Firefighting tank, from EnglishRussia.com
As a 430,000-acre series of wildfires burns near Moscow, bathing the city in an acrid, toxic smog and contributing to about 700 deaths a day in the city’s worst-ever heat-wave, what can most of the rest of us do but gawk?
Page of a U.S. Army training guide on homosexual conduct policy, from Wikipedia.
The front page of the New York Times today has a story about Pfc. Bradley Manning, the reputed source of the Afghan War Diary documents posted by Wikileaks. This isn’t the first place that it’s been disclosed that Pfc. Manning is gay, since, ferinstance, Gawker reported “strong evidence” of that back in June. But it’s provided right-wing bloggers with the opportunity to rail against the “liberal” mainstream media for not covering Pfc. Manning’s fabulous gayness until now. Speculation even before the Gawker post seems to have been that Pfc. Manning was transgender, which seems to have derived from a Facebook post in which he described himself as a drag queen.
Damn you people anyway; you always get that shit mixed up. Look, it’s very simple, people. Drag queen ≠ transgender, unless she is, or he, depending on said drag queen’s philosophical orientation and gender identity, which may exist as separate and distinct from any pink bouffant wigs and/or ten-inch platform Lucite heels s/he might be wearing. Am I getting through to you?
Yesterday’s New York Times ran a story on the plight of former Bimbo executive Chris Botticella. Get your mind out of the gutter, this isn’t an Ed Wood novel. That’s Grupo Bimbo, the giant Mexican food company, which bought Thomas’s English Muffins in early 2009. The 56-year-old Botticella was a Bimbo bakery operations executive with a reported salary of a quarter-mil which, in January, he gave up for a salary of $200,000 a year at, you guessed, it Hostess, telling his old coworkers he was retiring, not going to the competition. From Bimbo’s perspective, this puts the safety of the free world at risk.
The reason for all the ominous music? The recipe for Thomas’s English muffins. Apparently it’s a closely-guarded secret, kept in a secure “code book,” isolated and split up so bakery workers only know a small part of the process and only seven Bimbo executives know the whole recipe. Otherwise, says the Times, the competition would know how to produce those coveted nooks and crannies, and the market’s reported “$500 million” in English Muffin sales could slip out of Grupo Bimbo’s buttery fingers.
So the story goes this way. About fifteen years ago there’s this clown in Santa Cruz, okay? Okay, back up: Santa Cruz is this weird, weird town about a hundred miles south of San Francisco where weird, weird people go to be young and normal, normal people who want to believe they’re weird go to be old. Anyway, there’s some clown named “Mr. Twister.” Back up, wait, I mean, he’s not just “some clown,” he’s actually a clown — honk honk, that kind of clown, got it?
Anyway, there’s this clown in Santa Cruz and he supposedly gets a ticket from the Santa Cruz PD, and almost gets arrested and hauled off to the hoosegow, for going around feeding other peoples’ parking meters, right? The Santa Cruz cops are pretty much famous, like Wayne Newton famous, for pissing off the hippies by doing shit like kicking them in the groin while they’re sleeping and impounding their backpacks and telling them “You can’t sit there” and just generally being complete douchebags in a way that would make Vic Mackey give them a lecture on serving the public.
Imagine my chagrin this morning when I saw perched ominously atop my usual stack of Gmails complaining about my use of extreme profanity on Good Reads, a Google text ad: “Hearing Random Voices? www.ChurchOfStMarks.com – Take the Demon Test To Find Out Now If You’re In Need of an Exorcism!”
Um, excuse me, but — like I need a “Demon Test” to tell me if I’m in need of an exorcism? I was a kid in the ’70s. I know fucking well that if I need an exorcism, I won’t get a memo from the Jesus Freaks; the spewing pea soup and a higher-than-usual quantity of priests hurtling out my window will probably be my first clues.
