Spooks and Leaks

Posted on July 29, 2013 by gumbywan

I bet I got your attention with that title. Why did you think about one thing first? You sinners are all alike.

NSA Spooks and Peepers

What I want to talk about is government spooks = spies, intelligence (what an oxymoron!), and any manner of creepy government law enforcement agency that lusts after your personal information (pretty much everyone from the IRS head to the CIA janitor). These freaks actually think they are serving the public interest by knowing about everything from your shopping habits to your bathroom habits. They also want to label everything Top Secret that they gather so you and I won’t know what or how they gather it and what they gather, and especially how illegal that might be. On top of this they will label Top Secret any embarrassing information they don’t want you to see whether it should be secret or not because they know better than you what is good for you and the United States in general.

Conspiracy Theories

Now I’m not a big conspiracy theory believer like former governor and AWA wrestling legend Jesse “The Body” Ventura. Anytime you get more than two powerful people in a room someone of them is going to squeal or otherwise “compromise” any agreement to get what they personally want over the others. Powerful people are almost always double crossers and if they think they can get more by ratting and they also think there is a reasonable chance of getting away with it (or just killing their co-conspirators), they’re going to do it. Think about it. Think about experiences you’ve had at work, with government, at church, at fraternal organizations, even in your social circle. Somebody always outs the information and we all know what they thought they were up to. Hence I don’t think the Trilateral Commission or the Bilderbergers are up to anything more than a lot of back slapping and circle jerking. What I’m getting to is I do think when these things leak out of the government they are probably real and not just someone (like me) playing Chicken Little and we ought to pay attention to it. I will also tell you why we ought to be thanking these “leakers” as patriots to the US Constitution and helping them get away with it instead of listening to all the folderol about putting them in jail or worse as traitors.

AWA’s Jesse “The Body” Ventura

Let’s go a little farther back in history. Say before the disgraceful Iraq war. Remember those “weapons of mass destruction,” WMD’s. Remember when the government tried to suppress the testimony of leading international nuclear inspectors as top secret. Well it was labeled secret because it didn’t support going to war. What other possible reason would this be classified as secret? How did it put our country at risk for this to be public knowledge? Also remember that as soon as it was outed by the leakers, we suddenly now had a war for regime change. Is there something fishy in Denmark? I’ll say!

Weapons of Mass Destruction

Now lets jump forward a little bit to Abu Gharib (I’m too lazy to look up the correct spelling for you sticklers out there). The photographs were initially suppressed by the DoD as secret. Why? Because they would have caused more allied casualties? Huh? That’s when “Top Secret” always comes in. It’s like saying we need to keep secret that we interrogated some mobsters so the mafia wouldn’t be so pissed off at the police. First when did we start being the “bad guys?” Weren’t we always supposed to be the good guy John Wayne types. Let’s get beyond this. Why were they tortured at all? For fun I presume. Now we’ve had a breakdown in our military that the US citizen needs to know. Why? Because we can never be sure it will ever be dealt with otherwise and it has to stop.

Abu Gharib Sweethearts

Jump forward to the Bradley Manning leaks to WikiLeaks. First if you read through and look at this there is nothing, I mean nothing, that put anyone in harm’s way other than by revealing we weren’t playing by the rules (international and our own) again and also not telling the truth even when we were playing by the rules. So why was it secret? Half of it was already known. It was secret because your own government is embarrassed by the fact that it doesn’t play nice, by the rules, our own rules, and doesn’t look like the good guys they want you to think they are. There was no other reason to keep this information secret.

Jump forward to now. Did you ever look at the crap Edward Snowden leaked? A bunch of PowerPoint slides that reveal nothing about how the NSA information is acquired but it did state that the way they did it would not exclude data on US citizens in the United States. This is illegal by US law. The espionage spooks cannot have operations targeted on US citizens on US soil, period. Snowden’s “revelations” did nothing to compromise US security. Nothing. It was suppressed because again, we weren’t playing by our own rules and it is embarrassing and illegal to be caught pissing in the corner with your pants down. On top of this we can also question why it is even legal for the US to spy on your phone calls to Mexico to your great grandfather, even if you both are US citizens. Bet you didn’t know that. Now if you think for a minute that international terrorists or criminals didn’t already think their calls could be monitored before Snowden’s leaks, then you are just simple minded, and he didn’t show any new way as to how they could avoid being monitored either.

