Today’s foobtastic article title is the work of the winner of a super secret contest held over the last three million years in a layer of reality where time means nothing, the speed of light is the same as that of a stiff walk into a light breeze, and parking tickets are given out by fat bottomed cherubs with kidney issues.

After millions of subjective years, billions of entries, trillions of rounds of judging, and hoompta-tri-quggi-dillions of thought molecules, the winner was a last-minute entry from a Doctor William Cosby, who describes his creative process as one of “inspiration, meditation, and flatulence” and declares his entry to be not only an episode title, but also a dinner mint, a floor topping, and an aggressive tone-poem attack on nonliteral transubstantiation without proper documentation.

Thanks, Doctor Cosby! Hope you enjoy your prizes of a thousand-week vacation to Ejaculation Island and a boot straight to the junk.

Onward with the foobs! Bit of a thin herd this week, but what the heck, the spirit of the fooble freedom fighters will carry on!

First up, I recently learned of the existence of a hilariously brazen and horrible scoundrel of the comic book industry named Rob Granito.

I first heard the name when going through the archives of a webcomic called Gutters and found this strip immortalizing Granito’s gall and bastardry by lampooning it.

This intrigued me. It sounded like this Granito guy might just be the kind of shameless shitbag that is fun to read about when you are not personally involved. And I haven’t been involved in the comics scene since 1990 or so, so he’s not peeing in my pool, so to speak.

So I looked him up, which was less than effortless because the guy doesn’t seem to have a Wikipedia page, or even an Encyclopedia Dramatica page, so there’s no one definitive place to go to get all the poop on this fecal accident of a fellow.

But this article here seems to have a fair bit of it.

This sack of low grade fertilizer’s modus operandi is to just plain claim other people’s artwork as his own. It’s the perfect crime for someone who is both lazy and shameless. And stupid, of course, because come on, dude, like you can get away with that shit in this day and age. There are millions of nerds who collectively (and sometimes individually) know absolutely every piece of comic art ever, along with who drew it, when they drew it, what kind of pencils they used, and what their cholesterol count was at the time. You will get busted so fast it will violate causality.

But hey, judging by the fact that the asshole in question wanted people to pay him $150 an interview based on how “everyone was talking about him”, apparently, he just wanted the attention and didn’t care how negative it was.

I have a small amount of respect for that, and for brazen hucksters in general.

Still, man, what a turdburger!

Our other major foob for the day is…. well, this thing.

As always, click to enlarge

You already want one just from the picture, don’t you? I did.

It’s possibly the most outrageously ambitious and imaginative concept car ever, and just to rub it in, it’s called…. get this… The Flake.

It’s like it’s daring you to take it seriously.

And listen to some of the details of this thing : for one, it’s covered in fur.

I am serious. Fur. The car… is furry. Fake fur, of course, thank goodness, but seriously, according to the designer, this special fur will make it more aerodynamic.

And, presumably, easier to heat in the winter, and nicer to cuddle up with.

All those flat surfaces can raise or lower automatically in order to change the actual shape of the vehicle to the best one for different circumstances, for example, lifting up the opposite side as you go into a turn.

Imagine being in a car that ripples and heaves around like that. It would take some bloody getting used to, to put it mildly.

Oh, and the wheels…. aren’t wheels. Well, not exactly. They are instead a ring of pads connected to a small central hub by more hydraulic tubes, so that the “wheel” can also shift shape to the optimal one for different driving conditions.

For example, at high speed, the bottom part of the “wheel” can flatten, exactly like those expensive Daytona racing tires, and hence the name of this wheel technology, the “D-Wheel”.

Shows they know that in order for your concept car to sound cool to people, it has to have parts that sound like something out of Speed Racer.

The article does not quite make it clear whether there is a working prototype of this car or whether it’s all just design ideas now, but I have to admit, I want to see one of these things in action. And I don’t normally care much about cars.

But come on. It’s a shape changing furry car! How can that not be cool?

This crazy old mossy mudball upon which we stubbornly cling and insist on calling “Earth” (because calling it “Dirt” would be declasse’)has spun on its axis seven times since the last time I emptied my bucket of science news jewels into your lap, milady, and so it must be time to do the whole thing all over again.

