"...the worst English phrasebook ever produced. Its author, a Portuguese speaker, did not speak English. Rather, he took the a French-English phrasebook and a Portuguese-French phrasebook and translated the former using the latter."
"Your razors, are them well?
Yes, Sir.
Comb-me quickly; don't put me so much pomatum. What news tell me? all hairs dresser are newsmonger.
Sir, I have no heared any thing."
The Difference Between Men and Women
Let's say a guy named Roger is attracted to a woman named Elaine. He asks her out to dinner; she accepts; they have a pretty good time. A few nights later he asks her out again; and again they enjoy themselves. They continue to see each other regularly, and after a while neither one of them is seeing anybody else.
And then, one evening when they're driving home, a thought occurs to Elaine, and, without really thinking, she says it aloud: "Do you realize that, as of tonight, we've been seeing each other for exactly six months?"
And then there is silence in the car.
To Elaine, it seems like a very loud silence. She thinks to herself: I wonder if it bothers him that I said that. Maybe he's been feeling confined by our relationship; maybe he thinks I'm trying to push him into some kind of obligation that he doesn't want, or isn't sure of.
And Roger is thinking: Wow! Six months.
And Elaine is thinking: But, hey, I'm not so sure I want this kind of relationship, either. Sometimes I wish I had a little more space, so I'd have time to think about whether I really want us to keep going the way we are, moving steadily toward... I mean, where are we going? Are we just going to keep seeing each other at this level of intimacy? Are we heading toward marriage? Toward children? Toward a lifetime together? Am I ready for that level of commitment? Do I really even know this person?
And Roger is thinking: So, that means it was... let's see... February when we started going out, which was right after I had the car at the dealer's, which means...let me check the odometer... Whoa! I am way overdue for an oil change here.
And Elaine is thinking: He's upset. I can see it on his face. Maybe I'm reading this completely wrong. Maybe he wants more from our relationship, more intimacy, more commitment; maybe he has sensed, even before I sensed it, that I was feeling some reservations. Yes, I bet that's it. That's why he's so reluctant to say anything about his own feelings. He's afraid of being rejected.
And Roger is thinking: And I'm going to have them look at the transmission again. I don't care what those morons say, it's still not shifting right. And they better not try to blame it on the cold weather this time. What cold weather? It's 87 degrees and this thing is shifting like a garbage truck, and I paid those incompetent thieves $600.
And Elaine is thinking: He's angry. And I don't blame him. I'd be angry, too. I feel so guilty, putting him through this, but I can't help the way I feel.
I'm just not sure.
And Roger is thinking: They'll probably say it's only a 90-day warranty... idiots.
And Elaine is thinking: Maybe I'm just too idealistic, waiting for a knight to come riding up on his white horse, when I'm sitting right next to a perfectly good person, a person I enjoy being with, a person I truly do care about, a person who seems to truly care about me. A person who is in pain because of my self-centered, schoolgirl romantic fantasy.
And Roger is thinking: Warranty? They'd better not say its only a 90-day warranty.
"Roger," Elaine says aloud.
"What?" says Roger, startled.
"Please don't torture yourself like this," she says, her eyes beginning to brim with tears. "Maybe I should never have... Oh my, I feel so... (She breaks down, sobbing.)
"What?" says Roger.
"I'm such a fool," Elaine sobs. "I mean, I know there's no knight. I really know that. It's silly. There's no knight, and there's no horse."
"There's no horse?" says Roger.
"You think I'm a fool, don't you?" Elaine says.
"No!" says Roger, glad to finally know the correct answer.
"It's just that...it's that I...I need some time," Elaine says.
There is a 15-second pause while Roger, thinking as fast as he can, tries to come up with a safe response. Finally he comes up with one that he thinks might work. "Yes," he says.
Elaine, deeply moved, touches his hand. "Oh, Roger, do you really feel that way?" she says.
"What way?" says Roger.
"That way about time," says Elaine.
