First, here’s a link to that cartoon about poop that I mentioned before.

It’s called Aachi and Ssipak and it was released in 2006. I’ve watch a little over half an hour of it, and I must say, it’s amusing. The potty humour is, thankfully, non-explicit (at least so far), and so it is just a lot of people referring to defecation and “the holy anus”.

It’s highly stylized and reminds me a little of the underground comics scene of the 70’s in tone. It has that sort of anarchic madness, that feeling of life at full throttle, that the best of the underground cmics artists (and underground animators) depicted.

Doing awesome things because they are awesome.

Square : Why is there a big titted demoness on the side of your van?
Hip : Because big titted demonesses are COOL, man!
S: And why is she on fire?
H : Because fire is COOL, man!
S: And why is she wielding a chainsaw sword?
H : Because chainsaws and swords are both cool, man!
S :And why is she using it to gut some guy wearing a bowling shirt with “Steve” written on it?
H : ….because Steve’s a DICK, man!

And I have to admit, the movie’s anal fixation gets some highly immature laughs from me. So does the crazy poopcentric future it creates. Early in the movie, we are given a glimpse of the basic way their society operates. There’s port-a-potties where when you poop, it dispenses a JuicyBar, and those are super addictive, so presumably, that’s how Everyone Poops.

Oh. And there’s evil Smurfs with diapers on their heads.

Next up, we have a PSA about the idea that nobody goes hungry in America.

Funny how the people who say that the most are the people who want to do the least to make sure it’s true. They have a childlike faith that hungry people can just feast on the Magic That Is America, I guess.

Whatever cancels out the notion of guilt or duty, they will swallow.

When I was a kid, there was this kid in my elementary school class named Jason, who, looking back, must have come from a very poor family. I didn’t understand that at the time, though, any more than any of the rest of the kids did, and so we all thought it was pretty funny when Jason showed up for school with mustard sandwiches (just like it sounds, just bread and mustard) for lunch.

Looking back, of course, that’s not funny at all. His family, which I gathered was a recently post-rural family (grew up on a farm, but then…. there was no farm), must have been damned hard up to send him to school with that. And it’s not exactly nourishing either.

So Jason, if you are still out there, I am sorry if I laughed at your mustard sandwich lunch. I’m also sorry that I never liked you because you seemed stupid and irritating.

Like I was one to judge others at that time.

Our next feature is this rather marvelous short film. Warning, it’s nine minutes long and it’s a monologue, so it is quite stagey, despite not having been filmed on a stage and having actually quite high production values for a monologue.

I don’t mind that, but some do.

It’s a tad obvious and definitely quite earnest, but the kids are all about the New Sincerity now and I support them in that one hundred percent.

After all, they are just picking up where our Gen X cynicism left off. We hated everything because it was all so fake. They are keen to create things which seem real to them.

So I will forgive them for a lot of over-earnestness and pretension. They are Young, after all, and that’s something this tired old world needs like the desert needs rain.

And besides, if we’re going to change the world for the better with a democratic revolution, who do you think will be the front line soldiers?

Not us decrepit old farts, that’s for sure. We don’t have that kind of energy any more. All we really can do is cheer from the sidelines and offer them whatever advice they might find useful.

They have their own destinies to find, now. Some say they are the new Greatest Generation, but I think that is a bit too much pressure to put on a whole generation.

And they got enough pressure growing up from their helicopter parents!

Good luck and God speed, kids.

Finally, here’s the world’s most politically savvy 12 year old boy.

Amazing, isn’t he? Even if he is mostly just parroting back things he has heard adults say (and I am not saying he is), it still takes quite a good brain to keep all that straight and to understand what he is saying well enough to say it with conviction.

When I was twelve, I only had a dim idea that politics even existed. If I thought about it at all, it would have been “that boring stuff that Dad watches on the news” or “that thing that makes everything on TV suck when there’s an election on. ”

I didn’t become the political animal that I am today until high school. Like most kids, I ignored the serious world of adults until I was old enough to understand them.

