Book Your Hotel Now!

The 2005 World Beard and Mustache Competition is coming up soon! It will take place in Berlin on October 1rst of this year. Book your hotel room now, I'm sure they will all be full for the entire week within a few months.

Here is the 2001 competition in which I competed. I had a very different appearance then though. See if you can guess which one is me!

Here is a National Geographic story about my friends in the Swabian Beard Club.

My oh me, I'm so excited! I'm going to go apply my patented tonic right now!


Thanks to boing-boing for the timely reminder.

The Birth of Cool was the Death of Mankind -- Pt.II My 50 Cents Worth

Perhaps you recall the Frontline program, the Merchants of Cool, which I discussed in this post a reverse fortnight from now. Said documentary ends with an analysis of the media orchestrated rise of Limp Bizkit to (however short-lived) cooldom. The observation was made that only a year previously Rap Rock and Rage Metal had been aggressively counter-culture, founded on the idea of saying fuck-you to society and the establishment and yet, by the time the documentary aired, this anti-establishment anger had already commodified. The situation called to my mind an interview with a nameless hiphop pioneer on Rocksteady Crew's Seven Gems Vol. II (I do love my ghetto doubly dubbed-VHS bboy tapes), in which it is observed that "Hiphop is the manifestation of a repressed black and latino creativity, Rap is the effort by rich white suits to package and sell that creativity."

The Frontline program observed that these musical groups were loud and boorish and utterly lacking in couth and that it was amazing that this type of anti-social behaviour could be made palatable to society itself. It was suggested that it was the very unpalatability of the product that granted it authenticity and 'cool.' Now, pressing ever-forward in its desperate, greedy, all-consuming search for an authenticity that it can never really have, the media-machine presents us with 50 Cents. This young upstart carries his authenticity around wherever he goes in the form of nine gunshot wounds to the face and a three to nine year jail sentence for manipulating sixteen year old girls into running crack for him. What a cool guy!

Taking things ten-steps and then a five-mile jog beyond the social unacceptability of Limp Bizkit, the coolest thing going right now is crime. While America has always had a certain fascination with gangsters, the fact that gangsterism is a bankable characteristic in legitimate corporate america is quite disturbing.

The gangsterization of hip-hop has been building steadily since the initial whitey-shocking of "Fuck the Police" by NWA. Within ghetto communities, this kind of aggressive swaggering is understandable. Poor, young black males have been disenfranchised from main stream society to the extent that fear is the closest thing to respect that they can hope to receive from suburban middle america. It is through the perversity of cool that this unfortunate defensive posturing came to be one of the most valued cultural commodities in the world today.

And even more disturbing is what this is doing to the young, impressionable boys who are so desperate to seem cool. Violence is running rampant in our school system; even in previously safe upper-class neighborhoods. What is bizarre is that this is not the same kind of violence that occurs in desperately poor inner-city schools, a violence which often reflects the students' home-lives and surroundings, it is a bizarre mirror-world violence that reflects the glorification of the desperate acts of the poor and oppressed, acts which are being glorified because they are the only remaining source of authentic, previously unmarketed 'cool.'

In Toronto, we recently witnessed the stabbing death of a teenager who was trying to keep older boys from crashing his little sisters party in an upscale neighborhood. These boys were not driven to violence by poverty, they were not forced to sell drugs on the street in order to survive, they were simply posturing and preening in front of their peers according to the model they had seen on television and things got out of hand. Children are imitating what they see on television, because the concept of 'cool' has led them to believe that they have a more authentic relationship with 50 cent, than they do with their parents who are not cool.

I am not making the ludicrous claim, that this is some sort of direct monkey-see monkey-do, relationship between children and television. What I am saying is that because the media holds cool as the highest good, it is becoming increasingly difficult to reach teenagers and make them understand the importance of genuine values.

I can hear my jaded hipster readers now, intoning sarcastically as they proclaim "Oh wow Von Mustard, another rich, old German guy hating on Hip Hop, that's the fucking News Flash of the Week." I can feel that you feel let down, I can imagine you thinking "Too bad, and he seemed like such a righteous iconoclast too."

