Guns, Little Richard, Louie Gohmert, Martin Luther King, Ted Nugent, The Bangles

Your Dai…, Oops, Occasional Hot Air

A Lo-o-o-o-o-ong Week

Man, that was a weird week, no?

Eleven days? Along about Apolloday I started thinking, Hey wuz goin’ on here, mang?

And then by Circeday, I figured, Okay, we’re gonna start running out of Greek gods and other mythical figures to name the days after. So, anyway, Happy Thaliaday!

Now then. My last post was on the 19th. Today’s the 30th. Tomorrow’s the 31st and Sunday’s the 32nd, and…, oh, you know the rest. My point is I badly underestimated the amount of time I needed away from being the smartest-assed snark-pup on the block.

And you know what? I still need time away from it all.

Swear to the Big Daddy-o in the Sky, I’m rather enjoying not having to point out every single inanity and insanity uttered by the likes of Louie Gohmert and Ted Nugent and all the Second Amendment fetishists of this holy land.

(Hehe, some dope in Arkansas who wants all teachers to pack artillery in the classroom wound up shooting one of the teachers he was training how to use said artillery. As long as the other side’s got guys like that, whaddya need me for?)

Sleep Tight Tonight, Kiddies

■

By and by it had hit me that my rapier-like wit and unassailable logic are terrible burdens to bear. They are gifts, I tell you. See, whenever somebody says something like, oh, say, Martin Luther King was no liberal, I must spring into action. Dig: I’m like a superhero.

But, I dunno, have they made a Batman movie about him being tired of being Batman yet? Gotta be, I’d figure, considering they’ve made about 211 Batman movies in the last couple of decades. Hollywood, y’know?

So, I’d be like the Batman in that movie; facing a crisis of purpose. Should he continue to chase whatever hot starlet is appearing as Catwoman or should he pull in his wings a bit and chill?

I’m for chillin’. And that’s what I’m gonna keep on keepin’ on for a while.

Truth is, I’m going to be mulling some changes here. Like I said eleven days ago, I was getting sick of hearing my own voice. The Pencil will still be here. I just don’t know precisely what form it’ll take just yet. Stay tuned.

Oh, BTW: Black Comedy will continue when I return. People already are wondering how Anna and Tami will wiggle their way out of that Northwest Side bar filled with drunken white men. You’ll know when I know.

See ya. Probably soon.

▼

Walking Down Your Street

The hottest girl band ever. They have a pillow fight in the opening sequence. Shudder. Plus, Little Richard makes an appearance! Have I died and gone to heaven?

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08/13/2013

Your Daily Hot Air

Some Credit For BHO, Please

Don’t get me wrong, I know as well as you do that there are lunatics on the Left.

I know, I know, all I do is rail against the Right Wingnuts here. That’s because they scare the bejesus out of me more than Left Wingnuts do. They, the Rightists, are better organized and have gotten themselves elected to public offices all over this holy land. Their wingnuttiness is far more dangerous than the rantings of kids who tie bandannas around their faces and run around city streets playing cowboys and Indians with the cops whenever a political party holds a convention or the G-8 has a big meeting.

Louie Gohmert is a member of the United States Congress. Need I offer more evidence of the Right’s immediate menace?

Louie Gohmert Makes Our Laws

■

Anyway, here’s a personal message to my lefty fringe-ists: How about a little love for Barack Obama after his Justice Minister, Eric Holder, announced new guidelines for federal prosecutions yesterday? Holder said the fact that our prison pop. has grown 800 percent (I repeat, eight hundred goddamned percent!) since the mid-1980s is whacked out. The United States is the most incarceration-happy nation on Earth. And most of the people doing real time here have dark skin.

Not only that, many of our state and local prisons have been taken over by for-profit companies. No chance anything can go wrong under that kind of a set-up, right?

Holder said this to the American Bar Association yesterday in San Francisco: “Too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long, and for no truly good law enforcement reason.”

Not So Fast, Sez Holder

■

Wow. It’s about damned time.

My guys on the Far Far Left usually call Barack Obama a fascist. The Far Far Right usually sez BHO is either Hitler or Stalin, depending on which side of the bed they got out of that morning. They’re both saying the same thing, only in different languages.

