"How To Spot a Douchebag" 1/31/11

Today's subject: boycott-thor.com, and related sites.

For those who don't know, there was a stir among the uppity racist community over the fact that black English actor Idris Elba, probably best known as Stringer Bell in HBO's "The Wire," will be playing Norse god Heimdall in the upcoming "Thor" movie. And seeing as white supremacists take their Norse mythology very seriously, they took it somewhat personally, and have suddenly all discovered that Marvel Comics is in fact a giant part of the anti-White conspiracy they're all so afraid of.

Now, I'm all for an intelligent, considerate argument against casting a black actor as a Norse god. I would disagree that it really matters in this case, seeing as it's based on a friggin comic book that has very little to do with the actual Norse pantheon to begin with, but I would be willing to listen to it. But that is definitely not what we're getting here. Instead, it's all barely-veiled white rage and racist bile, hiding behind a defense of "white culture."

Some of my favorite examples:

From boycott-thor.com:

"To depict these men [one black, one asian] as slain Viking heroes is tantamount to slander against generations of our ancestors. It is a highly offensive form of political correctness."

Really? Slander? Depicting two people in the hall of Odin as not-Aryan is slander against all your blue eyed relatives? Pretty sure I don't have to say anything to point out how racist a notion that is.

Possibly my favorite, also from boycot-thor.com

"Marvel creator and front man Stan “Lee” Lieber is a left-winger and financier of left-wing political candidates like Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy."

Being so rabidly racist is bad enough, but now you have to throw anti-semitism in there as well? You're just going for the whole shebang! Because there is no other reason to throw in Stan Lee's birth name, the pretty obviously Jewish surname (for those of you who somehow hadn't guessed that Stan Lee might be Jewish) "Lieber," other than to conjure the image of the scheming Jew and his left-wing conspiracy buddies out to destroy White Christian culture, hiding behind his benign adopted surname. They might as well have just said "Marvel creator and front man (and Jew!) Stan 'Lee' Lieber..." just to make sure their less intelligent readers, which I'm assuming are many in number, picked up on their point.

And another:

"Another common question I get is 'How can you be sure that the decisions made by Marvel were politically motivated?'

Marvel Studios is most well known for it’s X-Men franchise. The movies are highly political. It is about two factions of 'mutants' fighting about how to respond to their enemies in the government. It is clear that the viewers are intended to see white Republican types as the true enemies of the 'mutants.'"

I'm not sure where to even begin with this one, it's just too juicy. If by "Republican types" you mean rabid bigots and people who would commit genocide, then I guess your point would be right. But even as a staunch leftist, I find that to be a pretty unflattering picture of most the members of the Republican party. Secondly, the main conflict is actually between those mutants who believe in attempting to peacefully co-exist (the X-Men, aka the heroes of the piece) and those who want to take over forcibly and destroy human culture (aka THE BAD GUYS!!!!). So in fact, the point of the X-Men franchise is the exact opposite of the one the boycott-thor site's are trying to assign it. But then again, these are people who are apparently on the side of rabid bigotry and genocide, which even in the movies is a pretty indefensible stand ;).

Another, from cofcc.com:

"An upcoming movie, based on the comic book Thor, will give Norse mythology an insulting multi-cultural make-over. One of the Gods will be played by Hip Hop DJ Idris Elba"

It doesn't take a genius to figure out what they're doing there. Idris Elba does have a side-career as a DJ (and I had to look that up to actually confirm it), but it's hardly his day job. He's an actor. A damn good one at that, if that matters to you. But instead of his impressive acting resume, they have to characterize him by his side project making, y'know, "negro music." Which I'm sure is also a left-wing assault on the purity of white culture, but that's another post.

"I Wish That I Knew What I Know Now..."

We've all got at least one of those albums from childhood, some random little piece of music miscellenia that found it's way into your adolescent experience and stuck around for a couple of good years, and hundreds of spins around the CD player. You may not listen to them nowadays, except during fits of nostalgia or (at worst) for shits and giggles, but if pressed you'll be able to name all the songs and recite a surprising amount of the lyrics.

Some you'll never admit to ever having listened to in polite company, or even among your closest friends and family. Others you will just never understand how your teenage brain could assign such profound meaning to something so unremarkable. And then there are those that, given the chance, will surprise you. This is a story about an album that falls into the third category.