What it comes down to is your government is spying on you for the purported reason of protecting you from terrorists. Did this prevent two Chechen kooks that weren’t even professional terrorists from bombing one of the most visible sporting events in the US? Ask the three people who died or those who were maimed if tapping their phones was worth it. If we get beyond that, would the country be any safer from terrorists if the TSA didn’t push you through some scanner that shows your teats and arse to everyone. Tell me how? Your chances of being killed by falling down the stairs are greater than they are from a terrorist attack. We already know your chances of being killed by a fertilizer plant explosion or a train derailment are worse. Why don’t we mobilize thousands of people tomorrow to inspect every aspect of the rail system or fertilizer production including tapping their phones to see if they are “cheating” on the regulations. The reaction to this nonsense is absurd.

Finally if you think that the government does have the capability to get your private information then you should be worried that somebody of questionable moral character might use it illegally. Do you think that government employees are any less prone to using your private information for nefarious reasons than anyone else? Why do you think that? Think about what was your last experience with a cog in the biggest bureaucracy, the federal government? Was it good? How about the last dozen? I think I’ve made my point. Government employees, and all these spooks are government employees, despite what you may like to think, are no less prone to using your private stuff illegally than anyone else on the street is. If it’s available somebody will use it eventually. Think about that next time you piss off a CIA paper pusher in the super market line or worse yet an IRS auditor. If they have it, somebody will use it. Remember that. If they can’t have it we don’t have any trust problems here then do we. Do you think the government cares if it gathers too much stuff even inadvertently? I don’t think so.

Questionable Roadblocks

If what we really cared about were people’s lives we would take everyone in the war on drugs, the TSA, the NSA (and their sister agencies), federal law enforcement and put them out on the roads conducting questionable, but somehow legal, road blocks to look for drunk drivers. We would save thousands more lives if we even let all the other cranks go. It’s a matter of priority and your freedoms. Why don’t we do it? Well there’s no power in arresting drunks. It’s no fun like being a spy is.

Don’t believe what your government says to you. Don’t believe what multinational corporations say to you. Don’t believe unless you skeptically examine the truth of the statements they make. They all think they know better than you how to “take care” of you.

(Un)Employed

Posted on July 21, 2013 by gumbywan

I know that last blog entry about the word thing sucked bad. Talk about bottom of the barrel. I almost deleted it but I figure someday long after I’m gone these little gems are going to bring me the fame and recognition of greatness I never had in life and it would be a shame if even the Dminus efforts were not included in my ephemera and marginalia, seeing that they are still certainly better than most of the hot air out there today.

Retirement

Let’s talk today about unemployment or as I like to refer to it: “coincidental early retirement.” I think the government should shift towards using this term and let the “unemployment” defined rate gradually fade to near zero. Everyone in our free and classless society would be pleased by this. Think about it, if the government would just assume that no one over 65 wanted to work anyway (drop them from the “unemployed”) and assume that anyone who has exhausted their benefits are just lazy and shiftless and wouldn’t work at any job no matter what, now we have the retired (over 65) and the early retired (the lazy and shiftless) off the unemployment statistics. If we go one step further and assume the disabled are going to forever be unable to work, then there you have another big chunk out of the “pie of idlers” as I like to call it.

Now before we…, Whoa you over there, don’t get up out of that chair while I’m talking and don’t you dare heckle me. I’ll come right over there and smack you. Before we go any further, to avoid any misunderstanding here, I myself am currently in a temporary bout of “coincidental early retirement.” So there. Now sit back down and shut up. You know what happens when you assume…

Where was I, oh yeah, like most things in the media, business, or government, we haven’t made any real changes to the physical world here. It’s all a matter of perspective (= spin). We’ve now got our new unemployment rate down way low, near zero (Somebody is going to start talking inflation now so we may have to add something back into our statistic. There’s always a pessimist around.). Voila! Everyone feels better. Okay maybe not everyone but a lot of people. Those that don’t feel better are just going to not really care and that doesn’t count. These are mostly the lazy and shiftless that I mentioned above and nobody listens to them anyway and most don’t vote. So now I’ve proven that either people don’t care or they are way happier about our new unemployment statistic now so on average (and remember 50% of people are always going to be above average!) I think we can agree that the day is just a little sunnier now. What’s so bad about feelin’ good? Isn’t that what we yearn for most in life, feelin’ good? If you can do it without moving anything, so much the better. Why work so hard (see the “Dminus Principle”)? Anyway I’m doing all the heavy lifting here so just pay attention.