Well, now the Right lunocracy will have ample fodder to accuse the Obama admin. of setting all its psycho-criminal black brethren free to wreak a reign of terror on our white streets. That’ll be their deranged reaction.

The Left lunocracy will have no reaction because the Holder/Obama statement does’t fit in with their carefully concocted depiction of the Prez as the second coming of Big Brother.

▲

Near Death, Far From Reality

If I believed in a being who one day decided to create an entire Universe in six days and then had to take a nap on the seventh, presumably because his lightning-shooting finger was all worn out, I’d thank him. [And that being would be a him, right? Anything that mighty would have to have a penis, I guess.]

I’d thank the Big Daddy-o in the Sky because researchers have found that mice — you read right, mice! — experience brain events similar those in humans which have caused the fairy tale believers among us to imagine we can visit heaven when we’re on the brink of death.

You know the New York Times Book Review weekly bestseller lists have been sullied of late by fever dreams of people who had near death experiences and swear up and down that they went to the Good Place and even met the CEO of All Existence. Oddly, the NYTBR puts books like Heaven Is for Real and Proof of Heaven on its nonfiction lists, which strikes me as a tad presumptuous.

The ramblings of a pre-schooler and a neurosurgeon who phonied up his tale seem more fiction-y than not, no?

So, let’s take a stroll down reality lane. Scientists, led by the University of Michigan’s Jimo Borjigin, studied lab mice who were experiencing cardiac arrest. They found that the brains of the mice kicked into a sort of super-mouse state as they were dying. This enhanced cerebral activity may be analogous to that of near-death experiencers who claim that their imaginings were brilliantly realistic, so much so that what they thought they saw as they lay near mort seemed more real than reality.

I Saw God!

■

“We found continued and heightened activity. Measurable conscious activity is much, much higher after the heart stops,” says Brojigan. She adds, “That really is consistent with what patients report…. The near-death experience is perhaps really the byproduct of the brain’s attempt to save itself.”

▲

WFHB’s New Boss Search

All the resumes are in at WFHB, Firehouse Radio. The deadline for those who wished to apply for the vacant GM position was Friday, last week. Now the WFHB board’s selection committee will hand pick a half dozen or so applicants for initial phone interviews, to be followed by personal interviews with three of them, and then — tada! — we’ll have a new Big Cheese at the station.

Here’s hoping the process doesn’t take as long as it did when Chad Carrothers eventually (and I do mean eventually) was tapped to replace Will Murphy a couple of years ago. That whole shebang took a good six months.

That’s crazy. What made it even more crazy was the fact that Carrothers was so head and shoulders superior to every other candidate that to dub anyone else GM would have been cause for scandal.

Wanna know a secret? One or two august members of the WFHB board think they’re running an operation as complicated and far-reaching as the United Nations.

▲

Heaven

▲

07/12/2013

Your Daily Hot Air

Super Quick Hits

◆ REAL MEN

The website PolitiChicks, “The Voice of the Conservative Woman,” has selected — get ready for this — The Hottest Conservative Supermen in America.

A panel of six Tory dames, all of whom appear to take cosmetics and physical esthetics tips from the Mattel Corporation, selected hot sausages from among all the talking heads, bloviators, gasbags, intentional misinterpretors, and dissemblers in the Right Wing phoni-verse. I should state here that there are plenty of reasonably intelligent male conservatives in the holy land, including, but not limited to, George Will, David Brooks, Tom Friedman, and Barack Obama. Just because a guy leans Right doesn’t mean he’s suffering from anencephaly.

PolitiChick’s Selection Panel

■

OTOH, PolitiChick’s fap list leans heavily troglodytic.

And, yeah, there are some handsome hunks of cartilage on the roster, but, man….

Okay, there are a couple of handsome (or at least non-terrifying) knights on steeds for conservative princesses to fantasize coming to their collective rescue. Consider David Spady of breitbart.com or Sean Hannity of Fox News, both of whom make the list. Any reasonable straight woman or gay man might deem the two bonkable (as long as they could ignore the incipient nausea caused by the duo’s babblings.)