So here I am, your classically competent collator of cromulent contributions to the Knowledge of Humanity, once more sifting the sands of science for your very own personal benefit.

And what the hell, I will even share my thoughts on each item too. You lucky stiffs!

First up : scientists have discovered the blackest planet ever.

No racial message here, it is just plain literally the blackest planet ever observed, absorbing nearly all of the light that falls on it. It’s blacker than coal. It’s blacker than flat matte black paint. It’s just plain really, really, really black.

And at the center of this Jupiter-sized exoplanet of ultimate blackness, in the shadow of the blackest heart of the blackest planet around the darkest star ever, you find this guy.

And if you find him…. and if your skin is lighter than burned toast, you won’t…. but if you find him there, you will find him…. angry.

Admittedly, it’s debatable how important finding the blackest planet ever seen will turn out to be to science in general or astrophysics in particular. It will be interesting to speculate on what the heck it’s made of to make it so damn black, but really, the main interest is poetic, or aesthetic.

The idea of “the blackest planet ever” just seems made for rampant science fiction fiddling. Maybe it’s a giant energy collector for some energy-hungry aliens who live at the center and who need every single bit of energy that strikes the surface of the planet just to survive.

Maybe it’s the central temple of some void-worshiping energy beings who use it both for all their important religious ceremonies and for the execution of their worst criminals, who are tossed into That Which Eats All.

Or maybe it’s just the Locknar. Or that evil planet thingy from Fifth Element.

And the science fiction fodder just keeps coming, because the big news from NASA’s family of researchers is that we seem to have found some DNA from space in a sample from a meteoroid.

Caution is the watchword with a story like this, both because of the potential colossal hugeness of the find and the potential for a false positive due to external contamination.

I mean, this is Earth, we got DNA all over the damn place, from the microbes in the air to the whales in the sea and everything in between. You can’t get away from the stuff!

And, you know, you’re full of it too. DNA, I mean.

And we are not, alas, talking about a full double helix from some alien creature, only awaiting the right combination of genetic science and complete ignorance of science fiction B-movie plots to be brought to life before us.

Instead, it’s more like bits of chemicals that could become DNA. There’s two of the four DNA “letters” plus some other DNA-ish junk. But the important thing is that it proves that pre-life type chemistry in floating space rocks.

This would bolster the panspermia hypothesis, which posits that life on Earth might have actually gotten its start from materials that fell to Earth from space. A comet, a meteor, the glowing substance from a Happy Fun Ball, something like that.

One more item to round out the troika…. hmmm, I had it somewhere here…… there was one more, I am sure of it…. oh right, here it is. Rich people are evil.

Or at least, significantly more evil than the average person. Less empathetic, less altruistic, less compassionate, less caring. All the attributes traditionally associated with morality the world over are things they lack, or actively reject.

I have been saying for a while that wealth infantalizes. The richer someone becomes, especially when they reach the point of decadence where interpersonal relationships are replacing with dictatorial relationship and the ability to identify with your fellow humans becomes less and less necessary. The ability to have whatever you want, whenever you want it, spoils adults just as surely as it does children. In fact, it does it faster, because the person is basically spoiling themselves. And just like with children, it makes them selfish, impatient, quick to anger, rude, dismissive, and just plain unpleasant.

It makes them, in fact, infants. They get everything they want via crying in anger, they are cranky and fussy, they refuse to take care of themselves and make others do it, they are demanding and impossible to please because they basically want a return to the womb, where everything is provided for them without them even having to ask.

And infants, of course, lack empathy. They are sociopaths, because they do not even have a sense of people as valid beings, just as means to satisfying their desires.

And because they are so firmly stuck in the decadence trap, they are often deeply unhappy people who lash out against the world, blaming their inability to be happy with their wealth on others. And they see the world entirely in a self-based morality. Anything they don’t like is evil and bad and mean and done just to hurt them. There can never be any possible moral justification for doing the slightest thing that displeases them. That, in their infantile moral language, is a program that just does not compute.