Perhaps you see this as another anti-rap rant, a gussied up version of the following formula; "Man I hate hip hop. It should be illegal. People are always listening to hip hop and then turning into criminals."

To that I say simply; there will be no hateration in this particular danceree. I, in fact am a great lover of hip hop. Hip hop is not to blame for this disturbingly deformation of cool, certain, specific hip hop artists and marketers are. To blame hip hop itself for these trends is like blaming public speaking for the rise of Nazism. Do you ever hear anyone proclaim; "Man I hate public speaking! It should be illegal. People are always listening to public speaking and then turning into Nazis."

There is plenty of good hip hop, but cool has usurped quality in music, because, as everyone knows all too well, video killed the radio star. As a result Black Star Power has twisted and inverted into a demented reflection of its previous beauty. In the place of Barry White, Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix we have 50 cent, Lil' Wayne and the Cash Money Millionaires.

And of course, following closely on the heels of 50 cent is his crunkness himself, Lil' John. It is a sad day on planet earth, when a man who uses the phrase "What?!?!" as some sort of an all-purpose, irrefutable logical syllogism has taken the throne as the hottest shit since the Poughkeepsie manure fire of 1875.

How has a man with a vocabulary of literally three words (What, yeah, ok) becoming the spokesperson of Black America? This is perhaps the saddest part of the new cool. It is an embracing of the primitive and uncivilized. These characteristics had never been commodified because they were previously, and rightfully, held to be negative.

As I mentioned earlier, certain disenfranchised black youths realized that the only power they could obtain in our society was the power to cause fear. Then, this twisted respect took on an aura of coolness and within a decade the marketing machine had packaged and sold it. It was fresh and cool because it was the last authentic expression to be consumed by the media behemoth. It was as-yet unexploited because it was coming from the furthest place beyond the mainstream, the most repressed part of society, the last outpost of outcasts in North America.

Until recently, the personas that these artists have invented would have been considered reprehensible stereotypes of black people. Essentially, Lil John and 50 Cent are Black men in Black face, pimping themselves and their people for the white media empire. What are we to say to those backwards people who still believe all blacks are idiots and criminals when they can support their position by pointing to 50 and Lil John? Thanks to the disturbing power of cool there are black criminals and black idiots on television, 24/7, prancing around and preaching their culture of ignorance and belligerance.

Schiavo Update (Taking Action)

Senator Bill Frist, one in a long line of US politician's who has acheived the distinctive trifecta of being a Senator, a Medical Doctor and a Lunatic, has publicly questioned the diagnoses of the neurologists who have been treating Terri Schiavo for the past ten years based on his opinion as a cardiologist who has seen some video footage of her on the internet. Yes, he's that good!

What a Fantastic and Wonderful thing! A man who can make effective diagnoses of the most difficult medical conditions based on digital media, this will be very helpful in the US where medical treatment is so expensive. As a result, some right thinking individuals have begun a program to take advantage of his unparalleled and perhaps paranormal e-diagnostic abilities!

So, if you have a medical condition, a sprained toe, a headache, Seasonal Affective Disorder, take a photo and send it to Dr. Frist for a free and public diagnosis. The link is here.

I would do so, but my health has been remarkably good since I came to fully understand Neitzsche's writings.

Alternatively, those of you would like to make it publicly known that you would prefer to die if you are left in a persistent vegetative state, unless your condition can be exploited for political gain in fields that you believe in strongly, you can sign a living political such as the one here.

I would do the same, but I have already made arrangements to be preserved cryogenically should something unfortunate befall my vaunted personage.

Taking Action #2: Cleaner Cleaning

I am an ecstatic devotee of dry-cleaning. There is nothing I love more than a crisp, fresh-pressed silk ascot, clean as a whistle and willing to play second fiddle to my fantastic facial hair. Ladies swoon at the sight of my stark white beard, sharp and angular, protruding out over the luscious burgundy fold of my ascot. Ah, but I must restrain my descriptive powers if I want to my female readers to remain and read on instead of running off to find fresh batteries.