I would have known some of what was going on in the world at that age, because I did watch the news with my Dad sometimes and there is always a certain amount of news that filters down to you via popular culture, especially if you are a hungry little information sponge like I was at the time.

Plus, you know, even game shows and cartoons are interrupted by News Breaks sometimes.

But I sure as hell would not have known as much as that kid seems to know, and what I did know I would not have had the interest or the wisdom to form an opinion about.

When you’re a kid, you’re a spectator. You don’t get into the game until later.

Well, I guess that’s it, all the video clips I have to show you today.

See ya later, folk… ah, I’m just messing with you. Here’s today’s vid!

Once more, I took something I wrote about ages ago and revived it in video form. It feels sort of cheap to do that, but I always add to my previous conclusions and refine my observations in the process of doing the video, so it’s just a matter of making a new version of an old thing.

And I think my thesis that obesity comes from an outdated evolutionary model that used to be a really effective survival package, is a damned good one. It explains where obesity comes from and sheds light on how someone can end up with such counterproductive and unhealthy instincts.

What do you think, folks?

Our first thing is about a particular kind of mouse.

It’s called the grasshopper mouse, of the species Onychomys, and it looks like this.

It’s like a fuzzy little potato!

Awwww. Isn’t it adorable? It’s so fuzzy and rodenty. It looks completely harmless. One would think that something so small and inoffensive would be at or near the very bottom of the food chain.

But you’d be wrong, because this mouse is a motherfucking ninja that can kill and eat things far, far scarier than itself and does so with game so tight it squeaks.

I mean, check this shit out. Trigger warning : if for some reason you love centipedes and would hate to see one lose a fight to something out of Redwall, don’t watch.

He made fucking BUG POWDER out of that huge scary centipede! And he did it with such speed, skill, and ferocity that I can’t help but just gape in awe.

That little fucker is so fast and nimble that he can jump backwards just enough to evade the centipede’s strike and then counterattack instantly with a series of bites.

This species even gives out a shrill battle cry right before attacking, which is technically meant to stun and confuse their pray but in my opinion, it’s also to warn Hell that another victim is coming.

These badass rodents are even immune to the venom of their prey, so in the unlikely event that centipede landed a bite, the mouse would be all “‘Tis but a scratch!” and proceed to kill it even harder.

Unsurprisingly, the grasshopper mouse is entirely carnivorous, and can use its deadly ninja magic to defeat and devour grasshoppers (duh), snakes, spiders, scorpions, worms, and even other mice.

And possibly Bruce Lee.

And it uses stealth to stalk and kill its prey just like any ninja would. It even defends its territory by growling like a mouse sized wolf.

And to think, I used to think shrews were the most badass rodents in the world.

Next up, we have a quite lovely video where friends and family of LGBTI people talk to their Year 7 selves and tell them what to expect.

I was a little confused by the Year 7 talk. Sounded like they were talking to a version of themselves that was a lot older than seven years old. But then I remembered that in the UK and Australia, they say “Year” where we would say “Grade”.

So these are Grade Seven kids, not seven year olds. That makes a lot more sense. Instead of seven, they would be around thirteen, and that’s definitely the year of transition into adolescence for the majority of kids so it’s a very special time.

I guess they call them “tweens” now.

I remember my first day of Grade Seven. It was also my first day of intermediate school (otherwise known as junior high)and all us kids were seated on the grass as the principal of our new school (which was right across the street from our old one…. we could have hit Parkside Elementary with a rock) tried to impress upon us that junior high was different than elementary school and that we would be expected to maintain a higher level of behaviour here.

However, his speech lacked specifics, so I soon lost interest.

If I could talk to my Grade Seven self, I would tell him that it really does get better. Intermediate school is better than elementary school (which had been Hell) and high school is even better than that.

You will even get some friends outside of school. They are not exactly top quality friends, but they can act as your key to wider socialization. Try to relax around people, and try not to be such a whiny wimp. Go ahead and get hurt. Stretch your boundaries. Get some life experience under your belt and stop worrying so much about what the smart thing to do is.

Just get out there and mingle!

