A Violently Executed Blog |
|
|
There is a god. His name is Thor. Jack Kirby is his prophet. A Violently Executed Feed BUY SOME STUFF, MAKE ME HAPPY Contact me. Links and stuff Handshake Bloggers Damn Good Music
|
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Picking Brains OK, so there's a good chance I might have to go to India for job-related stuff in the next month or so, probably Bangalore. Any of you, Dear Readers, ever been there? Know someone that's been there? Heard of good, reasonably-priced hotels and/or restaurants in the area? What are some local attractions I could see? Good museums? Fascinating temples? Any info would be appreciated. posted by Adam C. Lipscomb at 2:41:00 PM   | Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Elizabeth Edwards Rocks My World I've already been leaning towards John Edwards' campaign because of his pro-labor stance and his health care proposals. This kind of seals the deal for me. Elizabeth Edwards, starring at the kickoff event of San Francisco's signature Gay Pride Parade, came out in support of legalized gay marriage today -- taking a position which she acknowledged is at odds with her husband, presidential candidate John Edwards.Elizabeth Edwards sums up what I think most Americans really feel about the idea of marriage equality. Too many Democrats are still listening to the Viziers and Mandarins of the DC Beltway Elite, trying to delicately split the difference between "moderate" and "conservative" instead of staking out their own positions based on their consciences and well-considered beliefs. Elizabeth Edwards had the guts to publicly disagree with her husband's official stance on marriage equality. It's possible that this is the wedge that will be used to allow her husband to change his position without losing face, and it's possible that it'll just be something they'll agree to disagree on. Time will tell. Ms. Edwards' visit to Pride Day in San Francisco as well as her comments to reporters are a strong sign that the Edwards campaign isn't going to take the GLBT community for granted. That's a good thing. posted by Adam C. Lipscomb at 7:42:00 AM | Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Domestic Disturbance: Yes and No Melissa's latest column is out: Franny's taken to running away when things don't go her way. Faced with the loss of the garish ankh tattoo she got out of a vending machine or the news that she can't go swimming until she cleans her room, she stomps around noisily, weeping and throwing clothes in her backpack, and dramatically announces that she's leaving. Usually she gets about halfway down the block before she returns, all smiles and eager to tell us about the butterfly she saw or the new birdcall she heard. posted by Adam C. Lipscomb at 9:56:00 AM | Are You Fucking HIGH? Fat Tony does it again. One of the nine most powerful judges on the fucking PLANET, and this shit-brained psychotic tin-pot fascist can't distinguish between reality and a fucking TV SHOW: Senior judges from North America and Europe were in the midst of a panel discussion about torture and terrorism law, when a Canadian judge's passing remark - "Thankfully, security agencies in all our countries do not subscribe to the mantra 'What would Jack Bauer do?' " - got the legal bulldog in Judge Scalia barking.What the fucking fuck? I mean, what the hell do we make of this: "Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles"?? No, fucktard, Jack Bauer didn't save Los Angeles. Kiefer Sutherland, pretending to be Jack Bauer pretended to save Los Angeles from a pretend bomb on a fucking TELEVISION SHOW. See, that's what acting is, it's pretending. It's like when we were kids and we pretended to have super powers and "saved" our neighborhoods from invisible giant robots, rabid ninja pirate monkeys and Mrs. Kowalski the 3rd period gym teacher. The only difference is that there's a higher budget and (usually) marginally better writing than most kids had when they played dress-up. Fat Tony's not the only delusional sociopath with the reins of power in his bloodstained hands. Bush, Cheney, Rove, Rice - the whole criminal cabal in the White House are all suffering from the same hallucination, that the real world is like a TV show. Torture does not work for anything other than getting confessions. Not accurate confessions, just confessions. If someone is being tortured, they soon learn which answers get the torturer to ease up. Asking some innocent schmuck, "What do you know about Osama's plans to attack the US?" isn't going to get the truth - it gets you what he thinks will get the interrogator to stop trying to drown him, or stop beating him with a hose, or disconnect the alligator clips from his scrotum. If he says, "I know nothing," the interrogator just ratchets up the pain. If he starts babbling about plots to breed super-fleas that carry a disease that makes American penises rot and fall off, then things get better for him. Scalia, like almost all the rest of the ruling cabal in DC, is safely removed from it all. He never has to look his mistakes in the face, and is insulated enough that he can just close his eyes and plug his ears and shout "LALALALALALA" if confronted with them. The men and boys in Guantanamo Bay are exactly as real to him as Jack Bauer, and they're dirty brown people to boot, so they probably deserve what they get. As near as I can tell, this solipsistic disconnection from reality is, to use a clinical term, bugfuck crazy. If Scalia weren't wearing a black robe and oppressing women and minorities, he'd be standing on a street corner in shit-stained pants, screaming about the space monsters that ass-rape him in his sleep and begging for spare change to buy some tinfoil to make a helmet. Really, it'd be for his own good if we bundled Fat Tony off to a nice, 19th-century sanitarium for some of the classic "tough love" he seems to think others (especially minorities) deserve. posted by Adam C. Lipscomb at 8:52:00 AM | Monday, June 18, 2007
