 |
 |
|
links
Interconnected Notsosoft Threadnaught Plasticbag Oh Skylab Angryblog Orbyn Brainsluice Mo Morgan No London Swish Cottage Blue Ruin Tajmahal Wherever you are McCargow Blogadoon LinkMachineGo Cuckoo-Kid Unxmaal Methylsalicylate Hammersley Joeblog Grayblog the Collective Nick Jordan Fridgepoet Kooky Mojo Betty Woo Moth Tinyblog Genug As above
 |
tuesday
A double-take moment. This Slate article talks about "the new war", as one might "the new album" or "the new fragrance" - a new and particular expression of an old and understood concept.
"The new war" is what the name Neoptolemus means. Son of Achilles, killer of Priam. Who inherited his father's armour, and levelled Troy and its royal house in it. The "new war" was a savage one, without respect for age, home or divinity. Neoptolemus, for what it's worth , was also known as Pyrrhus, for his red hair, which is also the UK title of "An Arrow's Flight", by Mark Merlis, in which Neoptolemus is a male stripper in a fusion of the ancient and modern worlds, a kind of queer Arcadia. Read a passage here. You can probably imagine what Philoctetes' never-healing wound comingles with. It's a mess of associations. Old woundsand open sores. Achilles' heel. Poisoned arrows, topless towers and the fall of cities. The manifestations of illness and wars of elimination. Dialogues of power and helplessness. And in the end, blood. Innocent, fresh and, most of all, bad.
OK, back on the scab-picking. Mildly astonished over here by this from Ev, who quotes this paragraph from Wired:
"...one of the most striking things about the terrorist attacks in Washington and New York was the outpouring of outstanding Internet coverage from ordinary citizens." IMadmittedlyveryHO there were quite a few striking things about these events to tick off before we look at the astonishingly quality of webloggers' responses, many of them concerned with fucking great buildings falling down and people dying. You know, just for myself. monday
The cut out'n'dress paper doll is one of the fundamentals of any good woman-child's or androgynous younger brother's upbringing. It was all in the thin card, baby. No magazine for girls was without the opportunity to fold, spindle and mutilate. Alas, a difficult era of emancipatory struggle seemed to have put the kibosh on these delicately-powdered incitements to wildly inappropriate colour schemes.
Proves how wrong I was. Along with Quantum Leap fan fiction and dogsex, the dress-up doll has experienced a new lease of life on the Internet. I discovered this when a random connection took me to this oh-so-chichi dress-up punk girl doll. And there my descent into Hell began. Oh, sure, you get the old school. Dress up Natalie Wood, say. Or the teen-aspirational - make your own pop star (although technically speaking this is more like an exquisite corpse than a dress-up doll). But, just as the Natasha Henstridge unofficial fan page leads inevitably to chickswithgourds.com, so the world of computerised fridge magnetising swiftly becomes a cold and menacing place. Dress Dubya. Dress Gary Coleman. Dress the blue baby as a WWF wrestler. No, I have no idea why. I think it comes of listening to Slipknot. Sorry, I mean Slipknot. And, most horrible of all, the Texas Health Department brings us keep the devil child free of chiggers. Help me. thursday
I'm going to try to stop posting about this. It's just sort of buzzing around my head pretty much all the time.
Other voices. An attack on us all. An attack not against the world or an ideal, but a nation. It's always the end of the word somewhere. It's not unusual. Go John Howard. Shame they missed John Howard. Fuck the sanctimonious Brits.
This is a test - it looks like I have fallen off the GBlogs updated list again. This is becoming habitual.
This astonishing, inspired tribute to the joys of primitive Atari hand-held American Football games comes from Chad Matchett, victor in the Hand-Held Football Game Fan Fiction Competition at X-Entertainment.
HANDHELD FOOTBALL ROCKED MY FACE I used to play handheld football. Handheld football rocked my face, handheld football Mattel makes great toys. Handheld football rocked my face, handheld football I liked the bright red lights. Handheld football rocked my face, handheld football Rock Over London, Rock On Chicago...Lays... You Can't Beee-ootiful.
Meanwhile, elsewhere, we have a man in a skirt hanging out with large-breasted waitresses. I think I want to kiss Darren.
One of my key sources for background material is Slate, which is providing useful reportage and info at the edges of the main news. For example, what exactly is threatcon delta? What does the Lebanese Daily Star have to say? Or the American press?
The information available is spiralling wildly out of control.
What would happen in London? I'm fascinated by the comment that BT reserve the right to charge for the use of emergency communciations lines. It seems so...inapt.
Meanwhile, the US has yet to rule out nuclear retaliation. Which is entirely understandable. But ever so slightly scary. wednesday
Question. How exactly does one react to the news that a pair of jet planes have smashed into the World Trade Centre. If you're Matt, you call me to get updates gleaned from Barbelith and news radio. If you're my sister, who lived in New York City until last year, you call me because the news sites are down and Norwegian radio sketchy on details. If you're Joe, you get evacuated from your building and promptly move to a bar about 100 yards away to drink off the shakes.
