Where Ideas Can Hang Out...And Do Whatever!

internet-snarkive: In the Absence of Lady Partners From The...

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 21:06:21 -0700

In the Absence of Lady Partners

From The South Pole: An Account of the Norwegian Antarctic Expedition in the “Fram” 1912

http://archive.org/details/southpoleaccount01

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Tue, 20 Nov 2012 09:13:18 -0800

This guy.

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 21:35:02 -0800

This guy.

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Sun, 21 Oct 2012 13:34:30 -0700

I wish I could explain it better…but there’s...

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 22:49:56 -0700

I wish I could explain it better…but there’s something that I find inherently hysterical about pets betraying the wishes of their humans. Especially in a performance context. It’s kind of like the animal equivalent of newscaster fuckups.

I made a 101-song primer to pre-war blues

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 17:17:10 -0700

I made a 101-song primer to pre-war blues

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Thu, 02 Aug 2012 11:17:58 -0700

THE SOCIAL RAMBLE AIN’T RESTFUL mightyflynn: Satchel...

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 13:19:51 -0700

THE SOCIAL RAMBLE AIN’T RESTFUL

mightyflynn:

Satchel Paige on his 42nd [?] birthday

July 7, 1948

Cleveland, Ohio

SPORT Magazine photo

How to Keep Young, by Satchel Paige

Avoid fried meats which angry up the blood.

If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts.

Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move.

Go very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society. The social ramble ain’t restful.

Avoid running at all times.

Don’t look back. Something might be be gaining on you.

“Don’t look back, something might be gaining on...

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 13:01:50 -0700

“Don’t look back, something might be gaining on you”-Satchel Paige

(one of my late grandfather’s favorite quotes)

"Soundtrack" to "The Big Payback" by Dan Charnas, Pt. 1

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 16:56:12 -0700

"Soundtrack" to "The Big Payback" by Dan Charnas, Pt. 1:

I’m only 1/3rd through Dan Charnas’ excellent book “The Big Payback” (about the history of the hip-hop industry), and I was inspired to make a playlist of important tracks from the early days of rap music. This playlist spans from `78 to `88 and is roughly in chronological order. I’ll add more as I read more. Enjoy!

iscreencaptheshitoutofit: Map of Europe S3 Ep8 It’s a...

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 13:49:09 -0700

iscreencaptheshitoutofit:

Map of Europe

S3 Ep8

It’s a No-Brainer

I hate Hitler…his stupid mustache, annoying speaking voice...

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 15:24:00 -0700

I hate Hitler…his stupid mustache, annoying speaking voice and the way he’d never cover his mouth when he sneezed…But I’m pretty down with his core values and the way he chose to implement them.

Donald Trump Stares Forlornly At Tiny, Aged Penis In Mirror Before Putting On Clothes, Beginning Day

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 10:01:26 -0700

Donald Trump Stares Forlornly At Tiny, Aged Penis In Mirror Before Putting On Clothes, Beginning Day:

For some reason this article made me proud to be an American.

Thank God for Larry Flynt.

aquariumdrunkard: Songs We Taught The Gories Songs We Taught...

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 11:27:17 -0700

aquariumdrunkard:

Songs We Taught The Gories

Songs We Taught The Gories – a 2009 WFMU compilation comprised of tracks the band sourced for covers over the years, both familiar and obscure (the original disco/funk version of “There But For The Grace Of God I Go“, by Machine, is particularly revelatory).

You want to listen to this. Yes, you do.

Also, I just listened to the WTF podcast with Jack White, and I was pleased to hear him name-drop The Gories.

ratsoff: mehalicka: Moment of Mad Men Season 5? This is...

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 21:11:23 -0700

ratsoff:

mehalicka:

Moment of Mad Men Season 5?

This is beautiful.

It kinda troubles me that I like pigs about as much as I like...

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 12:09:30 -0700

It kinda troubles me that I like pigs about as much as I like pork. Which is a great deal.

"It all started with Saturday Night Fever about 20 years ago. In the very first scene, the guys drive..."

