There are bandleaders in Brooklyn starving because of people like me. Thanks, Jack Valenti, for giving all Canadians the right to freely download music from the internet. I mean, I’ll miss the hell out of Dal Richards when he goes, but it’s him or this Slave 4 U remix, and one must have priorities!
Anonymous vs Scientology, the video, is a true masterpiece of anarchist art; simultaneously exciting, enticing, and intimidating, it leaves the viewer both appalled and attracted. Or at least it does if you’re the sum total of my circle of friends. So what if they all hated it! It’s MY circle, dammit, so I have super-voting shares, just like Conrad Black.
This is an anarchy and I run it.
In any case, like everything from the creation of humanity to the blogosphere on down, great art is not achieved without a few false starts. For those of you returning from the Anonymous VS Scientology showdown in London today, here is something to keep the buzz going:
the Anonymous vs Scientology video blooper reel!
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Oft have we and many other notables of the blogosphere lamented the passing of the iconic Longhorse, most noble of beasts, most loyal of friends, most helpful of livestock, and, until now, most extinct of creatures.
We mourn no longer.
Inspired, perhaps, by the leg-lengthening operations so popular amongst Asians with high net worth and higher pain thresholds, or then again, perhaps by the spine-extension procedures perfected by Dr. Francois Charriere in his rotting and ghoul-haunted Providence house, modern science has dipped into the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and re-created the noble Longhorse, offering it on a for-profit basis in what can only be described as a Frankensteinian nightmare of simultaneous triumph and horror.
Dr. Boli has the proof:
Cautiously optimistic as I may be about advances in science, I think even the most coldly rational among us must pause and consider the implications of turning banal Dobbins into a tawdry modern similacrum of what was once one of nature’s most beautiful creations. Are we not all too familiar with what can occur when Man seeks to usurp the role of Creator?
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First of all, when people tag me to do memes, even cool ones, I ignore them. Sometimes I apologize, but mostly I just say “you think I’m doing a meme?” This is a continuation of my elementary school habit of refusing to write stories on any of the four subjects suggested and coming up with my own idea.
I think it’s fairly safe to say that “How to Capture a Unicorn” is a more compelling essay topic, particularly for a teacher who’s spent several hours wading through identical papers.
In any case, I don’t do memes when tagged. I do, on occasion, steal memes, though, and it is the result of one such theft which has made inevitable my eventual, and eternal, damnation.
It was a simple book meme; Grab the nearest book, turn to page 123, look up the fifth sentence, and type out the next three sentences. Innocuous enough, right? Like the pebble which starts the avalanche, it displayed no hint of the terrible chain of events it was about to set in motion. First, max posted it. Then I read it. And then, I’m ashamed to say, the urge to pocket it became irresistible and I gave in and grabbed that fucker like it was a chocolate-coated, bacon-wrapped, Viggo-topped ingot of solid gold.
And I ran with it.
Oh, man. This is so sad. The nearest book is The Last Battle, by CS Lewis. Great, I get the book that has the end of the world in it. Swell.
Tirian had no need to ask which was the High King, for he remembered his face (though here it was far nobler) from his dream. He stepped forward, sank on one knee and kissed Peter’s hand.
“High King,” he said. “You are welcome to me.”
Oh, great. And now I’ve put gay innuendo into a meeting of the High King and the Last King of Narnia.
I’m going to hell.
Well, I am!
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So…I guess you’d call it a slow start to the day, being that I woke up at 8pm. It is, on the other hand, Saturday, and yesterday I thought ahead and set all the blogs to autopost for today, so nothing actually occurred that required my being up and awake until well after I actually was. This is just the way I like it on weekends.
And then I like to have a cup of coffee or two and brush my hair and then I like to look like an efficient, informed hero-type of woman in front of a great many good-looking uniformed officers, at least one of whom does an appreciative double-take, even though I was wearing my baggy plaid pj pants.
And so it came to pass…
It was a quarter to midnight and all through the house the alarm bell was going, but no fires to douse. As per usual, it has been raining a great deal and, also as per usual, this set the fire alarm off.
Vancouver is a very different kind of town.
Normally (this is normal, in Vancouver) what happens is, the rain leaks in because our building is covered with stucco and punctured with many holes through which the rain gains entry. Because it is stucco, it cannot easily get out again, so it seeps down through the walls to the lower levels, which is why my living room wall has holes eaten through it from which emerge bugs of the sort that were thought extinct since the Pre-Cambrian era, and why mushrooms occasionally break the surface of my carpet. The Co-op claims they will do something about that someday.
In any case, after a substantial or prolonged rainstorm, something on which one may certainly count in Vancouver in the depths of winter, the vast pool of water stored within the building invariably finds its way to the smoke detector in the South hallway on the second floor, from which it gushes in a joyous, gravity-powered fountain. Naturally, this causes the detector some considerable agitation, to which it responds in the only way it knows how: by setting off the fire alarm.
So it is not unusual to have a fire alarm go off in the middle of the night (even if it doesn’t rain in the daytime, you may be sure it will rain at night in this city) in response to a good wetting.
That, however, is not what happened this time.
That would have been normal.
Noooooo, this time I hear a large bang coming from the parking garage below my apartment, a second later comes the the alarm, I look up from the computer, decide this t-shirt won’t do and I should change into my cute polarfleece hoodie, which I do, slip on some socks that match, get into my sandals, and then make my leisurely way out to the lobby, which is crammed with my neighbors, only a small percentage of whom have English fluent enough to be used under the influence of sirens. One of them who does informs me that a section of the ceiling on the second floor has fallen in, along with the smoke detector. This does not surprise me, for I have seen that ceiling and, under the new coat of stucco it looks like the panties of a gigantic woman whose period has caught her by surprise.
Alas, this dramatic story is not true.
As I usually do, I patrol the hallways of all four floors, looking for any sign of actual fire. I’m confident enough that there IS none to take the elevator, that’s how confident. And there is none, not so much as some incense, Chinese New Year notwithstanding. Maybe that’s why we have all these false alarms? The Buddha is not appeased?
The only thing that’s actually out of place is the smoke detector at the south end of the main floor hallway, which has exploded.
“Ghosts,” says one of the Chinese neighbors, inscrutably. And then they all laugh. Maybe they know something I don’t?
In any case, I get to tell the firemen what’s what, what it usually is, where it is located, and what about the parking garage. They seem to have no notes or collective memory about our smoke detector/rain alarm issue, so I fill them in thereon. One bystander, who’s apparently lent them her keys so they can get in and out of the complex, asks if the Captain has them and it appears that he does not. And, at this point a remarkably good-looking and relatively youthful member of the force enters the building, probably just because standing out in the rain is unpleasant, even if you’ve got the suit and the cool hat.
“Do you have this lady’s keys?” asks the Captain.
“No,” he replies. “I think Joey has them,” and as he turns, presumably to go get Joey, he does an appreciative double-take in my direction and I give thanks to the goddess Feria for my newly-red hair and suddenly wish I had put on the good jeans. The tight ones.
I’d have given him my keys.
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raincoaster 