Here come the naysayers. I’ve got my usual on target answers for them. The first thing that is going to be said is it is “different” than what we do today. I say: “Is what we’re doing today working, huh?” The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. I say: New Way, New Result, because what we have now obviously isn’t working. Second, the economists and statisticians are going to say that the new stat is going to skew things or under report the real situation. This is maybe the worst argument ever. The current old unemployment stat we use is a made up number too, I’m just offering a clearly better pretend number. A more optimistic made up number. Remember: perspective = spin.

c = speed of light

Third unemployment statistics aren’t like physical constants like Avogadro’s Number or pi or the speed of light, they are just made up numbers by people to measure some thing in some way with a certain perspective (remember: spin). Why shouldn’t we use new ways of calculating statistics that put our current situation in a better, more optimistic light? I say change it again if circumstances change. Remember nothing has changed in the universe except a lot of people are a whole lot happier and the rest (the ones that don’t matter anyway) are just the same as they were before; net gain. Economists will squawk from both sides but when were economists ever right and therefore why would anyone pay any attention to them? When was the last time a tax cut “trickled down” to you or a tax hike created any jobs that the lazy and shiftless defined above would take? Huh? Never! QED!

The other thing to remember in all this is even as the old unemployment statistic creeps down most of these jobs being taken are much lower paying than the ones people had before the crash. Most former auto workers in America are now slingin’ hash and they both count as employed but the latter just barely. Most former rice slingers in China are now making autos. But why rain on the parade? The new unemployment number takes care of all that. It is virtually unaffected by the quality of the jobs that the few outside of Wall Street work at. How better to measure a half-empty statistic?

I can see that some of you are still not on board with me. How about this: let’s measure the employment rate instead of unemployment rate. Now we can crow about our 93% employment rate instead of pity-partying about the 7% unemployment rate and we haven’t even played the numbers game. How ’bout dat? I bet if you showed somebody a picture with 93 guys in it then showed them one with 100 guys in it they wouldn’t be able to tell which was which. They sure would be able to tell the difference between 7 and zero. Real life is the same. Perspective and spin. Is your day getting any better yet?

The last argument will be that other countries don’t measure it that way. What? When did we ever worry about what foreigners, especially ones that don’t live here, think? Why would we behave like these lesser lights that we have to bail out globally like a drunk every New Year’s Eve? Remember WWI, WWII, Vietnam (France), Falklands (Great Britain), Kossovo, (remember that film Behind Enemy Lines with nutcase Owen Wilson as that downed NATO pilot) not to mention keeping their oil safe for them in the Middle East. We can measure unemployment any way we want. Besides when other countries see how low our unemployment is they’ll want to measure their’s the same better American way like they always do with things.

Full Employment Pot ‘o’ Gold

I still apologize for that last post about words. It was really awful. I had a sort of writer’s block thing going on, but now the meds are starting to work. Hopefully this post will make up for it.

Hijacked

Posted on July 20, 2013 by gumbywan

One thing that pisses me off is words that have been hijacked and/or rendered unusable by the ignorant politically correct crowd. These are perfectly good words that you might find in early 20th century or 19th century literature but have somehow been hijacked or otherwise consigned to the scrap heap of literature.

Hijacked Words:
Queer: queer used to denote odd, strange, or eerie. Somewhere along the way it was purloined to mean a homosexual, usually male. To use queer now in a sentence where the object is a person is to be perpetually misunderstood.

Gay: A gay person used to be a happy soul. The “gay” community stole the word to mean a homosexual of either gender but usually male. I hate particularly that this word was hijacked because it always was a useful synonym. To use gay in its original sense in a phrase is to almost always invite misunderstanding now.

Faggot: A faggot is a bundle of sticks period, as in “There’s a faggot in the woodpile.” to denote a thing out of place. I still use this word in its original sense just to piss people off.

Dike: an obvious hijack from its original meaning of a dam or seawall of some sort, as in: “Did you hear the one about the little Dutch boy who put his finger in the seawall to stop the flood? No but there’s nothing I like better than a good dike story.” He, he, he.

Tit: a tit is a bird. A teat is a mammary gland. ‘Nuff said.

To “come” is to arrive or journey to somewhere with a purpose, not an orgasm. I love to use this in a double entendre sense as well.

Corn hole: Where did the prurient sense of “corn hole” come from? It doesn’t make any sense. Corn hole is a bean bag game, like bean bag toss.

