Real Transformers

From the Japanese, of course.

Joss Whedon is awesome.

WHEDONesque : Comments on 9548 : This explains Joss perfectly.:

"But I am here with a purpose, my friends. Call me joss Whedon: Rumor Crusher! (Or 'Mister Fendendo', if we're being intimate.)

Since everyone's all abuzz with the CW rumor, I have to get all official and say: WE'VE STARTED FILMING NEW EPISODES! Of Dateline. I'm such a troll.

No, there haven't been any overtures from the CW as regards a SereniFly spin-off. I haven't even heard the orchestra tuning up. But if they happen to come calling, I do know what I would do:

1) In order to keep the show cost efficient, we would get rid of a few things we don't need, like spaceships, floors, and Jewel. (You thought I was gonna say 'costumes', didn't you? Porn guy.)

2) Nathan is busy making movies, but since I don't want new cast members, everybody in the cast would just move over one. Jewel (she's back!) would play Mal, Ron would play Kaylee, Morena would play Book, and so on.

3) People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy.

4) The actors can make up their dialogue. I'm bushed, and they're all funny, and the hell with it. Maybe I'll give them a premise to work off of, like 'You're all in trouble' or 'Wash has a thing'. They could maybe light it too.

5) Klingons, but not alien Klingons. But still Klingons.

So already the show is running like a well oiled companion. I'm just proud to be a part of the Country Western network, and I know this will be their biggest hit since 'Have Space-Gun, Will Travel.'

I hope, as always, this clears things up. And I hope the executives at the Carnie Wilson network DO give me a call. I've got a million ideas for redoing their offices.

Power to the people who are powerful enough to crush the other people! -jossy."

Sorry. I may be throwing off the curve. "Japan Battles Rising Obesity - Yahoo! News"

Japan Battles Rising Obesity - Yahoo! News:

"TOKYO - For those who think Japan is all fish and tofu, consider Sayaka Oyama's former diet: spaghetti and meat sauce for lunch, chocolates and cookies for snack and a dinner of rice balls and sandwiches at nighttime classes."

The Key to Everything

"In the province of the mind, what is believed to be true is true or becomes true, within limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind, there are no limits."

The Center of the Cyclone, Dr. John C. Lilly, 1972

Man is ignorant of the nature of his own being and powers. Even his idea of his limitation is based on experience of the past, and every step in his progress extends his empire. There is therefore no reason to assign theoretical limits to what he may be, or to what he may do.

Proposition 12, Magick, Aleister Crowley, 1932

When I grow up, I believe I'd like to be Grant Morrison.

Comic Book Resources - CBR News - The Comic Wire:

"In response to a question about 'The Invisibles,' Morrison recalled the transformation he underwent while writing that Vertigo series. 'It was weirder than I imagined it, because it was like doing voodoo. The comic began to write me. I lost control of it in a lot of places. Things in the comic then happened to me. I made the King Mob character be tortured and sick and have his lung collapse. And three months later I was in the hospital with a lung collapsed, dying. So after that I gave him a real, good time. If I can make myself sick and put myself in the hospital, then by god, I'm going to make myself into James Bond!'

Morrison continued, 'My life by the end of 'The Invisibles' was nothing like my life at the start.'

...In terms of politics, Morrison spoke about growing up with two anti-war activists as parents and hopping fences into military installations. Now, though, his outlook is less radical. 'I don't have politics. I just kind of explore things. By the end of 'The Invisibles,' it was more about incorporation than Us versus Them. I started as a kid who was taught to hate the police and hate the army and authority, but the more I grew up and studied those things, the more I realized they were just part of the system we live in, an inescapable part.'

...A practicing magician, Morrison discussed the connections between language, magic and science. 'Language is magical. People talk about magic as if it's something over here that only some people do. The human race is a race of things that do magic. The only reason we think there isn't any magic in the world is because there's so much of it. We don't see it anymore. We can use Google to look down at our house from space. That's magic!"