And in our broken world, they have more political power than everyone else, and want the world turned into their personal playpen, ground down into a never-ending bottle of pablum for their greedy guts, and anything else is just plain wrong.

So…. um…. science.

Science is still cool. Right?

Between various despotic and autocratic pseudo-communist regimes using the word “decadent” to describe anything they didn’t like (including the corrupt Western idea that you need to eat food or you’ll die) and the way modern megacompanies plaster the word “decadent” on anything they want to charges you an extra 20 percent on because it’s so “sinful” (Try our sinful, decadent, indulgent douche rinse now!), the word “decadent” and, by extension, the entire concept of decadence has taken quite a beating in the last century or so.

Add in the historical complications created by a Catholic church that condemns decadence from a triple-gilded and bejeweled Vatican, and the equally crazy Protestant extremists declaring war on any idea that life should be even slightly pleasant for even a second in its name, and it’s no wonder that the very word has disappeared from the living language.

Nevertheless, I think it is a valid concept, and something to be understood so that it can be guarded against and avoided whenever possible.

The problem is not that it is not a valid concept but that it has been used without being properly defined and hence used in so many different context that it loses all meaning.

Here, then, is what I consider to be the proper definition of decadence.

But first, I am afraid, we need to start with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

It looks like this :

As always, click to enlarge

Those of you who have taken Psych 101 or Philosophy 101 in college have probably seen it before. It’s a very simple idea : that human being have a great many drives/needs besides the basic biological ones needed to keep us alive, and that these can be arranged in a rough pyramid, with the lower levels in large needing to be satisfied before an individual can concentrate on higher levels.

A classic example that anyone can understand is that if someone is starving to death, they are going to spend most of their time thinking about food instead of, say, whether their clothes are in fashion.

But while we all understand that level of the hierarchy, what we almost always fail to see is that this progression does not end with the usual amenities of middle class life, and that satisfying the needs on one level inevitably brings the ones of the next level into sharper focus. Thus, satisfying one level can actually make a person feel less happy, as now the needs of the next level are crying out to be filled.

The worst consequences come from when people, for whatever reason, cannot acknowledge or satisfy the newly awakened needs of the next higher level, and instead attempt to drown out the pain of the higher level need with the pleasures of the current level.

My definition of decadence, therefore, is this : the misguided attempt to satisfy a higher-level need via lower-level means.

The classic example of decadence serves this definition well : the excesses of ancient Rome.

We all know the stories. Orgies, feasts, palaces, vomitoriums, in a never-ending cycle that grow more and more obscene and grotesque until whole villages were burned simply to provide a backdrop for the next horror of decadent excess.

But if you look at Maslow’s chart, you will see that for all their attempts to make themselves happy, all they were doing was hyper-saturating their lower desires while completely ignoring the vast amount of the pyramid above them.

That is what drives the excess. The more the lower level needs are satisfied, the more painful the denial of higher level needs becomes, but without a way to acknowledge let alone satisfy higher level desires, the only remedy for the pain is to increase the dosage on the lower level pleasures.

This is akin to what would happen if you try to treat your broken arm by taking painkillers. The condition worsens and more and more painkillers are needed to function, and it’s clearly not a long-term solution. But if you can’t get to a hospital…

This is also what leads to the highly modern phenomenon of the person who “has everything” and finds themselves still unhappy. They did everything they were supposed to do, and have the nice house, the good job, the car, the spouse, the kids. But they are still not happy.

How can that be? It must mean there is something very wrong with them, right?

Wrong. Look at the chart. All those “American Dream” things only take you so far up the pyramid, and “having it all” actually just makes you feel your lack of success in satisfying the higher needs all the more keenly.

In fact, one of the most shocking and heretical conclusions that follow directly from my understanding of decadence and human needs is that money can only take you so far.

The higher up the pyramid you go, the less effective money is at satisfying the need. Money is great for providing your biological needs, and pretty good for providing high quality safety, shelter, physical pleasure, entertainment, and so on.

But once you start thinking about needs like feeling connected to your community, happiness in your personal relationships, and self-actualization, wealth can help with these a little bit, but they are going to be far more strongly determined by aspects of your own personality and character, and those of the people in your life.