Red Meat: Spady & Hannity

■

But get this: the list also contains the eerie specters of Tucker Carlson, Louie Gohmert, and Mike Huckabee. The Carlson tab is mildly puzzling, considering he was probably named Most Likely to Be Molested In A Holding Cell in his high school yearbook. But Huckabee is as attractive as a shift manager at a CVS on the outskirts of Little Rock. And Louie Gohmert? Louie Gohmert, for chrissakes!

Canned Spam: Huckabee & Gohmert

■

And here, all this time, I thought the fringe right was wingnutty only in their political thinking.

(h/t to Wonkette.)

◆

REAL BABIES

Swear to god, liberals and conservatives name their spawn differently, reflecting their political orientations.

This is science, man. A researcher at the University of Chicago, Eric Oliver has discovered that conservatives tend to dub their unfortunate offspring with more traditional names. Not only that, they tend to prefer names with harsh consonant sounds, like Kurt.

Future Republican

■

Liberals, on the other hand, dig more vowelly monikers — cool, huh? I just made that adjective up — leading them to hang names like Ella and Sophia on their trophy children. Also, libs like names that have L sounds in them. Duh, right? Ls can be found in the words lesbian and homosexual; whaddya expect?

◆

REAL EVIL

If you don’t know that Ayn Rand is the single most important figure in American politics today, you don’t know nuffin’.

The US House of Representatives has been commandeered by a pack of ideologues who rode the Me Party wave back in 2010. And because these ideologues refuse to compromise on anything due to the fact that doing so will turn them into commie, fag, Muslim abortionists and (worst of all) RINOs, Congress has ground to a halt. Thanks, pals.

In case you haven’t guessed by now, Ayn Rand, before whom the Paul Ryans of the world genuflect, embodies every single thing in the world I find repellant.

The only thing she did in her entire life that I even slightly approve of is smoke — and that’s because I detest people who don’t have at least one good vice.

Rand, Smoking

■

Not that I don’t detest Ayn Rand. I do. As should everyone with even the slightest shred of human decency, compassion, agape, and good sense.

There.

▲

08/25/2012

The Pencil Today:

✍

THE QUOTE

“Republicans would like to pretend like Congressman Akin’s substitution of superstition for science is a lone problem but it’s not: they’re all magical thinkers, on nearly every issue. They don’t get their answers on climate change from climatologists, they get them from the Book of Genesis. Hence Sharia Law in America is a dire threat, and global warming a hoax.” — Bill Maher

▲

COWBOY UP

After the Aurora, Colorado, shootings at least one Republican (duh!) pol spewed the lunatic opinion that had the patrons of the theater been permitted to carry artillery into the place, they could have shot the shooter up like a swiss cheese and thereby become heroes forever. Oh, and they could have saved a life or two.

Gohmert: “…Was There Nobody That Was Carrying…?”

✍

Because, you know, 19-year-olds attending a midnight showing of a superhero movie in a darkened (natch), packed theater are nothing if not crack shots.

Apparently, that conceit took a hit yesterday when New York cops (who are trained to shoot pistols) opened fire on that guy in the suit who’d killed his former boss at the Empire State Building. So far as we know, the cops did most of the damage to the innocent bystanders, nine of whom caught lead.

One Down, Nine To Go

✍

So, yeah, they killed the guy with the gun but in the process did far more damage than the shooter ever intended to do.

Now, what was that about 19-year-olds with artillery in a darkened theater after midnight?

▲

THE NEWS IS A JOKE

Remember a few years ago how the punditocracy was wringing its hands over the fact that a majority of young people were getting their news from comedy programs like “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report“?

Me? I figured standup comedians and improvisational comics couldn’t do much worse interpreting the day’s events than cerebrally flabby blow-hards like Sean Hannity or Chris Matthews.

A Mighty Wind

✍

Anyway, what passes for today’s current affairs debate has devolved to the point where Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are elderly statesmen. In fact, if one really wants to get to the meat of a pressing issue these days, one has to click on Cracked.com.

Swear to the god I don’t believe in.

For instance, take a recent Cracked post entitled “5 Ways Modern Men Are Trained to Hate Women.”