You cannot makes this stuff up. Cheney and hunting the Most Dangerous Game.

Boing Boing: Mind control book and Cheney's hunting accident:

"Trance-Formation of America is a bizarre 1995 'autobiography of a victim of government mind control' that you'll see referenced a lot among the tinfoil beanie conspiracy theory set. Today, Jeff Long posted about a particularly interesting bit from the book. From Trance-Formation of America, self-published by Cathy O'Brien in September 1995:

Dick Cheney, then [assistant] White House Chief of Staff to President Ford...was the reason my family had travelled to Wyoming where I endured yet another form of brutality - his version of 'A Most Dangerous Game,' or human hunting.... Dick Cheney had an apparent addiction to the 'thrill of the sport.' He appeared obsessed with playing A Most Dangerous Game as a means of traumatizing mind control victims, as well as to satisfy his own perverse sexual kinks.

Link to CNN article 'Hunter wounded by Cheney 'doing well'' "

Kung Fu Monkey: Conservatives with Apostate Problems

Kung Fu Monkey: Conservatives with Apostate Problems:

"...'conservative' now seems to mean 'I support George Bush' rather than, oh, limiting the intrusiveness of the federal government and fiscal responsibility. Basically, no matter what your long-held policy views or conservative bona fides, as soon as you say 'I think George Bush might be screwing up job X', you get to star in the Broadway Revival of 'Galileo vs, The Catholic Church', and you ain't playing the role of Pope Urban VIII, if you get the drift. "

Lou Ferrigno will be sworn in Monday night as a reserve Deputy Sheriff

Lou Ferrigno Already Annoyed At Being Referred To As 'Deputy Hulk' - Defamer:

"We couldn’t help but scoff just a little when we read that Ferrigno was issued a gun, which, we presume, he’ll crush into a steel ball and hurl with great force at an escaping assailant. And while the Hulk won’t be brought in to quell the ongoing prison race riots (“You black. You latino. Hulk green. Hulk no see difference!”), we somehow feel safer all the same knowing he’s on our mean streets."

Primitive Drug-Suckers

Comic Book Resources - CBR News - The Comic Wire:

"'The Wolfskin is a Viking-like warrior; 'wolfskin' was in fact one term for the famous 'berserker' warrior of Nordic antiquity. Like the 'warp-spasm' warriors of ancient Ireland, the berserkers were said to transform into animals, in some accounts, like werewolves. What it seems they did, of course, is to take psychoactive mushrooms, which drove them nuts.

'Historically, they were far from alone in the concept of getting out of their heads before battle; some eastern cultures would give their soldiers sugar, which sent them absolutely haywire, as humans just didn't eat that stuff at the time. And, of course, there were the hash-head killers of Hassan I Sabbah, the hashishin from whom we take the word 'assassin.'

'But never assume the Vikings were just primitive drug-suckers. They were treated as freaks by other cultures because they washed every day. They were literate, and good with languages. I lifted a lot from the period and put it into a fantasy context: an elite Northish soldier, a Wolfskin, walking south into temperate Europe - speaking several languages, having adopted elements of other cultures as his own, and yet somehow excommunicated from his people."

See, it's about them hatin' our freedom. If you're a moron.

Why They Hate Us by Jacob G. Hornberger:

"After 9/11, many Americans had no idea why there was so much anger and rage in the Middle East, especially against the United States. All their lives, Americans had been taught that foreign policy was for federal “experts” and, thus, they had chosen not to concern themselves with what their federal officials were doing to people abroad. Innocently believing that federal overseas personnel, including the CIA and the military, had been helping foreigners for decades, Americans had no reason to doubt the official U.S. pronouncement immediately after 9/11: “We are innocent. The terrorists hate us for our freedom and values. That’s why they have attacked us.”

What Americans didn’t realize is that federal officials were being disingenuous when they made that pronouncement. U.S. officials knew full well that their decades-old U.S. interventionist policies in the Middle East were at the bottom of the volcanic rage that people bore in that part of the world.

