Zombie Lapdance

now if we take the political truism: "there could be no rebellion without darth vader" and extend it to the current political climate, the person who plays the role of darth vader is too obvious to mention.

the question then becomes, is barack obama a luke skywalker figure, and does his character arc between idealistic farmboy to cold-eyed jedi knight peak before or after the iowa caucus?

is hillary clinton a princess leia or a grand moff tarkin?

is john edwards more like biggs or wedge antilles? which is to say is he the eternal wingman or doomed to go down in flames?

and is kucinich an admiral akbar, or is that a mere physical resemblance.

discuss.

if you’re ever in austin, and it’s after 2am, you’re drunk, and you have access to cable, check out public access. if you’re lucky, and they haven’t been cancelled again, you might catch the PuppeTose puppet call-in show. you might not be in the proper mood for it now, but you would be if the previous conditions applied.

the same team is behind the super-brilliant puppet-apocalypse barbarians-and-mutants movie called VALLEY OF THE ROBOTS. i saw this screened at a local austin nightclub. as i recall, i was the only one there.

and if you’ve got 12 minutes to spare and you want as much obscenity as the human metabolism can stomach, checkout the PuppeTose sitcom PUPPETOSE STREET.

http://i14.tinypic.com/52f8i0o.jpg

i tried this with my "you might be a zombie if" t-shirt.

so, back in a review i did of a sanjay dutt film, i snidely mentioned that his fight scenes remind me that india doesn’t have an indiginous martial arts tradition. well, it turns out that i’m an ignorant prick.

india has a traditional wrestling style called pehlwani , which was apparently derived from the ancient vedic text martial combat system called "mallayuddha" and possibly persian fighting systems.

pehlwani is practiced in pits of milked sand. yes, sand and milk. now THAT’S macho.

although india seems to have a fairly healthy pehlwani community, albeit tainted by the influences of east asian martial arts and american professional wrestling, pakistan is having trouble keeping the tradition alive according to this BBC article.

and there’s a bunch more indian martial arts that have a wikipedia presence, but possibly not a lot else.

also if you have a lot of time on your hands you should check out the sikhipedia which is superior to the wikipedia because it’s only sikh related articles.

i think the internet should be exclusively devoted to this subject.

a year or so ago i found out that most of the great apes can inter-breed and produce viable and sometimes fertile offspring. being a normal guy i immediately wondered, does that include us? was lovecraft right? if people could cross-breed with apes, then you can be damn sure there would be a buncha ape-men running around out there.

according to a number of blogs and one or two moderately reputable sources, the russians have already tried to do this:
http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=2434192005

more importantly, someone has already tried to file a patent for humanzees, and there is at least one discussion group of animal-rights activists who want to interbreed chimps and humans in order to further their cause, in much the same way that people bomb abortion clinics to further the cause of life.

[  Currently: Eating kolaches like a madman ]
it’s been a while since i’ve blogged. since my last entry i’ve had a computer die and had a break in internet service. it’s been a little like being dead.

speaking of dead, i would like to note the passing of mr. vonnegut. i always thought of him as one the best of us, a cheesy sci-fi writer who convinced the world that everything he wrote was a metaphor. i remember arguing with my entire high-school lit class that slaughter house five was a science fiction novel. the teacher was particularly condescending when she said that the time travel was just a delusion. my co-worker johnny motard refuted that neatly when he said "if the time travel’s not real then the book’s no fun at all."

i had one other vivid moment related to vonnegut. i was standing in line at the 7-11, with a pair of big bite hotdogs (two for a dollar), and there was a flatscreen monitor above the cash register facing out toward the customers. it was a crass tactic to feed consumers more advertising. in the lull between a nike commercial and an advertisement for big bite hotdogs, the flatscreen went black, and in tiny, white print displayed the following text:

"Be careful who you pretend to be. Because you are who you pretend to be."
-Kurt Vonnegut

it was the last place in the world that i would have expected a self-reflective fugue. but there it was. i think kurt would have appreciated it.

i just got a link to an ebay sale from sarina brewer of the minnesota association of rogue taxidermists(MART). she’s putting up some of her personal collection of interesting items, such as this biological specimen of a pig with an external brain:

i kinda was intrigued by this woman for a while, at least enough to give her website my email address. it’s just the idea of a beautiful woman who makes art out of dead things.

yeah, dr.von hagen is an ugly freak compared to this. of course nothing he did was quite as disturbing as this cat:

i’m also a big fan of MART co-founder scott, who’s into conceptual dioramas and sight gags such as this:

not only is this avant garde art, but it’s for sale. and just in time for valentines day!

here are some of the hotdog opportunities one might find in austin’s way over-hyped entertainment district.

