arctic retreat, who would know? And if anyone ever found out, who's going to bitch at the most powerful humanoid beings in the entire universe about it, or anything else, for that matter?

Besides, if you take Larry Niven's "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" seriously, you'd have to admit that Supergirl is pretty much the only safe lay Superman is ever going to have access to... at least, until DC buys up Fawcett's characters in the 1970s and Mary Marvel suddenly appears on Earth-National.

Now, disturbing though this particular romantic near-relationship was, it doesn't hold a candle to perhaps the sickest chapter in Super-romance ever published by a mainstream comics company, which is to say, the time that Supergirl dated her own pet horse, Comet.


You think I'm kidding, but honestly, we're not that lucky. Comet the Super Horse, who was one of Supergirl's favorite pets, was in fact a centaur from ancient Greece who had, through magical misadventures, been transformed entirely into a horse, and then, to kind of make up for it, had been given the 'powers of the gods', which were pretty much the same powers as Superman and Supergirl have. Biron (his original name as a centaur) was then trapped on a distant planet for a few thousand years and only freed when Supergirl's Kryptonian escape rocket came tearing by and serendipitously shattered the radiation bands holding him imprisoned. He then followed her rocket back to Earth and decided to team up with her and help her fight crime, in gratitude for her saving him.(See Adventure Comics No. 364, January 1968, "The Revolt of the Super-Pets").

What makes this even weirder and more potentially sicko is that in a later story, Comet gets the ability to regain his human form whenever a comet is visible in the Earthly sky. Naturally, they had to do one Supergirl story where a comet comes buzzing through, Comet (the horse) regains his human form, takes on the name "Bronco" Bill Starr, rodeo rider, accidentally runs into Supergirl, and the two of them fall in love. (See Action Comics No. 301, June 1963, "The Secret Identity of Super-Horse", later reprinted as "Supergirl's Cowboy Hero" in a Supergirl All Romance Stories 80 Page Giant, which was where I first read and goggled at it unbelievingly when I was around 10.)

As you'd expect, Comet in his human form couldn't quite bring himself to tell the Maid of Steel that he was actually... er... her horse... (not to mention a tiny leetle bit older than her, like, a few millenia) and although they did a fair amount of tongue wrestling given the editorial constraints of the era, eventually the comet (the one in the sky, fella) continued on its path and Supergirl's latest paramour went all four legged again. Supergirl never knew what became of the poor goop and I fairly distinctly recall the story ending with a panel showing Supergirl snuggling up to her big white superhorse, petting him while sighing something like "Gosh, I wonder if I'll ever see him again", while Comet thought something like "If only I could tell her... but even if I could, it could never be!"

Or if it could, it would be the sort of thing you can only ever find footage of on underground European websites.

Sorry...

...I've caught a case of troll-itis, so I've had to reactivate 'comment moderation' for a while. I know it's aggravating, but, well, it's been made necessary by some numbnuts shit for brains who simply doesn't have enough self respect to stay out of places where they're neither invited nor wanted.

I suspect it's the man-child formerly known as Lord Corwin of Amber, and/or Gandalf the Grey, and the reason he won't sign even one of those names is that he sent me an email a while back telling me he was done with bugging me, and now he's unwilling to admit in public that he's a lying turd, as well as a gutless, pointless, loveless, desperate for attention one.

Whatever the case, comment moderation will stay up as long as it needs to.

In one of the many many many gnatlike, hissing, venomous little hate notes this skulking comment thread molester has posted over the past afternoon, he threatened to start posting his comments to other blogs as well... which would probably mean, he'll post them to any blogs that belong to my more friendly commenters. So, if any of you should catch troll-itis from this blog, well, I express my regrets.

Everything under the sun

Watching SuperGirlfriend in the early morning of a workday when she's running late is interesting. The stress pushes her onto a click on her dial where she has HyperSonic Speed, and there are after-images everywhere. Since she's a lovely woman, this isn't a bad thing, but it's a little unsettling, because you never know which one of them might be the real her. ;)

As I only own the first two seasons of ANGEL, and the fifth, she's used them all up now and reluctantly switched to BUFFY. She thinks BUFFY is okay, but it's not ANGEL. I'm hoping as she moves more fully into the second season, she'll get more into it, as, of course, the second season is pretty much all about Angel and his back story, as well as being arguably the best season of BUFFY there is. Having said that, ANGEL is the more adult themed of the two series; a great deal of the teen age high school angst in BUFFY can be tiresome to grown ups who aren't particularly nostalgic for that era of our lives.

