LIFE IS MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN YOU DESERVE!

So you made it through Xanadu with your sanity in tact? Well see if you can handle Dennis DeYoung's DESERT MOON!

(Aw crap, it won't let me embed it. Well just follow the link. The comments are an endurance test in themselves.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uqjwt8qXjKc

At long last, I've finaly uploaded my new Batman-oriented comedy short to Funny or Die.

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/0458f08b1d/

Please vote "funny" if you conscience allows it.

Once again, more proof that Pandora sucks.

What kind of "music genome" follows Thelonious Monster with John Cougar-Mellencamp's "Small Town?"

Jesus H. Christ in a chicken basket...

You think you're bad-ass, huh? You think you eat iron and sh*t angry packs of hungry wolves?

Well see if you can out-tough THIS!

(Yes, it's safe for work, but is it safe for your soul?)

I just had someone tell me that the last decade was called "The Noughties." I had no idea. I'm fully convinced that the reason nobody's tried to define this decade as anything is because nobody's come up with a decent name for it. "The 70's, The 80's, The 90's," the minute the decade clock ticked over, everyone fell over themselves to say how it had all changed. Then we got to 2000, and there's a few feeble marketing stabs at "The New Millennium," and then that was the end of it.

The decades have always been defined more by presidents than by numbers, anyway.

The 50's started with Eisenhower and ended when JFK was shot.
The 60's started with LBJ and ended when Nixon was kicked out over Watergate.
The 70's started with Gerald Ford and ended when Reagan swept Carter out the door.
The 80's were the "Reagan Revolution" of God and Money... but I'm pretty sure the 90's started in 1989 with Bush Sr. and kicked in with first Gulf War.
The 90's were all about Clinton, peace, prosperity, technology, good drugs and more sex. And we thought the good times were holding on until...
The 00's began with 9/11 and the sudden realization that we had to take George W. seriously, and not because we had any good reason to. "The Age of Irony is over," said one idiot Republican pundit, when in fact, the Age of Irony had just kicked in hardcore.

For me, this past decade has been a lot about working on my career and getting my brain sorted out, but as for the rest of the country, it beats me. Culturally we've been a sea oatmeal and motor oil, functionally, we've lived in grind and fear. The war damn near wrecked us. Music sucked, though TV was pretty damn good. Underground culture was either ignored or mostly collapsed, depending on how you look at it. All the girls in Playboy universally started shaving their pubes. I don't know what we're left with, really. Maybe it's because I'm too old now and think the music sucks.

I'm hoping Obama is signaling a new vibration in this country. I hope the 'teens open with Dick Cheney getting butt-raped by a pack of wild dogs and the underground dance scene kicking back in with a truckload of heavy funk.

Hey, it could happen.

How is it that Patrick McGoohan and Ricardo Montalban can die on the same day?

Which do you shout first?

"I AM NOT A NUMBER, I AM A FREE... KHAAAAAAAAAAAAN!!!!"

Let me see if I can sort this out...

Pirates are the new Monkeys
Clowns are the new Pirates
Midgets are the new Clowns
Robots are the new Midgets
Ninjas are the new Robots

Does that cover it?

I found one of my old writing exercises. It's not half bad, for what it is. I like these strange fragments of oddness that can come out of the human brain.
( Jack Parsons stared to long into the sun and it burned into his eyes the shape of the face of David Bowie... )

Edited to add:
It is Christmas eve. I am in my parents' house in snowy-white Rochester New York. Outside the wind is blowing so hard it rattles the house, and makes me feel like it could carry the house away.

You know what I hate more than people who post every last inane moment of their stupid day on Twitter? People who automatically dump all the sh*t to their blog.

This is the future of the Unimind. All humanity linked together to know whenever anyone just drank a yummy caramel latte and is dreading the pile of laundry waiting for them.

Jesus H. Christ.

(I'm not talking about you, of course. Just all those other people.)

I've decided I don't know what the hell I want to do with LiveJournal any more.

It's that weird line between personal and public, and I'm not sure what side I feel like presenting these days.

Maybe I'll just use it for my "One Life to Live" reviews and episode guide.

We know what Huey thinks. What's your opinion?

A. It is hip to be square.
B. It is not hip to be square.
C. Could someone please sodomize Huey Lewis with a steel toilet brush and then skull-f*ck him with a jackhammer? Thanks.

You know, I can't help but feel like the president pardoning two turkeys on Thanksgiving is a bit like Hitler pulling two Warsaw Jews off the train to Dachau. You make make a big show of it, but it's not much consolation to everyone left behind.

"Yeah. Thanks. Real generous, motherf***er."

I know it's probably not cool in 2008 to like The Jimi Hendrix experience, but drummer Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell passed away today, the last member of the band to leave this earth.

Maybe now they can all jam in Rock Valhalla.