"Oh," says Roger. "Yes."
Elaine turns to face him and gazes deeply into his eyes, causing him to become very nervous about what she might say next, especially if it involves a horse. At last she speaks.
"Thank you, Roger," she says.
"Thank you," says Roger.
Then he takes her home, and she lies on her bed, a conflicted, tortured soul, and weeps until dawn.
When Roger gets back to his place, he opens a bag of Doritos, turns on the TV, and immediately becomes deeply involved in a rerun of a tennis match between two Czechoslovakians he never heard of. A tiny voice in the far recesses of his mind tells him that something major was going on back there in the car, but he is pretty sure there is no way he would ever understand what, and so he figures it's better if he doesn't think about it.
The next day Elaine will call her closest friend, or perhaps two of them, and they will talk about this situation for six straight hours. In painstaking detail, they will analyze everything she said and everything he said, going over it time and time again, exploring every word, expression, and gesture for nuances of meaning, considering every possible ramification. They will continue to discuss this subject, off and on, for weeks, maybe months, never reaching any definite conclusions, but never getting bored with it, either.
Meanwhile, Roger, while playing racquetball one day with a mutual friend of his and Elaine's, will pause just before serving, frown, and say, "Norm, did Elaine ever own a horse?"
And that's the difference between men and women.
FutureMe.org will send e-mail you compose at a day and time you request. Use it to remind yourself of an upcoming dental appointment or anniversary. Or write a letter to yourself about where you are in life and postdate it a year or five into the future.
Ashley Smith, who was held hostage in her apartment in March by the man now charged with murder in the Atlanta courthouse shootings, was hailed as a hero after she disclosed how she had persuaded her captor to surrender, partly by reading to him from the spiritual best seller “The Purpose-Driven Life.”
But in a memoir released yesterday, Ms. Smith also recounts that she gave the kidnapper some of her supply of crystal methamphetamine during her captivity and that she did not tell the police for some time afterward.
Armed Kill-Crazy Anti-Terrorist Dolphins Loose In Gulf Of Mexico
Filed under:
* researchmaterial
— warrenellis @ 2:12 am
Armed dolphins, trained by the US military to shoot terrorists and pinpoint spies underwater, may be missing in the Gulf of Mexico.
Experts who have studied the US navy’s cetacean training exercises claim the 36 mammals could be carrying ‘toxic dart’ guns. Divers and surfers risk attack, they claim, from a species considered to be among the planet’s smartest. The US navy admits it has been training dolphins for military purposes, but has refused to confirm that any are missing.
Dolphins have been trained in attack-and-kill missions since the Cold War. The US Atlantic bottlenose dolphins have apparently been taught to shoot terrorists attacking military vessels. Their coastal compound was breached during the storm, sweeping them out to sea…
US Army Bulk-Buys Anthrax
Filed under:
* researchmaterial
— warrenellis @ 4:54 pm
The US military wants to buy large quantities of anthrax, in a controversial move that is likely to raise questions over its commitment to treaties designed to limit the spread of biological weapons.
A series of contracts have been uncovered that relate to the US army’s Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. They ask companies to tender for the production of bulk quantities of a non-virulent strain of anthrax, and for equipment to produce significant volumes of other biological agents.
The US renounced biological weapons in 1969, but small quantities of lethal anthrax were still being produced at Dugway as recently as 1998…
Is Bush the commanding, decisive, jovial president you've been hearing about for years in so much of the mainstream press?
Maybe not so much.
Judging from the blistering analyses in Time, Newsweek, and elsewhere these past few days, it turns out that Bush is in fact fidgety, cold and snappish in private. He yells at those who dare give him bad news and is therefore not surprisingly surrounded by an echo chamber of terrified sycophants. He is slow to comprehend concepts that don't emerge from his gut. He is uncomprehending of the speeches that he is given to read. And oh yes, one of his most significant legacies -- the immense post-Sept. 11 reorganization of the federal government which created the Homeland Security Department -- has failed a big test.