The point of this post is to draw attention to the fact, that the wonderful, otherwise unquestionably excellent, act of dry-cleaning may actually be contributing to our forthcoming apocalypse. Dry cleaning, contrary to Mr. Seinfelds barbaric suggestions, is done with a non-water solvent rather than the back of a grubby comedian's thumbnail. Until now, this solvent had been PERC. A perky carcinogen which is often found in our drinking water and has been known to sublimate out of dry-cleaned clothes and into groceries on the drive home. What's more, it's harmful to our planet as well, so even if we manage to kill ourselves off before we destroy everything, it will still be around doing damage.

The action that we can take is this. A new solvent is now available and there are four dry-cleaners in Toronto that use it. Here is a site that lists where the 1000 machines sold so far are located worldwide. I have ordered a machine for my mansion, but for those who don't find this option within there wherewithal, go to the site and find a new cleaner, or at least ask your regular dry-cleaner, if they use PERC and then stare at them disapprovingly for a while before you give them your soiled clothing.

The Simpsons Foreshadows All

It was so astoundingly obvious that the make-over of Bugs Bunny was a Sign of the Apocalypse that I didn't even bother to mention it at first. However, this sign keeps accumulating more and more potent sub-memes and I decided to post it because of its sheer forcefulness as an omen.

While it seemed to most that after the Simpson's episode about Poochy being invented to extremitize Itchy and Scratchy, even clueless marketing morons would refrain from embarrassing themselves publicly by revamping their characters; Warner Bros has reached a new low with its program "The Loonatics." It will star Buzz Bunny, a disgraceful and graceless pimping of Bugs Bunny's copyright. They should have known they were doing something wrong when the name they chose was already the name of a vibrator.

For an astoundingly offensive vision of what our doom will look like, check out this video inspired by the new Buzz Bunny. As a word of caution, this video is really really offensive. But if the wondrous memepool deems it postable, than so do I.

As an aside, I would like to add that, personally, I find it particularly disturbing that this has happened to the Looney Tunes characters. I remember when these characters first began to appear, sprouting up to populate the silver screen. Those were heady times; paperboys in the streets, everyone still believing that the world had seen the last and greatest war. Surrealism and Dadaism were still fresh in our memories, and it was not ingenuine to think of them when we saw this strange and wiley animals dashing about after the newsreel but before the feature. Especially that Dodo. He was weird.

Full Spectrum Hypocrisy

Recently I've taken notice of the Schiavo case in Florida. Terri Schiavo became brain-dead fifteen years ago. Since then, there has been a bitter legal struggle between the woman's husband who claims that she would not have wanted to be kept alive artificially and her Catholic parents who want her to stay on life support. Doctors say that her entire neo-cortex shows no activity, she is not capable of thought or emotion and that this is not ever going to change.

Recently, the U.S. Congress has created a special Congressional committee to deal with this single case and sub-poenaed Terri herself(?), her family and all of her doctors in order to try to prevent the court-ordered removal of her feeding tube. This subpoena, as I understand it, was then struck down by the courts, and now congress is working on a new bill. In the past, Florida Governor Jeb Bush created a special state law, that was actually called "Terri's Law," just for her.

While I'm not taking a stand on whether or not her feeding tube should be removed, it seems to me odd that the members of congress, who regularily rush through long complicated bills without having the time to even read the whole thing, should be taking this kind of time to get involved in the situation of a single person, who is by all medical evidence, not really even a person at all.

Currently, congress is working on a comprise bill with the senate in order to intervene again. Protestors are gathering in greater numbers outside of Terri's hospital room everyday. Meanwhile, between seventeen and nineteen thousand, non-brain-dead civilians have died in Iraq. For the most part, the Christian right sees this as an unfortunate side-effect of a just war.

On the otherside of the political spectrum, we have pro-choice peaceniks who think war should never ever be an option because of the the unjustified loss of innocent lives. Everyday there are more and more protests of the Iraq war, while I personally don't think the US should have taken action in the way it did at the time that it did, I'm not exactly sure what these protestors are proposing now. Are they suggesting that the US army should just leave Iraq right now? How would that help anyone. These people, who believe that war is never an option, even if it improves the lives of millions in the long-run, are the same people who believe that every woman should have the option of killing her unborn child. Does this make sense?

