Above: just one of many news stories about the UFO sightings in Stephenville, TX

UPDATE: Advena Avis in Turkey appears to have reached some conclusions similar to what you are about to read.

ORIGINAL POST

A UFO blew up in the skies above a Vietnamese island last week. The Vietnam News Agency reported that “The explosion happened at about 8 km (5 miles) above the ground, and perhaps it was a plane, but authorities could not identify whether it was a civil or military aircraft.”

The same agency reported that residents of Phu Quoc island found what looked like gray, metallic debris. One piece was nearly 5 feet long.

Residents in the Cambodian village of Kampot, near Phu Quoc, told of hearing a loud explosion and finding pieces of metal near the ocean.

Authorities on Phu Quoc proper got in touch with air services in Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand, but none of those agencies reported any accidents.

An official with Cambodia’s Air Force initially said he’d heard about a foreign plane going down near Kampot. He later retracted the claim.

All of this leads your host to ask: What is up with all the UFO stories this year?

I love it when stories of the strange and paranormal go mainstream. My imagination goes to work, and in general I learn that humans still haven’t fully fallen prey to the soul-sucking cynicism that I often fight in my real-world life and work.

Because one of my inhuman interests is stories about the unexplained, I have for years lamented the lack of paranormal themed coverage in the mainstream press. Since I’m kind of part of the mainstream press in real life, I understand the lack — but people love this stuff, so for a long time I wondered at the dearth of UFO stories in the news.

Then 2008 dawns, and right away, we have the Stephenville UFOs. The sightings in Stephenville, TX were subject to some serious reportage, garnering air-time on many semi-respectable cable news outlets. A website has been created about the Stephenville lights: http://stephenvillelights.com/.

These sightings tended to follow a trajectory familiar to anyone who has ever read about UFO sightings in America. There were reports from the public, regular folks doing their jobs, including local cops. Most people reported the archetypal “strange lights” in the sky, but some sightings were pretty specific. One report given to the Texas branch of MUFON told of seeing a “large, gray craft” in broad daylight. It was silent and said to be moving at a high rate of speed.

The military didn’t help where the Stephenville lights were concerned. At first, military spokespersons said they had no aircraft in the area on the night of the first major sighting, in mid-January. Then, days later, the military retracted the report: they had, after all, had some planes flying in formation near Stephenville.

However, Stephenville is not far from Dubya’s western White House in Crawford, TX. This has given skeptics of the Stephenville events some grist for their mills — if there are unknown military aircraft in the area guarding the no-fly zone around Crawford, it’s no wonder the military is evasive about the situation. They don’t want to telegraph to anyone the measures taken to protect the president and his family.

I recall other UFO stories in the news after the first flurry of reports about Stephenville, but let’s skip ahead to May, and this announcement from the Vatican: “Vatican says aliens could exist.” Quoting from the article:

Writing in the Vatican newspaper, the astronomer, Father Gabriel Funes, said intelligent beings created by God could exist in outer space.Father Funes, director of the Vatican Observatory near Rome, is a respected scientist who collaborates with universities around the world.

The search for forms of extraterrestrial life, he says, does not contradict belief in God.

Go figure. The biggest authority for the largest Christian denomination in the world can’t rule out the possibility that there is other life elsewhere in the Universe. Besides being good evidence that the Vatican understands that God is greater than we can ever know (and therefore fully capable of seeding the Universe with life where ever She damn well pleases), this is striking for its timing. I had to wonder, after reading about the Vatican’s word on this subject, why they came out now.

Then late last week, there was Stan Romanek’s dog-and-pony show in Denver. I linked the snarky Wired post about Romanek’s alleged video of an alien at his window, made in 2003, because the attitude in the blog post (titled, “Banana Squash Nerf Ball Alien Unveiled in New Video”) mirrors my own view of Romanek’s claims — he’s full of shit. One quick web search tells you, for instance, that Romanek is a freaking graphic artist, among other things. Not to mention the thoroughly unconvincing nature of the still image he and his buddy Jeff Peckman gave the media at their press conference.

