Too Many Books!

There are too many damn books to read. I was so proud of my self lately because I havn't bought any books in like a week and a half and I didn't plan on buying any, and instead I would read some of the others that I have already. But today I walked into the BookStop, just because I was there, and I ended up finding Downsize This (Michael Moore) and the classic Manufacturing Consent. Tsk, tsk. I'm buying more books than I can read and my stack of unread books is growing. It's sad. It's hard to keep up.

TSW Shirt Anyone?

I have an idea for a cool t-shirt. It will be all 9-11 looking, but really, it won't actually be about 9-11. It will have a picture of the Triangle Shirt Waist building on fire (instead of the WTC buildings) and it will say something like "we remember NYC 1911", instead of "911". The first '1' on "1911" could be in a different color or something, for good measure. Eh? Eh? I doubt many people would get the joke, or if they did, purchase the shirt. But if you would buy one if I made one, comment that you would. If I get 5 people, I'll make it.

PS: Look at this gross picture of toe fungus... if you dare.

Pictures of Me

I just stumbled upon these two pictures of me at the "Deadmary" website.
This picture looks like it was taken right near the Woodstock festival in the hippie days... but it really wasn't. It was taken a few months ago... not near the Woodstock festival.
This picture also has a cigar in it. Which is not a prop for the picture by the way. This is actually how the specimen of Grayson acts in his natural environment. Actually, the only time I smoke "cigars" is when I am in Rio Rancho and my band takes a smoking break. Sometimes I get bored and refry a cigar, such as in these pictures. I was just about to leave in this picture, that's why I have Ian's copy of "Dawn of the Dead" in my hand. Then Tom's girlfriend came out of the house with a camera and BAM! she took some pictures. I don't like those cheap cigars anymore, so that is probably the last time you will see me with one, which is unfortunate, because they make me look cool.

Fuck World Trade! Review! MOVE!

I've been listening to Fuck World Trade by the good Leftover Crack a lot lately. It is a pretty good album. Almost every song is of excellent quality. There are even two songs about killing cops. Personally, I don't believe in killing cops, because so many are decent people, but I do believe in destroying the police; the corporate protection institution as a whole. I think that's where they are coming from. Also, they have a song about the M.O.V.E. radical black group. Now there were some fucked up police in THAT incident.
For those of you who don't know anything about it, in 1978 nine members of the radical group were somehow sentanced to life for the result of one bullet that killed a cop in a standoff. How do 9 people get sentenced for the result of one bullet without even any evidence convicting any of them? Well, if that wasn't enough, in 1985 the police force of Philadelphia, now under Mayor Goode, dropped a bomb on the radicals' home after a 24 hour standoff. The fire department was forbidden from putting out the fire and the police had their guns trained on the exits of the home ready to fire. The police shot off thousands of rounds of ammunition and something like 60 houses were burnt to nothing before the fire department was able to put out the fire. No police were ever convicted of anything. I love the mayor's description of his strategy: "perfect, except for the fire". Of course, all this information is purely from memory, so minor details could be wrong, but I suggest reading up on it yourselves.
Clearly, you can understand Leftover Crack's motto of "Kill Cops, Because Cops Kill". I know that I'd shoot off a round or two if the city made WAR on my fucking HOME. The "Operation MOVE" song is a really good song and has an awesome violin buildup that really makes you feel the situation somehow. I'd written a song about the MOVE along time ago, but I think I lost it in some notebook that ended up getting trashed. Also, Howard Zinn narrates a documentary on the MOVE incidents. I really want to see that, but it's only in super underground, big city, theatres. The site for that is www.movefilm.com.
I had already heard about half the songs on the cd from either bootleg recordings (from the Live In Reading cd) or from different 7"s such as "Rock the 40oz".
The album has an awesome name/cover art (of which I have a poster in my room of) that features the twin towers burning and the president and other republicans happy and helping burn it down. World Trade is a death machine, as the cd suggests. This cd is excellent in terms of making you want to destroy things. On par with RATM in that sense. I saw an article about how chain stores (of course) refuse to carry this cd because of the artwork. That article is here.