Finally, we have today’s vid, which is a video version of an essay I wrote aaaaages ago.

It is a satirical work intended to fruitfully irritate and inflame people into thinking about our system of “democracy” and how it is really quite pathetic that we think we control our own society by picking which person to send to the Capital and get co-opted every four years.

As a means of control, it’s extremely weak. We don’t even get to tell the system what we want. We just get to pick the person who will play a tiny part in the decisions made by a vast body of other hacks who are also being corrupted by a lifestyle of prestige and privilege, and preening under their new social status as the rich and powerful do everything they can to make them feel like one of them, no longer one of the dust eating clods back home.

It’s a ridiculous vision of democracy on the face of it, and the only reason we don’t see it is that we are told that what we have is democracy, period. There was monarchy and then there was democracy and this is it. You have democracy. You live in a democracy.

The idea that there could be more democracy is blocked by the idea that you already have democracy, or so you are told.

But what you really have is democracy flavoured tyranny, and don’t you forget it. The moneyed elites permit the current form of democracy precisely because it poses no threat to them and provides them with docile workers who don’t fight for freedom and democracy because they are sure they already have it.

If the One Percent seriously thought there was a chance that democratic government threatened their position and power in any way, you would seem their attack dogs sink their teeth into everything that is part of democracy (without ever attacking it by name, of course) right away.

Kind of like what we have right now.

I think we should give them something to really be afraid of.

Direct democracy. The people are the parliament and there are no more politicians.

Sounds nice, doesn’t it?

Sorry folks, no science tonight. Today’s video took a lot longer to make than I thought it would (four hours and counting) and so I am rather pressed for time, and as a consequence I don’t have time to read all the science articles that I have bookmarked and then choose the Top Six.

So it’s stream of consciousness tonight, folks. It might not be the most professional or coherent form of writing, but it’s fast.

I do have a few things to share. Like this hella fun bit of video.

The song’s adorable, the singer is SUPER adorable, and the kitten is, of course, adorableness itself.

And I am pretty sure that having a kitten bomb your vid like that is not anything someone could plan, which makes it all the more delightful.

It’s slightly possible that the kitten did it in rehearsal, I suppose, and our cute songstress hoped it would happen again because of course, nerds + cats = YouTube hit galore.

But odds are, it was just a happy accident that we all get to enjoy. The kitten obviously needed someone to play with and was not about to make that optional.

Ah, kittens. Such adorable fuzzy lil cracked out ninja commandos.

Other than being pressed for time (how hard do you have to press someone to make the time come out, anyway?), today’s been decent. Got a GST cheque yesterday for $95. Saweet. That’s the kind of thing that is bound to lighten your mood, especially if like me you live on a little under $700/month.

What can I say, poverty sucks. My therapist keeps bugging me to apply for full disability, which would mean another $200/month plus the ability to buy a yearly all zones bus pass.

Both of those could mean a lot to me. I more or less just scrape by on what I get now, so any increase of income would have a huge impact on my life.

And the bus pass might be just the thing for opening the door to exploring the world more and desensitizing me from my agoraphobia. I picture myself heading out one day with the plan to stay away from home for a certain amount of time. I could do anything I like, just not at home.

And over time, I would increase the duration of my outdoor adventures until, eventually, I get a hotel room and stay overnight all my myself.

That sounds pretty awesome, doesn’t it?

So that’s all the reasons why I should get right on getting that done. Go to the welfare office, pick up the form, fill out my part, take the rest to my therapist who has already said he will fill out the doctor portion for me, submit the form, wait for the inevitable rejection (they reject almost everybody, figuring if you want it bad enough, you will appeal), go through the appeal process, and then maybe, just maybe, improve my life a whole bunch.

Yup. I have some very logical reasons for why I should do all that.

Doesn’t mean I will, though. That’s life with depression for you. There is still a lot of bad wiring in me that makes it hard to translate desire into action.

And so it goes.

Here’s a brilliant bit of comedy from The Onion which is sure to get them in a lot of trouble.