The point in lumping Romanek in with these other strange tales is this: he got some serious national media exposure. Romanek’s claim wasn’t isolated to George Noory’s Coast to Coast and its insomniac hordes; this story was covered by MSNBC, CNN, The Rocky Mountain News and others.

Is the mainstream media simply bored with the regular news? Do they finally recognize that there is a public appetite for UFO stories, after years of pointedly ignoring them? Or is most of it really just ‘let’s point and laugh at the freaks who believe this crap?’

In spite of being a “mainstream” journalist (who is actually much less long-winded) in real-life, I can’t really answer those questions. I can say that on the one hand, this new resurgence of the strange is heartening. For a guy like me it means I may be able to one day get a story about UFOs or whatever in print for pay, rather than just blogging about it. Yes, I would like to be able to do that.

On the other hand, I do have a paranoid streak. After all, that favorite year of end-timers who missed their desired apocalyptic orgy at the turn of the millenium, 2012, is only 3.5 years away, now. If one believes all that stuff about the apocalyptic Mayan prophecies regarding 2012, then one might think that at the very least, some kind of change is in the offing.

Because Wikipedia is right on this score — the original meaning of the word apocalypse is “lifting of the veil.” What if 2012 doesn’t mark the end of civilization, but the lifting of a great veil over human consciousness? What if the Vatican’s announcement in early May and the seeming resurgence of mainstream news coverage of UFO stories are all of a piece, and we are being prepared for something?

What if I need a new tinfoil hat?

Enough with the questions for now. There’s a Man in Black at the door.

Capt. Frank Reynoso of the Los Angeles Fire Dept. told reporters that the initial reports of the fire came in just before dawn. At the time it was located on a sound stage….

Reynoso also said that there was at least one explosion, and that some sort of filming might have been underway. An NBC producer was interviewed later on MSNBC and he stated that this was unlikely at that time of day, unless a movie was racing to meet a production deadline.

Firefighters have been trying to contain the blaze on the back lot. If it spreads to surrounding brush, it could be disastrous.

Between studio, city and county firefighters, there are more than 100 emergency responders currently on the job.

How long before some fucking idiot tries to make this seem like just desserts for ‘liberal Hollywood?’ We live in a country where everything gets politicized, eventually. The bullshit will come from a Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter or maybe even some loony preacher, but I can guarantee you it will come. So I say in advance: FUCK YOU, one-note idiot.

Like it or not, Hollywood is inextricably a part of our collective memory, our country’s history. Knowing that there have been no injuries or fatalities so far, I was perhaps most saddened to hear a film vault might be involved. At the least we can hope there were no original cuts stored there.

I’m not so sure King Kong is a loss. I love Jack Black, but the most recent movie sucked.

MSNBC reported at 10:25 a.m. ET that there was white smoke coming from the site. Typically this is good news. Maybe the rightards won’t have so much grist for their mill after all.

But like I said, I don’t like to blog about myself, so instead, I’d like to direct you to this radio show: RadioLab; and this entry at the ever-fascinating Damn Interesting about human chimeras…

RadioLab is broadcast nationally on National Public Radio. The subject for today was — at least in part — the human chimera. Indeed, I think they may have been referring at one point to the very chimera mentioned in the Damn Interesting article, a 50-something woman named “Jane.” From the piece:

What happened to Jane is a much rarer. Rather than a simple exchange of blood, she and her fraternal twin merged in utero, leaving only one fetus. The cells in her body are a mosaic of genes from both of the original embryos. The cheek cells from which the genetic testing was done were from one of those embryos, but at least some of the cells in her ovaries came from the other. Interestingly this genetic oddity gives her a better-than-usual chance of having a successful kidney donation, as her immune system does not reject as foreign either of two distinct tissue types. She would, however, be a poor candidate as a kidney donor were she in that position, due to the likelihood of two tissue types being present in her kidneys…

It’s one of those things that makes you realize why the term “truth is stranger than fiction” was coined in the first place. CSI has even incorporated human chimeras into the plot of one episode; a rapist and serial killer was a chimera. Gil Grissom discovered this when he saw strange markings on the killer’s back.

