The Sporadic Curmudgeon

Prominent conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan published a piece in The New Republic on Tuesday entitled WHY I AM SUPPORTING JOHN KERRY. Risk Management. He’s not going for irony; Sullivan is actually endorsing Kerry over Bush. I rarely agree with him, but credit where it’s due: he’s taking a principled, courageous stand given this administration’s frenzied attacks on apostates. You got guts, Andy.

We’re starting to see some signs that the election may not be as close as the media would have us believe. Let’s hope it’s enough to overwhelm the crude anti-democratic voter fraud being directed out of the White House by Karl Rove.

Assuming a Kerry win (and we can’t completely count out the possibility of Bush declaring martial law to stop the election, although I doubt he’s got the political capital to pull it off since the munitions dump story broke), we need to clean up this mess. Precinct by precinct, we need to root out every single person that cheated or arranged cheating in this election, regardless of party, and throw them in jail for a long, long time. Our democracy depends on it.

This is fantastic news: Necromania, the long-lost final film of Ed Wood, has been rediscovered and is being released on DVD. Coming at the end of Ed’s sad career arc, it’s a porn movie, of course.

Forget all that malarkey about Ed being “the worst filmmaker of all time.” Any Mystery Science Theater 3000 fan can tell you it’s just not true. That honor would have to go to Joel Schumacher, who somehow managed to capture the choking, foul stench of rancid intestinal gas on film.

If you look past the low¹⁰ budgets and amateur acting, Ed’s movies have a strange sort of beauty. His loopy dialogue, especially, leads me to consider him one of the great unrecognized stream-of-consciousness poets. I’m not kidding.

When I first moved to Hollywood in 1978, I must have walked past the apartment where Ed was drinking himself to death a hundred times. If only I’d known.

Go: Lie Girls… call 212-875-7000. Just go. Make sure no kids are within earshot, but really — you have to go.

A story in today’s Mirror details the agony of drama critics forced to sit through a performance of the worst musical since the dawn of time.

The play, a biography of Oscar Wilde written, composed and directed by British radio dj Mike Read, is described as follows:

• “In 1895, Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years’ hard labour. A more cruel and unusual punishment has been devised by Read - a musical of exquisite awfulness.”
• “The vocal talents of the cast range from cruise ship competent to barely audible.”
• “Oscar Wilde is one of the many projects with which Read has filled his post-Radio 1 career, and on this occasion it’s hard to feel anything other than incredulous contempt.”

Meee-ouch! Kinda makes you wonder if the show’s really that bad, or if Read once did something unseemly at a critic’s convention that mortally offended them and now they’re finally getting their revenge.

Coincidentally, I was discussing my general dislike for musicals this very afternoon. Actually, “ranting” is probably a more accurate a word than “discussing.” And it’s not really a coincidence, since I tend to go off on the subject of crappy musicals and how much I utterly loathe them at least four times a week. I mean, come on. I’m a lifelong supporter of gay rights; have lent my voice to the cause and all, and even I think musicals are the gayest thing since Liberace first twirled a stool.

There are a few musicals I will admit to enjoying. There’s Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, which revolves around the disturbingly entertaining theme of cannibalism, and Richard Elfman’s Forbidden Zone, in which Chicken Boy, a topless princess, Hervé Villechaize and a guy with a frog’s head run around in a sixth dimension that looks suspiciously like it’s made of cardboard.

Breaking story: A Republican-financed voter registration firm has been accused of destroying the registration forms of Clark County Democrats. Several employees of the company, Voters Outreach of America, AKA America Votes, have claimed that forms indicating a Democratic party affiliation were routinely torn up or shredded. The local media are advising any Democrats that registered to vote outside a mall or grocery store to visit the Clark County Election Department website to find out if they’re actually registered or not.

I resent that I actually had to go look.

Why aren’t these curs being driven into the streets? What do the Republicans have to do to finally outrage the American Public? They’ve started an unprovoked war on false pretenses. They’ve bankrupted the country. They’ve tortured prisoners of war. They’ve done all they can to damage the environment. They’ve spied on our reading habits. They’ve arrested our own citizens and held them without charges. They’ve tampered with voting machines.

We go after atheletes that cheat with steroids. Why not go after a political party that consistently defrauds the electorate? The Republican Party obviously believes it cannot win without cheating, and so they cheat. Again. Isn’t it about time somebody disqualified them?

Note: The same company has been active in Oregon. Check your registration, folks. Make sure you can vote. And raise a stink about this. It’s the only way we can get these unamerican assholes out.

Nothing brings a smile to my face faster than news from my old home town of San Antonio, Texas.