Genius. And very dangerous. A lot of people are just going to react to the content of the video, a truly horrible interpretation of the Wizard of Oz, and not get the joke because the joke is in the context.

To me, it is clearly a satire of pop culture analysis itself, and is making fun of the sort of overblown language and mushy minded thinking that often goes into that kind of thing by using the tools of pop cultural analysis to reach a truly awful conclusion that almost nobody could accept.

Thus, they expose the flaws inherent in that kind of thinking and challenge people to pay attention to the content of what they are hearing and not just accept or reject it based on how it sounds.

Admittedly, though, I can see that not everybody is going to see it that way.

But I do, and I love it!

Finally, here’s the vid that took me so damned long to make today.

The main reason it took so long was that the first hour of production was spent sorting out technical problems. Mother. Fucking. Technical problems.

God damn it, why can’t thinks just work?

First, as is its habit, my webcam decided to just stop working. Black screen. Computer says all the connections are good and the device is working fine but I might as well have shoved it up a miner’s asshole for all the picture I am getting.

So then I had to reboot, which ate up a bunch of time. Then, for whatever reason, the program I usually use for the primary recording of my vids, Cyberlink Power Director, shit the bed and crashed and was not inclined to come back.

Very well. I had been meaning to try out the program that came with the cam anyhow. So I booted that up, plonked in a few useful defaults, checked out the hilarious “special effects” the cam can do (not useful, but amusing), and used it to record the raw version of today’s vid.

I then import that into Ulead Video Studio, the program I use to do all the cutting and trimming and adornment for my vids, and everything seems to be going OK, but then I realize that the video is out of sync with the audio and hence useless.

Fine. It’ll be just me talking with a picture of a penny on the screen. But then, it seems like Ulead (or my computer) can’t handle whatever format the previous program used and as a result, the video only plays back in fits and starts, which is hell on the nerves, especially when you are trying to edit.

So I just output the whole thing back out in a more friendly format, re-import it, and work on THAT instead. And then… I could finally get back to working on the fucking thing.

Argh. Stress. Oh well, we must suffer for our art, and I proud of myself for staying bloody-mindedly determined throughout the whole ordeal.

God dammit, this video was going to get MADE!

And it did! Yay me.

Talk to you later folks!

You know the drill.

First off, we have this lovely news story about how Walmart is threatening to move out of Washington, DC if the city passes a living wage bill which works like this :

The Washington, D.C. city council voted in favor of a bill last month, by an 8-5 margin, to institute a living wage of $12.50 for employees of corporate retailers “with sales of $1 billion or more and operating in spaces 75,000 square feet or larger.”

Walmart, being the total cockpunting pustules that they are, are having none of this, and are threatening to halt plans on three new stores in the DC area if the bill actually becomes law.

To which I say, don’t let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya. Good riddance to bad employers! If you can’t afford to pay your workers a living wage, then you do not deserve to be in business and you certainly do not deserve to be a profitable business.

And those jobs you are threatening to take away? They are worthless. The Internet resounds with reports of Walmart employees having to use food stamps (now call SNAP) and other social safety net systems just to survive on what Walmart pays. What’s more, Walmart counts on those programs. They are part of the business plan. We will pay our employees dirt and get away with it because the government will pay the rest.

So go ahead, Walmart. Leave. Your profit margin has no rights here. If you want to make money in DC, you will pay a decent wage.

It’s up to you to decide if less profits is better than no profits at all.

And bravo to the DC city council for having the nerve to stand up to big business like this! All you have to do now, people, is not blink. Put the bill into law and make it stick. Show big business that the people are still in charge of their own society.

The economy serves the people, not the other way around.

But enough of that vitriol. Now we shall take a break from seriousness and depart on a magical journey to the mystical realm where anything is possible…. a place known as… Japan.

I really hope that there is a full movie of this out there somewhere and that this is not just a hilarious fake trailer for a fictional movie.

Not that I would watch the movie, necessarily. It couldn’t possible live up to the trailer. But I would like to believe that it is out there, somewhere, being marvelously fucked up.