It was... I want to say junior high? My best friend had moved 45 mintues away a couple of years before, so time spent at his house was usually a multi-day event spent cooped up in his room playing video games, watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 with his parents (they were cool like that), and playing Magic: The Gathering (yes, I was one of those kids). And listening to music. Lots of music. And he always had some new album by some band I had never heard of, which was always an exciting event. One of those was Everclear's "So Much For The Afterglow."

Not exactly "Highway 61 Revisited," but there was something about that album. It was just grungy enough, in music and lyrics, to make it past my "cool-o-meter" (it was the 90s, lets remember), but different enough from Nirvana and Soundgarden and all the bands that made careers ripping them off to seem exotic. Whereas most grunge and alternative bands of the day sang lyrics that were oblique metaphors at best, goofy nonsense at worst, Everclear was the exact opposite; if anything, their lyrics were TOO literal. And while almost all the songs on the album were at least somewhat related to the Nirvana-formula of power-pop songs played like punk songs, they also had out-of-genre touches that made it stand out and seem exciting, from the Beach Boys parody at the beginning of the title track to the synthesizer blips of "Everything to Everyone" to the cowbell and horns of "One Hit Wonder." Needless to say, it didn't take long for me to pick up a copy of my own. And we soon became the best of friends.

Fast-forward to over a decade later, and as I'm burning CDs onto a new computer I come across a burned disk labelled "So Much For The Afterglow" (I had sold the original copy years before), and I found I just couldn't stop myself from listening to it. And on listening to it, I discovered an album much different from the one that I loved as a 13 year old, one that I could only truly appreciate now that I was past 20 years old and had experiences that were completely alien to the teenage frame of reference. Not a perfect album. Almost certainly not a "great" album. But a good album, and a surprising one.

Like any good post-"Nevermind" 90s alternative album, "Afterglow" is plenty dark. But it's dark in a way that's different from all the rest. Whereas most followed the Kurt Cobain model of lyrics, highly metaphorical and abstract words usually about generic emotional experiences rather than specific events, Everclear was all about the specifics, sometimes the almost painfully exact specifics : it's hard to imagine another band of the time that would open a song with the line, "Here is the money that I owe you/so that you can pay the bills/I will give you more when I get paid again," or about how they will "buy you that big house/way up in the West Hills." And unlike most pop music, especially the ones that were inspired by the smell of teen spirit, the songs are not about teenagers or youthful experience. It's about the shame and pain and embarrassment that adults experience from living adult lives, from the pain of failing as a husband or a parent, to looking back at their own childhoods and realizing how it's affecting them now (usually negatively). The pain that the album speaks to isn't so much the fury of raging against the world, but the sighs of those who realized long ago that the world will always win.

This is both it's biggest charm and it's biggest flaw. The almost complete lack of metaphor in the lyrics creates a definite clarity of meaning which can be even more stinging than all the other songs that dance around what they're trying to say:

"I think you like to be the simple toy/ I think you love to play the clown/I think you are blind to the fact that the hand you hold/is the hand that holds you down."

"She is perfect in that fucked up way/that all the magazine seem to want to glorify these days/she looks like a teenage anthem/like she could have been happy in another life."

"I hate those people who tell you/"money is the root of all that kills"/they have never been poor/they have never had the joy of a Welfare Christmas."

But on the other hand, the very-literal can often become the just-plain-too-literal, to the point that it's not so much poetry as a guy who is literally just complaining about how the prozac doesn't work any more, in those exact words. Some of the songs, like "Why I Don't Believe In God," a literal recounting of living with a mentally disturbed mother and the way it affects him even as an adult, are only saved by the absolute conviction in lead singer/songwriter Art Alexakis' voice and the fact that it leaves absolutely no doubt that he means it, god damn it, and with some of the shit he's talking about it's probably best not to question him on it.

"So Much For The Afterglow" is fascinating and frustrating all at the same time. Some of it's songs, like "I Will Buy You A New Life," "One Hit Wonder," and "Amphetamine" deserve much more recognition than they ever got. Others, like "Normal Like You" and "California King" probably just deserve to be forgotten. But still, none of it's flaws are stopping me from listening to it right now.

Q: Why is Joe Biden the best VP ever?

A: Because he digs it when "The Onion" makes fun of him.

A mock photo of Vice President Joe Biden washing a Trans-Am shirtless. Strange? Distasteful? Crossing the line?

Not so, Biden says.

"I think it's hilarious," Biden told Yahoo! in a wide-ranging interview Thursday.