Although I said I wouldn't do it until at least A DANCE WITH DRAGONS was out, I couldn't stick with it. I broke down and started reading A FEAST FOR CROWS a few weeks ago. On the positive side, although it looks like an absolutely slender volume compared to its preceding installment, A STORM OF SWORDS, it's actually quite lengthy, weighing in at 547 pages of new text, I think.

On the negative side, though, well, it's not finished, goddamit. As I'm seeing all over the Web at this point: "Martin has explained that the book was becoming too long, and could not be published as a single volume, so he decided to tell the full story of half the characters, rather than half the story of all the characters. The remaining plotlines will form the foundation of A Dance with Dragons, which is now half-completed."

There's only one problem with that oft bruited bit of paraphrasing; it's all horseshit. This book doesn't tell the full story of anyone. It ends with every single character in it at a cliff hanger... a cliff hanger we now know will not be resolved until Martin finishes, not the next book in the series, but the one after that. And since it takes Martin five years to finish a fucking book, well, we're looking at somewhere around 2016 before anyone gets a chance to find out whether Brienne actually got hung by outlaws or not, whether Cersei or Margaery (or neither) gets out of the clutches of the Church Militant alive, and what Jaime does about Cersei's summons to be her champion. Not to mention getting any more on Sam, seeing any more of the Mage heading off to join Danaerys, or receiving any kind of explanation for why the hell Pate is apparently still alive when we saw him die at the start of this book.

That may give you an idea of just where it is that this fantasy series has gone so badly wrong -- it simply has too many characters, and all of them are fascinating and three dimensional, and they all have their own very intricate, often interacting storylines. The back of the current volume contains 64 PAGES of appendices, all of which do nothing except list by name and very brief description all the characters we've seen so far in the book. SIXTY FOUR GODDAM PAGES OF BRIEF CHARACTER NOTES. When, in all honesty, the only characters we really care about all that much are the Starks and the Lannisters, and shit, there are too many of them, too, despite Martin's noble attempts to thin the herd a bit over the course of his story.

The worst part of all this is that Martin clearly has no ability to impose discipline on himself or his story, and none of his editors are willing to, either. This series has made Martin a force to be reckoned with in the realm of fantasy publishing; A FEAST OF CROWS has been fifteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. When you can pull down those kind of sales figures, you have the ability to simply tell your editors to shut the fuck up, and most editors, realizing this, will simply sit there more or less happily and wait for the next book, no matter how long it takes, because by now this series has a guaranteed audience numbering in the hundreds of thousands so there's a big payday whenever Martin manages to get a new volume out, regardless of how little he actually manages to advance his plot in 500 to 600 new pages.

So, with no one to tell Martin "Hey, George, you really don't need to open your latest installment by introducing half a dozen brand new characters when you already have about a thousand on the boards", well, he's going to just keep making the shit up as it occurs to him to do so... and in all honesty, I get the very bad feeling that Martin himself has no idea what he's going to do with all these fascinating fictional people and plot threads. Brienne with Jaime's sword Oathkeeper? That has to be going somewhere, right? Theon must still have some part to play in all this, yes? That ancient cracked horn Sam Tarly is carrying around with him as he wanders the earth is going to be an important plot element at some point, surely? What about the enormous trumpet that supposedly summons dragons that the new King of the Ironmen has? We're going to do something with that, right? And the way Jon Snow switched the two kids up on the Wall, that must be important. And... well...

This is the problem. Martin is throwing story elements and possible plot devices out like a deranged boiler worker shoveling coal into the furnace, and I find it impossible to believe that he actually has more than the vaguest idea where all this is going to end up. I wouldn't mind so much him creating all this cookie dough if I thought it was all going to get baked by the time the series finally finishes, but I have little faith it will. Even assuming Martin lives to finish the series (and recent photos of him don't show a guy who exactly looks hale and hearty), I have a bad feeling that a lot of this stuff is simply going to get forgotten, dropped off along the way side, or peremptorily tossed out.

For the immediate future, then, life is bleak once again in Westeros, at least, for those of us who like to live there part time. Martin's site has a post no more than a few days old indicating he's less than half done with the next book (which is, in fact, the other half of this book). That means, regardless of how optimistic he wants to be, that it will be probably three years, at least, before we see A DANCE WITH DRAGONS, and then another five, at least, before THE WINDS OF WINTER, and then another five or six after that before A TIME FOR WOLVES, which hopefully will be the last of it, and, if the title holds true, the best of it as well, as whichever members of the Stark family still survive by that time finally emerge triumphant over their many enemies.

