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And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
- William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”
“Not since Jesus has a baby been so eagerly anticipated.”
- CNN on the upcoming birth of Brangelina hellspawn
Circling. The. Drain.
Look, people. You’ve been warned.
For almost three years now, we’ve given you periodic updates on the most insidious threat facing human civilization:
The impending takeover of the monkeys.
The general level of monkey mayhem has spiralled ever upwards over the past few years, increasing exponentially during the Year of the Monkey and continuing unabated even after that Year ended last February.
Scoff, if you will, at recent stories of monkeys biting humans in India, stealing cell phones in London, devastating farmers’ crops in Puerto Rico, breaking into homes in Japan, achieving civil rights equal to humans in Spain, or applying for citizenship in the US.
Well, it’s no laughing matter now. The monkeys have learned to kill humans. And that’s without the use of firearms, which they will, no doubt, soon evolve the ability to manufacture and fire. Obviously, we’ve made the Monkey God very, very angry, and he has responded by sending forth his minions to begin their long-feared takeover of the Earth.
We’ve said it before (actually, we say it at the beginning of every year) but this time we are categorically certain of its inevitability: by the end of this year, the tattered remnants of humanity will be huddled in caves, desperately seeking to evade detection from the Extermination Teams sent out by our Monkey Overlords.
The Time of the Monkey is Nigh! NIGH, we tell you!
The major telecom firms are trying to pass legislation through Congress, this very week, that will spell The End of the Internet as We Know It. If this vile legislation is allowed to stand, the internet will become as regimented and controlled as television, radio, and the major print media. ISPs will wield absolute control over who can place a site on the internet and who can view it (and, just as importantly, how fast they can view it.) Activities that don’t generate revenue for telecom firms, such as email and instant messaging, will be relegated to “slow lanes” or forced into a “pay per message” model. And Peer To Peer file sharing? Massive bandwidth use with little or no profit potential for internet providers? Yeah, you can forget about that.
This is, most manifestly, not a “Liberal vs. Conservative” issue. The countless little pissant conservative blogs that litter the blogosphere will be just as negatively affected by this legislation as the countless little pissant liberal blogs (like this one.) All of our rights to say and read whatever the hell we want on the internet will be severely curtailed if At&T, Verizon, Time Warner, Comcast, and their Congressional lackeys are allowed to shove this bill through. So check out the broad coalition mobilizing to oppose the bill, sign the petition, and maybe, just maybe, call and/or email your Congresscritter.
It’s going down this week, and there’s no time to lose. Get off your ass and do something.
It is with special sadness that we note last week’s resignation of White House press secretary Scott McClellan, a singular man for a singular time. His tireless dedication to presenting daily sessions of Republican pretzel logic was, indeed, an inspiration to us all. In a time when the defense of Dear Leader’s policies required a prodigious talent for producing mountains of verbal Jabberwocky, Scottie was more than up to the task. Indeed, one might say that his method of jousting with the objectively pro-terrorist Nattering Nabob hordes of the media was almost Zen-like in its simplicity:
While the first wave of Dadaist performance art ended in 1920, it heartened us greatly to know that a true master of the form was still in practice (and on a daily basis, on the biggest stage of all, no less! ) well into the 21st century. Now he is gone, and we are all poorer for it. No doubt, his fan club is in mourning.
Vaya Con DubYa, Scottie!
Last month, I posted a list of my favorite new albums of 2006. In that post, I lamented my inability to link to an online review for Motorpsycho’s Black Hole/Blank Canvas. Since the album has not been released in the US, and might not be due to the band’s lack of an American distributor (I obtained my copy through a certain file-sharing network), I despaired of ever finding a review in English.
Finally, tired of waiting, I clicked on one of the many German-language reviews I found online, and decided to test out Google’s infamous “Translate this Page” feature. The mangled, computer-generated translation that spat out was chock full of individual nuggets of unintentional comedy gold. For example:
That is not called naturally under any circumstances quiet, instead the two let classical skirt cutlery speak and get a correct music steam roller from the garage, in addition, to calmer parts with mehrstimmigem singing the duo thought. Here the hut burns.
Insanity, as it breaks its neck with “in Our Tree”. Among them: Sound volume in perfection.
Dreamed and far “Sancho Says” floats in, in order to likewise screw itself into a kind intoxication, which remains clearly gentler however
That is not to mean however that the Motorpsychos can be mutated the second part of the album back-lean and to pure Shoegazern.
Hey, it makes at least as much sense as your average Pitchfork review.