Had I not thought to myself, “What part of the country produces numbskulls like this” and run a WhoIs on the URL, I might have actually have imagined I was turning into a Giant Slug like Leslie Nielsen in this second-season Night Gallery episode I still occasionally have nightmares about. The answer is, Santa Monica, which is a dead giveaway.
Have you ever been to Santa Monica? It is about a hundred feet square and its most notable features are a carousel and a Ferris wheel. There are no crazy religious people in Santa Monica; the wackiest churches there believe perfectly reasonable things about how the President of the Galactic Federation brought billions of people to Earth in DC-8′s and blew them up using hydrogen bombs. All the holy rollers are elsewhere in Los Angeles County.
Undead! Undead! Undead!
In the Bad News About Bats department, ScienceNews.org reports on a story in the August 6 Science that an emerging fungal disease, white-nose syndrome, could wipe out the little brown bat, sometimes called the myotis bat, in a decade and a half.
This kitten demonstrates how it
In researching the oh so hilarious comedy bits for an upcoming post on the extinctions of bats, I ran across other cataclysmic animal news from, like, back in April. I may be well behind the Fox News outrage curve on this one, but then, I don’t exactly scour the internet looking for cruelty-to-animal news, since in my house the cruelty is usually committed by animals on humans. Sucking chest wounds from late-night drive-by biscuitings, anyone? Check. Squooshy cat poop in the slippers one fine August morning? Check. Enough Friskies vomited on the computer keyboard to feed every stray cat in Boise? Check.
About a decade ago I discovered this awesome little cafe on 14th Street in San Francisco, an easy drop-in on my way to work. Scraggly 34-year-old skater boys and goth-damaged conceptual artists in fishnets and combat boots hung out in front smoking cigarettes, talking road rash and Agent Orange.
One day I wandered in and heard the most loveliest music ever to reach my ears since Robert, Jean and Gaby Casadesus played Bach’s Concerto for 2 Keyboards with the Cologne Concert Orchestra circa 1967. In fact, its dreamy lilt was so heavenly it made the entire Casadeusus family, the most gifted pianists every to lay claim to a harpsichord concerto, sound like heaving drunkards spewing Seagrams-and-Hawaiian-Punch on my Hush Puppies in a dark Juarez alley. This stuff made “Perfect Day” sound like an AM broadcast of I Like Traffic Lights. Srsly.
I fell to my knees. I wept. I howled. I cried, “Why, God, Why? Such beauty! The pain! The pathos! From this point forward all other things in life will seem like the cheap jokes of a brutal universe! WTF kinda music is this, thirtysomething skater barrista with goofy hair and Buddy Hollies?”
From GuitarInternational.com
As if to prove that my life as become as virtual as Lincoln Rhyme‘s, I really cut that shit loose and celebrated blues guitar legend Buddy Guy’s recent 74th birthday by — brace for the scandal — reading his Wikipedia page. I mean, Buddy’s getting close to the big seven-five, so I wanted to majorly kick out the jams, you dig? We’re talking par-TAY.
Anyway, as it turns out, the esteemed Mr. Guy, like many young black men in Lousiana in the 1930s and ’40s, first learned to play music on a homemade Diddley Bow, aka “the jitterbug.” Buddy’s had two strings, but a Diddley Bow typically has a single string, leading to the instrument’s other nickname, the “one-string,” or its formal name, the “monocord zither,” which was also the name of a Lizard Men chieftain in the original Flash Gordon serials (okay, I made that last part up).
The Diddley Bow is usually played with a glass slide or a whiskey bottle, but the best-known appearance of the instrument on film is in Alan Lomax’s movie The Land Where the Blues Began.
Think bathtub gin is a thing of the past? Kuzimu, hakuna! (That’s “Hell, no!” in Swahili.)
In the Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya, nefarious crime groups trade in illicit liquor, with the occasional result that people go blind and die. Just last week, the Kenyan Alcoholic Beverages Association called for swift government action after 17 people died from illegal liquor, and scores more were blinded.