Today, human chimeras made me think of Stephen King’s The Dark Half. It’s one of King’s more troublesome books — for me, anyway — but even though King didn’t specifically use the phenomenon of the chimera in the work, I remembered how it ended today and realized that one of King’s main characters was essentially a chimera.

Scientists say the phenomenon is quite rare, but you know, how sure are they about this? What if it’s just rarely been reported? And another question comes — while scientists speak of chimeras having two sets of DNA, bodily organs that are essentially from different bodies, no one seems to address the chimera and personality issues. Could a chimera cause two different personalities? They result when two fertilized embryos merge in the womb. Imagine if the brains merged as well. I have to wonder how that could factor in to some cases of multiple personalities — the ones that are real, that is.

Walt Whitman once wrote of containing multitudes. To realize that this is quite literally true for a select few human beings is nothing short of stunning. That’s really the only purpose for this entry, I think. To just say, wow.

Teri (not her real name — you can just assume that every name I use is fake) had a pretty face. Her cheekbones were exquisite and her teeth were perfect. She was one of the few people I’d ever met who really was half Native-American. Her caucasian side showed in her light brown, wavy hair and pale green-brown eyes.

She sat next to me in English. A few days before homecoming she slipped me a note, asking me to go. It wasn’t the first time a girl had asked me out at that point, but I was still a sucker for that sort of thing. I wasn’t seeing anyone, so naturally, I said yes. Besides, she really was pretty hot, over all. In the next few days we began hanging out and making out, usually after school. The day of homecoming, she passed me another note, again in English class. Teri asked if I was into games. I returned the note, asking her what she meant by games. She responded, “love-making games.”

It was a weird way to put it, but I understood her perfectly. She was asking me if we could fuck after homecoming that night. After school that day I tried to clarify her meaning. She simply said, “you’ll see.”

Yep, she meant fucking. So we did…

This went on for a few weeks and I began to discover something; when Teri and I were out of bed (I had a room that was detached from my parents’ house, so sneaking girls in was ridiculously easy), we didn’t really get along very well. In fact, there was something about her that really unsettled me. Dealing with Teri in conversation was like biting into a twinkie only to chip your tooth on a stone embedded in the cream-filled center. She was from Texas and could be the sweetest southern belle you could imagine on the surface, but just beneath that syrupy veneer was something cold, cruel, and rock-hard.

In bed, things were just fine. Really fine.

But eventually, I chose to — as they say in the business world — ‘go in another direction.’

This did not set well with Teri. I don’t remember a lot of the details anymore, but she began a campaign of sociopathic malice towards me. It involved, in part, hitting up my most vulnerable male friend for info about me. He was vulnerable because he’d only ever had one girlfriend, and there wasn’t much to that. He was the very definition of a nebbish, a nerd. There was an unfortunate dichotomy in my friendship with Jim — it looked to outside observers like I was ‘the cool guy,’ and he was the geek. I used to get a lot of this: ‘why are you friends with a weirdo like him?’

I won’t digress much further here save to say this — under the surface, Jim and I had much more in common than anyone knew. When I hung out with him, I could revert to my nerdy, bookish self and not maintain the pseudo-jock-like, big man on campus veneer I’d developed throughout 4 years of high school. My friendship with Jim alone was worth a bad 80s movie, a John Hughes knock-off.

As weird and insecure as I was beneath the skin, I’d figured women out to some degree, and Jim had not. He hid his jealousy of the ease with which I could find a date pretty well, but when Teri started calling him and trying to charm information out of him about what I was up to, he spilled the beans. She was a great manipulator; she’d figured out that Jim thought she was hot, and knew how to make him think there might be some nookie in his future if he only came clean about me.

