A clip from the 1930 film The Dogway Melody which was a twenty minute spoof of The Broadway Melody in which all the parts were played by dogs. In this scene an ebony, four-legged gentleman bestows a few glittering rocks on young Queenie. However, when she refuses to put out he’s left with only one choice: groping of the non-consensual variety. Lucky for Queenie though, there is a telepathic drunk in the next room ready to dash to her rescue.
After a dozen years of tyrannical Prohibition, the people of our once proud and great nation had finally cracked. I know it sounds far fetched but bear with me, the mental decimation of North America at the hands of 12 years of sobriety at gunpoint and poisonous, bathtub concocted tonics explains everything.
Ectomo’s crusty, drunken Uncle Ellis pointed out in his Bad Signal email that today is, indeed, Valentine’s Day, that horrid celebration, seemingly designed by a shadowy syndicate of florists, chocolatiers, and greeting card manufacturers for the sole purpose of peddling their normally over-priced wares at an even greater profit margin. However, it is worth pointing out that, like most Christian holidays, Valentine’s Day occupies the date of an earlier, pagan holiday and, like many pagan holidays it consisted of the usual, heathen tropes, i.e.: costumes, drinking, sacrifice, and a focus on fertility.
Meet Corey Delaney, 16 of Melbourne, Australia and his “famous” glasses. Corey is being interviewed by a stern, buxom blond because he threw a party while his parents were on vacation, and when young Master Delaney throws a party, sometimes it involves over five hundred people and requires the attention of thirty police officers, a police helicopter, and the police dog squad. The raucous party goers caused an estimated twenty thousand dollars in damage which Corey or, more likely, Mr. and Mrs. Delaney may have to pay for.
Corey, for his part and to the frustration of the aforementioned buxom anchorwoman, seems unrepentant, and really, why should he? Shirtless, so as to better show off his single, pierced nipple, wearing a hat that he may have taken from a preteen girl or a mentally retarded woman, and glasses which are, as mentioned earlier, “famous” he has his whole life ahead of him. The world is his drunken oyster.
It makes me glad then, dear readers, that I do not live in a country, colonized by murderers, rapists, and thieves, that would produce a jackass of Corey Delaney’s caliber and instead live in a country, colonized by religious zealots who wanted to outlaw Christmas and which has never, ever, afforded people the liberty of such spectacular idiocy.
Very few of the parties I host at the Junta end up with us stripping down to our pastel-colored underpants and drunkenly prancing around the room with a constabulary of rugged, cocoa-colored Africans. Something about the Byronic air of the place — the textured, wine-colored wall paper; the oak golems staring out of the mantles; the dress code of fezzes, moustaches, pince-nezzes and smoking jackets; the imminently respectable personage of our man Jittimer arching an eyebrow at any display of youthful frivolity in the corner; the gigantic, Sunday-large skull of Eliza filling the room like a brutal sun — does not lend itself to sucking a jello shot out of an African-American’s navel. More the shame. I would give a chunk of flesh to attend this party, resurrected — immortal — from the dusts of time thanks to a handful of flea market Polaroids and the revivication power of the Internet.
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
