Happy Easter.
I think I’m just going to take a pass on this one.
Retailers went on the defensive. “There was no intention on our part to offer up a violent Easter basket. We’re very conscious of what will and what will not offend our customers. It was meant to be a lighthearted and fun gift,” says Kmart spokesperson Abigail Jacobs. “It’s in my opinion a harmless toy included in an Easter basket.”
The reaction to a Voice query at Walgreens contrasted sharply, with company representatives retreating instead of digging in. “Going forward next year, we don’t plan to have Easter baskets with toy soldiers or a military theme. The thinking on these Easter baskets was more toy-related and we didn’t really think about it otherwise,” says Walgreens spokesperson Carol Hively. “We apologize to anybody who is offended or felt that this was inappropriate.”
Anyone else want a crack at it?
However could I have forgotten the Generating Stabilizing Electro Carbon Condensating Atmospheric Pro-Cyclonic Compact Dynamic Magnet Box?
There’s been some recent traffic at an old post, one I wrote back in December on kid detectives (and inventors, and magicians) and magic and slandering Encyclopedia Brown (and just as a side note: sitting across the table from Kristen Brennan at Bucca di Beppo’s is a delightful exercise in fragmentary multichannel signal-as-noise watch-me-for-the-changes-and-try-to-keep-up brinksmanship): Mike Tatreau came through, finding the book long since forgotten but rather tenuously described as having “this haunting nighttime flight home over moonlit countryside on a bicycle, and a midnight picnic of sandwiches in a field in the middle of nowhere.” Ladies and gentlemen, it’s Jan Wahl’s The Furious Flycycle! —Except, of course, for the fact that the flight is away from home during (mostly) the daylight, and it’s a noontime picnic (with iceberg watermelon pickles), and there is some haunting moonlight, but it comes later, and anyway, Wahl slanders wolves. But. There it is.
—Now we just need to find that Dutch? German? French? book in English translation with the Purloined Waldo cartoons for each bite-sized chapter-mystery. Anyone? Anyone?
WYPSIDYOPINEPOL USA
Catchy, isn’t it? Just trips off the tongue. It’s a non-binding resolution I’d like to see passed: the Would You Please Stop Insulting the Dignity of Your Office and the Public’s Intelligence by Naming Every Piece Of Legislation with an Unbelievably Stupid Acronym Act.
The RAVE Act (Reducing Americans’ Vulnerability to Ecstasy, HR 718) is back. It amends the federal crack house law to make it easier to fine and imprison business owners that fail to stop drug offenses from occurring on their property—even if they do take steps to stop drug use. (It’s the age of responsibility, after all. Intent doesn’t matter. We only care about results.) —It was shut down by an aggressive campaign of protests, fax blasts and open ridicule last year, but all that is needed for evil to triumph and constant vigilance and yadda yadda. RAVE is spreading like some kind of virus; its basic provisions are in HR 718, the RAVE Act, but over in the Senate they’re S 226, the Illicit Drugs Anti-Proliferation Act (IDAP?) and they’re still buried in the guts of Daschle’s S 22 domestic security bill.
The CLEAN-UP Act (Clean, Learn, Educate, Abolish, Neutralize, and Undermine Production of Methamphetamines, HR 834) has—beyond a semantically null acronym—a doozy of a provision tucked inside. Turn with me to Section 305, which would add Section 416A to the Controlled Substances Act:
Whoever, for a commercial purpose, knowingly promotes any rave, dance, music, or other entertainment event, that takes place under circumstances where the promoter knows or reasonably ought to know that a controlled substance will be used or distributed in violation of Federal law or the law of the place where the event is held, shall be fined under title 18, United States Code, or imprisoned for not more than 9 years, or both.
We don’t even need for a crime to have been committed. Or even alleged. If you promote an entertainment event where you reasonably ought to know that drugs could be used or distributed, you’re busted.
The fine folks at the Drug Policy Alliance have put together a fax for your representative. Go kick his or her ass, would you?
Kelly J. Cooper knows the score.
I’ve been meaning to link to Comixpedia for a while now (and add them to the ever-burgeoning linchinography to the right there); the folks thereabouts are rapidly building a solid rep as the go-to gals and guys when it comes to writing about webcomics. (Is it a one-word neologism at this point? We do seem to have cast aside the usual coy engagement period of hyphenation, leaping alacritously from two words seen together [and gossiped about] with ever-increasing frequency straight to the cohabitation of portmanteaudom—still technically illegal in four Bible Belt states, or so I am given to understand.) —But recent events have forced my hand: they’ve gone and published a review of Dicebox which nets a three-pointer when it’s fourth and ten, a beautiful hanging birdie from just outside the paint. —Um. I should probably point out that a) I am married to Jenn, so objectivity flies right out the window on this one (but we’ve long since laid that myth to rest, surely), and b) I often affect to know nothing at all of sports, or the metaphors thereof.
(Psst. Kelly: “Peh” is a gender–non-specific pronoun [as opposed to gender-neutral], used when you do not wish to assume the gender of the person you’re addressing. The media in Dicebox use it as a regular formality, says Jenn [hear, hear, says I]; it’s also common to use it when addressing someone in authority [again with the hear, hear]. —Not there’s any way for you to have known this from context [yet], which is fine, which is perhaps part of the point; immersion and all, and I’m reminded of a post about reading The Hobbit at a young age and missing most of the big made-up words but loving it anyway, which cited information theory, but I’m not going to link to it because it already looks like I have a massive crush on the languagehat, so. —But! Three cheers for kicking the puzzle around. It’s what it’s there for. Right?)
