Vision? Nary!

Every New Years Eve the Finns celebrate by dancing the night away whilst wearing buckets on their heads. No one knows why they do this, and, should you ask, the people of Finland will deny this annual and ancient tradition.

An etymological exploration of the term “small potatoes” and ethnic slurs; how to smell like meat; a tirade about what could have been in the field of zeppelin technology; a tribute to the brave fighters of the balloon brigade. All in less than three minutes – a greater bargain cannot be had at any price.

My latest musical discovery is a band from Georgia, “Of Montreal.” That’s deep south Georgia – not Soviet Georgia, (or ex-Soviet Georgia, though that would be, I suppose, even better).

Their latest album, “Skeletal Lamping” is a concoction of mostly danceable songs which float and drift from theme to theme and sound to sound even within each track.

Skeletal Lamping

I can also recommend the previous album, “Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?”
And I’m not even recommending that because the title reminds me of Philip K. Dick. Though I’m sure that helps.

Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?

The album previous to that was called “The Sunlandic Twins.” This album contains the song “Wraith pinned to the mist and other games.” The song was used in a commercial for the outback steakhouse, though with altered lyrics. For this, some people decry the band as sellouts. Why exactly these people expect the band to starve I do not know.

Video: Suffer for Fashion

video: Wraith pinned to the mist and other games

Remember: the proper term for a woman born and raised in the Netherlands is “duchess.”
If in a group “duchesses.”
They are also then referred to properly as a “gaggle of duchesses,” but only if they are not in flight.

You heard it here first. Remember to cite that in any resulting scholarly work.

The Guardian reports that Burger King has entered the personal fragrance market with a value sized cologne that promises to make you smell of fast food meat. The odor is called “flame.” It can be yours for $3.99 (£2.65). Not a cheap knockoff! A cheap original!

You will attract stray animals and feral humans. Some of them may try to mate with you.

Are you strong enough to wear budget meat scent? Are you worthy of the duties and obligations smelling of cheap meat bestows?

You’ll smell like you work at a fast food joint! The Dames will swoon!

[via Apostropher]

If you’re interested in punk rock’s last vibrant period of activity, ‘88-’92, check out the book and DVD 924 Gilman.

924 Gilman

924 Gilman Street

924 Gilman is the address of the club of the same name set up by the well known magazine MaximumRockNRoll.

In every generation there is one great Ukulele player.
There was Ukulele Ike,
then Tiny Tim,
then Old Dirty Bastard,
and now Molly- the artist formerly known as SweetAfton23.

Merry Xmas Ukulele fanatics.

—

Some think it is wrong to hand off the title so soon from Old Dirty Bastard. O.D.B. had a great catalogue of Uke tunes that have never been released.
However, we have no way of knowing how long these tracks will be suppressed. Will his work be sanitized by a “young” Dirty Bastard? Will his illegitimate grandson O.D.B. III save the day with his earnest renditions of the master’s classics?

Time will tell. For now, Molly reigns as this generation’s Uke voice.
Let O.D.B. III lay in wait, practicing the four strings.

Dutch comedian and free speech advocate Hans Teeuwen is grilled by Muslim women over his “vulger and repulsive” comedy.
In Dutch with English subtitles.

This is footage of Amsterdam and surrounding area. It includes a velomobile, a bicycle enclosed inside a shell; a peek at the red light district, a glance at some windmills, street waffles and frites, and as much zwarte pieten as I thought you could handle.

I took this Betty Page photo at the sex museum in Amsterdam. It was in a display case of pinups.

When Betty Page resurfaced a decade ago she never allowed her picture to be taken again.

Here is some Betty Page trivia:
She was in her mid-30s the few years her famous photos were taken.
She was one of the earliest playboy playmates.
She disappeared for decades.
The US courts ordered the prints of her photos to be destroyed. Many of the surviving prints exist because they were hidden away.
She tried to become a Christian missionary in Africa but was rejected because she had been divorced.
A few years ago they made a Hollywood movie about her.

