Happy Alevromoutzouromata!
Yup! Yesterday was Alevromoutzouromata already! We missed it. Although, you know, once you get to Underpants Day, you know Alevromoutzouromata can’t be far behind.
Alevromoutzouromata is Greek for “people throw flour at each other.” Kidding? Der Spiegel says nein. People of the little village of Galaxidi in Greece celebrate the end of Carnival and the beginning of Greek Orthodox Lent by dancing and throwing 3,000 pounds of colorfully dyed flour at each other. The day is known, brain-hurtingly, as Clean Monday. (Click for pictures).
It all got started, quoth the Tourist Bureau, at the beginning of the 19th Century, when the Ottoman occupiers (read: killjoy Muslims) forbade the celebration of Christian holidays. In protest, the men of Galaxni painted their faces with ash and danced solemnly in the village square on the Monday before Lent. And then when the Muzzies were gone, it was all, like, ‘FOOD FIGHT!’
Weird? Pff! Not even the weirdest Clean Monday celebration on the Island of Greece. That would have to be the Penis Festival of Tyrnavos. There, once a year, you may dress up like a winkie and eat things that look like peens, drink strong beverages from tallywhacker-shaped cups through straws shaped like weiners, stir the spinach soup with unthinkable utensils and sing songs about boners.
I knew about this one. One of my roommates in art school was Greek — a city girl from Athens. She described how her family drove across the island one year on Clean Monday and unwittingly drove into the middle of Peckerfest. In a convertible.
Traumatized for life, poor girl. “Huge penises! They were…all around the car. Pressing against us…dancing…singing…waving things. Oh, it was horrible!”
Despite the timing, this is an explicitly Dionysian festival — another big fat Olde Worlde religion mash-up. Let us hope Galaxidi and Tyrnavos never get together for this one.
August 19, 2008 — 12:45 pm
Comments: 28
Clown wars
“When she was arrested in Afghanistan last month, Aafia Siddique allegedly had in her possession maps of New York, a list of potential targets that included the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, the subway system and the animal disease center on Plum Island, detailed chemical, biological and radiological weapon information that has been seen only in a handful of terrorist cases, as well as a thumb drive packed with emails, ABC News has learned.”
Seriously? She was carrying all that around in her purse? Was the thumb drive labeled “Shhhh…Super Secret al Qaeda Plan to Take Over the World”? Was she wearing a little black mask and pants and a striped shirt with “TERRORIST” written on it? Has any nation ever faced an enemy more cartoonishly slap-dash, underripe and just plain bug-fuck crazy?
Let’s take just one datum and think it through a little. The Statue of Liberty has symbolic importance to Americans, so I’ll give them that. But it’s on an island and access is controlled by the Parks Service. A search is involved, so you couldn’t carry much in the way of explosives. Not sure what explosives would do, anyway; the statue itself is a thin skin of copper stretched over a steel framework. Hard to damage. Maybe you could fly a plane into it (I accidentally did that all the time with Microsoft Flight Simulator). Might or might not work. Plus, small body count. In sum, not a very good target. So why even put it on a list, let alone walk around with it?
These fuckers are always being picked up with “maps of the subway system” or “lists of targets” — stuff that’s easily Googlable, perfectly innocent in isolation and make NO sense to be carrying around, unless the whole purpose is to buy yourself a world of hurt and look menacing in a headline. Honestly, when you’re just blue-skying your evil plans, it’s really, really not a good idea to write it all down and carry it on your person.
An earlier ABC News article quoted the Afghanistan National Police as saying she was carrying materials from the “Anarchist’s Arsenal” — bet you anything that’s our old friend the Anarchist’s Cookbook, helping angry Americans blow themselves up since 1971. How terrorized am I supposed to be by a pack of bozos getting their doomsday weapons out of a book you can buy on Amazon for twenty bucks? I think MIT ripped this chick off.