Words pc idiots have taken out of general usage since the stupid have misconstrued their real meaning:

Denigrate, to belittle. The obvious misunderstanding I attribute to the flaws in our education system.

Probably the worst misunderstood word in the English language is “niggardly.” It means miserly and always did. It was never applied in a racial sense, never. Again I blame the school system and the fact that even most teachers don’t read anything anymore. I have even heard of kids being chastised for its use, where in fact they should have been praised for their upscale vocabulary.

And finally, words that are just misused, gambit for gamut, could for couldn’t etc. These are just too countless to really go into.

Finally, a “safe deposit box” is an armored container in a vault. I’m not sure what a “safety deposit box” is, maybe some sort of container you put safety items in for a rainy day like ropes, reflectors, and flares. Look it up.

Naval Criminal Investigative Service

Posted on July 11, 2013 by gumbywan

Welcome back friends and relatives. Did you enjoy our little diversion into the wistful memories of childhood? Were you taken back to the years of your wasted youth? Well today we are back to serious business so no talking in the back there. Hey, you, do you want to share that with everybody? No, I didn’t think so, sit down and pay attention.

Today’s essential essay deals with the television program Naval Criminal Investigative Service, NCIS. I’m going to show you why this is not only the most entertaining and inspiring but also the most important show on TV today. If you watch nothing else on TV, you should be watching NCIS. The very survival of our democracy and your sanity depends on it and you know I never exaggerate.

Where to start? Hmmm. A little history. I’m not going to look up the dates because I’m lazy and exact details don’t matter anyway, what we’re going for here is the big picture (I give you all sorts of little hints about how to make your life easier by cutting corners so pay attention. Try to take away SOMETHING). NCIS was actually a spin-off of JAG and is one of the rare instances on TV where the spin-off actually exceeded the parent. Now I never watched JAG but I know from hearsay that NCIS is better, so trust me on this. I’ve seen the pilot NCIS episode say 20 times so I can tell you that most of the critical elements that make NCIS so compelling and intelligent were there at the start and are still there now. This is important in today’s fast changing world where tradition is casually thrown on the trash heap of history. NCIS has maintained the same basic formula for like, don’t quote me on this, 11 seasons. Why is this so important? Because contrary to popular belief, repetition is the spice of life and the thing that makes living tolerable. Gibbs, Ducky, Tony, Abby, and Kaitlyn were there from the pilot episode (Kate was in the Secret Service though for this premier episode).

As you can see the casting was exquisite. Putting aging ex-football star, pretty boy, and method actor Mark Harmon at the helm was sheer brilliance (Did any of you ever see that movie where Mark Harmon plays Ted Bundy? Outstanding.). The range of his ability made the ensemble almost beyond failure. The next stroke was resurrecting David McCallum who all the old folks, the primary broadcast TV demographic, would probably remember from The Man From UNCLE. Then the third stroke of genius was the casting of Goth Pauley Perrette as the quirky but cheery forensic scientist Abby Sciuto. With this three legged thespian stool as a foundation you could pretty much throw any actor or actress into the mix and come out with a winner, however Michael Weatherly (Tony) and Sasha Alexander (Kate) turned out to be no light weights either.

Over the years there have been some changes: Kate was tragically killed off by a berserk terrorist and was sort of replaced by the equally talented and beautiful Cote de Pablo (What kind of a name is that?) as the character Ziva David. The characters of McGee and Mr. Palmer and the agency Director as well as some on and off characters were added in but never was the basic formula tampered with. This is the key to it’s success: second verse same as the first.

Now to me watching NCIS is like family. I’m on a first name basis with all the characters, even the minor ones, and I think about the cast as real people, and you should too. These characters are all meant to be lovable, good looking, and quirky just like real people should be so you should act like they are real people that can affect your lives. Talk as though what they said in the show is real. Your otherwise miserable life will be richer for it.

Your NCIS Family

Why do I tell you all this? Well for your mental health. You need some funny but strong and lovable people to anchor your miserable life on. People you can count on since the real people you know are never going to come through for you, so why shouldn’t it be television characters? Pretend Tony and Ziva are your neighbors. Invite them over for coffee. Imagine rich conversations and interactions with them. Relive key moments in NCIS with Gibbs in a cheerful casual way at a barbecue. Every time you look at NCIS from now on all the characters are going to be like people you really know and love. And unlike real people they’re never going to let you down. They’re everything you wish you and your friends could be but never will be: intelligent, creative, courageous, kind, witty, good looking, pretty much the whole upbeat package. The worst that can happen to you is that some of these good qualities might rub off on you and bring you one more step up from the primordial ooze. What’s to lose?

