RSJS writes:

"...it was not possible to do deep throat safely, that it was a dangerous act that could only be done under hypnosis... emergency rooms were filled with women victims of throat rape, not to mention the ones who hadnt even made it that far and had died in the act."

Today's happy phrase is: "Throat Rape".

Chimp Justice!

Josh writes:

Chimps' Sense of Justice Found Similar to Humans'

I smell a TV series -- Chimp Justice! We follow Officer Bongo, walking his beat, stamping out the inequitable distribution of grapes and cucumbers. He's a hard chimp, a chimp who cares, damnit, cares about this shitty town and the innocent citizens who brachiate through it every day. A chimp who harbours a terrible secret about his past in the circus -- a secret that could destroy him. With the Chief breathing down his neck and a price on his head courtesy of the local crime boss, every day is a struggle just to stay sane while dealing out... Chimp Justice!

Episode 1 sees him chasing down a gang of capuchin gun runners, while trying to deal with his partner, who has been hitting the bananas hard -- damn hard -- after his wife left him to join a bonobo free love commune:

"Look at you man -- you're strung out! I need you with me on this!"

"Just gimme a fooking banana!"

"I have no bananas... on this day."

All that setup for one Eddie Izzard reference. Sad, really.

Hitlog Follies, Part 1 of Lots

Josh writes:

OK, you know how there is no God? Yeah, well the latest proof of that showed up in our hitlogs this morning:

sex donkey cock buried in pussy fuck

And that's not the worst part -- here's the full search URL:

http://www.google.com/search?q=sex donkey cock buried in pussy fuck&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&start=550&sa=N

See that "&start=550" bit? That means that the person was at page 55 of the search results (assuming the usual ten results per page). Someone waded through 55 pages of links to donkey porn before they came to us.

That's actually kind of sweet.

You can't take my music to crash cars to...

Apathy Jack writes:

STARS
Originally uploaded by Brain Stab.

Coming up on time to teach poetry again. So my first move is to the cupboard containing my collections of Poe, Dickinson, Yeats and Ginsberg. My second move is to reach over these tomes to the Johnny Cash CD that I keep at the back of the cupboard.

I can't really explain my hated for almost all works of poetry, especially when you juxtapose it with my obsession with song lyrics - an obsession that sees me teaching the lyrics to A Boy Named Sue to my Year 9s before I expose them to Frost or Eliot.

I guess words have more power when put over some manner of faux-tribal beat that syncs with the human heartbeat and promotes alpha waves in the brain or some such scientific explanation. All I know is that William Carlos Williams' Little Red Wheelbarrow is pointless enough to make me angry, but Avril Lavigne's Nobody's Home is so catchy and (manipulatively) emotive that I forgive her for rhyming 'home' with 'home'.

With very few exceptions, none of the great works of poetry speak to me, but I can be blown away by randomly heard lyrics.

When Lou from Naquadah, sounding lost and helpless, intones: Breathing takes everything that I've got I know what she means. Okay, that line is not the most staggeringly complex piece of poetry since Byron, but it summed up exactly how I was feeling when first listened to the song Backlash.

Now, the song and the things depicted therein have nothing to do with the sort of circumstances that made me feel that way - my issues and malfunctions bear no resemblance to those that inspired the lyrics (Naquadah being a New Zealand band, I can say that with the relative security that comes from having a passing acquaintanceship with the songwriter) and hell, the rest of the song, while being a damn fine piece of music, lyrically means nothing to me.

However, when the noise and weight are building in my head, pressing down, I can put that song on, and just for a few moments as I listen, think "Yeah! Yeah that's it! Exactly!" - and with understanding comes catharsis. In the smallest of doses, sure, but there nonetheless.

I remember when I first heard the resigned sadness, the depressed sense of inevitability in The Mercy Cage's Needle Marks (& scars) when lead singer M almost whispers It's the same old scene this year; Checking in for minor repairs. It reminded me of too many of my friends.