And if you're me you join him there, drink as fast as you can with various friends and acquaintances and a TV constantly replaying the same moments in the corner of the bar - probably of every bar - then go home and sit, checking names off as "I'm OK" emails trickle in, and shuddering. This is just too big. Meg's description of her reaction - thinking in terms of films - is highly relevant. Because the sense of incredulity is the same - the thought that in real life, this vaguely possible event would be forestalled somewhere along the way. I remember standing on the top of the World Trade Centre, fighting vicious winds, staring out over New York, and now the possibility of that experience no longer exists, and neither do however many thousand people. Shit. Shit. Shit. tuesday
The Tao of Dan. Knowing the right thing to say is a precious gift, and a rare one. However, time can usually be saved by eliminating "I was born to lick your face" from the list of possible options right from the start.
Although I did go through a face-licking phase. In the run-up to my finals, I discovered that I found licking the face of a medical student called (let's say) Dave to be very therapeutic. Calming. Soothing. How I discovered this I have no idea. Regrettably, the same effect was not felt by Dave, who was really quite perturbed by the whole thing. With the result that I often had to trap him in a room with only one exit, while singing the "licking your face" song, before pinning him to a wall and....well, licking his face. On reflection, I'm really not sure that the interests of society were served by this. Yes, it helped me to a servicable degree in philosophy and the classical languages. But it may well have scarred for life a man who about now will be emerging into the world with an array of sharp, pointy things and the blessing of society to use them on others. Who's the "winner" there? Who "wins"? friday
The comments here really sicken me. I'll grant that Star Trek was interventionist, idealistic liberal twaddle. I'll grant that it was stuffed to the gills with dangerously naive (and now totally discredited) 1960's leftist ideology. God knows I'd never let my children watch that kind of crypto-socialist propaganda. It was, simply put, a transparent attempt by the liberal-controlled media to indoctrinate Americans with Stalinist/feminist/racialist (Uhura did *not* belong in a white crew, I'm sorry -- her inclusion is sheer unmitigated racism of the highest order) ideology and destroy our moral and cultural heritage. Nevertheless, William Shatner is a decent and honorable man and it sickens me more than I can say to see his name dragged through the dirt by these morons. Please, people, a little rationality and common sense wouldn't come amiss here.
When right-wing fuckwits launch into defences of William Shatner on kitsch websites, the results are really very strange indeed. I mean, who is this dingleberry? How much does it really sicken him? Is he very sickened indeed, or does he just have very little capacity to express his nausea? Twat.
Although Dancing Bears has one of the more contrived titles in recent memory, it's a lot of fun - a knockabout political comedy with some fine lines, and a cast of lovable monsters. I enjoyed it enormously when I saw it on Thursday, before the flu-fog descended, along with Joe, Catherine and Tom, who got £2 off for being a card-carrying member of the Conservative party - perhaps the first time it has ever been an advantage.
Check out the flyer here. Oh, and if you are free on Sunday, and enjoy multi-disciplinary dance/music/comedy/theatre evenings, why not hit 93 Feet East on Brick Lane at about 7:30 to see the Lab. It's ambient entertainment, based around lots of small acts to be enjoyed while you sit, drink, chat...kind of like performance sushi, and there's always something there to love - I still get the giggles when I think of the magic act... I'll be there, brainflu permitting. How about you? Tell me. If you are going, you can get a discount by printing out the flyer here.
Although Dancing Bears has one of the more contrived titles in recent memory, it's a lot of fun - a knockabout political comedy with some fine lines, and a cast of lovable monsters. I enjoyed it enormously when I saw it on Thursday, before the flu-fog descended, along with Joe, Catherine and Tom, who got £2 off for being a card-carrying member of the Conservative party - perhaps the first time it has ever been an advantage.
Check out the flyer here. Oh, and if you are free on Sunday, and enjoy multi-disciplinary dance/music/comedy/theatre evenings, why not hit 93 Feet East on Brick Lane at about 7:30 to see the Lab. It's ambient entertainemnt, based around lots of small acts to be enjoyed while you sit drink, chat...kind of like performance sushi, and there's always something there to love - I still get the giggles when I think of the magic act... I'll be there, brainflu permitting. How about you? Tell me. If you are going, you can get a discount by printing out the flyer here.
First, the Earth stopped turning relative to the sun, and the moon parked itself on the dark side, a little outside the umbra.
The Americans and part of the Pacific were permanently in the light, in the end. Slowing and stopping took the best part of a hundred years -- a century of storms and monsoons, but the weather eventually settled down into a different pattern as these things do. We never had a chance to find out whether the system was stable however. Second, the Sun began to grow. "Ted. Lost the gut." "I'm wearing a girdle." "Thought so. Nice bra, too. End of the world again, then?" "Yeah, yeah, bwa-ha-ha-ha." Basically. The world is ending on the UpsideClown, and Matt is here to tell us about it. thursday
Strange things to think about, much less post on a web site: film roles which Christian Ricci has failed to land. Although any serious thought suggests that she would probably have been utterly wrong for Lolita, massively improved both Batman and Robin and Romeo and Juliet, although not enough to make them actually good, and Titanic would have driven her out of acting for ever. So, all for the best, probably.
Although doing Rose in Titanic in the style of Wednesday Addams...
I actually went online and said, "I realize that this has shocked a lot of people, and I've made a mistake by trying to shove this lifestyle--which is embraced by, maybe, at most, 10 percent of Americans--down people's throats. So I'm going to take it back, and from now on, Willow will no longer be a Jew."
Well, thank fuck for that. Joss Whedon irons out the one fault in an otherwise flawless programme. Oh, by the way, don't read this article if you don't want to know how Series 5 ends. It kind of leaps out at you. |
|
