Daily Archives: March 9, 2012

Friday and… whatever.

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Very alert readers will note that I am doing this entry much earlier in the day than normal. That is because I will be heading off to Vancoufur, the local furry convention, sometime in mid-afternoon (hopefully), so I have to do my writing a little early today.

As I mentioned yesterday, I will be at said convention all weekend, so odds are, there will be no posts for Saturday and Sunday. Sorry folks, but I am taking a rare vacation from my blog. Don’t worry, I will be back Monday with the usual semi-coherent drivel.

Also, as you will soon see, I am not doing my usual science reportage today. Sorry folks, I really wish I could do it, but I am super sleepy due to my sleep issues, and I just do not have enough of my marbles together to do it. I will have to catch up next week.

I had some extraordinarily detailed messed up dreams as a result of being in one of my tired periods, though. Here are some of the highlights :

  • Being chased by a mad scientist who was trying to catch me to experiment on me, and who had a big gas gun that shot big person-sized spheres of knockout gas that he would shoot at people to subdue them. I dodged the spheres of gas as he pursued me, and eventually tricked him into firing into the wind, which promptly brought his own gas back onto him, knocking him out. Served him right.
  • I kept seeing this giant (as in, a victim of gigantism) who I somehow knew in the dream was an expert at building things, and who kept building himself increasingly elaborate mechanical exoskeletons to help him with the problems caused by his disease. In the dream, I remember thinking how great it was that he was using his mind and his skills to make his life better, and I wished him well.
  • At one point, I was traveling around the world via something called the Secret Railroad, which only certain people knew about and which could get you anywhere you wanted to go way faster than any other way of transport. You had to know a bunch of secret signs, gestures, and so on in order to get access to it, and you had to sign documents saying you would keep the secret and not show it to anyone. This was ironic, because I was traveling with a guide, who was the person who had told me all about it. Unfortunately, I don’t remember anything about how this mode of travel actually worked, except for a vague memory of something kind of like a very high-toned subway system. Too bad. I am kind of curious to know how the heck that worked. Dream magic, I guess.
  • At one point, I had been given a thick wad of bills and notes written on notebook paper by someone (my guide? my roomie Joe? Dunno) and so I went to a bank to try to figure it all out. (Nitpick : I was in LA in my dream, but the money was clearly Canadian. ) I met with a very handsome and understanding bank manager, who showed me great patience while I emptied out the contents of my pockets and tried to put together the handwritten notes with forms ha had given me so I could access money in a bank account, and deposit the cash there as well. In addition to the money and the notes, there were these weird plastic fake-feeling slick things that were the size and shape of a one hundred dollar bill, but which looked more like a high security credit card, complete with a big hologram sticker. When the bank manager saw it, he rolled his eyes and said “Oh, that must be Wednesday’s edition. ” I think this was my brain’s impression of the new high tech plastic currency that will be taking over eventually. Anyhow, as I tried to figure out what to do, the usual dream confusion kicked in and I can’t ever seem to get my minds on all the notes plus the forms that need to be filled out at the same time. I just keep looking for things in my pile of stuff (which grows bigger all the time) and losing things and growing increasingly frustrated and embarrassed as I dork it up in front of this very professional and together kind of guy. At one point, while I am on the phone, the bank manager nudged me then dropped half a pill into my hand. I asked him what it was, and he just shrugged and smiled and said “Ask me when I get you home. ” And that was creepy. I then explained to him that I couldn’t take the pill because we aliens never knew how we would react to Earth drugs designed for humans. I think at that point in the dream I was a Tenctonese from Alien Nation the television series.

Sadly, that is where the dreaming ends. Just when I was an alien with a lot of money! Why do these things always end just when things are getting good? Oh well.

One last thing to share for today, a video for the British paper The Guardian which takes a rather novel approach towards depicting the modern world of social media and the rapid news cycle.

Namely, by showing an investigation into the Three Little Pigs and their grisly murder of the Big Bad Wolf. For those who don’t know, in the classic version of the fairy tale, after the Wolf discovers he can’t huff and puff and blow the third brick pig house down, he decides to sneak in via the chimney, but the clever third pig sees this coming and has put a big pot of boiling oil in the fire. You can figure out what happens to the wolf when he jumps down into the boiling oil.

Because classic fairy tales are harsh, man.

Anyhow, I thought it was a cute and attention-grabbing way to illustrate their point without actually delving into a real modern issue that might prove divisive or distracting.

That’s all. Seeya soon!

A Bag of Mystery

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When I was a kid, I was totally a sucker for those mysterious “grab bags” of candy (and who knows what else!) they would sell in candy stores and grocery stores. They were opaque bags around the size of a small bag of chips, and if you picked one up and shook it, their contents always had an intriguingly various and heavy feel to them, perfect for making a young me wonder “What could possibly be in there?”

The answer was invariably “a handful of random penny candy, a few weird foreign packaged candies, and a cheap plastic toy or two”, and as I grew older and more sophisticated, I realized that these things were cheaper if bought separately and I was never going to find something really amazing in there.

