Day of the Sun, June 29, 2003, around noon

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Let's give a big hand to MARIE BRADEN, who wrote me a nice note about my review of Comic Book Nation, and who has, several pleasant email exchanges later, agreed with me on the Madness That Is Robyn Pollman, and even better, blogrolled me. So I've blogrolled her, and you can find her fine work at Flashbulb Moments, which I urge you to do, and leave her a few nice comments, too.

And now back to our regularly scheduled blog entry.
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Brother Pat just blew by, looking very fit and tanned after a week in Mexico, sporting a rather villainous, half grown goatee, and insisted on sweeping Paul off his couch (where Paul was still asleep, having stayed up after working last night until the wee hours playing his new X-Box Street Basketball game) to go visit Paul’s dad, out at the home where the guy’s been stuck for years. Pat seemed to have his usual brusque attitude towards anyone keeping a schedule or with any sort of lifestyle different from his (Pat is, alas, quite a Republican these days), but I had a few gentle words with him while Paul was in the bathroom about Paul’s hours not meaning he was lazy, it just meant he had a different life from Patrick’s. Maybe I got through to him. It’s hard to say with Pat sometimes; he’s made a successful career out of being affable. Then he just turns around and does what he wants anyway.

I admitted frankly that my still being in bed at 11:30, and my not having even much looked for a job as yet (the Alpha Subject when another member of my family talks to me these days) means I’m a lazy bitch, and well, there you go. Although the fact that last night my nostrils clogged up a little and didn’t open again until early this a.m. also contributed greatly to me still being sacked out. Still, Pat seems to have absorbed the deeply conservative belief that if you’re not up with the sun and busy doing something productive every day, you’re either just plain worthless or actively working with the commies to bring about the downfall of Fortress America.

Chad and Mel called over shortly after noon yesterday to say they were going to the flea market in Tampa if either of us wanted to go along. Paul had to work at 3 and so begged off, but I took the opportunity to ride in with them and take a look at the place. I’d heard about it for years (Charlie Miranda, former City Council Chairman, used to talk about the Big Top flea market all the time while I was at the City Clerk’s office) and thought it might be fun to check out. It was interesting, although it was also a flying visit; Chad and Mel just basically wanted to raid the book stall there for more reading material. Ironically, their gain was my loss, since I took the opportunity of a trip into Tampa to drop off the two St. Germain books I still had out at a local library branch. I still hadn’t yet finished Communion Blood, and I’d been enjoying the level of detail with which Quinn Yarbro fleshed out Vatican politics in 15th Century Roma, too. Oh, well. I now officially have nothing to read, which is annoying.

While we were there I picked up a couple of things for Paul. The first thing I saw was a hat that (I swear to God) due to some brain dysfunction I thought was simply hyper-patriotic, as it had a red white and blue color scheme with white stars on blue stripes and like that. Even the 'rebel’ imprint on the back of the visored cap didn’t clue me in; I don’t think I was fully awake, or my brain was simply looking at the thing from an entirely four dimensional perspective. I thought such a hyper-patriotic cap would be a pleasantly ironic gift for Paul (who is mostly a lefty liberal, but he really doesn’t work at it; he’s pretty much politically ignorant and apathetic, but mostly believes in, you know, freedom and tolerance and X-box games for everyone), so I snagged it. Then we came across a rack of tie-dyed shirts and I decided to get one of them for Paul, too, although, honestly, I should have just bought it for myself, because some of them looked cool… but I’m not really much into tie-dye, and anyway, I enjoy buying presents for people more than buying stuff for me, sometimes, and Paul had really wanted to come along, and I’ve been a fairly rotten roommate so far. So with Mel’s help I picked out a nice one.

It wasn’t until I got home, much later that night, when Paul dumped out the bag I indicated held presents for him and stared at the cap as if it were a venomous snake that I suddenly regained normal 2003 American Liberal perspective and realized I’d bought Paul a cap modeled after the Confederate flag; North America’s answer to the black reversed swastika on a white circle on a red field. Heh heh. How embarrassing.