As it was, I don’t recall being up to all that much. I think I went back to an off-again, on-again ex, a girl who’d graduated from high school the year before and was taking a year off before attending college.

I must have done or said enough to set Teri off, though. I had my own phone line — a luxury for a teen at the time — and I began receiving calls at all hours of the night. Most were hangups. A few, however, consisted of variations on this theme: “FAGGOTFAGGOTFAGGOTFAGGOTFAGGOTFAGGOT!!!!!” (repeat until hoarse). Sometimes “FAGGOT” might be replaced by “FUCK YOU.”

The calls were from Teri. In school she was avoiding me as much as possible. We’d changed seating arrangements in English, and she was behind me. I could feel two hot burn-marks each day from where she leveled her psychotic gaze against the back of my head.

The calls got worse at Christmas time. Eventually, I asked my Dad what I should do. He said that if I thought there was a real danger from the girl, we could do something legal. This was before people took out restraining orders against each other as a matter of course, but in hindsight I’m fairly sure he was talking about something like that. I didn’t want to go there.

Ultimately, I didn’t have to. Teri found another guy, a football player at a rival high school. He apparently had no interest in kicking my ass on her behalf, so eventually, the nasty looks in the halls and in English abated, and the phone calls ceased all together.

Writing this I see that it doesn’t seem all that interesting; I’m re-hashing shit that was over more than 20 years ago and not nearly as interesting as it seemed at the time.

But the story is valuable because of the lesson I missed learning. From the moment Teri slipped me the note about games, I should have been wary. I wasn’t, though. Eighteen-year-old boys aren’t equipped to get their guards up, most of the time, if it appears as though an attractive female is offering up the golden prize. If the fruit is juicy, sweet, and hanging low, they’ll usually snatch it off the tree and take a big, lusty bite.

The world is different, now. I don’t know for sure, but I imagine that similar stories between teens in high school are a lot more common, today. Young women have a different view of their sexuality, a better understanding of the power they can wield. My experience with Psycho Bitch Teri probably seems quaint.

To me, that’s just scary, especially since I have more than 1 son. Neither of my boys are high school age, but knowing what I do today, I fear for them. Those changes in the way young females handle boys may simply mean that where I only encountered one Teri, my sons may be in line to deal with nothing but latter-day versions of the same girl, once they do reach age 17 or so.

Still, my experience with Teri was mild compared to what came later.

Later on I would deal with lullabies, three-ways, unfortunate fluid exchanges, and lesbians who loved to give blowjobs. So stay tuned.

http://www.dreamindemon.com/

The nom de plume there is Indrid Cold — straight outta the motherfuckin Mothman Prophecies, bitchez.

Especially about the Internet. I blog elsewhere, write professionally under another name. I have learned from those experiences that this here InterWebzoTubal place is filled with a good deal of nastiness.

Like pranks. People create viruses. They make fake personal profiles on MySpace, or Facebook. Nasty stuff, meant only to hurt or slander another person.

There are stories like the terrible tale of Megan Meier.

Megan was the 13-year-old girl from Dardenne Prairie, MO who committed suicide after a failed Web romance in 2006. Turned out the ‘romance’ was not with hunky 16-year-old ‘Josh Evans,’ but with some people masquerading as Evans to try and get dirt from Megan on her friendship with another girl. One of those people was the other girl’s mom.

If you don’t know about Megan, read the Wiki article I linked or get the fuck off the Web. Megan Meier is one of those stories you just know, if you surf enough.

But I do love one particular Web-borne prank. It’s so well-known at this point I feel stupid even explaining it all. Just in case you’re the one lone soul who has never used YouTube or watched a tech segment on a cable news broadcast, here’s a link explaining this meme that just makes me smile.

