10 Zen Monkeys

Ten Albums that Defined the Dot Com Era – Part 2

2010-01-01T06:09:51Z

Click Here for Part One
I spent New Year's Eve 1999 at my ecstasy dealer's condo in E-ville (natch), staring at a spectacular view of San Francisco Bay. And even the twinkly bright city sported a patchy waterfront fog like the chin pubes on a 1990s hipster...

I'd spent the entire decade with the same girl, and as we approached the door to an obscene feast of cheese, booze, and drugs — we were stopped short by a pair of very pretty and very fucked up people.

"Oh my god," the gorgeous brunette half giggled, half implored, "do NOT eat the sushi!"

With that they stumbled down the stairs to god knows where. It was only 11 p.m...

We'd arrived late, and thank Christ. The party people were not happy, as Mr. E had generously spiked the catered sushi with liquid LSD. And while I certainly admired the opulence, I couldn't understand why he did it, since he — and most of the kids there — were more about pills and coke. (Plus, I'm not a fan of the Pearl Harbor approach to getting your friends ripped to the tits on acid. Or your enemies.)

It was a great night — despite the grumblings of some who weren't as fortunate as we were in our early warning about the hazards of the hamachi. We watched as the clock struck midnight, ignoring the media hype about a coming Y2K apocalypse, yet feeling on the brink of something.

For me it was huge personal change, good and bad. But because I'm not really a coke guy (well, sure, there's Vegas and... well, you smell what the Rock is cookin') — and because I had to drive us home — I stood out on the balcony of a brand new condo, built and rented with dot-com dollars, the only person there who wasn't on drugs.

What was I thinking?

1. Kruder & Dorfmeister — The K&D Sessions

Like I said before, this list is not in any kind of order. But, sure, placement means a lot, and in Part 1 of this top 10 list, my placement of Kid A in the #1 spot was no accident.

So I've certainly wrestled with this decision again for "Part 2". I feel like the following album is just as top-notch a time capsule for the period as any piece of art or expression. But in the 1990s, if you were anywhere in San Francisco where music was being played — apart from Lucky 13, the late, great Fulton Street Bar, or Zeitgeist — you heard The K&D Sessions, whether you liked it or not. And most MDMA-dabbling, sexuality-exploring, HTML-coding city dwellers liked it.

As downtempo DJ fodder, this record was as necessary to your arsenal as the Bible is to a missionary. As something you'd put on at your place after being up on E all night, it was quite simply perfect. (Not too quiet, not too perky...) As music to bang to, it was even better than Sade. And it holds up easily to this day, embodying the best of what DJ culture had to offer, tastefully, artfully, and not without wit ("Kruder and... Dorfmeister?").

2. Beck — Midnite Vultures

Beck took Prince's advice to heart — to party like it was 1999 — when the year actually came. And he pushed his tongue-in-cheek flirtations with blue-eyed soul to its limit, from the James Brown dance moves to the over-the-top blue-eyed soul wailing on the quintessential nerd ballad, "Debra." It was a stroke of genius for Beck to intentionally counteract the angst of the entire decade in 1999 with a record so giddily fun that it made his previous, Odelay! look practically dour.

It was different than the "K&D Sessions," which was best when coming back from the club/party/Bacchanalian clusterfuck. Midnite Vultures was the record you'd play on your way out while popping the pills or chopping the pills or hiding the pills or maybe even shoving 'em up yer arse (if you had the proclivity to do so).

What I'm saying is that there were lots of pills around...

3. LTJ Bukem — Progression Sessions

When compiling this list, I realized I'd almost forgotten about drum and bass. But while it's rare to hear this genre in its "pure" form these days, its influence can be heard in dubstep — all the rage this year — and on the London scene with acts like Joy Orbison. And at the turn of the millennium, drum and bass was a bold new form that embraced and exploited technology. In fact, it could not exist without it.

What was fascinating about drum and bass out in the clubs was how it cleaved a wedge between dancers on the dance floor. The shuffling, intricate rhythms of d&b aren't kind to the amateur booty-shaker, so you'd get a mix of weed-smokin' head-nodders (raises hand) plus those bold enough and skilled enough to pull some amazing, post-breakdance moves.

Roni Size was arguably as influential as Bukem, but it was Bukem's frequent live shows with MC Conrad that endeared him to San Franciscans. Still does.

4. Various Artists — Rushmore (Soundtrack to the Film)

You know what I remember about the 1990s? The yuppie fear of car-keying, as gentrification kicked into high gear in former working-class neighborhoods like the Mission and SOMA. The pitched battle between the recently enfranchised and the constantly disenfranchised. The inevitable defeat of the latter.

As a nerdy outsider from a low-income neighborhood, I actually had things in common with both groups, so I tended to stay out of the argument...

One thing I can say for sure, only one of these groups' contingents was listening to the "Rushmore" soundtrack. Mark Mothersbaugh's wittily wistful sensibilities mixed with mild moroseness to create a great soundtrack — not just to the film, but also to long-winded, angst-ridden posts to your LiveJournal. Shudder.

5. Moby — Play

Ugh. There, I said it. Not exactly one of my favorite records, by not exactly one of my favorite artists. I just can't risk people thinking that omitting it reflected a failure to grasp what people were listening to at the time.

So for you douchebags, here you go. And for the rest of you, I sure hope you enjoyed "Play"ing with me as I reflected on what was — no matter how you slice it — a fascinating era...in music.

Click Here for Ten Albumds That Defined the Dot Com Era - Part One

See Also:
Dan the Automator Remixes the Blue Angels
How the iPod Changes Culture
10 Video Moments from 2006
Paul McCartney on Drugs
Eight Druggiest Rock Star Stories

Ten Albums That Defined the Dot Com Era

2010-01-01T06:08:44Z

So where were you 10 years ago?

Making more money than you were entitled to? Getting involved in a drug-fueled polyamorous relationship? Thinking about how after almost 20 years of prescience, Prince's 1999 might become oddly irrelevant?

Okay, you may be forgiven if you weren't having as much fun as you should have been having during the dot-com VC era. (Not by me. But whatever...) But there's no absolution if you weren't at least listening to some interesting music. This was the time of Napster's infinite-mp3-download-orgy, fer chrissakes!

I know, I know, there doesn't seem to be much nostalgia for that time. For comparison, it was only 10 years after Kent State that the creative process began that spawned The Big Chill. And not only am I unsure that this generation is capable of such a piece, I'm unsure that anyone is even interested in trying!

A lot of people are entitled to their share of bitterness over the burst of the dotcom bubble. Someone sold a lot of kids on the idea that the Brave New World had been reached. And when that wave of prosperity which brought us there — for a happy, shiny moment — rolled back violently, these kids found out even drugs wouldn't help.

But it's time for us to realize that the brevity of the whole dot-com era helps us distill its magic, as well as that bleakness which followed (and still continues to this day). At the time as someone who was older than most of the people I knew, I'd seen enough shit to enjoy the good times while they were there — and this attitude continues to inform my perspective.

Hence this piece...

But enough philosophizin'. If you love music like I do, these albums should trigger whatever nostalgia you feel is deserved by those times. Or maybe we can just be fascinated by the fact that 10 years from now, it's doubtful that the word "album" would even be applicable to such a list.

Whatever. Let's play!

1. Radiohead — Kid A

This list isn't in any particular order, but even so, I think this is a great place to start.

Today bands like Phoenix and Animal Collective think nothing of fusing elements of what used to be called "electronica" into a "band" context. But when the group that inherited the mantle of "The Greatest Rock Band in the World" from U2 seemed to barely unpack their guitars from their cases — in favor of sounds more akin to Aphex Twin — it was a bold step into the future.

Of course, the reaction from the rock crowd was a bit hyperbolic. If you listen to it now, Kid A is hardly a rejection of all things rock. The acoustic lament "How to Disappear Completely," the fuzz bass in "The National Anthem," the electric piano in Morning Bell — all of these represent a record grounded in song sensibility.

But yes, all these years later, as a DJ you can still work "Everything In Its Right Place" in its right place. Hypnotic — and propelled by the Fender Rhodes electric piano that defined this era in the band's history — "Everything" is a full, unabashed embrace of a new kind of pop that arguably hadn't been pushed forward since David Byrne and Brian Eno's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.

Kid A also allowed bespectacled hipsters who were way-too-Wilco to be caught dead listening to Hooverphonic a way to hear beats and blips they otherwise couldn't have accessed. So, uh, there's that.

2. The Flaming Lips — The Soft Bulletin

While some artists were ending the decade with a party vibe, Oklahoma's previously experimental freaks the Flaming Lips finally popped out of their chrysalis with a highly personal and intimate concept album — about death, mostly.

Couched in an inspired dynamic of lush soundscapes and (virtual) orchestration, mixed with a dash of punk sensibility — one lonely mic on the drum kit — Wayne Coyne's lyrics about the death of his father ("Waitin' on a Superman") and the band's bizarre struggles ("The Spiderbite Song") helped usher in the new age of post-ironic pseudo-sincerity.

3. Thievery Corporation — The Mirror Conspiracy

For the sake of disclosure, I am a DJ, and was arguably at the height of my "career" during the dot com era. So while you'll have to forgive me a bit of nostalgia and obvious subjectivity in this list's content, if you're in my demographic and think you didn't hear Thievery Corporation at that time — you're wrong. You might have wanted to hear the Dwarves instead, but you heard TC all the same.

There's no use denying the overwhelming presence of DJ-friendly acts and works on this list. But chill music, frisky enough to rock a club or a house party, meant the D.C. duo was a DJ's best friend. And at the same time I can recall hearing "The Mirror Conspiracy" blaring over PC speakers just as much as the Mackies.

4. Tool — Lateralus

Despite the above statements on the ubiquity and influence of electronica, it wasn't all about blips, beeps and knob-twiddling. There were also plenty of former nerds and misanthropes who still needed an outlet for frustrations that MDMA and getting laid hadn't quite ironed out.

In fact, I remember when this record came out — having almost forgotten the sheer boyish thrill of … metal! Rock Band was years away, and Hot Topic hadn't started marketing Iron Maiden shirts to 14-year-olds whose parents had barely hit puberty during the band's heyday. So indulgences like Lateralus were still a bit taboo.

However, this album has nothing to do with the adolescent nature of metal of yore. Like all of Tool's music, the art-rock flirting and complex themes and lyrics on songs like Schism make them strictly for grown-ups.

5. Air — The Virgin Suicides

For me, this record represents change.

Personally, it was a time of intense personal evolution and tumult. For Air, it was a complete reversal of the dreamy, kitschy charm of their debut album, Moon Safari. An opiate dream of a soundtrack, it owed as much to Pink Floyd's soundtrack to the film More as anything happening on a contemporary level at the time. "The Virgin Suicides" flew in the face of expectations for the French band, while helping create the moody atmosphere in Sofia Coppola's debut film.

For the ecstasy-driven culture of the dot commers, it presaged the comedown that one must expect when getting so high. Minor keys, dark themes, and no happy ending. It was still only 2000, and we were still sucking on the VC tit. But not for long.

Did Air know something we didn't?

Click here to read 10 Albums That Defined the Dot Com Era, Part II.

“Every Sizzler restaurant in America?!”

2009-10-24T08:08:08Z

"Some people want world peace," says Reed Fish. "Others want to photograph every Sizzler in the USA.

"A dream is a dream..."

Reed and his wife Liz are raising money on the internet to fund a tour of every Sizzler restaurant in America — which they'll photograph. And then self-publish the photos in a book. Called "Every Sizzler in the United States of America."

"Just as there's beauty in every person, there's beauty in every Sizzler," they explain on their fundraising page. "We make the photographs blurry to help bring this out..."

"Hopefully, a gallery show will follow."

And within a few weeks they'd attracted over $2,000. Kodak even donated film. The average donation size was over $50. And they'd proved something important. "We had the guts to do this," Liz wrote on their blog, "and no matter what happens, I'm proud of that."

Image via Google Maps street view
But why Sizzler's steakhouses? "Sizzler is Americana..." their page explains, grasping at the ghost behind this peculiar fascination. "If there isn't one in your town, there probably used to be..." In their web video, the couple fumbles to explain their quest's strange power.
REED: We really feel that chains, and especially Sizzler, tells us a lot about who we are as a culture.

Or, as they suggest in another part of the video.
LIZ: We're doing this so you don't have to.

REED: We're taking one for the team.

So who are these people? Reed Fish is that Reed fish — the screenwriter behind the quirky 2006 romantic comedy I'm Reed Fish, which Variety described as a "Charming, rural version of a pre-wedding panic." Two years ago the real Reed Fish married Liz, a professional photographer. And that's when the weirdness began...

Their Sizzler-rific quest is now 16 percent complete. Reed announces in their video that "We've already shot 34 of the 206..." While there's still 172 restaurants left to photograph, at least they're down to just 150 cities, Liz adds in a blog post. And she provides a glimpse of life on the Sizzler-photographing road.

"Our record so far is six Sizzlers in one day. The six-Sizzler day is actually kind of a rough day — because of navigating, traffic and, honestly — burnout."

It's not the first time someone has tried this. Thirteen years ago, when the web was young, Jason Alan Pfaff launched "Project: Denny's, attempting to visit as many of the chain's 2,500 franchises as possible.

But Reed wants to hit all the Sizzlers — so they're turning to the internet for support. So far "the Fishes" have attracted 38 backers — and three comments. ("Don't forget the menus!") — on the fundraising site Kickstarter. "If our project gets funded on Kickstarter, we're definitely going to try to get it all done before the end of the year," says Reed. ("It would be a mandate," adds Liz.) They've drawn $2025 in pledges, but with just six days left to raise the remaining $10,000 needed.

"But hey — a few weeks ago, if someone had told you 34 people would back The Fishes for almost $1700 (so far) to go photograph every Sizzler in America, would you have believed it?"

I interviewed Liz and Reed Fish about the weirdness, the art, and the secret American passion — and how it all led them on a collision course with a corporation named Sizzler.

10Z: Have you talked to Sizzler?

REED: We have. Essentially, giving them a head's up, because I didn't want them to hear about it from someone else who wasn't me. We had a good conversation — they thought it was a fun idea, and they were excited that it was their brand being promoted. But our strategy is, we're not doing an ad for Sizzler. We don't want to have an adversarial relationship, but we...

LIZ: You're half afraid someone's going to claim offense with it and say, "Okay, I'm going to sue you and prevent you from doing this."

REED: Obviously, this isn't Fast Food Nation! We're not taking a stance about whether Sizzler is good or bad. In a way, it's more of a documentary project.

10Z: "Hi. I'm planning an art installation with photos of all your franchises." So how'd Sizzler react?

REED: The thing is, I'd left a message — I just said what I was doing so they'd call me back, so I didn't get to hear their first response. I didn't get to hear, "You want to do what?!"

And I did most of the talking... I wanted to let them know that we didn't really want them to — we weren't asking them for money. And I think I did say, "But if you want to give us a gift card so that we can have dinner on the road, that'd be great."

10Z: How'd he respond?

REED: He just kind of laughed. And didn't send me a gift card. They thought I was a little crazy.

Honestly, they loved the idea. I think they just thought, "Wow, this is great this guy wants to do this..." And they thought it was funny.

10Z: On your web page, someone demanded "Where's the disclaimer that says this project was underwritten by Sizzlers?" And Reed responded: "Okay, here's the disclaimer: Sizzler is in no way affiliated with this project. That's why we're on Kickstarter trying to raise funds!"