So, Paul doesn’t want it, and I haven’t admitted to anyone out loud yet that I just bought the damned thing by honest mistake, for some reason simply thinking it was an American flag cap, which honestly, it isn’t. An American flag cap would be out of character for Paul or I to wear but, you know, not shamefully so; I’m not wild about many of the things my currently hijacked country has done recently, but America is still probably the best place to live on Earth (sad though that thought is, and much though lately I’ve been really wondering if I could get a job in Canada), and I could wear an Old Glory baseball cap without feeling more than mildly ironic.

What I told Paul and Pat was that I bought the cap so Paul could pick up chicks, which I strongly suspect in many parts of Zephyrhills he could while wearing it, and I probably could too (being older, fatter, and having longer hair and worse teeth than Paul, I look amazingly redneck with that cap on). However, having realized that the cap is indeed a symbol of kidnapped Africans laboring in the cotton fields while lazy European emigrants sit on the porch drinking lemonade, I’m wishing I hadn’t been so high on wowie sauce when we passed the stand where it was on display. Now I’m just going to have to burn the fucker. Or dye it black. Or something.

Leaving aside what an idiot I am (although people do seem to enjoy constantly rediscovering this, and I’m sure we’ll get back to it later), it seems my daydream of Warlord of Erberos single-handedly kicking off a massive pulp revival down in Australia, and me getting an unaccountably huge PayPal deposit sometime next month, was simply a farrago of moonshine, since Jonathan has told me in a subsequent email that TMIS #3 has only had about 25 downloads in addition to the 155 or so I’ve already been paid for (a princely sum of $50). Obviously, any kind of business enterprise on the Internet is shaky, but I’d honestly hoped that these guys had done some basic marketing and that we might actually luck into a reasonably sized audience now that the e-mag was publishing original material. It’s at times of maximum real world suckage, historically, that people have turned to escapist fantasy by the droves, and I was seriously hoping Warlord would strike a responsive chord out there. Maybe it still could, but it’s going to have to marketed better than Jonathan’s publishing company is doing with it. Of course, I’m sure Jonathan is also disappointed that his own pulp pastiches aren’t doing better, but he can do his own damn blog; this one is about me.

Anyway, with that big Hollywood movie check I was hoping for now a shattered dream, it looks like I’m going to have to seriously start filling out some job applications here in lovely scenic Zephyrhills. Oh, I’ve got Unemployment coming in for another couple of months, and probably longer than that if there’s still a Federal extension in place when my 26 weeks of benefits runs out… and out here in the land of the cotton, I can actually live decently off Unemployment. But it won’t get me my own apartment, and I have a feeling Paul would like his bedroom back sometime soon. Tempting though it is to feel settled in and comfie, I have to keep reminding myself this is a way station and I need to move on… depressing though the thought of ‘moving on’ to my own apartment in Zephyrhills is. (Not that having my own apartment again will be depressing; just the notion that it will be in Zephyrhills, meaning I’ll more or less be ‘permanently’ settled here… that’s what’s going to have me going through the medicine cabinet looking for overdose material.)

Other than the note from Jonathan, and a brief note from Louis Epstein bewailing the lack of quality in modern day comics art, it’s been quiet on the email front, and as I predicted, the longish entries for Friday here have attracted little to no commenting attention, either. But, that’s okay. As Anne from Peevish noted in an April 24 commentary on her blog in response to my “Attention Deficit Syndrome” entry for April 23, a Reader Is A Gift. (Google ego-searches are wonderful things for turning up comments regarding you, or your work, that you didn’t know were out there. I search on my real name, Doc Nebula, and the name of this blog quite often when I’m bored, and am sometimes pleasantly surprised by the fact that someone somewhere has written something about my work and not bothered to let me know. Me, when I write about someone’s work I nearly always let them know, but I guess I’m an oddball. Well… no, that’s pretty well established and not guesswork.)

My new policy on Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s blog is to stop seriously trying to engage anyone there on any substantive issue, since it just gets me beaten up by the bigger kids. Anyway, the level of serious solemnity there often approaches or attains earnestly humorless diligence, and while the world does indeed suck, it doesn’t suck so bad that being all dewey eyed and quiver-lipped about it is ever going to be a useful approach. Worse, it’s just not entertaining.