According to a May (subscription-only) article in the Economist via the Brookston Beer Bulletin, bootleggers in Kenya account for 60% of the trade in alcoholic beverages in the country, because beer is so heavily taxed it is only available to the super-rich. Nairobi’s most popular moonshine, Changaa or Chang’aa (which translates as “Kill Me Quick”) or Kumi Kumi (“ten-ten,” for its ten-shilling price), run the U.S. equivalent of 15 cents to a quarter per drink in a country where the per capita nominal GDP is $911.95, or about $2.50 per day; a beer in Nairobi runs about $1 to $1.25. (A GDP-equivalent price would have a beer costing $62.50 in the U.S.).
Actual magnetic resonance image of the author's heart. Off-hand spread at 10 meters, by a blonde named Magdalena who made love like she killed: off-hand, spread, at 10 meters.
If you’ve got a .45 ACP Kimber Ultra Carry II in your pocket AND you’re glad to see me, you’re probably thinking what any responsible, healthy, socially-minded, red-blooded and heavily-armed adult is thinking: “Where can I, as a gun owner, find love?” Meaning other than the local roadhouse, of course, where it can cost up to $45 or $50 plus the cost of the Jack Daniels and the methamphetamine, which can get pretty steep lately, depending on the county.
The good news? Gun Lovers Passions is free. And let me tell you, does this site know a sexy come-on when it sees one or what!?!? Mas oui oui oui, mon petit chou!
Welcome to Gun Lovers Passions!
Like To Shoot Stuff?
Definitely starting off on the right foot! Though I’m not sure if they mean “stuff” as in “assault rifles” or “stuff” as in “squirrels and Democrats.” I’m pretty sure it’s the latter, but in any event, back to Gun Lovers Passions:
Creative Commons photo by Dylan Parker, now with added terror.
Having listened to Terry Gross and Fresh Air since Lucy was in short pants — or, at least, sometimes it seems that way — I can count on the fingers of both hands the number of times I’ve found the show vapid, idiotic, or just off-base. Not a bad average, sure. But yesterday’s show had me unlacing my shoes.
The guest was Matt Richtel, whose series Your Brain on Computers graces the pages of the New York Times. In this series, which is well-written, well-researched and basically reasonable, Matt Richtel enlists an army of scientists and people walking on treadmills to promulgate the idea that “a little technology is good, but too much technology is bad.”
The talented and persuasive Richtel pushed the same broke-ass idea throughout yesterday’s Fresh Air, with Ms. Gross putting on that ultra-credulous Amazing Discoveries propeller beanie she sometimes wears — I strongly suspect to cover up the “I-don’t-really-give-a-damn” sleepiness in her voice.
If that’s true, I don’t blame her. Because, honestly, we’re still having this discussion? Because, you know, back in the day we had it about comic books.
Thanks for visiting Thomasroche.com; if you’re looking for a specific post, you might be disappointed to hear that the site is in the process of being revised and most of the posts I’ve put up over the last seven years are not currently viewable.
That will change! You’ll see most of them back here eventually. About 70% of my posts from 2005-2008 were lost when BBH media decided to take down their webzine, and many of the posts for the year after that pertained to my subsequent employer. So an entire revision of Thomasroche.com is necessary and underway. It will hopefully be completed by the end of September, 2010.
Meanwhile, go read my posts over at Techyum, will you?
If, like me, you were stupid enough to have watched TV in the late ’70s, you saw Shields and Yarnell almost constantly. The husband-and-wife mime troupe of Robert Shields and Lorene Yarnell were a regular fixture on variety shows like The Tonight Show, The Muppet Show, Sonny & Cher, Red Skelton, etc. etc. etc. In fact, they appeared on more than 400 TV episodes during their run as Shields & Yarnell from ’72 to ’86, and also had their own short-lived variety show from ’77-’78. But the absolute feeding frenzy of Shields & Yarnell guest appearances, as I recall, was about ’78 to ’81; there was mime blood in the TV water. You’d see them and think, “Oh. I know those people.” They were the Charo of mime.