But don’t go putting this one in your “WTF, Japan?” file as it is clearly fucked up on purpose, and indeed, seems to be outright mocking Japan’s reputation for fetishy perversions. I love that.

I also love the idea of superheroes powered by kinkiness. The superhero world is often stiflingly vanilla. Sure, the chicks all have big tits and revealing costumes, and the men are all uber buff shoulder monsters, but nobody ever actually has sex. And if they do, it’s only alluded to like in old movies, and depressingly traditional.

Even hyper violent comics fill with blood, gore, death, and horror would never dream of showing an actual penis. Phallic symbols only, please! No actual phalloi!

So I would love to see a superhero tale where sex is not only allowed, but it’s front and center, and central to the plot.

I am sure there is porn out there like that, but porn sucks. I mean something with a real plot, a good story arc, decent acting, and so forth.

I am telling you, if I was a billionaire, I would make the most gorgeous smut in the world. Marvelous, energetic, sex-positive, joyous porn with beautiful sets, top notch acting, expert cinematography, and a message of total sexual liberation for all.

You can have what you really want! It’s OK! Everybody does here. Whatever you really want, someone here wants to give you!

It would be like Fantasy Island but with real fantasies.

Hopefully, you all feel better now, because my vid today is about depression.

Like I say in the vid, I have avoided dragging my depression into my vids, but I got back from today’s therapy appointment, where I had talked a bunch about emotions as information and how in order to complete the emotional cycle and actually release an emotion, someone has to receive said information, and that got me thinking, and I decided to go ahead and do an honest talk about my own depression as today’s vid.

And it felt good. It felt, in fact, kind of like a confession. Like I got something off my chest and now that it is out there, I can stop feeling ashamed of it. It’s the truth and it’s nothing to be ashamed of and by telling that to others, I come a lot closer to believing it myself.

Funny how that works. Sometimes we need others to believe us before we believe ourselves.

Odds are, I will do more of them. I am in an introspective mood lately and I feel like letting things out. Recovery is like one long and difficult birthing process, where through pain and sweat and blood, we give birth to our demons and thus rid ourselves of them.

That might sound a little gross, but trust me, it’s not as bad as the first metaphor I thought of.

Talked with my therapist today about my gender issues. I told him that certain things made me feel like I was between genders. He disagreed, and said I am not between genders, I just have a rather traditional and culturally received notion of what it means to be a man.

And he’s right. It’s a lit embarrassing for an enlightened liberal intellectual like myself to realize that I have been the victim of cultural stereotyping, but I have.

I still don’t feel like I have quite hit the nail on the head with this, though. I know that there is a great sadness and anger, a crying rage, attached to this issue in my mind but I have not yet found the way to release it.

I will keep looking.

Videos. Mine last. The usual.

First we have a rather good PSA. It’s made by a group dedicated to fighting sexual assault, but its message about gender stereotyping is far more universal than that.

Certainly, as a gay man who has never felt like male gender roles fit him at all, and who has a lot of aspects to his personality which would be considered stereotypically female, I respond very well to any message about men not being bound by gender stereotypes either.

I feel deeply uncomfortable about my gender expression. I am slowly coming to the conclusion that, as in so many things, I will have to make up my own gender role and go on from there.

For years, I have just glibly deflected the issue with a joke like saying “I’m a me!”, but just saying “I’m a whatever I happen to be” does not resolve the issue. Especially not when you are in a period of heavy identity construction like I am right now.

Glib evasions aside, you have to know who you are in order to be happy. You have to know it and you have to accept it. That doesn’t mean you have to like all of it, but you have to accept that it is you, as you are right now, and denial about that fact only makes your problems worse.

I was a boy who cried easily. That is a major problem if you are male. We are taught not to cry, that it’s a sign of weakness, it means you are a wimp.

And “wimp” is pretty much the male equivalent of “bitch”. It’s the worst thing you can be. So much madness and hate packed into a one syllable word.

The only reason “fag” is used as an insult by men to men is that “fag” is assumed to be the absolute worst form of “wimp”. You are such a wimp that you are basically a girl, except not, because then you would have a valid gender identity of your own.