—Um. Lemme just get out of the way. Go, read the review; read the comic; if you haven’t started it yet, I’ll even shove you straight into Chapter 1, Scene 1.
I’ll just leave you to it then, shall I?
I will live at home unbulled—
—beautifully dressed and wearing a saffron-coloured gown.
That’s from the oath Lysistrata gets her women friends to swear over a spilled jug of unwatered wine, to withhold sex from the men of Sparta and Athens until the insane war between the two city-states is ended and peace is declared. Which is not what I’d suggest, literally, in this day and age; no. We are most of us more enlightened these days as to one’s sex, one’s gender, and the roles they play in determining one’s destiny and fitness for combat, and anyway, it would open us up to charges of not supporting the troops, and we can’t have that, now, can we?
Instead, the ever–with-it James “The Goods” Capozzola points us to the Lysistrata Project, who are organizing readings of Aristophanes’s rollicking, ribald Lysistrata around the world tomorrow, Monday, 3 March 2003. (As well as a National Moratorium on 5 March.)
Portland area readings include:
- Bridgeport United Church of Christ, 7.00 pm;
- PSU (either Smith Memorial Amphitheater or Lincoln Hall Studio Theater), 1.00 pm;
- the First Congregational Church, 7.30 pm;
- and a reading at Lincoln High School (contact Erin Jones), the details of which are not as yet listed.
Attend a reading, here, or wherever it is you are if it isn’t here; read it yourself to your friends or your affinity group or your spouse or your dog (like our Rittenhouse Reviewer will); find snippets you like and quote them where you can and spread the word. —Live at home unbulled, because (Rabelaisian as it may be) that’s the key and the heart of it all, right there.
That we might all live at home, unbulled.
(Color of gown is, of course, optional.)
Oulipo, oubapo,
OuLiPo, OuBaPo,
Let’s call the whole thing off.
Actually, let’s not. Languagehat is priming the pump to run oulipo up the Daypop word burst chart (and here, by the way, is a site that presents you with one of Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes, in English, every 60 seconds); I just thought I’d slip in a mention of comics’ version: oubapo. Ouvroir de la Bande Dessinée Potentielle, or Workshop for Potential Comics, was founded in 1992 by Thierry Groensteen and various members of the Parisian publishing collective L’Association, which included the always-divine Lewis Trondheim. The Oubapo-America site is a wee bit out-of-date (there’s still some traffic at the message board), but is nonetheless a nice little collection of links to some formal considerations of comics and experimentations with form—such as Matt Madden’s takes on the basic idea behind Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style.
Bring it, you ill-tempered, foul-mouthed Father-Coughlin–wannabe who’s so fucking pathetic you have to get your creepy-ass deep-pocket think-tank buddies to bulk-buy your book up the bestseller lists.
A certain bigot (and those on the right who want to claim him as their own, a necessary corrective to the liberal American mediasphere, be my guest; every time he opens his mouth he makes rain for us) with a brand spankin’ new MSNBC TV contract (whose fingerprints are those on the knife in Donahue’s back?) is making some waves by calling for the arrest of the leaders of the anti-war movement once the Shock and Awe start raining down. (A link to his front page is provided as reference, should you need to verify this fact yourself. Be warned: ugly type and blinking graphics await.) —Savage (whose bearded mug glares at me on my commute every morning, since the local talk-radio outlet has a deal that splatters him and Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly and Savage and local wannabe Lars Larson on the backs of busses, and there’s an irony in there, somewhere, a sick, stunted little thing that’s the best we can do, these days) also demonstrates an utter lack of familiarity with the middle school American History curriculum by linking favorably to the text of the 1918 US Sedition Act, repealed in 1921 and since repudiated as a grimy nadir, along with the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts. We can giggle, if we like, at his historical ignorance (doubtless he would wail and moan about goddless, communist NEA teachers slandering American history—much as he will twenty years from now, the four years of Bush 43’s term long since rubbing elbows with Harding’s and Grant’s at the bottom of the presidential barrel, the odious USA PATRIOT Act having been repealed, joining the US Sedition Act and the Alien and Sedition Acts down there with the slimy fear-mongering stuff that honestly, we see it now, it’s a bad idea, we’ll never do it again, promise); certainly, giggling is better for the health than glowering worrisomely at the millions of nativist brownshirts who presumably hang from his every slaver-drenched word. But I say what the hell. Let him have his Sedition Act. Go back and read it. Forget the latter “willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States” language; these are all gimmes, as no one on the anti-war side is mocking the First through Fourth Amendments like Ashcroft, or insulting drafted servicefolks like Rumsfeld. Nah. Check out the opening lines of the act Savage wants to champion:
Whoever, when the United States is at war, shall willfully make or convey false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United States, or to promote the success of its enemies…
That, ladies and gentlemen, is what’s known in the biz as a “money quote.” (Thanks, Sully. Oy.)
- Given that the Bush administration has made and conveyed false reports and false statements regarding Iraq at every turn;
- Given that “such systematic distortion of intelligence, such systematic manipulation of the American people” is to directly interfere with the operation and success of the military and naval forces of the United States, sending them into a conflict without the international support we require;
- Given that by every sober, informed estimation of the situation, the coming conflict will destabilize the Middle East to an unprecedented degree, providing new waves of recruits and new sources of arms to Al Qaeda, thereby promoting the success of our ostensible enemies, and putting this country in the path of a danger for which we are criminally unprepared;
- Well.
—I think it’s quite clear that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Wolfowitz, et al, would be the first to face charges of sedition under the renewal of this act, by golly.
Hey. It could happen. It could.
(Aw, forget the Father Coughlin ref. Father Coughlin’s too good for the likes of Savage.)
