Archive for October, 2006

Bush plays Chess

Thursday, October 19th, 2006

“He reminds me of one of those guys at the gym who plays about 40 chess boards at once.” — Tony Snow describing his boss, George W Bush.

I am reminded of an episode of the Simpsons, the one where school is cancelled due to a teacher’s strike. Bart goes from chess table to table, moving a chess piece, a wry reference to a scene from “Searching for Bobby Fisher”. A man yells out “Hey! This kid’s playing fthree games of chess at once!” This is followed by each of the competitors moving a piece, with “Check Mate!” “Check Mate!” “Check Mate!” Bart says “Damned”.

Questions

Wednesday, October 18th, 2006

Is Larry Craig gay?

Does the United States really own all of space?

Electorally speaking, is this 1994, 1946, or 1842?

Everyone knows 1994 and a few well-heeled political experts know 1946 (and may even figure out what those repurcussions may be for 2006), but Did I just pull the year 1842 out of my butt?

How Else to Read Donald Duck

Tuesday, October 17th, 2006

From Carl Barks and the Disney Comic Book: Unmasking the Myth of Modernity, by Thom Andrae…

In the 1940s and early 1950s, Barks had worked relatively free of editorial control. He had not received a list of specific taboos, but seven years of training at the Disney Studio and a habit of being “tooth chatteringly careful” about what he wrote gave him an idea of the limits within which he could work. However, more censorship occurred during the 1950s than in any other period: three of Barks’s complete stories were banned, and others were significantly altered. The new mood of restrictiveness surfaced with a vengence when “The Golden Apples”, a ten page Donald Duck story that was to appear in September 1952, was scrapped. Although the art for the story has vanished, Barks remembered it being a modern version of the myth of Atlanta and the golden apples. Barks explained, “I can only recall that I had Daisy quite angry with Donald because he was trying to win the hand, I guess, of this queen of the apples festival. Daisy was so jealous that she was throwing things at Donald and was not acting lady-like. The was the only excuse they ever gave me for cutting it.” Since Barks cast her as a volatile termagant, Daisy had often before acted unladylike, throwing things at Donald in fits of rage, but the idealogy of domesticity imposed on women in the 1950s demanded a more sedate image.

Anything with a hint of sexuality, however arcane, was taboo. In the “The Golden Fleecing” (US #12, 1956), Scrooge searches for the legendary golden fleece but is kidnapped by two Arab-looking traders who turn out to be Harpies in disguise. “I almost had to eat those 32 pages of drawing,” Barks complained. “It seems that Harpy or Harpie is an obscure nickname for a streetwalker. I managed to save the story by renaming the old girls “LARKIES.” […]

The more timorous atmosphere of the 1950s made a return to earlier motifs difficult. When he attempted to recapture some of the Gothic aura of earlier stories in “Trick or Treat” (1952), Barks again experienced censorship problems. Likewise, Barks’s return to stories featuring clashes between Donald and the nephews that had been de rigueur in the 1940s were now considered impermissible. In February 1955 he recycled a plot from the preceeding decade involving rivalry between Donald and his nephews. When he wrote a conflict plog for the the third time in the July 1956 issue, Barks’s editor, Alice Cobb, sent him a letter from a mother “which we feel is fair criticism”. In addition, “we usually use ‘quiet’instead of ‘shut up!'” Barks sent back a vitrolic reply.

[Long angry and sarcastic letter, key paragraph being:]

From now on you will see changed stories coming from this former breeding place of vice. You will see stories that will cause Ruth Downing to write another letter to say that she just lvoes the Donald Ducks. For every time she reads one to her little nose-picking crybaby, he goes to sleep in the middle of the second page.

Graffiti Watch

Monday, October 16th, 2006

At a bus stop near a Fred Meyers, I note the following scrawled to the bench:

“It’s All About God People”.

My reaction is something to the effect of “There are God People running around? How scary!”

In a public restroom I advise you to stay away from unless you really need it near this graffiti, I note this graffiti conversation:

“God is not Dead People.”

AND: “Of course God is not Zombies, Dummy.”

I have not and probably will not check to see whether the “God People” and the “Dead People” are in the same handwriting. They’re probably in the process of being scrubbed away anyways.

Two stories fixed by minor corrections

Monday, October 16th, 2006

Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has disputed media accounts that said he hid in a closet to avoid anti-Republican protesters during a visit to Pittsburgh last week.

Bush encountered protesters Oct. 6 while on his way to a fund-raising event for Republican Sen. Rick Santorum at Pittsburgh’s exclusive Duquesne Club.

Curiously, those media accounts seemed to focus more on the “closet” aspect of the story than on the behavior of the unruly, obscenity-shouting mob. The stories mentioned prominently that Bush sought “refuge in a subway station supply closet.”

Bush said it was actually a boiler room.

Maybe Jeb Bush hid in a closet, maybe he hid in a boiler room. If he did indeed hide in a boiler room, this is a case of what happens when a phrase becomes a well-known euphemism for something that would offend a large part of your base — “in the closet” as per “secretly gay”.

This is Newsmax, a publication that once published an account of a Subway sign that said “THINK OUTSIDE THE UN” and recorded it as perhaps a political statement by those Subway franchisers.

Jimmy Carter, during his presidency, once found himself making some diplomatic dealings with an unsavory world leader — as per the normal course of events — (perhaps the Soviet Union, perhaps an oil rich nation — I don’t remember). It was raining. He was forbidden from opening an umbrella, which is a practical thing to do in such circumstances. But the umbrella is the symbol for Neville Chamberlain, thus… Jimmy Carter had to get all wet in the rain.
………

Upset by the war in Iraq, Julia Wilson vented her frustrations with President Bush last spring on her MySpace.com page.

She posted a picture of the president, scrawled “Kill Bush” across the top and drew a dagger stabbing his outstretched hand. She replaced the page last spring after learning in her eighth-grade history class that such threats are a federal offense.

Too late.

Federal authorities had found the page and placed her on their checklist. They finally reached her this week in her molecular biology class.

The 14-year-old freshman at Sacramento’s McClatchy High School was taken out of class Wednesday and questioned for about 15 minutes by two Secret Service agents. The incident has upset her parents, who said the agents should have included them when they questioned their daughter.

I threatened Bill Clinton — kind of sort of but not really — for about 3 hours on my website. (see here, re “On the Death of Paul deParrie). But that’s a small part of that story.

The problem with this advice

“BUSH CAN SUCK MY FUCKING DICK!!”
See, you angsty teenaged fucks? That’s how you go about doing it. You can tell him to suck your dick, or eat shit, or to sniff your arsehole. You generate the same emotional effect as you would by threatening to kill him, but without the FBI agents knocking on your door.

is that the perpetrator is a girl. I suppose she can still do it, suggesting a “chick with dick” and thus doubling the humor in a sort of esoteric manner, but I think that would be too obscure and confusing. Would “Bush can lick my vagina” work? I do not know. It’s worth a try, I suppose.