Today’s post : some cool pictures from this day and age.

Like this gem : the people at uber-hipster site Free Williamsburg decided they agreed with that one Hasidic newspaper’s decision to remove all sexually suggestive images from that famous picture of all the higher up in the White House watching the Osama Bin Laden takedown.

I mean, I saw the original picture, and I could not help myself, all that suggestive sexuality was making me think all kind of unholy thoughts.

Obviously, there’s only one solution.

Phew, that's so much better.

What a relief!

Seriously, sometimes something is so perfectly absurd that the perfect response is simply to do the opposite, without comment or clarification, and just let the image speak for itself.

Funny how said Hasidic paper used extremely modern technology (modern Photoshop, which is MAGICAL) to enforce an absurdly old-fashioned idea about the nature of women and sexuality. When your rag is afraid to have any pictures of women, period, you have got yourself some serious issues there, boychik. You just know female-denying homosocial misogyny has reached a dangerous level when the men are so afraid of the women that they don’t even want to see them.

The less actual power women have, the harder they press their informal power, and the more they raise sons who are terrified of said female informal power, and make even more restrictive rules… it’s a cycle.

On the world of art, commentary, and crudely drawn wangs.

I love you, cock drawing dude!

You can probably more or less figure this out from context, but for the record, what happened here was that this wall had the quite excellent graffiti art by three groovy artists on it (as depicted in the top image) for years, and then someone , right out of the blue and without telling anyone, not even the artists, decided to paint over it with that really lame beige shit.

The bottom image, therefore, is one anonymous person’s commentary on this crime against art. Bravo, anonymous commenter! Sure, they will just paint over your statement too, but the point was made.

I think that every time they paint over some graffiti on that wall, more local taggers should get together to put something still more obscene on that wall.

Bet they run out of beige paint before the taggers run out of dirty ideas.

Next up, a crude stick cartoon of someone who walked right into it.

Oooh, RADICAL BURN!

Walked into that one at full speed with your eyes open, dude.

Of course, the parallel is not perfect, because most porn videos don’t have a host who is purportedly trying to teach you how to have better sex yourself.

Could be interesting, though, I mean…. a sexual education porno tape done in the style of a cooking show. A bright-faced and perky young thing telling you what sex position you will be trying that day, giving you the list of toys and tools you will need, giving you homey Martha Stewart style tips about how you can make your own dildo-handled whip at home with just a few common household items. Episodes with cutesy titles like “Everyone’s Going Anal!” or “Showing You The Ropes (And Whips, and Leather”. How just a few sprays of whipped cream in the right places can really make your evening special.

“And here’s one I prepared earlier. ” And then, wang.

You know, I am pretty sure that would be a very popular show with the ladies. But who would put it on their network? It would be labeled porn and only dirty old men would end up seeing it.

Idea for a web series, maybe?

And one last thing, a video clip this time, but in my defense, it’s impressively visual.

Being textually biased, I love this whole new trend of making this typographical animations. And by taking the art form into a 3D environment, I think the author of this clip has upped the stakes. I quite like the visual effect, and find the whole thing very interesting and a worthy experiment.

Plus I love the Donnie Darko version of Mad World.

It has technical flaws, though. The big one is that the image is just not centred properly. That’s a very serious flaw when your entire piece requires people to read rapidly changing, moving text. If you are going to only give people a split second to read the words, the words have to help as much as possible, and expecting us to seek then read in that situation is too much.

Still, a very cool innovation in the art form, in my opinion.

Man, I do not feel like writing right now. Anyhow, on with the show.

I have mentioned my recent sleep issues before in this space. Briefly, they consisted of shallow and unsatisfying sleep that left me feeling tense and restless.

Well, the drought has ended, and ended, of course, with a cloudbursting storm. I swear, it’s like life in the desert. It’s either no rain, or bloody Biblical.

Maybe I should start gathering two of every animal.

I’m going to need a bigger boat.

Anyhow, thought I’d try to jot down some of the weirdness that my dream soaked sands have disgorged today in my sporadic attempt to make some sense of all this crap.

Let’s see. At one point, I was at the taping of a show about some average folks who get drawn in this weird seaside carnival afterlife. They are not sure if they are alive or dead, or if they are in Heaven or Hell or somewhere in between. And there’s a lot of swirling line of blinking neon lights. Those I remember quite clearly. In lines like lightning, floating in the air and shimmering and swaying like heat distortion.