The Notorious Bettie Page

In fact, at Amazon, you can veritably drown in Betty Page merchandise.

The Glamorous Betty Page Cult Model 1950’s : Book 1

Bettie Betty Page Paige Juice Glass 2 Pc Set Pin Up

Bettie Page Round Tin Lunch Box

Betty Page died yesterday at the age of 85.

Some Internet users have expressed concern because their independent observations have concluded the level of spam has been greatly reduced as of late.
Please, be calm. In times of economic downturn everything slows.
In fact, the lack of spam is not so much an effect of the economic slowdown – it is a cause. If you think about it – these are the facts: all private parts have become enlarged, all partners are satisfied, everyone owns a cheap crappy knockoff watch, everyone has popped enough off-prescription prescriptions, etc.
Clearly only recession can follow. It’s inevitable.

The spam bubble was always ready to burst. This is just another period of spam readjustment. Already some capitalistic soul is preparing to send out millions of shady offers with forged return addresses.
Why? Because it’s Christmas.

Here is a gallery of photos from Amsterdam. There are a few hundred photos.

by David Raffin

Occasionally, in clothing stores, I am waylaid by the hat rack. I even stop and try a few on. But the truth is, the absolute truth, I am not a hat person.
I’m sure it does not help to have an unusually large head. Most hats simply don’t fit. Luckily, hat wearing in society is no longer a cultural necessity. People are now free to not wear hats.

In the past everyone wore hats. The hat you wore informed society everything they needed to know about you. Were you poor? Were you rich? What were your beliefs? Instead of going bare people showed their hats to the world.
Eventually, people stopped wearing hats. But, for a while, they continued to wear hats when attending church.

Religious headgear

The honest truth is - if it weren’t for hats I couldn’t tell any of the world’s religions apart. Frankly, some guy telling me about his god and my imminent destruction sounds an awful lot alike after you’ve heard it once or twice. It can even be argued that the most popular religions, the big three: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, are actually all the same religion. They are, in fact, all descended from the Judaic tradition. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once pointed out, “you who hate the Jews, why did you adopt their religion?”

Once a guy in the park handing out literature told me, with a smile on his face, that it was a beautiful day and the end times were coming.
Now I have to say that he was not wearing a hat and this on some level offends me. It did not afford me the opportunity to give him a wide berth; though I did take his literature, as is my habit, and turn it into a flyer for a punk rock show.

Unfortunately in our modern world, even amongst the world’s religions, people are wearing fewer and fewer hats. Religious people who don’t wear hats are sneaky little bastards.

Now, the Catholics, they have some beautiful hats. Distinctive. I can usually tell, right away, who in the hell they are. Nuns, bishops, the pope.
Let’s talk about the Pope. He has a very grand hat. A pope hat. One of the largest pieces of religious headgear ever worn. Now the pope, as the Catholics believe, is the go-between between god and man - the Word of God made flesh. Therefore he has to have a giant, giant hat. Because a man like this has a giant, giant head. Luckily, heavy is not the hat that sits atop a giant head. Because the giant pope hat… is hollow.
In fact, the pope’s hat doubles as a kite. Bet you didn’t know that. But if you go to Vatican City and you are very, very lucky - and very, very observant you may see the pope flying his hat. In the past there were occasionally more than one pope, antipopes, they now call them, and this resulted in the pope hat kite lines sometimes getting tangled. This is why the Church is adamant that there be only one pope at a time. The last thing anyone wants is pope hats breaking free and getting caught in trees.

Now, being the pope, one of the pope’s duties is to pontificate. A good pope pontificates and pontificates. That’s why another name for the pope is the pontiff.
There is an Old Zen Koan, propagated by old zen lumberjacks, which goes something like this: “Does the Pope pontificate in the woods? More importantly, if the pope pontificates in the woods and there is no one there to receive it as papal doctrine, does it still become official Dogma?”

Put that in your pipe and smoke it. But not in the Vatican City. It’s not legal there.

Protestants continue to bother me by being: 1. evangelical and 2. increasingly hatless. I suppose I could deal with one or the other but both? Remember, religious people who don’t wear hats are sneaky little bastards.