I could get into all sorts of other technical reasons why NCIS is excellent on so many levels, camera angles, direction, special effects, body doubles, mise-en-scene, montage, but I’d be wasting breath on the unteachable and I don’t know much about them, and they don’t really matter anyway (triple whammy!).

The other real reason to watch NCIS is it is all true! All that stuff they do on their computers, phones, and surveillance cameras is 100% correctamento. How do we know this? Edward Snowden, that Jeffersonian patriot weasel who ratted out the NSA surveillance spooks. He confirmed that all that crap that McGee and Abby and Tony do on their computers to listen in on your phone calls or your Facebook page or your e-mail are 100% real. Yep.

Edward Snowden – Patriot

So where’s the problem you say? I knew you weren’t paying attention. NCIS is TV not reality. Forget that right now. Sure we can trust our private communication with Abby or McGee or even Gibbs, but these are not real people, they’re characters played by actors. Get that through your thick head. Where did you ever get that goofy idea that these were real people? Not real! Whereas Gibbs et al are only going to use your vital information to catch the real bad guys and are going to forget it the minute they don’t need it, the real world doesn’t work like that. The real NCIS (and by inference all federal law enforcement agencies) are out to screw you, not protect you. Think about it. They are in actuality filled with people like you or me, vengeful little spiteful nobodies who want to get their little piece of the pie by using your e-mail and phone calls to blackmail you or harass you to kingdom come. Or worse.

Stay with me here. I’m not sure why you are having so much trouble separating fantasy from reality right now but you need to steady the boat a bit.

The people that are employed by the US Government come out of the same cesspool that other employers get their employees from (remember 50% are below average). Sure they’re vetted but only so they won’t rat or take drugs. It doesn’t say anything about not using a little “free time” to access your credit card transactions to Rubber Novelty World and making a little pocket change on the side. Remember most of these people are hardly being paid enough to live on. What would you do given the same circumstances? And we haven’t even gotten to the peepers yet.

Peepers

Peepers, yes that’s right, the peepers, freaks who want to look at you and your kids naked and self gratify. We already know schools, churches and daycares are full of these freaks so why should NCIS be immune. Via all sorts of bugs, surveillance cameras, and even the webcam on your laptop they are getting their thrills while you go about your seedy private business blissfully unaware. You know, you’ve seen it used on NCIS, in that episode with the school bomber. And I’ve just proven to you that if it is on NCIS it’s most certainly true. Unlike films and live theater, you can’t put stuff on TV that isn’t true or possible. It would warp children. You already knew that.

So now you are armed. I expect you to be tuning into America’s #1 broadcast show religiously. Watch the new shows faithfully on CBS. Watch the back to back rerun marathons on the USA cable network. You will be better informed, more sane, and maybe your pitiful life will just be a little richer for it.

Shrunken Heads

Posted on July 8, 2013 by gumbywan

Typical Leftover World’s Fair Museum

When I was a kid we used to go on field trips from school or my parents, usually my Mom, would take us to the big museums in the city. Now if you live in some Podunk city like I do now, even if it’s a pretty good sized metro area like Charlotte, NC, you aren’t going to have the same experience. Your museums are crap. No real mummies or tombs. I’m talking about the old museums where they had all the stuff the imperialists stole from the rest of the world. Anyway when I was a kid we went to the museums that were left over from old World’s Fairs. My favorite was the Museum of Natural History because they had so many freaky things in it. I mean really freaky things. Cool stuff and it was real not some special effects re-creation rubber crap.

Shrunken Heads

It’s hard to know where to start so I’ll start where we always started, everyone’s favorite: shrunken heads. The museum had maybe a dozen real shrunken heads from South America in this glass case. They were so cool. Now most of these were of natives who I suppose were always whacking each other’s heads off Hatfield and McCoy style anyway. We didn’t care about them in our ethnocentric childlike way. But there were two that were Europeans (I’m not sure how they determined the nationality; they all looked pretty much the same) and that really freaked us. I always thought: What if that was my great, great, grandma in that glass case with all those other heads? They showed how they made the heads with real photographs too. They outlawed trade in shrunken heads in the 1920s or 1930s for obvious reasons so a lot of museums don’t have any heads. They also had shrunken monkey or I suppose chimp heads but these were strictly novelty fare. However if real ones (monkey I mean) had been for sale in the museum souvenir shop we would have definitely bought them. See you’ve got to live in a city old enough, and big enough, to have important stuff like this.

