White Guys in "The Great Link Dump Robbery"

“[Mr. Bryant's and Kislingbury's podcast] . . . seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer . . . is marriageableness.”
--Ralph Waldo Emerson on White Guys, Square Glasses.

It's another big, fat link dump. Let's get started, shall we?

As for writing, here is a wonderful list of 15 words with no English equivalent. If you copy-edit my work (hi Joe!) prepare to be seeing these words again soon. We have a wonderful haunted house of a language and I see no reason not to drive it further towards the bizarreness that we deserve.

Semi-Follow-up: Here is the most thorough and insightful summary of the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden.

(Side note: "GET BIN LADEN" would have been a cooler title, even if it would elevate Bin Laden by reminding us all of how much of a badass Michael Caine is).

Speaking of Get Carter, the man himself is included in the newest League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Since about half of the story is entirely opaque to even the most college graduated of us, Jess Nevins and his dear Irish friend [name] have assembled an annotation of the book-- which is just one of many that Nevins has cobbled together.

Speaking of crime-- 40 years ago, a man by the name of DB Cooper hijacked a plane, extorted 200,000 dollars as a ransom, and parachuted out of the plane never to be seen again. He is at the center of the only unsolved plane hijacking case in American history. And, apparently, the FBI might have finally figured it out.

Ever wonder what happened to all of the places Patrick Bateman used to frequent? No? Well, want to find out anyways? No, huh? Well, fuck off, then.

You know what sounds good right about now? Some poached egg and grits.

I feel partially ripped off by life that I had only been introduced to grits this year. Oh sure, it's really kicked 2011 up into my top years of all time, but that comes at the cost of making all those other years look like beggars at the foot of a king.

You know who is awesome? Ansel Adams. You know what isn't awesome? Japanese internment camps. What do you get when you combine them? Something that is still fairly shitty, but, at the same time is an important document of one of the dumber chapters in American history.

Also, as a supplement to "The Longest Wind" supplement, here's a diary from a Japanese soldier on Guadalcanal. I haven't read it quite yet, but I didn't see the harm in linking it. I've been planning and writing an entry on the WWII episode we did, because I wanted to carry on and extend the arguments we (me, mostly) made on that show-- as well as some of the inaccuracies we (me, mostly) made regarding the Japanese and Germany and so forth. That's a long time away, though-- maybe when we do Part II?

You know who was a fun guy? Nixon.

No, wait, he was an asshole.

As I was saying, I was reading the latest League of Extraordinary Gentlemen this week and I finally made it around to the prose section in the back. I usually save Alan Moore's back matter for a later date because, to be frank, they're denser than hell and the man is a far more skilled comic book writer than he is a novel writer. Thankfully the stories were short and weird enough to catch my attention and, in a rare fit of clarity, I actually recognized several references. Not only is Detective Munch complaining to Rawls about giant ants (which is a rad sentence on its own), but the space ants are basically space Muslims that worship a frozen man encased in ice.

Oh, and there are clangers. What the hell are clangers? Well, since you're probably American, you've probably never head of them until now.

Clangers are these little knitted piglets that live on the moon that speak in whistles. Yup.

The only reason I've ever heard of them is because of Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe, which only rarely ever lowered its bile lever to talk about the works of Oliver Postgate.

And here they are.

Don't you just want to hug one?

The point of all of this is that I recognized a reference to a 1970's British TV show for kids in a comic book about Voldemort and Mick Jagger fighting Sean Connery. It's a rare thing and I'm going to revel in it.

Ah, heck, here comes one more video--

Ten for Grandpa from Pie Face Pictures on Vimeo.

Now let's get the fuck out of here and get some waffles.

Link Dump: Link Dumper

Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on November 16th, 1581, Ilya Repin.

It's that time again! It's time for me to phone in a blog entry for White Guys, Square Glasses! Let's begin, shall we?

Here's a fun little website my friend sent me: I Love Bagram.

