The news is generally frightening. I learned a few days ago that, in the Lone Star State, one Debra Medina is fighting to become the Republican candidate for governor. Her platform is staunchly conservative, and she’s so bat-shit crazy that even Glenn Beck isn’t amused. Quoth the New York Times:

Ms. Medina also appeals to state’s rights advocates who long to shift power from Washington to state legislatures. A leitmotif in her speeches is the idea that the federal government has usurped power from the states and that Texas should be able to nullify federal laws and regulations it deems unconstitutional. Her first target would be the Environmental Protection Agency, she says.

“We will tell the E.P.A., ‘You have no authority here,’ ” she told the Fort Bend County Chamber of Commerce on Thursday.

Thanks, Debbie. I can picture the freedom now: Those goodfernuthin E.P.A. pansies will quake as they’re forced by the noble Texas rangers to unlock Emperor Obama’s hidden oil-filled mega-caves off the coast of Corpus Cristi!

(Then they’ll have to free the animals, sending the august turtles-o-th’-sea to their native breaker islands, the ones used by our proud military to broadcast sub rosa numbers stations, thus preventing the start of Secret World War IV.) [Lol.]

In other news, liberals continue to drift farther from liberty. In the same Times that gives us that lovely snippet about the E.P.A., we have Paul Krugman shouting:

…The real story behind the euromess lies not in the profligacy of politicians but in the arrogance of elites — specifically, the policy elites who pushed Europe into adopting a single currency well before the continent was ready for such an experiment.

Firstly, shouldn’t we capitalize “Euromess?” I have a hunch that “Amerimess” (shudder at the fugliness) would get the cap. Or is this a reference to the currency, the euro (€); in which case, why doesn’t Krugman write “euro mess” or “euro-mess?”

Secondly, what the fuck? The problem with Europe is “elitism?” Sayeth an elite, in a country whose numero uno problema is that most of the country thinks there’s a problem with elitism (and intellectualism, and Darwinism, and most any -ism, even the ones that work pretty dern well) and is thus resistant to reform of any kind?

I mean, a) is this true? Did Jozef-the-Plombier, the average European citizen, really let himself get “duped” into supporting a strong currency? And, even if this is true, b) is the lesson that we Americans should learn from Greece’s financial woes that we should never, ever “trust the elites?”

The problem is probably semantic. I think the word “elite” is skunked (along with “postmodern,” to name just one), meaning it’s so often debated, so hotly, that no one even knows what it means any more. It’s a word everyone runs from and accuses everyone else of running into.

I wonder who these Euro-elites are, for example. Do they represent a powerful, self-interested business class that actually exists? On one level, I’m sure Krugman knows his economics and knows what and who helped fuel poor Hellas’ rapid decline.

But, simply by calling these avaricious policy makers “elites,” Krugman muddles an already complex issue. Thanks to that word, they become the same bogeymen feared in America (slick-talking Obama-analogs, the intellectuals against whom Palin bravely speaks, when she’s not distracted by the reminders scribbled on her hand). [Double lol.]

The problem with the idea that “elites” can’t be trusted is that they in fact can be. George Washington was an elite, in terms of class, money, education, military decoration, political ambition and achievement, and hair-style (mega-wig).

Even hardcore Marxists must admit that not all silver-spooned, Hahvahd-educated elites are wrong all the time. In the postmodern world, ideas are judged pragmatically (usually by professional hard-ass and British person Simon Cromwell, an online vote, or some combination of those two).

Of course, just to make the world wend round weirder, David Brooks posted an essay today arguing that we should trust the elites, though Brooks can’t resist telling us that the elites of the Olden Days were luckier and happier, and that our cold, autistic world is through.

If only the problems of the failing hyperintellecutal micromanagerial nouveau oligarchs here were simply their lack of empathy and their reliance on Blackberries—and not, say, their lack of Empire, their lack of money, &c. Then we really could have elected an Obama and known that our Obama would use his oligarchy’s surplus of cash and emotional equity and military trust around the world to affect positive change.

