Welfare Piss Test

A little something on the lighter side today, dear reader.

I do not watch TV, at all, and I haven't for over a decade. In fact, my TV has been unplugged for over two years now, and I even discontinued the minimal cable TV service I once had.

But a fellow 99er in Florida, an all-around good person by the name of Ellen Turner, sent me this link to a Jon Stewart episode that is just too good not to share. It's even worth sitting through the obnoxious commercial that precedes it. Ugh.

But the best part of the issue isn't even mentioned in the video. You see, Florida governor Rick Scott, who has been busted for MediCare and MediCal fraud multiple times, owns the string of clinics where the piss tests are to be performed. Oh wait, excuse me, he recently transferred legal control of the clinics to his wife. Well, that makes it alright then, doesn't it?

Part of what's so scary today is the shamelessly blatant manner in which the elites engage in their corruption. With the elites controlling the MSM to the extent that they do, it seems they don't even bother to hide their dirty dealings anymore.

And so I ask you once again the question I asked in my first blog. Quo vadis, my friends, quo vadis? Where in the name of seven hells are we going from here?

Cheap Possum Excuses

If Mary and Joseph rode into Bethlehem today...


Greetings, dear reader. Your faithful marsupial correspondent has been slacking off shamelessly on the blog posts this month, it's true. I'm claiming the holidays as my official Cheap Excuse ™

Since I still don't have anything intelligent (or even semi-intelligent) to talk about, here are some visual things to hopefully distract you. Hey, look, a squirrel!

The three wise men in Bethlehem today...







And as far as the NDAA nightmare, well, it's all been said. Goodbye, America. Skulz Fontaine of Graphic Visigoth captures it well.

I Got Nothing

Blame it on the heat, but my muse is on strike, and this morning my mind is a complete blank. Yes, even more so than usual. Here's an Onion video that sums it all up very well, complete with bullshit commercial for gas-guzzling, obsolete trash that nobody in their right mind would waste money on.

Open Salon readers can view the video here


Steve Jobs Resigns After Realizing Technology Has Gone As Far As It Can

One Year

Well, well, how time flies when you're having fun. It was one year ago today that I published my first blog at Blogger.com; the cross-post at Open Salon came about somewhat later.

Three hundred sixty-five days, and one hundred fifty-three scribbles later, here we are.

In all sincerity, I want to thank my dear old dad, whom we will refer to simply as "George", in order to protect his privacy. Without you pushing me to do this, father of mine, I'd never have gotten started. Thank you, with all my heart.

And so, dear reader, l'll spare you the tedious year-in-retrospect bullshit. But ask yourself, are you better off than you were a year ago? Are we, the human race, better off than we were a year ago?

I don't think so...

Bachmann Needs A Boobjob

So I woke up this morning, had a shower, and made myself a substantial breakfast of chicken Parmesan sausage, ($3.99 a pound at Henry's, nomnomnom!), hash browns with onions, and eggs. This turned out to be a good thing, because I needed all the fortification I could get before discovering that Michelle Bachmann (brief pause while the clouds part, the sun shines down, and the angels sing Hosanna), has felt a calling to run for President of these here Yoonited States of Amerika.

Of course, we all knew it was coming. But there's a difference between abstract knowledge of impending disaster, and actually getting kicked in the nuts.

Given that Obama is going to be a one-term President, there is a grim inevitability to the whole thing. Oh, I suppose if the Archangel Michael came down from Heaven with a flaming sword and announced in a voice of thunder that it was the Will of God that Obama be re-elected, it might happen. But short of that, he's almost certain to be kicked out on his worthless ass.

And the sad part is that everyone knows this. The Republicans know it, the Democrats know it, my cousin's dog in Shawnee Mission knows it. But the Democrats will nominate him anyhow, simply because that's what they have always done, and the Amerikan political machine worships at the anus of business-as-usual.

So, whatever, we're fucked, and there's really nothing to be done about it until people are desperate enough to start listening to the Anarchists; then the real party will begin. But until then, we might as well have fun with it, no?

So I put on some Wagner, as I often do when in an Gotterdammerung sort of mood, and all at once it came to me. Bachmann needs a boob job!

I mean, come on now, Palin has the rack, and it does get attention. After all, never forget Rule One.

(Possum's Guide To Understanding The Male Of The Species, Chapter 2-Axioms, Rule One - "Men are pigs".)

Yes, pigs. Grunting, oinking, squealing, rude, inconsiderate, farting, belching, perpetually horny animals. And most of us here in the USA have a raging obsession with boobs. Big boobs. So, clearly, the smart move for A-cup Michelle Bachmann is an expensive set of first-class implants. Now, if she's going to do this, it's going to be obvious. After all, that's the whole idea. So what point in subtlety?