Although perhaps there are situations in which it is the best option, abortion is disturbing and disgusting now matter how you look at it. Personally, I feel that abortion is the issue where the left's moral high-ground is most questionable, and yet it seems to be the one issue where the left sticks to its guns most consistently. Sure, the democrats are willing to go to war and cut taxes to sway voters, but they won't even consider that maybe abortion is a bad thing.

These are extremely complicated moral issues with good arguments on both sides. I am not taking a position here on when war or abortion is justified, but I would like to point out that people on both sides of both issues have lost all semblance of perspective or reason.

From a rational perspective, it seems to me that if you are "pro-life" you ought to be opposed to war and the death penalty and if you are "pro-choice" you have to admit that sometimes going to war is the best choice, even if it is a tragic one. I know that things are much more complicated then this and that it is possible, with the right assumptions, to develop logically consistent arguments in favour of almost any set of believes, but I don't think most of the people who hold these positions have even considered whether or not they are tenable.

My point is this: Everybody take a step back from your emotional, fanatical positions and try to look at things rationally. Try to to examine whether your personal set of positions and believes are internally consistent before you run-off at the mouth and start screaming and wailing and demonizing people left, right and center.

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BONUS SIGN OF THE APOCALYPSE -- ONE FREE IN EVERY BOX!

While this post was originally intended to make a point about people on both sides being hypocritical, I was shocked and disturbed to read just how hypocritical Bush is on this issue. He has forgotten to mention, while flying home from vacation to "Save Terri Schiavo" that he signed a law while he was Governor of Texas allowing hospitals to unplug brain-dead patients with no hope of recovery after ten days IF NO ONE COULD PAY THEIR BILLS (not the fifteen years that Terri has had) and his cuts to medicaid are ensuring that this is often the case. The MSNBC article that I read about a current case conveniently forgot to mention that Bush was governor at the time that the bill was passed, despite it's obvious relevance. Here is a well-reasoned blog-post about the issue. Notice Tom DeLay calling this "medical terrorism" which reminds me of the zombie terrorism from last week.

In my above discussion of the spectrum, I must admit, I forgot to mention a third group who have no such logical inconsistencies within their position. That is the clever neo-cons who don't believe in anything except for the systematic dismantling of all governments everywhere and the eventual enslavement of the population by the ultra-rich. It is interesting to notice how they take the moral high-ground on any cause -- abortion, assisted suicide, family-friendly media, gay marraige -- that won't cost them a penny or require them to hinder businesses. This way, they can talk the talk without ever walking the walk and stay in power without anyone catching on to the fact that they are soulless demons who have consistently lied about everything.

Full-Court Hypocrisy

Speaking of hypocrisy, check out this quote from Vince:

"If you don't believe that you can make the playoffs, then you don't deserve to be in this league," Carter said. "We have to leave everything on the court every night and let the chips fall where they may."

Matthew Lie - Paehlke
Official, but Occasional Editor
[It's my second post! Don't tell Von Mustard.]

New Link

There is a new link on the sidebar. There is no sign of the apocalypse. I just wanted to draw the attention of my readers to the vitriolic e-paroxysms of Latigo Flint. Latigo Flint is a man made furious by our society's failure to recognize the value of his lightning-like virtuosity at unholstering his six-shooters and letting fly with a lethal shower of red-hot lead.

The Birth of Cool was the Death of Mankind -- Pt. I Cool Hunters

It seems that that every time I turn on the portentoscope these days, I hear more and more about cool-hunters. This has been a difficult concept for me to recognize and digest, because for the greatest part of my life, something was cool only if it was somewhere between luke-warm and cold on the thermometer.

If you don't know what a cool-hunter is then, goodness gracious, are you out of the loop. A cool hunter is someone who is paid by an advertising company to stay ahead of the curve; some young hipster who finds the next big thing even before the early adopters get there and explains it to corporate big wigs. Many of the characters in William Gibson's excellent new book "Pattern Recognition" are cool-hunters. In fact, you are so behind the curve that PBS did a show on the topic FOUR YEARS AGO! Ouch, it must be pretty flat on your part of the line.