Pickled Punks

The next thing we always went to see was the Pickled Punks (I stole this from carny talk but that’s what we all called them too). The Punks were real human fetuses at various stages of development preserved in big glass jars. We always wondered where the ones that looked like an almost born kid came from since they looked perfectly normal and we felt kind of sorry for them. There were a few freaks too, two headers and the like, but we actually didn’t look at these much. I’m not sure why. The regular fetuses were the main attraction.

The Thin Man

Next was always Roast Beef Man. Roast Beef Man was this guy they sliced in a giant deli slicer like you get cold cuts from. They sliced him sandwich thin and put the results in a series of parallel glass cases so you could see progressively all the way through all the organs and stuff, even the dick (We thought this was just the greatest of course, especially on school field trips with girls.). We always wondered how they sliced him so thin (this was way before cutting lasers were common), well actually we didn’t wonder, we figured they did use a huge deli slicer. Can you imagine pushing that guy back and forth across the giant rotating knife and seeing him come off like pastrami?

After the Thin Man came mummies. They had a lot of crap from tombs and all, but nobody wanted to see that, although the reconstructed tomb itself was pretty good. We really wanted to see the wrapped and unwrapped mummies. There were Egyptian ones and South American ones. None of them looked like nor were as tall as Boris Karloff, which was always disappointing. I always wondered why you could dig up these people from their graves and show them off. Think about it. In a couple of thousand years they’re gonna dig you up and you’re on display for everyone to see in some museum. Not a pretty thought, but maybe better than worm bait.

Cave Man

Next were those dioramas showing life size cave men in supposedly contemporaneous surroundings. They never changed, and looking back on it now I wonder why, since anthropology and archeology kept discovering new things about prehistoric man even back then but the dioramas never changed. They probably still have the same ones now. The Carboniferous era dioramas were cool too because they had dragonflies and their ilk that were as big as a toaster oven. Here’s a good question. If all the oil and gas and coal and diamond comes from plants and animals in Carboniferous times that were all squeezed up and transformed by tectonics or what not, why doesn’t it still happen now? Why aren’t we getting all squished up and turned into crude oil. Think about it. Did dinosaurs just not get out of the way when a big continent came rushing up at a few feet a century? Then it’s like, okay, crude oil production is geologically done now. That time is over so on to the Renaissance or whatever.

Finally dinosaurs; those giant bone fossils put back together and dwarfing the museum space. Brontosaurus and especially the full size Tyrannosaurus Rex were the favorites. Now I guess they didn’t have enough fossils all the time so they always filled out the exhibit hall with “reconstructed” skeletons made out of colored paper mache or something. These of course were of inferior entertainment value and thus shunned by us when we identified them as crude fakes.

There were still endless things to look at in the museum but these were all the primary attractions. Nobody wants to know about or look at dioramas of things crawling out of the ocean for the first time or fossils that were smaller than a Volkswagen so lunch at the crappy cafeteria (no McDonalds in the museum back then) was usually on tap by this time and after that either back on the bus (field trip) or begging Mom to leave ’cause we were bored now having seen all the worthwhile attractions.

Penguins

For some reason it seemed like every time we went to the museum there would be some big group of Orthodox Jews and/or a whole bus load of Penguins (= nuns) at the museum. These were both an oddity to us although there were inevitably reformed Jews and a lot of Catholics in our school group. What do they do round up all the nuns in the convent and take them on a field trip? What are they interested in in a museum? Probably shrunken heads, Pickled Punks, and Roast Beef Man. I wonder if they always go to see the shrunken heads first. Maybe it’s one of their missionary friend’s ancestor. Nuns are already creepy so a nun shrunken head would be super creepy. They should make a little habit to go with the head but headhunters probably wouldn’t think of that.

Monsters & Literature

Posted on July 4, 2013 by gumbywan

Here’s your Independence Day treat. Don’t eat it too fast, it’ll make you sick.

Okay, now I’ve already told you about how all music is better when played faster and louder, well here is the next step in our artistic journey: all art and entertainment is better if it also includes monsters. Although this construct is self evident, I’ll provide a few examples along the way just to prove it. Also we will get into the unfortunate misuse and overuse of monsters in literature.

