Company Town

This is the name of the column Rambler writes for the LA Times (yes, it still exists). It is also how one writer summed up Hollyweird to the rest of us rubes in "Rolling Stone."
Hollywood really is a company town, he said. The people go to bed early, watch their weight, and talk about one thing: the industry.
There's probably more exciting night life in Iowa City, he concluded.

I heart Rape-Man

Rape-Man is real. Rape-Man is found in Japanese comics. What Rape-Man does it very specialized and labor-intensive.
Rape-Man avenges jilted (male) lovers by finding their ex-girlfriends and raping them.
That'll teach them.
I imagine the end of such comics. (Jilted lover) "Thanks, Rape-Man." Rape-Man, "no ploblem."

Please don't drunk and post

It's just after ten in the morning and I am wasted. I blame the drug companies, which I took some of their product this morning. Trying to start exercising regularly, eating right, and dying
anyway.

Time to start lashing out reuglarly. First is for the NRA, who have 20,000 handgun deaths a year (or maybe it was 12). Time for the rest of us to storm with guns, even fake ones, because, hey the lawmakers think it's a good idea to practice anywhere. So why can't I bring one to the Capitol or the Supreme Court? They voted on a law intended to protect militia-members and made it an individual right.

Even fukin' Obama has to scrape and bow before this group, talking about "Second Amendment Rights." But it was the court's 5-4 decision to come out against DCs handgun legislation that really turned the tide. Before, there was only speculation on the law's meaning.

Notwithstanding Viginia's great sport of exporting death (in DC, up the NY), lawmakers in Virgnia and other backwoods peckerwood places have interpreted that they can as many guns as they wan't.

It's not their fault, said one supporter, if clients use the guns in crimes. They import guns for sporting reasons altogether. Anyone up for a pheasant hunt?

Under the Broken Sky

The train tracks that led into Auschwitz end in a gatehouse, that, despite the millions killed in and around it, is surprisingly small and not nearly as threatening-looking as one might think. That's how people who have been there describe it and how it looked in the NYT today.

All my life, I have been fascinated by places where huge numbers of people breathed their last. I looked once at the rolling farmland and woods of Antietam, the bloodiest single day of the Civil War, and couldn't help thinking that for thousands, this was their last landscape of the planet Earth.

Earlier I had seen the shrapnel-filled fields of Verdun, where a million soldiers died in World War I. The day was misty, the earth winter-barren, and the thousands of crosses of the dead climbed the hills into the far distance. With the pill-boxes still there, and the outlines of the trenches never to be overgrown, it looked for all the world like "All Quiet on the Western Front."

But most places of mass death are not like that. The fields of Manassas, as a matter of fact, are beautiful and have had to be protected from the rampant development of Northern Virginia.

I went there and laid on the ground, the blood long since absorbed by the rich soil. I looked at the sky, the same sky so many looked up at before death. It hasn't changed, just as the sky at Auschwitz is not forever stained Crimson. God isn't evil, only indifferent.

New People to Harass and Bore!

I finally stole Rambler's list of links and made them mine. Read me and justify my existence. At the very least, check out the rise of "Sharking," a new and extremely disturbing/sickly fascinating trend from Japan and now, of course, LA that I have somehow missed. Start with "Fear the Shark" and see what the globe's finest voyeurs have come up with now courtesy of the Internet.

Rambler can now only be contacted through Ryan Seacrest, or, God help you, picking up a phone, thereby setting off an earthquake when/if all that weight is picked up on the other coast.

Walsh McGuire is Out to Get Me

I've now figured out the mysterious phenomenon of Asian-characters appearing in my blog responses: It's Walsh McGuire.

When Walsh was studying Chinese in Washington, Lux and myself would leave pidgen-Mandarin gibberish messages on his answering machine. Soft-hearted tortured-poet Haverford grad Walsh was the perfect target, and we of course thought that line of study was the equivalent of bird-call analysis in the Aleutian Islands.

Now Walsh is a business mogul in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and I'm now certain he's handing me verbal dunce-caps at every chance possible now that Hari-Kari is starting to look like a good career move for me.

A thousand pardons, Walshire.

From the Land of the Rising Moon

Apparently "Sharking" originated in Japan! Yes, this practice of raising a girl's skirt and pulling down her panties (or "bottom sharking") can be found in weird vids from that land of totally restrained people. There's a lot of footage in rail and subway stations, though I have not seen the related phenomenon of ejaculating suddenly on unsuspecting women (the trains are too crowded to even let your shark out to play anyway).
What would Shamu say? (wait, he's actually a whale).