Instead, you are at Gender Conformity Zero, which is far far worse.

And what the hell, while we are delving deep into the bitter darkness, let’s tackle race.

Tim Wise delivers a brilliant talk about the myth of whiteness. Everything he says corresponds to something I have thought about for years but never quite put into words, and of course, that is exactly what a public articulator does.

And he’s right. Whiteness is entirely bogus. It was an invention of North American pioneers who wanted to really emphasize how different they were (and felt) from the darker hued people they were busy enslaving and robbing of their land.

As usual when it comes to us humans, the only thing that really gets us to band together and overcome our differences for the common good is an outside threat. All these paler skinned people set aside the differences that back in Europe would have set them at each other’s throats and made a solemn vow that it didn’t matter if you were French, or British, or Dutch, or whatever.

All that mattered is that you were more like each other than you were these dark faced inhuman heathen savages who should be glad we are here to rescue them from their pagan misery.

So in a sense, it was progress. The arc of history has always bent towards human beings organizing themselves into larger and larger groups. It is beyond tragic and getting into the realm of the downright absurd that it took the need to band together against the people they were repressing in order to do it, but the fact remains that this myth of the “white race” (a scientifically hilarious concept) actually helped to unify many disparate peoples who were still killing each other back in Europe.

And this time, said peoples went beyond the conquering empires which brought them together in the first place, and made their own empire for oppression and slaughter of a new kind of people.

That’s innovation, that is.

And finally, of course, there’s my little contribution.

Thought it would be fun to put a bunch of nerdy type jokes up on YouTube. Those were all that I could remember when I was making the vid. Sure, I could have looked up more on the Internet, but where is the fun in that? As is, I put myself through needless pain and suffering by cudgeling my grey matter for the ones I did remember.

I am just no good at that kind of memory. I am great at remembering things when prompted, which is why I always tested so well. Things remind me of things all the time. It gets a little tricky sometimes, to be quite honest about it.

But I am not good at just remembering everything I know about a certain subject. This is especially true when what I am trying to remember has no narrative structure to give it a sequence or meaning.

I was just lucky that when I was a kid, rote memorization had been almost entirely removed from education as a Bad Thing We Don’t Do Any More. I am pretty sure I would have been able to do it, but I would have utterly hated it.

What a disgusting way to learn! Just cramming the fact into your brain undigested like that. It gives me mental indigestion just thinking about it. I am definitely the sort of person who heavily processes everything before it is added to my mental structure. Everything has to find its way to the right place, congruent with the rest of the structure, or it gets rejected.

In other words, I check everything for consistency with what I already know before accepting it. However, the existing knowledge does not always win. I am open-minded enough to let new information change the existing structure, especially when the new information resolves other conflicts.

That all sounds so clinical. I’m a really warm and sweet guy, honest!

I just have a brain like a diesel computer.

But I enjoyed making it! More on that later.

First off, this Dustin Hoffman interview clips is making the rounds.

First, he explains the origin of the movie Tootsie, which started from a brilliant and insightful question : how would I be different if I had been born the opposite sex?

Not how would it feel. How would I, the person that I am, be different if I had been born female instead of male? I can’t help but imagine that my life would be radically different.

Not necessarily worse, just not the same. Might even be better, honestly. Assuming that many basic aspect of my character would remain the same, I might do better being a chatty, warm, intelligent woman.

Then again, menstruation. Yikes.

Personality and self are really what it all boils down to, though, isn’t it? We like to think that the basics of our personalities are fundamental to us and unchanging. And to a certain extent they are. Babies, after all, show distinct personality traits practically from birth. There is a strong scientific argument for personality being something we are born with.

But I can’t help but think that being born female would have led to so many life choices and events that would be impossible for a male me, or at least very unlikely, and that would lead to, if not a totally different person, a totally different arrangement of the same basic elements.