Staunch righty that I am, it would cross my mind that the government is making all this stupid shit up, until I remember how much of it there is. Like, remember this guy? Mohammed Taheri-Azar, former University of North Carolina student. Pleaded guilty yesterday to nine counts of attempted murder. Avenged Muslim deaths around the world by driving his SUV into a crowd of UNC students. Really, Mo? That’s your evil plan?
You know, you can give ’em all the education you want, but someday they’ll break loose and fly off down the road waving their arms and going “ULULULULULULULU!”
It’s like we’re fighting the Global War against Angry Pinwheeling Retards.
August 13, 2008 — 9:57 am
Comments: 21
There ain’t no God but Allah, y’all
Workers at the Tyson chicken plant in Shelbyville, Tennessee get eight paid holidays a year. Under the new contract they just signed, Labor Day is no longer one of them. Instead, they traded it for Eid al-Fitr — the last day of Ramadan, when Muslims break fast.
That’s because more than half the workforce (700 out of 1,200) is Muslim. Mostly Somali.
Shelbyville. That’s like Bugtussle, folks. Possum Holler. East Dawgtesticle. Shelbyville makes Mayberry look like Gotham City. Or did.
Somalis. Aren’t they the guys that dragged our dead soldiers through the streets? Why are we importing them? In quantity? To little bitty towns in Tennessee? Seriously, WTF?
August 4, 2008 — 8:23 am
Comments: 69
You know what’s great about going to Hell?
I’ll know so many people there!
This was a birthday gift from my hiking buddy. She saw it and thought of me immediately (blasphemy/weasel? Tack/weasel? Not sure, but I’m flattered). You press it onto a piece of bread and, when you make it toast, the pressed parts come out darker. Voilà! Miracle toast!
At least, I think that’s how it works. I haven’t tried it; my toaster was one of the first things to go. It was a beautiful object — according to the Toaster Museum it was a General Electric 139T81. I saw a picture of one in the industrial design catalog of the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Arts once.
But the pressy thing was go-bust, and you had to jam a fork in it to make the toast stay down, which was pretty bad mojo, especially if you forgot and immolated your toast. Nothing says are you flipping insane? like silverware jammed in an electrical appliance.
I’m proud to say this blasphemous object came from the college bookstore of my alma mater. Wait, can you call it your alma mater if you drop out? I know they consider me an alumna, regardless.
Probably because so many, many people wash out of the grinding hell-machine that is art school.
May 12, 2008 — 7:19 am
Comments: 49
Shattering my worldview, one dead hippie peace activist at a time
Okay, so this Italian artist — Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo, known as Pippa Bacca — decides to hitch right across the Middle East to Israel and the Palestinian Territories. Wearing a wedding dress. For peace.
I know: makes perfect sense to me, too. “She had said she wanted to show that she could put her trust in the kindness of local people.”
Okay, y’all aren’t going to believe this next part: it didn’t have a happy ending.
She was hitching with a friend. They separated in Istanbul and planned to meet up again in Beirut.
Then she vanished and turned up naked and stone dead under some bushes in the woods in Turkey.
A Turk named Murat Karatas was nicked when he tried to use her cellphone. He confessed he had picked her up at a gas station and raped and murdered her.
I know! Can you believe it? It’s like the ordinary laws of time and space don’t apply!
April 12, 2008 — 6:30 pm
Comments: 56
Creepy Monday
So I had this dream about Mike Huckabee, and the punchline was, “not David and Goliath, Davey and Goliath,” which I woke up thinking was the funniest joke evarrrrr. Then my eyes adjusted and saw that I was lying on a mattress on the floor covered in cats and dustbunnies.
Monday. So very, very Monday.
Anyhow, Davey and Goliath — for all you philthy pherriners — was a stop-action TV program of the ’60s, brought you by the Lutheran church and Art Clokey (of Gumby fame). Yes, it was every bit as fun as it sounds. It ran Sunday mornings, and you watched because…what the hell else you going to watch Sunday morning? Davey and Goliath has to be in my top five Programs I Wouldn’t Want to Watch after Dropping the Brown Acid.
