Is Anyone Still Actually Buying This Shit?

Okay, so now apparently since the GOP's latest flavor of the week is threatening to self destruct in a big ol' cloud of office ass-grabbery and cheap pizza farts, their next big Golden Boy may be (and here's a fresh, invigorating new name)... Newt Gingrich? What th'?!

I'm sorry, but having done a bit of rubber-necking at these GOP presidential primary debates and watching each one of 'em ranging further and further from unintentional satire to the realm of flat-out slapstick, I've just gotta ask... does anybody here but me feel like they could get far more substantial and informative political insight from watching a late-night marathon of old "Hello Larry" reruns?

Happy, erm... uh...

Well, I'd wish y'all a Happy Labor Day, but since, according to the Very Serious Adults on the far right, these days we're evidently supposed to view workers as borderline parasites and unions as a tool of the anti-Christ, I reckon "Labor Day" is fast approaching the point where ya cain't sez it on the telly-vision no more.

Therefore, let me get a wee bit ahead of the game and wish you all a very Happy Shitpissfuckcuntcocksuckermotherfuckertitsandlabor Day! Go eat a hot dog.

75 years ago today...

On March 4th, 1936, the LZ 129 Hindenburg made her first test flight. She had been under construction for four years, and was intended to be the first in what was to have eventually become a fleet of 50 or more airships linking all of the world's major cities as part of an international airship service. At 804 feet in length and a maximum diameter of 135 feet, she was the largest aircraft that had ever flown, and with a cruising speed of 77 mph she was, at the time, the fastest way to cross the ocean.

She was brought from her shed at the Zeppelin works in Friedrichshafen, Germany, at about 3:10 on the afternoon of March 4th, carrying 30 passengers and a crew of 55. It was the first time she had left her hangar, and a large crowd had gathered to see her. Originally, the flight had been scheduled for that morning, but inclement weather had forced the ship's commander, Dr. Hugo Eckener, to delay departure until conditions improved. Now, in mid-afternoon, the crowds finally got their first look at the new Zeppelin as it was walked stern-first out of its hangar.

The LZ 129 begins to emerge from her hangar, as seen from the hangar roof. Note the patchy look of the hull, which has not yet received its final coat of doping compound.

Onlookers, standing in fact hundreds of feet in front of the ship, from the watch as the LZ 129's is backed out of its hangar, its upper fin towering almost 150 feet above the ground crew.

Finally, the LZ 129's bow appears, also as seen from atop the hangar. The small black spot above the mooring cone is a small open hatch through which the navigators could take an old-fashioned sight with a sextant.

From the gigantic, swastika-emblazoned tail fins, towering at their highest point some 146 feet above the ground, to the large outrigger engine gondolas along the side of the ship, and on toward the bow, the LZ 129 emerged into the grey afternoon before large numbers of fascinated onlookers. Eventually some among them would note that there dull, patchy-looking spots on the hull that still needed another coat of aluminized doping compound, and moreover that the ship's name, already announced in the press as "Hindenburg", had not yet been painted above the control car. It was, therefore, probably appropriate at this point to call the ship by its official Luftschiffbau Zeppelin construction number, LZ 129.

The LZ 129 just prior to takeoff. Note the absence of the name "Hindenburg" alongside the ship's bow.

Once the ship was out on the airfield, about ten minutes after being brought out of the hangar, Eckener gave the command "Luftschiff hoch!", and the LZ 129 was pushed aloft by her ground crew. She rose silently as the ground crew, the engineers and construction workers who had built her, and the crowds of onlookers surrounding the airfield burst into a spontaneous cheer as "their" new airship took to the skies for the first time.

At a command from the ship's captain, the LZ 129 begins to drift upward over the crowd. Two members of the command crew can be seen leaning out of the control car windows.

The LZ 129 rises into the air for the first time.

The LZ 129 rose to a height of about 150 feet, and then her four diesel engines came to life one by one. Slowly at first, she began moving forward, and the cheers from the crowds below turned to gasps of concern. A long trail of what appeared to be smoke was trailing from the tail of the airship, and for a few moments the fact that the LZ 129 was filled with inflammable hydrogen gas was on the minds of everyone watching. But then the smoky trail faded, and it became clear that what had looked like smoke was actually just dust that had settled onto the top of the ship's hull during her years-long construction.

A trail of dust, looking disturbingly like smoke, streams off of the top of the ship.

Her engines now up to full speed, the LZ 129 circled the airfield and then flew out over Lake Constance where she cruised for the next couple of hours while crew got a feel for how she handled. Then they brought her back inland to circle Friedrichshafen and the airfield. At about 6:25 PM, about three hours after it took off, the LZ 129 landed and was then taken back to her hangar to await another test flight the next morning.

