A Place of Judg(e)ment

Every Halloween the church down the street hosts something called “Judgement House.” A few days later, on some years, I have to go to that same church to vote, which I think is something of a conflict of interests.

“Judgement House” always brought to mind images of a Christian haunted house: pious hams in demonic costume raving about the consequences of premarital sex, abortion, and an activist judiciary against a painted backdrop of flames and damned souls. It was something I have always felt compelled to experience—one of American Protestantism’s unique offerings, for want of a 21st century version of “Sinners In the Hands of an Angry God.”

I was to be profoundly disappointed. Of course, having attended no prior Judgement Houses I can’t say how this one compares; I speak only of the general experience.

First, we were required to register. This was actually required in advance, so you begin to understand my commitment to the experience. I signed in under a pseudonym: Sam Simms.

The evening of the event was damp and chill. A persistent gloom blotted out the stars and shed icy mist onto those of us awaiting entry to the church-cum-Judgement House. I learned that we would go through in groups of ten or so, with ten minute intervals between groups. Of those I spoke to outside, none were return visitors. Judgement House was clearly a “once is enough” experience.

Finally my turn came, and instead of a menagerie of mincing homosexuals and pinch-mouthed adulterers, I was greeted with lukewarm amateur dramatics. Judgement House, it seemed, was essentially a live performance of a Pacific Garden Mission “Unshackled!” radio drama.

We went through several rooms, across which we were told the story of a young girl named Samantha who—Oh, you know. She finds Jesus and then she dies, inspiring her drunken and sinful father to repent his evil ways. Pretty standard stuff, but distinctly unentertaining.

We were then presented with a “judge” who ruled on the damnation or exaltation of the various characters from the playlet we had just witnessed. The judge then read out each of our names in turn, and explained that there was still time for us to choose our ultimate fate. I felt a giddy rush at hearing him call out “Sam Simms!” It was as if I were some kind of spy infiltrating secret proceedings. “Your identity for this mission will be Sam Simms: a simple sinner in search of salvation.” I resisted the temptation to take surreptitious pictures with my phone.

After that we were taken to hell. Rather than being accosted by comically-attired buffoons with pitchforks, we were instead crowded into a room not quite large enough for all of us. It was dark, vaguely smelly, and kept just barely too warm by the aid of out-of-sight space heaters. All told I was somewhat impressed by the subtlety of the presentation. Still, I don’t think that minor physical discomfort is a proper analogue for the eternal separation from the divine spirit, but I’m no theologian.

A shadowy figure then introduced himself as Satan and briefly lectured us on how rejecting the salvation offered by Christ will doom us to an eternity with him. It took a tremendous feat of willpower to avoid saying something snarky (“Why should we believe you? You’re the devil!”), but I prevailed. I was determined to see this through.

Our group was then paraded into another room where we were presented with—I shit you not—bibs. Well, our guide somewhat sheepishly told us that they were robes, but they only covered our shoulders and part of our chests. I found myself salivating out of some Pavlovian expectation of a rack of ribs.

Our next stop was the empyrean heights themselves: Paradiso. This was not as impressive as hell. Composed largely of bright lights and white fixtures, it looked more like a photoshoot at an abandoned house. We were greeted by a figure who claimed to be Jesus and he told us pretty much exactly the same thing Satan told us, which I thought was odd. I mean, if Satan was telling the truth about how to get to heaven, is he really that bad of a guy? That’s not exactly behavior befitting a Prince of Lies. What else are we not being told about Old Scratch?

After that we handed in our bibs—distressingly free of barbecue sauce stains—and moved right to the “Would you like to accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior?” bit.

I declined, and apparently did so casually enough as to pierce my facade of legitimate interest. My “encourager” and I locked eyes, and in that moment my deception was revealed. I was no penitent seeking absolution. I was one of the heathen horde, holding his beliefs in silent contempt. We looked at each other from opposite sides of an impassable gulf, each regarding the other with silent pity. Beneath his feet yawned the abyss of damnation, and only by the grace of God did he avoid plummeting headlong into its depths. Beneath my feet was only the whirling crust of the earth. Never the twain shall meet.

I left for the parking lot, where Judgement House’s previous patrons fled the grounds in their cars. Did the weather or the message propel them with such curious urgency? Did they feel God’s arrow aimed at their hearts, ready at His command to be made drunk with their blood?

“The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.”

I walked home as the gloom began to part, if only for a few minutes. Through the rent I could see Orion, and I remembered the story of his punishment by gods older than Yahweh—but no less spiteful. Behind him stretched not the void of damnation, but of eternity.

A Special Reminder From Hollywood

As the holiday season approaches, you, like many Americans, will be drawn to the warming light of cinema to fill the idle, empty moments in your life. We would like to take a moment to thank you for being an essential part of the process of making movie magic. Without your patronage it simply wouldn’t be possible to continue delivering the kind of high quality entertainment that you have come to expect—and deserve.
That said, we would also like to take this opportunity to remind you of something:
POPULAR ACTRESS has breasts.
We here at Hollywood are very interested in making sure that you, the average movie-goer, is fully aware of the existence of POPULAR ACTRESS' breasts. Please take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with them, as you will be seeing them many, many times in the future.

Nice, yes? I thought you would agree. Just give yourself some time to appreciate them, to fully comprehend them. Admire their dimension, their bearing, their very gravity.
Imagine them in your hands. Imagine the soft, yielding flesh pressed against your calloused palms, tickling you with the tiniest of downy hairs.
Stop.
This is a pleasure that will, of course, be forever denied you. Do not weep. This is simply the nature of the world. As bigshot studio executives, we have had varieties of pussy so magnificent as to be fully beyond your corn-husking comprehension. Compared to many of these women, POPULAR ACTRESS is but a bloated Hefty bag full of cottage cheese and despair. Yet to you she is an angel on earth, a carnal paragon—sex incarnate. She is no more a woman than an ephemeral ideal that, so far as you know, exists only in the imagination of the Olympians themselves.
Tonight, as you lie sweaty and spent atop some sow-eyed she-creature (that we can only imagine passes for female in dim light) it is our hope that your moment of physical exultation was filled instead with the vision we have crafted for you:
The vision of POPULAR ACTRESS' breasts.

Oh, what a dreadful life you must lead, oscillating between shifts at the cannery and bitter rounds at the local dive. Our fondest wish is to gift your empty and baleful existence with the faintest taste of what nature has seen fit to hold apart from your oleaginous kind.
Take POPULAR ACTRESS' breasts. They are our gift to you. Stare, slack-jawed, at them as they bounce and heave across the screen. Allow yourself to be lost in whatever passes for erotic fantasy among your proletarian kind—something involving Neolithic positions and country music. Later, as you drive back to your double-wide trailer in your Ford F-150 with a window decal of Calvin urinating upon something, you may feel that vision fade. You may feel the panic of returning to that mewling, ape-like troglodyte you call a wife or girlfriend. You may think about how her breasts—saggy udders with nipples like vulcanized rubber—are nothing like the breasts of POPULAR ACTRESS. A deep depression will no doubt seize your soul.
Take heart! There will be many, many, many more opportunities to delight in the jiggling visage of POPULAR ACTRESS' breasts. We will see to it.