I didn’t realize until I Wiki’d it this morning that the sweet, stupid Davey of the Sixties turned into a major dick in the Seventies: cheating, contaminating a well and “telling a handicapped child to shoot himself for being so ‘dumb’.” I’d love to know how Goliath handled that one.
It’s still running on some religious stations, minus certain episodes. Violence, racial issues…that sort of thing. Yes, we have lived to see the day that Davey and Goliath is too edgy for children.
And speaking of edgy and creepy…a doctor in Australia is under investigation for mutilating and abusing hundreds of women.
Carolyn Dewaegeneire, a patient who broke her silence on a national TV news program last week, was admitted to Pambula Hospital on August 2002 to have a minor lesion removed from her labia.
Before she lost consciousness to a general anesthetic, she said Reeves leaned over and whispered in her ear: “I’m going to take your clitoris, too.”
After the operation she discovered all her external genitalia had been cut off her body. It is alleged Reeves later boasted of removing “all the fun bits” — and said she wouldn’t need them as her husband had died.
He wasn’t struck off for that. He was merely ordered not to practice as an obstetrician. He was struck off for disobeying and working as an obstetrician anyway.
Note to self: swing by the liquor store on the way home.
February 25, 2008 — 3:14 pm
Comments: 39
Pretty Princess Pancake
I’ll never forget the year and the approximate date Princess Di got creamed: it was shortly before my very first trip to Britain. That faded stamp at the top; that’s the trip. The “7” in 1997 got stamped over. If my flight had been before the funeral, I could’ve made a fortune scalping my tickets. Oh, well.
Her funeral was on the 6th. I got there on the 16th and we went downtown, near the parade route. Apparently the main funerary action was next door at Buckingham Palace, but even in Hyde Park they had to use bulldozers to pile up all the flowers. Some of them were still there; a huge, wilted mountain behind portable fencing. Still. Ten days later. There were great pools of candle wax an inch thick puddled along the walkways. It was like the morning after some creepy Medieval religious festival. Our Lady of the Photo Op.
I stared at the giant pile of tribute for a while. It was mostly flowers, some with extraordinarily personal notes attached. There were deflated balloons sagging off the iron fence. And legions of stuffed toys.
Stuffed toys? For the funeral of a grown woman?
The whole business was embarrassing and unEnglish. Grief is one thing. Lining up by the thousands along the funeral route, silently mourning — that’s the kind of outpouring I expect from Britons facing history’s sad bits.
Balloons and toys and candles? It was so…unseemly. It was like an outburst of folk magic; like that weird fusion of paganism and Catholicism that happens in very rural, isolated places in backward foreign lands. Like a Cute Overload Santeria.
That was the first time I noticed or really thought about the spontaneous death shrine. I swear we didn’t build such things when I was young…did we? I’m sure I would have noticed. Now they seem to be everywhere; ugly warts along the highway, simultaneously tragic and tacky. Death kitsch.
What do the toys mean? “Your death gives me free-floating protective feelings as if I were in the presence of a child.” I guess.
The practice seems so alien to both the US and Britain. Very un-Anglo. I can’t decide if it really is a sort of Catholicism by osmosis, or evidence of that vague paganism that spontaneously takes hold in the absence of formal religion.
Whatever. It creeps me out.
August 31, 2007 — 6:21 pm
Comments: 28
For posterity: the taxonomy of crystal-sucking twats
Religion. It’s one of the things I started this blog to vent about. Then it turns out my thoughts on the topic are conflicted. And boring. And — this is a little brain-hurty for an obnoxious atheist such as moi — more often than not I find myself sticking up for religious people online. There are so many excellent reasons to criticize a religion (starting with the core beliefs) that it gets up my nose when the religious are criticized for bogus reasons (the MSM’s shock and disappointment every time an actual Catholic is elected Pope, for example).
I have no such mixed feelings about the religions of the New Age. It’s one thing to believe the junk you were raised with; it’s lazy, but they get to you when you’re young and especially vulnerable to fantastical shit. It’s quite another thing to turn your back on the faith of your fathers in adulthood and embrace some wild-ass foreign cult or, worse, a bunch of stupid hippie crap made up in the 20th Century by a clown-carful of be-toga’d con artists.