You see, I love being RickRolled.

Most 80s music was crap. Even 80s pop icon Rick Astley — the “Rick” in RickRolling — said the song behind the RickRoll phenomenon, “Never Gonna Give You Up,” was “pretty naff [cheesy], really.”

The first time I fell for a RickRoll, I giggled and laughed like a 3rd grader for 5 minutes straight. My 80s nostalgia was tweaked. I graduated from high school in the middle of that decade, and “Never Gonna Give You Up” is one of the few songs I can recall hearing on the radio in my early years in college. It also hit me right away — RickRolling is such a good-natured prank.

I mean, I rarely read a response to a RickRoll that seems pissed. In threads on social bookmarking sites like Digg, in comments on message boards and blogs, the majority of RickRoll victims react the same way — they think it’s hilarious. If it isn’t hilarious, the reactions at least seem amused. Even when a person is new to the phenomenon, their confusion as to why they just clicked a link to a tacky 80s music video when they thought they might see Britney’s new accidental upskirt vid is tinged with amusement.

That’s how you do a RickRoll, see…

You gotta see this!!!! Britney done done it agin, y’all!!!1!!1! OMFGZ!!!1!1!!

A click on the preceding link should have taken you to smilin’ Rick Astley, circa 1987 or so, rockin a fly ginger pompadour and some truly natty naff threads, Wayfarers and a trenchcoat. If you’re pretty savvy about html, you may also note that I used SnipURL.com to disguise the link. A successful RickRoll can often be done by using that site or TinyURL.com to hide the fact you’re sending your victim to YouTube.

The RickRoll is old, in Internet terms. That’s one of the amusing things about seeing mainstream news articles about the phenomenon — the news writers explain it as if it’s the ‘new thing,’ and it’s been going on for nearly a year.

But the fact that it’s hung on and even become a phenomenon beyond the Web is striking. You have to wonder why.

Have you ever been in a stressful situation, and instead of bursting into tears found yourself doubled over laughing? Not hysterical laughter, but good, clean, cleansing laughter that drained all the tension away? I have, more than once. Each time it happened, something triggered the laughing fit, usually something genuinely funny in any context.

The wild laughter was a symptom of my mind saying enough, though. Saying I couldn’t handle any more stress, any more darkness right then.

I think the psychology behind the longevity of the RickRoll as a prank and a meme has something to do with that basic human need to just bust a gut and not take anything or anyone too seriously for a minute. To just not give a fuck. To just sit for 3 minutes and 30-odd seconds and watch a silly video playing a completely frothy and inconsequential pop song.

We all have a need for things to just not matter, sometimes. The surprise of the video starting, the bouncy music, the dark-toned soul singer’s voice coming from a guy who looks like he’s barely out of his schoolboy’s knickers — it’s bewildering, then for a moment annoying, and finally, just funny and stupid. You laugh, and you stop taking yourself or the world too seriously.

The person who does the RickRoll gets that sly satisfaction known to pranksters everywhere, if he or she learns the fruits of their labors. Yet that satisfaction comes without any real, lasting guilt — if guilt enters the picture at all (I personally have never once felt bad about RickRolling another person, but I’ve also made sure I wasn’t promising to link them to something serious at the time). After all — what harm have you done?

As the RickRoll has hung on in pop culture over the last year and made its way off the Web, another weirdly joyful aspect of the joke has been revealed. It seems so trivial, but it’s as if it brings people together.

Anonymous collects across the street from a Scientology “Church” and unleashes a boombox RickRoll. The Anons are protesting what they see as a very real threat to free speech from the wealthy and litigious “church,” but at the same time, there’s a strange, youthful joy in what they’re doing as they dance and sing along with the song. And there is no real harm in it. Watching Anons goof along with the song you are seeing a truly puckish effort, entertaining street theater that still makes a point. Whimsy and humor are bound up with a serious statement about the beauty of the human rights to free speech and free assembly.