Movie Review: Collateral (new)

Collateral is better than the trailers make it look. It is somewhat of one of those non-believable action movies, but it's better than most of them. I thought the directing/cinematography was way better than most action-type movies and this made it a much better movie already. The plot was also pretty good as well. It is about this guy who murders people by having a cab driver drive him to the places where he kills the people (there is also this same idea in this book by Hubert S. Selby called Waiting Period... I wonder if that's where they got the idea). The movie gets better because it has this big gang conspiracy thing that builds up and ties together... don't worry, I'm not giving anything away because you pretty much learn that from the start, but you just don't know how it ties together... Well, at least from what I remember, I saw it a few weeks ago. This movie probably deserves 4 stars.
4 stars

Movie Review: White Oleander

I'd never heard of White Oleander until a few days ago when I saw it on HBO. Apparently, it's somewhat of a popular movie, because everybody I ask has heard of it. Well, I watched it and I thought it was good. It's like a "coming of age" movie, but it's not a comedy. It's more of a drama about this girl and her relationship with her mom who is in prison for murder. The girl is thrown around from foster home to foster home and a lot of bad things happen to her. It's kind of a sad movie in some ways, but it is pretty good. I recommend seeing it if it sounds interesting to you.
4 stars

MK-ULTRA

Remember the classic SNES/64 game, Mortal Kombat Trilogy? Well, now there are much better graphic systems such as the PS2 and Mortal Kombat can be greatly enhanced by this. The old game is great, better than the new "Deadly Alliance", but it would be awesome if they made a "trilogy"-esque game for the PS2. I even have a name for this new game: Mortal Kombat Ultra, or, MK-ULTRA. It will attract video game fans and hippies alike.

Coincidence: Corporate Hands

OK. First of all, I should say I've been on some sort of corporation-themed books binge lately (the Corporation, No Logo, and now Corporateering). Awhile ago, I had the idea for a t-shirt design that showed how the two parties are controlled by the same organizations (corporations). The picture would be of these two hands with strings coming down from them and one hand would control the elephant and one would control the donkey. At the bottom it would say "Enjoy the show!". So today in my art class I sketched that out on paper. Then, this evening, I walked down to the used book store a couple blocks from my house (Bookstop) and I saw a book I'd never seen before "Corporateering". The cover had a picture of a hand with one of those wooden plus ( + ) signs that has the strings coming down. The hand had a cigar and a diamond ring, which mine lacks. Also, mine didn't have the wooden plus sign... the strings were kind of just tied onto the fingers for some reason, but I did think of putting some bling bling on one of the hands. Aaanyways, in the picture on the book cover, all you see is one hand and you don't see where the strings go, but I still think it was pretty crazy that I was just drawing something so close to that today. Plus, I'd never even heard of the book before, but I bought it.

He could still run...

On the Olympics TV thing, some announcer said that a runner got in a motorcycle accident. "He could still run, but his training was in question" the announcer said. What the hell does that mean? What kind of training IS there besides running? The training for track is this "here, go out and run a lot, tomorrow there is some running on the schedule. Maybe on friday we will spice it up and let you run in place for a little bit, but then its back to training you to run around more".

Movie Review: Bourne Supremacy (new)

First off, I need to say that I have never seen the Bourne Identity, so the Bourne Supremacy is probably different to me than it would be to somebody who saw the first one. I will explain the whole plot of the Bourne Supremacy: Matt Damon is running and hiding from the CIA which is trying to catch him because they think he killed some people. That is the whole plot. It was an amazingly simple plot, not to mention the fact that that is the formula for 1 out of every 20 hollywood movies. The directing and everything I didn't have a problem with. The fact that it felt like I have already seen this movie about 15 times in other forms (not including all of the James Bond movies) bored me a bit. My parents really liked it though, so maybe you will. Also, keep in mind that I havn't seen the first one, and maybe there is some amazing piece of information that I don't know that would have made the movie perfect... but I doubt it.
I will not rate it since I haven't seen the original.

Strongbad Zone Shirt

The StrongBad Zone shirt is cool. You shall spend your money to buy it for me.

Idiot 'Liberals'!