Then, as often happens in my dreams, what starts off as something I am watching become something I am living, although in some tense, it’s still a show and I am still watching it, just from the inside. It’s like an experience of total immersion into a television show or movie.

I guess maybe that’s the sort of dream a writer who was raised by the boob tube would have. One on which you are fully immersed in a narrative which you are also writing. That is every writer’s dream, really. The ultimate writer’s fantasy is to move in to the world of their own writing, where they control everything and everything is exactly how they want it to be and they are, in essence, God.

That’s right, faithful readers. You have been following me into the realm in which I rule all this time.

And I just have to say…. hey. Thanks.

Sadly, I don’t remember any more of that particular dream thread, which is too bad. It seems like a fairly interesting premise. I remember being a sort of backstage spectator to the show, possibly from the point of view of someone who had written it but now was just watching people bring it to life (now THERE is a fantasy!), Then, with dreamstate fluidity, I was a character in the show, and I remember feeling an enormous surge of emotions, trepidation and excitement and wonder and an intensely energizing sense of possibility, as I faced the prospect of having to explore this bizarre and enticing new realm.

I suspect some of that vibe came from the book I am reading, Weaveworld, by Clive Barker. It also features a wonderful magical realm filled with possibilities. Barker has a real talent for vividly dreamlike imagery and dealing in the stuff of dreams, both pleasant dreams and nightmares.

Anyhow, that’s where the thread of that dream ended, at the threshold of possibility, in the arms of mystery, with no way out but further in.

One and a half dreams later, the premise was that my friends and I, in the dream, had gotten together to find an inexpensive rental property that we could use as a clubhouse of sorts. Just someplace we could get together, hang out, relax, shoot the breeze, play video games, and be ourselves.

Sounds pretty good, honestly.

So we find a place, and it’s a small office in an out of the way neighbourhood downtown. We find a place, find out it’s going for a ridiculously low $1378/month, which is well within our budget (there’s around eight of us in total), and make the deal. At this point, we’ve only really seen the place in the dark, with the lights out, but whatever.

Then later, I am in the area and decide I feel like relaxing, and so I go to the clubhouse-to-be, let myself in with my newly acquired keys, somehow completely fail to notice that all the lights are on, and flop out on a second hand medical cot I had put there earlier.

I am just beginning to mellow out when I just happen to notice there’s a nice lady behind a desk who is looking at me. Slowly, I begin to realize that this is still an active office full of people.

I am a little embarrassed. Given that this is all a dream, I supposed I should be glad I had my clothes on.

But I smile at the nice lady and turn on the charm and tell her the story about how me and my friends wanted a clubhouse and so on and so forth. As I talk to her, more people appear from other parts of the office and gather around the cot to listen to me. Meanwhile, I am keeping up the charm offensive and gingerly trying to figure out what the hell happened.

Am I in the right place? I must be, my key worked.

Did they not know the place had been rented to someone else? Were they um, planning on moving out soon? To a new location, or…?

That’s roughly where that dream ended. Weird, huh?

Oh, and the weirdest part : I was woken up by the feeling I was experiencing light suction on my bare back, like someone was playfully poking me with an active vacuum cleaner hose to wake me up. So I wake up, and there’s this incredible sense of reality dysjunction when it’s like the world is snapping back into reality jarringly, and I realize that the sucking sensation was actually the usual blowing of air from the little fan I keep on my bed. My dream addled brain had somehow reversed it.

That’s right, space cadets. She went from suck to blow!

My brain continues to come up with new weird ways to mess with itself.

Decided that today, just to shake things up and have a little fun, I would turn my blog into my own little movie festival and show off some fun clips I have lying around. Some are recently acquired and others are stuff I have had around for ages.

But it’s all really good, I swear!

Like, check out this amazing clip from extremely early Muppets history.

It’s from Sam and Friends, Jim Henson’s early live-action television show, and as you can see, it already has his trademark brand of warm and wacky humour. Obviously, Henson was the kind of guy who only needed two puppets (both voiced by him) and a telestrater to play with in order to create something adorable, hilarious, and jazzy. I am just floored by the sheer amount of creativity that went into this piece, and yet, it obviously has no budget at all.

It just goes to show that you don’t need a lot of tricks and toys if you have the magic in you. A really creative mind and a strong desire to make good stuff goes a long way towards making amazing stuff.