LIZ: I've also had people say, "Why are you putting this on Kickstarter? That's the dummest thing, because you should just have Sizzler pay for this." And it's like, "No. It's an art project, and we want to have control over it. It's not an ad." Its genesis was completely different from anything that Sizzler would create.

REED: And we also — if it was a campaign from Sizzler, we wouldn't be trying to raise money. We'd just be doing it, and trying to get press as we're doing it. The whole trying to raise money — it's just counterintuitive, in a way. Especially considering that we're pretty far from our goal right now. Sizzler can be a tough sell. Especially when you're pitching it as a serious art project.

LIZ: I think we've had a hard time figuring out how to promote, because I think we feel like if we're trying to promote it as an art project, people don't think of it as super-serious, even though we really do. But we're presenting it in sort of a light way to bring people in.

REED: We feel like it's a populist art project.

LIZ: Yeah.

REED: It's not just for the hoity-toity crowd in New York. We love those people, but ...

LIZ: Maybe we're between crowds...

10Z: But how do you really feel about Sizzler?

REED: I swear, when we tell people, for the most part their face lights up. "Oh, I love Sizzler."

LIZ: It's kind of nostalgic.

REED: And at the same time, our friends don't go to Sizzler at this point. It's almost if you — it's almost ironically, if you're in the hipster/L.A. crowd or whatever. It's not something that people go to quite a lot. But it's one of those things — it's actually good.

10Z: I think we're approaching an answer to the biggest question. Why Sizzler?

REED: Because it was Americana. If you say "Sizzler", everyone's like, "Oh, god, I used to love it when I was a kid." Everyone.

It really evokes a reaction to anyone who grew up in the United States... They have a feeling about Sizzler. I believe a lot of the ones that have closed were in places like Missouri, Ohio, and Wisconsin... What I've heard from people is "Oh, I grew up in Connecticut. There used to be one there, but it's gone."

That's one of the other reasons why we think it's really great. It's kind of emblematic of the change in the culture. It's like your bankruptcies and closings — we've actually, in our travels so far, gone to two Sizzlers that were closed that were on the web site. So we drove over there, and it's kind of like the scene in Vacation where they drive to Walley World and it's closed. We drove from Los Angeles to New York, and the Sizzler was closed.

LIZ: But there were other Sizzlers in New York, and it was okay. And at the same time, we've seen new Sizzlers go up. And the development is different now. They'll be in mall parking lots — there'll be a Home Depot and the anchor store, and then there's the Sizzler.

REED: Sizzler itself is aspirational. It's a very middle class — middle to lower-class chain. Those are the people that go there. And I remember — it was a special occasion to go to Sizzler when you're a kid. It's like, "Oh yeah! We're going to Sizzler." And it's all you can eat, which is — nothing more American than that.

LIZ: Yeah, it's value. I think all those things are very much things that we seek as Americans. It's something that maybe we don't think about being quintessentially American, but I think it represents a lot of things throughout the years that, from the 1950s... It's one of the original chains.

REED: I think there's things that are specifically Sizzler, and also things about it that are just more general, in terms of the way Americans embrace chains and chain restaurants and stores.

10Z: And yet neither of you has childhood memories of Sizzler?

LIZ: But when Reed told me — when we initially talked about this project, I immediately was like, "Yes." I didn't have to explain — because you just get it. Because my family used to go to Shakey's and Pizza Hut, and that for us was a very similar experience. It was a way that a family could go out, and it felt nice. At the time, they used to wait on you. I'm the youngest of nine, so the fact that we could all go out was such a big deal.

REED: I actually had the idea in college, 15 years ago. And I think — like, I don't know if it was our first date...

LIZ: One of our first dates. "What are your dreams? What do you really want out of life?" And Reed said: "I want to photograph all the Sizzlers."

REED: If you tell a girl that, and she smiles and thinks it's great, you pretty much know then that that's who you should be with. It just made so much sense for us to do it together, because I think it's something we both felt a passion for. And it was a great opportunity to do this kind of epic thing together — with your best friend and the person you have trust in and you believe in and trust artistically. It's been fantastic.

10Z: So what's it like photographing Sizzlers?

REED: Sometimes you have to drive for hours, and sometimes it's a few minutes. But invariably we'll be driving up to one and right before we see it, or when we see it, Liz will say something along the lines of: "Now that's a beautiful Sizzler..." Such a genuine excitement from her at seeing the next Sizzler and seeing what it's going to look like.

LIZ: There's definitely a variety of Sizzler styles. And I find a lot of the architecture interesting. I mean, we saw in — where was that? The flat Sizzler. In New York — in Massapequa, there's one Sizzler that it's just — it has a flat roof. It's just a box. When you pull up to it, there was just something about the Sizzler that looks like a box that....

REED: It was the world's saddest Sizzler.

LIZ: And I hate to say that, but ...

REED: But one of them had to be the saddest.

LIZ: And we noticed it had a "For Lease" sign. So once its lease is up, it'll probably be out of there. It was sort of like this weird, sad Sizzler...

And it's also about the neighborhood and the atmosphere.

REED: One of the larger themes about the project is the sameness of the American experience, of how wherever you are in the country, you can eat the same food at the same restaurants and shop at the same stores. That for me was one of the central ideas about it. But then in the execution about it, you go and find that maybe they do serve the same steak, but in different buildings, in different neighborhoods. And all the people who work there bring their own unique experience to the place. So no two are exactly alike.

Sizzlers are like snowflakes.

LIZ: It's true, actually.

REED: And then also, you meet the people there, who are real people, nice people — people just trying to make a living. What I think it has done for me is humanize this chain. Where you were kind of going in thinking this chain is emblematic of the United States and the sameness everywhere — but there's humans behind it, and kind of an endearing human experience. I relish the differences in all of them. And they're not exactly the same.

10Z: So what's the most dangerous Sizzler you've been too?

REED: I think Sizzler is a very non-dangerous place. I think Sizzler, to me, is — like, it's safe. Sizzler is what it is, and it's not necessarily full of exciting stories, but it's beautiful nonetheless.

LIZ: We did take Reed's dad with us and photographed some of the Sizzler's around San Diego... And he was just like, "I just don't understand why anyone would give you money for this." And he kept saying that, over and over. We went to two or three with him, and he just kind of stood around.

REED: Taking your dad to — that's the scariest moment of all. And that's my other favorite quote: "I just don't get why the photographs have to be blurry."

10Z: I know it's a conceptual art project, but why do the photographs have to be blurry?

REED: Well, a few reasons. I think it kind of enhances the beauty of the Sizzlers. And it gives them also a sense of nostalgia. It enhances the feeling you have. You have these kind of memories, and it's a subtle reference to that.

And then the other theme we were talking about, in terms of the sameness of the chains — if you blur it, the actual specificity of the site kind of melts away a little bit, so you don't know if you're looking at the Sizzler in Flagstaff or Barstow or Orlando.

10Z: So what was it like photographing the Sizzler in Barstow?

REED: I have no comment.

I don't know if Barstow is renowned for being the most awesome place in the world — you stop to go to the bathroom on the way from Las Vegas to L.A. — but I believe that the photo we took of the Barstow Sizzler is really beautiful. So there is beauty in these places that we overlook.

10Z: How's photographing in New York City?

LIZ: It was hard to do them all in one day. It felt like an epic day. I mean — I think it's Smithtown. You really feel like you're in a small town, in a way. It's just so much different than, let's say, the Queen's Sizzler in New York.

We really experienced some traffic and that New York driving where — and then we ended up having to go back to Brooklyn and drive across. It was one of those days where it's just like — you can't wait to get out of the car, because it was just such a difficult driving day.

REED: One of the great details is in Orlando. The Sizzlers there... they actually serve breakfast in Orlando! But in Orlando, they really cater to British tourists for breakfast. So you go in there, and it's all these British families in leisure soccer gear hitting the buffet. And in the buffet they have beans and stewed tomatoes and all this British food. And it's really the weirdest, oddest thing.

LIZ: I think a lot of people would say, "Oh, I wouldn't be able to spend that much time with my spouse." Or my girlfriend or boyfriend. It has a lot to do with our relationship... We inspire each other, in a way. And we do want to spend the time together. And it has been a really great experience, for that reason.

REED: And so it's maybe a quest to find the most romantic Sizzler. You get to do it with your best friend and the person you love the most — who gets you the most. I mean, geez, real honestly, does it get better? I don't think so. Photographing Sizzlers with your wife? I mean — wow.

10Z: What's the reaction you're getting to this project?

REED: It runs the gamut from people thinking this is the greatest thing ever to people saying, "You guys are idiots." One guy said, "This is either the most brilliant thing I've ever seen or the stupidest thing I've ever seen." That to me is just about as big a complement as you can give. We're really serious about it, but I kind of like that people maybe don't know if we're serious

10Z: When I first heard about this, I just assumed Sizzler was funding you as a viral marketing campaign (like that stealthy paid placement in a real high school graduation speech for the movie "I Love You, Beth Cooper".) The big question is: How can we be sure Sizzler isn't paying you?

REED: In our video — and this interview — hopefully we come across genuine enough. We had been wondering that, and it's kind of too bad that it's gotten to that point, and that's the first thing that people think. I'd do the same thing — I'd wonder, too.

The fact also is, I'm a really bad liar (both Liz and I are)... The projects we choose may sometimes be wacky, but that doesn't mean we're not serious about them.

10Z: Seriously — it's the culmination of a year's-long dream?

REED: I would say, 15 years.

10Z: Ironically, Sizzler declared bankruptcy during that time, in 1996.

REED: That was a dark day for me. I remember where I was when I heard the news. No, no, I'm just kidding. But it's been a long time coming.

10Z: So how exactly will you pull off this nationwide road trip?

LIZ: We took all of the Sizzlers off the web site, because they do list all the addresses. So we printed that out...

REED: They're all listed on the web site, and then we just went through and Googled all of them and where they are. Because Sizzler doesn't have a map.

LIZ: If there are multiple Sizzlers in a town, we just sort of map them out as we go...

10Z: And then after you've visited a Sizzler, you get to change the color of its pin on Google's map?

REED: It's a great moment — just to get it off your to-do list. Sometimes you want to get to the end of the list. And that will feel good, when we change that last pin's color. That will feel like an accomplishment. That will feel like the culmination of a year's-long dream.

10Z: What about all the Sizzlers in foreign countries? There's 81 Sizzlers outside the U.S. — scattered throughout Australia, Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Singapore.

REED: That would be, I think, the sequel.

Secrets of Al Franken

2009-12-07T19:06:52Z

Through 35 years in show business, he left a wake of bizarre sketches. ("Don't worry about your breath and your armpits, Al. It's your personality that stinks...")

Web sites remembered Al Franken's strange past life as a movie and TV comedian when he joined the U.S. Senate last week — in the ultimate weird (or all-American?) triumph. At the age of 25, Franken had started his career playing himself in this parody of a spray-on deodorant commercial in the 1976 movie Tunnel Vision.

"Hi. I'm one of the best-looking guys in town," he explains to a woman in a swimming pool. "Wanna go somewhere and shoot the shit?"

"Where do I meet you with my gun, feeb?" she replies.

One More Saturday Night

Future-Senator Franken even lights up a joint in one rowdy 1986 movie — and sings "I'm gonna get laid! I'm gonna get laid." ("Hey, I can't help it," he explains. "I'm a lesbian trapped inside a man's body.")

In One More Saturday Night, Franken played the singer in a scruffy local band — the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia produced some of the movie's music — and the movie ends with Franken's character taking Percodan and Demerol for a punch in the jaw. ("Idiot could've gotten 20 of those if he'd asked for them," says a bandmember played by Tom Davis — another Saturday Night Live writer who co-authored the movie's script with Franken.)

Their film resembles Fast Times at Ridgemont High, cross-cutting between several interlocking teen-oriented stories. ("Dad, did you ever have sex with any ladies besides Mom?") The widower dad gets busted having sex by the lake, but what's most fascinating is the script's perspective on the state of Minnesota — which would later elect Franken their Senator!

"The state of Minnesota has got more blonde, luscious, genetically pure Swedish women than any place in the world," Davis tells Franken. Al tries to wave Tom off of one hot prospect, saying "She's got kids," but their script supplies Tom with the perfect answer.

"It's okay. They can watch."

And the most scandalous thing about the movie may appear in its closing credits, which thank James R. Thompson, the governor of...Illinois. Franken's movie about a night in a small town in Minnesota was filmed entirely in Illinois, after Minnesota's Film Board deemed its script too obscene, according to Davis's recently-released biography.

He also reveals that this movie was never released on DVD — or even into theatres, after it failed two test screenings in Times Square and Sacramento, California. But you can still watch its generic "80s teen movie" credits on YouTube.

Over the Borderline

In March Davis released his tell-all memoir about performing with Al Franken as a comedy team — including a drug stop at the Canadian border. Davis hurtled an incriminating hash pipe into a river — in front of the border police — who then insisted on detaining and strip searching both Davis and Franken, along with their friends. (One friend suggested next time, he'd hide a folded note for the officer between his butt checks.) But when the police tried to intimidate the future Senator, telling him privately that his partner had already confessed to everything, Franken daringly improvised the perfect response.

"We didn't mean to kill that Indian! It was an accident!"

There's also a 1983 visit to Jamaica, in which Franken spends an hour teaching a native how to play Frisbee, "before he finally figured out she was a hooker." But Davis's book also reveals the two most disturbing facts about the man from Minnesota. Franken's wife, Franni, was once Pauly Shore's baby sitter.

And Franken's mouth is so large, he can cram his entire fist into it.

Washington Whispers

Franken loves to tell the story about challenging future-President Ronald Reagan with a question about decriminalizing marijuana. (In 2004 Bill Clinton, at a book signing, greeted Franken by saying "My hero's here.") Franken recaps the incident in his book Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot. But in 1999, for his second book, Franken described making a (fictitious) run for a seat in Washington — the Presidency — just 10 years before his actual swearing in as a Senator.

"As you know, I have not been elected president," Franken explains patiently to the Supreme Court's Chief Justice, William Rehnquist, in a fake letter which opens Why Not Me, adding "and I have no plans to run for office — local, regional, or national." (Franken then asks Rehnquist if he'd appear on the book's cover...and if he'd travel to New York for the photo shoot — by train, during off-peak hours, to reduce Franken's expenses.)

And the book also includes a campaign speech where Franken promises no major scandals during his administration. But "I'm not saying there will be no scandals whatsoever. No candidate can honestly make that pledge."

Unfortunately, his fictitious administration unravels after the release of an all-too-honest campaign diary. ("May 6... Splurged on hooker.")

The book's election might've gone differently if voters had paid more attention to Franken's campaign biography, The Courage to Dare, which chronicled his experience with entrepreneurial success in college: founding the Fabulous Freaky Freakout Company, along with its subsidiary, the Smoking Doobie Banana Brothers, Ltd.

I Fought the Law

It was the strangest omen of all, when the media and political worlds began merging right before America's eyes.

In 1998, Franken starred in a short-lived NBC sitcom called LateLine. But now real politicians were drawn into Franken's bizarre TV world, and its 19 episodes included cameos by three U.S. Senators — Paul Simon, John Kerry, and Alan Simpson — while the show's fake Senator, "Crowl Pickens", was played by Saturday Night Live's Dana Carvey.