I found this "liberal clothing" website. In ACTUALITY, it is ridiculous. It has a bunch of blind sighted contradictions and even has a whole section to bash on one of the few actually real liberals we have, Nader. The site calls itself liberal, yet in the John Kerry section among countless stickers proclaiming "so and so's for Kerry" it has a sticker that says "Conservatives For John Kerry". That sounds pretty fucking liberal to me. Then, later, it has a sticker that says something like "Register Green. Vote Kerry". You know what would be closer to the truth? "Register Republican, Vote Kerry." Low and behold, there is actually a sticker you can buy on the site that says "Republicans For Kerry". And like I said, there is a whole section devoted to hating Ralph Nader. There are stickers like "Ralph Nader for President... of Indonesia!". What a clever sticker. Oh wait, Nader would be a much needed improvement to Indonesia, seeing as how the Democrats don't seem to give a shit about human rights and the sweatshops contracted by Nike and the other American corporate land rappists. Hey, maybe we should give Kerry a chance. I bet he'll change things like that and help the world... oh, what's that? His campaign is funded by these same criminal corporations?

Naughty Nader!

Ralph Nader has accepted money from the Republican party which wants to see some of the Democrat votes "stolen". How terrible!... oh wait, this doesn't change Nader's platform at all and simply helps counter the damage done to Nader by the Democrats and their various tricks. It sounds like a bad thing to accept money from the conservatives and corporate elite... but then again, that's what Michael Moore does when he makes his movies on major corporate productions. The thing is that it doesn't CHANGE what he says in the movies. It's the same thing, yet nobody seems to have a problem with Moore. It is also the same when Rage Against The Machine produced their obstensibly socialist marxist records on a Sony record label. People did have a problem with that, though. I never did, but some people did. Then Tom Morello summed up what some of us already had figured out: Rage Against the Machine sold fourteen million records of totally subversive revolutionary propaganda. The reason why is that the albums were released on Sony and got that sort of distribution.
I think people should worry less about the fact that the Republicans gave Nader donations (ignoring the fact that the Democrats have consistantly tried to sabatoge the man) and more about the fact that the Democratic party is funded and controlled by the same big-wig multi-national corporations that fund and control the Republican party. Sorry for the interuption. Please, continue enjoying the puppet show 2004.

What Is George Talking About?

OK, could someone please explain to me what the hell our president is talking about in his commercial? He says "I can't imagine the great agony of a mom or a dad having to make the decision about which child to pick up first on September 11"... actually, I think I just figured it out. Maybe he is saying picking them up from school (assuming that they don't go to the same school?). Hey, I am an only child and I wasn't picked up on 9/11! What's the deal? My parents had no great agony making the decision of who to pick up, they never even thought about it! And why would they? Why would you need to pick up your children when something happens that has nothing to do with their school or anything they are involved in. Maybe that's not it at all. Maybe he is saying which one to pick up as in physically. Perhaps, which one to hold in their laps and explain to them the wonders of racism and eurocentrism and how other nations are bad and western nations are good, so good that the bad nations get SO jealous that a few of them decided to go on suicide missions to attack our country just to get their message across: "hey, we are jealous of you! watch how we risk our lives and kill ourselves in order to show you how jealous we are."........ Maybe that's what George was talking about in the commercial. Which child to put in your lap first and explain how simple global conflicts are. Either way, the fact remains that George Bush is a twat. I should add that John Kerry is a twat as well, but at least in John Kerry's commercials you can understand what the fuck is going on and don't have to ponder them for like 13 minutes only to come to the conclusion that our president is a twat and there is no point in listening to him in the first place.

T-Shirts

I've taken up the responsibility of making cheap t-shirts for the world to buy. The company name is Ruminant Clothing and I should call it "a non-profit organization" because there sure as hell isn't any profit. Maybe eventually I will make some sort of profit, but I have a lot of money to make before all my supplies "pay for themselves". It's probably worth it once I get things going. Today I just got some new paints in the mail and a new screen. I already had paints and a screen, but I found out there were better kinds for printing onto dark colored shirts. Anyways, this should be good and people should buy the shirts. I already .have some shirts made of two different designs if anybody wants to buy one. They are both white ink on black shirts and I have a few different sizes. If you like the cow one, you should get it soon because I only have like 3 or so made and I'm not printing any more. Here are the two designs. Click em:
The Cow One
The Flag One

I plan on making many more hella tyte t-shirts and a website for them.