Like, check out this magnificent piece of comedy done only with video editing and a microphone :

Forgive the flangey quality of the voiceover, but this clip is somewhat ancient now and was presumably made on more primitive technology than what all you slick kids with your iPads and HD video camera and whatnot all take for granted.

Yup. I am old. Fuck.

Anyhow, to me, it’s an Internet classic. We’ve all had out brains assaulted by incomprehensible and inane movie trailers that mix the same stupid corny phrases about “out of control thrill rides” or being “perfect for the whole family” with so many jump cuts and cheesy editing tricks that by the end of it, you have absolutely no idea what the movie is about. If someone asked, all you could say was “Um…. I think that was Paul Rudd… and um… there’s a dog? And at one point, something explodes. ”

Obviously, the people making those trailers think that what is important is to create a sort of impression of excitement and quality without providing you with any actual information. Information only gets in the way of the emotional manipulation.

Well screw that. If a trailer is that vague, I just assume the movie will be just as incoherent and retarded and immediately discount the movie forever.

Obviously, a culture target as completely full of crap as the movie trailer was (and is) ripe for parody.

Just like George Lucas.

And, of course, the French.

I have to admit, the premise didn’t grab me. The word “existential” has been used as a blanket phrase for “lazy attempts at surreal humour by pseudo-intellectuals” for too long for me to trust it.

But I was pleasantly surprised. I didn’t exactly laugh out loud, but I still thought it was quite amusing, and a lot of fun to see good old Jean Paul Sartre’s self-fascinated existentialist drivel juxtaposed with classic scenes from the original Star Wars.

I have to admit that, as much of an unpleasant asshole as Sartre was, and how hopelessly self-indulgent and myopic a lot of his writings seem now, he did have a real talent for articulating depression. I certainly can relate to the sentiments in some of the phrases from this clip, and certainly feel like, for instance, I am adrift in a sea of infinite possibilities sometimes.

I just don’t go around acting like saying so is some amazing revelation.

Sarte was emo WAY before everyone else. But then again…. he was French.

Finally, here’s another personal fave from the anals of Internet comedy. Warning, this film contains a Tarantino type level of swearing.

The way I see it, you either think that film is hilarious and brilliant, like I do, or think it is stupid, repetitive, inane, and juvenile, like, it seems, most of the people I share this clip with.

Personally, I think it’s genius. From the creative way they did the opening credits to the very intelligent choice to take what is essentially a long conversation between two people and have it occur over many locations and situations in order to make the film more visually interesting, to the perfect timing and flow… everything about this film is high quality and hilarious.

But I admit, it’s comedy geek humour. You probably have to be a hyper verbal comedy nerd like myself to really get into it.

And, you know, be comfortable with long conversations about butt sex.

Welp…. guess what? I’m sick.

Woke up this morning feeling slightly more than moderately crappy. Got a sore, dry, scratchy throat, a lightly running nose, a heavy wet feeling in my upper chest, and that all time favorite, that general feeling of malaise that accompanies any self-respecting infection.

This one is manifesting as an overall tired and heavy feeling. Sort of like feeling like I have become heavier, but not quite. More like feeling some mad scientist villain has a gravity enhancing ray trained on me from above, delivering a steady stream of heavyness that falls on me like rain and pushes me down.

Oh, and I have an ear infection. Just found out. See, as it turns out, coincidentally, I had a doctor’s appointment already scheduled for this morning. So I woke up feeling bleah and thought “Well, I was only going there to get a pill refill, but I might as well tell him about this cold I feel coming on too. ”

So I told him, and he checked my blood pressure (a little high…. uh oh…. but I will worry about that later) and my breathing and then checked my ears.

He looks in the right ear with the otoscope and pauses a long moment, then checks the left ear, then asks me “Do you have any pain in your right ear?”

I thought about it for a moment then said “Well, it feels kinda hot in there right now. ”

He laughed and said “Well, you’ve got an ear infection!”.

It was news to me. Guess with the other ways I was feeling crappy, I didn’t notice that I had a bit of a hot ear going on.

Add to that the general “icky” feeling that comes from being sick, and the sick-sweat threatening to congeal on my poor body, and in general, I am feeling pretty damn ill.

I also feel kind of good.

I have no idea why. It seems downright perverse. Not that I am complaining, mind you. Being ill should always feel this good.

I would be worried that it meant I was running a fever, but the doctor checked. Nope, 36 degrees, totally normal. So this is not a fever induced euphoria. Besides, I feel good, but not THAT good.