We make this solemn vow, to you, our wailing patron: We will put POPULAR ACTRESS' breasts in every movie possible, from now until the pre-ordained day of their expiration (not long after her 25th birthday). When that day comes, we also promise to replace them with a bosom no less bountiful to fuel your gruesome, primitive rutting.
We will do this for you.
Because we fucking hate you.

Game Review: Dragonage

Dragonage is a new RTS/RPG hybrid by BioWar games, famous inventors of Belter’s Gate and other Dungeons In Dragons video games. This is their first foray into recording games for the X-Boxer and Player Station 3, and it shows. The entire affair is marred by amateurish presentation more fitting for a late night sword & sorcery schlockfest than the CD-ROM multimedia interactive movie it was intended to be.

NOTE: I AM REVIEWING THIS GAME ON MY IBM PERSONAL COMPUTER. IT HAS AN INTEL PROCESSOR AND A HARD DRIVE. RAM: YES. IT IS WATER COOLED BECAUSE I LIKE TO OVERCOOK MY CHIPS.

Let’s start with the graphics. I don’t know for certain, but I’m pretty sure they’re at least 128 bit (maybe even 200). The problem is that they look closer to 96 bit, which really shows the series’ Atari Jaguar roots. Whatever, they’re passable, even if all of the character models look like muppets half burned up in a grease fire. It’s hard to believe this is FMV. Supposedly they used the same high tech imaging process as Moral Combat, but I just don’t see it. (Before you think I’m just not familiar with the technology, know that I used to play MC2 at the roller rink eight hours a day while my mom was at work. Sometimes sixteen hours if she had to pull a double shift because one of the other girls was at the clinic. I still know all of the fatalities, animalities, babalities, and bestialities. Do not question what I know.)

The sound in this game is great, even though sometimes it doesn’t fit. For instance, when your main character casts a magic incarnation, he sometimes calls out “SPAWN MORE OVERLORDS” which is kind of unusual. Female characters sometimes just make fart noises when given commands, and while it’s pretty damn funny it’s also just unnecessary. By and large, however, the swords sound just like swords and the magic spells sound just like they do in real life. My only real serious complaint is the narrator, who doesn’t sound like Mako at all.

UPDATE: the narrator is NOT Mako. Mako died in 1999.

The plot is a meandering mess. It starts out in this magical kingdom called Floralden, full of elfs and gnomes, and there’s some kind of war going on. It appears that betrayal is afoot, and things will never be the same. Basically it’s the same plot as Lord of the Ring: Return of the Jedi. I’m not strictly complaining, but I expected something more original.

You can choose from among three character classes: Swordman, Mana Wizard, and some kind of ninja guy. You can be a guy or a girl, but there’s really no reason to pick a girl due to the crippling stat penalties. To make matters worse male characters get +10 to hit girls, and every time you give a girl an order there’s a 25% chance that she’ll fall down and become stunned. Also their faces all look like they’re about to cry and you can’t change them.

Anyway, I really couldn’t follow the plot. You start out by meeting this guy named Gary Warren and he hires you to help him stop this disease called the Bloat. The Bloat is spreading all over the world and creating all of these ugly monsters called Darth Spawn. This is silly because Darth Spawn was the bad guy in the third Star War movie, I’m almost sure. Martin Sheen played him. You can check IMDB on this. Whatever.

The plot progresses along typical lines: go here, kill some rat lords, gain experience until you have enough X Points to buy a new firebrain spell. Occasionally you are required to participate in a rhythm minigame where you have to type out the lyrics to the Dragonage theme song. This wouldn’t be so bad except that it happens at every area transition and load screen. You open a door so your character can go to the bathroom because his Bladder stat is full, and you get “Dra-GONE-age! DRA-gone-age! Hearts of fi-re, love’s in-side her, Dra-gone-AGE!” It’s like they did it just to pad out the game. Right before you have to swap to the second disc it plays a variant version with extended guitar and bass solos. The guitar stuff sounds like AC/DC, so I didn’t really mind, but it didn’t jive with the whole Crimean War/Moorish occupation steampunk setting.

Near the end of the game you finally confront the evil Dragonage, who wants to rule the world because the love of her life—the Tempeler—left her for a Witch of the World. Before you can fight her, though, you are teleported to the underground land of Fate, where you discover the game’s dark secret:

All of the characters are patients in a mental hospital in the real world. The events of the game are just a dramatized version of their group therapy sessions, ending in a climax where the characters overcome their mental problems and move on with their lives. It’s something of an anticlimax, but it actually kind of works. When they all hug at the end is especially touching.[/SPOILER]

There are four alternate endings, but two of them are the same only with the characters in different period costumes (American western and Edwardian), and one of them has the characters starting a rock band called—guess what—Dragonage! I won’t spoil the final and best ending, but you can go back up a paragraph and read it again if you want.

Now let’s get to the real meat of Dragonage: the characters. By and large BioWar really outdid themselves giving the characters unique personalities and back stories. I have to question some of the creative decisions, however. One of the characters, a female Mana Wizard named Morrissey, spends the entire game completely topless. Normally I wouldn’t have a problem with this except for two things: First, the nipples on the character model are badly misaligned (also they are more brown than pink—brown nipples are gross). Second, they never explain how a female can become a Mana Wizard despite starting with half of the Intelligence of a male character. To be fair, however, she isn’t very good at her class and spends most of the game making meals and sewing things for the boys. She is basically comic relief, and several plot sequences require your character to console her after she is reduced to tears by your constant teasing about her lisp.

Other characters include Alice, a knight (and a man, by the way—I really think they mixed up a lot of the character names and just never got around to correcting them), and Steve, a black man. Later on there’s a pair of morbidly obese twins who join your party, but I never used them except in the pie eating contest. World 4, Level 5 takes place in a sumo wrestling contest, but you don’t meet the twins until Word 6—another example of BioWar’s slapdash approach to this game.

One problem character is this elfish assassin who joins your party. His character is openly gay (ASS-ASS-IN… get it?) and spends most of his time mincing about the screen in leather straps. He also hits on your character all the time, and since I made my guy to look a lot like me this made me feel really uncomfortable. It was made worse by the fact that when I first met him I thought he was a girl, so I chose lots of romantic dialogue options. If you aren’t careful BioWar will trick you into a depraved homosexual relationship that you can’t escape without uninstalling then reinstalling the game. Just another part of the gay agenda, I guess. It’d be nice if there were just one game that didn’t involve rampant gay sex between men.

Oh, did I mention the rampant gay sex? After you start a romance with the elf there is an obligatory interactive sex scene, complete with graphic penetration. If you try to skip it, it just starts playing really loud techno music. There’s an option to plug in a rumble-capable gamepad during these sequences, but I don’t know why you would want to.

These sequences are absolutely disgusting and I had to watch each of them three or four times before I could believe what I was seeing. They take the form of a minigame, and, in fact, replace the theme song minigame on every loading screen afterward. The mechanic is simple: just tap the spacebar to coordinate with the characters’ pelvis thrusts. If you fail the characters get this disappointed look on their faces, and it’s really disheartening. A help popup encourages you to use your own penis to tap the spacebar for maximum interactivity. At first I balked, but it really does make the sequences a lot easier. Later in the game the two of you run away to the neighboring kingdom of Quar, where gay marriage is legalized as part of the plot (there’s that agenda again). While there they learn some exotic new positions which are integrated into the minigame. Unfortunately they require so much tapping that you’re likely to inadvertently have an orgasm before the sequences are complete.

