I think I mentioned last year that Vancouver had pot leaf-shaped fireworks on Canada Day. This year I forgot all about the fireworks, so I have no updates for you. Instead, I present this Firework Personality Test:
What Your These Fireworks Say About You |
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You don’t let others see your intensity often, and when they do, they are quite surprised. You burn brightly, but you also burn steadily. You have the endurance to get the one thing you desire most. |
Yay! Something everyone everywhere can celebrate today. America is free! Free of one of the most malevolent and powerful doctrinaire bigots it’s seen since Emancipation.
Let’s all sing along with Klaus Nomi, whom Helms would have hated on general principles, even though he’s not black. Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead!
There are some great comments over on Gawker, but it appears the site is down right now. Instead, let’s look at a sliver of what the Guardian had to say about him:
Senator Jesse Helms, member of the US Senate’s foreign relations committee for two decades and its chairman from 1995 to 2001, has died at the age of 86. To echo this newspaper’s memorable comment on the death of William Randolph Hearst, it is hard even now to think of him with charity…
He became one of the most powerful and baleful influences on American foreign policy, repeatedly preventing his country paying its UN contributions, voting against virtually all arms control measures, opposing international aid programmes as “pouring money down foreign rat holes”, and avidly supporting military juntas in Latin America and minority white regimes in Southern Africa.
In domestic politics he denounced the 1964 Civil Rights Act as “the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress”, voted against a supreme court justice because she was “likely to uphold the homosexual agenda”, acted for years as spokesman for the large tobacco companies, was reprimanded by the justice department and the federal election commission for electoral malpractice, and compiled a dismal personal record as a slum landlord…
Robert Pastor, whose ambassadorship to Panama was scuppered by Helms in 1995, commented that, “nothing Jesse Helms did in his entire career will enhance America’s national security more than his retirement.”
I wish the CBC had had the courage to call it like it actually was. For their mealymouthed obit, click here, although why would you?
Here are some quotes from Helms himself:
I was with some Vietnamese recently, and some of them were smoking two cigarettes at the same time. That’s the kind of customers we need!
I’m so old-fashioned I believe in horse whipping.
To rob the Negro of his reputation of thinking through a problem in his own fashion is about the same as trying to pretend that he doesn’t have a natural instinct for rhythm and for singing and dancing.
Rest in place. Let’s build a monument bigger than the pyramid of Cheops on top of the bugger, lest he try to claw his way back.
For some things, my friends, there are no words. The soulless perversions, both polymorphous and (shockingly) amorphous, of the cosmic aberration which is Cthulhu know bondage neither in space nor in time, nor in any other dimension either dreamed or measured.
Here, my friends, is proof. Cover your eyes and turn away, rather than click on and be damned.
Here be dragons.
Here be Cthulhu Goatse: Continue reading
Another rival to the clown crown falls to “natural causes.” So-called “natural causes.”
Larry Harmon as Bozo the Clown
“I felt if I could plant my size 83AAA shoes on this planet,
(people) would never be able to forget those footprints,” he said.
Yes, one of the most prominent clowns in history, Larry Harmon, has died. Harmon, who played Bozo the Clown for most of the latter part of the Twentieth Century and could plausibly said to have been the first person of any description to clone a clown, is only the most recent in a string of mysterious clown deaths.
Larry Harmon, dead at 83.
Marcel Marceau, dead at 84.
Red Skelton, dead at 84.
Nicolai Poliakoff OBE, dead at 74.
Achille Zavatta, dead at 78.
One by one, the most prominent clowns in the world have been picked off, most succumbing to the blandly ubiquitous “natural causes,” and none living much past their 84th birthday.
The world shrugs, sighs, says “these things happen,” ah yes, but why do they always seem to happen to the rivals of one man? One man who is known to associate with hardened criminals. One man who has at his fingertips the very substances of which a heart attack is made?
One man, ladies and gentlemen. One man named Ronald McDonald.
For Devo:
For the record and just to warn the universe on general principles, it is now eight minutes after midnight on July 4th and the moronic bumblers working on the garage gates of our apartment building are STILL AT IT WITH THE FUCKING POWER TOOLS, sixteen hours after they started and six hours after the bylaws say they have to stop. I tried calling the noise bylaw hotline: it’s open from 9am-4pm, Monday to Friday, and there is NO VOICE MAIL.
If they really want to see a power tool up close and personal, just let them keep this up till my bedtime.
Thus: the Devo. I am self-medicating with New Wave.
Although in Operation Global Media Domination news, I note with great pleasure that my post on Ashley Kaufman at Lolebrity is on the front page of Google. The post on Gawker got kilt; wonder why? Ah, well, less competition!
raincoaster 