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 12:18:17 -0700

“It all started with Saturday Night Fever about 20 years ago. In the very first scene, the guys drive up and call him a ‘fuckhead.’ That’s the point where I got up and left the theater with my wife. I said, ‘I don’t need that.’ That’s where it all started, about 20 years ago.”

- Ray Bradbury, 1999 interview with the AV Club

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Mon, 04 Jun 2012 18:56:00 -0700

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Mon, 04 Jun 2012 12:24:45 -0700

Some Thoughts on Zombies

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 20:59:00 -0700

I remember the first time I heard about a “zombie apocalypse plan.” A college friend told me that he knew “exactly” what he would do if zombies ever took over, and proceeded to detail escape routes and ideas for shelter.

It struck me as funny because we both knew that zombies weren’t real, but he had an amusing earnestness to the way he presented his idea, as if it was something he’d been thinking about for a long time. This was in 2005.

I recounted the “plan” to another friend who informed me, somewhat dismissively, that “a lot of people say that.” At 18, I was often disappointed when I’d find out that something I thought was novel was, “already a thing.”

Fast forward a few years, and the “thing” is bigger than ever. I used to think of zombie preparedness as a “cultivated quirk”- like claiming that you hate the word “moist” or that you’re terrified of clowns.

But now it’s as if zombies have replaced “aliens” in the cultural imagination. The Center for Disease Control even had to make an official statement denying their existence.

As I’ll explain, it seems like there are ways in which “being ready” for a zombie apocalypse shares elements with our melting-pot brand of national paranoia.

It takes real fears about our customary ways of living coming to an end, and fictionalizes them.

I should note that I’m talking about zombies as a cultural theme, and not as much about the specifics of “Walking Dead,” or “Resident Evil.” Also, I could write an entirely different essay about how Christian belief in resurrection plays into this, but that’s for another time.

Yesterday I saw BuzzFeed’s “Zombie Apocalypse Starts in Florida” piece, which compiled a list of odd news stories from recent days that shared characteristics with zombie movies.

I make no bones about the fact that I’m a morbid-ass guy. I read a lot of news stories about gruesome attacks with rapt attention, and the guy who chewed a homeless man’s face off was no exception.

Human interest, okay? Horrific fucking human interest.

But I was a little put off by the way I saw people using zombie tropes in reaction to a mentally disturbed man’s brutal attack on a homeless person- something I’d wager happens every day. I also understand that people feel inclined to make jokes in reaction to something terrible. I do it constantly. My point is not to attack the “insensitivity” of people who made zombie jokes in reaction to an actual person partly eating another person’s face. Life can be horrifying. What else can you do but laugh?

What interests me, though, is what makes us assign certain concepts, like zombies, to news stories.

Putting zombies on hold for a second, let’s talk about the actual attack.

I’m not saying it’s categorically wrong to kill any person for any reason, and I don’t want to make a moral argument. The cop in this case claims the attacker was not stopping, and thus he had no choice to shoot. The homeless man might have died if the officer didn’t use lethal force.

I’m both disturbed and completely unsurprised that the officer is being praised for killing the “zombie.”

Everyone would agree that there are certain instances where you would be justified using lethal force to protect yourself. But some people form whole identities around the slim chance that they would one day need to kill someone.

In my experience, the same person who would call that police officer a “hero” is likely be the same person (probably a man) who has spent a lot of time mentally preparing for an attack.

You know the mindset I’m talking about.

“If anyone laid a hand on my kids, I’d kill him.”

“Burglars better be ready for a chest full of lead if they break in.”

Justified violence. Righteous violence.

It’s the impulse behind the angry white guys who donated to George Zimmerman’s defense fund. The theme of every Mel Gibson movie.

At the risk of venturing into armchair psych territory, it seems like people who are obsessed with the idea of the “zombie apocalypse” are at times transferring their real fears into something they know is fictional.

In fiction, the zombie theme deals with real-life anxieties about scientific catastrophe, like a virus. The hubris of scientists, the horror of technology gone out of control, the breakdown of government and industry - these are real things that people think about. But almost everyone finds them extremely hard to talk about honestly.