(And, honestly, could you imagine any broadcast or cable news outlet even touching that topic? With the recent verbal assaults on Sandra Fluke and rape victims, it’s clear — isn’t it? — that too many men hate the hell out of women around this holy land. Someone’s got to be teaching them how to do it!)

Fluke Took A Beating

✍

Post author David Wong (oy, I hope that’s his real name) liberally sprinkles the piece with perceptive gems. He begins by recalling Rush Limbaugh’s attack on Fluke. Limbaugh, Wong rationalizes, “is paid to say outrageous things.” It’s the chimps who follow Limbaugh that scare the bejesus out of Wong: “If you really want to feel all dead inside, you need to listen to what the regular folk were saying.”

He quotes commenters on Right Wing sites who described Sandra Fluke in terms that made it look as though Limbaugh were trying to coo into her ear.

“My Darling Slut”

✍

“Now go to the front page of any mostly male discussion site like Reddit.com and see how many inches you can browse before finding several thousand men bemoaning how all women are gold-digging whores (7,500 upvotes) and how crazy and irrational women are (9,659 upvotes) and how horrible and gross and fat women are (4,000 upvotes). Or browse the ‘Men’s Rights’ section and see weird fantasies about alpha males defeating all the hot women who try to control them with their vaginas.”

No, neither Sean Hannity nor Chris Matthews has touched that one yet.

Wong says movies teach us that it’s a man’s right to be awarded a hot chick after he accomplishes some feat. “When the Karate Kid wins the tournament, his prize is a trophy and Elisabeth Shue. Neo saves the world and is awarded Trinity…, the hero in ‘Avatar’ gets the hottest Na’vi, Shrek gets Fiona, Bill Murray gets Sigourney Weaver in ‘Ghostbusters,’ Frodo gets Sam, WALL-E gets EVE… and so on.

“Hell, at the end of ‘An Officer and a Gentleman,’ Richard Gere walks into the lady’s workplace and just carries her out like he’s picking up a suit at the drycleaner.”

Cleaned And Pressed

✍

Yeesh!

Wong concludes, “From birth we’re taught that we’re owed a beautiful girl…. It’s why every Mr. Nice Guy is shocked to find that buying gifts for a girl and doing her favors won’t win him sex. It’s why we go to ‘slut’ and ‘whore’ as our default insults — we’re not mad that women enjoy sex. We’re mad that women are distributing to other people the sex that they owed us.”

I doubt if one in twenty Gender Studies classes comes close to hitting that nail on the head.

Want more? Wong’s got it. He quotes from a Right Wing site where men were discussing the merits of then-US Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. One man said the Kagan is, “So fugly, I’d say ‘Don’t even look’!!!” Another man agreed: “This person is disgusting and I would never trust ‘it’s’ [sic] opinion on ANYTHING!”

Oh, Why Couldn’t Obama Have Nominated A Babe!

✍

Wong writes that a woman’s “role in society or level of accomplishment doesn’t matter. Even if she’s a damned candidate for the Supreme Court, the female always has a dual role: to function as a person, and to act as decor.

“And we get pissed if she doesn’t do her job…. She owes it to us to be pretty.”

Man.

Wong has plenty more to say about American misogyny. Go there and read the piece for yourself. After doing so, you’ll understand a lot more about men than if you’d studied a hundred “serious” articles in the New York Times Magazine.

▲

Here’s how I waste my time. How about you? Share your fave sites with us via the comments section. Just type in the name of the site, not the url; we’ll find them. If we like them, we’ll include them — if not, we’ll ignore them.

❏ I Love Charts — Life as seen through charts.

❏ XKCD — “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.”

❏ Skepchick — Women scientists look at the world and the universe.

❏ Indexed — All the answers in graph form, on index cards.

Indexed

✍

❏ I Fucking Love Science — A Facebook community of science geeks.

I Fucking Love Science

✍

❏ Present/&/Correct — Fun, compelling, gorgeous and/or scary graphic designs and visual creations throughout the years and from all over the world.

❏ Flip Flop Fly Ball — Baseball as seen through infographics, haikus, song lyrics, and other odd communications devices.

❏ Mental Floss — Facts.