Christians are constantly telling me to turn the other cheek. Then again, lately they’ve been constantly telling me it’s okay to waterboard people. Torture, of course, goes way back in religious circles; either to elicit confessions or to force conversion. And what is a forced conversion? It’s someone torturing you in order to get you to wear their choice of hat. Today, increasingly, there’s not even a hat. They threaten you and then expect you to wear a metaphorical hat. What a gyp.

So they torture people. After all many Christian sects are almost totally focussed on the brutal death of Jesus Christ on a torture instrument. They have a torture esthetic. An inclination. Who can argue?

Jews, of course, wear hats. Their hat wearing pleases me. It’s not a showy hat. In fact it’s kind of utilitarian. You’re probably familiar with it. It’s a little hat sits on top of the head called a yarmulke. Very similar to a beanie. Now some beanies do have the advantage of having propellers on them. This is a later advancement, and only the most reformed sects of Judaism wear yarmulkes with propellers. It probably need not be pointed out to you, dear reader, that a yarmulke makes a terrible kite. However, this is no advantage vis-à-vis Christianity versus Judaism - since only one person gets to wear the giant kite hat in Christianity, but all male Jews get to wear a propeller-less beanie. Women too, in the privacy of their own home.

Many men get a bald spot in that area. This is the utilitarian part of the headgear. The yarmulke perfectly sits on top of the bald spot. I don’t have this problem, but if you do perhaps Judaism is right for you.

The problem with Jews is that they have a tendency to run over people with bulldozers. This is probably unfair, since there are Jews all over the world and they don’t run people over with bulldozers, but in Israel they do. And it’s not because the hat in some way obstructs the view of the bulldozer driver. As I pointed out the only purpose of the hat is to cover the bald spot.
Therefore I am left with no other choice but to believe some people in Israel are running other people over with bulldozers for kicks. How you square this with Yom Kippur atonement has never been fully explained to me. It is one of the great mysteries.

It has been explained to me that the only way an Israelite can drive a bulldozer on the Sabbath is to start the bulldozer running before nightfall and leave it idling until the next day. Driving a bulldozer on the Sabbath also presents a problem in steering and braking. I mean, they can’t brake and they can’t steer. To not run over those people therefore becomes an offense against God; however, to run all those people down is another offense against God. This is known in theology as the Israelite’s conundrum.
Oh, but what can be done about it?

Now, Islam is the youngest of the three faiths descended from Judaism.
Muslims pray on a schedule five times a day. Five Times. I am amazed you can get any suicide killings planned and carried out on that kind of a schedule.
In this country a lot of people believe “Moslem” is synonymous with “terrorist.”
This is probably unfair. Like all the Jews who don’t run people over with bulldozers, and all the Christians who don’t torture people, there are all those Moslems who defy categorization by not blowing anything up. In mathematics there is a phrase for all of these people in all three groups: they are individuals who fall outside the standard deviation.

It should be pointed out that men wearing turbans are more than likely not Moslems but Sikhs. I have nothing disparaging to say about the turban. The turban is a perfectly fine piece of headgear. In fact, I like to think the turban is a great mystery box that may hold many fascinating things.
In the 1970s, in the Saturday morning cartoon starring the Harlem Globetrotters, there was a character (“Sweet Lou” Dunbar) who could at any point reach into his giant Afro and pull out whatever was needed. I like to think this about the turban.
It may not be true, but that has never stopped the propagation of any belief.

Man, 50-55, sitting outside borders books, on a bench, repeating as a mantra, “Thinking out of the box. Thinking out of the box.”
It is so hard these days to determine whether someone is speaking to themselves or if they have a device plugged in their ear, a bluetooth unit;
Therefore it is now very difficult to determine if a person is insane or just a douche-bag bluetooth cyborg.

Last time I saw use of the word prophylaxis it was an album title by J Church.

I think that’s about as common as even the world’s most casual user of marijuana using the term “Mary Jane".