Don't miss the so-called 'Boring Figure' (you've seen it!), the 'Short Boring Biography', the 'Boring Revisionist Essay', or the nail-biting episode of 'The History Channel: Boring'.
Okay, I need some help with this. It's a mood thing for some writing.
I need pointers to good old-fashioned, 'throw the hero's babe into the volcano' Hollywood savage ceremony drumming. Not real voodoo drumming...The real thing is pretty relaxed and lacks the threatening feel and the vicious, nasty crescendo I'm seeking.
No, what I want is The Natives Are Restless Drumming. Headhunter drumming. Cannibal king drumming. They're coming with machetes in the night drumming. We're summoning up the dead drumming. We're about to throw your pale, slinky butt to the giant gorilla drumming. Also chanting that is in the same vein. Drumming and chanting together is even better.
If it's audible on the internet, that's best, but point me at soundtracks, at CDs, at movies, at any useful source for this.
How's everybody doing? I'm in schoolwork/studying hell...
Other surprises: Still alive, still in California, looking for work. Anyone need a, a, ah...an Anarcho-Republican with moderately good *nix sysadmin skills?
Quick. Dirty. Chunky. This is to chicken soup what wor won ton is to that anemic little broth with a noodle or two and a shred of lettuce in it which is usually served as 'won ton soup'.
8 c chicken broth from cans 2 lb chicken breasts cut into 1" chunks 1 lb chicken prosciutto ravioli 16 oz pack stir-fry veggies cut into 1" chunks 1 c snow peas 1 c leftover salad greens (mixed) 2 lb baby yellow potatoes 1 med. carrot 1 c broccoli floret cut into 1" chunks 1 c cauliflower floret as above (is cauliflower floret redundant?) Some kind of chicken or vegetable spice mix sans MSG
Cut larger baby potatoes into halves or quarters for really big ones. Set in pot to boil. (Note: boiling will take place more reliably if you put water in with them.) Shake spices over chicken, toss into large stir fry skillet, cook about halfway through, flip over, leave center a tiny bit pink. Add all non-potato veggies and continue cooking until chicken appears done. Shake more stir fry spices over assemblage. By now about 15 mins should have passed and potatoes should be near done. Add to the mix. Stir fry skillet is probably now appearing rather full. Pour broth in over top liberally and begin to stir. Add ravioli, submerging it beneath the level of the bubbling broth. Cook about 10 mins more. When you have a mass of chunks of aromatic chicken, vegetables and ravioli with broth covering about the lower half of each chunk, you're pretty well done. Probably a half hour since you started.
Serves three to six depending on level of hunger. Provide some form of bread for sopping up remaining teaspoons of broth once all chunks have been picked out.
Options: For sick girlfriend raised on Campbell's chicken soup w/stars, substitute one can of abominable starry crap for 3c of broth. Boil shrimp and peel (or buy pre-stripped shrimp). Add while cooking chicken.
If I hadn't spent the last two hours snugged up against my sweetie, I'd say my evening was entirely wasted.
If you hoped to see the Sisters of Mercy tonight in Seattle at the Premier, sorry, you were shit out of luck. Their lighting tech decided that overloading the fog machines and maxing out the back lights and strobes to completely mask the band from the audience was the way to go. When we stepped out the front, it looked like the building was on fire, the smoke so thickly poured out the club's door.
There was so much fog going that they managed to blow the light rig, and of course their engineer didn't know how to reset it. As we came out, the club's own engineer was cussing up a storm about how he'd left so he didn't punch the guy.
But hey, don't let me make you think the lighting and effects ruined the show.
No, they had plenty of help from the sound mixer, who couldn't possibly have mixed it muddier if someone handed him a bucket of dirt and water. I know (from shouted conversations with others) that I wasn't the only old, frustrated Sisters fan there who couldn't even tell what SONG they were playing at several points. For the first half of the show the muddy, overdriven bass completely overwhelmed Eldritch as well as the lead and rhythm guitars, and in the second half of his performance Baron von E was reduced to caterwauling over the thick, lugubrious reverberations in order to be even vaguely heard. Harmonics were causing the roof beams to groan louder than the audience at several points. It was an outstanding example of audio ineptitude. Frankly, I will never again be able to listen to 'Giving Ground' without imagining it being played by a wannabe industrial ensemble composed of the original Sisters of Mercy accompanied by an idling earthmover and a thirty-foot piece of cellophane.