You can avoid the relationship with the elf, if you can, and instead pursue one with the comically large-breasted Morrissey. Unfortunately, the heterosexual sex scenes are far less graphic than the homosexual ones, and Morrissey’s weird nipples make it hard to maintain an erection for extended tapping. I can’t wait until someone puts out a mod to give her normal nipples.

Now, there’s no multiplayer but there is split-screen co-op, which is a mixed blessing because the game forces one player to be the gay elf. In that mode the minigames require both players to tap different parts of the keyboard, so…

All in all it’s a solidly average game. It doesn’t have the depth of Masterfect or the charm of Jade Umpire, or the powerhouse Dungeon In Dragons license (though there is a surprise cameo by Drizzt Do’Urden, it occurs during one of the previously mentioned minigames). BioWar clearly intends Dragonage to be the beginning of a new franchise, but after what I’ve seen in this game I’m not sure I want to go along for the ride. Still, projected advances in teledildonics over the next few years make the prospect of a Dragonage sequel simultaneously terrifying and irresistible.

So, if you’re a fan of this sort of thing (and there’s nothing wrong with it if you are), give Dragonage a try. Otherwise you might be better served by pre-ordering Modern Warfront 2: Called to Duty at your local Gamestop or EB Games—that way you are guaranteed a copy on release day, unless they happen to somehow run out and you have to go to Best Buy where they have, like, 500 on the shelf.

I give it 2 Thai Ladyboys out of 5.

Those two. Specifically.

My Left 4 Dead 2 Demo Experience

First there was a Steam update. When is there not one? Then I had to download the game. This was expected, and progressed very smoothly. In only a few short minutes I was joining my first game. I selected my character and waited for the person who started the game in the first place to… well, start the game.

And waited.

And waited.

Someone named “Brian Peppers” joined, and immediately began screeching into his microphone in a pubescent warble:

“WHAT UP, MY NIGGERS!?”

“WHAT UP, MY NIGGERS!?”

“HEY, NIGGERS!”

“YOU BUNCH OF POOR NIGGERS!”

Fuck that. I joined a new game. I was randomly assigned Coach and after a short wait the game began. Immediately, one of the other players started shooting me. This player’s name was “NEGRO.”

The third time was a charm, however: after a vote to kick NEGRO, I and my competent and helpful teammates were able to play the demo to completion. Still, it was a brutal reminder of two things:

1) I fucking hate online games.
2) I fucking hate people.

You might think I’m generalizing too hastily. What about that third game that went well? Should I let the previous two incidents color my judgment? Well, consider that I played only three fucking games today. In the first, a teenager bleated tired racial epithets. In the second, a player named NEGRO teamkilled me. I consider this a pretty representative sample of the kind of sub-moron that gravitates towards online games.

If I had my way I would have them all rounded up and gassed. I shit you not. I don’t care if they’re otherwise normal kids just having a goof in the anonymous world of TEH INTARNET. They are, on some deep, intrinsic level, irredeemable scumbags who deserve—at the very least—chemical castration.

There’s a lot I could say about the semi-anonymous online environment and basic human nature, but I’m not going to. It’s not worth it. We just need a fucking pogrom.

I’m off to play Dragon Age.

Why Movie Theater Lobbies Don’t Have Clocks

I had one of those conversations the other day that starts out perfunctory but leads to a profound revelation.

“Why don’t movie theaters have clocks in their lobbies?” someone asked.

It was a good question, and at the time I didn’t have an answer.  Later on it occurred to me that concessions were the reason. If there were clocks in theater lobbies, people might look at them and think “I only have four minutes before my movie starts.  Fuck popcorn, I need to get a seat.”  Without the overhanging specter of clearly visible time people are more likely to linger in the lobby and stock up on overpriced popcorn and Milk Duds.

It’s a pretty standard “do everything you can to deprive the consumer of information so he will make more irrational decisions” strategy.  Casinos use it, theme parks use it, soda companies use it—everybody uses it.  When’s the last time you saw a clock in a Wal-Mart, or a Best Buy for that matter?

I’m sure that the numbers have been judiciously crunched: without clocks concession sales go up.  In this age of ubiquitous phones with synchronized timekeeping devices, the effect is certainly less pronounced.  However, if there were no effect at all, surely some theater somewhere would stick a clock in its lobby just for raw convenience.

There are certainly small theaters out there that provide such a simple courtesy for their patrons, but the big chain leviathans (Cinemark, Regal, AMC, etc.) do not.  Again, I’m sure they’ve run the numbers on it and found it simply to be more profitable.

This is such a strange idea, that it’s okay to withhold information from people if it brings in more money.  In fact, it’s downright nefarious.  They justify it by saying that they aren’t forbidding people from finding out what time it is; they just aren’t telling them.  Okay, fine.  Still, the overall level of ignorance is increased, and I fail to see how that benefits anybody.

Whatever.  The point is a simple one, and this is the revelation that struck me like the ray of light that knocked Paul off his literal ass: we cannot trust the private sector to do what is right if there is a wrong option that is more profitable. It’s simply the nature of the beast.  You can’t expect a bear to choose a pinecone over a fish.

We all understand this on some level.  It’s why we don’t have private police and fire departments, and why our roads and airwaves are public (sort of).  Of course there are those among us who believe that everything should be privatized: they call themselves libertarians, or Austrian school economists.  They believe that private organizations invariably provide better services than public ones.  From what data they draw that conclusion is a mystery, as nobody has ever tried a broad program of privatization before.  As far as I’m concerned, it’s no less flawed at its core than communism: sounds good on paper, leads to disaster in practice.

Which isn’t to unduly praise the waste and inefficiency of government.  That waste and inefficiency, however, is often the very thing that holds government power in check.  We should all dread an efficient government more than any thing.  Efficient governments come up with ideas, and they put ideas into practice with plans, and plans become beasts of their own that devour lives according to arcane political designs.

When the blunt and impersonal “invisible hand” comes into play, though, well, you end up in a world without clocks.

The End of the End of the World

Despite the unusually high level of public retardation on the subject, I’m looking forward to the year 2012. Once that year dawns without incident—like the year 2000 before it—the final hard date for the apocalypse will have passed.

There is this kind of loosely organized society of secular doomsday nuts floating around, and 2012 is pretty much their last chance.  When it becomes clear that the end of the world is not coming imminently, when that final box on the calendar for possible doomsdays is marked off, will we finally be done with this cultural derangement?  Perhaps they will simply resign themselves to watching the calendar with bated breath, hoping for one of the considerably more vague Abrahamic prophecies to pan out.

I consider it partly an outgrowth of the unfulfilled Armageddon promises of the Cold War. Some took the threat of nuclear war as a warning; the end of the world was supposed to fill people with a sense of alarm. Some, however, seem to have taken it as a promise. Rather than “We have these terrible weapons and must not use them!” they heard “We have these terrible weapons and using them is inevitable!”

When the Soviet Union disintegrated and the specter of large scale nuclear war disintegrated with it, a lot of death fantasies went unfulfilled. There still remains this little nugget of apocalyptic mania in the American psyche.