Wherever you are located vis-a-vis the curve, I highly recommend that you watch the program online. The documentary was put together and narrated by Douglas Rushkoff and it aired on Frontline in 2001. In my well-aged opinion, the best part of the program occurs when one analyst compares media mega-corps to the British Empire and teens to the mysterious Africa that it set out to colonize and exploit. When I think about picking up my great-grand-nephew from his school dance a few years back, it does remind me of my days in the dark continent. It was terrifying, for sixteen malaria-ridden months I was more interested in the tonic than the gin.

Oh how lyrically I digress, but my point here is about cool-hunters and what they imply about our culture. Cool is not something we want to go out and find! I have lived through the rise of cool and I will tell you that cool ought to be our enemy. Cool is not something we should be hunting, cool is something that hunts us. While I never blanched in the face of those ferocious demons who kill men and wear their skins as clothing, I am terrified of cool. I am terrified because cool is just the reverse of those pompous hellions.

Cool is a chimerical, surface-flicker skin that hides in plain view. Cool can cover a man from head-to-toe, sealing him in and cutting him off, suffocating him even as he seems to breath with manful vigour. Coolness can turn a man into a walking-corpse and all those that see him will still be green with envy. Cool will cling to your face and eat you alive while you dance and jerk and carry it around, feeding it, even as it digests your inner substance.

In the eighteenth century, when I may or may not have been a child, there was no such idea as cool clothes. There were beautiful clothes and, while they were to be envied, no one believed that these clothes improved their wearer in any sphere other than appearance. Admittedly, expensive clothes did make a socially significant statement -- by demonstrating a person's class and wealth, these clothes represented real power. Nowadays though, things are all out of whack; I can spend three thousand dollars on a handsome pair of beaver-fur trousers only to have some street urchin laugh at them. How is it that a three-thousand dollar pair of trousers is deemed less valuable than a twenty-dollar tshirt which displays a particular logo or witticism? This is something I shall never understand. Cool clothes cast some kind of inexplicable stamp of approval on their wearer granting them unearned social status and respect.

Although it may surprise you to hear me say this, there is something that concerns me more than cool's ability to devalue class distinctiosn and raw currency. I am frightfully frightened because, not only does cool devalue the class implications of clothing, it seems to have displaced all of our other hard-earned cultural values. Cool is a devastatingly powerful semiotic vampire which signifies nothing!

Every since 'Rebel without A Cause,' young kids have been willing to lie, cheat and steal to be just like James Dean. And, unless I am deeply out of touch with this young 'baby-boomer' generation, James Dean is still the ultimate arbiter of coolness today. For example, we spent centuries inculcating a well-earned respect in teachers and scholars. When I went to school, the headmaster hovered under an aura of authourity comparable to a greatest Borinian gurus. Students were kept in line not so much by the strict discipline as by the bankable respect which teachers had accrued, a respect which was reinforced by the way parents and society as a whole treated teachers. But today, parents are not cool and thus cannot lend any cool to desperately dorky teachers, and our children run amok in the classroom and the schoolyard because they can instantly attain cool be 'dissing' the uncool teachers.

Cool is an irrational, fleeting thing which is more highly prized than morality, ettiquette, bravery, prestige and intelligence combined. Cool could only occur in our media-saturated, over-populated modern world. Cool is a value which would appeal only to our high-paced, time-obsessed society.

The allure of cool is two-fold; it can be attained quickly and it is instantly recognizable. While it takes a life of effort to, for example, win the nobel prize (or in my case at least a few years and a clever pseudonym) you can become cool overnight by dying your hair and buying a leather jacket, just like Sandra Dee (who has recently and tragically succumbed to a long and excruciating death by cool). What's more, even once you've won the nobel prize, no one knows it by looking at you! A nobel prize won't get you in to Studio 54 (the hottest new club if you didn't know). On the other hand, the presence or absence of cool can be seen immediately. Cool is the only value, besides beauty (which is devilishly hard to fake), which is apparent in an instant even to the naked eye. This is why cool has become the ultimate currency of our instantaneous, image-obsessed, information super-culture.