It should be noted, I suppose, that A FEAST FOR CROWS is as good as any of its preceding installments, but dammit, I'd like a time machine so I could skip ahead to 2040 or so and pick up the entire boxed set.

Although that would be depressing, too, because the music will suck worse than it does now, everyone will be wearing filter masks, we'll be living under a constant Code Orange terrorism alert, and George W. Bush will still be the Commander In Chief, 'pending the end of the War and the resumption of temporarily suspended elective procedures'. And I'll probably have to steal a copy of the boxed set, anyway, since I won't have a Federal I.D./Citizen's Work Credit Card, and thus will have no way to make a legal purchase.

Hmmm. Maybe I need to get in that time machine and head back to 1999, instead... with enough newspaper headlines and videotaped evidence to convince Ralph Nader to stay out of the election.

Mortality

I wanted to note, because it's important to me, that SuperGirlfriend and I had a pretty bad weekend a few days back. Why? Because on Friday, during a routine check up, her doctor discovered what she called "a pretty significant heart murmur".


And then, because we aren't rich, said doctor scheduled SuperGirlfriend to see a cardiologist the following Tuesday... giving us three days of fretting and worrying and general stress that would have been completely avoided if we were billionaires, or related to Dick Cheney, or both, because in such a case, we'd have been in an expensive private clinic and the doctor who found the murmur would have immediately wheeled in a million dollar diagnostic array (or just whipped out one of those whistling salt shakers from the first STAR TREK series that Bones always had) and done whatever tests needed to be done right there on the spot, while slaves (or interns, whatever) fed us truffles and caviar and played us soothing harmonies on their gigantic golden harps.

Or something like that.

So, anyway, we worried and fretted and stressed and my head, at least, was filled with all sorts of gloomy visions of cardiologists grimly telling us that immediate open heart surgery would be needed and even then without a transplant the love of my life only had at best a few months to live.

And this all seemed very plausible to me, because, you know, if there is one thing I've learned in this life that is an absolute certainty (besides "if he or she is a Kyle Rayner fan, he or she is also pretty much a complete waste of highly organized living tissue") it's "the good stuff never lasts". I mean, why should I get this lucky? After 43 years of mostly solitude occasionally interspersed with not particularly great relationships, why should I suddenly find True Love and as close to Perfect Happiness as anyone gets down here on Paradise Planet... and having found these things, why should I get to keep them for any length of time?

Julia, over at One Odd Goose, didn't make it to her own first wedding anniversary. She didn't even get a Christmas with the love of her life. And she's a pretty cool person. So why should I expect anything more?

I don't know. Here's what I do know (besides, for some strange reason, that liking Kyle Rayner seems to be a reliable litmus test for utter personal worthlessness):

Every day... every hour... every minute, every second, every immeasurable moment... is a gift.

We went to see the doctor, and after an excruciating half hour or so hooked up to a large beeping piece of equipment run by perhaps the coldest and most unpleasant woman on the globe, and another fifteen excruciating minutes waiting for the doctor to show up and tell us what the test results indicated (because Cold Unpleasant Bitch, who certainly had to know what the results she was looking at indicated, simply said, in a monotone, when we asked "It's not my place to make diagnoses, you'll have to speak with your doctor when the tests are done", throwing SuperGirlfriend and I into a near panic because we couldn't believe anyone could be so brutal as to say something like that if everything looked fine), the guy finally came back in and said "You're fine. It's just an innocent murmur."

So SuperGirlfriend is sleeping well again, which is good, because it means I can, too. And we're relieved; the only surgery in her near future is some minor outpatient stuff which she's already referred to over on her own blog, which we can pretty much take in stride.

But it's a gift. It's all a gift, every passing instant. You never know when it's going to suddenly come crashing to a halt... so appreciate it while you have it.

30,000 pairs of sweat sox

I have $1,425 in plastic.