According to a recent post on American Libraries, the state of Maine has petitioned the Bush administration to have the state excluded from the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) Library Agreement that is currently being negotiated in Geneva, Switzerland. Maine Governor John Baldacci wrote, “Libraries are important sites of free and democratic exchange of information. For this reason few developed countries have committed libraries to the terms of the GATS. By committing libraries to the GATS and not specifically exempting public funding from GATS rules, we compromise the support that taxpayers give to ensure that public libraries continue to serve as valuable democratic spaces. Please carve Maine out of the libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural services sector.”Public Citizen notes that “the U.S. has never specified that public funds for libraries are limited to public institutions only and, ‘since aspects of these services are provided in competition with other service providers,’they may be subject to claims of unfair competition by the commercial sector.” What exactly does that mean? Well, libraries could be sued for offering videotapes and dvds, and even ostensibly for loaning books since all of those services could be viewed as unfair competition.
Since Republicans are always yammering on about “state’s rights” and against “big government,” I’m sure the administration will have no problem allowing an individual state to chart its own course in information policy, right?
Yeah, right.
Outrage! The Dark Lord of Freedom™, Big Swingin’ Dick Cheney, was booed off the field when he threw out the first pitch at the Washington Nationals’ home opener today! (Rage and froth at the shocking, blasphemous video of the event! ) How dare these traitorous baseball fans exert their First Amendment right to voice public displeasure of a public official whom their tax dollars employ? Don’t they know we’re at war???
(Links via A Bunch of Commies )
It has become crystal clear to us that the vast majority of Americans are, in fact, traitors to America. We therefore strongly urge a vast new program of mass arrests and detention camps designed to protect this great country from its citizens. Stop the America-hating American public before it’s too late!
UPDATE: It appears that we will have to add Colin Powell the ever-lengthening list of America-hating Americans. Will no one step forward and save America from America?
UPDATE 2: Retired two-star Army generals now hate America as well.
The other day, in a fit of sheer, synapse-frying boredom, I decided to check out the website of the public library where I used to work. Lo and behold, what should my astonished eyeballs gaze upon but a job posting! The director with whom I battled on an almost daily basis was leaving!
Now, I’m not particularly proud of what I’m about to say, but there’s no sense sugar-coating things: my first emotion upon ascertaining my former nemesis’ departure was a dark, unholy surge of malicious glee. “O dear god,” I thought, “please tell me she got fired.” I spent a joyous hour envisioning various vile tableaus and scenarios in which that miserable, micromanaging bitch would have been shitcanned. Heavy, sneering chuckles abounded as I imagined a mass revolt of fed-up employees quitting and walking out the door in protest as I had done, followed by a terse, closed-door session with the library board in which they would informed her that, yeah, it’s just not working out.
“You can’t do this to me!” she’d shriek. “Don’t you know who I am?” Then she’d hiss like a Komodo Dragon and slash at them with razor-sharp talons before storming out into the library proper and tearing down shelves of books while howling like a banshee. Then, of course, the cops would be called and, after trying and failing miserably to calm down her insensate rage, would have no choice but to break out the Tasers and zap her with fifty thousand volts, reducing her to a quivering mass of semi-sentient jello, blubbering and cursing to herself on the floor as her baleful eyes rolled wildly to and fro in her head.
And then, of course, someone would pour water on her and she’d melt, just like the Wicked Witch of the West.
Yeah, that was a fun little hour while it lasted. Unfortunately, after sending a clandestine email to a former coworker at the library, I found out that the director is not, in fact, getting fired, but instead resigning to spend more time at home with her new baby. So, not only is that vile woman not getting what she so richly deserves, but she has also passed on her squalid DNA to another generation!
Life is unfair.
Our take is that the time/effort/energy/bandwidth devoted to talking about what “Library 2.0” is or isn’t could be better used on something, uh, useful. “Library 2.0” is just a marketing buzzword. And, as further evidence that librarians suck at marketing, people pushing ideas which may or may not fall under anyone’s personal Library 2.0 umbrella don’t seem to realize that they hinder the reception of the concepts when they use the “Library 2.0” label. We suspect that a lot of folks see or hear the “Library 2.0” label (made even worse if “so-and-so gets it” is also part of the spiel), instantly turn their thoughts elsewhere, and the meat of the message turns to “blah-blah-blah.”
Amen to that. My fantastic judgement in paying no attention whatsoever to the “Library 2.0” debate is hererby affirmed.