Just eight years later, Franken announced his own candidacy for the U.S. Senate — and he's now working with John Kerry.

The studio's atmosphere was surreal. "Next door was Sesame Street," one of the directors remembers on his blog, "and it was not uncommon to see guys walking down the hall with Muppets on one hand and cigarettes in the other." But the puppets would also share the hall with other misplaced guests from Washington, including Congressmen Dick Gephardt and Pat Schroeder.

There were visits from former presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, plus one-time Clinton administration officials like Joycelyn Elders and Robert Reich. The Muppets might also spot real-life political pundits like John McLaughlin, Pat Buchanan, and William F. Buckley. And the show even had parts for Allison Janney and Martin Sheen — the future stars of The West Wing.

Franken's show would mock journalists — he played a late-night TV correspondent — but ironically, in this episode, the future lawmaker would get pulled over by a cop.

And his night's about to get a lot worse....

Monday Night Live

"I take this oath very seriously," Franken said last week from the Senate Judiciary Committee, as he prepared to question Sonia Sotomayor over her nomination to the Supreme Court. "I may not be a lawyer, but neither are the overwhelming majority of Americans. Yet all of us, regardless of our backgrounds and professions, have a huge stake in who sits on the Supreme Court."

But while he'd later ask many questions — about privacy, internet access, and the right to an abortion — Franken's long strange trip came full circle when he'd eventually grill the future Justice over a TV-related question.

What was the one case that Perry Mason lost?

"Like you, I watched it all of the time," Sonia Sotomayor admitted, though she was unable to cite the fictitious case's title.

"Our whole family watched it," Franken remembers warmly, in one last nod to his television past. "And because there was no internet at the time, you and I were watching it at the same time."

"Is the Senator from Minnesota...going to tell us which episode that was?" demands Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, giving Franken a chance to make one last oddball joke before launching his six-year term.

"I don't know!" Franken replies.

"That's why I was asking!"

See Also:
The Great Wired Drug Non-Controversy
Prescription Ecstasy and Other Pipe Dreams
Lost 'Horrors' Ending Found on YouTube
Five Freaky Muppet Videos

Transhumanist Salvation or Judgment Day?

2009-07-27T00:16:20Z

We're starting to brush up against real robots, real nanotech, and maybe even the first real artificial intelligence. But will emerging technologies destroy humankind — or will humankind be saved by an emerging transhumanism?

And which answer is more liberating?

If anybody knows, it's R.U. Sirius. The former editor in chief at Mondo 2000 (and a Timothy Leary expert) has teamed up with "Better Humans LLC." They're producing a new transhumanist magazine called h+. (And R.U. is also one of the head monkeys at 10 Zen Monkeys.) But can he answer this ultimate question? Terminator Salvation played with questions about where technology ends and humanity begins.

But what will we do when we're confronting the same questions in real life?

10 Zen Monkeys: Isn't this whole idea of real transhumanism kind of scary?

RU SIRIUS: Everything's scary. Human beings weren't born to be wild so much as we were born to be scared, starting on a savanna in Africa as hunter-gatherers watching out for lions and tigers and bears (oh my... Okay, maybe just lions), subjected to the random cruelties of a Darwinian planet. I would say that the transhumanist project is probably an attempt to use human ingenuity to make living in this situation as not scary as possible, and in some theories, to actually change the situation, to create a post-Darwinian era.

See Also

» Read h+ magazine online
» Read the first issue
» "Is the Future Cancelled?"
   Spring 2009 Edition
» HPlus Magazine's main site
» R.U. Sirius's editor's blog

Of course, that — in itself — is scary. Our favorite narratives — our favorite movies and stories and comics tend to involve humans being altered by our own technologies to dramatically bad ends. Most of those stories are silly in the particular, but the broader fear of unintended consequences or the use of advanced technologies by intentionally destructive people isn't silly.

For instance, we explored the very rapid development of robotic technologies for warfare during the web site's Terminator Week. That's viscerally scary. Logically it can also mean less civilian casualties, less harm to soldiers, and so on. And on the other hand, it can also mean less hesitation to use violence against others, or a possibly objectionable system of total control in which revolution is permanently rendered impossible. And on the other hand... I can do the "on the one hand and on the other hand" until the Singularity or at least until the Mayan apocalypse of 2012.

But seriously, what really scares the crap out of me is that we might not make radical technological problem-solving breakthroughs — that we might stop, or that the technologies might fall short of their promises. What scares me is the idea of a 6 billion-strong species finding itself with diminishing hopes, resource scarcities, insoluble deadly pandemics, and global depression based on the delusions of abstract capital flow resulting in increases in violence and suffering and territoriality and xenophobia.

10Z: But how does transhumanism resolve these problems? How does a bunch of rich people living longer solve any of this?

RU: Let's take this one at a time. The technological paradigm that has grown out of transhumanist or radical technological progressive circles that I'm most fond of is NBIC. Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno. The promise of nanotechnology — which has become much more tangible just in the last few months (thanks to developments we recently covered on our site) — is basic control over the structure of matter. This should eventually solve most of our scarcity problems, with the possible exception of physical space. (And there are ways we might deal with that, but I'm trying to keep it short.)

Nanotechnology, of course, has enormous potentials in terms of health as does biotechnology. People can find these details just about anywhere so I won't go into it. Anyway, sickness is perhaps our greatest source of misery and our greatest resource sink... particularly if you contrast sickness not just with the absence of disease but with the possibilities of maintaining a high level of vitality.

Then... information technology allows us to organize the data for distributed problem solving and — to a great degree — democratizes it. (More eyes and more brains on the problem, working with and through more intelligent machines.) IT is at the heart of all the breakthroughs and potential breakthroughs in nano and bio — and all this is leaving aside the further out projections of hyper-intelligent AIs.

You know, getting back to what's scary, I agree with Vernor Vinge that the greatest existential threat is still nuclear warfare. But next in line is the possibility of a major plague... a rapidly spreading pandemic. And already we can see that the tools for dealing with that come down to intelligent systems and biotech. There's biotech medical solutions using intelligent systems married to global mapping and communications and organized distribution. Human behavior has a role too, of course... but not as much as romantics might wish.

Which perhaps brings us to cogno — getting control and better use out of the brain for greater intelligence, greater happiness, less misery... hell, maybe even cheaper thrills! Why not? A lot of our problems are self-created... or they're created by particularly unstable or irrational people. As a veteran of the psychedelic culture, the potentials and problems of cognition are a particular area of fascination for me — and also as a nonconformist who is suspicious of the tendency of society to be hostile towards what we might call creative madness. So I do have some ambiguities, but it's just a huge area of intrigue as far as I'm concerned.

Now, all of this is just the prosaic stuff, without imagining Singularities, or say hyperintelligent humans who aren't needy... happily living on converted urine and nutrient pills while entertaining one and other in ever-complexifying virtual spaces. Lots of energy savings there, Bubb.

10Z: President Obama is reconstituting his bio-ethics panel. Just how high are the stakes, in the here and now, regarding U.S. political policy governing future research?

RU: You know, I think the bioconservatives who dominated Bush's bio-ethics panel and opposed stem cell research were just pissing in the wind... but that stuff can hit you in the face. Really though, I think that the discourse in opposition to embryonic stem cells will some day be seen as every bit as absurd as Monty Python's "every sperm is sacred."

More broadly, I don't think the stakes are very high because I don't think you can get the federal government today to be terribly functional... and I'm not a knee-jerk anti-government guy at the level of economics or investment in research. I just think there's a certain all-American "can't do" thing going on there and there's no effective strategy for changing it.

Sometimes I think that the people who really control America — the corporate oligarchs and finance kleptocrats, the national security apparatus and so forth — realize that the Titanic has already hit the iceberg. And laughing up their sleeves they said, "Quick! Put that charismatic black guy behind the wheel!"

10Z: I'm surprised to hear that you're not a knee-jerk anti-government sort of guy. I read that you were an anarchist.

RU: I've read that too. I have an anarchistic streak, but I can't even begin to believe in it. I do think that being an anarchist is an excellent choice though, because it's never going to be tried by any large group on a highly populated planet with advanced technology. So you never have to witness or experience the consequences of your belief system being enacted. It will remain forever romantic.

On the whole, though... I should try to be diplomatic. Let's just say that anarchists and pure libertarians are the most anti-authoritarian, and I like to be anti-authoritarian. It would be more convenient and more consistent to believe, but I don't think ideologies work in the real world.

10Z: Let's get back to those ambiguities you mentioned. That seems like a rare trait in the community represented by h+ magazine.

RU: Hardly. But I'm probably more richly ambiguous than most other human beings. My only ideology is uncertainty. Although you'll see it if you explore transhumanist-oriented discussion groups and blogs like Michael Anissimov's Accelerating Future or the writings of Nick Bostrom ad infinitum. They're rife with complexity and argumentation, and concern about existential threats, inequalities in the distribution of positive results from scientific achievement, and on and on. The reality is there's a rich and varied discourse within the techno-progressive movement just as there is between the progressives and the bio-conservatives.

10Z: It's hard to see where longevity and immortality fits into your vision of social responsibility.

RU: First of all, I emphasized problem solving to respond to your question about fear. And in essence my answer was I'm more afraid of standing still or going backwards than I am of moving forward. But man... and woman... cannot live by social responsibility alone. (We don't go around now asking people to die so we can spare resources or whatever.)

And I think that our humor columnist Joe Quirk had the best response to people who are against hyper-longevity... holy crap! These people want me to die!

Can we allow people to be the owners and operators of their own experiences and decide for themselves how to answer the Shakespearian question — to be or not to be? I think it's doable. There's a very substantive discussion from Ramez Naam in our first issue about why hyper-longevity should not create big resource problems. It has to do with demographics and the tendencies of educated, comfortable people to make less kids, and a fairly high percentage of inevitable deaths even if we cure aging and most illnesses.

10Z: But won't this exacerbate already extreme class distinctions? Won't we have a wealthy race of immortals and then everybody else?

RU: That's plausible, but very unlikely. And it always surprises me that that's the first thing you usually hear, since a great portion of the human species already has access to universal health care. Even left to the market, the investment that's being made in this should eventually lead to a need to sell to a large consumer market. In our first issue, we have a chart that shows billionaires who are investing in revolutionary science projects... and a few of them are investing in longevity. Well, they're going to want to take their product to market and get a big consumer share. John Sperling isn't going to be sitting in some mountain retreat rubbing his hands together and saying, "Foolish mortals, I shall use this only for myself and my beautiful blonde cyborg bride Britney!" That's the movie version, not the reality.

The reality is actually sort of comical — the wealthy are the early adapters of new technologies, but those new technologies usually don't work very well at first... they tend to fuck up. Now, I think you can imagine that as a potential movie that can satisfy everybody's need for schadenfreude.

10Z: Francis Fukuyama wrote some critiques of the transhumanist vision. In one essay he writes: "Modifying any one of our key characteristics inevitably entails modifying a complex, interlinked package of traits, and we will never be able to anticipate the ultimate outcome." How would you respond?

RU: This gets us to the cover story on so-called designer babies in the current Summer Edition of h+ magazine. There's hugely intriguing and potentially controversial issues about enhancement in this edition. And that's not only around parents pre-selecting traits for their children, but there's also a portrait of Andy Miah in the issue. He's a British professor who — for all intents and purposes — is pro-sports doping.

Before I go into this, I want to take a bit of a detour. When I wake up in the morning and start working on h+, I'm not thinking "How can I spread propaganda for the glories of transhumanism?" or anything like that. I'm thinking: "How can I do a totally cool-ass website and magazine with the transhumanist idea and sensibility at the center of it." That's my charge, and I'm approaching it as a craftsman. So I'm looking at this first as a magazine writer and editor — I want it to be accessible, exciting and fun, and I want it to look great. I want it to ride along the boundary between being a pro-transhumanist magazine and being more of a balanced and very hip generalist geek culture magazine. That, for me, is the sweet spot in this, and I think, along with other contributors, we've pretty much nailed it.

So I'm first of all an editor and writer. And secondly, I'm a curious editor and writer. This isn't necessarily all good or all bad. It's interesting. And that's how I'd hope and expect most readers would approach it.

And there's one more thing coming in a very distant third. In the context of an overarching commitment to my philosophy of uncertainty — or meta-agnosticism — I'm an advocate of the radical technological vision. I've thought long and hard about politics — and about consciousness unassisted by radical technology — and I've concluded that radical technology is the only bet that has a chance of winning not just a sufferable but a generally positive and enjoyable human future. But I'm not a stoical defender of the cause or anything like that.

So what Fukuyama proposes is interesting — that altering a few alleles to create some characteristics could iterate into monstrous or unhappy consequences further down the road. And I think that the general consensus among geneticists is that this is very unlikely with the small kinds of changes that are being discussed now (for example, selections of eye and hair color). Beyond that point, I say... let the arguments rage on! One of the assumptions among advocates is that by the time we're able to make significant incursions into germ line engineering (to affect people's intelligence or make them more or less aggressive or sexier or whatever), we'll have significantly advanced measurement and predictive tools...plus, a really good understanding of what we're doing.

And there's another argument: we change stuff all the time in the "natural" evolution of human beings — and we reap both positive and negative consequences. But generally we gain more than we lose by proceeding with technological advances. There's this idea called the "proactionary principle" which came from Max More, one of the originators of transhumanism. He basically argues that we measure the potential negative consequences of a technology, but we also need to measure the negative consequences of not developing a technology. What do we lose by its absence?

Anyway, I sort of want to punt — in the specific — on the issue around choosing traits for babies. I prefer to acknowledge that it's a controversial area, but I'm excited to present the articles that are favorable towards these activities and hope they generate lots of interest and discussion.

10Z: Before I let you go, let me ask you about the politics of h+ magazine and the transhumanist movement. Ronald Bailey, who writes for the libertarian magazine Reason, criticized another transhumanist — James Hughes — who apparently advocates democratic socialism. Where do you come down on all this, and what are the politics of h+?

RU: First of all, the magazine has no explicit politics. Having said that, I think we have an implicit politic that both Ron Bailey and James Hughes agree with. It's the idea that human beings have a right to a high degree of autonomy over their minds and bodies, and that the trend towards transhuman technologies makes those rights all the more important and poignant. So human beings would have the right not just to choose their sexual preferences, or to control their birth processes, or as consenting adults to take whatever substances they like, or to eat what they like. We would also have the right to control and change our biologies, to self-enhance, to alter our bodies through surgery and on and on. So let me be oh-so-diplomatic, by emphasizing our points of agreement.

I'll give a bit of my own perspective in terms of the great late second millennium debate that puts an unfettered market at one end of the spectrum and communism at the other end of the spectrum; that puts competition on one end of the spectrum and cooperation at the other end; that puts decentralization at one of the spectrum and centralization on the other end of the spectrum. I'd have to say I'm horribly centrist. I'm dead center. It's not a mainstream centrism, but without going into a long explication, I'm almost embarrassingly moderate.

But while I think these arguments are still lively and vital today — and I have my own cheers and jeers over each day's political issues — from a near-futurist transhumanist perspective, the debate seems really tired. For about a decade I've been arguing that the future I see emerging is witnessed by the open source culture, Wikipedia, and file sharing. And in another decade or two the dominant economic mode will not be the market or socialism or the mixed economy that we actually have pretty much everywhere — it will be voluntary collaboration. And yes, that's kind of an anarchist view... but I'm saying it will become the dominant mode, not the only mode. (The market and the state will continue to be factors.) I hear Kevin Kelly just figured this out. :)... although his use of loaded words like socialism and collectivism are somewhat unfortunate.