Still, one shouldn’t mistake the doomsday fascination for a recent phenomenon. Human beings have been predicting the End of All Things for as long as there have been human beings. In fact, cultures that produce apocalyptic literature tend to be going through rough times. The first Judeo-Christian apocalyptic literature was produced by the Hebrews during one of their many periods of enslavement.

“The world is crap,” the doomsayer says, “and it won’t get any better. The only way things could improve is if the world just ended and everybody died.” This attitude was echoed by Christianity during their own period of repression, and enshrined in the book of Revelation: a highly symbolic critique of the Roman Empire.

This is worth contrasting with Norse mythology, which has Ragnarok. At Ragnarok the Aesir (representing order) will fight the giants (representing chaos) in a battle that will kill most of them and destroy the world. A big part of Norse mythology is the inevitability of this: Thor will be killed by Jörmungandr, Odin will be eaten by Fenrir, and Surtr will burn Yggdrasil with a flaming sword. Everyone—even the mythological figures themselves—know that this will happen. They don’t lament the end, or celebrate it as a time when their oppressors will be destroyed; they embrace it as destiny.

This all harkens back to a simple fact, something that every human being understands on a primal level: the world is ending—not by prophecy, not by divine mandate, not by destiny—by fact.

The universe is a closed system. There is no energy coming into it from outside. What is currently here is all that exists and all that ever will exist. As light inevitably turns to heat, and the heat inevitably dissipates, the universe inevitably turns cold and dark. The universe is, in fact, dying slowly all around us. Very slowly. So slowly that none of us will be around to see it end—and then not in a bang, or even a much of a whimper. The end really will come, as the Christians say, “like a thief in the night.” A very, very long night.

For some people this physical fact of entropy isn’t good enough. I admit that it isn’t very dramatic (though it does possess a certain romantic resonance). Cities bursting into flame and continents sinking into the sea make for a much more satisfying mass-death fantasy.

This points to a deep cultural depression. Our age is one of social desolation. Progress is empty and mechanical, and science is no longer considered a source of joy, but of existential horror. I fear that we are all sick of living, but are too cowardly to just kill ourselves. We hope for some cosmic circumstance—some runaway bus of prophecy—to come and mow us down instead.

“It is fated,” we can say.

“SIGH.”

This thanatotic impulse constitutes a great challenge for our species. To overcome it, to discover the joy of life in an age of wonders, may prove an essential step in the long-term survival of our species. Rather than regarding existence as a burden successful sapients must treat it as a challenge—an opportunity to assert collective will against the impersonal forces of the universe and, rather than succumbing to ennui and despair, prevailing and taking reality by the throat. Intelligent life is the universe’s only hope for escaping the inevitable cosmic night.

Don’t sit around dreading/hoping that the universe will drop a rock on your head and free you from the burden of sentience. Grow, learn and do anything you can to make the world a better place. The human race deserves to survive, and so do you.

Harry Dean Stanton Approved

I love Wal-Mart's new line of "Great Value" products.  There's nothing like cracking open a bag of Great Value "Tortilla Chips" and dipping them in some Great Value "Salsa."  It makes me feel like I'm living in the world of Repo Man, where all products come in generic white packaging with labels that describe what's inside.  BEER.  FOOD.  SLICED PEACHES.  SHREDDED CHEESE.

Emilio Estevez Tested, Harry Dean Stanton Approved!

Along with this intoxicating lack of pretension, however, is the haunting suspicion that what you are eating is somehow ersatz--that the contents are kept deliberately vague, to disguise the fact that your TUNA FISH is actually HORSE HOOVES, or that your BAKED BEANS are, in reality, TOXIC PLANKTON.

Yet these products are inescapable, and you may be lured to them by their dangerously low prices. Why, turn down any given aisle of Wal-Mart these days and you are likely to be greeted by a sight eerily similar to this…

…right down to the blank-faced youths toiling in sullen anonymity.

Of course, there is a reason for all of this.  The economy is a turd basket.  When Repo Man was made (1984—right in the middle of the real wine and roses days of Reaganomics), store shelves were lined with similar bland generics.  Now they have returned, like a recurring cold sore that belies a deeper, more disturbing problem.

With them comes a hope, however: a foolish, impossible hope that I may one day drink BEER with Harry Dean Stanton in a 1973 Chevy Impala.

In these tough economic times we have to cling to our hopes.

Guns, Guns, Guns!

People with ideological or political axes to grind are invariably among the most oblivious people on earth.  Take this for example, discovered while looking for pictures of women with guns (hey, we all have our thing).

In summary: "My pet political opinions are awesome and people who disagree with me are ugly and dumb."  You know the drill.  It’s the kind of bottom-of-the-barrel simulacra of political discourse that we have all begun to accept as right and normal.

I’m past it.

Here’s the problem: The author finishes his diatribe by posting a trio of pictures featuring the very thing I sought--women with guns.  But just look at these pictures.  How could any responsible gun owner find them anything less than grotesque?

 OH

 MY

GOD.

TRIGGER DISCIPLINE, LADIES.  For fuck’s sake, the woman in the third picture is pointing the gun at her own femoral artery and her finger is on the trigger.  I can’t jack off to this.  It's horrifying.  It's one errant muscle spasm away from gore porn. 

(Also the first two are kind of ugly.)

The author of this filth should be ashamed of himself, particularly as a gun owner.  Hopefully he is a mere gun fetishist, and hasn't put himself and his family in mortal danger by owning an actual firearm.  It undermines his entire message, which amounts to:

"Guns rule, and Americans have the right to bear arms, now here are some pictures of women demonstrating deplorable gun safety!  Woo, I have no fucking idea what I’m talking about!"

He doesn't realize this, of course, because he is an idiot.  Like many of your rabid gun crowd I imagine that he will accidentally perforate his own skull while cleaning a loaded Desert Eagle, which he bought because he saw it blow a telephone pole in half in a movie.

Good riddance.

Yes, they are prop guns.  I hope.  That does not excuse such gross irresponsibility.

DLC Follies

At the risk of looking like I want to join the benighted ranks of so-called game reviewers, there is something I must say:

Mothership Zeta is a pile of suck.

Obligatory backstory: Mothership Zeta is the final piece of downloadable content (which we have taken to calling DLC in our pathological lust for easily digestible acronyms) for Fallout 3. 

I enjoyed Fallout 3, despite being a deranged Fallout purist who thinks that the cancellation of Van Buren was tantamount to Satan’s release from his infernal prison as per Revelation 20:7.

That said, I had (and still have) some misgivings about Fallout 3.  Misgivings that I cheerfully laid aside to enjoy the experience Bethesda actually delivered, rather than the one my fevered imagination wished might have been.

Mothership Zeta, however, is a pile of suck.

I won’t go into how it emphasizes Fallout 3’s weakest element (the S in FPS), or how it’s basically a giant gray corridor crawl punctuated by reactor explosions.  I won’t point out that it’s basically just Operation: Anchorage all over again with a graphics swap.

No.  Such complaints have been covered in more detail by people who actually get paid to play this kind of diarrhea.  Instead, I will focus on two particular elements that I believe showcase the general lack of “give a shit” displayed by Mothership Zeta at every turn.

