Friday, March 27, 2009

The House in the Middle



Goddamnit the '50's rocked. I saw this video awhile back when I was researching for a project, and I'd forgotten about it until now. Note how they use atomic paranoia not only to get folks to rake their yards, but also to get them to hate poor people! And you've gotta love how the golden reward for people who follow the CLEAN UP, PAINT UP, FIX UP campaign's credo is a charred shack lousy with nuclear fallout.

Also, I wish I'd known about this when I was in Scouts.

Two Facelifts for Sister Jeffrey

As I have become bored recently with this blog, I've decided to, yet again, make a few changes.  I'm trying out a few new names, because I think the Chicago Public Radio pun is getting a little old.  Once I find one I really like, I'll change my URL.  

Content-wise, I'm going to try to shift away from bitching about my endlessly trivial life and focus more on some of my passions:  nuclear explosions, naked girls from the '50's, and pedal steel guitars.  Expect things to get a whole lot more pretentious around here.

















Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Progress Report

Ok, let's put aside how new he is, how handsome he is and how black he is.  Let's put aside the fact that he's not his predecessor, and that his grandmother died a few months back.  Let's put aside the fact that John Roberts fucked up his oath of office, and let's put aside the fanfare and the hair-raisingly ironic Shepard Fairey propaganda, and the speech at the victory column.  In his two months of office, Barack Obama has been, in my humble and perhaps (PERHAPS) uninformed opinion, a pretty crappy president.  I know he's distracted by the strained economy, but even before that, even during the campaign, I never heard him (or John McCain, or Al Sharpton) breathe a word against the Patriot Act.  In fact, I don't think he ever mentioned it at all.  Now, I don't know if this is because he simply didn't have the time in all of his lofty, towering allocutions to say a little something about civil rights, or if he actually supports the legislation (See: Lord Acton's Dictum), or if I just haven't been paying enough attention.  But, I like to think I keep up on things, and I read most of the stories on the President when I scroll through the news every day, and I think that, even if I've missed some citation of the Patriot Act by America's Sweetheart, even if there's a reference to it tucked away in some far corner of the recorded media, my point stands unscathed.  Because, foks, this is EASILY the most vile piece of law to have come out of the last administration, and if Obama means business, he should be shouting its curses from the goddamn White House roof.  This may seem nitpicky of me, but, you know, it's one of the biggest mistakes ever made by our Government, and I haven't heard so much as an apology from anyone for, like, eight years of bullshit man.  
Now, I ALSO haven't heard anything about No Child Left Behind, which is also extremely bothersome, Especially since the President came out of a part of the country that was really taken advantage of by it.  And now I'm hearing that we're spending the better part $700,ooo,ooo to keep Mexican drug dealers out of the United States.  Frankly, aside from what Obama has said he plans to do at some point, I haven't seen enough of a difference between the old boss and the new boss to get me to vote again in four years.  This may change, and I hope it does.

Monday, March 23, 2009

Maybe I'm too Smart to Sleep

Welp, the passion's gone from my life. It left the moment we had a 60-degree day with sun and thawed dirt. Passion, usurped in an instant by the immature freewheeliness of spring. Not until autumn's whipping winds will I again find the perceptive tunnel vision required for me to pull it together and do something. All I can think of as it becomes warmer and friendlier outside is kites and tall steel slides and the smell of crayons. I wish meeting girls in the park was as easy as John Cusack makes it look. I can't wait to start finding tufts of nylon fibers stuck on benches again.

I deleted my facebook about three weeks ago, and my anxiety levels have dropped like a baby bird on the sidewalk. But my connections to the tangential people are shriveling like a baby bird on the sidewalk. Still, I'm finding a lot more time to sit around and be bored, which is something I didn't have enough of before now.

I'm currently taking an introductory course in logic. I'd always thought before now that I was a reasonable, logical person, and now I've been forced to abandon that fantasy like a mother bird who pushes her babies out of the nest and has to watch their swollen, purple, ugly, ugly eyes pop like blueberries on the sidewalk. I miss the feeling of intellectual superiority I once had over people who suck, and I'm finding that I'm pretty much a know-nothing with a head full of 1996 Guinness facts and no real smarts, and those sucky folks have probably had the right idea all along.

Happy Spring!

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

I Tried So Hard to Share Your Fun

I'm finding it more and more difficult to justify having this blog. I live with all the people who read it, and in the course of conversation at home, I usually repeat whatever's on here directly to them, and I always show them my comics with the gusto of a Pokémon kid well before they're posted on this meaningless Wyoming billboard of a web journal. I've had maybe 20 or 30 different people look at this thing since I started it almost a year ago. And let's be realistic, now: the only reason any of us posts anything on the internet is so that we can get attention for it. Nobody does anything just because. Some people get a certain therapeutic sensation from writing on a blog, but as anyone who reads this particular blog can likely tell, that's not the case for me. I don't really get any satisfaction from writing things down I already know in my head, because nobody's going to see them anyway. So for now, everybody, I guess just brace yourselves for something of a lapse in publishing.

Monday, March 9, 2009

Monsters of Bach

I've started listening to only classical music lately, as much as someone can really "only" voluntarily listen to one kind of music. Maybe it's just that I'm going through a non-musical phase, but I don't think so. I don't really miss rock n' roll or pop or even jazz all that bad; and I think I would miss classical quite a bit if it were somehow stripped away from me. Maybe it's because I've been spoon-fed the young-people stuff since I was little by my parents and friends. It's like some weird, weird psychological thing whereby in order to gain independence from my immediate circumstance, I run to the biggest status quo in music. I think it must be the same way Alice Cooper became a Republican. This is not to say I'm a musical Luddite; I still prefer composers of whom there are photographs to composers of whom there are only portraits. I'm just sick of trying to keep up with the newest Santogold release as if I give a shit, and of keeping company with hipsters far hipper who will always be more on top of it than I am, and of being told that hearing a new song I like in a movie is the wrong, dumb people way to discover music. And I'm sick of tall, birdlike women and tall, birdlike men who wear quilted nylon coats and skinny jeans, teetering around Uptown like blueberries stuck on twigs, who go to progressive films and "care" about "tolerance" but who still have this whole bizarre, elitist Cult of Beauty thing going on, uniforms and all. Now, if anyone really reads this, I'm likely to catch flak about never having been a true "music person" in the first place, an accusation about which I don't PARTICULARLY care. It might also be you could criticize my syntax and word choices today as "pretentious," which is fine. I'd rather be a pretentious jerk with a vocabulary grounded in dictionary English than just another internet dolt, lolling and fapping around in a deep, deep well of stupid, stupid people with no individual personalities or thoughts.

Thursday, March 5, 2009

Space, Space.

A bunch of interesting stuff I've been running across lately:


The Barbarian Group is a weird design/advertising firm that makes all sorts of interesting digital gizmos and software.  They're probably most notable for designer Robert Hodgin's brilliant, beautiful Magnetosphere visualizer.

These dudes are just plain fucking awesome.