Or so it seems:


Adam Warlock $10.00
Amazo $20.00
Anthony Stark $25.00
Apocalypse $17.00
Ares $47.00
Arnim Zola $4.00
Arthur Curry $10.00
Atom $20.00
Baron Mordo $6.00
Baron Zemo $12.00
Batman (Green Gloves) $5.00
Batman (Vampire) $20.00
Beta Ray Bill $20.00
Bizarro $12.00
Cain Marko (FF LE) $7.00
Captain Marvel $15.00
Catgirl $9.00
Catwoman $4.00
Commissioner Gordon $5.00
Count Nefaria $24.00
Crimson Cowl $8.00
Crystal $5.00
Cyclops (IC) $4.00
Deathbird $6.00
DeSaad $1.00
Despero $10.00
Dormammu $10.00
Elektra $10.00
Enchantress $8.00
Fantomex $15.00
Flash (GA) $10.00
General Zod $12.00
Giant Man $10.00
Gladiator $24.00
Goblin Queen $10.00
Hecate $5.00
Hulk (CM) $20.00
Hulk (X-plosion) $15.00
Hulk LE $12.00
Iron Man (Unique) AW $6.00
Iron Monger $5.00
Jane Foster $35.00
Jocasta $3.00
KC Bat Sentry $15.00
KC Batman $27.00
KC Flash $47.00
KC Magog $27.00
KC Shazam! $10.00
KC Superman $50.00
KC Wonder Woman $20.00
Key $1.00
Kilowog $10.00
Leader $7.00
Lex Luthor $8.00
Loki $30.00
Longshot $20.00
Mad Thinker $5.00
Madame Hydra $6.00
Magneto (Armor Wars) $12.00
Martian Manhunter $30.00
Medusa $10.00
Metallo $12.00
Mimic $7.00
MODOK $10.00
Moondragon $14.00
Mordru $9.00
Mr. Bones $6.00
Namor LE $3.00
Natasha Romanov (U) $5.00
Nick Fury $15.00
Nightcrawler (CT) $50.00
Nightmare $3.00
Norman Osborne $4.00
Oracle $20.00
Parasite $1.00
Patsy Walker $5.00
Professor X $17.00
Prometheus $15.00
Quasar $7.00
R'as al Ghul $5.00
Red Skull $6.00
Ronan $8.00
Samadahl Rey $6.00
Sauron $12.00
Selina Kyle $5.00
Sentry $13.00
Sersi $5.00
Shadowcat $10.00
Shathra $4.00
Shazam! $10.00
Siamese $2.00
Silver Surfer $30.00
Silver Swan $6.00
Simon Williams LE $5.00
Spider Man (CT) $10.00
Spider Man (FF) $15.00
Spider Man (IC) $10.00
Spider Man (Xplosion) $10.00
SpiderWoman $6.00
Steel (Giant) $5.00
Sue Storm LE (FF) $14.00
Super Skrull $15.00
Superman (black) $5.00
Ted Kord $5.00
Terra $6.00
Thanos $12.00
The General $10.00
Thomas Oscar Morrow $3.00
Ultra Humanite $4.00
Vindicator $12.00
Vision $10.00
Warbird $14.00
Witchblade $10.00
Wolverine (Armor Wars) $8.00
Wolverine (FF) $10.00
Wolverine LE (IC) $10.00
Wonder Woman $20.00

TOTAL "$1,425.00"

Ranging from a pathetic low of $1 (poor Desaad and Parasite don't get no respect) to an impressive high of $50 each (Nightcrawler and the Kingdom Come Superman), these prices are culled from recent searches on Ebay. I essentially simply took the lowest Buy It Now! price I could find on each figure. If I knew how to actually search on auction results, I'd average the most recent three final auction prices, which I'm sure would give me a much more accurate price on many of these.

Still, it's a place to put my feet.

At this point, it's simply an exercise in curiosity; I'm not planning on running any HeroClix fire sales any time soon. Still, it's nice to know that there's a grand or so in silly little plastic figures sitting around the apartment if we need it.

Focusing only on Uniques (including the upcoming Collateral Damage set), here's stuff I'd still like to have:

Adam Strange
Brainiac (Icons)
Captain Boomerang
Captain Marvel (CD)
Crimson Avenger
Darkseid (Hypertime)
Dr. Psycho
Eclipso (Cosmic Justice)
Felix Faust
Green Lantern (KC)
Guardian
Jonah Hex
Kalibak
Kara Zor-El
Krypto
Lex Luthor (Icons)
Mongul
Owlman
Professor Zoom
Superman (WOW)
Superman (Son of Darkseid)
The Flash (Icons)
Ultraman
Ant-Man
Bastion
Hulk (Ultimates)
Thor (Ultimates)
Iron Man (Ultimates)
Mojo
Morgan LeFay
Mr. Fixit
N'astirh
Natasha Romanoff (CT)
Nimrod
Nova (both)
Phoenix (Ultimates)
Rupert (Mole Man LE)
Shadow King
Silver Dreadnaught
Silver Surfer (Defenders TA)
Spider-Man (Armor Wars)
Spiral

Also, I totally forgot to add Terrax and the Scientist Supreme to the list of Uniques I own. I can't find an Ebay listing for the Scientist Supreme, but Terrax seems to go for around $15, so that will bring me up to around $1,440 and change.