You can’t see it in this picture, but the stars here are completely static.  It looks like there’s a giant black box around the ship upon which some miscreant spattered uniform blobs of white.  Because that’s exactly what it is.  The sun, meanwhile, just kind of hangs there and, due to the obvious proximity of the wall that mocks the eternal vastness of space, seems to be about as large as an overinflated beachball.

Inexcusable.

Then there’s this:

Perhaps you can see the problem.  Press ‘1’ for a hint.  Boop.  Where is your left glove, Captain Vacuum Exposure?

Now, a particularly clever shithead (or at least one who thinks himself clever), might attempt to rationalize these obvious deficiencies.  He might say that these things indicate that Mothership Zeta does not, in fact, take place in outer space but rather in a computer simulation.  Just like Operation: Anchorage.

A simpler explanation, of course, is that Bethesda simply didn’t give a shit.

“What are we gonna do for our last DLC guys?”

“Fuck, I don’t know.  Some new guns.  Some new guys to shoot.  I don’t think we need to work on a plot, or quests or anything.  Just kind of runnin’ around in a closed location, completely severed from the laboriously detailed game world we slaved over for years, shootin’ stuff.”

“And blowing up reactors?”

“Naturally.”

“Also, you can team up with a samurai and a cowboy.”  [NOTE: I am not making this up.]

How does this whole clusterfuck limp across the finish line?

Well, the Vault Dweller and his ragtag group of allies commandeer the alien spaceship, upon which another alien ship swoops in for the attack!  You must utilize the ship’s systems to defeat your interstellar adversary, rerouting power between the shields and the death ray, as the situation demands.  Eventually, through skill and determination, victory is achieved and the earth is saved.  You must crank up the death ray to maximum, then hammer the “fire” button until the enemy ship blows up real good.  No effort is required, and none is expended.

That sums up the entire Mothership Zeta experience in a nutshell.

Note: I demand respect for resisting the urge to title this post “MotherSHIT Zeta.”

Old School Internet

In conversation I’ve taken to preceding the words Facebook and Myspace with unnecessary definite articles.  “I don’t use the Facebook,” I’ll say, or, “The MySpace is for idiots.”

It’s an effacing acknowledgement of how deliberately, stubbornly (even curmudgeonly) out-of-touch I’ve become with the popular online landscape.  Whenever I express this distaste towards self-styled “social networking,” I am invariably challenged for a reason.  People act as if I should want to tie my Internet presence to my corporeal person, to cast myself as a celebrity-in-miniature.

I see little to no value in this.

The Internet is intangible by nature, a gloomy sheol populated by disembodied ghouls, each trying to carve an ephemeral fiefdom out of its ever-shifting sands.  If the nihilists are right, and all human achievement is but written on the winds, then that is doubly so for the Internet.

“The Internet is our generation’s Vietnam,” I often say, and I am only half joking.  The online shadowplay is how our spoiled, weak and feckless generation gives form to its peculiar demons: entitlement, consumption, selfishness, and unbounded ego.  Every man on the Internet is a little ersatz god, carving meaningless commandments onto illusionary tablets of stone.  The allure of “social networking” is the illusion of teeming Israelites waiting at the foot of the mount for you to bless them with your wisdom.  Cobweb of cannibalistic sycophants, strangers and egomaniacs form, feeding one another through mutual attention.  Sheer numbers of believers—and whosever believeth in me, I shall also believeth in—give form to the shadow, to bring corporeality to the incorporeal wastes.

This pleroma quickly threatens to become kenoma under the influence of a million little demiurges.

Yet the times change, and despite my crabbishness I am something of a neophile.  The day may yet come where I abandon my snobbish “old school” mentality and set up a tiny outpost of flesh amid the sea of electrons.

The day may yet come.

Until then I will stare unflinchingly into the unformed chaos of digital space, delighting in the power that anonymity affords one in a world of ubiquitous celebrity.

A Dark Obsession

I have a problem.

Inklings of it first crept into my waking mind some months ago, as I slid a copy of “Next” into my DVD player.  It came as a kind of itch, buried in the depths of my brain, a vague sense that something in my life wasn’t right. 

I next felt this sensation while watching “Left Behind.”  The feeling still had no name, and no fixed identity.  It floated freely within me, this nebulous unease, and I had begun to think of it as a newly developed aspect of my personality.

Only a handful of weeks ago I was watching “The Room” when I suddenly perceived a new dimension to this presence.  It had a distinctly puritanical character, by which I mean it was composed largely of the feeling of “wrongness” and the intense desire to set things right.

Then it struck me.  The full force of it exploded in my mind, flooding my consciousness with a wailing, irrefutable truth:

While I was watching “Next” I could have been watching “Touch of Evil.”  While “Left Behind” was vomiting forth from my television in wave after wave of inanity, I could have been bathing myself in the warm, clean waters of “Ikiru.”  While “The Room” was doing things to my mind that could possibly be irreparable, I could have been watching any number of films by Welles, Kurosawa, Bergman, or Truffaut.  I could even have been watching any of the silent classics that sit inert on my shelf, purchased on impulse and then never watched.

I was deliberately watching bad movies, while ignoring ones that I had reason to believe would actually be good.  I had become a cinematic coprophage, gleefully consuming offal, and delighting in the bitter, hateful taste.

The feeling that had plagued me these last months was the very essence of good taste, bursting free from some psychic prison built out of improbable action sequences, shallow characterization, plot stupidity, murky cinematography, and bad writing.  It rose out of me like a fire, and I can feel it battling the dark presence that drives me to fill my eyes with the polluted light of bad cinema.

This monstrous presence has a terrible power, and I am not sure that my better nature will prevail.  I have not seen “Aguirre: the Wrath of God,” but I have seen “Twilight.”  I have watched the entire oeuvre of Uwe Boll, when even the weakest works of Hitchcock would be like dreams made real by comparison.

I haven’t watched “Battleship Potempkin” yet.  It’s only 75 minutes long.

In a few hours I’m going to watch “Push.”  I think it will be awful.  No.  No, I hope it will be awful.  If I have any power over this beast at all, I will watch “The Third Man” instead.  I feel a great heat that threatens to consume my body, and I know that it is born from the fire of conflict between these two aspects.

There must be a balance.  Part of the joy of cinema is, after all, stimulation.  Must every flim experience be an artistic enthusiasmos?  Is there no place for disgust, hatred, or even schaenfreude toward a job poorly done?

God help me, but the trash calls out.  Like a sleazy carnival barker, it offers me access to a world of intellectual outrages that give me every bit as much pleasure as great art.

After all, if you never watch a truly terrible movie, how will you ever recognize a great one?

The Good, the Bad and the Ataxic

Let me begin by saying that I enjoy “Call of Juarez – Bound In Blood.”  As far as Western-themed shooters go, I like it almost as much as Lucas Arts’ “Outlaws.”  Almost. Which isn’t saying much, I suppose, since that was over ten fucking years ago.  You have to understand that the pickings during that intervening decade have varied greatly: anywhere from utterly execrable (“Western Outlaw: Wanted Dead Or Alive”) to passably diverting in a bland, manilla envelope full of tapioca pudding kind of way (“Gun”).