And when wealth becomes great enough, it actually can actively work against some or all of your higher level needs being fulfilled by providing you with so much short term pleasure to distract you and isolating you from most of the rest of humanity.

And that is where decadence truly takes its toll. When a person is stuck on a lower level, the inevitable result will be increasing unhappiness, even despair, no matter how thoroughly they satisfy their lower level needs.

Once you understand this principle, a lot of middle class and upper class problems become fair more clear and easy to understand.

There is no final happiness…. only satisfying one level and starting on the next.

Anything else is just mindless decadence.

First, start with a main character your target audience will identify with, namely someone in their early to mid twenties who is either just out of college or just about to graduate at the beginning of the movie.

As our movie begins, have some profound but mundane personal tragedy occur to them. Someone they know dies, a long term relationship breaks up, they lose their job, they do something crazy in a moment of uncharacteristic extreme emotion that completely derails their life. It has to be something that your audience can identify with, so keep it realistic.

The unrealistic, possibly science fictional or magical realistic element will come in later.

During or after the mundane personal tragedy with which you open your original indie movie, you show your main character’s mundane, crappy life. Their crummy apartment in the city, their weird roommate, their colorful but believable friends and/or co-workers, their jerk of a boss, maybe a parent or two.

The idea is to paint a portrait of their lives as being just like your target audience’s lives, so the movie will feel like it is really about them. To this end, work in themes of not being able to get a job with your impractical college degree, feeling alienated in a world that you don’t get and who doesn’t get you, and if possible, work in music from your friends’ indie bands and references to whatever graphic novels you like.

Once you begin to need to have a plot, introduce your unusual, magic-realist element. This not only provides a hook for what otherwise would be obviously just another indie movie, but keeps the audience interested while you slowly work through your basic romantic plot.

Yes, your breathtakingly original indie movie that Hollywood could never make because they are too busy making the next “talking animals make poop jokes” classic will, in actually, just be a standard romance movie in different clothes and locations.

But first, you need that hook. It will have to be something strikingly odd and visually arresting that your main character, in order to show how cool and indie your movie is, will treat somewhat or entirely casually, like this is odd but not big deal.

Also, it should be something with a really obvious metaphorical nature. Your main character feels abandoned and ignored? They discover they can disappear into a magical realm where they are important. Betrayed and disillusioned by someone turning out to be a much worse person than previously thought? They discover they can now see the hidden demons that cause all the evil in the world.

Things like that.

Oh, and don’t worry about firmly establishing whether this is really happening or whether it’s just the main character losing his or her mind in a particularly cinematic way. Your audience will interpret your creative laziness in not making up your mind either way as carefully chosen ambiguity that shows how much you respect their intelligence because you are not spoon-feeding them the answers, but leaving your audience to make up their own minds about how real it all is.

This excuse has worked for at least fifty years, and shows no sign of wearing out, so don’t worry, you are covered.

As for the plot, if you have seen even one romance movie in your life, you already know exactly what the plot arc will be. Your main character meets someone, falls in love with them, they grow closer through most of the arc of the film, then near the end, there will be a sitcom style misunderstanding that drives them apart and prompt your main character to have to do a big grand romantic gesture, often referencing lots of little details from their relationship as shown up till now (“I checked every store in town for that brand of dental floss you said you liked, and when I finally found it…. I bought the whole case!”) in order to make your audience go “awww!”.

This romantic gesture will not seem to work at first, in order to drag out the tension that once extra beat, but then it will totally work, and the film will end with our two lovers finally totally getting together, for real, with an implied happily ever after.

Oh, and because your indie movie is “realistic”, you will need to sprinkle in some “realistic” awkward moments in the relationship, you know, like the ones you never see in movies, assuming you haven’t seen anything made after 1960 or so.

Oh, and to prove your indie cred, be sure to use as much weird cinemetography and unusual editing choices as possible. Track from a rooftop conversation to one on the street below. Have your character fall out of a window and land in bed, asleep. Why? Because you’re outside of the box, man! You’re free! You can do whatever you want! So you’re obligated to show everyone that you know it and give the film school types something to babble on about in their faux-industry lingo.