People sometimes wonder how wealth will get distributed in a future economy that will likely require close to 0% human participation and that still presumably requires people to hustle themselves up some proof of value. But I think there's a good chance that an advanced "file-sharing" culture hooked up to advanced production nanotechnology will render the question moot.

Free lunch for everybody!
See Also:
Latest issue of h+ magazine
Read the first issue
R.U. Sirius on "Terminator/Robot Week"
"Is the Future Cancelled?" Spring 2009 Edition
HPlus Magazine's main site
R.U. Sirius's editor's blog

‘How I Sued a Craigslist Sex Troll’

2009-11-21T23:30:29Z

It been nearly three years, but one victim has finally successfully sued an infamous Craigslist prankster who published the private emails received in response to a fake sex ad.

Now for the first time, the court's "John Doe" has agreed to tell his own side of the story. "The message is in the fact that a lawsuit is indeed possible based on privacy issues," says the victim, "and those considering similar behavior as Fortuny are advised to consider that fact."

In September of 2006, Jason Fortuny posted a personal ad on Craigslist pretending to be a woman seeking kinky sex — and then published sexy pictures and complete emails he received, including any names and phone numbers, from over 150 men. "[T]he chorus of blog posts saying 'someone ought to sue him' gave me some satisfaction to being able to do just that," says Doe, "on behalf of those who wished for justice in this matter."

"IT IS HEREBY ORDERED AND ADJUDGED," wrote Judge Joan B. Gottschall 30 months later — handing down $74,252.56 in legal fines to Fortuny. Three law firm associates had spent 129.2 hours (at $175 per hour) litigating his 2006 Craigslist prank, plus another 35 hours by the main attorney billed at $275 per hour. As part of the judge's award, Fortuny will have to pay all their legal fees — a total of $32,365.50 — and he'll even end up paying the extra costs accrued because he avoided their process servers.

"I hope that it demonstrates that claims (and attorneys) do exist that enable victims to pursue those who commit wrongful acts," says the victim's lawyer, Charles Mudd.

Jason Fortuny
"Whenever I questioned 'why bother doing this', I just re-read the posts where Fortuny was taunting the victims who begged him to remove their information," says victim John Doe, "and that renewed my resolve." In the end, Fortuny's stubbornness is what led them to court. "He publicly demonstrated his unwillingness to negotiate with others, so I knew that only a hardball response would be effective and that direct contact with him would be a waste of time and tip him off to my plans."

Ironically, Fortuny was only fined $5,000 for "public disclosure of private facts" and "intrusion upon seclusion." The remaining bulk of the award — $35,001 — was for violating the plaintiff's copyright. "The Copyright Act provides for statutory damages from $750 to $35,000 per infringed work," says Mudd, but those damages "can exceed $35,000 up to an amount of $150,000 per infringed work where the conduct was willful." This means that ultimately, it was Fortuny's own "willful" conduct that increased the price he'd eventually have to pay, Mudd argues. "In general, Mr. Fortuny could have limited the amount of damages under the Copyright Act and could have significantly reduced the amount of attorney's fees throughout the course of this matter.

"He chose not to do so."

Judgment Day

Fortuny initially argued that the suit against him was "abusing the intent of copyright law, stretching the common law terms of privacy, using unverified e-mail as alternative process, and side stepping personal jurisdiction." Last summer Fortuny wrote an eight-page letter informing the judge that "I do not have the resources for legal proceedings in another state, much less the exorbitant attorney fees for a Federal copyright case." But John Doe's lawyer points out that Fortuny didn't have to appear in person, and seemed genuinely surprised by the lackluster fight that Fortuny put up.

Judge Gottschall rejected Fortuny's only other response — a "motion to dismiss" — writing that "It appears that the defendant filed the documents in the wrong courthouse." (The court's rules also required a "notice of service" which Fortuny failed to provide.) By the time Fortuny's motion reached the right court, Judge Gottschall had already entered a default judgment against him. "My firm and the Plaintiff provided Fortuny every opportunity to vacate the default," says attorney Mudd, but after several months with no response, the case had moved forward.

"The foregoing being said, I would have welcomed the opportunity to address the claims on the merits."

Fortuny's victim acknowledges that "The judge's verdict was just a formality based on the rules. Fortuny lost this on procedural grounds." But there's still a lesson in his legal experience...

Fortuny's prank became a symbol for unapologetic online "griefing," and last August, the New York Times wrote Fortuny "might be the closest thing this movement of anonymous provocateurs has to a spokesman." Fortuny told the Times he knew two victims had lost their jobs over his prank. "Am I the bad guy?" Fortuny asked rhetorically in the interview. "Am I the big horrible person who shattered someone’s life with some information? No! This is life. Welcome to life. Everyone goes through it. I’ve been through horrible stuff, too."

A Seattle newscast reported one man responded with a picture
exposing himself in his cubicle where he worked — Microsoft —
adding "That man got fired."

But John Doe was determined to fight back.

The Victim's Story

On that day in 2006, Doe was alerted to his sexy picture being published online — first via an anonymous tip-off, and then helpful pointers from two of his friends, according to documents filed in the case. He'd quickly deleted his photo from the Wiki-like page at Encyclopedia Dramatica — only to see it re-appearing there later (and with future deletions disabled). "Through legal counsel, Plaintiff requested that Encyclopedia Dramatica remove Plaintiff's Private Response, Copyrighted Photograph and personal email address from the Fortuny Experiment," reads the case filing.

It adds that Encyclopedia Dramatica complied with Plaintiff's request, but then Jason Fortuny himself grabbed the picture, and re-published it on his own site. It was then that the angry victim sent Fortuny a DMCA notice, arguing that the photograph was copyrighted.

More About Jason Fortuny

» 20 Funniest Reactions
» Fortuny's Legal Defense
» Jason Fortuny Speaks
» The Secret Life of Jason Fortuny
» Good Griefers: Fortuny v. Crook
» In the Company of Jerkoffs

"I initially sought to protect my privacy and leave it at that," Doe told us this week. "Fortuny opposed my actions to remove my personal information, and so I was left with no choice but to take additional legal action against him."

One internet rumor says the plaintiff must've luckily had a friend who was a lawyer, but that's not true, says Doe's attorney. "Neither I nor anyone at my firm knew of or communicated with the Plaintiff prior to the Craigslist Experiment." But he adds that "The case was well researched and on solid legal footing, and we had every reason to expect a favorable ruling on merit."

Fortuny's prank may have struck 149 other victims, but John Doe was different. "I had the personal resources and was at liberty to risk additional publicity," Doe says, "unlike apparently all the other victims. Fortuny miscalculated in that regard as he assumed no one could either afford the legal costs nor take the personal risk to oppose him.

"This was a miscalculation that was perhaps not clear to him until a long time after I began the process."

Doe's photo was removed — temporarily — but by the end of the month, the photo was back on Fortuny's site yet again, along with the text of the original sexy email message. Fortuny had filed a counter-notification disputing the copyrighted status of the photo. "The counter notification basically says 'you're a liar liar pants on fire'," Fortuny explained on his blog, "and adds that if you don't respond within 14 days, I get to put my shit back up."

The incident occurred back in September of 2006, and the first summons to Fortuny was issued 18 months later — over a year ago, in February of 2008. "For personal reasons I let some time pass before pulling the trigger on the lawsuit," the victim says, and even then it took more than four months before the executed summons was finally returned. "We had advised Fortuny that we reserved the right to take this up again at our convenience, and I suppose he mistook that for a bluff." The lawsuit acknowledged that after nearly two years, the photo and email were still displayed on Fortuny's site.

And to this day, nearly 100 of the original photos, remain online at Encyclopedia Dramatica. (Caution: link is not safe for work.)

This wasn't Fortuny's first brush with the courts. One of our readers contacted us with a list of Fortuny's other past legal skirmishes — including three municipal court citations for "no driver's license on person" in 1999, 2001, and 2002, as well as a 2004 citation for driving without proof of insurance. But looking at the judge's decision today, Doe sees a larger message. "Beyond the goal of protecting my own privacy, there was a broader 'civic' aspect to this case," he notes, "which was motivating for me and of particular note motivating for my attorney. Fortuny maliciously harmed a lot of people by his actions, and he made the point of bragging about how he was toying with the efforts of those who attempted to deal with him directly.

"It was sad to watch this happen, and it furthered my resolve to act as the 'adult on the playground' and respond to this bully on behalf of all his victims in spirit anyway."

But there's another lesson in the incident — and ironically, it comes from the Craigslist sex troll himself — via the lawyer who prosecuted the case against him. "I believe Fortuny himself sent the message for users of the Internet through the Craigslist Experiment — beware what you read online," says Charles Mudd, "and think several times before communicating personal information through electronic mail to anyone.

"Especially someone you have never met."

See Also:
20 Funniest Reactions to the Fortuny Verdict
Jason Fortuny Responds to Lawsuit
Jason Fortuny Speaks
Craigslist Sex Troll Gets Sued
The Secret Life of Jason Fortuny
Good Griefers: Fortuny v. Crook
In the Company of Jerkoffs

20 Funniest Reactions to the Jason Fortuny Verdict

2009-05-08T08:52:39Z

His blog at RFJason.com disappeared, and one anonymous Livejournal comment claims that "he hasn't made contact with anyone for weeks. Even his accomplices don't know what's going on." (Though his personal blog at LiveJournal is still up — with its old tagline "Getting away with everything you can only dream of.")

But now that a judge ordered Jason Fortuny to pay $74,252.56 in various legal fines —what's the internet's final verdict? Was Fortuny's Craigslist prank instructive, malicious — or a little bit of both?

Here's the 20 funniest reactions.

*

"Why do I hear Aretha singing 'Dancin in the streets'? ;-) Honestly this should be declared an international holiday or something."

      — Livejournal blogger Mrs-Ralph

*

"trolls are getting sued now? what is the world coming to"

      — Livejournal user Kassichu

*

"This is what happens when you don't put out like you imply you will."

      — Livejournal user Demure

*

"I love when reality collides with LiveJournal. It's like a super nova exploding."

      — Livejournal user Katastrophic

*

"Don't worry about lawsuits. They won't happen."

      — Jason Fortuny, October, 2006

*

"If he was a TRULY great troll, he would have done it all anonymously. As it is, he's pretty much in the same position as those dudes who sent him pics... ...consequences got back to him. That's life."

      — Livejournal user Yhanthlei

*

"Well, it's not like the plaintiff won on the merits of the case, if that makes you feel better. He only won because the troll didn't show up to some meetings. Happens all the time in civil court."

      — Livejournal user Nandexdame

*

"A legal 'appearance' does not mean that Fortuny had to physically appear in Court initially. Rather, he had to properly file the appropriate documents in the correct court.

"Mr. Fortuny failed to do so."

      — Charles Mudd, the lawyer in the successful lawsuit

*

"If you are 13 or older you should expect naked explicit pictures of your ass to show up on the internet. this is 2009 America, after all."

      — A possibly-sarcastic commenter responding to Dan Savage

*

"i'm going to send nude pics of myself to an anonymous ad on craigslist what could possibly go wrong."

      — Livejournal user Kassichu

*

"It's like a stupidity contest, except the winner gets to pay ~$75k."

      — Livejournal user Derumi

*

"You don't have to feel sorry for him to recognize that the law is on his side here. Fortuny behaved wrongfully, and now he's suffering the consequences."

      — Magicgospelman

*

"Let's hug."

      — Livejournal user Girlvinyl

*

"The amount seems a high and random but really 'I did it for the lulz' shouldn't be a valid reason for fucking with someones life. I kind of wonder if there would have been a difference reaction if the guy had targeted a different group [than] male doms."

      — Livejournal user Muilti-factedg

*

"I take it back. You might get sued if you do a Craigslist Experiment..."

      —Jason Fortuny on his blog last summer

*

1. Trolls being sued is ridiculous
2. That doesn't make this any less funny

      — Livejournal user Layiliyal

*

"Contrary to what some people here want to believe, the Internet is not a lawless libertarian wonderland where you can do whatever the fuck you want without legal consequences. ....If you do these things with the goal of fucking with people, you shouldn't be surprised when they fight back."

      — Livejournal user Magicgospelman

*

"Can you blame him?"
"Not really."

      — Jason Fortuny
         responding to a TV news interviewer last summer.

See Also:
How I Sued a Craigslist Sex Troll
Jason Fortuny Responds to Lawsuit
Jason Fortuny Speaks
Craigslist Sex Troll Gets Sued
The Secret Life of Jason Fortuny
Good Griefers: Fortuny v. Crook
In the Company of Jerkoffs

Researcher Finds Bad Sex Information Online

2009-05-13T01:28:29Z

There's a problem with sexual information from the top medical web sites.

It's wrong.

"Even widely trusted sites like WebMD are not that accurate when it comes to adolescent reproductive health," says Dr. Sophia Yen, a Stanford University Med School instructor in Adolescent Medicine. She conducted an online review last summer and concluded many of the web sites weren't just incomplete — they were often wrong, wrong, wrong.

See Also:

» Top Six Inaccurate Sex Facts
   on the web
» The D.C. Madam Speaks
» Sex Panic! — an Interview with
   Debbie Nathan
» Sex Expert Susie Bright
   Lets It All Out

For example, weight gain isn't a side effect of birth control pills — but 60% of the reviewed sites claimed that it was. (And three sites even claimed, incorrectly, that IUDs should only be used by women who had already had children.) In fact, 40% of the web sites actually contradicted the guidelines of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists on PAP exams, mistakenly recommending the tests every time women change sexual partners or as soon as they turn 18. "Extra Pap exams are an unnecessary stress and expense, and a barrier to getting birth control," Yen says — since some teenagers may postpone birth control if they mistakenly believe it will first require a Pap exam.

With undergraduate researcher Alisha Tolani, Yen reported her results in March to the annual meeting of the Society for Adolescent Medicine, concluding that web sites "don't always incorporate changes to policy or to clinical recommendations that have occurred within the past five years." Between July and August, Yen's team performed a detailed assessment of the sexual health information online, a process she describes in an online video. "We did a Google search for phrases such as birth control, sexually transmitted diseases, emergency contraception, and IUDs, and looked at which web sites were the top 10 to 15 that came up on each of these topics." They cross-checked their list against Alexa's reports of U.S.-based traffic — but were still disappointed by the information they discovered. For example, "about half of the Web sites, including such highly trafficked destinations as Wikipedia and Mayoclinic.com, failed to provide accurate, complete information about emergency contraception," according to the study announcement by Stanford's School of Medicine.

Emergency contraception has been available over-the-counter since 2006 for people over 18, but 29% of the web sites Yen checked failed to mention this fact. She discovered 16 of the 34 sites correctly stated this information, but then failed to mention that in nine states it's also available over-the-counter without any age restrictions. And Yen also faults 10 of the 34 sites for failing to correct a common misconception — that emergency contraception is identical to the RU-486 abortion pill.

