Steely Dan was named after a dildo in Naked Lunch.
How about the muscle relaxer named "Soma"?
Here are some funny spoof energy drink adds:
"Be uncomfortably energetic! It's like adding chocolate to a lightning storm!"
Power Thirst
And the sequel.
"With flavors like "GUN"!"
Power Thirst 2, with preposterone!
Thanks for the interesting post. I'm looking forward to checking those comics out.
I used to read Hate and Eight Ball. I loved those comics in the '90s.
Holy cow.
It's reprehensible. Immediately after reading this, I found a story on the new Terrorist Buster logo, based on the ghostbuster logo for a CIA counter-terrorist group.
The kitsch, plus the torture makes me shudder. These guys not only threaten and torture, they think they're cute while they do it.
Torture Busters Logo Story.
Christopher Hitchens has a column online where he deals with the fact that his words influenced a young man, previously anti-war, who went to Iraq and died there.
These pro-war columnists and writers need to realize that they are complicit in this disaster, and that people they'll never know paid terrible consequences for their deluded and misguided punditry.
The link
I find it deplorable that a medicine is being withdrawn from people who need it and that the same forces seem to be at work to make another medicine less available.
Adam, I think that the controversy is that some children require more individual attention than others in school. I'm not talking about the children with ADD, but just high maintenance kids who need a lot of guidance. These children can be kept in their seats if they are put on medication, which is cheaper than staffing the schools, but not always the best solution for the children.
I don't think the solution to this is to ban Ritalin, that won't fix a thing.
When I was in Japan I couldn't find anything that fit. I had to mail order stuff to a place in the US who could then ship it to Japan.
A lot of Japanese women have a tough time finding clothes that fit them here in the US. Banana Republic fits them perfectly, and I wonder if they designed their clothing with the Asian market in mind. When I worked in SoHo there was always a stream of Asians buying clothes from their store on Lower Broadway.
A very New York experience and a total bummer. Anyone who has lived in a neighborhood full of junkies also learns that smell.
How ironic that complaints of a left splintered over the politics of Isreal and Palestine would completely derail the discussion in this thread about the torture of prisoners by members of the 82nd Airborne.
I agree with you, Jim. What I don't get is why a guy like me, poor student of history and a simplistic understadning of geopolitics could see from the start that this adventure would fail in precisely this way. Well, not precisely, I actually expected the Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis to be in open war with Turkey and Iran poised to intervene. So, I guess from my dire predictions, things are going swimmingly.
Still, we are prolonging our agony by staying. I think one problem some of my "stay the course" friends have is the idea that we broke something and we can't fix it. People think that we should atone for this misadventure by making things right in Iraq. While I agree with the sentiment, I don't think it's within our power to make things right in Iraq.
We hurt that place, and we can't even make proper ammends. It's a shame, but asking more soldiers to die for a collective sense of guilt is not a solution.
That is it EXACTLY! Thanks so much for this post.
I love the, "So we can actually win the war!"
The whole Democratic position that we are going to out con the neocons is buying completely into their premise that we can reshape the middle east, when that was just cover for their military adventure anyway!
james woodyatt writes: "I'd think that slushpile management would be a lot easier if more new writers could be intimidated into suicide or heroin addiction before even submitting their manuscripts in the first place."
I don't know what new writers did to you when you were young, but it must have been bad.
Writing is really hard, even bad writing. It's easy, when writing and recieving little recognition to become bitter and to start hating the sad state of the world. Editing is also a difficult job. It’s easy to hate people who do a really crappy job but who think they are fantastic. There are myriad ways to feel better-than and bitter in the world of writing and publishing.
In my opinion, if you want to be a writer, then you should know that you are signing up for a lot of work with no gaurantee of success or recognition.
If you want to work in publishing, then know that you will be hit with a barrage of crap writing to sort through and edit.
In either case, right or wrong, these seem to be part of the territory, so if you do choose to be a writer or editor, try to remember that you signed up for all of it. In other words, try to be nice.
Sorry that I sound like the church lady.
Lisa, I think you'll really love this essay.
It sums of some of what is wrong with literature and academia in a really funny way. Regarding your colleagues who must "remove the mask of metaphor" I don't think they do that solely with myths and legends.
I can't count how many lectures I sat through while we examined the imagery an author used and then decoded it. One professor claimed that the image of a shadow of the brim of a hat moving across a windowpane was actually an attack on Christianity, since the window panes of that era would have been defined by a cross, and the shadow would have resembled a knife. My experience of reading is so far from that type of...um...investigation.
Dave!
I do NOT deplore your tastes, nor was I intending to criticize. The point I was trying to make was that some people are into genre but not "literature", and that some people are into "literature" but not genre, and that they seem to look down on the other.
In the spirit of this thread, I was trying to catalogue the different amounts of "not getting" each other's tastes, but I honestly was not trying to put you down. I read fantasy, I like books with maps of fake places in the front. I also like so-called literary fiction, except from the New Yorker, which I can't stand.
I was trying to make light of this yawning chasm between the two affinities for genre and literary fiction by comparing them to the continuum of human sexual orientation and all the misunderstanding and mistrust that has engendered, pardon the pun.
Oh...my...oops.
6 should read: exlusively mainstream.
That's what happens when I cut and paste Kinsey.
Dave, I'm scoring you a 0. There's no judgment in that.
Sean's Kinsey scale of fiction orientation.
0 - exclusively genre. (Only reads books that start with a map.)
1 - predominantly genre, incidentally mainstream. (Has thumbed a copy of Moby Dick, liked the opening line.)
2 - predominantly genre, but more than incidentally mainstream. (Read a New Yorker short story once, when drunk. Never told anyone.)
3 - equally genre and mainstream (Quotes Tolkien and Roth indiscriminately.)
4 - predominantly mainstream, but more than incidentally genre (Sticks with the New York Times Bestseller list, saw The Lord of The Rings trilogy twice.)
5 - predominantly mainstream, incidentally heterosexual (Longstanding member of Oprah’s book club. Saw the first Matrix, liked it until informed that was science fiction.)
6 - exclusively homosexual (Only reads Nobel and Pulitzer prize winners.)
I'm really enjoying this thread.
Lisa, your post, referring to Teresa's essay, brings up another interesting aspect to fantasy. For some reason, if a fantasy story is a legend, or has some other cultural context, that makes it OK for people who would normally not get fantasy.
I wonder if it still works for them in the same way that fantasy works for people who get fantasy. If I were a brain scientist, I'd love to hook up a fantasy fan and watch his brain while he reads his favorite story, and then hook up a medievalist's brain while he reads his favorite legend.
I wonder if genres tickle a different part of the brain. It's absurd, I know, but there is something going on for genre fans that seems to be distinct from what mainstream readers experience.
I love genre fiction, but I do often feel a difference between mainstream, literary fiction and genre fiction, most of the time.
Maybe I'm bigenre, Michelle is fantasy, and her professors were mainstream. I'd love to see some kind of Kinsey scale based on this, since the differences in taste seem inexplicable.
When I explain to people with mainstream literary tastes that a certain book they like, say "The Life of Pi" is also fantasy, they get a queasy look on their face, the same as when I tell a super-straight guy that those long, slow pans up and down Stallone's greased up and shirtless body are homoerotic.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2007 | 6 |
| 2006 | 1 |
| 2005 | 34 |
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