Another one.

Question for any jewish visitors. Would not eating the pig constitute a miztvah?

What I made at work this morning

This cartoon was typeset and cleaned-up by the extemely attractive Erik Salk.

Albert Brooks vs. Cornholing Studio Dicks

Albert Brooks is god. Albert Brooks is FUCKING Prometheus, only Jewish. Albert Brooks has just completed a movie called Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World .

It’s a fake documentary about a highly sensitive State Department mission Brooks goes on to find out just what it is that makes Muslims laugh. Spit takes? Ventriloquists? He ends up in an unwitting audition for a sit com on Al Jezeera. Gold!

Brooks goes to Pakistan and India, and performs stand-up in front of Muslim audiences and bombs.

I’m not making this up. And I’m so fucking glad that I’m not making this up, you have no idea.

But, being a cool, original, mind fucking good thing, it has been repeatedly cornholed by concerned and sensitive studio executives. No one would distribute the thing, but thankfully Warner Independent Pictures picked it up, so we should be able to see next year.

The vomit/bile-inducing hypocrites in this story (because vomit/bile-inducing hypocrites always make an appearance) are the sensitive artistes over at Sony Pictures, the studio that made the nuance and humanitarian "European Gigolo," –- a film whose sensitive portrayal of a female Chernobyl victim who has a penis instead of a nose earned such positive recognition from the likes of Sting and Oxfam. Of course, Sony can reject any film they want. But they’re still pussy weenuses.

The Birds.

You may have heard of a recent documentary called The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, a film in which a kindly and sensitive hobo tends a flock of WILD PARROTS that have made Telegraph Hill their home. (Telegraph Hill is a interesting place even without the parrots. It’s home to houses with no road access, Coit Tower -- a priapitic monument to a Victorian firefighter groupie who was called Lizzie Coit (I think). It looks like a giant fire hose nozzle, and is fairly well coated with WPA social realist mural on the interior. The Hill is also where you can find the former home of Philo Farnsworth, inventor of the cathode ray tube. As if you care.)

Where do the parrots come from? Hell if I know. I haven’t seen the movie. All I know is those noisy little bastards come down from the hill on early evenings when the weather is warm and settle in a little park I pass through on my walk to the BART station. (Note: NOT the same park that hosts Old-Chinese-Lady-Robics . That would be too much radness and a black hole would form. )

They’ve been doing this for as long as I’ve worked in the neighborhood, and it’s one of my favorite things about living in the Bay Area (which I’m growing slightly less enchanted with year by year). What kills me is since the release of the film, SENSITIVE GOONS WITH EXPENSIVE CAMERAS have come out to INTERFACE with the goddamn parrots, like they’re the fucking Dalai Lama. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE THOSE SCREECHY LITTLE FUCKERS, I’m just like “NOW you’re interested, you fucks? Because of a goddamn movie? It’s like an indie-film version of the creepy spectacle of paunchy suburban shit heads flocking to the baseball diamond where they shot “Field of Dreams”. Remember that? What is wrong with people?

In a curious development, this same park has recently been populated by chickens -- your garden variety, bock bock, fat, fluffy back and white speckled yard birds. From whence did these birds come, as they are flightless? They certainly look healthy, and it appears they remain unmolested by the few career homeless that hang out in the area.

It’s an open park, with a small fenced-in corporation yard. Aside from the afore mentioned homeless, it’s a popular hangout for bike messengers – they come to smoke weed and threaten each other with violence under the eucalyptus (another amazing transplant. The central California coast is full of these wild growing stands of Eucalyptus, imported by an early twentieth century entrepeneur eager to corner the budding telegraph pole market. He unfortunately brought in the wrong species of Eucalyptus and went bust. True goddamn story. My plan is to now introduce Koalas.) , but to date, they have not subjected the chickens to acts of violence.

My own experience with bike messengers is limited. I sort of knew a guy that owned a bike messenger service, and he was a super sweet guy. Another guy I knew, a romantic rival whose hopelessly tragic girlfriend I was trying to woo (I found out later he gave her genital warts) was a low-foreheaded thug, who felt the main benefit of the job lay in the fact he could do it while frying on acid.

The guys I’ve seen hanging out at the little plaza above the walk are definitely of the low-foreheaded variety.

(Funny bike messenger anecdote: There is a place in downtown SF called the Wall, which is, appropriately, a low curving wall that runs ‘round the e-Trade day-trading outlet. The messengers hang out here as well, although the lot down here seem to have more a sunny disposition than the Parrot Park Stranglers. Anyway, this was the mid nineties. Some yuppie was walking down the street, screaming into his cel phone. Almost as if it were rehearsed, the group of twenty or so bike messengers all pointed and laughed at this guy at once, very loudly. All the guy could do was glare at them and continue yelling. The class struggle is funny!)

Anyway, Parrots and chickens living peacefully. I’m a fan.

Next: maple syrup to Vermont.