It's over six-hundred observations of why Bagram Air Base is the best air base in all of the Hindu-Kush. For example:

4.11.11- No joke, last Saturday I asked for Praline and my response was the 1,000-yard-stare. Now if you don’t know who I’m talking about, then it’s about time you reward yourself with a frozen treat tonight at Dragon DFAC. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Russians had a nickname for this guy after he massacred a company of paratroopers back in ’79, because I doubt Mister Softee got those scars from wielding the ice cream scoop… but who knows, after all he does work for Fluor. Maybe one day I’ll work up the courage to ask him... no, no I won't. This man scares me to death.

Delightful.

What I love more than Bagram is one public television host, Huell Howser. And I love him about as much as I am annoyed by him. On the one hand it's always delightful to know that there's a grown man who is still excited by the idea of somebody grinding corn to make into a tortilla and on the other hand, it's upsetting to me that he's been doing this for over twenty years and there's yet to be anything actually exciting happen to the guy.

All that said, this KCRW guest DJ spot is pretty delightful. He talks about Johnny Cash and drinking whiskey in the White House and after all of this, I am convinced that I want nothing more in life right now than to see John Waters and Howser in a one-on-one conversation.

While Roling Stone magazine has a fairly storied history in distorting the truth in order to serve a perconcieved stance and what's good for all of us, if half of the shit in this article is true, than America is in a fucked up scary place.

I don't mind religious folks, but I do mind people-- of any faith-- that see it not only as their right, but their mission, to get all up in everybody's shit. Isn't that one of the reasons why they hate Muslims? Because they have a bunch of bearded weirdos who think they can hear God and tell everyone to act accordingly? And how can you be for the Constitution and for smaller government, except when it comes to inserting the Bible into people's lives? It's madness.

Why can't we nominate Huell Howser for something? I'd be alright with that. Someone start printing out bumper stickers.



Welcome to my nightmare! Now, let's move on to a nightmare of a different kind, shall we?

"A Jurassic Park sex hotel," you say? "How is that even possible.

One word: Japan.

"Oh, okay then," you say and sit back down, staring at your iced tea, wondering where all the time has gone.

As fucked up as Japan might be right now (on account of the tsunami and the earthquake, I mean, not it's bizarre and occasionally frightening pornography), at least they aren't Russia, which is a country about which I ask "What's wrong with that place" about every other week.

With a frightening consistency, most of the time I ask this, it's about the typical Russian themes of graft and corruption. Occasionally, something new and terrible will pop out of the nation that Ivan the Terrible built. One such thing is the drug Krokodil.

It is a drug for the poor, and its effects are horrific. It was given its reptilian name because its poisonous ingredients quickly turn the skin scaly. Worse follows. Oleg and Sasha have not been using for long, but Oleg has rotting sores on the back of his neck.

"If you miss the vein, that's an abscess straight away," says Sasha. Essentially, they are injecting poison directly into their flesh.

So, I ask you, what the fuck is wrong with that place? I mean, it's not like we have that over. . . oh.

Yeah, but still.

I want to say that we rarely talk about Iran on the program, but as I think back I realize that we probably talk about Iran more than most other countries. Anyways, not too long ago the Iranian nuclear program was (thankfully) hit by a computer virus called Stuxnet which, it's safe to say, fucked their shit up quite a bit (technically speaking).

But, why take my word for it when this slick video presentation can do it much more effectively--

Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus from Patrick Clair on Vimeo.

When I went and saw Werner Herzog presnet The Treasure of the Sierra Madre at the Hollywood Forever cemetery, someone asked him if he had any work coming out. He said that, yes, he had five movies coming out there year. One of those five movies is about him going to prison.

Good for him.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to imagine Herzog screaming, "I am not locked here with you, you are locked in here with me."

Alright, if the drugs and prison weren't horrible enough for you, I've got one more bit of horror before we get to the light at the end of the tunnel.

In Libya not only does it seem that Momar Khadafi is deploying squads of soldiers to gang rape civilians, in some cases, the civilians are replying in kind by murdering the rape victims.

Because they don't want people to think poorly of them, now do they?

Now time for something light to get the taste of that out of my mouth. How about some Michael Caine? Good call. Here ya go--



Aw, yeah. That does me good.