Bet I still have some real interesting dreams today, though.

And as far as I know, I’m not a masochist, so it’s not like I am into pain and this is like a blessing for me, where I can just lay back and revel in my own suffering. (A masochist, of course, is merely an introverted sadist. ) I might be a little Gonzo sometimes in my definition of “fun” and I have even be known to be oddly cavalier about my own pain on rare occasions, but I do not, as far as I can tell, sick pain. I certainly don’t feel I need to suffer for my sins, or anything like that.

How could I have sins? I hardly ever do anything!

Plus, with no religion in my upbringing, I have never had anyone tell me what a sinful sack of shivering shit that I am just for being born, and so I am not carrying any of that bullshit around.

I bet there is a huge statistical correlation between BDSM and Catholicism.

Right now, the theory I am entertaining is that this illness has slowed down my faculties just enough so that my normal panoply of neuroses and complications can’t function, and so I am enjoyed a rare period of calm while my personal demons regroup and try to come to terms with the new austerity measures.

But as entertaining as that theory I am entertaining might be, the real answer is likely something far more basic and pragmatic : the war between my immune system and the invaders is producing various little aches and pains as a byproduct, and those, in turn, are producing a nice cozy endorphin high.

I must say, I do feel slightly stoned. Well, not so much stoned as just a little drunk. It’s a pleasant enough feeling, a sort of soft and mellow feeling like I’ve been wined and dined very well.

I have antibiotics for the infection. Good ol’ amoxycillin, the modern penicillin derivative, which I had had before a few times for various minor things. I am slightly concered because it usually has the effect of making me feel more tired than usual, and I already feel kind dragged down, but what the hell.

If I end up sleeping a whole lot, that can only speed the healing process.

To be honest, I could use the rest.

And should be destroyed.

Another utterly brilliant comedy premise, although I can imagine the work it takes to get the vocals to match the lip movements is considerable.

I am so jealous of these people with their internet friendly comedy premises!

Wouldn’t that be a great name for a terrible Sunday afternoon current events talk show?

Happy Mother’s Day, all you marvelous Moms out there! And what the hell, all the really shitty ones, too. Gonna give my Mom a call once this little missive is done, and hence, I am bracing myself for the usual mixture of pleasure, nostalgia, homesickness, and above all just plain missing her that talking with my mother usually entails. Overall, I am always very glad I have gotten to talk with my mother on the phone. It reminds me what a wonderful person she is, and how lucky I am to have such a weird, sweet, charming mother. But even more importantly, it reminds me that I come from somewhere, that I have roots and a family and a context, and giving how little contact I have with my far flung family, that’s something I need very badly.

I’m a poor correspondent, though I am getting better. She writes me letters, and I write a reply and send it back to her via my brother’s email address. I keep pestering her to get her own email address and join the new era and, most importantly, be able to get emails all the time from her beloved youngest (me!). But I guess she’s just a little too advanced in years to deal with all these newfangled Internet tubes. To her, the computer is for the little video games (Hello, PopCap) she likes, and that’s about it.

I keep telling her she should be one of those cool “hey look, an older person is using the Internet” people, but she’s not buying it.

Meanwhile, I am under more than the usual financial stress lately. I made a mistaken assumption when signing up for gameaccess.ca earlier this month and it has caused a minor cascade of humiliating slip ups in the tiny world of my personal finance that are stressing me out.

See, I knew that if I wanted to sign up for said service (a rent by mail Netflix style video game site), they would, quite understandably, want a deposit of fifty bucks. After all, without said deposit, they would be sending valuable video games to just anyone with a mailing address with no security at all, for free. There would be nothing to keep people from going “ha ha, free video game, suckers!”.

And I knew that once my ten day free trail was over, they would be charging me their usual $17.95 monthly fee for my first month’s service.

But somehow, quite illogically, I got the idea into my head that the monthly charge would come out of the deposit, and hence, did not put enough money on the old prepaid credit card to cover both. Hence, both the monthly charge and my precious Netflix charge have both bounced, insufficient funds, and I feel guilty and stupid for having messed up like that.

Oh well, it’s an easy enough mistake to make, I suppose. I will be fixing it tomorrow morning by stopping in to Money Mart (the issuer of said card) and putting more money on the card.