In prior literary times it wasn’t common to feature monsters in literature. We would get the occasional witch or demon but no real monster stuff up until the Romantic and Victorian eras. Then we got real monster stuff like Frankenstein and Dracula. However these were all considered brown wrapper books, back of the store stuff for the most part. Who really got monsters started into literature was Herman Melville. Melville wrote a lot of stuff: Typee, Oomu, and a story about a lazy guy who doesn’t want to work, crap nobody reads anymore and crap nobody read back then either. Then he came up with a brilliant idea, write the same kind of book but include monsters in it: man-eating whales and giant squid. Well you know the rest of the story. They couldn’t keep Moby Dick; on the shelves even though it was longer than a Stephen King novel. Now you might think a whale is no big deal but think about the novelty in the 19th century, nobody had real monsters in novels or stories, so a giant, man-eating, toothed, sperm (he, he) whale was a big deal. Sure it’s dated now but so’s your mother. Peter Benchley even stole it in the modern era and made it a crumby shark for heavens sake, so you can’t say it’s that dated.

Well monsters in literature went out of favor for awhile while guys like William James and Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope (he, he) wrote a lot of boring books that nobody reads anymore, even when they’re assigned in school. Kids just crib it from some Ivory-Merchant movie, or Cliff’s Notes, or Wikipedia now. And it’s no wonder, these books are dead boring and rarely feature even the occasional witch, demon, or even body snatcher (They aren’t very well written either.).

So a couple of years ago (2009) there was a spate of “literary” (= boring) novels that got jazzed up with the addition of monsters. This was generally a good thing. It all started with Jane Austen’s dreary book of marriage foibles entitled Pride and Prejudice. Now Ms. Austen got one thing right: alliteration in titles, but that’s about all she had worth reading. Then along came the eminently talented Seth Grahame-Smith with the genesis of how to make the 19th century “parlor” novel tolerable: add monsters. We therefore got Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I cannot describe how excited I was on first hearing about this “novel” artifice. Sadly the execution was not as grand as I had hoped it would be. Don’t get me wrong, this was far better than the dreadful zombie-less version of P&P but it wasn’t as good as it could have been, hence the disappointment (What’s new?). The problem was the zombie sequences were all bolted on, not made integral to, the plot of marrying off the ugly and fat Bennett daughters. There were lively scenes of zombie ninja slaughter interspersed but it never really affected the main characters in any lasting way. Now for a monster insertion into a piece of writing, film, or television (we’ll leave out live theater for the obvious reasons), to be realistic it has to engage the major storyline and affect at least some of the main characters. Just having zombie fight sequences inserted with everyone else living happily ever after is never gonna wash.

Here’s how I would have done it, and done it right. I would have had at least one of the girls get bitten by the “unmentionables.” Then the action could have figured on how the daughter would have to be married off before the “affliction” became obvious to the suitor. See how much better that would have been. Alternatively you could have Elizabeth being bitten but then engaging in a mad race with Mrs. Bennett to get the other sisters married off before the curse sets in on her. Another angle could be to have the stricken Elizabeth, summoning her last ounce of humanity, pimping Darcy off on a less worthy but also less undead débutante. Ah, I was born to be an editor or producer.

Anyway this started a wave of updated and improved “classics” starting with the marvelous Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (much better alliterative title than the clumsy P&P&Z). A lot of my hoity-toity (ex)writer friends referred to these pastiches as “abominations.” Needless to say we crossed them off the invitation list.

Well of course things got out of hand like they always do. Pretty soon we had Android Karenina and similar dreck. An android is not a proper monster, it’s just a robot. Then we had the spate of historico-literary punch-ups like Queen Victoria Demon Hunter all of which were blatant fakes except for the excellent Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter which was based on actual suppressed federal documents. I think FEMA or the Trilateral Commission were behind the suppression. Now the entire sub-genre of monster enhanced classics has waned from both overexposure but also from the fact that the literary novels left to insert monsters in are so bad that even a monster won’t save them.

There you have it: add monster, shaken not stirred.

Next time I’ll tell you how the inclusion of television, broadcast or cable, can enhance anything from sex to nature walks.

Welcome to my dreary life…

Hide the razorblades…

Monthly Archives: July 2013

Spooks and Leaks

(Un)Employed

Hijacked

Naval Criminal Investigative Service

Shrunken Heads

Monsters & Literature