Stanford Researcher Sophia Yen
And it's not just teenagers that misunderstand the information. Yen cites one study which determined that 45% of newspapers confused emergency contraception (which prevents pregnancy from occurring) with RU-486, a pill which triggers an abortion after pregnancy occurs. Possibly because of this, 31% of teenagers now wrongly believe that emergency contraception induces an abortion, according to studies cited by Yen — while another 35% of adolescents have never even heard of emergency contraception.

And Yen found that many web sites also failed to include the latest guidelines from the World Health Organization about Plan B emergency contraception. (The group recommends that the pills be taken as soon as possible after sex, adding that the latest they can be effective is five days after intercourse.)

Yen's interest stems from her work as a pediatrics instructor at Stanford's medical school, and as a specialist in adolescent medicine at the Lucille Packard Children's Hospital. In fact, the hospital's chief of adolescent medicine added a statement to the announcement. "Making the transition between childhood and adulthood can be tough on teenagers," said Neville Golden, MD, noting that teenagers have many questions about sexual health. "That's why Dr. Yen's research is so important.

"She has demonstrated that there is a tremendous amount of misinformation on the Web."

But do adolescents get their sex information the web? Yes. Yen cites two studies by the PEW research center plus a 2003 survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, which determined that approximately 25% of teens acquire "some or a lot" of their sexual health information from the internet.

And though more than half of teenagers mistakenly thought they were immune to herpes if they were only kissing, this wasn't addressed by 69% of the web sites studied. (Only nine of 29 pages about STDs explained that herpes could be transmitted through kissing.) It's just one more example of ways health sites are failing their teenaged readers. "No studies have investigated the extent to which these myths exist and are perpetuated on the internet," Yen argues in her findings, adding that in the last five years, "several notable changes to policy and clinical recommendations have occurred."

Yen recommends that teenagers see a physician who specializes in adolescent medicine, and seek web sites reviewed by similar specialists (like the web sites associated with academic medical centers). She recommends Go Ask Alice, a question-and-answer service from Columbia University, the Center for Young Women's Health by the Children's Hospital Boston, TeensHealth by KidsHealth.org, and Planned Parenthood's Teen Wire. And she also recommends the book Our Bodies, Ourselves.

Ultimately, she suggests web sites "should consider more frequent reviews by health practitioners to contain accurate information consistent with such changes." She also has some advice for doctors — "be aware of myths on 'reputable health websites' and actively debunk them in clinical settings." And finally, she has some advice for teenagers.

"Be cautious about finding sexual health answers on the Web."

See Also:
Top Six Inaccurate Sex Facts on the Web
The D.C. Madam Speaks
Sex Expert Susie Bright Lets It All Out

Top Six Inaccurate Sex Facts on the Web

2009-05-09T20:29:11Z

Dr. Sophia Yen, a Stanford University Medical School instructor, believes the following six medical facts about sex are the ones most often overlooked or reported incorrectly by medical sites on the web.

1. Emergency Contraception is available over the counter.
In most states that's for women over the age of 18, but by early May of 2009, that age will drop to 17. And in nine states, it's already available without any age restrictions.

Alaska
California
Hawaii
Maine
Massachusetts
New Hampshire
New Mexico
Vermont
Washington

2. Emergency contraception doesn't cause an abortion.
It's not RU-486 — it's a way to prevent pregnancy from occurring.

3. IUDS are safe for adolescents

4. Birth control pills won't make you gain weight.
"You know, maybe one in a thousand may gain weight," says Dr. Yen, but in general the research shows people do not gain weight on birth control pills."

5. PAP smears aren't necessary until women turn 21.
Or until three years after women become sexually active. (Unless they're HIV-positive or have a suppressed immune system.)

6. Herpes can be transmitted by kissing.

Click here for our article about the study

Will ‘The Hunt for Gollum’ Satisfy True Fans?

2009-05-03T05:18:07Z

Hardcore Lord of the Rings nerds will get a little somethin'-somethin' on Sunday to help them through the Middle Earth drought until Jackson's production of The Hobbit is released.

But let's be real. This internet-only production isn't a "fan film." Rather, it's a vehicle for a crew of young, talented Hollywood wannabes to break into the industry by showing their chops.

It's true, the flick could end up being as badly-written and poorly-acted as your average fan film, but it's not likely. And in any case, the production values completely deprive the audience the pleasure of audio-visual comic fail should it turn out to be otherwise unwatchable. The trailer proves that.

There is further evidence that this is a professional endeavor, not an amateur one.

The lead actor who plays Aragorn, Adrien Webster (who claims to be a devout "fan," as do all of the 150 volunteer crew-members) was pressed to provide some nerd credentials so that the audience didn't feel it was being exploited.

"I don’t think we’re exploiting anything," said Webster. "I'm actually Viggo Mortenson's evil twin."

But, while we have no doubt that the guy makes a convincing Ranger, what could he offer in the way of story details from the LOTR appendices that the plot's allegedly drawn from — something to indicate a real depth of love for the mythology that would show he's anything more than a casual cinema-goer like so many "fans"? Not much. (He couldn't even give us a good nerd joke from on-set.)

"I think it does follow more closely to the books in terms of timeline," Webster said. "The movie deals with Aragorn’s search for Gollum after Gandalf has charged him with this task. It allows us to show more of Aragorn the Ranger."

Well, yeah, but we read that on the movie's website, dude.

From an interview with the film's writer-director, Chris Bouchard:

It's all written in the appendices of the books, where he tells of what Aragorn and Gollum got up to before the trilogy began. Last May I took elements from that story and didn't even have to fill in many gaps before I had a 25-page script. It worked like a short episode — an additional chapter of the Peter Jackson trilogy... Above all I was so inspired by Peter Jackson's trilogy. And jealous that he got to make it first! I loved the scale, the quality, the epic scope of it all and figured, hey, maybe we can do that too.

The filmmakers do seem unaware that the chapter in Fellowship of the Ring titled, "The Council of Elrond," includes Gandalf's report to the Council regarding Gollum — his capture, imprisonment, and escape from the elves of Mirkwood.

"Hunt" film editor Lewis Albrow claims in his bio on the crew page that he read The Hobbit when he was seven and LOTR when he was 11, but then — what's this? — "he skipped past much of The Council of Elrond"!

Gandalf's report on Gollum is omitted from Jackson's film adaptation.

It's pretty clear that crafting a traditional, if low-budget, piece of cinema was the driving factor in making this film. This is supported by the fact that Bouchard's been occupying his time in recent years making independent, low-budget zombie movies, not learning Elvish or arguing online about whether Tolkien was a racist.

As for the legal status of the project, Bouchard has said that he's been in contact with the Tolkien estate and that they were OK with it, though his movie's disclaimer says otherwise. (It warns that The Hunt for Gollum "is in no way affiliated with, or sponsored or approved, by Tolkien Enterprises, the heirs or estate of J.R.R. Tolkien, Peter Jackson, New Line Cinema, HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. or any of their respective affiliates or licensees…")

And while the overt visual mimicry of Jackson's films raises obvious questions about dilution of trademark and other legal vagueness surrounding fan fiction, it's also clear that, with such a non-profit, online-only film, the rights-holders have very few options. The film is finished and loaded into the chamber. Regardless of any legal victories by those who might want to stop the release of this thing, it only takes one anonymous finger to pull the trigger and fire it around the world in an instant.

"I'm just saying my prayers and eating my vitamins brother," actor Webster told us. "I haven’t been involved too much with the legal side of things."

Any publicity would only guarantee a larger audience. And a more general audience would likely be made up of folks who are even less able to distinguish between a New Line Cinema release and an "amateur" fansploitation effort.

How precious.

See Also:
Neil Gaiman has Lost his Clothes
When Cory Doctorow Ruled the World
Lost 'Horrors' Ending Found on YouTube
A Selection of Obscure Robert Anton Wilson Essays
Is The Net Good for Writers

Eight Druggiest Rock Star Stories

2009-05-01T22:03:07Z

The following is an excerpt from Everybody Must Get Stoned: Rock Stars on Drugs. The book was inspired by Paul McCartney on Drugs, an article I wrote for 10 Zen Monkeys in January of 2007.

In researching this particular section, I relied heavily upon two great sources: Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (An Evergreen book) by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain and High Times magazine. Other major sources for the book included Celebrity Stoner and a great book titled Waiting For The Man: The Story of Drugs and Popular Music by Harry Shapiro.

During the latter half of the twentieth century, rock stars were privileged with the opportunity to experience just about every imaginable thrill. They were young, they were aggressive, many of them were wealthy, they were in a culture where thumbing your nose at authority was the rule rather than the exception, and they were treated like sex gods by members of the opposite or desired gender. And, of course, there were plenty of drugs around to get crazy with. These are some of the twisted highlights or low-lights of rock star behavior related to drugs.

1. Blood of the Stooges

In 1969-1970, Iggy Pop and his seminal proto-punk band the Stooges lived together outside Detroit in a house they nicknamed "Fun House." (They also named an album for it.) Besides writing and recording music, they were injecting massive amounts of drugs, mostly heroin. When setting up a hit, the Stooges would squirt the blood out of their syringes and shoot it all over the walls and ceilings. After a while, enough blood had accumulated on the apartment's walls to create a sort-of degraded smack addict's Jackson Pollock mural. Ron Asheton, the only Stooge member who was not a junkie and who lived elsewhere, described it "...a lot of times there would be fresh stuff. Then it would dry on to the table or on the floor.... I wish I was smart enough to take pictures of it because it would have been a masterpiece."

2. Sid Goes to the Toilet

Dee Dee Ramone found himself at a party in London, hanging out for a few moments in the bathroom snorting great quantities of speed. It wasn't the sort of place you'd want to hang out for too long, as Dee Dee quickly noticed that the bathroom was disgusting — sinks, toilets, everything was full of vomit, piss, and shit. Sid Vicious — a key figure in the London punk scene but not yet a member of the Sex Pistols — wandered in and asked Dee Dee if he had anything to get high on, so Dee Dee generously gave Sid some of his crank. Vicious pulled out a syringe, stuck it into a toilet filled with puke and piss, and then loaded it with speed and shot himself up.

3. Brave Ted Nugent, Rock Warrior

The right-wing rocker Ted Nugent is known for being very antidrug and very prowar. The Motor City Madman happily calls out any pussy-ass traitor not ready to grab a gun or a bomb or a nuke and show those towelheads that we mean business. But back during the glory years of the Vietnam war, this most macho chickenhawk in the Republican firmament went to extremes to make sure his own pussy ass didn't end up in Vietnam, and he used drugs to do it.

In a 1970s High Times interview, Nugent related the story of how he avoided the draft. For 30 days prior to his appearance before the draft board, the hairy and bearded Nugent stopped brushing his teeth, bathing, washing himself, or combing his hair. He ate nothing but junk food and high-fat foods and drank nothing but Pepsi and beer.

Then, a week before his physical, Nugent pulled out all the stops. He stopped going to the bathroom. "I did it in my pants. Shit, piss, the whole shot. My pants got crusted up." Then three days before the exam, Nugent started staying up with the help of crystal meth.

When he finally went in for the army physical, Nugent was so sick that he passed out during his blood test. During the urine test, he couldn't pee. And when it came time to give them some excrement, he pulled down his pants and it was all there and ready. In fact, he got it all over his hands and arm. Nugent bragged to High Times, "...in the mail I got this big juicy 4-F. They'd call dead people before they'd call me.... I just wasn't into it. I was too busy doin' my own thing." Didn't Dick Cheney say something like that? (Nugent has recently claimed that he made this story up.)

4. Can You Tell the Difference Between Tripping Out and Nodding Out?

In 1967, rock guitarist and notorious smack addict Michael Bloomfield, who had played with Bob Dylan on his classic mid-sixties albums and as a member of Blues Project, had his own band of fellow musician-junkies. They called themselves the Electric Flag. They were hired by B-movie master Roger Corman to create the soundtrack to Corman's LSD movie The Trip (starring a young, acid-gobbling Jack Nicholson).

The band was invited to the film opening, where they took the front-row seats that had been set aside for them. But the lads had arrived so loaded down on smack that they were nodding off and spacing out throughout the film. In a High Times interview, Bloomfield added that the band was also encouraged to sleep by their positioning in the theater: "We're sitting in the front row, and we're like one inch from the screen — we have to sit at a 90 degree angle just to see the movie..."

When the movie ended, everybody filed out except for Bloomfield and his coterie of stoned musicians, who were glued to their seats, some with eyes closed and the others glassy-eyed. Confronted by members of Corman's crew as to why they were not leaving the theatre, Bloomfield had enough presence of mind to come up with an excuse that would be socially acceptable at that time and within this particular milieu. "We all had a lot of acid," he told them. In 1967 Hollywood, at the screening of The Trip, this had to be respected. Not wanting to bum the fellows out during such a sensitive event, the crew members left the musicians alone in the theater. It took them several hours to pry themselves from their chairs.

5. Waste Not, Want Not

Japan has a reputation for searching rock stars for drugs. Most famously, Paul McCartney spent some time in jail after going through Japanese customers (see also the chapters: "The Beatles on Drugs" and "Big Busts and Big Deals"). So when Guns n' Roses guitarist Izzy Stradlin was warned by his manager to get rid of any drugs he might have before going through customers in Japan, Stradlin put them someplace he knew he wouldn't lose them — in his stomach. He must have had quite a stash, because he wound up in a coma for 96 hours.

6. Jim Morrison's Excellent Adventure

In Please Kill Me, Ronnie Cutrone, an artist and denizen of Andy Warhol's 1960s Factory scene described a typical night out with the Doors' lead vocalist: "Jim would go out, lean up against the bar, order eight screwdrivers, put down six Tuinals on the bar, drink two or three screwdrivers, take two Tuinals, then he'd have to pee, but he couldn't leave the other five screwdrivers, so he'd take his dick out and pee, and some girl would come up and blow his dick, and then he'd finish the other five screwdrivers and then he'd finish the other four Tuinals, and then he'd pee in his pants, and then Eric Emerson and I would take him home."

7. But Why Is Elton "Still Standing?"

In his mid-1970s heyday, Los Angeles declared "Elton John Week." To celebrate, the glam rock pasha invited his relatives out to L.A. to celebrate. Allegedly, Elton took 60 Valiums, jumped into a hotel pool, and shouted, "I'm going to die." His grandmother was heard to comment: "I suppose we're going to have to go home now."

8. When Ozzy Got Some of That Good Government Cocaine

In a 1999 High Times interview, Ozzy talked about the time he had the best coke he'd ever had. He said, "I'm lying by the pool one day and I met this guy and I ask him, 'You want to do some coke?' He goes, 'no no no.' I'm whacking this stuff up my nose, it's a brilliant sunny day, and this guy's sitting there with one of those reflectors under his chin getting a suntan. I say, 'What do you do.' He says, 'I work for the government.' 'Uh... what do you do with the government?' 'I work for the drug squad.' I sez, 'You're fucking joking.' He shows me his badge. I fuckin' flipped...flames were coming out of my fingers, man. He says, 'Oh you're all right. I'm the guy that got you the coke.'"

Buy the book!

See Also:
Paul McCartney on Drugs
Ed Rosenthal: Big Man of Buds
Prescription Ecstasy and Other Pipe Dreams
Willie Nelson's Narcotic Shrooms

The QuestionAuthority Proposal
Bush Administration’s Greatest Hits (To Your Face)
Catching Up With an Aqua Teen Terrorist
Don't Go There: Top 20 Taboo Topics for Presidential Candidates

Steve Wozniak v. Stephen Colbert — and Other Pranks

What Happened to the Perry Bible Fellowship?

