Sunday, August 06, 2006

Blog in, blog on, drop out.

Syd Barrett: Remembered
The Washington Post’s obituary of the Pink Floyd founder concluded with: “He enjoyed gardening, however, and was said to be skillful at stuffing peppers.”

My dog lies hypnotized.
Arthur Lee, RIP. He was a man. He went oop ip ip oop ip ip yeah. No, I'm not going to explain it.

Psychedelia
I was just talking about hallucinogens with the Child Bride last night. She asked me how many times I took acid when I was a kid. I couldn’t remember. Four or five times, I reckoned, assuming it was even acid that I took. It got me to thinking about the sixties - which, in my case, were actually the early seventies. If you look at the so-called icons of the times, there’s not much glimmer there. Timothy Leary? A con man, and a sleaze. The Yippies? Lordy. Ken Kesey? Please. He wrote two books, and then became famous for taking acid. Does anybody really think that LSD improved the output of the Beatles? Grateful Dead? Hello? Acid leads to noodling. I have noodled. I do not recommend it.

Stoned memory.
Once, while stoned on the marijuana with some friends, we were walking around Minneapolis, and I happened to see a baby elephant being led into a music store. My friends, as it happened, were not facing in that direction. “Hey,” I said, “I just saw an elephant.” Oh, how they mocked me. But I led them into the store, where in fact a baby elephant stood. The elephant was part of a publicity stunt to launch a record by a band called Elephant’s Memory.

Elephant’s Memory
From Wikipedia, so you know it’s true: “Elephant's Memory were a New York band most notable for backing up John Lennon and Yoko Ono during 1972, on a pair of albums and a handful of TV and live appearances. Two of their songs appeared earlier in the soundtrack to the movie Midnight Cowboy, ‘Jungle Gym At The Zoo/ and ‘Old Man Willow’.”

Elephant's Wiki
From MTV.com: "On Monday's episode, [Stephen]Colbert praised Wikipedia, the online resource that can be read and edited by anyone with access to a computer, for promoting what he termed 'Wikiality' — a sort of pseudo-reality that exists when you make something up and enough people agree with you.

"'I'm no fan of reality, and I'm no fan of encyclopedias,' Colbert opined. 'I've said it before: Who is [Encyclopaedia] Britannica to tell me George Washington had slaves? If I want to say George Washington didn't have slaves, that's my right. And now, thanks to Wikipedia, it's also a fact.'

"While he was speaking, Colbert was also typing away on a laptop computer, apparently editing the Wikipedia entry on George Washington to read, 'In conclusion, George Washington did not own slaves.'

"He also apparently edited the Wiki entry on his own program, replacing a lengthy section on his reference to Oregon as both 'the Canada of California' and 'Washington's Mexico' with 'Oregon is Idaho's Portugal' — an example, he said, of Wikiality.
...

"After making his changes, Colbert encouraged his viewers to spread his concept of Wikiality by changing the site's entries on elephants to reflect the fact that the elephant population in Africa 'has tripled in the last six months' — a way, he joked, to disarm environmentalists worldwide.

"'What we're doing is bringing democracy to knowledge,' he said. 'It's time we use the power of our numbers for a real Internet revolution. We're going to stampede across the Web like that giant horde of elephants in Africa. Together we can create a reality we can all agree on — the reality we just agreed on.'

"All was well and good until The Colbert Report aired on Comedy Central at 11:30 p.m., when Wikipedia administrators saw his bit and immediately blocked StephenColbert from editing any more entries on the site."


Speaking of noodling…
Reuters: “Hundreds of Britons are being urged to attend what is being branded as Europe's first ‘Masturbate-a-thon’, a leading reproductive healthcare charity said on Friday.”

Intelligent Design v. Evolution
Adam and Eve may have had an elephant, but they did not have a dachshund. I rest my case.

America: We’re Stupid.
A producer for MSNBC’s SCARBOROUGH COUNTY got as drunk as Mel Gibson to prove… something or other.

Curds from the blogosphere, on acid.
Blogger Jane Hamsher, founder of Firedoglake and Huffington Post contributor, is also a supporter of Ned Lamont, running for Senator against Joe Lieberman in Connecticut. As a gesture of that support, she posted a photograph of Lieberman, in blackface, with Bill Clinton, to prove… something or other. This wayward bit of Photoshoppery does not seem to have increased Mr. Lamont’s poll numbers. He told the Washington Post, "I don't know anything about the blogs. I'm not responsible for those. I have no comment on them."