I learned about a new wrinkle in the RickRoll today. Someone decided to take the not-new concept of the flash mob and pair it with the RickRoll. As a result, some 500 strangers got together in a crowded London train station, and they Rickmobbed the place.

It was loud. The videos were often shaky, and sometimes the video camera’s owner out-of-tune voice was louder than others, shouting the words to the song. It was bizarre.

It was beautiful.

Of course, there are better things people could do with their time and energy. But why? Why right then? Why not take 2 minutes or so out of your busy day and sing a stupid 80s pop chestnut along with 499 other strangers? There was no harm in it. If you got a look at many of the faces seen on the videos of the event uploaded to YouTube, there was actually — that word again — something like joy. For a moment, they all seemed to say, we don’t give a fuck. We’re just singing “Never Gonna Give You Up” and being silly.

Hell yes, it’s all improbable. The whole phenomenon is absurd. The first guy who thought up the RickRoll probably just did it because it was goofy, and because the song was so overtly “naff.”

But I think we too often forget just how badly we need those moments in our lives. I know I do. When I was a kid, I’d sometimes wake from nightmares as kids will do, but not call for my mom. She worked hard during the day, and maybe I wanted to be a big boy, put myself back to sleep.

I couldn’t though. Did I cuddle up to a stuffed toy? No. I didn’t turn on the TV, either. I’m old enough to have lived in a time and place when most TV stations were off the air by 3 in the morning.

In those situations, I always found something funny to read. A cartoon book, a stupid comic book, a joke book. If I could eventually manage a grin from looking at any of those, I could calm down enough to get back to sleep. Laughter, or at least a light-hearted smile, would lift the dark veil left by the bad dreams enough for me to get back to sleep again.

I’m sometimes sour and cynical, but I’m also a bit of a romantic. Not just in the typical sense of the word, either. I’m a romantic about the human condition. I have to be, or I wouldn’t think anything about a silly Rickmob in a London train station was “beautiful.”

But it was. Beautiful in a way that we can only experience now, at this point in history. For that, I almost envied those Brits, with their printouts, their Guy Fawkes/V masks, their Rick Astley trenchcoats.

My father used to rail against movie musicals because they were so ridiculous. People in the real world never just drop everything and start singing, he said.

I thought of him today as I watched videos of the Rickmob. How much I love his own deeply jaded and pessimistic brain. I felt bad. Hey Dad, I thought — things can change in the most unexpected ways, sometimes.

Sometimes, now, people really will just drop everything and sing. And because it’s a song that doesn’t matter… well, it matters. You can’t sing “Never Gonna Give You Up” in the middle of a Rickmob and be remotely serious. And ain’t that the point?

It’s crassly commercial, but what the hell. Some people calling themselves “The RickRollerz” got together and made a new mix of the Rick Astley song. Then they very cleverly set it to videos from the London Rickmob. The video is embedded below. You can see The RickRollerz MySpace here.

]]> http://inhumaninterest.wordpress.com/2008/04/13/you-wouldnt-get-this-from-any-other-guy/feed/ 1 Gaylord Sundheim http://inhumaninterest.wordpress.com/2008/03/21/after-ripping-into-the-silliness-there/ http://inhumaninterest.wordpress.com/2008/03/21/after-ripping-into-the-silliness-there/#comments Fri, 21 Mar 2008 21:25:00 +0000 Indrid Cold http://inhumaninterest.wordpress.com/2008/03/21/after-ripping-into-the-silliness-there/ ]]> I, of course, got my damn self a DailyKos diary. I wonder if my slippery political pontifications that tend to cross party lines with gleeful irregularity will be welcomed there?