Satirical publication The Onion has repeatedly made the Vice President a target for particularly randy news stories and online cartoon spoofs -- and the jokes have been a viral sensation.

In The Onion's stories Biden invites the "nation's women" to talk taxes at a "private ski chalet", bounces a check at a liquor store, gets banned from Dave & Buster's, and most famously...

[Video: Watch one of The Onion's Joe Biden parodies]

"I saw the one of me washing a Trans-Am automobile in the driveway shirtless with tattoos all over myself and out there," Biden said with a smile. He took some issue with the story, though. "By the way, I have a Corvette-- a '67 Corvette-- not a Trans-Am."

Biden laughed that he's probably not supposed to encourage the mocking, but he said he still gets a kick out of it.

"Most people refer to me who know me, and even in the press, of being a little bit square," Biden said. "And now, I'm the philanderer. I think it's hilarious, the stuff they do on me."

Biden's staff had previously refused to comment on the The Onion coverage. "Let me get this straight: You want to interview the vice president about stories about him in The Onion?" spokesman Jay Carney askedThe New York Times when they tried to get the scoop. "Well, I'll give you credit for trying," Carney said.

The Times was attempting to verify reports from The Onion staff that Biden's team had emailed the publication to tell them "keep it up."

It appears The Onion may not have been joking about that one.

Anna Robertson and Erin Green produced the interview for Yahoo! News.

(Photo of Biden and Obama: AP/Ron Edmonds)

2010.: A Year in Review

Oh, 2010. Let no one say you weren't at least amusing.

You were the year the common American voiced his anger and showed his strength... by joining the pack of rabid idiots called the Tea Party and targeting the true enemies of American prosperity: non-existant socialists, gays, and night-shift working Mexicans taking the jobs you wouldn't even take in the midst of the worst economic downturn in nearly a century, aka 2010.

You were the year that the electorate showed their displeasure at a President who failed to live up to the promise that he never made them: to make them all millionaires give them all handjobs before the coming Mayan Apocalyse.

You were the year of one of the worst cinematic crimes of human existance, Sex and the City 2, a movie so bad you just had to read some of the reviews to appreciate how soul-crushingly awful it was. (Here's a good example: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/burkas_and_birkins/Content?oid=4132715&cb=a405d6579a075b46f5cd8964c854e820&layoutId=PostComment&view=comments#comment-4152112 )

The year that saw fit to kill Elizabeth Edwards, but not John.

The year where God decided that what Haiti really, really needed was another humanitarian crisis of epic proportions.

The year that proved once again is the reason politicians lie is that it's the only way to get you morons to vote for them.

The year that saw the Catholic Church compare the pedophiliac priest scandal that continues to consume its time to the oppression of the Jews under the Nazis with a straight face.

The year Sarah Palin still refused to to go away.

The year the swine flue epidemic went away without killing anyone who really deserved it.

Here's to you, you silly ol' bugger!

World War Z

OLD blog post that I never finished. Still, it doth contain a kernel of truth, though I doubt there's anyone who would want to read "World War Z" that hasn't already. But let's face it, blogs are all about self-indulgence:

Just finished Max Brook's "World War Z," which easily has to be the most profound book about the living dead since at least The Bible (I'm being charitable for the religious out there). I was apprehensive about ready a 300+ page book about zombies, because there hasn't been much new to say about them for a couple of decades, but my brother and his girlfriend proclaimed "You HAVE to read it!" And they were right.

World's First Feminist Nuclear Powerplant?

An ode to feminine power? Or a really juvenile choice of design?

Only YOU can decide!

Black Friday=Walpurgisnacht... it all makes sense!

Black Friday: the biggest shopping day of the year, when all the idiots come out in the dark to scream and grab and punch
Walpurgisnacht: the witch's sabbath
Jdimytai Damour: WalMart employee trampled to death after he opened the doors to Black Friday customers.

So here's my conspiracy theory: Black Friday is really a Satanic Ritual, a feeding frenzy orchestrated by the evil Masters of the Universe, ie The WalMart Board. How could a situation like this ever exist WITHOUT demonic influence? People aren't really this mindless... right? This year, with the economy tanking, a human sacrifice was required by their demonic overlords. Enter poor Jdimytai Damour, thrown to the wolves (in this case, consumers) so that the stampede can continue.

I'm sure there are plenty of Illuminati experts who can provide additional information on this. :)