Pigeon Kam

This is Pigeon Kam
it is very insightfull

Movie Review: PCU

PCU is another one of those Animal House type knockoffs. This perticular one is about this college that is really politically correct and all the different groups always protest eachother. One perticular group doesn't care about any of the PC type things, but they end up offending all the other groups. This group has to raise 7$K in one night in order to keep their house, so they plan on having a party, but there is no way for them to have all the different groups come without fighting eachother. Overall, it's a pretty mediocre movie and I don't encourage seeing it or not seeing it. It's like one of those movies that's alright if you are tired and have the day off and are bored and are half paying attention to it. It has David Spade, but more importantly it has George Clinton.
2 1/2 stars

Rock, Paper, Saddam

This site is pretty funny. I reccomend going to it, old school.
Rock, Paper, Saddam

Book Review: Savage Nation

Review of The Savage Nation, by Michael Savage. This is my review I put on the Amazon.com website.

First of all, this book provides absolutely no notes, stats, or any type of documentation to back up anything he says. Believing almost anything in this book is to forget an AWFUL lot of history. On top of that, there are COUNTLESS contradictions in the book. Especially when he proclaims that he loves the freedoms of this country (which he proclaims often) and then two pages later he says that radicals who oppose the war should be locked away at war time for national security reasons! another example is when he talks about how he hates "hate-free zones" because he says that it's "his right to hate who he wants"... two pages later he says "look what terrorist nations have accomplished. Racism. Sexism. Hatred. Religious intolerence." then he goes on to bash Islam.
The book reeks of Stalinist-type propaganda:
"They come to kill us. They come to poison your daughter's lunchbox. They come to fly planes into buildings. These snakes pretend to be one of us. They might blend in as they await their orders to stab America in the back."
Savage is ostensibly racist and doesn't try to hide it. He even has a section of his book that celebrates the "fact" that "most important and consequential inventions have come almost exclusively from white males". Again, this overlooks an AWFUL lot of history.
He is critisizes Americans of not racial profiling enough. It's amusing when he speaks of middle-eastern nations: "We are facing a battle of civilization versus one-thousand years of darkness." Could he be MORE eurocentric? This is also amusing because scientists have proved that civilization CAME from that area of the world (the fertile crescent)! In refering to Bagdad, he proclaims that "one American child is worth more than your entire, rotten, stinkin city".
But there is more ignorance! Savage LOVES to use "clever" sayings on almost every page of this book. One example is "Commu-Nazis". This is especially funny because using this term requires forgetting all knowledge in the feilds of nazism and communism. Nazi fascism is the extreme OPPOSITE of Soviet communism. In fact the Soviet Union considered Hitler's fascist Germany even more of an enemy than America did! Savage either ignores the fact that Russia and America allied together in fighting Germany, or he just doesn't know much about what he is talking about... I assume the latter.
The funniest part of the Savage Nation is probably when he talks about Christianity and he states the "problems" with relying on science: "I'd have to say most of the scientists that I have met were amoral." But it gets funnier when he says that you need a lot of religion to keep a society working because with only science, people would have no morals. "science is not conerned with right or wrong. Take the Germans. For the first half of the twentieth century, the Germans had the most advanced society on the earth at the time. They were great scientists. They also gave us death camps."
Conclusion: Michael Savage is an idiot. Germany had Christians as well and Hitler even tried to appeal to many of them. A quote from Hitler's 'Mein Kampf': "I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord"
Clearly Nazi Germany needed MORE religion... And what about the KKK? They probably needed more religion too. How about the Islamic fundamentalists? They probably just aren't religious enough!
The book is full of amazing examples of ignorance such as this. I still have much more to critisize about this book, but I'm going to stop about here.
A section of the book is called "how to pick up liberal women". Savage says: "Here's how it works. Go to a bookstore. That's the place where most liberal women congregate, for reasons unknown. I don't know why books are associated with liberalism, but they are."
Maybe Savage should spend more time at bookstores looking for BOOKS, not women.

Doh!

If somebody isn't answering you, be careful...