❏ Sodaplay — Create your own models or play with other people’s models.

❏ Eat Sleep Draw — An endless stream of artwork submitted by an endless stream of people.

❏ Big Think — Tapping the brains of notable intellectuals for their opinions, predictions, and diagnoses.

❏ The Daily Puppy — So shoot me.

▲

Electron Pencil event listings: Music, art, movies, lectures, parties, receptions, games, benefits, plays, meetings, fairs, conspiracies, rituals, etc.

Saturday, August 25, 2012

◗ Twin Lakes Recreation Center — IU Bloomington Cricket Club, Hoosier Cup 2012; 7:30am

◗ City Hall, Showers Plaza — Farmers Market; 8am-1pm

◗ Rogers Elementary School — Kappa Kappa Sigma Garage Sale & Bake Sale; 8am-noon

◗ IU Jordan Avenue Parking Garage — Fall Bike Auction; 9am

◗ Tibetan Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center — Mind Training through Pain & Disability series, presented by Ani Choekye; 10:30am

◗ WonderLab — National Dog Day Celebration: Greyhounds; 1-4pm

◗ IU Mathers Museum of World Cultures — “The Arms of the Shire of Mynydd Seren,” demonstration by members of Bloomington’s Society of Creative Anachronism branch; 1:30-4pm

◗ Monroe County Public Library — Session 3, Basic Literacy Tutor Training; 1:30-5pm

◗ IU Cinema — Film: “Shane”; 3pm

◗ IU Cinema — Film: “Hannah Takes the Stairs”; 6:30pm

◗ Ryder Film Series — “The Well Digger’s Daughter” at IU Fine Arts; 6:45pm

◗ Oliver Winery, Creekbend Vineyard — Music: Jenn Cristy; evening, call for exact time

◗ Muddy Boots Cafe, Nashville — Music: Kevin Bruener; 7-9pm

◗ Brown County Playhouse, Nashville — Music: Carrie Newcomer; 7:30pm

◗ Ryder Film Series — “Take this Waltz” at IU Woodburn Hall; 8pm

◗ Cafe Django — Music: Post Modern Jazz Quartet; 8pm

◗ The Player’s Pub — Music: Pet Monkey; 8pm

◗ The Comedy Attic — Garfunkel & Oates; 8 & 10:30pm, Both shows sold out

◗ IU Memorial Union, Whittenberger Auditorium — UB Films: “The Avengers”; 8pm

◗ Ryder Film Series — “The Pigeoneers” at IU Fine Arts; 8:45pm

◗ Bear’s Place — Music: Cooked Books, Energy Gown; 9pm

◗ Max’s Place — Music: White Lightning; 9pm

◗ The Bluebird — Music: Main Squeeze; 9pm

◗ IU Cinema — Film: “LOL”; 9:30pm

◗ The Root Cellar at Farm Bloomington — Queen & Bowie dance party; 10pm

◗ IU Memorial Union, Whittenberger Auditorium — UB Films: “The Avengers”; 11pm

ONGOING

◗ Ivy Tech Waldron Center — Exhibits:

“40 Years of Artists from Pygmalion’s”; through September 1st

◗ IU Art Museum — Exhibits:

“A Tribute to William Zimmerman,” wildlife artist; through September 9th
Willi Baumeister, “Baumeister in Print”; through September 9th
Annibale and Agostino Carracci, “The Bolognese School”; through September 16th
“Contemporary Explorations: Paintings by Contemporary Native American Artists”; through October 14th
David Hockney, “New Acquisitions”; through October 21st
Utagawa Kuniyoshi, “Paragons of Filial Piety”; through fall semester 2012
Julia Margaret Cameron, Edward Weston, & Harry Callahan, “Intimate Models: Photographs of Husbands, Wives, and Lovers”; through December 31st
“French Printmaking in the Seventeenth Century”; through December 31st

◗ IU SoFA Grunwald Gallery — Exhibits:

“Media Life,” drawings and animation by Miek von Dongen; through September 15th
“Axe of Vengeance: Ghanaian Film Posters and Film Viewing Culture”; through September 15th

The Electron Pencil

Category Archives: Louie Gohmert

Your Dai…, Oops, Occasional Hot Air

A Lo-o-o-o-o-ong Week

Sleep Tight Tonight, Kiddies

Walking Down Your Street

Share this:

Like this:

Your Daily Hot Air

Some Credit For BHO, Please

Louie Gohmert Makes Our Laws

Not So Fast, Sez Holder

Near Death, Far From Reality

I Saw God!