No, no, they hang you for a sheep, they hang you for a lamb, may as well steal the whole buggering flock. Our dear Michelle should clearly throw caution to the winds and go for the Godzilla-does-Tokyo broke with a set of the Hitomi Tanaka-style monsters. (Be aware that any search you do on that name will very probably yield results which are decidedly NSFW, but check Jlist-dot-com if you're curious. And at home.)

Now picture her doing a campaign ad, with the winged helmet and the iron bra, with Ride of the Valkyrie playing in the background, shaking her spear in the air and displaying The Twins for all those anal-retentive, mother-fixated, closet Nazis that are the stalwarts of the Republican party.

Tell me that's too crazy for US politics. Tell me it would never happen. Go ahead.

Hamlet Online

While enormous volumes have been written in recent years on the subject of online games, the vast majority, (if not the entirety), of that work has been written by those who are not themselves gamers. This is the equivalent of a treatise on rainbows written by a blind woman.

While I seldom venture upon this subject, preferring for the most part to focus upon international affairs, I have been a gamer since 1971. Now, "games", in that long-distant age we call "The 70's", consisted of half-inch square cardboard counters moved upon a paper map, usually regulated in hexagons. It would not be until the following year that I would encounter the first electronic game, as such, in the form of an arcade game called "Pong", right there next to the Foosball tables in the old Parkway Bowl.

Forty years later, a bright-eyed 11 has become a somewhat-world-weary 51, and the world of games is dominated by computers. Unfortunately, the games industry is dominated by corporations. Virtually all the big names from the early days of computer games are long gone, and the few that survive do so as naught but an empty shell, a shambling zombie corpse animated by the necromantic marketing of their soulless corporate masters.

The perhaps inevitable effect of this corporate domination has been catastrophically devastating to originality and innovation. This is bad enough in PC games, but the console is the ultimate expression of corporate slavery. Everything about a console is completely proprietary; it is capable of doing nothing other than playing the games approved by the corporation which controls it. And this leaves the gamer utterly at the mercy of that corporation.

Fortunately for the game geeks of the world, this bleak situation within the USA is somewhat balanced out by the availability of games from abroad.

If you'd like to try something really different in turn-based gaming, check out Romance of the Three Kingdoms XI from Koei. The game is based upon the oldest novel in the world, a 14th-century account of the end of the Han Dynasty, which actually took place in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD. Gameplay and all, this is a real gem, and something enormously different from western games. In a cruel irony, RTK XI is actually a PC port of what was originally a console game. What can I say?

But the game I mostly want to talk about today is something older, and amazingly successful in spite of relatively primitive graphics. Yes, I'm talking about Mabinogi, a free (yeah, right) online game played in large part by those 1/3 my age. And they're doing Shakespeare.

That's right, Shakespeare. In a move of staggering audacity, the folks at Nexon, the Korean company that owns Mabinogi, have actually translated Shakespeare into a playable "generation" of the ongoing campaign storyline.

They started with Hamlet back in January. Now, those of you that know your Shakespeare will realize that Hamlet is a very mutable play, since the three surviving "earliest" versions of the play, (referred to as Q1, Q2, and F1), are each so different from the other two, and Q1 much shorter.

Hamlet worked very well. I've played it all the way through with three different characters, and it was quite enjoyable. That wasn't what surprised me. What really surprised me was how well they managed to capture the spirit and essence of the story. I've seen stage productions of Hamlet which did not accomplish that goal so well. Let the purists scream in outrage.

Next they tackled Romeo and Juliet. This is a somewhat more difficult campaign, and I've only played this all the way through with one character so far, but again I would call it a success. They have managed to capture the essence and the feel of the story. All the major scenes are there, including one in which you have to sneak past the guards to serenade Juliet on her balcony. And another in which you play Romeo, and are forced to fight Tybalt.

I admit I felt guilty when Mercutio died, and I admit I was choked up at the very end when Juliet awakened to find Romeo dead and...yeah, well, you know what happens. If they can make the audience, (that's me, the gamer), feel what the Bard meant an audience to feel, I call that success.

Now, Nexon said at the start that they meant to do four Shakespeare plays, and they showed a teaser with four little icons. We have seen the first two. The third was something unrecognizable, at least to me, but others have suggested Othello or the Merchant of Venice. The fourth icon was clearly of three witches.

Oh my. The Scottish Play. Talk about mixed feelings.

Alexandria, 50 years ago

Foreign Policy magazine is, for the most part, little more than a conservative propaganda organ. But every now and then, they do publish something well worth looking at.

Such a gem is the new photo essay Once Upon A Time In Egypt, which consists of a few paragraphs of background and nine black and white photographs, taken in Alexandria in 1959.