What Kind Of Asshole Conservative Response Did You Have?
Posted by Jesse Taylor at 12:55 PM
It's like a Livejournal quiz...only without the quiz part. You get to decide what kind of asshole conservative response you'd have to Hurricane Katrina!
Religious Conservative
God hates faggots and the rich white unmarried college kids who travel down to the French Quarter every year to drink, carouse, and deposit various genital secretions on or in each other. Thus, he killed a bunch of straight black people with families.
Economic Conservative
New Orleans was destroyed because it was a pitiful welfare state, the root cause of which was a mixture of the endemic nature of black people to rely on Big Daddy government coupled with the endemic nature of liberals to prey on black people. This explains their reluctance to pay $5 for a waterlogged Twinkie - years of socialism have stained their ability to understand that market economics require the fucking over of black people during emergencies, lest the government actually help them and turn their children into welfare-loving parasites. Gay welfare-loving parasites.
Cultural Conservative
The race pimps and hustlers keep saying this is about race. It isn't. It's about niggers being too stupid to move out of the way of the storm.
Faux-Moderate Conservatives
We're in the midst of a crisis here - there's plenty of blame to go around. We'll apportion Democrats' now and the rest to Republicans when New Orleans is rebuilt...in 2025.
Compassionate Conservatives
Finally, Katrina has done what years of government intervention couldn't - herd all the poor black people into a giant stadium where they can be dealt with by giant trucks of crap from Wal*Mart. Where's my firefighter calendar?
AKRON, Ohio - Just 45 minutes from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, half an hour from the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton and two blocks from the Inventors Hall of Fame in this city's downtown is an attraction like no other.
Where else but at the Archives of the History of American Psychology can visitors see the uniforms and billy clubs used in the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which students ended up acting the role of guards all too realistically; watch a home movie of Freud batting fruit out of a tree with his cane; or have the bumps on their heads measured to calculate their personalities and career prospects with a 1933 psychograph?
Among the more than 1,000 instruments in the collection, a crown jewel is the simulated shock generator designed by Dr. Stanley Milgram. It was used in experiments in the early 1960's to investigate how far people would go to obey instructions from an authority figure. The participants were told that they were in a study on using electric shocks to penalize participants who failed a simple learning test. They were instructed to flick switches that would deliver steadily more intense shocks, from mild to dangerously severe. In fact, despite the convincing labels and knobs, the shocks were imaginary, and volunteers pretended to react in pain to the nonexistent shocks. Dr. Milgram found that nearly half of the real subjects followed orders to inflict pain that they were convinced was real. "It's probably one of the most important psychological experiments of the 20th century," Dr. Baker said. "It deals with a very fundamental question about the nature of good and evil. We like to believe that it would only be a very sick and evil person who would inflict torture on others. He showed us otherwise."
...where the papers of Dr. Abraham Maslow, the humanistic psychologist, are in numbered boxes. Box M437, picked at random, had a folder marked "expression, spontaneity." Inside was a column of an undated article from The New Yorker torn from its surrounding page. The article, apparently addressing the question of why writers write, offered this dour answer, "All work and creative action is a way to snatch ourselves from the meaninglessness of transience."
Dr. Maslow would have none of it. In his angular, easily legible script, the psychologist famed for extolling the search for peak experiences had scribbled this typically Maslovian answer: "To objectify our subjective thought so as to be able to look at it and improve it toward perfection. To seek peak experiences."
bad signal
WARREN ELLIS
Jesus Christ's liver tasted of gin and semen.