And, from the same song, my breath still quickens just slightly when I hear the line that exhorts:

Keep breathing

Inhale

Exhale

Exhale

Hell, if ever I doubt the emotive power of music, I only need to think of the song I Speak Corruption. Sung by my friend Kat (you've got to love the New Zealand music scene, really, don't you? Alright, it's not the biggest creative pond to go swimming in, but it is kind of cool being able to be friends with the people in your favourite bands). Kat is one of the loveliest people I know - her mere presence is enough to cheer me right up. However, when I listen to this one song (downloadable here) I disconnect from the image of my positive and loving friend and, over the course of three minutes, become incredibly depressed.

Analysing it, I think it might be the slight gap between the first and second lines of the song:

I see you dying softly slow and tender




I like it.

But it's not only the personal resonance, it's also the intensity: In the Clutch song Rock N Roll Outlaw, when Neil Fallon sings Well you can rock it like Sir Sisyphus, But even in its genesis, It's really quite ridiculous, 'Lectric hobo, So now you know, Not to clock the Weeble Wobble hot rod gang, Revelator big bang you can tell he really, really means it. What "it" is in this context is anyone's guess, but boy is Fallon taking it seriously.

Clutch is also the perfect example of another reason that I love music so much; the grand, sweeping and totally meaningless rock song.

Listen to their song I Have The Body Of John Wilkes Booth; about a man on a fishing trip, who happens upon a lead box containing the body of the famous assassin and tries to sell it to the highest bidder because everybody's got to make a living somehow.

Sure, it lacks the mania of Animal Farm (Planes drop from the sky, people disappear and bullets fly, little grey men are coming our way, tastes just like chicken they say) or the paranoia of Escape From The Prison Planet (One man asked me for a dollar, I asked him "What's it for?", he said "I have seen them" I said "Okay it's yours") and hey, it may be a completely pointless work of fiction which pays far more attention to the state of fishing than to the discovery of Booth's body, but that's part of the charm. In four minutes you get a dose of pointless, funny intensity and madness, which is what Rock and Roll is built for.

Of course part of it is my love for words. Someone who can do clever things with words is always worth listening to. I've given Clutch too much time already, so I'€™ll limit myself to mentioning that they remain the only band in my experience to have a song with not one, but two rhymes for 'austrolopthicus'.

Sadly, more and more these days, in order to find the real gold in wordplay we need to leave the world of guitar music (if I hear A Simple Plan telling me that no one knows what it's like to feel alienated when they're a teenager one more time I'm flying to the States just to kick them to death) and go to hip and/or hop music.

Eminem does the cleverest rhymes I've ever heard, either through being stylistically clever (rhyming As we move toward a/ New World Order) or being deceptively simple almost to the point of stupidity (Since birth I've been cursed with this curse to just curse). And you have to admit that the rap tradition of self-aggrandisement hasn't been done much better than when Ludacris warned people to Watch out for my medallion, My diamonds are reckless, Feels like there's a midget hanging from my necklace...

I don't know why these lyrics should impress me more than, say, Shakespeare or Pound. I guess it's something to do with the feeling and emotion. I have been known to appreciate the odd piece of poetry that I've read, but every (and I mean every single) time I've heard a poet reading their own work, they sound so very self important. That's a pity, because there's really no reason they shouldn't be able to convey their emotions (when they're meant to be conveyed aloud, that is) as well as your average musician. Sadly, most just come across as expecting the audience to be moved, without actually giving them any impetus.

Impetus. Now there was a good Clutch song.

Hmm... Even when I try to talk about poetry, it always comes back to lyrics.

Nope, I'd say I'm pretty much beyond help as far as this "poetry" thing goes.

The Fourth New Sermon of the Neo-Catholic Church

That Morthos Stare writes:

A distraction from the day's festivities. I want to tell the great unwashed public a little something about friendship.

I have shunned, for a little while now, the usual mores and requirements of civilised society. I can do this because if there are only a few utility monsters, like myself, then the world finds us charming and we can get away with ediquitte murder. Still, that is a matter for another time...