2009-09-17T23:01:36Z

It's been over a year since cartoonist Nicholas Gurewitch entered semi-retirement. But he's working on a movie, a TV show — and he even made a surreal appearance on a Fox News interview show. And he's left behind a message for his fans, tucked away in plain sight in the comic strip Catch Phrase. "There's no secret message," Gurewitch told us last week. "There's an overt message perhaps. That sometimes Life can pigeonhole a person.

"That's something I personally believe is a danger..."

So in the last 13 months, the 25-year-old cartoonist has drawn just that one strip while he explores even bigger mediums. "I'm very, very excited to imagine either of the films I'm working on being made," Nicholas told 10 Zen Monkeys. "I might very well post production materials for them on my web site in the near future.

"I haven't been home in three weeks because I've been script-writing with friends."

And Wednesday he finally released what may be the final collection of his Perry Bible Fellowship strips. It contains "a heck of a lot more," Nicholas told Publisher's Weekly, and the book's official site lists out bonus features like unpublished "lost" strips and original sketches, plus Nicholas's revealing behind-the-scenes interview with Wondermark cartoonist David Malki.

An earlier collection, The Trial of Colonel Sweeto, will be discontinued, and this book is "more of a deluxe edition," says Darkhorse Publishing's publicity coordinator, promising there's more than 20 strips that weren't in the first volume, "so its a more complete library."

They warn that this will probably be the final collection of Nicholas's work, though in December the cartoonist told us he was "taking it easy, preparing some ideas," and in last week's email promised "I'll probably be posting a new PBF soonish." (The site was offline briefly in December, but only because "my Australian server guy fell on hard times.") And in this book, "Nicholas went through and talked about a lot of the process he was going through," according to Jacquelene Cohen, a publicist at Dark Horse publishing. "He put a lot of thought into his inspiration."

Television versus Books

Working in two countries, Nicholas prepared a pilot TV show for British television while also retouching his strips for the book and remastering their colors. In fact, the book's publication date was delayed six months while Nicholas gave it the same lavish attention as his web comic. "He really wanted to be thorough and give each strip the time it deserves," remembers Cohen, saying only that he committed "a painstaking number of hours put into making this as special as it could be."

And the TV show? It would be a series of sketches — including at least one based on the surprise-hazing strip Weeaboo. "The guys at the company that produced it — Endemol — fought hard to make sure that comic was adapted," Nicholas told us last week. "Most of the material is sparkling new. I wrote it with my friends." And the scriptwriting received expert supervision by one of the writers of the surreal British comedy show Look Around You, Robert Popper.

"He was a great guy," adds Nicholas.

The BBC and the rival Channel 4 network are both reviewing the show now. ("I've been told that the hurting economy has hindered the speed of their decision-making," Nicholas notes — but he says that both networks are still interested in it.) In fact, Nicholas had already experimented with making movies out of some of his most famous strips, including New Specs for Ken and A Kiss For Joe (a two-minute film in which Nicholas himself makes an appearance).

Last week Nicholas told us he's now working on the script for a feature length film (along with his friend Jordan Morris). "My buddy Jordan is always really good about knowing how I should amplify an idea," Nicholas says, "and he's come up with ideas [for the strip] on his own. We're all kind of on the same wavelength collaborating, and it's extremely easy." Nicholas explained to one interviewer that "When we’re both giddy with laughter, I can tell we’re on to something good."

Nicholas seems to have cinema-sized dreams — Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody even wrote the introduction for his new book — and Nicholas offered a simple explanation to the Daily Cross Hatch. "I think a lot my ideas have grown so weird that I think I may need another medium for it." Nicholas has always been clear about his reasons for slowing the publishing schedule: "I want to do other things besides be a cartoonist." He discusses the transition in his book's introduction, and Wondermark's creator David Malki makes a provocative point — "We'll never know what kind of novels Charles M. Schulz could have written."

See Also:

» Records Broken by the
   Perry Bible Fellowship
» The Trial of Colonel Sweeto
» Neil Gaiman Lost His Clothes
» Secrets of the Perry
    Bible Fellowship

Nicholas also uses the interview to suggest that he's taking a lesson from the cartoonist who created The Far Side. "I'm sure Gary Larson had trained his brain by the peak of his career to derive the unbearable oddness of any slice of life. Like, I'm willing to bet that there's a muscle in his brain that he just honed, so that he could see all of life a certain way... If he's constantly looking at the world with that vision, and it's an honest vision, I don't think he can do much wrong."

But Nicholas also makes sure he acknowledges his admiration for Bill Watterson, the popular cartoonist who fiercely resisted merchandizing of his comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes. ("Bill knows better than anyone the value of keeping your characters from appearing on things that get thrown away.") In the same spirit, Nicholas's new book comes with a satin-red bookmark, and was designed with an eye for quality. "This book will look great as a (sick and twisted) coffee table book," wrote one reviewer on Amazon.

"It's almost a shame to put it in a shelf as the cover is such eye candy..."

Dark Horse Publishing acknowledges that "We didn't really understand the potential of his first book, and it ended up being a major, major success." (Nearly 27,000 copies were sold before the collection was even released!) Jacquelene Cohen remembers that when Nicholas visited trade shows, "he would have lines wrapping down one aisle and then halfway down the next — people mobbing him for autographs and signed prints and books. It was crazy — like mayhem.

"He loved it."

Beyond the Perry Bible Fellowship

It's been 13 months since Nicholas reverted the strip to "a pace I'm more comfortable with," and over the summer he told interviewers that "I doubt they'll have regular intervals. But that's something I'll focus on as soon as I finish up work in these other areas." Fans may miss the strip, but Nicholas shares a secret in the new book — just how much care went into the online strips (even after they'd been published in newspapers). "I think there's about a hundred hours' work difference between the 'Commander Crisp' that I finished for the newspapers and the 'Commander Crisp' that I finished for the web."

I've lost a week's worth of work before because I've realized that a comic could be done better. I scrap stuff all the time. In fact, I find it kind of exciting to be able to scrap something I've put hours of effort into.

A lot of times, you work all that time to maybe give your mind some liberated state that allows you to do the very best job that you can do.

A panel from "Commander Crisp"
The last year suggests the same freedom may be growing from Nicholas's entire Perry Bible Fellowship experience. After seven years of laboring over the strip, it may become the first creative outburst that just unlocks an even greater one. "I'm never worried about scrapping something," Nicholas says in his book.

"Because a lot of times that fragment that you labored over ends up finding a home in some other future work."

See Also:
Records Broken by the Perry Bible Fellowship
The Perry Bible Fellowship Almanack
Neil Gaiman has Lost His Clothes
Secrets of the Perry Bible Fellowship

Blossom Dearie’s “Conjunction Junction” Romance?

2009-02-11T22:27:01Z

Did the woman who sang "Unpack Your Adjectives" ever get together with the guy who sang "I'm Just a Bill"?

It turns out the answer is yes! Sort of...

Blossom Dearie was an occasional singer on Schoolhouse Rock, and so was Jack Sheldon, who sang the gravelly-voiced conductor song Conjunction Junction. When Blossom came to Hollywood (for a big recording session at Capitol Records), Sheldon was her trumpeter. "I was madly in love with Blossom at the time," he remembered wistfully. "We were going everywhere and doing everything together..." reads his remembrance 34 years later from the liner notes of Blossom's re-issued album. "Blossom was marvelous."

(Click to hear Jack's love-struck trumpet
on the album's title track, "May I Come In?")
Blossom Dearie, the beguiling blonde jazz chanteuse, died Saturday at the age of 82. But when she'd met Sheldon in 1964, she was just 38, and had already lived in Paris for several years — even though she didn't speak French! Within a few years, Blossom had recorded several jazz albums and married a Belgian saxophone player named Bobby Jaspar, who had recorded with Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Chet Baker. In 1963, Jaspar died of a heart attack at the age of 37 — but Blossom Dearie was about to earn her own fame in America.

In a funny twist of fate, an entire generation fell in love with her voice, mostly from just two songs — her vocals on two educational "Schoolhouse Rock" cartoons in the 1970s. Dearie and Sheldon actually sang together in a third cartoon, which featured every Schoolhouse Rock vocalist including Bob Dorough and Essra Mohawk. (In a song about the history of inventions, Dearie sings about Thomas Edison's mother, plagued by the lack of an electric light.) And it was her haunting vocal on the Figure Eight song which first captivated generation X. A cello in a minor key set a somber tone while Dearie's sunny girl-like voice thoughtfully advised children to "figure eight....as double four," and in a later video she described a rotten camping trip by unpacking her adjectives.

Jack Sheldon and Blossom Dearie became familiar to millions of children — or at least, their voices did. The short three-minute cartoons won four Emmys — even beating out Mister Roger's Neighborhood in the early 1970s. In the years to come, Sheldon would enjoy a lifelong fame, recording parodies of his Schoolhouse Rock songs. And Blossom? She became a cabaret singer. It's a dying art form — just a singer at a piano — but she had a wispy, sunny voice and a personality that could capture a room. On the day she was born, a neighbor celebrated by bringing peach-tree flowers to her family — one story says that's where she earned the name "blossom." And 80 years later, she was still delighting crowds at Danny's Skylight Room on Restaurant Row in the Broadway theatre district.

Sadly, that big recording session in Hollywood hadn't earner her big money. "I kept working, but it doesn't seem like there was much of an impact," Blossom once said. She appears on the album's cover in a mink coat — but the CD's liner notes point out that "It wasn't hers." (A secretary loaned it to her for the photograph.) Watching her pennies, Blossom once complained simply that "I don't want to have to worry about taking a cab uptown." Thirty years later she'd record the jingle for Calvin Klein's Obsession perfume, book-ending her first real fame in 1963, when she'd recorded a promotional album for Hires Root Beer — "the most rootin' tootin' songs of 1963."

"Today, the original LP goes for hundreds of dollars on eBay," one blogger noted, "when you can find a copy." She may not have gotten rich, but she delivered a million smiles, and left many people today feeling the same sentimental memory.

"I like to think that you might go out to Woodstock on some winter's day and see a little old lady skating by herself on a frozen pond, quietly singing Figure 8 in that baby-doll voice."

Five Most Violent Super Bowl Ads

2009-02-04T20:05:07Z
Super Bowl ads were always violent, but Sunday's game cracked the mold. Men were exploding, electrocuting, and — in one unaired spot — buying porn at gunpoint. PETA wanted to broadcast sexy models performing near-fellatio with vegetables, but the day belonged to the dudes. Some were big, some were stupid — but they all had one thing in common.

Violence.

#1. I'm Bad

The meme attains perfection with Pepsi's "I'm good" ad, offering not one but four violent vignettes (culminating with a man hurtled across the sky by a high-voltage shock.) "I'm good," everyone says — since men can take anything except the taste of diet cola.

It's a bit of a stretch, though it's really just an excuse to show four crazy stunts. (Pepsi continues a tradition that dates back at least to Bud Light's infamous slapping ads.) But you know what I can't take?

Pepsi's stupid new logo.

#2. Beer and Porn

"You needed a secret code to see this spot online," warns one YouTube user — before uploading a pirated version of Budweiser's 2009 pitch for Bud Light. It's a two-minute dramedy demonstrating just how bizarre a commercial can get. (At one point, Budweiser actually had to pixelate a vibrator.) "Please drink responsibly," Bud adds at the end.

Since the days of Chaucer, porn has united humankind in a warm round of uncomfortable nervous laughter. But with this ad, Budweiser may have sent the wrong message: bad things happen when you drink Bud Light.

Especially...the crappy taste of Bud Light.

#3. A Grand Slam They Can't Refuse

Denny's turned to the mafia to promote their "free breakfast on Tuesday" promotion. But Denny's first Super Bowl ad ever — "Thugs" — finds their conversation interrupted by a waitress spraying a smiley face onto their pancakes.

It's a slap at IHOP (which dessert-ifies every pancake beyond recognition). But personally, I think the real mafia is behind all those ads for Cash4Gold.

And William Shatner's toupee.

#4. Talk Into the Clown's Mouth

After 40 years, Jack was finally mowed down by a bus — presumably spilling secret Jack sauce all over the street. "No. It's really bad," says a flunky into his cell phone. "I'm just lying to him to cheer him up." But one columnist pointed out that the Jack in the Box site wasn't broadcasting the follow-up ad. "Should we just assume he's dead?"

There's a fake Twitter feed, and HangInThereJack.com racked up nearly 500 comments — possibly from his ad agency. ("LETS ALL EAT MORE JACK IN THE BOX SO THEY CAN PAY THE DOCTOR BILLS!") But most greeted the ghoulish ad campaign with an appropriate dose of internet cynicism
can I have your STUFF???
THIS IS THE DUMBEST THING IVE SEEN OR HEARD!!!!
Your food actually made me sick yesterday!

And one commenter even suggested Jack's biggest problem was with the jerk who produced his Super Bowl ad.

"Maybe the camera man should have yelled something like, 'Look Out!' instead of just standing there recording your death."

#5. The Unaired MacGruber

MacGruber jumped the shark two years ago — after the first of seven appearances on Saturday Night Live. The night before the game, the real MacGyver even appeared in a Saturday Night Live skit in which he confronts "MacGruber" about selling out. (It's right before MacGruber pauses to announce "There's always time for Pepsi" — and then dying in an oil refinery explosion.) In the final SNL segment, the theme song changed its lyrics altogether to just "Pepsi Pepsi Pepsi Pepsi" — and every single word of MacGruber's dialogue became "Pepsi."

At that point, anything that happened on Super Bowl Sunday would be anti-climactic.

And I still wish they'd detonate that logo.

See Also:
7 Things I Learned From Super Bowl Ads
5 Best Videos: Animals Attacking Reporters
Pulp Fiction Parodies on YouTube
5 Sexiest Apple Videos

Bush’s Last Day: 10 Ways America Celebrated

2009-09-18T18:15:54Z

"For 15 minutes, America turned its gaze from the guy who landed the plane in the river to the guy who landed the country in the ditch," joked Jimmy Kimmel — adding that “White House decorators are busy right now peeling the glow-in-the-dark stars off the ceiling in the presidential bedroom.”

Back in Texas, George Bush told a crowd Tuesday that "when I get home tonight and look in the mirror, I'm not going to regret what I see — except maybe some gray hair." But many Americans reacted differently to the Bush presidency, observing the end of his eight-year term with some anger, some humor — and a lot of all-American creativity.

1. Calls for Arrest

At the President's last appearance, the L.A. Times reported, crowds responded with anger. "Just as demonstrators clogged the barricades to protest his court-mediated victory in the 2000 election, so the disenchanted lined Pennsylvania Avenue on Tuesday to express their dismay..."
On the drive to Capitol Hill, the current and future presidents passed protesters carrying signs reading "Arrest Bush." When Bush entered the grandstand with the band playing "Hail to the Chief" for the last time, the crowd below began singing a different refrain: "Hey, Hey, Good-bye."

One man waved his shoe.

And finally, when Bush's helicopter lifted off from the east front of the Capitol, cheers rose from the crowd and throng stretching down the National Mall.

The Times noted that while Bush is famous for being thick-skinned, "as the morning wore on, his smile appeared to grow more strained..."