At least the bouncers behaved professionally. The ones we spoke to seemed appalled to be associated with the performance tonight.
The turnout was an interesting mix of people, post-goths turned soccer moms and yuppie dads mingling with people who wished they'd been alive when the Sisters was a happening band. Post-punks and lost, bewildered metalheads who responded enthusiastically to the overloaded sound system. We spent much of the show stranded behind a pair of jackasses who persistently mocked and mimicked other people's dancing. While the black lace, eyeshadow and leather crowd was well-represented, so were bluejeans, t-shirts, and I'd swear I even saw a leisure suit.
I've seen some major screwups by bands in my day, confusion over what song to play next, notes that weren't so much dropped as tossed out like a hot potato, singers too drunk to remember the lyrics, any number of blown amps and speaker stacks...But I really can't say the band was sucking tonight. I couldn't tell whether they were or not. The lead guitarist seemed to have his chops on, and I can chalk Andy's inarticulate bellowing up to rage and frustration over the mixing...
If you're in a band and reading this, take note: be good to your mixer. He or she can take your best performance and turn it into total crap at the slide of a lever, the turn of a dial.
I've been meaning at some point in the near future to geto back to using this journal for more political and philosophical pronouncements, but tonight I just have to get my irritation at this unprofessional behavior out of my system.
Hope you had a pleasant evening, and a pleasant-sounding one at that.
In the first scene where we see Darth Vader finally entombed within his life support armor, all I can think of is the Futurama 'Bend Her' episode with Calculon looking up at the camera yelling as melodramatically as possible:
We are faced with an enemy that ignores or is unaware that 'civilian' casualty counts from many 'reputable' sources don't distinguish at all between true civilians and ununiformed, armed partisans. People who believe that our uniforms in Iraq and Afghanistan are worn by dedicated killers who signed up for the opportunity to pull the trigger rather than the troops under fire that CNN's Martin Savidge filmed who had no translator and yet were taking so much time to communicate via hand signals with and carefully not threaten a Baghdad family they were trying to evacuate from a house. People who believe that the only use we make of indigenous forces is cannon-fodder so our own don't have to die, rather than that we do our utmost to train these people to stand alone, so that they can make their country what they want it to be, rather than what we want it to be.
Those people need to read things like the memories of this Iraqi Lieutenant Colonel. Lt. Colonel Ahmed Lutfi Raheem was a B'aathist. It doesn't say that in the article, but any Major in the Iraqi armed forces had to at least pretend to be, or wouldn't have reached that rank. Now he's putting his life on the line and rebuilding his country, despite having been at the focus of several attacks by both jihadists and his own countrymen. He has been bombed, kidnapped, robbed and beaten.
"I do my best, though," Ahmed said. "I do my best to protect my country and to give my country its security." And he does one more thing that doesn’t earn medals in any army on earth: he continues to show up for work. And in the face of suicide bombings, targetings, and abductions and beatings, in Iraq, this is just the typical story common to all the 230,000-plus Iraqi Army Soldiers and police service officers choosing to serve their country.
Bill Hobbs has now established a clearing house site for voter fraud reporting. Whatever party, whatever report, if you read an article on voter fraud and it isn't up there, mail it in with the link, date, source and summary to voterfraud-at-gmail.com to get the list updated.
It's a long list.
Professor Bainbridge has another long list of ugliness. Absolutely inexcusable and violent ugliness that if it was being done by the opposition party would surely be getting more news coverage.
Funny how that works.
Certain elements of the press should be afraid, I think. They should be very afraid. If the person who is clearly not their candidate wins, some statements may be made regarding their attempts at kingmaking. There's a big difference between 'silencing' the press and holding the press responsible for deliberate misreporting or deliberately not reporting stories that are newsworthy...Such as the fact that CBS chose to report these two incidents while ignoring quite literally a score and change of incidents involving ACORN in a clearly organized effort in multiple states.
This is far from the first time we've seen this behavior. Let's hope it's prosecuted more strongly than the last time. No matter what happens in the beginning of November, expect recount referendums to continue well into early next year the way things are going.
For starters, let's go with a mandatory felony for vote-tampering, if it isn't one already. See, Felons aren't citizens. They cannot vote.
You cheat, you're out of the game. Prosecute, prosecute, prosecute.
The idea that you can explain anything to anyone if you take it carefully, use reasoned discourse, a clear chain of logic, and available reference data falls apart in the borderland where 'Violence never solved anything.' meets the city limits of Carthage.
amused