The people of Friedrichshafen gather by the edge of Lake Constance to watch the new Zeppelin.

After three days of test flights, the LZ 129 would spend about ten days in her construction hangar getting some last minute adjustments and finishing touches, including having her last coat of doping compound painted on her hull, along with the name "Hindenburg" in big red gothic script just aft of her bow. The LZ 129 Hindenburg would go on to make 62 successful flights in all, until her infamous final voyage in May of the following year. By then, she had carried about 2,000 passengers and logged approximately 3,000 flight hours


For more information on the Hindenburg and its brief but fascinating history, check out my buddy Dan Grossman's excellent site, http://www.airships.net/.

If you are interested in a closer look at the stories of the 97 passengers and crew who were on the Hindenburg's last flight, I have compiled them on a site of my own called Faces of the Hindenburg: http://facesofthehindenburg.blogspot.com/

"Onward Christian Wan-kerrrs..."

And then, to the surprise of virtually no one, another self-proclaimed defender of Christian values and bug-eyed crusader against anyone - particularly if they happen to be gay - who doesn't choose to cleave to that narrow a worldview is arrested for being a miserable goddamned kiddie-peeping pervert.

Yes m'readers, it seems that the Reverend Grant Storms of Metairie, LA, who has, for the past ten years, led a small congregation of moralistic yo-yos called the Reformer Church, and who has apparently made quite the name for himself by bringing his brood with him to gay-friendly events and screaming religious-tinged invective at people through a bullhorn... well, evidently this latest and greatest of God's Chosen Ones (which is news, I'm quite sure, to any deity matching God's general description) has gotten himself into a bit of a pickle... involving, as it were, his pickle. Let's go to the New Orleans Times-Picayune for details:

The Rev. Grant Storms, the Christian fundamentalist known for his bullhorn protests of the Southern Decadence festival in the French Quarter, was arrested on a charge of masturbating at a Metairie park Friday afternoon.

Hel-LO SAILOR!! Tell us more!

Storms, 53, of 2304 Green Acres Road in Metairie, was taken into custody at Lafreniere Park after two women reported seeing him masturbating in the driver's seat of his van, which was parked near the carousel and playground, a Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office report said.

Carousel? Playground?! Naw... couldn't be...

The first woman told deputies she was taking her children to the playground and parked next to the van at about noon. As she was walking around her own vehicle, she noticed the van windows were down and the occupant was "looking at the playground area that contained children playing, with his zipper down...," the report said. The woman noted that he was masturbating and quickly ushered her children out of her car.

She told a second woman, who walked to the van and also spotted the man masturbating, the report said. The second witness told deputies that the driver saw her and tried to conceal the zipper area of his pants with his hand.

Puh-RAYSE the LOR-DUH!!!

All right, let's review: Some asshole spends his life self-righteously obsessed with other people's sex lives, leads others in a crusade to loudly and incessantly hassle these aforementioned other people, and he then ends up getting busted for jerking off to a playground full of kids.

Is anyone even mildly surprised by this?

Shouldn't somebody have gotten the hint that this guy was seriously twinked in the ol' melon when his entire iPod turned out to be filled with nothing but various and sundry versions of "Jesus Loves The Little Children"?

Was a red flag not wildly waving above this guy's head when the scoop-master at last year's Reformer Church Annual Fag Bash and Ice Cream Social asked him his favorite flavor and he replied "Toddler," before quickly stammering something about "godforsaken Papists" and then running off into the night?

Evidently not.

And so, this bastion of Christian moral values ends up sitting in a van next to a playground, squeezing his Jesus juice into a sock whilst watching God's children at play. Horrified mothers call the cops on him, and he gets to ply his self-described "Christian Patriot" trade behind bars... for a day or so, anyway. Evidently there were too many truly dangerous criminals like pot smokers and weekend drunks in the slammer, and they couldn't take up valuable cell space with a mere pedophile. So, the good Reverend was released back unto his flock.

Just in time for the obligatory Weeping Street Interview.

And here we go, right on cue... the schmuck is denying something nobody's accusing him of, and then trying to blame the whole thing on pornography.

Storms replied: "There were children, in, in, in, right, yeah, in the park right in front of the van."

However, Storms went on to say: "The impression is that I was out there exposing myself to them, and that's not the case," he told reporters. Storms added, "I was not looking at the children."

Listen, Stormyballs, you didn't get busted for exposing yourself to children, you got busted for parking your van next to a playground and sitting in there jerkin' yer gherkin while watching the kids playing! The kids were in front of you, you were sitting there facing them and slappin' the ol' salami... but you weren't looking at them. Whaddya got on that van there, Spanky? A windshield that's mirrored on the inside? Or is there perhaps just the slightest possibility that, in addition to being an intolerant misanthrope with delusions of religious grandeur and being a pedophile, you're also a two-bit liar? Yeah, I'm sensing a bit of a trend in that direction.

