Up From The Depths of Tartarus

If I seem to be smoldering and leaving a foul pall of thick black greasy smoke that smells of must and musk and magma wherever I go, it’s because I just dragged myself up from the depths of my own personal Tartarus and all that smoke is coming from the overheated bearings of what passes for my brain.

So don’t worry. Eventually, that scorched smell will fade, the surface blackening is merely carbonized dural epithelials (easily washed away when the surface is cool enough), and my brain will go from its current black-hot state back to its usual red-hot running state.

Meanwhile, I am investigating brain lubricants. All this overheating is seriously adding the miles to the poor old thing, and the wear and tear alone must be shortening its useful life.

Doing a fairly decent job of not letting it depress me, though. Or rather, accepting that it physically depresses me, making me feel crappy and dragged out and achey and giving me a pounding headache (must be from my brain expanding when heated and being too big for its case), but not letting the depression spin those temporary pains into something about life, or me, or the universe, or anything.

It’s just some shitty weather. All you can do is protect yourself as much as you can from its effects and ride the rest of it out. It doesn’t mean anything.

Even the fact that my emotional awareness of the world tells me things are terrible is meaningless.

It’s just the weather.

It’s Waiting For You!

Speaking of foul creatures that rise up from the depths, take a gander at this here picture.

That has to be the most hilarious advertising fail I have seen this year. You can totally see what the people who put together this extraordinary cocktail of seafood and nightmare sauce were trying to do. They were trying to convey the idea “Hey, weary traveler. Just a friendly reminder that we here at Red Lobster are always here, waiting for you with delicious seafood feasts at an affordable price. So come on over, friend. We’ll be here waiting for you. ”

A fairly typical approach. Make your restaurants seem friendly and warm and inviting to people. I personally strongly dislike faceless corporations driven entirely by lust for profit trying to pretend they are my friend so they can get closer to my wallet, but still, it’s not an unusual approach.

But of course, somewhere, that intent went horribly, horribly askew. Instead of making it warm and inviting, they instead created something that sends the message “Red Lobster is a horrible mutant zombie who is waiting to kill you and serve you up on a platter like he did to this seafood. ”

In fact, the whole thing seems like it could be the poster for a horror movie for lobsters.

Imagine this in the Movie Guy voice with a slight “underwater” filter : “They thought they were safe. They thought they could eat the tasty food in the wooden boxes and still not get caught. They thought they could live that way forever. THEY THOUGHT WRONG. ”

Or maybe you should do that in the voice of Doctor Zoidberg from Futurama. That works too.

Can a libertarian be a fascist?

On the news front, there is a depressingly and disturbingly large and growing pile of evidence that Ron Paul has strong ties to white supremacists and neo-nazis.

I sincerely don’t want it to be true, but this evidence uncovered by Anonymous is making it hard to maintain my denial. At the very least, you can no longer deny that Ron Paul has ties to these horrible genetic rejects in the American racist movement(s).

That is the best case scenario. The worst case, of course, is that he has not only been happy to associate with those people, but shares their deepest beliefs and is, in fact, deep down, deeply racist and hateful and is therefore actually the most successful Neo-Nazi candidate for President in the modern fully integrated era.

It makes me feel bad for ever liking him a little, like somehow, by liking his refusal to tow the Republican line of insane bullshit (he has his own, thank you very much) and his liberal-friendly positions on things like drug legalization, he has gotten some Nazi on me.

I imagine a lot of us on the left are feeling kind of like that about all this now. We never wanted that little nutball to be President of anything. But we couldn’t help liking him a little, and now, we feel pretty weird about that.

Say it ain’t so, Ron.

Might As Well Go For A Coda

I am going to hell for that heading. But I resigned my soul to Pun Hell many years ago, when I bought an eraser shaped like a television just so I could say “I think I’ll watch a little TV” then whip it out and stare at it.

Yes, I seriously used to do that, and what’s more, I enjoyed it immensely.

No wonder I loved Night Court so much. I practically am Judge Harold T. Stone Presiding.

What can I say, I get enormous pleasure out of things like that. I am not even sure it still qualifies as comedy exactly when I do things like that. I think it’s more about a deep craving for a world that is as funny as the sitcoms I grew up watching.

To me, that always seemed like a great world to live in. Everyone is hilarious and even the most serious problems can be fixed in half an hour.

Works for me!