I am enjoying the game I current have rented from them anyhow. It’s Monster Hunter Tri for the Wii (natch) and it’s a lot of fun, although also quite difficult at times. You get to be a mighty monster hunter with a bigass sword (or hammer, or gun, or whatever) and hunt dangerous monsters and gather resources and in general play a highly stylized, JRPG type version of a monster hunter’s existence.

It’s got a lot of controls. It’s very much a Japanese style game, in that there’s a lot of options and menus and factors and so on. It all gets a little overwhelming at first, but I soon adjusted to the heavy level of player details and now I quite like it.

Also, it’s mission-oriented, and I really like that in games. I am an inherently goal oriented person, and so I am happiest when focusing my energies towards a well defined goal. “Sandbox” games do not appeal to me, and I am pretty comfortable with a game being completely linear, as long as it’s interesting.

Technically, I am an animal lover and hence should not enjoy the role of the hunter. But the makers of the game anticipated this, and all the monsters are very mean and ugly. They are all dinosaurs as well, or bugs, for the most part. And the ones that are non-aggressive, I leave alone.

Well, unless I am hired to hunt them.

Eh, it’s a living.

Feeling vaguely tired and crabby today. I have that very enervating feeling like my joints are all under-lubricated and my tired bones grind against each other with every move. Fun.

This, at the same time as an upsurge in hay fever symptoms. I’m beginning to think they are related. I have suspected for a long time that my allergy attacks are about a lot more than just the obvious sneezing and sinus congestion, and that it may be more of a full-body histamine response that causes an inflammatory response in every part of my body. Hence, sore joints, Irritable Bowl Syndrome symptoms, headaches (inflamed dura?), and any other inflammatory symptom you can mention.

If this is true, the necessity of adding a 24 antihistamine to my daily medications rises in priority, along with, possibly, some sort of over the counter anti-inflammatory in order to cool the symptoms.

Earlier, I was also enjoying this weird newish sensation where I feel coldly alert in a way that is fairly unpleasant. It’s not physically unpleasant but I find it emotionally disquieting because it is quite unlike my usual warm mood. It makes me feel almost reptillian and remote. If I try to sleep, no matter how tired I am, I just get less than an hour of extremely shallow sleep and wake up feeling even weirder.

It’s the sort of thing that makes me long for a super sleepy phase. That, at least, I am used to dealing with.

Compounding my stress, something is up with my prepaid Visa card. Transactions are bouncing when I am almost positive that the funds are there for them. I get the feeling there must be a charge I am not accounting for in my mental list of charges versus the $50 I put in there last month, and hence, there’s not as much in there as there should be.

If that’s the case, I am going to have to stop by Money Mart and put some more cash on the card, which I can ill afford. But it really came to a head today, because my Netflix payment did not go through, so now I got no Netflix to watch until I fix it.

That means that there is only YouTube via the Wii’s Internet Channel (in other words, their web browser) between me and the possibility of having to watch actual television.

Surely, we can come together as a nation and a people and agree that this is a tragedy that must be avoided at all possible costs.

I mean, that shit has like commercials and schedules and shit. Fuck THAT. What’s next, watching something just because it’s the best thing on? Like an animal?

Like I have mentioned before, money is stressing me lately. I live on a very thin margin, and that margin has been dwindling lately. I really wish I had a way to make some extra money. Maybe I should look into selling some stuff on eBay. What the hell, it can’t hurt to give it a shot.

Although, being the fragile and sensitive sort, if I put an item up for auction and nobody bids on it, I am going to feel terribly, terribly hurt. I do not handle rejection well.

I have said it before and I will say it again : being sensitive is not for wimps.

I just don’t like my life, really. I mean, it could be far worse. I could be a homeless crackhead ranting incoherently at passersby in the Downtown East Side, or dying of a wasting disease in a hospital. All my physical needs are taken care of, and I have great friends to hang out with and meet my social needs (though sometimes, I wish I knew more people so I could do that ‘networking’ thing and make some sort of connection with the world I wish to live in. )

But it’s still a fairly bare existence. I have absolutely no way of earning money and that is highly corrosive to someone’s self esteem over time. I truly think that human beings have a strong urge to find their role in society so they can contribute their unique capabilities to the collective, and I have no way of doing that. This blog as all I have, and that’s a fairly sad thing.

I feel like I have an amazingly complex and powerful mind, and a warm and caring heart, but a sad and tiny spirit that just doesn’t get me anywhere.

Good thing there’s self-pity.