I gobbed it out on to the floor and looked around the control room. Somewhere out back, the Pope was still screaming. If I hadn't punched the teeth out of the pirahna before I poured them up him, he might be dead by now. The only thing muffling his fucking noise was the mouthful of used condoms. The Virgin Mary came out of a side door with a shotgun. I bit off the end and spat it in her eye, laughing. "Virgin Mary my arse," I said. "Any wife of mine coming home with that story would have been left out for the lepers before midnight. You like the taste of dadpaste and no mistake. I've chewed open your son and washed his raw meat down with a bottle of shit wine. What do you think to that?" As the Virgin Mary went down on her booted knees and skilfully guided my purple-headed battering ram past her prehensile tonsils, I looked at the control panel. There was a depression in it with a red button at the bottom with the sign DO NOT PRESS. At the last moment, I ripped my beef missile free of her vocal cords with both hands and shoved it down into the control console.
The world exploded.
And THEN I ejaculated.
The end. Fuck off.
###
bad signal
WARREN ELLIS
I grabbed a handful of my own semen out of Mother Teresa and flung it at the oncoming cops. They all got instantly pregnant and fell over. Even the men.
"I've had better," said Mother Teresa, sparking a match off her nipple and lighting up a joint.
It was then I knew I had to kill everyone in the city. With my penis.
I flexed my flaming meathammer. The road cracked in half. The cops exploded. So did the buildings. Everybody died.
Except me.
Result.
The end. Fuck off.
bad signal
WARREN ELLIS
10.59am -- I open the Engine to readers of Bad Signal.
11.02 -- Comics writer Andy Diggle posts a message. That
proves to be the last message posted on the Engine. Many,
many people will blame Diggle for what is to follow. And who
is to say they shouldn't?
11.25 -- Email fills with reports that the Engine has engine trouble.
12.30pm -- I return home. The Engine is not responding. I ignore it and eat lunch.
1.30 -- The Engine is still not responding. I ignore it and start work.
2.30 -- The Engine is still not responding. I start reloading the page once every couple of minutes.
2.42 -- I have slow access to the Engine. The log states that the rush has reduced to one new visitor every twelve seconds or so.
2.44 -- I have no access.
2.51 -- I send Melinda and Jessica in to try and reach the Admin menu of the forum software. I need to take the load off the server so Billy can get into the Secret Codey 10101110101 Bits and look at the deep settings.
3.06 -- No word from Melinda or Jessica. I am growing worried. They didn't take any food or water in with them, after all.
3.10 -- Melinda makes it to Admin. I instruct her to set the forum to "restricted." No word from Jessica.
3.11 -- Jessica is probably dead.
3.14 -- Jessica is definitely dead. No word from Melinda.
3.15 -- I get the log-on screen.
3.16 -- Nothing happens. And Melinda may be dead. Darren's going to fucking kill me.
3.20 -- Jessica is alive and in admin. Melinda is alive and has attempted to lock the forum. If Melinda fails, I have to send Jessica in. The awful, senseless waste of human life tortures me as I eat some more fruit.
3.21 -- I note out of the corner of my eye that LiveJournal's gone down. Is that my fault too?
3.28 -- Melinda reports restricted status on. Jessica is definitely dead this time.
3.30 -- No change. A vein bursts, somewhere deep in my brain.
3.33 -- Restricted status seems to have gone on. Visitors increase to an estimated one every six fucking seconds.
3.35 -- I get into Admin myself, stepping over Jessica's body.
3.37 -- I am attempting to close the Engine entirely. I may not survive the attempt. Remember me. Just, you know, not the farting and the snoring. You can forget that.
3.39 -- I think I just ruptured something. No, really.
3.40 -- I go for a piss. While I'm doing that, Melinda dies.
3.42 -- The front end of the Engine should be sealed off. I don't know, because people are still hitting it and it's not loading...
3.46 -- I purge all records of Melinda and Jessica from my email and go out for a cigarette. Let it be known that they died for Comics and The Internet. When I have their bodies burned in a garbage can in a remote location, I will do it with love and appreciation for their sacrifice.
A story is a powerful concept. If enough people believe in a particular story, it can alter the way we perceive reality. "Testament," a new ongoing series from Vertigo set to premier in December-- by writer Douglas Rushkoff and artist Liam Sharpe-- explores the effects a story can have on society...