Headline: Associated Press
Woman uses dashboard to bake cookies.

When the news itself is news….
From Ynet News, whatever that is: “A Reuters employee has been suspended after sending a death threat to an American blogger. The message, sent from a Reuters internet account, read: ‘I look forward to the day when you pigs get your throats cut.’ It was sent to Charles Johnson, owner of the Little Green Footballs (LGF) weblog, a popular site which often backs Israel and highlights jihadist terrorist activities.”

More Photoshoppery!
Also from Ynet News, whatever that is: “Reuters withdraws photograph of Beirut after Air Force attack after US blogs, photographers point out 'blatant evidence of manipulation.'”

And from the comments on Little Green Footballs, that bastion of reason in the blogosphere…
congrats charles you rules!
from rathergate to reutersgate
fake but accurate msm are the 5th column
You are the premiere american citizen soldier and we salute your tireless efforts to defeat the enemy
the media is the enemy
and citizen soldiers can win the war
Charles thanks

NYT Mag: David Rieff
“It is one thing for President Bush to present Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah as part of the wider global war on terrorism and quite another to open another front in that war when the fate of Iraq hangs in the balance and American commanders are faced with the necessity of committing more troops to what even the U.S. military is now beginning to characterize, rather desperately, as the battle for Baghdad.”

And some bloviating, also from NYT:
“Was this alcohol-fueled soliloquy an ugly insight into Mr. Gibson’s character — in other words, in vino veritas? Or was it just the tequila talking?”

Did anybody test Mel for acid? Just asking.

And another thing…
Iranian Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, you may recall, stated last June that he wasn’t quite convinced that the Holocaust really happened. He also stated that Israel will be “wiped off the map.” Some insist that what he actually said was Israel would “wiped away from the pages of time,” which no doubt is reassuring to some: he doesn’t want to destroy Israel, per se, he just wants to Photoshop it out of the picture.

Could there be a connection, do you think, between his attitude towards Israel and the sudden missile attacks on Israel by the Hezbollah? Or maybe he was just drunk.

A thought…
The whole world’s on acid! We’ve got to talk it down!

The elephant in the room…
…at least when it comes to Lebanon, is Iran, according to the Toronto Star. In an unrelated article, the Star also claimed that President Bush would be an invisible elephant in the room when Stephen Harper had breakfast with Tony Blair. If the room is the GOP, then the elephant is President Bush’s low poll numbers, according to the Washington Post. For the Democrats, the “pachyderm is …Iraq,” according to Salon. According to the Hill, the newspaper for and about the U.S. Congress, that elephant is the rising cost of pharmaceuticals. In New Jersey, the state budget was the elephant in the room, according to NewJersey.com. "Global warming is the elephant in the room," said Philip Sharp, president of Resources for the Future, a nonprofit research center. That’s from the Arizona Star. Eco-advocate Hillary Hauser told the LA Times, “But to our way of thinking, there's this massive infrastructure problem in which we're using the ocean to dump sewage into. That is the elephant in the room." Arab/Muslim countries are the elephant in the room, so I’ve read, along with changing shopping patterns, the shadow of drug use in sports, driving while under the influence of alcohol, Barry Bonds, and the lack of public discussion about Israel.

There is even a new book called The Elephant in the Room, Silence and Denial in Everyday Life, by Eviatar Zerubavel. It’s about conspiracies of silence.

Okay, we can all agree on one thing. There is an elephant, and there is a room. What they are beyond that is in dispute. Me, I’m just going to Photoshop the thing out of there. Things are getting a little too wikial for me.

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Bravo!

-D.E.
P.S. I think you may have stumbled on Food Network's next show: Noodling Around (the catch: No one ever successfully makes a noodle!)

11:35 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

My take on the Mel Gibson thing: Alcohol has never made anyone say anything that they wouldn't have thought while sober. I didn't really believe the rumors about his anti-Semitism when he made "Passion of the Christ," but I believe them now.

5:24 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

By report, Mel Gibson's father is part of a strange sect (heresy? I don't know what the catagories are in this) that holds all Popes since Pope John XXIII are not legitimate.

I've heard of being "more Catholic than the Pope" but I always thought it was a figure of speech. Apparently not.

3:04 PM  

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