But for a while, I could not resist their allure. Why, just about anything could be in there!

And that’s what today’s entry is going to be. A mixed grab bag of ultimate mystery! Sure, it will likely have the same sorts of things that you normally find in my little missives.

But for right now, the bag is unopened and the possibilities are limitless.

There could be a big shiny golden coin in there!

Granted, it will probably be chocolate on the inside, but still! Mmmmm. Chocolate.

An Important Bulletin

First off, the local news : I will likely not be able to post on Saturday and Sunday, as I will be off at yet another convention. I will, in fact, be at VancouFur, the GVRD’s first ever furry convention, and so my access to a computer will be limited, plus, to be honest, and don’t take this the wrong way, my dear readers, but I plan on having too much fun to be bothered to sit down and write words for you people.

So sorry, I am taking a small vacation from posting. It still might happen, mind you. I will be lugging my ancient laptop with me, and I often have trouble sleeping at conventions so I might end up awake in the wee hours of the morning with nothing to do but make those word things happen.

But I just thought I should warn you nice folks beforehand that there might be a brief interruption in the regularity of my postings.

I am sure you are all devastated. But with faith, hope, and cuddles, the healing can begin.

Of course, this also means the cat (and the fox, and the wolf, and the bear, and the… ) is out of the bag regarding me being a Furry. Yes, one of those people, just like those freaks you saw in that one episode of CSI! Weird, huh?

Actually, we are nothing like that, and as a group, we generally hate that god damned CSI episodes. Us members of freaky little subcultures tend to prefer obscurity to that kind of erroneous and sensationalistic exposure, to be honest.

There is great freedom in being part of something that nobody from the outside world knows exist. You can just do your thing and there is nobody around to judge or interfere.

Of course, the tiny but highly visual minority of us who dress up in costume do tend to attract attention and make that whole “underground” thing more problematic.

But oh well. We can easily withstand being in the rapidly moving mainstream spotlight now and then. There are worse things than being the Freaks of the Week.

After all, it only lasts a week.

Bad Things Happening To Evil People, Part I

Moving on to the larger news-scape, we come to some truly wonderful, succulent schedenfreude, this time delivered by the self-proclaimed “Queen of Mean”, comedienne and Friar’s Club Roast stalwart.

Seems that because of Ms. Lampenelli vigorous and open pro-gay stance, those perennially petulant pricks at the notorious hate church the Westboro Baptist Church have been picketing her shows.

Because, you know, otherwise they would have to go get jobs or find something meaningful to do with their lives or even find a healthy, positive motivation for living instead of just hating the hell out of everything and anybody.

In response to their presence, Lisa Lampenelli came up with what I think is an absolutely brilliant counterstroke : she vowed to donate $1000 to a gay rights charity for every member of the Westboro Baptist Church who picketed her next performance.

She judges around 44 protestors were at said show, so she has donated $44,000 to Gay Men’s Health Crisis, an old and well-established anti-AIDS charity… and the best part is, she donates it in the Westboro Baptist Church’s name.

This, to my mind, instantly makes her the Queen of All Fag Hags. Way to go, Lisa!

Sure, not many of us could afford to do the same. But I bet we could do even better with a crowdsourced solution. Have enough people pledge to donate a dollar per protestor, and you could get some serious cash coming to the GMHC, and all courtesy of the WBC.

Wouldn’t that be grand? Heck…. wouldn’t that be many, many grands?

Bad Things Happening To Evil People, Part II

And finally, I would be sorely remiss if I failed to touch base with the continued complete and total destruction of Rush Limbaugh.

The link above is really one worth checking out, because it links to a marvelous list the nice folks at The Atlantic Wire are maintaining of all the advertisers who have yanked their ads from Rush’s shows due to his wildly evil and wrongheaded throwing around of two of the most emotionally loaded words in the English language, “slut” and “whore”.

Those are third rail words, you feculent formation of fulminating foam. You touch them and you die. People are saying “But he’s said all kinds of horribly foul, vile, and evil things before… what is so special about this time?”

Easy question. The answer is that “slut” and “whore” are, to women, the equivalent of “nigger” or “kike” to Blacks and Jews, times a million because of the incredibly deep psychosexual issues involved.

It doesn’t matter what other words were in that broadcast. It doesn’t matter what other words were in that sentence. Call any woman a slut, let alone a white, educated, completely and totally respectable thirty year old woman, and people will come down on you with the very kind of white hot unreasoning mob rage you right wing types have been exploiting for years.

And the best part of it is, this is a completely nonpartisan kind of rage. Even hard core right wingers will balk at calling some random woman a slut and a whore. There are some things you just do not do, and that is definitely one of them.

You finally did something too awful to ignore, Rush, and I could not be enjoying your public death any more. I blame you personally for starting the trend that completely destroyed American public discourse. You are the one who started the whole “war on liberals” meme, and it is decades beyond the time you faced a reckoning for that.

Roast in pieces, you sack of shit.