The original “Call of Juarez,” of which “Bound In Blood” is technically a prequel, was a competent, not-too-hideous gunfight simulator marred by stealth sequences of the “stay hidden or die” variety.  Still, it allowed you to shoot faceless goons in ten gallon hats with one hand while reading fire-and-brimstone verses out of a Bible in the other.  There was no gameplay benefit to doing this, it was simply awesome.  Sadly, the amusement factor of playing a fundamentalist lunatic on a rampage of revenge lost all of its charm after four hours of gooey controls, “Oh, who gives a shit?” plot, and plasticized, zombie-faced character models.

“Bound In Blood,” in addition to (marginally) improving these areas, is also a frank depiction of the hardships endured by two brothers cruelly stricken with Klumpke’s palsy.

Ray and Thomas McCall—our designated protagonists—both suffer from sudden-onset hand paralysis, kicking in every time there’s a one-on-one gunfight.  Considering that every single mission ends in such a showdown, you begin to see the great hardship under which the outlaw brothers endure.  The gunfighting mechanic is as such: the camera drops down to ass-cheek level, with your adversary in the center of the screen, and your character’s hand hovering over his holstered shooting iron.  Your opponent moves right, then left.  This goes on for an eternity until somewhere, someone decides to ring a church bell.  That is the signal for you to reach for your gun by moving the mouse.  The problem is that every inch of on-screen movement requires about a foot and a half of mouse movement, regardless of sensitivity.  So the church bell rings, and your character begins to move with agonizing slowness toward the butt of his pistol, his hand jerking inch by inch across the seemingly vast interstice between man and victory.  While you are dragging the mouse across your desk again and again like you’re reeling in a garden hose, your enemy has effortlessly unholstered his weapon and perforated your character’s spleen.

You will repeat this process many, many times until finally you get lucky and your ataxic character manages to grip his gun and bring it to bear on his opponent. Inevitably you will shoot as soon as possible, which has the hilarious side-effect of making all gunfights end in crotch shots.

Now, despite the crippling disability that nature has bestowed upon the McCalls, their true downfall is pride.  They never turn down an offer for a gunfight, knowing as they must that every gunfight is an exercise in excruciating pain and humiliation.  It is inevitable, in fact, that your character will die several times during these events, in what is either a clever parody of the wild west anti-hero’s eternal flirtation with violent death, or just REALLY SHITTY FUCKING GAME DESIGN, YOU FUCKING ASSHOLES.

Every single mission in the game ends with somebody wandering out and demanding a gunfight like it’s constitutionally mandated.  That the greedy, cruel and dishonorable McCall brothers heed these requests is all the more baffling.  Solitary enemies stumble out from behind cover, outmanned two-to-one, and aren’t unceremoniously shot in the face from a hundred paces. 

Nobody in this universe has ever been shot in the back of the head while playing cards.

Thus we come to my primary complaint, and it is the same complaint I have lodged against every western-themed game ever: this is not a depiction of the American post-Civil War frontier period.  It is a depiction of what Italians in the 1970s thought the American post-Civil War frontier period was like.

Western shooters need to give up spaghetti like military shooters need to give up brown palettes, or RPGs need to give up Tolkien and giant spiders.  It’s time to move on.  A whole generation of homegrown western films have raised the bar, introducing some of the real moral grayness that characterized the period (beyond simple not-so-nice guys shooting at other not-so-nice guys).

Is it necessary to keep going back to the trough for grizzled, scarred and stubbled villain-protagonists to shoot historically inaccurate weapons at mighty Apache warriors over lost gold?

Hopefully not for much longer.

Bread and Circuses

Unwanted History Lesson: Battle of the Crater

What would you say if I told you that an invading army once tried to break a siege against a heavily fortified city by digging a 500 foot long mineshaft underneath it, then detonating 4 tons of gunpowder inside?

What would you say if I then told you that the plan backfired terribly and, through a combination of poor planning and incompetent leadership, resulted in a resounding victory for the opposing side?

You might say “Who was in charge of this operation, Wile E. Coyote?”  Then again, you might say “I saw Cold Mountain, asshole, so I know about the Battle of the Crater.”

Regardless, let us turn back the clock to the summer of 1864.

The Civil War is entering its last leg.  The Confederate States of America, driven out of the West and thwarted at every turn in the North, is now facing a competent, well-trained, well-supplied Union Army.  Chattanooga had fallen to General Ulysses S. Grant last November, and the entire Confederacy lies open for a military campaign that will see General William Tecumseh Sherman within sight of Atlanta in mere weeks.

It is in this climate that beleaguered Confederate defenders hold their ground at Petersberg, Virgina, only 23 miles away from the Confederate capital of Richmond.

A dire situation, indeed.  In less than a year the war will be over, and the Confederate States of America will be crushed, survived only by a weathered set of “Heritage, Not Hate” mudflaps.  Fortunately for the defenders, however, they are up against General Ambrose Burnside and a motley collection of some of the most criminally incompetent commanders that the United States Army has to offer.

General Burnside is a career fuck-up.  He comes fresh from his staggering defeat at Fredericksburg, where he daringly sent man after man after man headlong into withering defensive fire, in bold defiance of the laws of logic and battle.  The result was a defeat so stunning that one might have forgiven President Lincoln had he wandered about the White House in a daze, shouting “Burnside, Burnside, give me back my legions!”

Burnside was not a man with a great aptitude for plans.  So when the Siege of Petersberg descended into a bitter slog through mud and trenches (an eerie premonition of the Western Front, if only Europe had paid attention), Burnside takes ideas from all comers.

Enter Lieutenant Colonel Henry Pleasants, miner by trade.  The exchange that follows is one that echoes back and forth through the ages in a long line of “smart guy has a great plan that his superiors are too stupid to properly enact.”  His plan is fiendish:

Step 1: Dig 500 foot long shaft 20 feet beneath enemy lines.
Step 2: Fill up with 8000 pounds of gunpowder.
Step 3: Blow up gunpowder.
Step 4: Send troops through resulting hole.
Step 5: Win battle.

Burnside likes the plan because, well, it’s a plan, and he is generally unfamiliar with them.  Pleasants is set to task immediately, coordinating men and moving massive amounts of earth.  It is only after a series of other failures to break the stalemate around Richmond, however, that Pleasants is given the go ahead to (in the words of General Grant) “Pop the cork on that bitch.”

It is at this point that things go terribly, terribly wrong.  For whatever reason, it failed to sink into the Union commanders’ heads that someone was about to detonate 4 TONS OF GUNPOWDER underground.  Well, that’s not entirely accurate.  They must have had some measure of the glorious clusterfuck that was about to ensue, because the first division chosen to charge into the breach was an all black division led by Brigadier General Edward Ferrero.  The men were drilled, trained, and as prepared for what was to come as any man possibly could have been.  Then, at the last minute, someone caught a case of the politics and decided that sending only black guys into the post-apocalyptic inferno might raise some eyebrows.

This was in 1864.  Remember that the next time a sweaty guy wearing a “The South Will Rise Again” t-shirt bitches at you on the bus about “political correctness.”

A victory for civil rights, perhaps, but a major blow to the plan.  Burnside, left with no other options, does what he does best: fucks everything up.  Instead of training a new division for the unique job, he decides to just choose a division at random.  He lines up all of the division commanders and has them choose from one of three doors.  Behind two of the doors are goats.  Behind the third door is the chance to run headlong into the aftermath of a giant explosion and probably die.  The job goes to the 1st Division under Brigadier General James H. Ledlie.