There are, of course, other clix I both own and do not own but would like to that are REVs, but that's a whole 'nother effort to make, at some entirely different time.

Moving on from that...

Those of us who are both opinionated and outspoken will receive responses, and since there are a lot of foolish, emotionally retarded, and cowardly people out there who feel empowered by distance and anonymity on the Internet, many of those responses will be silly, irrational, childish, hypocritical, and gutless.

Sometimes, though, you hit the Internet equivalent of a trifecta, and while idly ego seaching on the net last night, I found one of those... but before we get to that, let me further exposit: one of the most common criticisms that people post about me, and my work, runs something as follows: It's really, really long.

I get this a lot. Okay, I tried to read that insane thing he wrote about Busiek, and I couldn't even get through the first couple paragraphs, but you're right, he's nuts. Or I'd read your blog, Darren, but I only have so much time to read blogs and the blogs I read I can read all the new stuff on in five minutes or less. Or My God this guy just goes on and on and on and on!

Etc ad nauseum.

It seems evident that, according to the vast majority of people out there, everything I write is too long. My novels. My short stories. My essays. My blog posts. My comments to other people's blogs. All of it, every last damned bit, is simply too lengthy, too voluminous, too massive for the larger audience out there to be able to encompass within their tiny little minds.

I love this. No, I really do. What people are essentially saying here... well, no, what they are actually sniveling, or wailing like three year olds, here... is We have no attention span! And... it's HIGHLANDER's fault!

I will also note, just as I go by, that the majority of folks who seem to hate my work the most... have, by their own admission, never actually read any of it in its entirety.

And, again... somehow or other... this is my fault. They can't spend more than five minutes reading something. They feel free to formulate and spew toxic, insanely personal opinions in response to things they can't be bothered to read completely. And yet, in the end, in what passes for these people's minds... all of these profound mental failings on their part somehow, in some way they cannot clearly articulate, add up to me being an asshole.

It's... you know, delightful... to have so many people dislike me and my work who are so obviously and irrefutably moronic.

And, speaking of that, here's a comment thread I found recently, over at some blog whose name I can't remember, but I think it was something like sayimagiganticdroolingfucktard.blogspot.com, or something close...

Ragnell said…
Pally, you forgot that the whole ADD diagnosis is yet another sign of parents not wanting to believe they just have annoying, ill-mannered children who need proper discipline.

Drugs! Ludicrious! They need some freaking attention and for someone to teach them right from wrong.

Jon said...
Yeah, but I remembered that posts over eight hundred words drags me into Doc Nebula/Highlander/John Jones territory, and that's something I'd just rather not be.

Besides, ADD, while certainly overdiagnosed, at least has the backing of a few honest-to-god doctors, not just crystal-reading hemp-wearers that stink of patchouli.

It's totally a crutch, though, you're right.

And now that I've invoked Highlander, he will no doubt appear here and make my life a living Hell of thousand-word responses. Damn me.

Ragnell said...
Just don't link to him. He'll never notice you that way.

Jon said...
I have five bucks he Googles his nom de web with a "- swords" or "- there can be only one" in an effort to find more people he can mock based on the unfortunate timing of their birth.

Highlander said...
"Yeah, but I remembered that posts over eight hundred words drags me into Doc Nebula/Highlander/John Jones territory, and that's something I'd just rather not be."

Yeah. God forbid anyone think you have an attention span.

Say. NOW you're linked to me. Isn't that fun?


Just a few final notes. Jon, whoever he is when he isn't launching ad hominem attacks on someone he doesn't know and has had no interactions with at all, has two blogs. One of them is called Face Down In The Gutter.

Honestly. I couldn't make stuff like this up.

Now, as to Ragnell... this is someone whom I have not only never said a bad word about, but have, in fact, said many many nice things about over the past few weeks, on my blog and over at hers. And, you know... this is what I get for that.

But, well, I suppose it's foolish to expect anything else, from anyone who would ever open a paragraph with the non-word 'pally'.

Not to mention someone who likes Kyle Rayner's butt.

POST SCRIPT: Wait! I just noticed! The Idiot's other blog isn't actually called Face Down In the Gutter. Its real title is: Facedown in the Gutters.

So, you know, he's not only a gutless whiney wank with no attention span who thinks that people who can actually focus on something for more than 800 words are hateful and evil... he's also, pretty much, subliterate.

Well, you know, he fits right in with the rest of them...