Instead, we lose the EPA (no need for the hilarious supernumerary periods) and find more bogeymen, everywhere we look: It is our leaders’ elitism that dooms them, their lack of empathy—anything but their stupidity and hubris, their playing out a cycle on a stage that has seen the cycle played before.

The cowboy stories have taken up a fair chunk of time. Thus there have appeared here fewer posts on grammar and whatnot of late…

While awaiting more delicious words about words, please do enjoy this blog-post about a rum made from the ink of the legendary Kraken,—what killed Cpn. Thom “Ruckus” Marwallach back in 1905 (the only man to ever sail to the North Pole entirely in the nude),—not to mention the first of the Fumarole settlers in California in the early nineteenth century (who, it is said, summoned the beast by sacrificing to grim Triton a new breed of terrier which was never again seen to piss or heard to bark on this earth),—nor even to contemplate the whole township of Zollenkramshaftige, Deu., which disappeared into a tremendous black tentacle on Ash Wednesday, 1666, just as the monks were distributing festive steins of “salt-spiced” Zollenbier (the beer’s briny/umami flavour came from human bone-ash).

Entrepreneurs, take note: Assuming this rum sells even moderately well, consider launching rival brands such as:

• The Sweat of Ulysses. A foul but paradoxically aphrodisiacal ouzo distilled from 100% legendary Greek people (heroes, villains, hermaphrodites, lion-people, people-who-turn-into-trees-in-order-to-escape-horny-deities, &c.).
• Loup Grenache. The unsurprisingly delicious cherry-flavoured sweat of the vegan werewolf.
• “Thunder.” This mystery vodka comes to us from Hohoq, the Flying State, and we don’t know what’s in it, only that it sells for $7.99 at gas stations in the South and Midwest and tastes like battery acid. Rumored to have powered a “green” vehicle farther than expected. Rumored to blend well with grapefruit juice.

Further suggestions welcome.

• The Haunted Vagina by Mellick Carlton III
• HELP! A Bear is Eating Me! by Mykle Hansen
• Fart Proudly: Writings of Benjamin Franklin You Never Read In School by the man himself

These book non-recommendations come courtesy Abe Books’ Weird Book Room, an indispensable trove of books I don’t really want to read (Haunted Vag. and HELP! A Bear aside). Other weird books include Blessed Are the Cheesemakers and What’s Wrong With My Snake?

Francis Bacon did us a solid when he wrote a little number called “Of Envy,” an essay that pretty much trashes haterism and covetousness to death with a lead pipe of logic.

That being said, I am still well envious of commercial diver Lenny Speregen and NYPD detective John Drzal, who provide the meat of a New York magazine investigation into the murky depths (well, mostly shallows) surrounding the city.

Two highlights of this superb submarine report are The Case Of The Spilled Silver Ingots (in 1903, a barge between Staten Island and New Jersey capsized, spilling 7,678 silver ingots; 6,000 were reclaimed; the rest, worth $26 million, are still down there) and The Case Of The Sunken Ice-Cream Truck Armada (in 1969, the Department of Environmental Conservation dumped a fleet of scrapped Good Humor trucks off Atlantic Beach in order to build an artificial reef).

Even more envy-inciting is the work of filmmaker Goksel Gülensoy, who’s dived beneath the Hagia Sophia, discovering 800-year-old submerged graves, secret Ottoman tunnels, and possible connections to the Anemas Dungeons, where Byzantine Emperors imprisoned each other for fun.

Granted, this is a free country, more or less; I could go swimming every day and apply for a job with the Underwater Eel Police, or whatever the proper department may be. Granted, my envy could be mitigated by action.

But I’m lazy, and I’m terrified of not being able to see more than a foot in front of me—and of dodging booze-cruise yachts, and encountering the aquatic octo-rats that have surely evolved off the Brooklyn coast. (Octo-rats always wanna battle, even though they can’t rhyme in English, and I don’t understand F’thskreek, their ink-twitch language.)