00:53:51 punkorastropunk: hey, slutdick, why don't you answer me
00:54:22 dmbdrummer11: slutdick is not here...just DAD of slutdick....MAYNARD
00:55:43 punkorastropunk: hey, i dont know why he always makes up weird nicknames for himself. i just go along with em tho


luckily I quickly fixed the sitution with a clever ploy

Paranormal Book Found!

The book is called "Unexplained Mysteries of the 20th Century". I've seen it before, but I guess I didn't look close enough in it to realize that it was the one that I remember from my childhood. I looked in it and saw some pictures that I remembered, but they aren't really that scary now that I'm older. There is a picture of these two faces following a boat in the water, which is interesting, but the scariest one to me today is probably this one of this woman sitting in the grass. It's a completely normal picture, but it says she is dead, I don't know why that one scares me the most. I also remember that one from when I was a kid. You should check out the book when you are in a bookstore next, they have it just about anywhere. I saw it at Birdsong used books for $7 also.

Movie Review: Stink Of Flesh (new)

The Stink Of Flesh is a locally made, low budget zombie movie. I guess they only showed it for TWO nights at the Guild. It was packed and sold out on both nights, on both showings per night (I think). When I saw it, there was this drunk girl that was REALLY annoying who kept on talking about chickens and trying to make jokes all loud that weren't funny at all. Like in Seinfeld (see: "that's GOT to hurt!").
The movie was pretty weird. It was about this kinky couple who looked for men who were still alive so the wife could screw them and the husband would watch. Some scenes were.... uncalled for. But overall, it wasn't bad. Also, there was this one lady who had a sister who was built onto her body... and it wasn't like a real person, it was like this weird ass clay thing... I didn't really understand what was going on for awhile... and it never explained it... but aside from that, it was a pretty cool movie. It was excessively violent too. I'm not going to rate it, because it's not really an officially produced movie, so I can't put it up to official movie standards. But it was interesting.

Movie Review: Manchurian Canidate 04' (new)

I havn't seen the original Manchurian Canidate, so don't expect me to compare the two. This one was alright, I guess. I wouldn't recommend seeing it, but it wasn't something I hated either. It was about an election in which this corporation, Manchurian Global, was trying to steal and control the president with mind control. They injected these weird bugs into people's shoulders to control them. It's funny that people would be all scared and appaled if that happened in reality, but they seem to have no problem with the fact that it already does happen; the difference is that instead of injecting them with bugs, the corporations just give the politicians lots of money and get what they want that way. But at least there isn't mind control!
3 stars

Movie Review: Elephant

Jessie Abbot told me to see Elephant and I heard about it a few other times after that. So today I watched it. I was dissappointed. It is an indy movie about a school shooting, which sounds good on paper, but when they made this movie it wasn't very good in my opinion. First of all, most of the movie had nothing to do with anything... and not in a GOOD David Linklater type way either, it was random boring stuff that kids do. For example the camera made you watch as a student went through the whole process of developing film and it showed another kid play the whole Fur Elise (sp?) song on the piano... the whole thing! It was interesting at first how the director used really long takes that could be even 10 minutes long at times. That got boring afterawhile because the plot was really boring and nothing was happening. All this put together makes a very slow boring movie to watch. I could have gone out to the store and came back and not missed anything important or interesting at all. Also, the movie shows you the perspective of a bunch of different kids, so when they interact you are forced to watch the interaction take place over and over and over again from different views. I think they went a little overboard with their "independant techniques", but then again, it probably wouldn't have mattered if the plot was good... which it wasn't. Like I said, it had nothing to do with anything until about the last 20 minutes. Another thing that annoyed me was all the different examples of bad acting. On top of that, a lot of the things they said and did weren't realistic at all. There were a bunch of kids that didn't even really mind there being a school shooting it seemed like, they just stood around taking their time leaving and such. Especially this one jock type kid who goes around looking for the shooters. What the hell? Nobody would do that! He was all non-chalent about seeing dead bodies on the ground as well. There was also a ridiculous scene in which the two shooters were shooting off some rounds in their garage, and the gun shots were so incredibly fake. There was this big blast and it looked really cheesy. I don't care if it was low-budjet or anything, they should have never used those weird cheesy gun effects. As if all this wasn't enough, there are no, I repeat NO elephants in the whole movie! That was the final straw for me. I recommend not seeing this movie.
2 1/2 stars

Terrorism Alert!