Consider:

1.
The U.S. government’s international paramilitary force, the CIA, covertly engineered the ouster of the popular and democratically elected prime minister of Iran and replaced him with a brutal dictator whose secret police tortured and terrorized the Iranian people for decades. Yet to this day, Americans cannot fathom why so many Iranians still hate the U.S. government.
2.
The United States and other Western nations actively supported Saddam Hussein and his tyrannical regime, even delivering him the infamous weapons of mass destruction that U.S. officials later used as an excuse to invade Iraq.
3.
In their role as imperial international policeman, U.S. officials turned on Saddam when he invaded Kuwait, even though the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was no more the business of the U.S. government than the U.S. invasion of Panama or Grenada was the business of Iraq. Moreover, the fact that U.S. officials had supported Saddam’s attack on Iran and then later had turned a passive eye on his intention to attack Kuwait makes U.S. officials look even worse. Thousands of Iraqis were massacred and maimed by U.S. bombs and missiles in the Persian Gulf War, decimating Iraqi families.
4.
After the Persian Gulf War, U.S. officials inspired Kurds and Shi’ites to rebel against Saddam and then stood aside as Saddam massacred them.
5.
Brutal economic sanctions were imposed on Iraq and then continued, year after year, for more than a decade, with the aim of forcing the Iraqi people to oust Saddam from power. The sanctions contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children from disease and infection, especially from dirty water.
6.
There were the infamous no-fly zones over Iraq, by which U.S. officials continued killing Iraqis with bombs and missiles, even though the zones had never been authorized by either the UN or the U.S. Congress.
7.
U.S. troops were knowingly and deliberately stationed on Islamic holy lands, in utter disregard for religious sensibilities of Muslims. In fact, is it not easier to understand the depth of the adverse Muslim reaction to the stationing of U.S. troops in those areas given the recent adverse reactions to U.S. military abuse of the Koran and to the publication of the cartoons mocking Mohammed? Does anyone honestly believe that U.S. officials were unaware of the potential for such adverse reaction when they stationed U.S. troops in those areas?
8.
The U.S. government invaded and waged a war of aggression against Iraq under false and deceptive claims regarding weapons of mass destruction and then continued a brutal military occupation of the country under the deceptive rubric of “spreading democracy.” The invasion and occupation have killed and maimed tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi people – innocent in the sense that neither they nor their government ever attacked the United States or even threatened to do so.
9.
U.S. military and paramilitary forces tortured, sexually abused, raped, and murdered Iraqi men taken into custody. What better way to turn anger into rage than to knowingly and deliberately humiliate Iraqi men in such a manner rather than treat them like men and soldiers entitled to the protections of the Geneva Convention, especially given that most of them were doing nothing worse than defending their nation against an illegal invasion and war of aggression by a foreign power?
10.
The U.S. government has long provided unconditional financial and military support to the Israeli government as well as foreign aid to such pro-U.S. authoritarian regimes as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt."

Remember

Alchemical Braindamage:

"What really happens is not that at some arbitrary marker your body decides to swirl down the crapper. More like, at some actually quite predictable interval, the neglect or bad habits you haven't addressed, have quite predictable effects.

If you continue the slouching and slumping that most of us do in front of tv and computers and in our lumbering awkward gait, you will invariably experience neck, back, and joint problems in an accelerating downward spiral. I'd say 95% of the massage clients I've seen so far have this and pretty much all of them dismiss it as 'stress'. Except when they're in permanent pain and can't move anymore.

If you require glasses for reading and lazily wear them all the time, when you don't have to, the muscles around your eyes that are supposed to control the shape of your corneas, will atrophy, and you will end up wandering through a landscape of blurry nonsense at any juncture when you happen to not have your security blanket.

If your diet consists of the usual over-processed, fiberless, nutrient denuded crap that most of us were weaned on, then as time goes on your digestive and metabolic health will decline, and the buildup of toxic byproducts will trigger all kinds of allergies, sensitivities, chronic illnesses and early death.