That’s a lie, frankly. What actually brings a smile to my face fastest involves several improbably-endowed women, a wad of untraceable fifties and a dishonest pharmacist with fond memories of the sixties.

Nevertheless, the black cloud of despair that forever darkens my sky lightened somewhat when I read that a military couple stationed at Fort Sam Houston were arrested for having sex in the Alamo. It’s nice to see young people taking an interest in history again.

Happily, the city didn’t freak out as much as in 1982 when Ozzy Osbourne pissed on the Cenotaph, a monument commemorating the Texans killed in the 1836 battle. (Note: link points to utter bullshit merely because it’s entertaining utter bullshit.) In Ozzy’s defense, he was totally wasted, and the Cenotaph does resemble an enormous urinal.

Outsiders don’t grasp how religiously Caucasian Texans regard the Alamo, which became a shrine after Mexico had the audacity to take it back from the bunch of militant white guys that had grabbed it. Our Hispanic brethren have a somewhat different take on it, as you might imagine.

I’m not talking about feline fisticuffs. “Cat-slapping” is a bizarre sub-genre of Japanese porn where an actress walks up to women on the street and without warning slaps them in the face. This and other equally baffling activities are described in what has suddenly become my favorite website of all time, the Hentai Dictionary: Japanese Perversions, Fetishes, and AV Slang.

As I’ve asked ad nauseam, how come Japanese pop culture is so much more fun than ours? My God, these people actually have used panty vending machines! (Or did, anyway. Dang moralists.)

Well, it’s easy to make fun of the Japanese and their bottomless appetite for twisted sexuality. As a matter of fact, the perversions of your average Tokyo businessman are an excellent example of the long-term effects of censorship.

For centuries Japan had a tradition of explicit erotic art, called shunga. (That link is not for minors, by the way.) Then came that little misunderstanding of the late 1930s and early 1940s, and before you know it General Douglas “Delicate Sensibilities” MacArthur is declaring the depiction of genitalia illegal in order to improve the moral tone of the nation. Forbidden by law to view pictures of naked people doing what naked people tend to do, the Japanese did what any of us would have done under the circumstances: they invented tentacle porn.

The American Occupation censorship laws may still be on the books, judging by the pixelated privates frequently seen in modern Japanese erotica. (Which I’m told can be found on the Internet.) Either that, or they’ve even fetishized big pixels. After browsing the Hentai Dictionary, I don’t think that’s an altogether unlikely scenario.

Amazing work: a funny-but-effective piece detailing the Bush Misadministration’s policy vacillations done as a mainstream retail print catalog.

The person that created this satire is gifted indeed. Somebody at the DNC needs to get in touch.

I’ve noticed over the years that there are several non-Californian locations around the globe that produce a disproportionate number of bizarre news items. New Zealand is one; Germany another. But many of the darkest, most twisted tales tend to come from Romania. I don’t know why, they just do.

By way of illustration, I offer the following: an elderly Romanian man mistook his penis for a chicken neck, cut it off, and the dog ate it.

There are a few fundamental questions left unanswered in the Reuters report. It mentions that he was in his underwear when he rushed out into the yard to kill a noisy chicken that was keeping him awake. Then how exactly did he get the cocks confused? Did he put the chicken in his BVDs first?

Moreover, how did this mistaken impression persist after he’d grabbed the faux fowl? Trust me on this: every single male on the planet knows exactly what it feels like when he grabs his own dick. And it don’t feel like somebody else’s giblets, if you get my drift.

Either we’re not getting the complete story here, or this guy is the world’s least competent masturbator.

Hard to believe, but this is the second Whoops/Food/Genitalia In The News post in less than a month. Let’s hope it’s not a trend. Or a fad.

We are taught, most of us, that each life is unique and sacred, but sacrilege follows sacrilege in Iraq. Over a thousand American and tens of thousands of cvilian Iraqi lives have been snuffed out in the name of oil and global dominion.

There are other casualties: the chaos in Iraq has resulted in the destruction of hundreds of Mesopotamian archaeological sites. The Cradle of Civilization is being looted. War machines are rattling down ancient walls. Cities that lay undisturbed for 2,600 years have been sacked in the last two by people desperate to survive.

We speak of honor for the dead. Millions of people lived and died in the ancient empires. All that remains of their lives are hidden clues in a sprinkling of ruins. When the ruins are gone, so too will be all trace of countless men and women, their dreams and deeds blown away in the dust of millennia. If the Song of Babylon is silenced, it will never be heard again. No one living will remember the melody.

The barbarism of this so-called administration is sickening.