WFHB’s New Boss Search

Heaven

Share this:

Like this:

Your Daily Hot Air

Super Quick Hits

◆

REAL MEN

PolitiChick’s Selection Panel

Red Meat: Spady & Hannity

Canned Spam: Huckabee & Gohmert

REAL BABIES

Future Republican

REAL EVIL

Rand, Smoking

▲

Share this:

Like this:

The Pencil Today:

THE QUOTE

▲

COWBOY UP

Gohmert: “…Was There Nobody That Was Carrying…?”

One Down, Nine To Go

THE NEWS IS A JOKE

A Mighty Wind

Fluke Took A Beating

“My Darling Slut”

Cleaned And Pressed

Oh, Why Couldn’t Obama Have Nominated A Babe!

❏ I Love Charts — Life as seen through charts.

❏ XKCD — “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.”

❏ Skepchick — Women scientists look at the world and the universe.

❏ Indexed — All the answers in graph form, on index cards.

Indexed

❏ I Fucking Love Science — A Facebook community of science geeks.

I Fucking Love Science

❏ Present/&/Correct — Fun, compelling, gorgeous and/or scary graphic designs and visual creations throughout the years and from all over the world.

❏ Flip Flop Fly Ball — Baseball as seen through infographics, haikus, song lyrics, and other odd communications devices.

❏ Mental Floss — Facts.

❏ Sodaplay — Create your own models or play with other people’s models.

❏ Eat Sleep Draw — An endless stream of artwork submitted by an endless stream of people.

❏ Big Think — Tapping the brains of notable intellectuals for their opinions, predictions, and diagnoses.

❏ The Daily Puppy — So shoot me.

Saturday, August 25, 2012

◗ Twin Lakes Recreation Center — IU Bloomington Cricket Club, Hoosier Cup 2012; 7:30am

◗ City Hall, Showers Plaza — Farmers Market; 8am-1pm

◗ Rogers Elementary School — Kappa Kappa Sigma Garage Sale & Bake Sale; 8am-noon

◗ IU Jordan Avenue Parking Garage — Fall Bike Auction; 9am

◗ Tibetan Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center — Mind Training through Pain & Disability series, presented by Ani Choekye; 10:30am

◗ WonderLab — National Dog Day Celebration: Greyhounds; 1-4pm

◗ IU Mathers Museum of World Cultures — “The Arms of the Shire of Mynydd Seren,” demonstration by members of Bloomington’s Society of Creative Anachronism branch; 1:30-4pm

◗ Monroe County Public Library — Session 3, Basic Literacy Tutor Training; 1:30-5pm

◗ IU Cinema — Film: “Shane”; 3pm

◗ IU Cinema — Film: “Hannah Takes the Stairs”; 6:30pm

◗ Ryder Film Series — “The Well Digger’s Daughter” at IU Fine Arts; 6:45pm

◗ Oliver Winery, Creekbend Vineyard — Music: Jenn Cristy; evening, call for exact time

◗ Muddy Boots Cafe, Nashville — Music: Kevin Bruener; 7-9pm

◗ Brown County Playhouse, Nashville — Music: Carrie Newcomer; 7:30pm

◗ Ryder Film Series — “Take this Waltz” at IU Woodburn Hall; 8pm

◗ Cafe Django — Music: Post Modern Jazz Quartet; 8pm

◗ The Player’s Pub — Music: Pet Monkey; 8pm

◗ The Comedy Attic — Garfunkel & Oates; 8 & 10:30pm, Both shows sold out

◗ IU Memorial Union, Whittenberger Auditorium — UB Films: “The Avengers”; 8pm

◗ Ryder Film Series — “The Pigeoneers” at IU Fine Arts; 8:45pm

◗ Bear’s Place — Music: Cooked Books, Energy Gown; 9pm