Had I your tongues and eyes, I'ld use them so That heaven's vault should crack! The beer, it is dead. It's passed on! This beer is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet its maker! It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If I hadn't poured it down the sink it'd be pushing up the daisies! Its metabolic processes are now 'istory! It's off the twig! It's kicked the bucket, it's shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!! THIS IS AN EX-PORTER!! Somehow, the beer was skunked. I got home from my trip to find a layer of mold grown over the top of it. I can only assume that somehow, something wasn't as sterile as it was supposed to be. So, to those anticipating a nice cold raspberry porter to savor on the 4th, well, I'm sorry. Come back in about 6 weeks, I should have something then. Exeunt all, weeping and pursued by bear posted by Adam C. Lipscomb at 8:38:00 PM | Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Travelin' Man I'll be going to a family reunion this week, which should be fun - I'll be seeing cousins I haven't seen in years, decades in one instance. It'll be a bitch of a drive, thanks to some last-minute workish stuff that threw a monkey wrench in my plans, but it'll be worth it. posted by Adam C. Lipscomb at 12:08:00 PM | Monday, June 11, 2007
Helpers Aplenty My raspberry porter is coming along nicely - it should be ready to drink on the 4th of July. Alec did not help me this time (so far, knocks wood), but Calico Jack thought maybe kitty kibble + beer was the way it was supposed to be, so he came to ask an important question: 
posted by Adam C. Lipscomb at 9:00:00 PM | Friday, June 08, 2007
| Tuesday, June 05, 2007
Adventures In Home Brewing Saturday, I went down to Austin Homebrew Supply and the fine gents hooked me up with a kit for a raspberry porter. Last night I brewed it up and started it fermenting. 2 weeks to bottling, 3 more after that until it's ready. I don't think it'd be cheating to open a couple bottles on the 4th. Let's hope Alec doesn't "help" me again. posted by Adam C. Lipscomb at 11:37:00 AM | Monday, June 04, 2007
Reviews And Musings Catching up. I've been kind of busy lately. Books: Phillip K. Dick - A Scanner Darkly and Time Out of Joint. Both excellent, trippy excursions into the nature of objective reality and all that groovy stuff. Scanner is the better of the two, one of Dick's best, combining not just perception of reality but also self-identity. Dick's fiction is hard for some to get into - his stories are frequently happening on several levels at once, and some folks just don't dig that. Me? I love it. Raymond Chandler - Farewell, My Lovely, The Big Sleep and The Lady in the Lake. Somehow, I missed these my first go-round in hard-boiled land. I read Hammett, Spillane and who knows how many pastiches of Chandler, but for some sick reason, I never picked up a copy - perhaps because I'd read too much Spillane and got soured on the genre. At any rate, I'm doubly sad. First because I went all those years without reading Chandler's stuff and second because there's only a couple more books of his I haven't read - much like the disappointment I felt when I picked up Dorothy Sayers' Busman's Honeymoon and realized that I'd reached the end of the line for Peter Wimsy. Marlowe is up there with Nick Charles in my list of detectives I like - he's rough and cynical but with a solid core of principles that keep him on the straight and narrow. Chandler's got some of the best gut-punch prose I've ever read - "She had a face that would make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window". These aren't "read-once" books for me. They're going into rotation. Movies: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest - I liked it. It was a tad rushed - it seemed they tried to cram too much into one movie, and in many ways, I think it could have easily been split into two movies, filmed at the same time like LotR was. That would have allowed for more character development and a less-rushed plot. A little too much Keith Richards, not nearly enough Jack Davenport. Still and all, a good beer'n'popcorn movie. Still hoping to find the time to see Hot Fuzz, which looks to be exactly my cuppa large-caliber, rapid-fire tea. Gaming stuff: Working on a new campaign, post-collapse adventuring in a post-greenhouse Earth. Think Mad Maxx meets J. G. Ballard's Hello, America, "By the Waters of Babylon" and the pulpy classic "Meg the Priestess" stories with small dashes of "Buck Rogers" and TSR's "Gamma World" RPG for spicy goodness. No solid takers on it so far, but I'm having fun building the world. Now if I could only figure out a way to throw in some Nazi Flying Saucers... posted by Adam C. Lipscomb at 12:32:00 PM | |