Of course, the real meat of the clip is Hoffman’s massive realization that if he, with the best makeup and clothes possible, could still be the sort of woman men ignored without even knowing it… and he knows that he is an intelligent and interesting person…. how many wonderful women had he ignored because they were not attractive enough to the eye?

I think “brainwashed” is a good term for him to use, because it gets across the feeling he must have had that he had been fooled somehow, hypnotized into not seeing what was right in front of him.

What a powerful revelation that must have been! I wonder what his wife thought of it.

I picture her rolling her eyes and saying “Well, duh!”. But that’s just me.

Next, we have this Amy Schumer piece about how women interrelate. Warning, while brilliantly written, it is also quite harsh, especially the ending.

Honestly, that ending sucks. It makes no sense in terms of the skit. She totally dropped the cow there, and she dropped it into the sad sensationalistic meat grinder of modern cheap comedy.

It would have made a lot of sense if the ladies had attacked the one who just said “thanks”, or screamed at her for being a stuck-up bitch, or waited till she left and then just piled on the departed cheery person with comments about what a bitch she is and how they all hate her.

Mass suicide made no sense at all.

But otherwise, I think the writing is completely brilliant. The things the women say to run themselves down are marvelous.

“I look like a golden retriever’s dingleberry.
“I look like a whore locked out of her apartment. ”
“Fuck YOU, I look like a cow. Indian people are trying to worship me. I sleep standing up in a field. ”
“I’m legally retarded. On my SATs, I just drew a picture of a house on the first page, and ate the rest. ”

That is some serious LOLs there.

It builds well too, and keeps the ball in the air by switching targets. A dye job, a dress, a hat, and so forth and so on.

And the ladies deliver it all perfectly, really nailing the contrast between the singsong cadence of the compliments and the monotonous and staccato cadence of them putting themselves down.

I would, of course, find that shit impossible to endure. I would neither put myself down after someone gave me a compliment, or put up with people who felt the need to do it.

Just say thank you, and leave it at that. That is actually the best choice.

Finally, here is today’s vid.

It was a lot of fun to make, and with Ulead, not that hard either. I’ve been planning on doing a simple music video for one of my original compositions for some time, and today I finally did it.

Doing something colorful and abstract like that was a good first step. That way, I did not get trapped in indecision by trying to figure out what real world images best represented my music.

Fucked if I know. It would be one thing if my works had lyrics. Then you would have words to provide the structure. But when it’s purely instrumental, I would rather not try to translate it into a visual medium, and that is the only sort of music video that I am interested in making.

After all, that’s the kind of music video I like. Anyone can make a music video that has nothing to do with the song. A real music video is an extension of the song into the visual.

But I am, fundamentally, a little too left-brained for translating the purely musical into images, at least, not with the sort of fidelity I would be demanding of myself.

So, abstract it is, at least for now. The colors and their motions have nothing to do with the music. I am no synesthete. Numbers don’t have colors to me, I can’t taste a musical chord or smell words. (Can anyone smell words? That would mostly suck. )

But I figure that if you can’t say what the music is saying, don’t say anything, so all I did was make some pretty video wallpaper to watch while listening to the song.

Maybe I would have been better off just putting a single image up. That is what a lot of people who post music to YouTube do. Usually it’s cover art, and I don’t exactly have that because it’s not like I put out an album or anything.

But I could fake it.

Tomorrow : who knows? Maybe The Deal Episode Six. Maybe another music video. Maybe something so weird and wonderful that even I can’t imagine it… yet.

Onwards and upwards, folks!

We’ll get to my vid eventually, but first, other stuff.

Like this. This ain’t making me happy.

There is already a nearly perfect version of Slaughterhouse Five. It was released in 1972, it stars Michael Sacks, and it is pretty much a direct translation of the book into movie form.

I am serious. A book that many people thought was unfilmable because it is so “weird” was translated directly into a movie by the director, George Roy Hill . The book is actually quite cinematic in nature and not at all hard to make a movie out of, although not exactly cheap to make either.

And now Andy Kaufman and Guillermo Del Toro want to make a new version. Kaufman I tentatively trust. He wrote Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and I loved that. But what I loved most about it was its extraordinary visual style that somehow feels more real than any movie I have ever seen.