Green-eyed landlubber, I suppose, I’ll remain.

Traditionalists may see the death of old media and the fracturing of style as threats to time-tested systems. Old writers likely want people to read books, dangit, and books written within clear limits of genre, even if those limits have only existed for a few decades. Each medium wins its hawks, and so each medium has mourners to bemoan its inevitable death.  But how much gladder am I to laud the comings of a form, the birth of a new literature, a new system of meaning, one made of transparencies and Japanese music videos…

These musings are really just to say: My friends P. D. and M. R. of What We Know So Far have been presenting for the last year or so a series of simultaneously low-fi/hyper-current lecture-operas about, among other rhizomatic topics, the internet—what it means, where it’s going, and how quickly information in general is mutating in the Twitter era.

The other night at 3rd Ward they presented a series of short… lectures (?) and videos, some of which I’d seen in earlier, less-polished (but always entertaining) rounds of composition. To sum it up quickly and perhaps badly, WWKSF’s work blends the words of Baudrillard and the images of ICanHasCheezburger seamlessly, so that it’s afterward surprising that the great French de-thinkers of the twentieth century weren’t inspired by the internet, but somehow prefigured it, perhaps by doing lots of awesome drugs, or by being really smart, or a mix of columns A and B.

For What We Know So Far’s bold and hilarious efforts to probe just what we know and how we know it, in toto, they receive this week’s Honourable Badge of Merit.

In related news, (i.e., the news of cat memes on the internet), I found a new favorite sentence of the summer, from the New York Times:

No group, from the mostly white soldiers and bureaucrats who corral and abuse the prawns to the Nigerian gangsters who prey upon the aliens and exploit their addiction to cat food, is innocent.

This sentence claims to describe a movie, District 9, which I hadn’t really wanted to see until reading about the Nigerian cat-food gangsters. I wonder now, rereading the sentence from beyond the stars, if the c.-f. gangsters ever heard of Athanasius Kircher’s anti-mellifluous cat piano, and if cats like aliens, or if aliens fall into the same category as other cats, vacuums, mops, twine, roaches, bees, human toes, and floss.

This Saturday at 8 p.m., I’ll be playing the Logician in The Mighty Theater’s one-night-only production of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, a long, funny play about… well, conformity, drinking, logic, and rhinos, among other things. The show’s in Peekskill, at the Paramount. Here are the full details. And here is LoHud’s sneak-peak. Those in the Hudson/Westchester/MetroNorth region, check it.

FUN FACT: Rhinos are perissodactyls, or odd-toed ungulates. Looking up “perissodactyl” on Wikipedia yielded my new favorite sentence of the week, my emphasis:

In contrast to the Ruminant Artiodactyl ungulates, perissodactyls are hindgut fermenters; that is, they digest plant cellulose in their intestines rather than stomach.

At which show one may enjoy five-dollar all-thee-can-imbibe sangria and beer.

This event will be all ~10 kinds of fun (+/- 1 standard margin of error of fun), not to mention the first Heavy Jamal show in a year, featuring songs never before heard by the public.

Sangria Dance Party ft. the Mangoose and Heavy Jamal
Friday, April 24 at 8:30 p.m.
293 Monroe St. #3, Brooklyn

PS - the HJ show starts after the Pomp & Circumstance party, if you are going to that (as I am).

PS2 - The penguins are coming to destroy us. Be warned.

From “Taxing, a Ritual to Save the Species” in the New York Times:

The more closely knit an animal society is, and the more interdependent its members, the higher the rate of taxation. Among bell miner birds of Australia, for example, pairs of breeding adults are assisted at the nest by several youthful helpers, usually male. The helpers provision the couple’s fledglings with a steady supply of lerp, sugary casings secreted by plant-sucking insects.