He said his problem is with pornography. "Pornography is destructive and it can ruin a person's life, and it ruined my life."

Uh... yeah. I think most of us have at least a small stash of porn somewhere (others of us, it's not so much a stash as a medium-sized wing of storage lockers) and yes, we flog the ol' floogle to it. Stormyballs here, on the other hand, flogs his to a bunch of KIDS climbing on the goddamned monkeybars!!

Your problem isn't porn, you fucking degenerate. Your problem is obviously that you get turned on by children.

There aren't many constants in this world, but it seems that one of them is that any time you see some self-righteous God jockey going on a crusade against gays or anyone else whose sex lives they don't agree with, you can be pretty goddamned good and sure that they've got sex addiction problems that go way, way beyond whatever they're pointing the finger at others for doing.

All I'm saying is, somebody had damned well better check Rev. Fred Phelps' basement for little child-sized slave cages...

"Why, in MY day we worked for FREE and we were GRATEFUL fer it!!"

Will somebody please explain to me why, in the name of Christ's clanging balls, we are supposed to view the concept of collective bargaining as though it were some kind of neo-Stalinist plot to destroy America?

The new right-wing fad du jour is apparently these so-called "right-to-work" bills being pushed by Republicans in state legislatures across the country. Essentially, they're nothing more than the same tired old union busting horseshit that the right has been trying to push for decades. Now, I'll be the first to admit that unions sometimes go way overboard - convention exhibitors having to shell out close to a hundred bucks for a union guy to knock in a couple of nails to hang an exhibit booth banner is fucking nuts. Agreed. Then again, this sort of thing is hardly confined to union labor. Hell, our entire financial system is run under the concept "How much can we get away with?"

To take extreme examples like this as justification for doing away with collective bargaining altogether is beyond asinine. But damned if the right isn't trying to do exactly that.

Obviously, the wealth addicts at the very top of the pyramid are going to oppose collective bargaining or anything else that gives workers any sort of recourse as far as getting decent compensation for what they do. It's always been this way, and it always will be. They didn't voluntarily give up on child labor, they didn't voluntarily kick down the 40-hour work week or sick days or overtime pay or any of the other things that most of us take for granted at our jobs. If there is nobody forcing big business to do this shit, then the only alternative is for us to move closer and closer to third-world wages and working conditions.

Yeah, it sounds like hyperbole. But our work force is being forced to work more and more for less and less, because despite all the right-wing whining about unions, we have one of the least unionized nations in the industrialized world, with some of the weakest labor laws. Middle and working class wages have flat lined for the past 30 years, with no relief in sight. And yet, it's always the middle and lower classes who are expected to suck it up and make even more sacrifices when the wealth addicts get out of control enough to break the economy, as happened a couple of years ago.

This, if you extrapolate the far right's reasoning a wee bit, is the true American Dream as far as they're concerned. Robber barons making virtually limitless profits while everyone else just barely scrapes by with absolutely no recourse other than the ability to vote to see which politicians get to lap up lobbyist bribes whilst doing the bidding of said robber barons.

I can come up with a helluva lot of very descriptive names for that kind of thing, but "American Dream" doesn't even make the first cut.

And Then, Months and Months Pass Like Nuthin'…

Five months, to be exact. Almost half a friggin' year, and with nary a peep out of me. See, this is what I'm talking about with the damned writer's block.
[....] <<< Look at this spot right here. I just now sat here staring at that same spot for a good ten minutes or more, with that glazed, empty, slack-jawed look, as though somebody had shot my frontal lobe full of novocaine or forced me to watch three straight hours of Glenn Beck. (But I repeat myself.)

Maybe I'm going about this all wrong. I keep waiting for some sort of inspiration to come along so I'll have something worthwhile to write about. And when I say "inspiration", I don't mean any of that bland, pre-digested, pastel-colored pap that you see on notecards and bumper stickers at your local New Age and/or Religious Supplies emporium, nor do I mean the sort of fiery, poetic, bolt-from-the-blue, history-altering creative erection that we hear about in songs, poems, or LSD war stories. No, when I say I'm waiting for inspiration, I don't mean anything more profound than simply a random goofy-ass thought with which I can entertain myself as long as I'm able to keep spewing words about it.

This is what I seem to spend an inordinate amount of my keyboard flight hours waiting for, and what I've experienced less and less often over the past few years. And since it's clearly not working, the only real solution is to try and dream up another approach altogether. If all I'm writing is chunk after piece after snippet of laughably uninspired, mind-starvingly clichéd horseshit, then maybe the solution is to just dive straight into the swamp, dare to completely and utterly suck, crank out all the empty, self-indulgent dreck that my mind seems hell bent on hobbling me with in the first place, post it all up here, and just hope to eventually come out the other side of it with something at least mildly interesting to say.