Cool also has an important tertiary appeal in that, while the rich can certainly buy cool, one can also become cool without being rich. For this reason, cool, like the lottery, holds a certain disturbing sway over the hopes and dreams of the entire population.

And yet cool's very assets -- its transience and consumability -- are what make it utterly worthless in the long-run. Just look at the things that were cool five years ago -- the Frontline program holds up Dawson's Creek and Limp Bizkit as examples of cutting-edge cool. God, what insipid, mind-numbing crap it looks like now.

Oh, woe is we! Look, how we were blinded by cool's ephemeral veneer! Cool is the only cultural value that is inherently fleeting. Works of genius, acts of heroism and legendary beauty live on through history, but cool lasts only until the sun comes up the next day and exposes your over-sized, vomit-encrusted, fun-fur raver pants for the garbage that they really are.

I pray thee dear reader, forsake the demon cool and all that it tries to sell you. Coolness is a deceiver of the most elevated form and it will only ever sell you worthless rubbish lacking real moral fibre. It is because of my moral aversion to cool that I still wear a monocle and use a field radio, which is attached to a perpetually slovenly low-ranking officer, in place of a cellphone. Matteus von Mustard is completely uncool and proud of it. Unless perhaps, these things are so uncool that they are cool again. I really don't care either way because I'm rich, brilliant and fiendishly handsome.


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This post is part one in a probably three-part series about cool. The next installment will focus on the bang-bang, bling-bling world of 50 Cent.

If you are interested in this post I have also touched on this idea of the displacement of genuine good before in my rant about how pathetic, snivelling celebrities are deified in the place of real heroes.

Owned!

In the process of doing my research for my new missive on the subject of cool I found a terrifying sub-sign of the apaocalypse. While perusing the website for the Frontline program "Merchants of Cool," I learned that Viacom, ironically enough, owns a publishing company called "The Free Press."

Did you hear that? Viacom owns the free press. How ominous is that omen-fans??!?

Curse You Blogger.com!

Nothing in the world turns my stomache more quickly than clicking on 'Publish Post' and finding a 404-error. Oh how I back-pedal, fingers-flailingly, clicking desperately upon the back-button, only to find the create new post page, grinning fiendishly with its toothsome blank white boxes, barren and textless. And always after I have composed yet another magnum opus to wow and astound my readers. Even as I type this, I can hardly keep down the Duck Confit and White Asparagus which Alphonso prepared for supper.As such, there may be a slight delay in the posting of this week's portent. Know you this though, this week I have set my 'sites' upon my greatest and most elusive enemy -- coolness.

I do sound quite savvy about this interweb now though don't I.

The Exploitation of A Dear Old Friend

I have just received word that a series of trading cards has been published which depict the various adventures of my dearest, oldest friend Friedrich Heironymous Munchausen, better known to the ladies as "oooohh, the baron. [fluttering of eyelashes]"

I am not exactly sure when these cards were printed, but I presume, based on the fact that they are published in colour on stiff cardboard, that it was within the last year. As far as I know, colour printing was, until quite recently, prohibitively expensive.

Now, as we all know, Friedrich's adventures were world-class and well-worth being recounted in the form of tradable cards. However!, I am deeply offended because these cards were published to promote Little Joker Tobacco.

These cards are clearly designed to delight and invigorate small children and yet they promote the unhealty, but delightfully invigorating, habit of smoking pipe tobacco! Smoking is a knavish habit, and the Baron would never willfully promote smoking amongst women, children or the lower classes.

To see the good name of my comrade sullied, especially in a post-pseudo-humous manner such as this, is a great blow to my normally high spirits and clearly a sign of our impending doom.

For those who would like to know more about the Baron Munchausen, you can read about his exploits here. For those philistines amongst you who would rather not read, there is also an excellent film made by the incomparable Terry Gilliam. It is both mine and Matthew's favourite film.

Zombie Terrorists!

Sweet Jesus have mercy!!!