Check out my first entry there.
]]> http://inhumaninterest.wordpress.com/2008/03/21/after-ripping-into-the-silliness-there/feed/ 0 Gaylord Sundheim http://inhumaninterest.wordpress.com/2008/03/19/priorities-straight/ http://inhumaninterest.wordpress.com/2008/03/19/priorities-straight/#comments Wed, 19 Mar 2008 04:16:00 +0000 Indrid Cold http://inhumaninterest.wordpress.com/2008/03/19/priorities-straight/ ]]>

To visualize this conflict, picture a flipflop wearing middle-aged man with a tiny ponytail and neatly trimmed beard tearing off his bluetooth and flinging away his half-caf honey latte in disgust as a doughy earth mother type in a gypsy skirt crosses her arms tightly and glowers. At least that’s how I picture this big steaming pile of stupid.

The NY Times‘s “The Caucus” blog reports from the front lines:

On Friday, it got to be too much for Alegre, a diarist on the flagship liberal blog DailyKos, who frequently writes in support of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“I’ve put up with the abuse and anger because I’ve always believed in what our online community has tried to accomplish in this world,” Alegre wrote Friday evening. “No more.”

Objecting to the tone of attacks against Mrs. Clinton and her supporters on the blog, the diarist called for a “writers strike.”

To folks like ‘Alegre,’ Kos is too Obama-heavy, and that conflict is causing people to be, well, mean. So the bloggers who would lick Hillary’s love-sweat off Bill Clinton’s face are preparing to gather up all their Legos and go the fuck home, thank you very much. That’s the gist of the story.

The fact that Democrats finally have a pair of candidates who could feasibly win the White House has gone to hardcore Dems’ heads in a big way. They now can officially buy into the delusion that what they say in a blog post on the monolithic Kos actually matters. That what they say in a blog post anywhere matters. Lord help us all.

Now, I know at this point you think you’ve got me pinned down as a fascist jackbooted rightwinger, ready to unload on the loony left at any opportunity. Well, before you ride off on your snit-colored high horse, you need to read a little more of the blogging I’ve done here.

I’m the guy who believes that extreme politcal partisanship can be a form of insanity, be ye left or right.

And sadly for me, I actually want a Dem in the White House this year, after voting (rather listlessly) for Republicans for several years. Go figure — the first year I think I can stomach a Democrat in the White House, and they go and start infighting like rednecks at a houseparty the night Daddy got home from his most recent stint in prison. The Kos conflict described above is laughable, ludicrous, but it is a symptom of a larger problem, in the way farts are symptomatic of digestive issues.

Seriously, though — we’re living in a new world, and though I myself am a blogger, I occasionally find that new world massively irritating. One of the reasons for that irritation is crystallized in the DailyKos civil war story — because it ain’t a story. Who the fuck cares, except other wankers posting the newest variation on ’9/11 was an inside job’ in comments there? It’s the essence of non-news in a political season, when real news is always readily available.

One reason I started this blog is because it once occurred to me that not much being said on a blog anywhere really matters, so why not just say what the hell’s on my mind? And I don’t care how many people read the site, that ‘it doesn’t really matter’ bit also goes for DailyKos. To me, a “writers strike” at Kos is akin to all the middle-aged mushroom-haired lady mallwalkers who traipse the multi-level down the street each morning boycotting the mall because the management turns on the fucking fountains too early or doesn’t play nearly enough Roy Orbison on the Muzak. It’s a tiny human conflict that in a normal universe should go down without a trace, barely leaving ripples and bubbles on the surface.

I confess I did like the response of “Kos” himself, Markos Moulitsas, who said of the “strike” — “It’s a big Internet, so I hope they find what they’re looking for.”

Kos was polite. He could have just said, “Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke,” and it would have meant the same thing.

Finally, what’s the award for the Tards of the Day? Just me bothering to say something, man. All the more appropriate when you consider that at the moment, this blog averages a stunning 9 readers a day, and three of them are me. Eat that, DailyKos.
]]> http://inhumaninterest.wordpress.com/2008/03/16/tards-of-the-day/feed/ 0 Gaylord Sundheim