2. Signing Off

Some pranksters went even further. Down a two-mile stretch of San Francisco, they changed all the street signs identifying Bush Street to...Obama Street. "The entire street was covered end to end," one of the pranksters told us — adding that the media mistakenly thought they'd missed a few intersections becuase "locals were actually taking them down the next morning as souvenirs!"

Tuesday's prank reminded one area watcher of an even harsher prank eight years ago. "When Bush was first elected all the BUSH street signs were changed to say PUPPET." But one newspaper noted San Francisco voters had rejected the ultimate prank — a city measure that would've renamed a sewage treatment plant after former President Bush.

3. The Onion Gets It Right

The Onion had run a prophetic headline back in January of 2001, mocking President Bush with a fake quote. "Our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over." Monday blogger Teresa Hayden collected every Bush-related story from The Onion — nearly 400 of them — arguing that "Other histories of the Bush years will doubtless be more factual, but none will ever be truer."

The Onion kept tweaking the president throughout his eight-year presidency. There's Bush "horrified to learn Presidential salary," and later, "U.S. Takes Out Debt Consolidation Loan." But many of the headlines focus on the war in Iraq.

Bush Won't Stop Asking Cheney If We Can Invade Yet

Bush Thought War Would Be Over By Now

Bush Subconsciously Sizes Up Spain For Invasion

Bush Asks Congress For $30 Billion To Help Fight War On Criticism

Rumsfeld Only One Who Can Change Toner In White House Printer

"[I]n this moment before a changing world overwrites our memories of the era," the blogger writes, "let us pause to salute our constant companion of those years..."

4. Heckling CNN

Oakland's Parkway theatre announced they'd broadcast a feed from CNN on their movie screens Tuesday, including Bush's final departure and Obama's swearing-in. By 7 a.m., nearly 400 people had formed a massive line outside the theatre, and many had to be turned away. Extra chairs were set up in the theatre's aisles, and the huge liberal crowd booed the Republicans as they appeared on the screen — Dick Cheney, Dan Quayle — and later heckled Bush's departure. And as the former president finally stepped onto a helicopter to fly away from the capitol, one heckler suggested an alternate flight plan.

"Send him to Guantanamo!"

Also watching were 5,000 schoolchildren at a community center in Harlem. "It hurt my ears. That's how crazy it got," reported NPR's Robert Smith. But as Bush ceded his presidency to Obama, "Some didn't seem to catch the finer points of presidential transitions," NRP reports. "...about five minutes into Obama's speech, the attention of the younger kids started to drift.

"They threw paper at each other and used their American flags as swords."

5. The Last "Great Moment"

David Letterman assembled a final four-minute montage of Bush's greatest goofs, celebrating the end of a recurring feature on the late-night comedy show: "Great Moments in Presidential Speeches."

"[W]e have to unload what was a tremendous rich heavy-laden vein of comedy for us," Letterman told his audience nostalgically. For over four minutes, the gaffes keep coming, and towards the end, they get even weirder. There's the thrown shoe, the dropped dog — and the infamous moment when Bush's speech was accompanied by a continually-yawning boy in a red baseball cap.

6. Jenna's Last Ride

Jenna Bush and her twin sister Barbara were more famous for partying than for public service — but they observed the transition with a letter left behind for President Obama's daughters. They remembered when their father's father was sworn in — "being seven, we didn't quite understand the gravity of the position our Grandfather was committing to" — but much of their letter seems like it was ghost-written by a Republican spinmeister. ("Our Dad, who read to us nightly...is our father, not the sketch in a paper or part of a skit on TV.") And instead of writing "Eight years go by so fast," the catty Bush twins wrote to the daughters of Obama that "Four years goes by so fast..."

7. Battle of the Presidential Speeches

The site SpeechWars.com created a special exhibit including Bush's own inaugural addresses in 2001 and 2005 — along with those of every president that preceded him. "See how often US presidents have said certain words in their inaugural addresses," the site promised — and it ultimately uncovered two forbidden words which Bush and his predecessors had never spoken in any of the 56 pervious inaugural addresses — but which Barack Obama did.

"Non-believers" and "Muslims."

But Bush's first inauguration speech from 2001 is still shouting out from Google's cache, reminding web surfers how Dubya promised to reform social security — and to "confront weapons of mass destruction." And blogger Andrew Sullivan remembered a Saturday Night Live sketch at the same time which presciently predicted that President Bush would eventually tell the American people that "we had that war thing happen." In the skit, Bush hold up a map showing the Atlantic ocean flooding Louisiana (with the flooding continuing all the way up to Minnesota...) Unfortunately, according to the skit's "glimpse of our future," this alternate reality would be even worse because Vice President Dick Cheney is involved in a hunting accident — where he's killed by President Bush.

8. Perverts Say Goodbye

At a rowdy San Francisco Event called "Bye Bye Bush," San Francisco writer Thomas Roche debuted a new 34-page "gonzo sci-fi cryptozoological horror" story involving evil fish, the Bigfoot monster, and the mayor of a small town in Alaska (and her husband Todd). "I was asked repeatedly to write some political smut," Roche explains, "for a Sarah Palin porn site, for an election reading, and finally for an inauguration-themed reading..."

A half dozen local writers read their short fiction as part of the "Perverts Put Out" series, but Roche came up with a "gonzo Lovecraftian science fiction horror story" in which several Alaska tourists and some unsuspecting environmentalists wander into the dark and mysterious backwoods, and confront — no, no, it's too horrible to describe. "Fairly creepy sexual description..." Roche warns at the top of the story. "Not intended for readers under 18."

"I read an extremely abbreviated version of this story in a room full of weird sexual deviants, and people seemed to like it."

9. Free the White House

"Here's a small and nerdy measure of the huge change in the executive branch," wrote blogger Jason Kottke. The White House's web site had more than 2400 restrictions for search engines — preventing web-crawling spiders from accessing entire directories, photo essays, and the text of certain speeches.

Geeks argued about whether this represented a moving break from the past — or simply an artifact of web coding. But one thing's clear — George W. Bush won't be leaving any more policy statements on the site.

In Texas Tuesday, George Bush joked that his wife Laura "was excited about me mowing the lawn and taking out the trash — it's my new domestic agenda."

10. Losing Facebook

In the last year of Bush's presidency, a Facebook group rose to over 1,000,000 members. The name of the group? "I bet I can find 1,000,000 people who dislike George Bush!"

But now many members are commemorating Bush's departure with a final Facebook ritual. Over 190,858 messages appeared on its Facebook "wall," with many now announcing that it's time to move on.

well it was a good run, but its finally over. Later guys...

I still hate George Bush... but he's gone so I don't see the point in having this crowd up my groups now.

"im leaving this group to move on from this era"

"NOW I CAN LEAVE THIS GROUP IT IS IRRELEVANT"

But as George W. Bush finally left office, there was a new group was already springing up on Facebook clamoring for the new president to enact a more liberal policy. Its name? "5 million strong to petition Obama to legalize weed."

It currently has just 3409 members.

See Also:
20 Wildest Reactions to Obama's Victory
Site Sparks Political Sexiness War
25 Harshest Reactions to the Wall Street Bailout
Why Sarah's Sex Life Matters
Don't Go There: 20 Taboo Topics For Presidential Candidates
Oakland Celebrates Obama's Victory

Christmas with Hitler

2008-12-24T00:49:09Z

What was Christmas like with Hitler?

The answer comes from a Michigan communications professor, who's created a disturbing web collection showing the Third Reich's attempt to convert the holiday into military propaganda. But Christmas of 2008 also finds authentic reminders of the Nazi era turning up on eBay and YouTube. The question is uncomfortable, inappropriate — and morbidly fascinating. And fortunately, some comedians on YouTube have supplied the last word.

Randall Bytwerk teaches communications at Calvin College, and his web exhibit of Nazi propaganda offers an actual glimpse of the murderous dictator at Christmastime.

"Hitler had thousands of Autobahn workers as his guests in the Berlin Sportpalast at Christmas 1938," explains an upbeat pamphlet called Everybody's Hitler!. "Note the Christmas trees... Hitler's enemies lie when they say that Christmas has been abolished in Germany." (After invading France, the Nazis were assuring its Alsace province that der Führer still celebrated the holiday.)

Another photo shows a decorated tree behind a festive Christmas dinner for Hitler and his soldiers. The blitzkrieg isn't mentioned, but the site does remind us that later — of course — the pamphlet was translated into Dutch.

Professor Bytwerk shows that during the Nazi regime, Hitler's culture department continued producing a Christmas booklet with magical stories, festive songs, and lavish illustrations. (The 1944 edition was 200 pages long.) Several pages quoted the fanatical Christmas Eve speeches of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.
On this evening we will think of the Führer, who is also everywhere present this evening wherever Germans gather... The flag and the Reich shall remain pure and unscathed when the great hour of victory comes.

Like Santa Claus, Hitler is everywhere — and he probably sees you when you're sleeping, and knows when you're awake. The book even includes an apparent Christmas card from der Fürhrer himself displaying a red flower with an inspiring Christmas quote: "All nature is a gigantic struggle between strength and weakness, an eternal victory of the strong over the weak."

Another site actually shows Santa paying a visit on Nazi officers and their girlfriends in Christmas of 1944.

But the Nazis ultimately had an insidious agenda for the holiday, and Hitler's propaganda department could show Bill O'Reilly what a real war on Christmas looks like. "The Nazis were out to transform Christmas from a Christian holiday to a celebration of the family in a National Socialist context," writes professor Bytwerk. In 1943 the Nazis released a 64-page pamphlet for Advent which never mentions Jesus. A drawing of lonely soldiers is captioned:
Through your bravery, you give us at home a lovely Christmas season. Each child, as he sees the candle's glow and sings the songs, thinks of you, full of thanks.

The most disturbing entry is a Christmas story about three men lost in the woods — a king, a soldier, and a wood-cutter. Bright stars light a poor woman's hut where she holds her newborn child. She advises her visitors that children fulfill the promise of the future, and the three visitors offer him gifts. "Nazi propaganda intended to remove as much of the Christian content of Christmas as possible," writes professor Bytwerk, "turning it into a family festival with German racial overtones."

There's a page for each day of the month, but each entry is intensely secular, like a sample children's letter to a soldier on the front. ("Mother is already baking for the soldier's package... We think of you so often, especially when we hear the news on the radio...") One YouTube user has even found a clip of a documentary showing Goebbels' Hitler Youth propaganda for Christmas of 1942.

More than 65 years later, it's still a painful subject, and in 2006 the German magazine Spiegel uncovered a bizarre incident:
Germans shopping for Christmas trinkets have been shocked recently to discover row upon row of Santa Clauses looking to all the world as if they are giving the Hitler salute — right arm, straight as an arrow, raised skyward. Never mind that St. Nick is carrying a bag of toys and wearing a silly red hat complete with a white pom-pom. Shoppers were sure — these Santas were Nazis.

It's still possible to buy Nazi artifacts on eBay, including Nazi-era coins and stamps — but not in every country. "This item cannot be sold in Germany, Italy, France, or Austria," reads one page description, "as stated in Ebay Rules." But the web has found more than one way to remember a dark moment in world history. In fact, 2008 ends with Hitler starring in his very own humiliating meme.

There's at least half a dozen videos on YouTube swapping in silly subtitles for Hitler's dialogue in an intense movie called Downfall. The original film chronicled Hitler's final 12 days in a bunker in Berlin, receiving bad news from subordinates as his military crumbles.

But now web wise guys have the dictator ranting insanely over trivial slights — poor attendance at Burning Man, the subprime mortgage crisis, getting his avatar banned from World of Warcraft, or struggling to upgrade Windows Vista. Inevitably, last week someone appropriated the meme to show Hitler complaining about the cost of buying Christmas presents.

"Those of you that think I am being unreasonably cheap better leave now..." a furious Hitler warns his staff.

Magically, the footage has been re-titled again and again, forcing Hitler to endure every possible insult of fate, and this latest video shows him being slowly bankrupted at Christmastime — by requests for iPhones, Wiis, and the Xbox 360 Elite.

See Also:
A Christmas Conspiracy
Christmas 2.0: Subverting the Holidays with YouTube
Death at Christmas
Five Awful Thanksgivings in History

Elvis Presley’s Strangest Christmases

2008-12-25T09:55:18Z

He's the biggest kid, with the biggest toys, and he loved Christmas like he loved life — a little too much. Maybe Elvis will wander into a truck stop this Christmas Eve, toting his gun and demanding a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich.

But if not, we can celebrate the holiday sharing six legends of his rock and roll excess in December, as a poor boy from Tupelo grappled with three all-American holiday obsessions: stars, Christmas, and money.

1. Elvis Gone Wild
At 22, Elvis had struck it rich. For Christmas in 1957, he brought his mother one of every electrical appliance (according to one Elvis Christmas site) — plus, a cashmere coat. Unfortunately, five days before Christmas he also received an unwelcome card from the army — telling him he'd been drafted.

The next Christmas, Elvis's mother had died, and he was living in a German hotel and hitting on a 19-year-old German girl named Elisabeth. (He crashed her parent's house for Thanksgiving, then told them in December that he wanted to hire her as his secretary.) Yes, Elvis slept with her — and a bunch of other girls — and he was starting to live large, according to stories in the biography Careless Love. Elvis rented a sporty BMW, bought a Cadillac from the company commander, showered money on the local orphanage for a Christmas party, and discovered amphetamines.

Elvis served for two years (after getting a three-month deferment to finish filming King Creole). But in December of 1958, after a hard day of working with his platoon, one of the soldiers picked up a guitar and starting singing Christmas songs. "One by one others joined in," according to the biography, "and then the soldier with the guitar asked Elvis if he would like to take part too. 'Yeah, all right' said a subdued Elvis...and he led the soldiers in song." Elvis went into a personal rapture when he got to "Silent Night," and one sergeant remembered all the other voices dropping out for the King.

"'Those going on pass didn't interrupt. They simply walked silently be Elvis, touched his shoulder, and walked out the door. Not another word was spoken after the song until Elvis broke the spell.

"Merry Christmas, everyone" he said.
"Merry Christmas, Elvis!" they replied in unison.

2. Head in the Clouds
Elvis's religious fervor got stronger, and for Christmas in 1964, he put a new headstone on his mother's grave — and experienced a miracle. He was searching for a spiritual solace, at one point announcing to his wife Priscilla that he'd now "withdraw myself from the temptations of sex." Within a few months, 29-year-old Elvis was driving his entourage across Arizona for the filming of Harum Scarum. ("Elvis brings the big beat to Baghdad.") And he suddenly spotted a mystical face in the clouds. Unfortunately, it was Joseph Stalin.

"That's Joseph Stalin's face up there..." Elvis whispered to his spiritual advisor Larry Geller. "[W]hat's he doing up there?" Geller himself remembers that the clouds did look like Joseph Stalin — and then that the miracle had happened.

Before I could answer, the cloud slowly turned in on itself, changing form and dimension until the image faded and gradually disappeared. I knew we had witnessed something extraordinary and turned to say so, but stopped when I saw Elvis staring into the cloud, his eyes open wide and his face reflecting wonder... Elvis' expression was the one that you read of in the Bible or other religious works: the look of the newly baptized or the converted.

Elvis violently screeched the bus to a halt, crying "It's God! It's God...! The face of Stalin turned right into the face of Jesus, and he smiled at me, and every fiber of my being felt it."