As fate would have it, Ledlie is an able commander with a keen respect for his men.  He prepares them well for the arduous task ahead of them and, when the moment comes, is by their side as they charge headlong into history.

That entire preceding paragraph is a lie.

Ledlie is a coward and a fool.  Just ask any of his men.  In a previous attack on June 18th he opted to have a few drinks and pass out on the battlefield, bypassing the ugliness of battle much like Bilbo Baggins did at the Battle of Five Armies.  In this case he doesn’t even bother to tell his men exactly what job they just got randomly signed up for.  I imagine that he just kind of strolled into camp, made a farting noise with his mouth, then said “Welp, guys.  You’re leading the attack after they do the, you know, thing with the, you know, thing.  See ya there!  Unless I’m too drunk to show up!” Then he sauntered away into eternal ignominy (more on this imminently).

We move ahead to the day of the detonation.  July 30th.  Just before dawn.  Ledlie’s men wait for the signal, which will be the loudest man-made explosion in history up to that point.  The Brigadier General is nowhere to be found.  When the bomb goes off at 4:45am it leaves a crater thirty feet deep, churning the earth into a shroud that blots out the sun.  Great clods of earth rain from the hellish sky, complemented here and there by splintered Confederate rifles and shattered bodily remains.  Ledlie’s men—caught completely unprepared for the scale of the blast—wait ten minutes before stumbling blindly into the crater (instead of around it, as the original division had known to do).  Inside they find Confederate soldiers half-buried by the blast.  Some are still living but buried face down, their legs kicking in the air above them.  In those chaotic first moments of the offensive, Ledlie’s men perform search and rescue.

As more of the 1st Division enters the crater, all semblance of order evaporates.  Units dissolve, officers become separated from their troops, and nobody has much of an idea what they are supposed to be doing.  Then, someone remembers that the men in the blue uniforms and the men in the gray uniforms are supposed to be shooting at eachother.  The Union soldiers, milling about in the crater, make a fine shooting gallery for Confederate riflemen on the rim, and for Confederate cannons behind the lines.

Burnside, eager to add another entry to his list of “catastrophes I have committed while serving as a general in the United States Army” orders the black division under Brigadier General Ferrero—the very same that was supposed to lead the attack in the first place—into the crater, where they too are chewed apart by concentrated rifle and artillery fire.  Brigadier General Ferrero, however, is nowhere to be found.

The Union would ultimately lose the battle but, as we all know, would soon win the war.  The casualties of the Battle of the Crater, while heavy, were far from the most outrageous of the conflict.  Still, the battle marked a subtle shift in the landscape of battle, a whisper of things that were to come.  It presaged a war—only a few decades away—where technology would outstrip tactics, and where military capability would exceed military competence.  It even held glimmers of another summer day, 81 years to come, and another plan to end a war with a single, titanic explosion. 

Yet a question remains.  Whatever happened to Generals Ledlie and Ferrero?  Where were they at the moment their men foundered in the crater, when their men most needed leadership?  Where were they while madness and confusion reigned on the battlefield?

They were drinking rum together in a bomb-proof bunker, far from the front line.

That’s the story of the Battle of the Crater.

ATTENTION: AMAZON.COM

That I liked Firefly does not, in fact, imply that I would be interested in a wormy turd shat onto a greasy paper plate by Joss Whedon.

Really.

Also, that I confessed to having enjoyed Akira should not suggest my interest in watching big-eyed anime schoolgirls being sodomized by tentacle monsters. Though, I admit some culpability here. I never should have told you about Berserk. How was I to know that it would cause hundreds of seemingly identical DVDs to appear in my recommendations with unwieldy names and featuring box art of freakish, wide-eyes pixies with improbable hair colors? It was my assumption that positively rating a show in which a man cuts a horse--and its rider--in half with an unreasonably large sword would attract similar programs.

My mistake, perhaps.

However, it was no mistake of mine when I told you that I enjoyed Mastodon's Crack the Skye, and you accosted me with aural abortions like Behold... the Arctopus.

(Honestly, I don't know what you were thinking in this case. I can only assume that you are now--and perhaps always have been--deliberately fucking with me.)

Finally, my interest in television shows such as The Wire does not--in any universe--lead to an interest in the entire run of Everybody Loves Raymond. Similarly, that I individually purchased all six season of The Sopranos does not mean I have the faintest interest in purchasing all six seasons again in one bulk purchase for a sale price of $278.

I ALREADY FUCKING OWN THEM, YOU SEE.

All is not piss and vinegar, however. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a fine suggestion for someone who enjoyed The Searchers. (Unfortunately I already own that movie, and thus your recommendation was no fucking help whatsoever.) I will even admit a strange sort of accidental logic behind suggesting El Dorado based on Rio Bravo (as they are--despite Howard Hawk's protests to the contrary--the same fucking movie).

In conclusion: HOW MANY FUCKING TIMES AM I GOING TO HAVE TO CLICK "NOT INTERESTED" ON A DRAGONBALL Z DVD UNTIL YOU GET THE FUCKING MESSAGE?

Who Was King of Bavaria During the Seven Years' War?

There are fools out there who will tell you that it is liberating to be without the Internet. They will say that it makes one more focused, more creative, more productive, more (fill in your own empty buzz word here). They will say this to you with a straight face, and they may even believe it. Ask any one of these people to show you the issue of a night of Internet-free productivity, however, and they will invariably come up with empty hands.

I find that time without the Internet is exhausting, and I am no practitioner of the great hoax on civil human society that is “web 2.0.” I check my e-mail once a day, steadfastly refuse to send messages (instant or otherwise), and am a proud non-participant in the dog-and-pony show of “social networking.”

No, what I miss about the Internet during those times when I suffer without is information. You may remember the promise of an “information age” that was made to us some few decades ago. The Internet, it was said, would be a vast library of not only formal, fixed scholarship, but also the raw, ugly matter of pure human experience. Then, some idiot figured out that you could use the Internet to meet people for sex.

The Internet is an adjunct to the brain. The human brain evolved to fit a very basic set of requirements: processing environmental stimuli, maintaining a store of information on past events, and the ability to extrapolate future events from a combination of the two below. These requirements are themselves mere sub-routines of a primary process: to avoid dying, at least until successful reproduction. Art, literature, dreams, writing, law, compassion, affection even love all owe themselves to the successful operation of our unique jelly.

The brain, however, does a few things rather poorly. One is recalling detailed information accurately. We evolved to process just enough information to save our lives, which is why we focus on the gun during a stick-up rather than the offender’s facial characteristics. Your brain doesn’t care a whit for accurate police testimony. It only cares about living. The other thing our brains do poorly is retain large amounts of information. Again, in nature it is simply not needed. You need only be aware of danger and safety, food and not food, predator and prey. The human today—compared to the human of even 1000 years ago—hold stores of information that are vast, and wholly unnecessary to survival.

Consider the question I asked at the beginning. No, the very beginning. Doubtless there are many people in the world who can answer a question like that from memory. There are even more who cannot. Before the Internet you had two options for discovering that kind of information:

1) Ask someone who is more knowledgeable than you.
2) Find the answer in a book.

The first option necessitated knowing someone who could answer the question, of course. The second would require either owning a book containing the answer or knowing where to find one. In the old days (of which I lived several) this meant a trip to the library.