Today — I forget why — I was looking for my favorite Usenet post, ever, and I was shocked to discover a Google search of “crystal-sucking twats” didn’t turn it up. Instead, it turned up me, stealing the phrase without attribution in a lowly blog comment. That ain’t right, so I went to Google Groups (formerly Deja News) and scared it up. Reproduced here for posterity.
This is an exchange between Matthew M Mckeon, who originated the phrase, and Ian Sturrock, who expounds upon it at some length. The newsgroup is alt.gothic.
Subject: Re: Praying Students Killed By Classmate From: a...@califia.sub-rosa.com Newsgroups: alt.gothic Matthew M Mckeon <m...@andrew.cmu.edu> writes <snip some interesting points> > There are also hordes of fluff-brained, emotionally unstable > crystal-sucking twats who involve themselves in paganism > in the hopes that they can learn spells to hurt their enemies > and that they will get ritual sex. Just to correct you on this one- the fluff-brained, emotionally unstable crystal-sucking twats are unlikely to want to hurt their enemies & get ritual sex. Rather, they want to 'heal' their enemies with 'glowing dolphin lurve energy' or something, and have meaningful tantric experiences. The ones who want to *hurt* their enemies are more commonly malice- brained emotionally unstable inverted-pentacle-sucking twats. The ones that want ritual sex are the cock-brained emotionally unstable middle-aged science fiction fan twats for the most part. These distinctions are very important if, like me, you have chosen to work in an occult bookshop-cafe & must know precisely which kind of emotionally unstable twat your customer is. So please get your facts straight in future. I did get to overhear the tail end of a fascinating discussion in the cafe recently between a bloke who thinks he's Satan (aging heavy metaller with bad tattoos & a penchant for hiring the plastic vampire cape from the fancy dress shop across the road) and a bloke who claims he's a Navaho Indian Shaman- from Ontario (geographically-challenged terminal bullshitter who was a martial arts expert last week- I guess he'll have graduated to Traditional Witch status by next week). -- Deadly Ernest
June 7, 2007 — 1:55 pm
Comments: 54
Define “precious”
You know, this thing is so vomitously godawful, I feel cheap laughing at it. Lucky for you, I’m pretty comfortable feeling cheap.
Sam Butcher is an illustrator, in the venerable Big-Eyed Children school of American art. Don’t feel bad for him. He might be aesthetically retarded, but he must also be terribly fucking rich by now. Perhaps those two conditions are not entirely unrelated. His ’70s grotesques are the basis of Precious Moments figurines — one of the Holy Trinity of the Church of Knick-Knack, along with Lladro and Hummel. In gratitude for his success, Sam built for us all the Precious Moments Chapel in Carthage, Missouri.
This is not mere weaselsnark. Sam hisself claims he was inspired by the Sistine Chapel. Possibly in the same way one would be inspired by an industrial pressure cooker accident: there is shit all over the walls, the ceiling…everywhere.
On the lefthand wall, the Old Testament As Acted Out by Precious Moments Figurines. On the righthand wall, the New Testament As Acted Out by Precious Moments Figurines. The far wall, the Last Judgement, both cuter and yet somehow more horrible than I pictured it, Acted Out by Precious Moments Figurines. On the ceiling, big-eyed angels sing thee home to rest.
Since I am not only cheap, but also lazy, let me nick the description from Roadside America:
People reverently look up at magical scenes covering nearly every surface. Scenes from Genesis — two baby angels with flash lights illustrate “And God said let there be Light.” And god created Earth — several dead baby angels, including one of two black angels, play basketball with the earth.
At the back wall of the Chapel is its defining mural, Hallelujah Square. It depicts a new dead child being welcomed to heaven by Timmy Angel. Other dead children angels hold signs saying “Welcome To Your Heavenly Home.” The sign with “Welcome” written on it is held wrong side up, as cute children will sometimes do. Others in Hallelujah Square romp and frolic. In the exact center of the mural is a ministering Christ. He is the only adult depicted in the chapel.