Apparently, Washington has come across some "strikingly alarming" evidence for a terrorist attack on America. Wait, on America, or on certain American institutions that go against everything that Americans should stand for (see: democracy)? Indeed, two of the main targets for attack are the IMF and World Bank. I think we should all hope and pray (if you are into that) that nobody gets hurt and the buildings are evacuated before the attacks; but it is also important to pray that those two buildings are bombed to hell. Talk about destroying terrorist bases.

Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers told Congress in 1995 that, for every $1 that the U.S. spent on the World Bank, it got back $1.30 in contracts for U.S. corporations.
Summers called this "enlightened self-interest." He should have called it extortion.

A few Terrorist Activities of the WB and IMF (random order):
1. the number of people in the world living on $1 a day increased to 1.3 billion as a result of the East Asian financial crash of 1997-98--and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) austerity policies that followed
2. In South Korea, a country whose income was approaching European levels, unemployment skyrocketed from approximately 3 percent to 10 percent
3. In Indonesia, the worst hit country, poverty rates rose from an official level of 11 percent before the crisis to 40 to 60 percent in varying estimates. (hey, at least we can wear Nike shoes! that probably evens things out)
4. The state of Orissa, in eastern India, received a $350 million loan from the Bank in 1996 to restructure its electricity industry. But the condition was privatization of the state electricity board, which was taken over by the U.S.-based power company AES in mid-1999 for $10 million.
After privatization, power rates in Orissa jumped by 500 percent--despite the fact that only 20 percent of households could afford power when the industry was run by the state.
5. In October 1999, Orissa was hit by devastating cyclones that killed thousands and made millions homeless. Even as the state government was struggling to cope with the disaster, Dennis Bakke, the chief executive of AES, demanded to be paid $60 million for the cost of repairs to the electricity system.
6. Since its creation, one out of every four trade disputes that came before the WTO involved one country challenging another’s laws on health, safety or the environment. In each case, the WTO has ruled against such regulations--on the grounds that they amounted to an illegal trade barrier and had to be removed or modified.
7. Indonesia’s Suharto–the vicious tyrant who ruled for four decades until he was toppled in 1998–was especially notorious for funneling money to himself and his family. But the World Bank had nothing but praise for Indonesia under Suharto.

It only took a few minutes of searching and reading online to find these examples. There are many more if you actually go out and read a book on them, such as (as I have mentioned before) Greg Palast's The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.

FIGHT TERRORISM, FIGHT THE WORLD BANK AND IMF!

Movie Review: Corporation (new)

I saw the Corporation at the Guild movie theatre a couple of blocks from my house tonight. The movie was very interesting and well made. It is a documentary on "the corporation" in general. Countless interviews are displayed in the documentary, in fact, that's what about half of the movie was. The interviewees range from various authors, such as the one of No Logo*, to Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, to various corporate CEOs. I especially liked the CEO of the largest carpet manufactuer (I can't remember the name of him or the corporation), I agreed with just about everything he said, I would never expect some one like him to be a big time CEO. The Corporation evaluates corporations as if they were people (as they claim to be to obtain certain rights) and comes to the conclusion that they would be diagnosed as medically pyshopathic.
A lot of the movie focused on another problem that stems from the problem of corporate America; milk. Milk isn't bad, but the chemicals that are given to cows are. The movie showed how the American FDA had no problems with the chemicals which ended up doing great harm to cows and resulting in puss coming out of their utters, along with milk. Canada on the other hand, never accepted the chemicals as decent and banned their use from the begining.
There are dozens of dozens of examples of this type of corporate reign that goes unaccounted for. Many examples are in the movie, but the overall problem with corporations would take many massive book volumes to cover and not just this one 2:30 hour movie. The movie did do a great job in addressing a wide array of corporate abuse from oppressive dictatorships in other countries (funded by US tax money for the sheer purpose of protecting corporate interests in the countries) to pollution and sweatshop labor. Also, this movie is a great source of footage of corporate caused mutations, such as a child with backward feet and a kid born with eye sockets... but no eyes.
FEAR the CORPORATION
and see this movie (ends August 5th)

*of which I plan on reading soon. Kevin got the book awhile ago, I looked at it and it looked very interesting.