(Now, a note to my fellow purists: I am neither suggesting that the Internet is a substitute for a good library, nor that words printed on a screen are superior to ones printed on paper. I am a firm believer in books, and am further convinced that no innovation will obsoletize ink on wood pulp technology for a very, very long time.)

However, the Internet can save you such a trip on matters of minutae. Say you’re writing a great novel about the life of Richard Wagner, and you need to know who ruled Bavaria when he wrote Lohengrin. You don’t need a complete run-down of his duties as monarch, or his foreign policy stance re: Prussia, you just need his name so that you won’t have to come back and fill in countless “KING SO-AND-SO” stand-ins the next day. The Internet fills small voids in knowledge in a timely manner, and does so magnificently.

(Though I should say to fellow victims of the humanities that a wealth of primary sources can be found on the Internet, if you’re game.)

Still, a grain of salt, as they say.

We are, sadly, conditioned to despise the technology that facilitates and enriches our lives. Again and again we are told that the witless savages of the stone age were in every way our moral and cultural superiors; That their ignorance of letters, science, and even the basic fundaments of law were not deficiencies against which they had to endure, but blessings! Intellect, many of us believe, is a curse, and its fruits diseased.

That is because we are creatures of our age, and like all creatures we think that our age is the worst one yet. Who hasn’t felt the dreadful gravity of the not-so-distant savage that still inhabits his mammal brain? It can be easy to imagine that life was better before soap, penicillin, and birth control. Part of us actually believes that. It tells us to shut off the Internet and the air conditioner, and labor in sweat and isolation. If it had its way it would relegate us to painting our thoughts in charcoal pictograms on the walls of our apartments. Even that wouldn’t be primitive enough in the end. Only when man is slumbering in a cold and damp cave, swathed in a cloud of his own bodily funk, with no more regard for the future than the source of his next meal and orgasm, will that deep, bestial part of us be satisfied.

Ignore him. Embrace technology. Love it. When it’s absent, miss it. If it ever leaves us, mourn it. It has been mankind’s truest, noblest friend.

True Tales From the Shallow South

I recently went to my city's lavish civic center (and by lavish I mean largely barren, and by civic I mean "next to an empty lot underneath an overpass that would make a great lair for a hobo serial killer").

The local classic rock station had assured me--between Nickelback and Charlie Daniels Band--that an "Electronics Expo" was to be held there, and that phenomenal deals were to be found on

CAR STEREOS DVD PLAYERS BLU-RAY PLAYERS HOME SECURITY SYSTEMS RADAR DETECTORS B61 NUCLEAR BOMB FUSES and FUTURISTIC SEX DOLLS!

I was skeptical.

My father was not.

We arrived at the site in the late afternoon, just as the sun was beginning to melt into the dingy urban haze. A familiar, greasy smell filled the air that I forever associate with elephant ears and cheap, rural carnivals. Around us milled a throng of teen and preteen girls.

"Must be here for the futuristic sex dolls," I said. My father frowned.

This was troubling, being a party consisting solely of two adult ogres, adrift amid a sea of flowers in various stages of bloom. My father, being older and wiser, was more sensitive to the awkwardness of the situation than I, and he suggested that we quickly find out "where the fuck we are going before security asks us to empty our pockets."

We hacked bravely through the pre-oestral thicket, and while we incurred a few nonplussed looks from nigh-obese guardians with drooping fanny packs, we finally made our way to a clearing. There, upon either side of us, were two signs consisting of 8.5x11 sheets of printer paper fixed to a sign holder. The text was, predictably, some member of the twisted Arial font family.

This was one of those cruel reminders of time and place: my current co-ordinates in cultural and social space-time. I was--quite literally--between the Cheetah Girls and a Gun Show.

That revelation was my second reaction. My first reaction was "What the fuck are Cheetah Girls?"

The throng of women-children veered to the left in a great arc, as if pulled by a source of tremendous gravity (or perhaps repelled by the opposite). My father and I remained before the dreadful sigils, straddling the barrier between two strange and terrifying worlds.

Without a word my father turned and began to head right, following the instructions of the second sign. In those moments where I drifted, contemplating my place and purpose in the universe, confronting the terror that I was finally and irrevocably out of fucking touch, my father was reading the cultural geography.

An electronics expo, he reasoned, would naturally occur closer to a gun show, just as a stream's source must fall near a mountain, and a swamp must lie near the sea.

Would a truck pull be far behind?

I'll tease the reader no longer: we never made it to the electronics expo. After navigating a chubby wilderness of orange vests and woodland-print coveralls we found that the touted expo was charging eight dollars for admission. Savings indeed! Dreams of home security blu-ray sexbots dissolved in my head into a murky solution, which then boiled down to a brownish powder, eventually burning away and leaving only acrid smoke.

We left in near total defeat, my only consolation being the knowledge I had gained--bitter though it was.

My father was considerably more Zen about it.

"At least they validated my parking."

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These things and more could be yours! All you have to do is buy my DVD workshop "Oh, How They Laughed!" and the companion workbook/starter kit "YOU SHALL RUE THE DAY!"

Just read these exciting testimonials:

"After I was laid off at the plant I thought I'd never get work again. Now I rule my own subterranean fortress grotto, full of degenerate mole men who attend to my every villainous need. Next week I'm going to sink the Chrysler Building and replace it with a statue of myself made out of pure nickel from the earth's molten core! Beats the sheet metal press any day!"

-Ted, Chicago

. . .

"As a stay at home mom I'm always looking for ways to make a little extra cash. Holding the great cities of the world hostage with an orbital earthquake generator is not only profitable, but all kinds of fun! HONEY, STAY AWAY FROM MOMMY'S SUPERCOMPUT--"

-Susan, Dubuque

. . .

"My latest scheme may have had me banished to an alternate dimension, but at least I had fun getting here!"

-Philip, TANGENT B-7 (the one where dinosaurs never went extinct)

. . .

"I AM ETERNAL--WITHOUT LIMIT--WITHOUT END. THE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE STRETCH OUT BEFORE ME AS A GREAT, BLACK OCEAN, AND ONLY I AM PRIVY TO ITS CURRENTS AND EDDIES. ALL THAT LIVES DOES SO AT MY PLEASURE. ALL THAT DIES DOES SO AT MY COMMAND. ENTIRE GENERATIONS WILL LIE PILED BENEATH MY FEET, AND FROM THEIR FLESH I SHALL FASHION A GRIM CATHEDRAL BEFORE WHICH EVEN THE STARS THEMSELVES WILL BE FORCED TO KNEEL. BEST $299 I EVER SPENT!"

-Xargax the Deathless, Great Pit of Sorrow At the Center of All Time and Space

. . .

WOWWOWWOW!

Why wait? You could be the next to force your enemies to
REAP THE MOTHERFUCKING WHIRLWIND!

Special price for the next 15 minutes only: $299.99*
(or four easy installments of $79.99).

Don't hesitate! Order today and receive an exclusive invitation to this year's live seminar--"Rule By the Lash: Henchmanagement In the 21st Century"--being held in July in beautiful Salt Lake City**!

*Payment accepted in blood diamonds, Nazi gold, and Mastercard.
**Pending the outcome of negotiations between the US government and Doctor Cyclops, the seminar may be moved to a backup location deep within the Antarctic wasteland.