FEMA is now sending ice to Maine.

Two young marines with a Canon

Check out this blog: Testing Fate Entertainment. It's a brand new blog, run by two Marines in Iraq who are documentary film makers on the side. There isn't much there yet, but I am willing to cut them some slack as I imagine they are somewhat busy.

I support our crazy Marine film makers in combat.

Lovely.

Found this posted comment over at Rightwingnuthouse.com, a conservo site:

David Caskey, MD Says:
September 6th, 2005 at 12:15 pm
It is horrible what has occurred in NO. But to lift you from your melancholy, NO has shaped Louisiana for 200 years. Every election has been difficult due to the very neighborhoods that were ravaged. Now NO is dead. It likely will not return in its previous form and the political machine has been distroyed by nature. If this vision holds it will mean a very swift move to the right for our state!

##

Yay, GOP! People died, so you may live! Yay!

15 ways YOU are making it happen and getting shit done, in An Alternative Universe.

You are Hermann Goering, lead singer of the Commodores, and you are guest hosting for Mike Douglas at an Imperial Orgy.

You made your millions repeatedly punching a mule in the nuts, which is a highly regarded profession in this particular Alternative Universe.

Your third buttock is coated with nugat. Great job!

You are personally responsible for keeping the Dalai Lama’s shunt clear of all debris.

Your reality TV show, in which you eat pieces of your own head, has just won a Peabody.

You are slowing turning public opinion in favor adding a new letter designed by you personally to represent the sound of a ball peen hammer striking a Grimace commemorative plate to the alphabet.

You have cornered the leather straw market, and the Feds can’t touch you, because you’re a big swinging dick in AARP.

You killed the Boll Weevel before it could strangle Pope Richard Dawson.

You discovered the Northern Hemisphere.

Your dirigible is phat with hoopty. Or something.

You were successfully absorbed into Steve Ballmer’s fleshy thorax.

You brokered the peace between the Crips and a multi-speed electric drill.

You can remotely trigger orgasms in Oprah using your pituitary gland, and for that she has named a fragrance after you.

MaryKateAshley offer its mating ganglia to you during the Macy’s Parade. Always a class act, you declined.

You invented the dog whistle.

Ooof.

I could write a bunch of shit about how everything sucks, but you already know it does.

The scariest part of all this is that the basic responsibilities of government, really of civilization, were not met. What does that mean for us as a country? Have we entered our decadent phase? Will we be ritually wrestling for mating partners come 2015?

This is what I think: The primary advantage of belonging to any organized, centralized social unit is protection. The most nut-bag distilled water hording tree-dwelling libertarian weirdo couldn't deny that fact. Maintaining a sembalance of safety is the primary role of government. All other rights are secondary, It was true in Hammurabi's time, it should be true now. We go through our lives expecting the state to ensure domestic tranquility and provide for the common defense. That conceit keeps us from running around like Daffy Duck, going "Woo Woo! Woo Woo!"

It's that basic. Whatever your party, having to watch your baby die of dehydration because somebody couldn't figure out how to airlift water to the pot of fecal soup your family has been stewing in for a week is pretty the definition of savagery. When said authority actually turns offers of water and emergency personnel away, that goes beyond simple disorder into cruelty.

Some people have been eager to lay the blame on the city, the parish, the state. So, yeah, New Orleans, surprise surprise, is an inefficient and corrupt little burg , but we aren't just talking about losing Tipitina's here. This is about national security and national economics, hoss. That falls on squarely on the federal lap.

The 2004 National Response Plan explicitly states that, "at times of any natural or manmade incident, including terrorism, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the population, infrastructure, environment, economy, national morale, and/or government functions,
the federal government pre-empts local and state government in its responsibility to act quickly."

Where the fed failed:

a) we may have lost, through incompetence, up to ten thousand people.

b)we have lost our primary eastern container port.

c)we have signaled to the world that we couldn't get our shit together security-wise after four years of comic opera pomposity and stern buttock clenching from our incompentent leadership.

Those are my thoughts, for what they're worth.


Having said all that, this post from High Clearing sums up how the blogs are taking this:

From what I can tell in the last couple days’ reading, Katrina has chiefly served to confirm people in their previously held views. Liberals proclaim it proof of the need for a robust federal government (shades of Bill Moyers in September 2001), conservatives find themselves confirmed in their belief in the overriding importance of social order vigorously enforced, and libertarians regard the disaster and its aftermath as an exemplary failure of government. (Anarchists see government failing at even its core functions. State-accepting libertarians see government as having ignored its core functions for inappropriate pursuits.) Environmentalists amaze themselves with the realization that Katrina proves we need cars with better gas mileage and religious nuts of all persuasions discern the hand of God smiting their - and, need it be said, his own - enemies.
Hooray! Everyone wins! Again!

(Original post can be found
here.

He probably missed that issue.

"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." --George W. Bush 9/1/05

Well, Jackass, try this Scientific American article from 2001.