The effect of the work (including a Michelangelo-like painted ceiling) on the assembled crowd is haunting. No babies cry (“They never do,” says our guide.) Adults looking at the cartoons are stock still.
One mixed-media mural shows “The Second Coming,” in which painted clouds part and a painted Jesus appears to a collection of Precious Moments porcelain miniatures, some driving tiny cars.
In a pew-filled back room — still part of the tour — past stained glass Precious Moments windows, is a shivering tribute to Butcher’s son, Philip, who was killed by a drunk driver. On the wall is a large painting of Philip’s bedroom when he was a child, featuring Philip surrounded by his siblings. Above them on puffy clouds, baby angels hold signs saying “Welcome Home, Philip.” Philip was 30 when he died, but nowhere in the room is he shown as an adult.
I’ve never been there. I’m not sure my kitsch gland is strong enough to take it I found this websurfing last night. I woke up this morning smelling of cotton candy and bile.
April 24, 2007 — 8:36 am
Comments: 28
What Easter means to me
That’s right. It means the Wizard of Oz on television again.
My original interpretation of the afterlife was eternity in a large, barn-like structure with picnic tables inside, where I hung out with my grandmother and ate icecream. That’s the best infant me could work out the “heaven” concept.
Then I saw the Wizard of Oz and instantly recognized it as the afterlife; it was a dangerous, sparkly place full of scary midgets and wingèd monkeys and evil green ladies in striped socks. Oh, it’s so obvious: Oz was in color, Kansas was in black and white. Dorothy gets smacked on the head, falls into a coma and is transported to a beautiful, horrible place. When she wakes up back home, Uncle Henry says, “we thought we would lose you.” Ergo, Oz is where you go when you go. Plus, they put it on at Easter (“…and on the third day, Dorothy arose crying, ‘verily, there is no place like unto home!’…”).
I never missed it. Never. Not once. It’s hard to remember the sense of specialness movies had in the days before VCR’s and DVD players. Most movies came around once a year. Some less. But Oz was a unique occasion, a religious holiday. I never got over a sense of trascendant awe on WoO day. I’m no friend of Dorothy, I’m an acolyte.
In college one Spring, I decided to treat my friends to an evening of Oz and LSD. Yes. That was every bit as bad an idea as it sounds.
Oh, Oz went fine. It was afterward that the flying monkeys truly arrived. I knew my party wasn’t going well when the girl from downstairs stood up and declared, “welp, I’m going to go nail myself into my room now.” Then we heard the sound of her footsteps and nails being driven into the doorframe.
Hoping to lighten the mood, I put on the soundtrack to the Sound of Music. For, like, eight straight hours. I’m pretty sure there are one or two people who still haven’t forgiven me for that inspired act of cruelty.
The hills. The hills are alive, man.
I permanently ruined recreational drug use for myself that night, but I didn’t ruin Wizard of Oz. Once, not long after, I even saw it on the big screen; a brand new print that had arrived at the theater that afternoon. It was amazing: you could see the strings holding up the Lion’s tail and those odd bird creatures in the background and everything. It was only when we got to the end that the projectionist realized the last reel was missing. Crucifixion without resurrection. Oz interruptus.
I kept up my annual pilgrimage to the Merry Olde Land faithfully for another five years, until I got my first VCR. Then, somehow…once I had it on tape, I never watched it again. It didn’t seem right that I could watch it any time I wanted to. It was subversive and dangerous. Once I had the lightning in a bottle, I was afraid of it. Afraid I’d wear it out. Afraid I’d hear the overture and not get all chuffed. If ever that happens to me, the last vestiges of my spirituality will be swept away forever.
So it is a Very Big Deal that I ordered the (three volume collector’s) DVD this morning. It’s been almost 25 years. I’m bringing Xanax. And a hanky.
April 10, 2007 — 12:13 pm
Comments: 10