Dead City Scrolls

“The 33rd President of the United States handed Bod over to the famous writer Victor Hugo, who threw the boy into his sack and put it over his shoulder.”  There’s a perfectly ordinary English sentence for you courtesy of Neil Gaiman.

Via the Worst Forums Ever: Monument to Muntadhir al-Zaidi built at orphanage.

Doom:

Orphans helped construct a monument to a reporter throwing shoes at the stupid little man who helped ruin their corner of the world.

The only thing that could make it more deliciously poetic is if Bush was a crooked contractor trying to close the orphanage down and at the end of the movie the shoe statue falls on him and it is so wacky.

History will judge him indeed. Has every day since January 20th been our Birthdays+Christmas?

Blagojevich`s last day

Doom:

“At moments during the day, Mr. Blagojevich reflected on what was ahead, most immediately how best to pay his mortgage come March 1 without his $177,000-a-year salary.` He spoke of the guilt he felt toward his family for entering a political life, the “personal Greek tragedy” that he said he saw as his circumstances, and, all the while, his love of his job. His biggest error, he said, was the friends he had picked.”

Those sentences being next to each other is the most delicious sour grapes.

Doom Unit is my first choice for news.

John Oliver, Daily Show correspondent, is an excellent stand up comedian.  This is his special from last year.

“And yet, does it not say something for how this current US administration is viewed by the rest of the world that I think deep down, deep down this planet yearns for the days of the British empire again.  They long once more to be treated that badly, that politely.”

It’s late, but it’s here: The Blackest Years, the second chapter of The Second Rise.  With excellent scriptural contributions from Maxavier Petersson near the end.  Look forward to part three, Lions At War, in the next couple months!

Previously on Dead City Scrolls, The Second Rise: Part 1

There are very expansive and boring conversations to be had in lit classes about the importance of artist’s intentions, and more specifically to today’s class the importance of whether the effect of what an artist produces is intentional, but I’m a member of the biology team and a subscriber to the Clay Shirkey style networked collaboration theory of enterprise where perhaps no single person involved even knows what they’re working toward as a final goal.  I recognize the craft of an author or an artist who has the clarity of vision (or pure simple force in a sort of middle ground case where the artist has something to express but it’s sublimated in the art itself, not fully understood by the artist except through the act of creation) combined with talent to make something that expresses what they want it to express exactly, but on the other hand I’m just dandy with results reached unintentionally.

You get a fun example today.

Dug up by way of perennial land of horrors and burster of mercury from retardometers 4chan, I’d be hard up to say that this is meant as any sort of high art.  It doesn’t aspire to any heights of emotion or exposition of the human spirit, but it gets my attention in a complicatedly not-purely-sexual way.  Ignore that her tail emerges from an intersection between 12th Thoracic Way and 1st Lumbar Ave. and take close inventory of this.  I may be alone in this, but aside from being relentlessly pleased to look at a well done picture of a naked lady, I find myself drawn to her and curious about her.  The pose and facial expression are relaxed but pensive, unselfconcious but introspective, neither particularly sexual except in the least interesting of ways (“look at how I have contorted this pretend woman’s body!”) which might for all I know have been the artist’s intention.  Which is the point.

Boneyard Jones: I watched some of an episode of American Idol. Apparently Simon Cowell’s job description is “slit the cultural throats of nations and drink their cooling blood.”
Rhetorian: He’s become very popular for it, too. But then, if there’s one thing pop culture loves, it’s a vampire.

Views:

This month looks like a mouthful of nasty fucked up teeth for some reason.

Now that he’s fucked off I want to say something nice about Mr. Bush. He’s probably nice. He seems like when he’s not being the president, if you don’t get into politics with him he would be a friendly guy to spend an afternoon around. The best movie villains are that way, incidentally, but that’s not where I’m going with this. It’s just a compliment.

I’ve been wondering for a while what Bush will do when the President gig is over, so I’m going to watch him closer now than I did for the last eighteen months of his actual presidency.  He says he’s going to go into public speaking.  Play to your strengths, right?

In other news, this Blagojevich guy is hilariously incompetent.  He’s like a cartoon villain but even more benign, or like Max described him, a Simpson’s charicature of himself.  From reciting Ulysses (which is hilarious and eerie because, as noted to Max, there’s a bit in Transmetropolitan where a slithery, corrupt, hilariously vindictive presidential candidate quotes Ulysses to Spider Jerusalem for exactly the same reason Blaggo did.)

He was on The View recently, and I’ve absolutely got to see that.  Blagojevich versus the fucking Cabal.  Sounds like a good old fashioned low fantasy Conan the Barbarian ripoff, doesn’t it?

Raven says:
Was this like “If we put him on camera, what are the chances he’ll fuck up for us?”
Maybe try to catch him selling audience seats before the show started

Boneyard Jones: Speaking of litfaggotry, I’ve been pretty good in the last year or so at not lamenting the past. It’s curtailed a lot of misery and internal conflict. But lately I’m lamenting the way-distant past. Like, I really wish Fyodor Doestoevsky had lived another decade or so. The Brothers K was supposed to be the first chapter in a huuuuuge epic called The Life of a Great Sinner, but he died a few months before or after it was published, I don’t remember which way it went. There’s like, nothing in the world that I want to read more than a continuation to that story.
Improvidence: Hah, yeah. Goddamn mortality.
Improvidence: But then, without mortality, we wouldn’t write as interesting stories anyway.
Boneyard Jones: Things like that happen a lot to great authors. I think, with no false modesty about my delusions of grandeur, that it’s a good thing I’m getting an early start.
Improvidence: Hahah. Maybe you’ve got it wrong, though. Maybe people only write good things when they’re about to die. You’d better hope your stuff isn’t too good just yet.