So, instead of posting serious opinions (which the Smarter Fellas there just jeer at anyway), I’ve started posting fortune cookie mottos… epigrams that sound good but mean nothing, like:

There are ways. There are means. There are committees to discuss them. But when the big black stretch limo drops us off down the block, exactly which block are we on?

All wind, no lass. All spirit, no link. All an, no imus. It's the inside of things that matters, but the outside of things that sells. We all know this. We are all humbled by the knowledge. Yet in that humility we find the strength to simply quit.
For what good is any of it? The anthracite remains in our sullen veins, and simony rejoices as our drug of choice. Our atmospheric culture has been poisoned by the ever billowing smoke stacks of left handed instinct and hollow eyed reason. Where is the glamor in an Imperial gladiator dying of a simple respiratory infection?
Your ass, my hamster.

Followed up with such simple words of wit as:

Some think political memoirs are like eating ice cream from a blind man's eye sockets. Others say it's just senseless ideagrams scribbled in oil soaked sand by a jaded, faded mandarin.
Ends may justify means, but what about averages?
The cool thing is, I can churn out stuff like that all day long. And who knows, maybe somebody somewhere will think I’m profound. ;) But now is not the time for such nonsense, now it’s time to talk about movies. Namely, I watched Office Space and it was pretty good for the first half. However, Mike Judge seemed to entirely run out of jokes about 2/3s of the way through and clearly had no idea whatsoever how he should wrap the movie up. He also seemed so delighted to get Jennifer Aniston in his film that he forgot to actually write a part for her, at least, one that had anything remotely memorable about it. So overall, I’d have to say Office Space was pretty much a waste of same, but I enjoyed parts of it.

I also watched 12 Monkeys again for the first time since I saw it back in 1995 in a theater. Back when I first watched it I immediately picked out a crucial flaw in the film’s internal time travel continuity that made the whole thing senseless and stupid and ever since that one viewing I have relentlessly trashed the film whenever it came up… ‘yeah, yeah, that was the first film where we really got an idea that maybe Terry Gilliam wasn’t so great after all’… except that’s not true, Fisher King was the first movie where we got a clue that maybe Terry Gilliam wasn’t so great, but never mind.

Anyway, I watched it this time and the interesting thing is, that crucial flaw in the internal time travel continuity just isn’t there. At least, I can’t find it again this time around; I must have taken too many cough drops before I watched it the first time, or something. Oh, it’s a little convenient the way the Bruce Willis character keeps simply vanishing from the past at various intervals when it takes such a huge amount of machinery to send him there in the first place, but never mind that, we can just accept that and move on.

No, 12 Monkeys is actually a very good SF/time travel movie. The portions showing us the wretchedly grim and somewhat whimsically ludicrous future are done with Gilliam’s usual cockeyed brilliance (the bit where Cole wakes up back in his future to find himself being serenaded by the ruling council, who are all singing Fats Dominoes’ ‘Blueberry Hill’ acappella and doing a truly abysmal job of it is just mind boggling). If the film has any drawback at all, it’s that it’s so thoroughly and gruesomely depressing in every conceivable way. Our starcrossed lovers never even get to sleep with each other (at least Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor got to get jiggie with it once together), and the entire film is based around the somewhat refreshing but still rather disheartening concept that what has happened has happened, and the past can’t be changed… all this time travel is being done, not with an eye towards getting rid of the unacceptable future and replacing it with something better (as nearly every other time travel movie is trying to accomplish) but, instead, simply with gathering important knowledge that will allow the scientists in the godawful future to hopefully do something towards improving the miserable lot of the few still surviving humans there.