And he didn’t have anything to do with that.

However, he was also the producer of Being John Malkovitch, a great movie, as well as Adaptation, a pretty good movie with a heavily layered plot, and that shows he has what is needed to do Slaughterhouse Five (not nearly as complicated) justice.

So I am willing to trust him…. somewhat. But Guillermo Del Toro is a terrible director. Every movie he makes demonstrates that he has a talent for rich and impressive visuals but no talent for coherent storytelling, and I shudder to think of what Vonnegut’s story would turn into in his hands.

The only thing I can think of that they could improve over the 1972 version is the special effects for the Tralfamadore sequences, and that’s just where they would let Del Toro splash his baroque nonsense all over the scene and completely ruin it.

So yeah. Not happy about that. The things that happen after the author dies…

Then there’s this juicy little incident.

To me, it’s obviously not an actual kiss. It is what happens when two dudes try to do the “I am all up in your face” nose to nose macho thing, and one of them makes an unexpected move.

It’s no more a real kiss than accidentally touching someone’s butt is sexual assault. It’s an accident, and nothing more than that.

I’m not saying it wasn’t hot, I’m just saying it was not a real kiss.

But hey, it’s progress.

And then there’s this bit of truly spectacular satirical journalism.

It’s about Detroit. So, brace yourself.

I love this piece because it is done with such a deft touch. It makes its points in a somewhat satirical fashion, but never forgets that what it is talking about is a deadly serious matter and that the point of the piece is to generate outage, not to mock people’s pain and suffering.

So it’s like Michael Moore but without the smugness.

Detroit is clearly an object lesson in modern anarchy. Hell, if you live in Detroit, why not be a criminal? It’s not like you will get caught. They basically have no police force now.

And it’s only going to get worse. The whole reason Detroit has to do such insane things as reduce their police force to perfunctory levels is that so many people have moved out that the tax base is minuscule. Why is it so small? Because people keep moving out.

And why do they move out? Because the place is an anarchic wasteland that any sane person with the means would flee. And so people leave, the tax base gets smaller, living there gets shittier, more people leave… you get the idea.

I have said it before but it bears repeating : Detroit may well become the world’s largest ghost city.

But hey, all you libertarians will start moving there soon, right? After all, Detroit is rapidly turning into a government free paradise where the free market rules and government regulation is no longer strangling innovation and tying the Invisible Hand behind our backs.

Talk about paradise! Sure, there’s crime, but you have guns, so who cares?

Pretty plain, much like yesterday’s. The heat makes it so hard to think! Plus, honestly, I kind of felt on both days that the subject matter didn’t lend itself to video clips, images, and so on.

Plus, that might be the last The Deal for a while. I am losing interest in it. It’s a lot closer to the sort of content I want to make than anything I did before this (some of that earlier stuff from this project seems pretty embarrassing now) but it’s not quite there yet.

But who knows. Maybe before it’s time to make tomorrow’s vid, I will have a great idea for another thing to explain The Deal on, and there will be a #6 after all.

Admittedly, I am feeling mildly discouraged and depressed today, so all this might just be a symptom of that. Dunno what it up with me, although caffeine withdrawal is a definitely possibility.

I knew going in to this “drying out” period that I was risking a drop in energy/enthusiasm levels in the short term, and it seems like I was right. I feel vaguely grumpy and discontent today.

These things pass, though. Nothing lasts forever, not even the bad things. I will regain my bounce once I have regained my bearings and once more found my little bit of solid ground in the oceans of emotion.

If this experiment does yield a happier me, then I will simply stop buying diet cola. I will still end up having it when we dine out (because it’s the only sugarless option) but that is once or every once in a while twice a week, so that’s no big deal.

And I will miss it. Cola is tasty, even the diet stuff. But there are plenty of other carbonated beverage choices, and if I find myself really craving the stuff, that just proves I was addicted and I am better off without it.

So the next little while might suck a bit, but I will get through it.

Maybe I should start drinking coffee….