Let me pause here to appreciate not only lerp itself—a most vivid and terrifying substance, “secreted by plant-sucking insects,” as opposed to, say, plant-tickling or plant-massaging insects—but also the men and women of Noblest Science who venture forth to learn of the lerp, to love the lerp.

Our article continues:

And though some scientists had wondered whether lerp wasn’t basically a junk food, offered up to the young bell miners as much for show as for substance, researchers report in the March issue of Animal Behaviour that lerp is, in fact, as important to the fledglings’ growth as is the meatier arthropod prey supplied by their parents. By all evidence, the helper birds are honestly “paying to stay,” trading a valuable currency for the right to remain within the aggressively guarded precincts of a bell miner breeding colony, with the hope of better times and personal propagation opportunities ahead.

The only response I have upon reading of colonies of lerpers is:

FUCK yeah, cilantro. You know how humans do.

We may or may not pay taxes because our ancestors shared the mammalian equivalent of lerp, but we definitely share salsa now (in part) because of you, cilantro. You and your leafy green cool refreshing mintacular steez.

The best material model of a cat is another, or preferably the same, cat.

—Norbert Wiener, Philosophy of Science (1945) (with A. Rosenblueth).

Courtesy my brother G., an aphorism about the best command-model for cat-thinking-about: Think about the cat you actually have. Problem of cat-concept solved.

This brings up the hilarity of phenomenology in general: What is the best (the only) description of a thing? The thing. (The thing beyond description. Chillin in its own little multiverse of thing-ness.)

Applies also to music: “What’s DOOM’s new album sound like?” “Well, you know—[insert comparison to other DOOM albums], [insert me humming a few bars]. It’s good.” Which is not to say that I wouldn’t enjoy going into figurative overdrive to describe DOOM’s work—only that my description would be inadequate for someone with little or no experience of paratactic/rhizomatic rap music about food, cartoons, and rap music.

This is all to say: I anticipate eagerly the new DOOM album, and if I have to paint a cat, I guess I have to paint my own cat, even if neither of us knuckleheads is happy about that situation.

Video/design expert and friend Patrick Davison designed Hello Cthulhu; lunchboxes and mousepads soon to come. H.P. Lovecraft was a top-notch bastard; this image would have probably driven him to an early (and soon unearthed) grave:

Writer and friend C.J. Hauser draws single-panel cartoons, every single day.

In terms of “famous” cartoonists and other drawers, I must note Partially Clips and Achewood (again), which have severely influenced my own stances toward talking animals and fourth-wall destruction.

Robot.

But here’s the twist: Robots, apparently, desire to be soldiers.

Whereas my cat would no doubt be content to play the robot pur sang—mindlessly spinning and cleaning and freaking out when I pour water on him [it?]—the poor robot whose job he’d so heartlessly steal would be an ethical soldier, one capable of making “the right choice” about when to unleash a devastating hail of armor-piercing minigun rounds onto children, compact cars, noisy televisions, life-size cut-outs of Adnan “Crazy Cheeze” Sabri, &c.

To clarify my position on ethical robotic devastation, I should add that attempts to trick-out the ethics of human soldiers have so far led to nada; as my man Philip Zimbardo points out on TED, the adoption of the uniform of an “ethical” government has—since the slave-Imperium of Roma, since the slave-empires of Sumer and Egypt long before—provided only a smokescreen, a chance to faux-ethically rationalize away our wars.

Perhaps robots can do us one better. Or perhaps we might pass the job of soldiering on to the noble (and highly irrational) cat. While certainly unethical, any given cat-soldier would also be pissy and libertarian, unable and unwilling to coordinate with the next—thus preventing the formation of a feline SkyNet or Matrix. Wars would be shorter and center around the control and distribution of fish-guts and whole milk. And—when the cats (individually) took command of the Roomba factories—the hardwood floors of the world would look a lot shinier, a lot faster.

(Paritur pax catto?)