To quote directly -
The late 1950s marked the end of an era in Alexandria that had begun in the late 19th century, when the port -- then the largest on the eastern Mediterranean -- emerged as one of the world's great cosmopolitan cities. Europeans -- Greeks, Italians, Armenians, and Germans -- had gravitated to Alexandria in the mid-19th century during the boom years of the Suez Canal's construction, staying through the British invasion of the port in 1882 and the permissive rule of King Farouk in the 1930s and 1940s. Foreign visitors and Egyptians alike flocked to the city's beaches in the summers, where revealing bathing suits were as ordinary as they would be extraordinary today.

The photographs are like something out of a time machine. The women seem a bit chubby by the standards of today, when the starving refugee look is all the rage, and the swimsuits are very tame, although they were daring at the time.

But remember this is Egypt. The Egypt that was.

And if you read to the end of the introduction, you'll learn that the girl on the far left of the first photograph, Odette Tawil, would 40 years later marry Elie Moreno, the man who took these photographs. Is life not strange?

Science Fiction Is Dying

I stumbled across this unusually good article at Open Salon. I say unusually good because Open Salon consists in large part of writing on intensely personal issues, issues about which my interest could be measured in micro-giveashits.

I'd suggest you go read the article linked above, then come back and continue here.

I still remember Star Trek well. I was in 1st grade, and the word "trek", meaning a long journey, was not in our vocabulary, so we called it "Star Track", but every episode was the main topic of conversation at first recess the next school day. But that was the 60's, and it was a different world. We lived far slower-paced lives, and the population of San Diego County was 1/10 of what it is today.

Sic Transit Gloria Fuckin' Mundi :)

Part of the problem is that Science Fiction, as a genre, is far better suited to the written word than the video medium. And Americans simply do not read nearly as much as they used to. In a very real sense, Science Fiction is dying. This is in large part because the publishing industry has become so dominated by huge corporations, like everything else in the modern world. And huge corporations are both highly averse to bold risks, and very poor at doing anything original. Yet both boldness and originality are precisely what would be required to save Science Fiction as we know it. What will undoubtedly survive, will be puerile crap like "LOST", which is little more than reality TV with a thin veneer of artificial science fiction flavoring.

The Science Fiction Channel was probably never a viable commercial idea, but they did some excellent work in their younger years. Their production of Children of Dune was truly magnificent, for such a low-budget film. And it was a delight to my Inner Horndog, with more devastatingly-attractive actresses per square meter than any other film I've ever seen in my life. Awoooooooooooooooo! (down, boy, down!).

But when they changed the name to the unbearably cutesy "Sy-Fy", I knew the idea was in serious trouble. Ah well, as I said, it was probably never a commercially viable idea in the first place.

Television is a lost cause anyhow.

Angry Possum Day

My apologies, dear reader. Your faithful correspondent is too consumed with marsupial ire, too far in the grip of beady-eyed passion, to write coherently today.

As poor and partial compensation for depriving you of my usual pungently half-witted observations, allow me to offer you this potpourri of bits and pieces from around the Intarwebz.

Two assholes in suits and three fascists in uniform. From left to right, Neville Chamberlain, Daladier, Santa Claus, Mussolini, and Ciano

Today is the anniversary of the signing of the Munich Pact, by which Britain, France, and Italy gave to Germany a big chunk of Czechoslovakia. Incredibly enough, Czechoslovakia was not represented at the conference. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, over?

If I were thrashing around desperately, looking for a modern equivalent, I might be tempted to cite the manner in which US generals, politicians, and analysts openly discuss the fate of Afghanistan, arguing for the partition of the country, or even the removal of quasi-elected President Hamid Karzai.


Recently, our beloved Vice-President Joe Biden told his Democratic party core to "stop whining". This is such a charming comment that I find myself utterly at a lack for a coherent response. Fortunately, there are others far more articulate on such subjects. I do love Donalee King, aka Paladinette. While I cannot claim to love either Cenk Uygur or Dylan Ratigan, I did find this video rather amusing.




Former Icelandic Prime Minister Geir Haarde is to face charges of Negligence for failing to prevent the meltdown of Iceland's economy. My, what a thoroughly wonderful idea! Why can't we get some of that here in the USA? There are some questions about the 2008 financial meltdown that urgently need to be answered. For example, Timothy Geithner's role as then-Chairman of the New York Federal Reserve involved any number of shady and quite illegal back-room deals. Not to mention, of course, the star criminals would be Bush and Cheney.

Russian Leaders Argue on Twitter, During State Council Meeting

Sweet immortal gods have mercy, what have we done to the world? Somewhere, Josef Stalin is rolling over in his grave.

This morning's edition of Foreign Policy had a vastly amusing little report on a Twitter-borne spat between Russian President Dmitry Medviedev and a regional governor named Nikita Belykh. The exchange of messages, complete with smiley faces and sad faces, had your favorite beady-eyed varmint howling with laughter.

Unfortunately the actual exchange was in Russian, so we Americans have to rely on a translation, and Russia Today posted a rather more limited version of the tweets.

PEGI's Paradox

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