You know that old adage, "On every bus, there is The Weird Guy. If you look around and you don't see him, it's you."

I think the opposite is true of hipsters. "If you walk into a bar and there's too many hipsters, you're one of them."

By Harold Meyerson

To: Mr. Roger Ailes

President, Fox News

Dear Roger,

You should be sitting when you read this, because I'm writing to apologize.

In times past, I've had harsh words for Fox for its consistent misrepresentation of the news. In 2003, I cited a survey from the Program for International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) and the Knowledge Network that showed that 45 percent of Fox viewers believed that the United States had uncovered incontrovertible proof that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda had worked together; that we had found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; and that a majority of peoples in other lands supported our war in Iraq. In case these bizarre misconceptions merely reflected the a priori beliefs of President Bush's supporters, PIPA further documented that Bush backers who got their news from other networks had a decidedly firmer grasp of the facts.

Now, I don't in any way retract my judgment that you guys were at the time and still are a constant source of right-wing fantasies. It's just that, at least in today's political environment, I'm no longer sure this is a bad thing.

The election has left the Republican Party reeling, its base shrunk to those Southern, Plains and Mountain West states where rural cultures still predominate. The party's smarter strategists are arguing that the worldviews of the social conservatives and free-market extremists who dominate the GOP are either irrelevant or ridiculous to voters in the middle of the political spectrum. "We can't be obsessed with issues that are not the issues that are important to American voters," Jim Greer, chairman of the Florida GOP, told the New York Times.

But Fox has won its viewership precisely by promoting such obsessions.

During the campaign just completed, you guys focused on Barack Obama's allegedly Muslim and alien roots and socialist ideology; meanwhile, in the real world, unemployment rose, foreclosures soared and Wall Street went flooey. Over the past eight years, you beat drums for such causes as state intervention in the Terri Schiavo case. You demonized undocumented immigrants (okay, CNN's Lou Dobbs gave you a run for your money on that one). You fed the Republican base with a steady diet of bile -- and now that bilious base is the biggest impediment to the Republicans' repositioning themselves so that they can win elections again.

Reach out to Latinos -- the inescapably growing segment of the American electorate that voted overwhelmingly for Obama after four years of GOP immigrant-bashing? Not if Fox viewers have anything to say about it. Not after you've drummed into their heads that the Latino immigrant population is some looming terrorist threat.

Modify that opposition to stem-cell research? Tone down the ridicule of people in public life who have advanced degrees? Call off the Republican war on science that kicks in whenever science runs counter to right-wing fundamentalism in religion or economics? Not if the Hannity faithful can help it.

You're not alone in reinforcing those beliefs that marginalize the Republican right, of course. You've got plenty of help from Rush and all the little Limbaughs who dominate talk radio. But together with your allies, you haul truckloads of troglodyte garbage to your flock.

And the way your flock sees it, the modifications that Republicans need to make to become competitive again in American politics -- acknowledging a need for state intervention to make the economy work, backing off the primitive religiosity, embracing a more tolerant pluralism -- amount to nothing less than heresy.

As an aide to Richard Nixon back in the day, Roger, you were around for the birth of the Southern strategy -- the policy to move all those disgruntled racist Southern whites into Republican ranks. But the party as Nixon would have recognized it ceased to exist after the Republicans captured Congress in 1994. Since then, the national Republican Party has been dominated by far-right Southern legislative leaders -- Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Trent Lott -- and by George W. Bush. The past two elections, Republicans have grown weaker everywhere but the white rural South -- the region that remains the least educated and least diverse.

And rather than present these voters with a picture of a complex, changing world, you guys at Fox serve chiefly to reinforce their fears, to paint people who hold different viewpoints as alien and threatening.

In that sense, your work remains dangerous and disintegrative to the nation. But it is also, more narrowly, tactically, for now, a great gift to liberals and Democrats. You ensure the ongoing Palinization and marginalization -- electorally, the terms are synonymous -- of the Republican Party.

And to think that you're doing all this not on the Democratic National Committee's dime but on Rupert Murdoch's.

Cheers from your new fan,

Harold

And I know you're thinking I mean some kind of incurable groin rash, but no...

After weeks of back-and-forth with business affaris, I can finally talk about the fact that Cartoon Network optioned my series pitch for "Pizzor the Destroyer."

Long story short, it's "The Road Warrior" meets pizza delivery, and I could not be more excited within the legal limits laid down by the Bush administration. The artist, John Fountain, and I are currently writing the pilot script and putting together some concept art, and the executives so far have been pleased. We hope that continues.

Meanwhile, I'm in the Lost Souls cafe, staring out the door at the gray vent across the alley, pounding out the first action sequence. It's an odd feeling. Good, but odd.

As Smilin' Stan Lee once said, "Excelsior!"

He also said, "Screw you, Ditko!" but never in public.

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