And that time is now!

Sorry, dizzy spell.

One benefit to my nature is my almost blase approach to friendship. I do not feel obliged to friends perhaps in the way that society dictates I should. I like my friends and when I think of them, sometimes rarely, sometimes often, I think of them fondly and want to be with them. I do not, however, feel that I have to maintain friendships.

It's a weird phrase, 'maintain friendships;' I suspect that most of you will both find my disdain of this maintenance both good and bad.

The bad first, because the bad is the most obvious; we do not like to maintain such things because such maintenance indicates a level of work that denigrates the notion of friendship. A friendship that needs this kind of maintenance is no real friendship; it is pure obligation and nothnig more. The friendship is kept alive via esoteric, quasi-erotic rituals designed to make you forget that you have moved on, matured or killed one of their family members (or vice versa).

The bad is obvious and it is unfortunate just how often it is true... Especially of you.

The good notion of maintenance is that friendships should not become stagnant and thus be of need of constant work. This is, of course, not true. I'm not denying the terrors of stagnation, but I am wondering why we feel that a friendship needs work to avoid. Surely the maintenance cost just indicates that the bad notion has arrived and you're not willing to admit to it just yet.

Happiness is a strange form of apathy mixed with contentment.

I have a few really good friends. I am happy with the number; I have some of my very best friends safely ensconced in foreign climes and there are some people, two couples to be precise, who have kept me sane over the last few years, and to them I owe a great debt I can never repay. One of these sets of people I see weekly, the other I see twice a year and speak to just over double that.

Yet I am as close to the other as I am to the former.

Friendship is a bond, possibly one with filligie and naughty lingerie. When I feel its call I obey it. Yes, I regret not hearing it more often, but then again, perhaps it would not mean as much if I did.

...

Well, that's serious. I was going to give a talk on why underwear is oppressive and I find myself waxing lyrical on platonic-bonding.

I really shouldn't drink tea.

Welcome Back...

Apathy Jack writes:

The famous story was that the targets got hauled across the field and set in rows and sophomores stood holding bows and sharp arrows waiting for the gym teacher to signal the moment to shoot. And one time a dog wandered onto the field and before the gym teacher could call it away one of the kids just shot it. And then everyone was running to help the dog and the kid shot another kid and he just kept on shooting until he got tackled. He said he wasn’t a disturbed person. He said he was just a plain normal person that sometimes had to kill people with arrows.

- Cruddy, Lynda Barrie

Yeah, all in all, I’d say the first week of school has gone smoothly...

Of course, my habit of vagueness and generally using grunts and gestures to transmit instructions to students is under threat:

Me (as I languidly gesticulate at the board): “The essay can be written on either of these two. So moving on...”
Blind Student: “Which are these two?”
Me: “Oh. Right. Yeah, you’ll have to keep reminding me about that...”

Of course, three days with students and I’m already planning to go and buy the Franz Ferdinand CD, just because all of my music is depressing, and I feel the need to listen to something upbeat. I mean, have you ever seen live footage of these guys? Not for them the wankery of angst and pain – they look so goddamned happy to be rock stars.

Also, just in case you were wondering, if your way of saying hello to one of your students after the holidays is to put your hand on their head and say “Good Lord, you haven’t grown at all. That’s insane.” it turns out they whine at you.

I’ve learned something.

Event Reminder

Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling writes:

Caption Competition...

Richard S J Scholes had his heart set on the derelict Meremere power station as a location for a photo shoot — and trespass notices did not deter him. However, the police weren't so easy to ignore. He was caught making a daring escape attempt under a barbed wire fence. It's a rare thing to be arrested while working on your art, but Richard Spartacus Jellybean Scholes is definitely unique.

His upcoming show, The Charybdis Tarot, opens in Devonport this weekend and reveals 78 manipulated photographs based on the 78 cards in a tarot deck. Richard has used about 50 friends in a collection of poses and costumes to represent the different cards. Locations ranged from a studio, to bedrooms, living rooms, garages and to an abandoned warehouse. Richard describes his work is very "angsty and gothic".