A Kentucky high school student has been arrested for a short story about zombies attacking his school, which the police seem to have taken as some kind of a death threat. Little do they now that the danger is far more insidious, this boy has concocted the world's first UNDEATH THREAT! -- a clear sign of the apocalypse.

The article begins with the headline "Student Arrested for Terroristic Threatening..." Oh truly, that is a delectably cataclysmic word -- Terroristic. Matthew suggests to me that it sounds like the title of "a turntablist album" -- except it would apparently be spelled TerrorWristTic. As always, I'm at a loss to understand his meaning.

As you continue your perusal of this post, I would ask my gentle readers to keep in mind that this is actually true and NOT a satirical piece posted on the onion.

Here is the article in full, because each and every sentence gets better and better. I am particularily enamoured of the student's appalling southern-drawl grammar, which one can only imagine carrying through the whole zombie-attack-narrative.

STUDENT ARRESTED FOR TERRORISTIC THREATENING SAYS INCIDENT A MISUNDERSTANDING

"A George Rogers Clark High School junior arrested Tuesday for making terrorist threats told LEX 18 News Thursday that the "writings" that got him arrested are being taken out of context.

Winchester police say William Poole, 18, was taken into custody Tuesday morning. Investigators say they discovered materials at Poole's home that outline possible acts of violence aimed at students, teachers, and police.

Poole told LEX 18 that the whole incident is a big misunderstanding. He claims that what his grandparents found in his journal and turned into police was a short story he wrote for English class.

"My story is based on fiction," said Poole, who faces a second-degree felony terrorist threatening charge. "It's a fake story. I made it up. I've been working on one of my short stories, (and) the short story they found was about zombies. Yes, it did say a high school. It was about a high school over ran by zombies."

Even so, police say the nature of the story makes it a felony. "Anytime you make any threat or possess matter involving a school or function it's a felony in the state of Kentucky," said Winchester Police detective Steven Caudill.

Poole disputes that he was threatening anyone.

"It didn't mention nobody who lives in Clark County, didn't mention (George Rogers Clark High School), didn't mention no principal or cops, nothing,"
said Poole. "Half the people at high school know me. They know I'm not that stupid, that crazy."

On Thursday, a judge raised Poole's bond from one to five thousand dollars after prosecutors requested it, citing the seriousness of the charge.

Poole is being held at the Clark County Detention Center."

Three things have a particularily apocalyptic tenor here. First, notice that police detective Steven Caudill's questionable use of the word 'or' leads him to suggest that "any time you possess matter involving a school or function it's a felony in the state of Kentucky." That's quite a law -- I suggest everyone in Kentucky cease and desist sending out flyers for the school play immediately!

Secondly, the student suggests that people know that he won't make zombies, because "they know I'm not that stupid, that crazy." It seems that he believes his sanity and intelligence (limited as they are) to be the only things preventing him from making zombies to 'over-ran' the school.

Thirdly, it is not just one police detective who has difficulty with the word 'or' who is concerned about the likelihood of the student being a necromancer; no, no, a presumably well-educated and experienced judge, raised the bail because of the 'seriousness' of the crime.

If anyone amongst my truly legion readers has access to the original zombie-attack manuscript, I think they would find it quite lucrative, in that I would pay them a lot of money so that I could own it.

Thanks to boing-boing.

Sign of the Apocalypse Captured on Video

If a picture is worth a thousand words, is video worth a thousand words a frame? If so, this is one crazy, terrifying, endlessly self-violating, horror-show of a run-on sentence.



Go to the site linked above and view the video of the EZ Catch Harvester(tm) chicken catching machine.

thanks to www.boingboing.net
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AMMENDUM as of 11:20pm Sunday March 13, 2005

It seems that the video has been removed from the site, presumably because of the myriad readers who were spurred onwards and outwards by my magnanimous verbiage! See how quickly the enemy erases the signs after I identify them?

You must believe me that the video was truly terrifying and disturbing. It showed a gaping machine-mouth, fed by hungry, spinning drums all aprickle with foam fingers, feeding itself more and more chickens, chickens which were whipped onto a blazingly hasteful conveyor built and fired out of a cannon at the back of the machine into cages, a flapping, squawking, living stream of feathers and chicken flesh.