the "best wurst" stand distinguishes itself as having the most stomach-turning pun for any business that’s not a hairdressers. but the food is far from stomach-turning. the all-beef wurst isn’t really a hotdog, it’s almost unfair to classify it as that. it’s more like a meat pipe, almost like a kielbasa. when you bite into it the sausage casing pops and squirts a flood of meaty juice across your tongue. the sourcraut nicely sets off the sweatly spicy wurst. two stands now, one at 6th and san ,which will have a half-block line of drunken and belligerant real-world castmembers, and one at emos.
Best Wurst: Grade A-

casino el camino is one of the last bars on 6th street that someone not wearing a shiny-shirt would bother visiting. there’s pool on the top level, weird 70s movies on the TVs, and a fry-cook kitchen in back next to the men’s room. no matter how much money you slip in the tip-jar the fry cooks will still be insanely inneffient and slow. by the time you hear the garbled shout of your name, you will have finished your first shiner and be halfway through the second, thereby allowing you to enjoy your greasy bar food all the more. by the time i got this hotdog ensemble, i was ahead of the curve on the shiner consumption so i completely forgot what it was called. i dunno, it had four words and one of them was "tommy" for some unexplained reason. this hotdog is the barfood version of that espresso drink that every independant coffeshop has, you know, the one with four shots of espresso and a wad of chocolate syrup with the incongruously macho name, like "kevorkian" or "crowbar". if you could see through the forest of bacon strips on this hotdog you would still have to peer through the slab of cheddar before you could see the two super-greasy pork dogs laid end-to-end. the service was terrible, the condiments limited, and the actual food quality mediocre, but by god there was a lot of it.
Casino El Camino: Grade B+

the hotdog king has an RV kitchen several times larger than a hotdog stand really needs to be. i ordered the "chicago dog" and was surprised to find that it was not only a foot long, but came with none of the cornicopia of condiments that one would normally associate with a chicago dog. the meat though was a delicious kosher beef and the bun was a much higher quality than the notoriously soggy chicago dogs normally merit. i would go so far as to say that the hotdog king’s buns were sourdough-esque.
on red river next to the red-eyed fly.
Hotdog King: Grade B

here’s a whirlwind tour of everything i haven’t been blogging about over the holidays:

over the holiday i wandered through austin’s "trail of lights", a mammoth funnel of children and plywood cutouts of spongebob squarepants. this cybernetic santa, courtesy of Dell, was the most avant garde xmas display. unless you count the performance stage at the end of the trail where middle-school girls performed burlesque dance routines from "cabaret".

my co-worker stuart spent a large portion of his life making the "guitarpsicord". everything is handmade, including the keyboard and the string-plucking devices. here’s a clip of how it sounds.

while in dallas i visited mad-scientist dr. von hagen’s "body worlds" exhibit. my girlfriend thought the flayed woman posed with the disembodied capillary systems of a pair of doves was particularly beautiful. and it was beautiful, and underneath the anatomical majesty it was also horrific. i think the giftshop bags sum up the experience: without the context of the exhibit, they look like they’re covered in bloody handprints.

i found an extremely large spider in my room which my housemates assured me was not "particularly venomous."

i bought this mexican candy at a late-night taco place.

the pacifier device is a tamarind-flavored hard candy which you’re supposed to dip/store in the soccer-motif plastic cup. the cup is filled with chili powder and salt, so everytime you dip the spit-wettened pacifier into the cup, you get a brand-new coating of eye-opening mexican flavor. the only drawback to the design that i can see is that after a couple of days, the flavor powder in the cup gets all gummy and clumpy from the repeated applications of spit.

i just found links to the "mel and floyd summer replacement show" aka "it’s monkeytime with mel and floyd". this is the only thing i miss about living in madison, wi. it’s a program played on WORT, madison’s community radio station. most of the time WORT plays what my mother refers to as "lesbian organic gardening call-in shows" but not me, no sir, i would never make light of eco-feminism and its many valid belief systems.

every friday afternoon, mel and mr. smarty pants (floyd has never been on the show as long as i’ve been listening), ramble and quip about current events. there’s long silences as they search through their piles of newspaper clippings or finish chortling over their own jokes. but they’re genuinely funny for all that.

i used to live near the radio station, and one day while i was doing laundry at the laundromat across from WORT (the cleanest laundromat i’ve ever seen, the owner would come in every hour to wipe down the machines, it was amazing) the two of them came in to buy some sodas from the machine. i recognized them by their voices. my god they looked appalling. mel looked like that big guy from "goonies" but without that one eye being lower than the other. mr. smarty pants looked like a librarian who got hit by a truck carrying flannel, fake beards, and midgets.

or maybe i was just diappointed because the most talented media duo in town were kinda funny looking.

here’s a direct link to an episode, but it’ll only be available for the next month or so.

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