I’ll be honest, I can’t even bear to watch the news anymore. For those of you who don’t live in America the current contest to decide the next president has been going on, non-stop, here for about two years now. It is a constant barrage of sound-bites, platitudes, and nonsense. At this point satire isn’t even enough to get me to pay much attention. You too may be tired of it, even you who live in the parts of the world that our children are taught is simply called Not America. It is a disturbing trend in politics that most public official’s time seems to be spent in preparation for the next contest.
That said, however, at least there is one candidate who has the resources and ability to end this horrid cycle of Paid For advertisements and trite slogans. Ectomo is not political. We do not endorse candidates here nor do we wish to influence your decision, argue your chosen candidate’s merits, or win you over to our point of view. No, really all we want you to know is that we have accepted the inevitable, that it is not so much about change as it is about fate. You may argue amongst yourselves about who the best person for the job is but in the end it’s not going to matter. When he wakes up, we’ll all be food anyway.
It’s comforting in a way to know that one’s paranoid theories of powerful men bartering with the lives of millions of people as if they were human Pokemon are, in some ways, not so paranoid after all. Documents recently released by the State Department’s historical office detail a particularly enlightening conversation between Chinese Chairman Mao Zedong and US Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger:
“You know, China is a very poor country,” Mao said. “We don’t have much. What we have in excess is women. So if you want them we can give a few of those to you, some tens of thousands.”
Mao circled back to the offer a few minutes later. “Do you want our Chinese women?” he asked. “We can give you 10 million.”
Kissinger noted Mao was “improving his offer,” and the chairman is on record then saying, “We have too many women … They give birth to children and our children are too many.”
“It is such a novel proposition,” Kissinger replied. “We will have to study it.”
Novel indeed, Henry. Certainly it can be argued that Kissinger’s stance on Cambodia during the Vietnam War puts the man in a light that may be less than flattering but I think everyone can agree that this shows full well the depths of the man’s depravity. I mean what kind of animal turns down an offer to supply the citizens of his country with Chinese women.
Photographs from the San Francisco Scientology protests are up at Ectomo’s flickr. San Francisco is being called the best dressed protest, though it was probably only around 200 people. I was very impressed with the level of professionalism, politeness, and focus. There was an almost total lack of meaningless catchphrases and memes, though I think a certain amount of that is good for morale. I observed a huge amount of public and police support for the cause and the action, and people actually read the flyers they were handed.
Tomorrow at 11AM, all over the planet, Anonymous mobilizes.
Purpose: to protest, in person, the Church of Scientology’s abuse of human beings, manipulation of law and public opinion, and general shitting-up of the Internet.
My father and I have long maintained a correspondence of epic intellectual proportions. Usually these take the form of discussions on science and science fiction, Rick Gauger being an award-winning science fiction author, and all-around life of the party.
Recently I sent him a link to a collection of cartoons on the fashion wars of the early 1800s, which were as vicious as they were short-lived. Men and women abandoned the stiff, straight-laced wardrobes of the 1700s and briefly adopted a more modern, flowy, comfortable look. This was the famous Regency era, in which Jane Austen lived and wrote. Unfortunately for fashion, it was quickly destroyed by the severe repression of the Victorian age’s corsets, high heels, and silly hats. Dad, armchair fashion historian, elaborates [with my notes appended, thusly]:
Yes, I’ve always thought it odd that women went out of, and back into corsets in the early 19th Century. In our own time, the 60s got over in a hurry, as women went back to makeup and hairdos in the early 70s. In my century [Dad is 64], I think that the corporations panicked as they saw hair styles, makeup and tailored clothing apparently becoming obsolete, and they put on a major propaganda offensive. The majority of people (including women) never understood the 60s anyway, so they were ready to buy into it. We had a last hurrah of big cars, just at the moment when we should’ve been changing our ways.
Another reason for the quick loss of those styles was that a woman really has to be very good-looking [such as my mother, 54, who to this day refuses to learn how to use an eyelash curler, probably because she’s too busy beating men away from her door with a stout stick] to be able to go without makeup and tailoring. There were a couple of girls among the grad students of 1965 that made me froth at the mouth; most others, however smart and sweet they might be, just didn’t have what it took. One of them was the girl who welcomed me back from my first tour in Vietnam. She came out in a nightie that made her look like a joke. I would have rather died than hurt her feelings at that moment.
A city councilman in Utah, Mark Easton, had a beautiful view of the east Mountains until a new neighbor purchased the lot below his house and built a new home. The home was 18 inches higher than the ordinances would allow, so Mark Easton, mad about his lost view, went to the city to make sure they enforced the lower roof line ordinance.