Well there you have it. Throw in some hip pop-culture laden comedy for your comic-relief everybody but the two leads, a B plot line for whatever character seems the most audience friendly, and you have yourself a brand new breaktakingly original, impossible to make in Hollywood, fresh and groundbreaking indie movie.

You know, just like all the other ones you like!

Been slowing learning the details of the rioting in London, and been talking about it with some friends, some British, some not, and it’s brought a lot of thoughts to mind about how these sort of things can happen, and what they mean.

A lot of people are wondering what the hell happened to make a whole generation of young people willing to riot like this. The news is full of interviews with rioters displaying their extraordinarily ugly vocabulary, mindset, stupidity, ignorance, and general vileness.

It’s easy and natural to lay it all at these people’s feet, and a lot of people are going to be drawing the wrong sort of conclusions as to what makes someone like that.

“Oh, we were too soft of them!” people will say. “Obviously, what these young people need is more harshness and cruelty in their lives, that always makes people more civilized. ”

It’s the shortest distance out of really thinking about things, and the quickest route to the fun of good deep righteous punitive anger. String them up! Yeah!

After all, chavs, and their equivalents worldwide, are horrible on nearly every level. They seem almost designed to make middle class people recoil in horror. There is little difference between the people rioting in London and the ones entertaining the masses on Jersey Shore every week.

But if we do not want these things to occur again, or spread to our own shores, we have to ask ourselves how people get like that. How do you get these ignorant, angry, ugly, stupid, senseless, violent people in the first place? What made them like that?

I have seen these people in my own home town, and talked to them, and thought about their lives and how they ended up like that, and I think I know.

Many people will blame government assistance, and in a sense they are right, but not in the simple-minded punitive rageful way they think. The problem is the long-term dependance that necessitates the assistance in the first place.

Being unemployed is depressing. Depression makes people less capable of work. Chronic unemployment in a region simply intensified this cycle. People lose the ability to hope for work or even to think of themselves as capable of work.

Long enough on public assistance, and they, being human beings, adjust to their new existence. You can only hope for a job for so long before that hope has to die before it kills you. And when that vital link to society known as work is gone, people lose their ability to cope. Human beings have a deep, driving need to take their place in society. When society says “We have no place for you, here’s a check, go away” it causes a kind of pain that drives people crazy in a very nasty, deep way.

The drive and intelligence dies in them, or is focused on the one form of advancement by merit left open to them, namely finding new and innovative ways to scam more money out of the system. Hope dies, and with it, the ability to progress as a person.

This is bad enough when it happens to adults with life experience to fall back on, memories of times when they were accepted into society and made to feel useful.

But if the problem persists, said adults raise children who inherit this profound lack of hope, who have never lived in a working family, and who grow up in the resulting milieu of drug use, alcoholism, sexual excess, domestic violence, abuse, and all the other horrible results of chronic poverty and unemployment.

When people can’t find work, they can’t grow up. It’s truly that simple. And so they end up suspended in a perpetual angry adolescence, filled with rage they don’t know how to name at a society they know is to blame but can’t explain how.

Society failed them. That doesn’t make them any less responsible for their crimes, but it does lead to a possible solution.

We have to recognize, as a society, as a globe, that chronic unemployment is an emergency-level problem. People going jobless for a long time is a crisis that goes far beyond simply feeding and clothing them.

We have allowed the system to collect these people with the best of intentions, but without the understanding and vision to know that what people need is not just cash, but work.

Hire them. Put them to work. And not just “dig a hole and fill it up” work, get them doing something with visible results, something where they can feel a sense of accomplishment, like they earned their paycheck by contributing to society.

FDR had the right idea. Public works. Those men built things people would use for generations, things that are still in use today.

Sure, some of them will balk at first. They are terrified to hope that they can actually have a place, a real place, in society. They have grown used to the sad life of the unemployed. They see attempts to get them to work as attempts to make them grow up.

And they are right.

But it’s the only cure. And in the long run, it is far cheaper to put them to work than to put them in jail.

We just have to be willing to see past our anger and disgust, slow down our urge to punish and control, and address the real problem.

People need work. And when the private sector fails them, the public must step in.