If you abuse your body in the characteristic ways of going about 'exercise' and don't invest the time or money in some kind of regenerative or healing activity, like yoga, massage work, fasting, or meditation, the cumulative wear and tear of various trivial but never fully healed injuries will eventually cripple you.

None of this has anything whatsoever to do with actually being chronologically older. Except insofar as a thirty year old has ten more years of stupid habits to account for than a twenty year old, and ten years of momentum in the way of repairing them.

As time goes by, the backlog of stupidity does narrow your options somewhat and makes the window of health a little smaller to fit through. Everything in life is about balance. The thin edge of that balance point never changes, but the consequences of falling off it are proportional to how long you've been wandering, as is the difficulty of getting back on after you've fucked up."

Never stop.

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
e. e. cummings

Persistence

'So long as there is breath in me, that long I will persist. For now I know one of the greatest principles on success; if I persist long enough I will win.'
Og Mandino

Becoming

'Man often becomes what he believes himself to be. If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning.'
Mahatma Gandhi

"the “Neal Adams, hairy-chested, love-god” version of Batman"

Brilliant.

NEWSARAMA.COM: WONDERCON '06: DC - THE BEST IS YET TO COME PANEL:

"In an unexpected announcement at the DC panel (though not coming as a complete surprise), it was just announced Grant Morrison will be the next regular writer of Batman, following James Robinson’s eight-part story arc running through that title and Detective beginning in March.

...Morrison said that he’s already plotted 15 issues, and in his first issue alone, he has 15 ninja man-bats as well as Talia, and the story is called “Batman & Son”. Morrison said Batman coming out of 52 OYL will be a more of a “fun guy, more healthy”, more like the “Neal Adams, hairy-chested, love-god” version of Batman."

Live up to it.

“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.”

Hindu Prince Gautama Siddharta, the founder of Buddhism, 563-483 B.C.

Evolution

"1000 BC Eat this root.
1000 AD That root is heathen. Say this prayer.
1600 AD That prayer is superstition. Drink this potion.
1900 AD That potion is snake oil. Take this pill.
1960 AD That pill is ineffective. Take this antibiotic
2006 AD That antibiotic has resistance. Here, eat this root."

People sometimes suck. Therefore, Wilde gives perspective.

a life in the day of cheezygoof: che is so smart:

"'it is absurd to divide people into good and bad. people are either charming or tedious.' (oscar wilde)"

Balance in the Media

The Rude Pundit:

"What's it gonna take to surprise anyone? At this point, we could discover that Karl Rove and Dick Cheney rape Iranian village pre-teen girls and then the President, ashamed of the sinful actions of his two close advisors, as well as of the defiled children, kills the girls, gutting them, cutting them up, and feeding the press corps a buffet of pate' and meatloaf made from the bodies, catered, of course, by Halliburton...

And you know what? CNN would still balance the facts of the story with the demonic visage of Scott McClellan spinning it away, calling it ludicrous and ridiculous and 'beyond the pale to suggest' yet never really denying all the fucking and gutting and grinding and rubbing, although if it had been done, it was for security reasons that are classified."

Tales of the Obvious

When Death Is on the Docket, the Moral Compass Wavers - New York Times:

"Common wisdom holds that people have a set standard of morality that never wavers. Yet studies of people who do unpalatable things, whether by choice, or for reasons of duty or economic necessity, find that people's moral codes are more flexible than generally understood. To buffer themselves from their own consciences, people often adjust their moral judgments in a process some psychologists call moral disengagement, or moral distancing.

In recent years, researchers have determined the psychological techniques most often used to disengage, and for the first time they have tested them in people working in perhaps the most morally challenging job short of soldiering, staffing a prison execution team.

The results of this and other studies suggest that a person's moral judgment can shift quickly, in anticipation of an unpalatable act, or slowly and unconsciously."