Unlike Brazil, which has about the happiest ending it can have within the established context of the film, 12 Monkeys abandons all attempt at giving us a happy ending, and although its protagonists do, in the end, have to try to prevent the nightmare from coming to pass, they are, as they always knew they would be, helpless… and you can see, if you look closely, the resignation in Madeline Stowe’s eyes at the end, where she has accepted that yes, Cole is dead, but within hours or days at the most, she will be dead as well, and within another few weeks, so also will be civilization… yet at least, as her gaze settles for a moment on the young boy she knows is also Cole as a child, she briefly smiles, as she realizes he has yet to live out his entire life, and therefore, he will survive the coming plagues, and in some temporally twisted way, he and she will continue forever…

In fact, if Gilliam is trying to impart anything throughout this film, it seems to be the rather cynical message that mankind, by and large, really deserves to be exterminated.

Horribly depressing movie, but still, an excellent and thoroughly self consistent time travel story. And at the very least, Gilliam didn’t come back ten years later and try to undo most of his storyline with a really poorly conceived sequel.

***THIS JUST IN****

In a late breaking news flash, the moderator at Patrick Nielsen Hayden's blog (his wife, Theresa) has just posted the following exasperated message:

From Teresa Nielsen Hayden,
posted on June 29, 2003 03:12 PM:
Your attention, please, Doc/Doc Nebula/Handsome/Darren Madigan:
This is your friendly local moderator speaking. Your remarks are making less and less sense. You need to do something about it.
I don't know what you usually do about it, but whatever it is, you need to do more of it, or go back to doing it, or whatever the heck it takes (I'm not asking), because you're starting to sound like you're broadcasting from the ozone layer.
This is meant as a friendly and helpful communication. Please read it that way.
Cheers --
tnh

To which I replied:

From Doc,
posted on June 29, 2003 03:46 PM:
The dialectic may sprout with the fury and fervor of genetically modified corn stalks, T. But if the seeds are sterile, whereof doth it profit us?
You may think I babble like a brook, but bear in mind... Theodore Marley was one fine lawyer when he wanted to be.

Ha! They want to slap me around when I'm serious? I'll just drive them nuts with whimsy. And, hey, Theresa... get a sense of humor, you bozo.

THE HOMERSEXUAL AGENDA

The recent Supreme Court ruling regarding so called gay rights is loathsome and reprehensible and spells almost certain doom and disaster to old fashioned family values and the American Way of Life.

What is insidious about homosexuality and what many refuse to acknowledge is that the homosexual agenda is everywhere. In the traditional American Way of Life and following sacred family values boys are kept sequestered from girls and vice versie for their entire childhoods but especially during adolescence, when the devil glands first make themselves most powerfully known. This is to keep our children safe from unwarranted and proscribed experimentation with the great, holy and blessed joys of conventional heterosexual intimacy, which is indeed great, holy and blessed, but only for adult Christian males; for wimmenfolk it’s just their plain duty and for kids, of course, it should not, in a proper society, ever be acknowledged or discussed because childhood is an age of innocence that must not be sullied by coarse matters of the flesh.

If however the homersexual agenda were to be recognized as having validity by our courts as a legitimate social function then suddenly same sex segregation is no longer a viable option in protecting our children from the sins of the flesh. Which is to say if we have all the boys sleeping in one room and all the girls sleeping in another room then Lord alone knows what deviltry they’ll get up to (but you can be pretty sure Pat Robertson probably has extensive photographic documentation of that sort of behavior that he only looks at for hours on end by himself in a locked basement for purposes of hardening his heart and learning to ferret out such loathsome sin by the smallest of signs and gestures in its licentious practicioners). In a world in which the Supreme Court has actually forbidden the police from doing their god given duties of breaking into known homosexuals’ bedrooms and whacking them over the head with their nightsticks for engaging in such horribly sinful activities as sodomy, there is no up nor down, no black nor white, no good nor evil, and if the police cannot harass and persecute homosexuals for their gratuitously lewd and unnatural acts, then how can we possibly teach our youngsters that these gratuitously lewd and unnatural acts are unacceptable in decent society?