Rushkoff's interest in stories and the way they can influence reality deepened with the rise of the cyber phenomenon and hacking. "The question of the era seemed to be, 'How much of our reality is programmable? Redesignable? Up for grabs?'"
His exploration of the idea of an open source reality and his Jewish background lead Rushkoff to examine the sacred texts of Judaism. "As I explored the Jewish texts-- Torah, really, and the rest of the Bible-- I saw that it was really saying close to the opposite of what most of us think it's saying," Rushkoff said. "There's a lot of Bible-thumping going on these days-- in Judaism and Christianity alike. And it has left the impression that it's some sort of book of rules to follow, tenets to believe in and historical events to set in stone. Where it's actually the story of a revolution-- both of a bunch of people, and of human consciousness. It's a proposition for an open source reality and a set of guidelines for how to break the news to real people who love to believe in idols."
Rushkoff tried to communicate his findings in his book "Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism." "I got blacklisted by some Jewish groups who never even read the book-- just reviews of the book," Rushkoff stated. "I learned early on in life that if you have something that might be truly dangerous to say, say it in comics.
..."Testament" is set in three different times and places. "Most simply stated, it takes place in a near future where things have gone a bit further in the direction they're already going," Rushkoff said. "The Gulf War has expanded, the draft has been implemented, the economy has crashed. We're in the New York area-- mostly Brooklyn to start--- with a group of draft-dodgers who are trying to change things.
"But their adventures have all happened before-- or are happening simultaneously, depending how you look at it-- played out by characters in the Bible. So there's parallel action happening in Bible time, which is kind of like 1100 BC and all, but I don't see bible time as historical, so it's more like myth-time. And, like Torah, time is all screwy in there, anyway. Torah doesn't happen quite in order and events resonate with other ones centuries before or after. Something happening in one century can either trigger or justify things happening in another.
"Then there's a third space, the space of the gods. They exist outside linear time, so they're not allowed into the frames of the comic," Rushkoff continued. "At least not in their embodied form. If they try to stick their hand in a frame, it ends up becoming flame or smoke or whatever element over which they can exert influence."
...The first story arc of "Testament" is called "Abraham of Ur." "It begins with the implementation of the draft in modern times, and the sacrifice of sons to Molloch (the god people believed in before the Bible's God came around)," Rushkoff said. "Most people don't talk about it, but there are plenty of instances of child sacrifice in the Bible. Prior to the whole Israelite way of doing things, it was a standard practice. And whenever times get hard, you see God's Israelites resorting to it all over again. All the prophets keep pleading with the people to stop sacrificing their kids.
"It seemed like a great way to demonstrate the premise of the book-- that particular forms change, but the central behaviors and beliefs remain the same. Here we are, sacrificing our sons in the name of the Christian God against other people who are sacrificing their sons in the name of the Muslim God. (Who are the same God, of course-- only the prophets are different-- but no one likes to remember that part.)
...While it may first appear that the villains of "Testament" are played by the Gods, the out of control military and economic elite found in the story, Rushkoff says there's more to it than just that. "I suppose the real adversaries are the human qualities in themselves that end up being manifest or exploited (depending on how you look at it) by the gods who live off these fears and desires. It's a story, so I've personified the adversaries. But the real adversaries are almost always internal or projected."
...A comic like "Testament" can be a tough sell. Readers on one side of the political spectrum might be opposed to or uninterested in a comic that explores biblical stories. While readers from the other side of the political spectrum might be opposed to a comic that explores and interprets biblical stories in a different way from what they believe. "Most people either like this stuff for what I see as the wrong reasons, or hate this stuff because they think those other people have a monopoly on the Bible," Rushkoff stated. "They've bought the religious institutional take on what Bible is about. Kind of like buying the Microsoft version of computing, instead of the Linux version.