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AMMENDUM as of 11:20am Wednesday October 11, 2006

Youtube be praised! The video which the industrial food machine didn't want you to see is BACK!

Run on, you crazy sentence...

WARNING: This post will not be pleasing to those with a low tolerance for prolix, verbose, circumlocutory, garrulous writing, especially if that tolerance is lower still in instances where the aforementioned writing is being fustian just for the sake of being fustian.

ADDENDUM: Now while it may be true that I said, thinking at the time that I was speaking the truth, that I would post only once per week, in actual fact, because of the plain fact that there are far too many apocalyptic signs that require prompt classification for me to limit my posts in such an extreme and, indeed, unwarranted manner, I will heretofore post as often as I see necessary, although I shall (in keeping with last week's insight) reserve my best post of the week for Sunday evening.

After reading a sentence (constructed by David Foster Wallace) which had been published in an issue of Toro Magazine, I was shocked to discover that this sentence -- which was a mere 205 words in length, words which I counted with my own well-manicured index finger -- this sentence, which seemed to my mind to be a regular run-of-the-mill sentence, was being held up as "the infinite run-on sentence."

What kind of a world do we live in that we have forgotten about James Joyce and William Faulkner and even The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez where each chapter is a single paragraph and now believe this admittedly long, but certainly not long-winded, sentence by David Foster Wallace to be some sort of a triumph for sentence-length enthusiasts?

With the primary intention of defending my belief that a beautiful sentence is long and winding like the finer hiking trails which meander through the Swiss alps near Bern and a secondary intention of demonstrating that short, clear sentences are for feeble-minded individuals who do not have sufficient syntactical landscape to observe a full-bodied sentence in its entire length, I shall type up a single-sentence quotation from William Faulkner, the lengthiness of which is, I believe, as-yet unsurpassed.

"Oh yes, I know: 'Rosa Coldfield, lose him, weep him; caught a man and couldn't keep him' -- Oh yes, I know (and kind too; they would be kind): Rosa Coldfield, warped bitter orphaned country stick called Rosa Coldfield, safely engaged at last and so off the town, the county; they wil have told you: How I went out there to live for the rest of my life, seeing in my nephew's murdering an act of God enabling me ostensibly to obey my dying sister's request that I save at least one of the two children which she had doomed by conceiving them but actually to be in the house when he returned who, being a demon, would therefore be impervious to shot and shell and so would return; I waiting for him because I was young still (who had buried no hopes to bugles, beneath a flag) and ripe for marrying in this time and place where most of the young men were dead and all the living ones either old or already married or tired, too tired for love; he my best my only chance in this: an environment where at best and even lacking war my chances would have been slender enough since I was not only a Southern gentlewoman but the very modest character of whose background and circumstances must needs be their own affirmation since had I been the daughter of a wealthy planter I could have married almost anyone but being the daughter merely of a small store-keeper I could even afford to accept flowers from almost no one and so would have been doomed to marry at last some casual apprentice-clerk in my father's business; -- Yes, they will have told you: who was young and had buried hopes only during night which was four years long when beside a shuttered and unsleeping candle she embalmed the War and its heritage of suffering and injustice and sorrow on the backsides of the pages within an old account book, embalming blotting from the breathable air the poisonous secret effluvium of lusting and hating and killing; -- they will have told you: daughter of an embusque who had to turn to a demon, a villain: and therefore she had been right in hating her father since if he had not died in that attic she would not have had to go out there to find food and protection and shelter and if she had not had to depend on his food and clothing (even if she did help to grow and weave it) to keep her alive and warm until simple justice demanded that she make what return for it he might require of her commensurate with honor she would not have become engaged to him and if she had not become engaged to him she would hot have had to lie at night asking herself Why and Why and Why as she has done for forty-three years: as if she had been instinctively right even as a child in hating her father and so these forty-three years of impotent and unbearable outrage were the revenge of some sophisticated and ironic sterile nature on her for having hated that which gave her life."

- William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, pg. 137, 1936, 532 words!