Let us remember that the homosexual male is a person who has no use whatsoever for the human woman in all her feminine glory. Yes, you show the finest flower of femininity as has flourished to full fecundity anywhere on Earth to a homosexual and they would just as soon have some sort of pizza with fruit toppings and little salty fish on it. Unless of course the homosexual in question is female herself and well that’s just too disgusting to support conjecture although we would certainly like to join Pat Robertson in looking at photographic documentation of such activities in order to learn the secret body languages that would allow us to ferret out such proclivities in our daughters early so they can be sent to re-orientation seminars. Nonetheless, the point remains that a homosexual is a so called man who could look at pictures of Angelina Jolie or Reese Witherspoon in some hellbound California-style thong bikini and merely reflect on how well the hue of the garment brings out the Hollywood harlot’s eyes and hair color. And that is not natural nor is it good or right or proper, and by all means such indifference to the beauty that God has put before all men as a snare and a distraction from their higher spiritual duties should and must be punishable by law.

Homosexuals may claim a right to privacy but there is no such right enumerated anywhere in the Constitution and even if there was, it would have been meant for good God fearing Christian heterosexual men and women like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and J. Edgar Hoover, who stood so staunchly against the homosexual/Communist alliance throughout the early to mid 20th Century.

Remember that homosexuality is a choice. Even homosexuals who have been tied to trees and stoned to death by mobs of their classmates, even homosexuals thrust into the gutter by right thinking Christian youth groups to have their jaws broken against curbstones, they still insistently and stubbornly choose their sinful lifestyles and egregiously unnatural behavior. The homosexual is tricky and filled with deceit, truculent and sullen and fully prepared to engage in the lowest tactics in order to debase and distort our wholesome Christian family values. It is in fact well known that all non-Christians and especially Islamic terrorists are homosexuals and there are scientific studies that show that all homosexuals are, in fact, non-Christians and at least somewhat sympathetic to Islamic terrorists. Many homosexuals have in the past and are currently giving knowing aide and comfort to the enemies of America because it is well known that Islamic culture is far more tolerant of and permissive towards the homosexual lifestyle than ours, and for this reason above others, police and other security agencies must be empowered by our courts to continue to break in to the private residences of known homosexuals and arrest them when they are caught in the midst of their seditious and unnatural activities.

If so called gay rights are upheld, then the terrorists have won. If you support homosexuality, then you do not support our brave troops currently under fire on foreign battlefields, and shame on you.

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, “Wow, I didn’t recognize you in men’s clothing”. According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I’m reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I’d take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here’s The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people’s blogs, you MUST NOT:

(a) seem smarter than the person writing the blog you are posting comments to
(b) be funnier than the person writing the blog you are posting comments to
(c) be a better writer than the person writing the blog
(d) be correct when you point out some manner in which the person writing the blog you are posting comments to was wrong, and/or
(e) Upset The Wimmenfolk On The Blog.

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin’s Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron’s blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don’t really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren’t related to me by marriage, I’d most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don’t care if you:

(a) seem smarter than I am, I like people who are smarter than I am, as long as they’re not jerks about it;
(b) are funnier than I am, then I get to laugh at your witty remarks, and hey, that’s all good;
(c) are a better writer than I am. Although I’m in a peculiar place as regards writing skills; good enough to be better than nearly all the amateurs out there, not good or lucky enough to be a professional at it. So if you are a better writer than I am, you are probably a professional writer and therefore do not have time to post comments on other people’s blogs, so this probably doesn’t matter, as relates to this blog;
(d) correct my mistakes; unlike apparently 9.5/10ths of the remainder of the human race, I am under no illusions as to my own infallibility and simply don’t care if someone points out that I am wrong about something. Being wrong about things does not strike me as either a character flaw or a shameful embarrassment; we are all wrong about a lot of things every day of our lives, and that’s just how that works;
(e) Upset My Wimmenfolk. Well, actually, I shouldn’t say I don’t care if you upset my wimmenfolk, I do, the very thought deeply offends me. However, it’s just that the wimmenfolk at this point on this blog are my mom, my cuz in law, and my sister in law, and if you do something to upset them, I strongly doubt the authorities finding what’s left of you will be able to identify you without a DNA comparison. My mom, and any woman who marries any of the males in this family and stays married to him for any length of time, are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. So offend them all you want; it’s a self correcting problem.

If there is a rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don’t Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.

A Brown Eyed Handsome Man