"Fact is, the Bible can be used as a set-in-stone sacred and unchangeable viewpoint, or it can be used as the entrance to an utterly open source perspective on reality. As I see it, these stories give people the tools they need to begin to confront life and reality in a very open, evolutionary fashion. To me, the Bible makes a case for evolution-- not creationism. And it's important that I expose people to this side of things, before they completely dismiss this stuff as irrelevant or sanctimonious."
...In a sense, the worst thing that can happen to a story is that it become a sacred truth. That's what kills its life.
Look. We have the technology. We have the brainpower. We could, if there were any real incentive to do so, if the government had done its job and if they had pushed forth with anything resembling social responsibility, and if the populace had been educated enough to care, we could easily have fast sexy well-built cars that get 100 mpg, right now, today, cars that give off nearly zero emissions, and we could be giving the finger to Saudi Arabia and we might not be losing a brutal war in Iraq and thousands of undereducated U.S. soldiers wouldn't be dead and we might, in fact, be headed toward a much greener, lighter, less warlike future than the one BushCo has mapped out for us. An oversimplification? Maybe. But not by much.
So why don't we do it? Why are we still so grossly dependent on oil? Why does every car on the road suck down gas like Dick Cheney sucks life force? Why did we, in fact, go in the opposite direction and embrace bloated and imbecilic SUVs over elegant, efficient cars? Simple: Because there has been exactly zero pressure on Big Auto to change. Because your government does not care. Because profits matter more than social responsibility. Because when supply is plentiful and oil prices are low, we simply don't give a damn. Just ask any Hummer owner.
See, they just don't know. Or, for that matter, care. The government and the GOP in particular, they just have no idea of true American reality, of how the poor actually live, of the vicious inequities of consumer culture (which their nasty domestic policies only exacerbate), the brutal gap between the haves and the have-nots, between Lands' End and Salvation Army, between stock portfolio and food stamps, between stashing away an emergency block of Brie and a case of Sterling cab for when the Big One strikes, and hoping you don't get stabbed at the emergency shelter over a candy bar.
This is, after all, what most baffled the snide and quietly racist GOP leadership: Why didn't all those poor people in New Orleans just leave? Why didn't they hop in the Escalade and fill the tank with a hundred bucks' worth of Unocal premium and hightail it outta New Orleans and head for a Travelodge and watch the disaster on the Panasonic big-screen TV with the rest of us, like any good upstanding citizen? What the hell was wrong with them?
Mark Waid has stated that the current "Infinite Crisis" and the surrounding darkening of comics is not part of a trend that DC intends to follow, but an end of the road to that sort of storytelling. He writes, "The good news is, and I guarantee you this, when we're on the other side of the CRISIS, those days are GONE. Just gone. We're sick to death of heroes who are not heroes, we're sick to death of darkness. Not that there's no room, not that Batman should act like Adam West, but that won't be the overall feeling. After all this stuff, after everything shakes down, we're done with heroes being dicks. No more we screwed each other and now we must pay the consequences. No, we're super-heroes and that's what we do. Batman's broken. Through no ONE person's fault, but he's a dick now. And we've been told we can fix that."
Certainly an intriguing and interesting twist from what readers have been expecting, given current DC fare.
Not all of DC's editorially influencing creatives feel entirely the same way as Waid. Grant Morrison is on Mark's side, naturally. Judd Winick and Greg Rucka take a different view. And Geoff Johns can play to both sides equally.
But with "All Star," "Identity Crisis," "Countdown," "Infinity Crisism" "One Year Gap" and "52," DC have proved themselves experts at presenting a united, unified and cohesive creative front to the public. Makes a nice change. Can only be for the good.
There are some talks about a more mature readers superhero line at DC to compliment a new direction from the rest of the DC Universe. But talks are all they are for now.
Erotic dancers and strippers are entertaining crowds of police, firefighters and military personnel instead of the usual audiences of drunken conventioneers and tourists in Bourbon Street's Deja Vu club, which reopened this week.
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - A field reporter for a new Dutch television talk show plans to use heroin and other illegal drugs on the air during the weekly program on issues that concern young people, producers said Wednesday.