It was a long project, done over about 18 months. After using 200 rolls of film, including six rolls for one photo, Richard has decided to use digital for his next project. The Mt Roskill artist is planning to make a tarot deck from his images and have someone read his cards. Before this, Richard's photographic work was mostly journalistic, "recording, rather than using, it as an art form," he says. And he admits to being "utterly and totally petrified" about showing these pieces in public.

But for someone so nervous, and someone who calls art a hobby, he's definitely been bitten by the bug and is already planning his next show. "I wanted to get an art exhibition out of my system, but it's not working because there's another one on the way."

• The Charybdis Tarot is on display at The Depot Artspace, Main Gallery, February 5-18.

Esoterica, Misanthropy, Pies

Josh writes:

Originality: tricky bastard, isn't it? I blame modern plumbing -- if there was a bit more lead in our piping, the world would contain many more drooling simpletons, who I could then impress and enthrall with pithy banter and sardonic wit, safe in the knowledge that anyone else who might have come up with it is now chewing on furniture and arguing with the cow. But no, you think you've turned out something that makes you Witty McWitterson of the clan McWitty, and then find three dozen folks who got there before you, wrote the book, made the movie and printed the T-shirt.

For instance, I thought I was being very droll and obscure in the keywords I picked for our Blogwise entry, and for a minute it looked like we were the only site to appear under "misanthropy" -- until I realised I'd spelt it wrong. Nope: 7 sites listed for "misanthropy", 11 for "esoterica", and 33 for "pies". Fair enough on the last one -- everyone loves pies. Big, steamy pies.

...

Sorry, we were talking about pies?* Oh, right.

Now, while it can be dispiriting to have it hammered home that you aren't the font of innovation you thought you were, it isn't really that big a problem most of the time -- if I've made friends and influenced people with some off-the-cuff rejoinder that some guy in Mozambique also came up with last Friday, well, chances are neither of us will ever know about it. Even the global community of the Internet is still big enough that a bit of repetition is hard to spot.

Go into a smaller environment, though, and it can get to be an issue -- the next smug bollocks I hear paraphrase that Oscar Wilde quote in relation to Katherine Rich's dumping is going home minus their primary reproductive organs.

And you know what? I'll bet you someone else is penning a piece on the current ubiquity of that quote right now. I am not a beautiful, unique snowflake. I am not a beautiful, unique snowflake. I am not a beautiful, unique snowflake. I am not a beautiful, unique snowflake. I am not a beautiful, unique snowflake....

* Joke stolen from Simpsons episode 8F09 ("Burns Verkaufen der Kraftwerk"). Fuck you.

Wheeeeeee nekkid chicks.

RSJS writes:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?c_id=466&ObjectID=10008513

As my esteemed and beady-eyed colleague has pointed out, Sandra Paterson is not down with the porn. Porn is alllllegedly connected to many if not all incidents of nasty men doing terrible things to innocent virgins with their thunderous truncheons of engorged beef (the nasty men’s truncheons, not the virgin’s truncheons. That’d be plain odd). Porn is also, alllllegedly (i.e. something a drunk guy in an anorak told me) a harmless form of recreation for those of us blessed with the personalities of boiled cabbage unable to seduce even the most vacuous of Shore girls with our tales of particularly hair-raising dice rolls in our last LARP. Did I say “our”? I meant “their”. Honest.

The argument from the woofters whose main fear in life is unauthorised funning is always “This object that we are attacking was at the scene of an incident and as such we will say it was a contributing factor if not the root cause” Teehee, “root”. And fair enough, I suppose: Guy obsesses over porn, springs a dose of surprise sex on some hapless stationery-slinger soon afterwards, then tries to fold the woman in half and cram her under his bed. Porn equals teh bad. Burn the Playboys, tape over “Anal Arsenal 4” with uplifiting sermons from that benign sweater-wearer on Sunday morning TV, blah, blah, blah.