Zombies may be a passing cultural fad, but the theme is prominent enough that it’s worth discussing the real, unacknowledged fears involved. People “believe” in the zombie apocalypse because they actually believe in scientific discoveries that could destroy all human life. Depending on their political leanings, they also fear society breaking down from economic, environmental, or moral crises.

And it also fits perfectly with the suburban American anxiety about an “other” breaking into your home and attacking you.

When the guy obsessed with “zombies” is white, male, and armed to the teeth, sometimes I can’t help but think he’s actually thinking about “rioters.

A couple years ago Portland’s Willamette Week ran a piece about a zombie combat simulation game, complete with actors and Airsoft rifles.

“Some countries are experimenting with mind control,” one guy said in the article. “You pump [someone] full of drugs, affect the central nervous system…you can’t say it won’t happen. Can you afford to pretend it’s science fiction?”

To me there’s an uncomfortable parallel between the impulse to stock up on guns to be ready for an imagined crisis and the desire to spend a weekend shooting “zombies” in the head.

It’s not a wholesale condemnation on guys who want to go out in the woods and shoot guns, or people who play first-person shooter games. But imagine a combat simulator where, instead of zombies, you protected yourself from “looters” after a hurricane.

And I’m not blaming the zombies. When the U.S. first started exploring space and did its whole decades-long dick-measuring thing with the Soviets, I’m sure the resulting science fiction led plenty of people to subconsciously conflate “aliens” and “Ruskis.” And the anxiety around nuclear war is probably related.

All-out class war may be a bit more likely than a zombie invasion. The end of petroleum or a global currency collapse seems even more plausible.

My brother refers to these kinds of scenarios as “the thinking person’s zombie apocalypse.” Like zombies, belief in those events is often fueled by anxiety about our comfortable ways of life coming to an end, and being forced to fight for survival.

Out of sheer boredom and comfort, we’ve create scenarios about “the shit going down” in dramatic, instant ways that would force people to instantly adapt and change their way of life. It’s like the Christian concept of Armageddon, minus the religion.

It’s almost like people want a zombie apocalypse if for no other reason that it would make their lives interesting.

“The shit” is going down, though, and has been for a long time. Just not here.

“The shit” isn’t Hollywood material. It mostly involves stuff like urban squalor, fights over access to clean water and medicine, droughts, and rising food prices.

It’s exciting to imagine the economy collapsing and the government shutting down when zombies are involved, but Americans aren’t exactly talking about hypothetical survival plans if they lived in Somalia, or even Northern Mexico.

Somehow it’s easier for us to imagine the resurrected dead roaming the streets eating brains than it is to imagine seeing 15 decapitated bodies hanging from an overpass on your drive to work. And people here aren’t plotting out how they would hijack commercial ships with AK-47s if forced by circumstance.

We don’t really know what it’s like to live in terror, and most of us have never been forced to fight to survive. And the “zombie apocalypse” is just another example of how people both fear and, in a different way, crave a major shift in the way they live.

Maybe we’re just bored, but maybe we’re so disgusted by our society that we’ve found a “cute” way to fantasize about a world devoid of most humans.

It’s easier (and less mentally stressful) to picture a zombie invasion than it is to picture a world war. A lot of us are consumed with speculations about future war, disease, climate change and genetic engineering, but we still have the luxury not to.

Zombies, then, are a convenient avenue to put those thoughts.

Lately, I can’t help but crack a joke when someone comments about how strange the weather has been.

“Yeah, it’s almost like there’s some sort of change in the climate or something,” I’ll quip.

I take a lighthearted approach to discussing climate change because it’s utterly terrifying, and I don’t want to be a downer.

But I wonder how my friends would react if I adopted a “climate change survival plan” as a quirky conversation piece.

“I know exactly what I’m gonna do when the planet heats up,” I’d say before detailing my plans to forcefully defend myself against water thieves and start a new society in the Yukon.