In short, it's time for me to get the shitties out of my system.

Yeah, it'll all probably end up being glorified Facebook status posts and warmed-over socio-political observations that wouldn't so much as ruffle the labia of the most vacuous, Zima-swilling suburbanite hausfrau. But it's either that or double down on my daily gherkin-jerkin' schedule. So, y'know, what the hell.

Mosquerade at Ground Zero

Okay, well I think it's a pretty commonly accepted truism that the guaranteed way to endear oneself to a new crowd of people is to walk into the room and launch immediately and without preamble into a political rant. Right? Right. Okay, so…

I wasn't really planning on hauling out the ol' soapbox this soon, though anyone who knows me could have told you that some political screeds were inevitable. But this load of self-righteous horseshit over the so-called "Mosque at Ground Zero" is snowballing into utter insanity, and I've got a bit of spleen in dire need of venting over the whole thing.

So first, let me see if I've got this straight.

A few subhuman buckets of fuck blow up buildings full of people in the name of their own twisted version of a particular ideology, and we're supposed to tar everyone who believes in the actual ideology as somehow being responsible? And their presence anywhere near the scene of the crime is supposed to be an affront to those who remain emotionally affected by what happened?

By that "logic", the Republican Party should never have any sort of organizational presence in Oklahoma City again, because Timothy McVeigh was a right-wing nutjob.

But okay, so it's an election year and the wingnuts have found another total non-issue to whip up into a massive fundraising bonanza of a crisis. Can't get the Elmers all het up over gay marriage this time? Welp, may as well shift gears and go after them thar Moozlems for awhile!

And boy howdy, are they!

By now, there can't be more than a small handful of Americans (mainly coma victims) who haven't heard about the right-wing brouhaha over the construction of the "Mosque at Ground Zero." The "mosque", of course, is the Cordoba House, a planned Islamic community center to be built two blocks away from the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan. It's going to be a 13-story building (which, in Lower Manhattan, qualifies as a ranch-style home) that does contain a prayer room – as well as a performing arts center, a swimming pool, a basketball court, a fitness center, and a culinary school.

In other words, it's not really a mosque, at least any more than a YMCA or a hospital with a chapel is a "church", and furthermore it's not even on "Ground Zero".

But don't lets go lettin' facts get in the way of a perfectly good tantrum, shall we? The "mosque at Ground Zero" has become the flavor of the month for outrage-craving teabaggers from sea to blathering sea, and Republican politicians, desperate for a cheap election-season hotbutton issue, seem more than happy to glom onto the controversy.

They'll all tell you, though, that this isn't about anti-Muslim bigotry and hatemongering. Nooooo… it's merely concern for the feelings of those who lost people when the Trade Center was destroyed nine years ago. It's about protecting the "hallowed ground" of the Trade Center site. It's all about respect, y'see.

And if you buy that one, why then I reckon we oughtta wander on over to Brooklyn and go bridge shopping.

But yeah, they're just "protecting hallowed ground". Horseshit. This is Lower Manhattan, fer cryin' out loud! Vatican City, it ain't. There's a strip club one block south of "Ground Zero", another strip club three blocks northeast (and one block from the proposed Cordoba House site), an off-track betting parlor a block east of that… you get the picture.

So, are the strippers at those clubs required to have images of the Twin Towers embossed on their pasties? Y'know, for the benefit of the horny businessmen who frequent those places when they need a quiet moment to reflect on what "nine-eleven" means to them?

A five-minute video is now making the Internet rounds, shot yesterday during a rally against the building of the Cordoba House, that shows exactly what's fueling these protests.



A rare moment of candid honesty in this whole sorry-ass mess, isn't it?

And, predictably enough, it turns out that the "Muslim" the crowd was hassling wasn't even a Muslim. He was, reportedly, a union carpenter named Kenny who works at the Trade Center site.

One of the most unintentionally hilarious parts of that video is about 1:50 into it, after the crowd has gone completely nuts on ol' Kenny. Some fucking tool can be heard just off camera bellowing, "They can TRY to make it look like we're a buncha racists, but it AIN'T HAPPENING!"

Hey Stosh, that crowd just went after that black fellow like he was made of free bacon, and all because you morons thought he "looked like a Muslim."

And you think that "They" are going to try to make y'all look like a bunch of racists? Nobody needs to "make" you look like anything, pallie - that angry mob of yours just showed with appalling clarity just exactly what it is.

Now, take a deep breath, and walk around the block to New York Dolls for a lap dance (be sure to ask for the Hallowed Ground Special!) and just calm the hell down already, willya?