But this is a pretty simplistic attitude. At each location where The Porn (a pretty arbitrary term, I might add) is found, other things are found. Beds, for example. Beds are what people fuck like bunnies in, so surely beds are an inspiration for granny-molestation. Wallpaper, carpeting, TVs, corn plasters, rice, spiders, all lurking in the same dwellings as the aforementioned Anne Geddes calendar or whatever is classed as obscene these days… Spiders = chocolate spiders = sodomy = hand me my raping stick, I’m off to herd up some chitlin. Anything can be the cause.

Okay, so you’re all going “How facetious, for the porn is linked to the sex unlike corn plasters unless you’re sick in the head. Are you sick in the head, young man?” Well, that’s neither here nor there. But those who maintain that porn is about the human sexing, and as such the most likely motivator behind a dose of the in-out in-out with the nice young meter maid ticketing on the wrong back alley in town are in my humble opinion, wrong. In fact, I think porn is a prophylactic.

Yes folks, overuse of porn will actually lessen the incidents of rape. Oh, yes.

Imagine Billy Hard-on, with his sticky collection of crusty magazines stuck to the underside of his mattress and a hard-drive full of Gothic Sluts pictures ripped from the Internerd by some slavering Imagewolf program. He’s all worked up into a lather over a new collection of light bondage with some raven haired and tattooed chick whose track-marks are almost invisible. And he then goes running into the woods, howling at the full moon that so nicely imitates a pock-marked arse, and he decides to have some grunt’n’shunt with a local wench whether the filthy little slut likes it or not.

Cue our hero leaping from the bushes and attempting to do something obscene to a passing milkmaid. So far, so good, cry those who would burn my Dita von Teese collection of artistic gash shots. But this is where the difference between porn and reality comes in. Billy finds that women have hair, and dangling labia, and stretch marks and sweat and odours and wrinkles and differently-sized boobs that are affected by gravity and acne and tend not to look happy when being sodomised. There is little or no relation between the eminently human person squirming in front of Billy and the airbrushed mannequims he was polishing his pole over on his PC. In fact, the gulf between porn and actual pussy is such an echoing one that if one is enthralled by the former, the latter might well be a Lovecraftian nightmare of squirming nastiness and unnameable dread… How watching a Japanese cartoon schoolgirl with a dozen tentacles tearing her downunder asunder with mighty thrusts while she mumbles demands to be split in half by a nekkid demon would make one put up with some bawling shop assistant with a nametag is beyond me. Like the link between your school teacher putting a condom on a banana while a Gray’s Anatomy illustration of a pendulous cock is on the overhead projector and the ballsack keeps being half-projected on said teacher’s shoulder, and lascivious thoughts. Sex education and actual sex are further removed than sex and lawn bowls, goddammit. Everything that people link to sex tend to have very little to do with it. The point is, the point IS, if Billy is all about the porn, confrontation with the unpolished snack–crack of your typical middle-aged Muppet would have him running for his Photoshoped net porn faster than you can say “vagina dentata”. If one likes porn, one likes porn, but that doesn’t transfer over to liking actual intermacourse which is a whole other kettle of (wait for it) fish (teehee again).

So the question is, what IS the actual trigger, the object or action that spurs on rapists and kiddie fiddlers?

Simple: They are bad people in need of a good ballacking with a sackful of bricks. It’s not the porn, it’s not the condom-banana-sundae, it’s their freakin’ decision to beat the ever-living shit out of a harmless wiener then park their dick in them. Introduce porn into this mix and you’ve got exactly he same situation, but the mad crackhead cock-monster is left wondering why the victim doesn’t moan while he prolapses her rectum with Mister Stabby.

Ah, fuck it. Hand me my porn and my raping stick.

The Third New Sermon of the Neo-Catholic Church

That Morthos Stare writes:

Most of you, if not all, were probably not expecting me today, here and especially in this tawdry uniform. I can explain; you see I have been let off early for good behaviour.