Which, of course, they did and his neighbor was forced, at a significant expense, to lower his roof. It was only recently that Mr. Easton noticed that his neighbor had installed some vents into the side of his house, now eighteen inches lower but still in the midst of the councilman’s mountain view.
A short film by Alfonso Cuarón, director of, among other films, the excellent Children of Men. Here he teams up with No Logo author Naomi Klein for her new book of the same name.
A few brief seconds of footage deleted from an episode of Invader ZIM in which a door-to-door candy-selling competition turns into an arms race. The footage was from a simulated reel of destruction projected into the holo-goggles worn by potential candy buyers, to show them exactly what would happen, were they not to purchase chocolate treats. ZIM himself is narrating, of course. The shot was removed, at the cost of broadcast punctuality, because a flaming New York City was considered too 9-11ish.
The show was plagued by the political ramifications of current events. The pilot episode had to have parts re-drawn when a fight in a cafeteria was adjudged too like the Columbine shootings.
The pattern of world politics, etched upon the solid gold cock ring of Karl Rove’s gay, piercing fetishist father, Louie?
I didn’t know his son — all I knew about his family was what Louie recounted to me as I looked at their pictures in the living room. Other than that I was mostly bothered by their visits to Palm Springs or his to Santa Fe, since that meant the house was closed for other over-night friends. And as to his former wife, Louie told me he had come out and so they divorced. But when I saw his family photographs I just saw the usual groupings of people and smiling-faced portraitures.
As a way to introduce me to piercing, he showed me a collection of the “world’s first body piercing magazine” — PFIQ (Piercing Fans International Quarterly). Those early magazines depicted a world many thought of “only as a handful of widely dispersed and closeted hardcore fetishists.” I was fascinated.
And pictured in that magazine was Louie … well, not Louie’s face but it was definitely Louie’s piercings [Editor’s note: in fact, Louie was one of their best known cover models!]. Louie had more genital piercings — all gold — than God … and there they were, all pictured in that magazine.
Perhaps not: it’s all anecdotal and unsupported, and the timing is suspect. Of course, I’m not sure I want to see the clinical DNA report that proves conclusively that the big toe thick ring laying in the palm of this guy’s hand, strangely stained with crusty verdigris, was actually used to thickly squeeze the erection of Rove. Sr.
Arnold Schwarzennegger’s famous speech from the homoerotic masterpiece Pumping Iron, in which he compares lifting weights to ejaculating. He seems to like the way the word “coming” sensuously rolls over his tongue, so then he says it over and over and over again, his eyes become more frantic with each repeated phoneme.
Thirty years later, this guy’s a Governor, and I don’t want anyone to think for a second I don’t approve, or approve only snarkily. An ape-like foreigner with a thick Austrian accent who is obsessed with ejaculation becoming, within three decades, one of the leaders of the country? That’s the American dream.
Incidentally, you might want to sit back from your screen, lest one of Arnold’s bulging veins rip out of his skin and — whipping around like an out-of-control fire hose — take out your eye.
Politicians! That gaping, bloody anus, spongily spread by two gnarled hands to equal the diameter of a toilet rim? That is the heart and soul of the Internet.
I’m sure it seemed like a good idea at the time: a bunch of Internet unsavvy presidential candidates read about that new-fangled YouTube service in USA Today and decided it would be a cheap way to promote themselves.
What they didn’t realize, of course, was that the average YouTube user who chose to pose them a debate question would be a socially awkward shut-in, moistly mouth-breathing his question into a webcam.
But YouTube is as full of pranksters as it is full of losers and someone managed to do the impossible: Goatse.cx Hilary Clinton.
The incident in question came during a question about our nation’s healthcare system. The user who submitted the video was speaking innocuously into the camera when the image of “goatse” was flashed for the briefest moment in 1/24th of a second, ranging just above the framerate treshhold with which television broadcasts.
Though the image flashed only briefly, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were seen wincing at the image. Whether or not it was recognized remains unknown.
As of this time, it is unclear as to how many Americans witnessed the outrage, but there are reports of as many as 200,000 phone calls made to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) reporting the obscenity.
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.
The pattern of world politics, etched upon the solid gold cock ring of Karl Rove’s gay, piercing fetishist father, Louie? 
Politicians! That gaping, bloody anus, spongily spread by two gnarled hands to equal the diameter of a toilet rim? That is the heart and soul of the Internet.