Indeed, I have been remarkably good in recent times; in an act of perverse mismanagement the Church is currently suffering a surfeit of funds, partially because I've been gainfully employing myself but mostly because I've stopped Brother Morthos from taking any money out of the 'Shoot the Tories Into Space' Fund (which, for the numerically interested of you, is responsible for 13% of the most recent advances in mid-to-large range projectile technologies).

Employment has been interesting; in need of a little more pocket money and a reason to leave the Bunker I became the Papal Under-secretary's Under-secretary, making me simultaneously Mr. HORansome's boss and underling. Whenever he fired me I'd just sign (and then counter-sign) a new contract, type another derogatory note to the Pope (the few of you who are not mentally challenged will know that this (or that) is me (or I?)) and then use Ransome's stamp to signify it. It was then the matter of a moment to deliver said note to myself and then subsequently ask Hieronymus to send himself a note to the tune that I was notifying him that I would be watching his work all the closer. One should never call my Mother a deranged fruitbat with a brain the size of a Bismarck Herring.

Work, as you can ascertain, is 'Fun' for all concerned. Although I worry about the raft of conditional statements I have begun using...

The old days of slinking off to my bunk bed with a book of jumbo-sized elephant parts and a wagon of 'holy water' have gone the way of the gannet; now I type away for hours on end and have lustful thoughts about the women who wander in to our office asking about the services we offer (there is a sign outside which says 'Woman, come in and ask about our services!' which Hieronymus assures me was left over from the last establishment that lurked here). What it is that Ransome tells them I've yet to overhear, but it mustn't please a large section of the female populace because he gets slapped (well, more so than usual).

Hieronymus Oliphant Ransome, Papal Under-secretary and guttersnipe, who I am sure you have been asking after recently, has taken to his native gutter journalism like, well, a guttersnipe. After the incendiary remarks made about him by one of the Cardinals (who is now very much on the outside of Neo-Catholicism) Mr. Ransome has taken to writing pieces on just how ineffectual any kind of social policy is, and why your Mother, in particular, is a deranged fruitbat with a brain the size of a Bismarck Herring. Considering that the Neo-Catholic Church really espouses no particular politic either way this has come as a shock to at least one member of the clergy, who was surprised that there were still elections going on.

Hieronymus' views can be summarised as 'The world is a collection of processes, none of which have any particular assigned purpose, and thus the world is working out as the processes dictate, which is neither good nor bad;' at least this is the view he put forward in 'Drinking With Children: Gin for the Under Fives as a Social Experiment.' As far as I can gather, having had to type up most of it, his argument is that the world isn't mean to function in any particular way; it's just meant to be. If there is no purpose to existence other than to exist then you really can only pass judgement over existence if you import an idea of how things are meant to work, and that is a suspicious move (apparently). He calls the view that the world isn't working out as 'middle-class angst,' claiming that it is symptomatic of the middle-classes to be brought up believing in things working out for the best and then being shocked when the world doesn't provide it without large-scale help.

Frankly, I can't help but be bemused by it; he seems to be espousing a kind of middle-class angst about middle-class angst (and if you buy my bemusement then I'm showing some degree of middle-class angst about middle-class angst about middle-class angst; this could go on ad nauseam)...

Which is why I plan to retire from my working life and returned to the onerous responsibility of keeping Morthos away from the torture cages and puppy farms. I'll miss the steady pay check and the playful punching of the groin that my employer delivered, as well as not being able to engage in the jabbing of his kidneys on a daily basis, a regret I will just have to bear.

But it does have the immediate benefit in that I will not need to worry, unduly or at all, about the pros and cons of the modern lifestyle and the invasive nature of the media. No longer will I need to read social commentary or be made aware that certain things are just not done. Piqued self-interest always comes before the Empire's fall and I want to be holidaying elsewhere when that happens, preferably in a bunker.

Ah, there comes the local constabulary; they'll want to know what exactly I've been covering up with this policeman's helmet.

Ta ra.