Elvis later decided that he wanted to become a monk, and according to the Careless Love, "the guys all fumed at this latest evidence of the boss's weirdness and almost perverse dedication to the bizarre."

And that night in the Mojave desert, their motor home caught on fire.

3. Elvis's last Christmas
Two days after Christmas in 1976, 41-year-old Elvis was heading to Wichita, Kansas after finishing his run at the Las Vegas Hilton. Elvis looked "very tired and quite sad," one fan reported, and according to biographer Peter Guralnick, Elvis had even asked minister Rex Humbard if he should abandon show business altogether to devote himself to god. (Then Elvis started talking excitedly about Armageddon...) Humbard remembers that he politely "took both his hands in mine, and said 'Elvis, right now I want to pray for you.' He said 'Please do,' and started weeping."

A bewildered reporter at the Memphis Press-Scimitar watched the last show in Vegas, and wrote that "one walks away wondering how much longer it can be before the end comes, perhaps suddenly, and why the King of Rock 'n' Roll would subject himself to possible ridicule by going onstage so ill-prepared.

"And yet they keep coming back, and they will pack his next road tour... Once a king, always a king. Maybe that's it."

"And just maybe they're still coming because they think it might be the last time around."

4. I Fought the Law
Even at the peak of his popularity, Elvis wistfully remembered his days of obscurity. In 1954, Elvis was a struggling 19-year-old superstar wannabe facing his first brush with the law (according to an interview he gave in 1966). Elvis had been the singer for a three-man combo, and one cold December night was driving back from Shreveport, Louisiana when a highway patrolman pulled him over for speeding. "It was cold," Elvis later told a reporter, "and I was sleepy. I woke up, and the officer asked, who are you?"

After hearing Elvis's name, "The officer looked puzzled. Of course he had never heard of me. Hardly anyone had. I thought, 'Here goes my Christmas money for a traffic ticket.'"

Instead, the officer waved them off with a warning, and relieved, the singer and his band performed a strange ritual. "After the officer left, the three of us got out of the car and counted our money by the car headlights. It was mostly in dollar bills. Man, that was the most money I'd ever had in my pockets at one time!

"I blew the whole bundle the next day for Christmas presents."

Elvis took a moment to remember the night 12 years later, just a few months before the filming of Paradise, Hawaiian Style. "There is a lot of difference in Christmases today and when we were growing up in East Tupelo," he told the reporter.

"[But] honestly, I can't say these are any better...."

5. Elvis's Revenge
Elvis had a dream on Christmas Eve just 19 months before his death — that no one who worked for him really cared about him; that they just wanted his money. According to biographer Guralnick, on Christmas morning Elvis spilled the details with a sympathetic nurse. "He had dreamed that he had gone broke, and when he needed them they walked out on him." Elvis and the nurse stayed up talking until 3 a.m., and by the time he came downstairs, nearly all of his friends had left.

So on Christmas day, Elvis tried treating his friends to a trip on his private jet, the Lisa Marie. As he was handing out jewelry to his posse, Elvis's drunken aunt Delta suddenly shouted at one of them " You ain't no damn friend of his! And I got a good mind to take this .38 I got in my purse and just shoot you dead!'" Looking at another hanger-on, she said "And you ain't worth a shit either, you wall-eyed son of a bitch... All you sons of bitches are here for the same thing. You just want his damn money!"

Elvis advised his friends she was drunk, but that night at 2 a.m., began beating on her trailer door with a cane. "His hair was messed up, and he was wild-eyed and red-faced..." remembered Elvis's cousin Billy, who had grabbed a gun before consoling the king about his Christmas day humiliation. ("He was out of his mind, he was so mad...")

But maybe Elvis had already gotten the ultimate revenge in 1971. Five years before his death, Elvis gathered his posse into his den, according to a gossip item Guralnick quotes in Careless Love. Each hanger-on remembered the previous year, when Elvis had given out several new Mercedes — and this year Elvis was promising them "maybe a little something special."
With a sly grin on his face, the singer turned to his father, Vernon Presley, and asked "Where are the envelopes, please?"

Vernon reached into his coat pockets and produced the envelopes. "Well, it's been a mighty lean year," said Elvis, whose income probably exceeded $4,000,000 in 1971. As the envelopes began to be opened, the room fell silent. His special gift for 1971 was a 50-cent gift certificate to McDonalds.

But Elvis was just kidding, and later gave them all thick envelopes loaded with cash. And a few days later, Elvis rented an entire movie theatre downtown just so he could watch Shaft.

That was also the year Elvis recorded his final Christmas album.

I've seen and I've done most everything
That a man can do or see.
But if I could only borrow one dream from yesterday
I'd be on that train tomorrow.
I'd be home on Christmas day

6. Resurrection

Did Elvis fake his death to escape a grueling show business life? For 30 years, the legend persisted, until one night the question was settled on an episode of American Idol. In August of last year Ryan Seacrest introduced "a duet you thought was impossible," resurrecting the ghost of Elvis from December of 1968 so he could sing with Celine Dion.

It was either a holographic monstrosity or a touching remembrance, as the legendary entertainer belted out the showstopper from his comeback special one last time. Though he would've been 73, somehow Elvis's image and voice transcended death itself — and kept on earning more money for other people. (Eight weeks ago, Sony records even used the same trick to release 12 new Elvis Christmas Duets.) From the great beyond, Elvis sends a final "Merry Christmas, Baby," and American Idol had probably identified the song you'd most expect to hear after re-animating the king of rock and roll.
We're lost in a cloud
with too much rain.
We're trapped in a world
That's troubled with pain.

But as long as a man
has the strength to dream
he can redeem his soul
and fly.

The video may not constitute a Christmas miracle worthy of Andy Kaufman.

But it does suggest that maybe Elvis isn't really dead —as long as his fans remember him.


See Also:
Christmas 2.0: Subvering the Holidays with Re-Dubbing
Alvin and the Chipmunks Launch iMunks.com
Atheist Filmmaker Issues "Blasphemy Challenge
A Christmas Conspiracy
They're Dreaming of a Boobs Christmas

Death at Christmas

2008-12-19T23:08:57Z

It's easy to hate Christmas: the endless forced good cheer, the media-driven consumer frenzy, the It's a Wonderful Life fantasy dissolving into a Married... with Children reality.

But no matter how bad your holiday is, rest assured that it could have been far worse.

1. Family Discord.
Home was definitely not the place to be for the family of R. Gene Simmons of Dover, Arkansas in 1987. The clan was rapidly becoming estranged from the family patriarch. Even his favorite daughter, who had borne him a son, had run off and gotten married. It was time for revenge. As each contingent showed up at the dilapidated family mobile home to try to put a happy face on for the holiday, Simmons shot the adults and strangled the children. By Christmas Day, he'd wiped out almost three generations of Simmons, 14 all told. It was the worst family slaughter in American history.

But wait — he wasn't done yet! For an encore a few days later, he went on a shooting rampage through a few former places of employment. He killed two people and injured four more before surrendering to police. He later became the first man executed by lethal injection in Arkansas.

2.The Season of Not Giving.
The holiday-fueled impulse to eradicate one's family isn't limited to the dysfunctional trailer park crowd. H. Sanford Williams was eminently respectable, having been an Army Chaplin, a Methodist Pastor, and finally the head of a charity, the National Retirement Foundation. Alas, the season of sharing had been a bust donation-wise and his foundation was in serious trouble. On Christmas Eve in 1957, the St. Petersburg, Florida man shot and killed his wife and two sons before turning the gun on himself.

3. Xmas Pageant Inferno.
It was the climax of the 1924 Christmas Eve pageant at the Babb's Switch, Oklahoma one-room schoolhouse. The last recitation had ended, the last carol faded. Now Santa himself was handing out bags of candy to all the children. But oh no! Santa brushed against the candle-lit tree. Within minutes, the room was a seething inferno, with 200 men, women, and children trying to force their way out the only exit: a door that opened inward. Thirty-four people died. But thanks to the heroic efforts of Santa and the schoolteacher (both of whom were themselves incinerated), only five children were among the dead.

4. The Deadly Christmas tree.
The substitution of incandescent lights for candles didn't eliminate the tendency of Christmas trees to turn into pyrotechnic yule logs. One of the deadliest of these modern-day holiday firebombs was Niles Street Hospital's 1945 tree. When a nurse unplugged the tree lights on Christmas Eve in the Hartford, Connecticut convalescent hospital, a spark ignited the dry needles. She grabbed a fire extinguisher, but panicked at the sight of the roaring flames and fled. Not only did she not even bother to call the fire department (neighbors, woken by the crackling flames, summoned them several minutes later), she left the front door open to properly ventilate the blaze. The building was completely gutted, and 15 patients and two staff died.

5. The Lethal Midnight Mass.
Christmas Eve midnight mass in Temoaya, Mexico in 1953 had just finished. Three thousand worshippers were peacefully filing out when someone tripped over the wrong wire. There was a bright blue flash, and then total darkness. All sense of peace and goodwill toward men vanished as the crowd transformed into a panic-stricken mob stampeding from the sanctuary. By the time the lights came on a few minutes later, 23 people were dead and over 200 injured.

See Also:
Five Awful Thanksgivings in History
Christmas 2.0: Subverting the Holidays with Re-dubbing
Atheist Filmmaker Launches Blasphemy Challenge
Alvin and the Chipmunks Launch IMunks.com
"Miracles"

Timothy Leary’s New Book On Drugs

2008-12-18T23:57:28Z

I always sort of liked Timothy Leary, but I never took many drugs and never really read any of his work. I've sat through a few videos in which he came off as a good-natured eccentric — spaced out, but with a sharp sense of humor.

This book is a surprise. Published by Re/Search, purveyors of books about pranks, punk rock, and body modification, it may not make you want to become an "enlightened" acidhead, but it should leave you with at least one insight: Timothy Leary was a damn fine writer. Who knew?

I interviewed Leary On Drugs editor, Hassan I Sirius, by email to get the scoop on this new collection of Leary's writing.

Click here for
more information
about the book!

JAYDEN DEVEREUX: I was mostly surprised by the quality of Leary's writing and his seriousness of purpose. How did you go about selecting materials for the book?

HASSAN I SIRIUS: My approach was pretty much exactly what you've just implied. Most of the content was selected for the quality of the writing and for the calm lucidity of Leary's thoughts about drugs. With all the recent positive reports about psychedelic research (Time magazine even had a story titled "Was Timothy Leary Right?") — and with the growing awareness of the destructive nature of drug prohibition, it seemed wise to try to make this a fairly serious contribution to our collective knowledge and thinking regarding drugs, particularly of the psychedelic variety.

Leary wrote a lot of material, some of it frivolous, some of it caught up in the battles and in the hype of a particular time period. And some of that material may not stand up to scrutiny. I think I mostly selected materials that stand on their own. You don't have to understand the sixties or the seventies all that well to get something out of these pieces. They really are pretty much focused on drugs – descriptions of experiences and visions, theories, observations and so forth.

JD: The theoretical material is a bit dense. He had a scientific orientation.

HIS: Yeah. Even when he was living in a teepee at the height of the hippie movement, he never cancelled his subscription to Scientific American. And even though he started using all those eastern Hindu metaphors that became so popular then, he was also seeing it all in terms of genetics and DNA, very early on. It was not that long after the discovery of DNA – less than a decade — and this really impacted on his vision of psychedelic experiences from the start in 1960. You can pretty much find him intuiting evolutionary psychology even in his earlier writings. He went on evolutionary trips, experiencing the emergence of life and its evolution toward humanity. He assumed everybody would have that trip, which is one place where he went a bit astray.

JD: I was able to understand most of it. Most of his arguments for psychedelics don't seem particularly wild. But what I really enjoyed was the stories. Some of those are pretty wild and pretty intense. The political section is almost scary. Can you say a bit about that?

HIS: Yeah, well some of the trip stories are pretty intense too. But you're probably referring to the story involving Mary Pinchot, who was one of President Kennedy's lovers. And it seems pretty clear that she involved Leary in a successful conspiracy to turn JFK on to LSD. The material, in this case, is from his autobiography, Flashbacks. But in Flashbacks, this particular narrative was sprinkled throughout the book as you go through his life chronologically. When you actually isolate the sections about Pinchot and then stitch them together as an entry, it makes a stronger impression.

The other thing you may be referring to is the conversation at the end of the book that Leary had with a hardball Swiss political operative with various intelligence connections while he was in exile from the U.S. government in Switzerland. The entry is almost painful in its sophistication and leaves the book on a solemn note — we are still all prisoners of men who lust for power, from Leary's point of view.

JD: What were Leary's favorite drugs?

HIS: I guess they all had their place. He was a social drinker and he was a social guy… so that amounted to a fair amount of drinking. It's sort of funny – he's always celebrating great moments in the psychedelic revolution with a glass of champagne or something along those lines. Mind you, I don't see anything wrong with it. And he always thought LSD was an extraordinarily marvelous invention. In a 1988 article included in the book, he writes about "good old LSD" and marvels that it's still the best. There's a segment on heroin. He wasn't crazy about heroin, even though he found it pleasant when he tried it… and he makes it clear that he wasn't happy about the dominance of coke and crack in the drug culture during the 1980s.

JD: Do you think he would be happy with all of the psychedelic research going on now?

HIS: He was alive to see it begin again and he commented on it favorably. Yeah, he would be thrilled with the positive reports. People forget he started out examining these drugs in a therapeutic context. On the other hand, he denounced control of drugs by the medical profession, particularly later in his life. He took a libertarian view that adults have a human right to do what they want with their brains. But at other points, it's clear that he prefers the medical model to leaving it in the hands of the drug warriors.

JD: So what does Leary have to say to us now?

HIS: Well, read the book. It's not so much reflective of the politics of the moment – although plenty of lessons about that can be found in there — but most of the material is really reflective of a search for meaning, and self-understanding, and peak experiences that people can find valuable no matter what is going on in the world.

In this book, what you get, mostly, is a very thoughtful and sensitive Leary pondering the meaning of it all.

See Also:
Prescription Ecstasy and Other Pipe Dreams
Hallucinogenic Weapons: The Other Chemical Warfare
Counterculture and the Tech Revolution
Don't Call It a Conspiracy: The Kennedy Brothers

20 Wildest Reactions to Obama’s Victory

2009-01-28T17:43:58Z

Susie Bright screamed naked. The Santa Cruz-based author belonged to a Facebook group called "I will walk out my front door naked as soon as Obama wins!"

America went a little crazy on Tuesday night, finding a diversity of wild and wonderful ways to celebrate or to protest Obama's historic victory.

Here's 20 of them.

1. Naked in the Streets

That "naked" Facebook group had 227 celebrating members — and on election day, their reports began rolling in. "Its dark and cold here in Vermont, but it felt great!"

"I did it too! In fact, I danced on the front porch, and yelled 'Whoo hoo!'"

"My partner and I went downstairs in our robes, dropped the robes and cracked up like a couple of giddy schoolgirls!"

And in Santa Cruz, Susie Bright reported that she "tore off my clothes and ran out on the front porch and screamed my head off."

2. Impeach Him Already!

Facebook users have already started another dissenting group called "Impeach Barack Obama." In fact, they've started 30 different groups with variations on the same title, with a total of over 9,000 members. But soon other users were joining a competing group — called "Deport Those Who Wish To Impeach Barack Obama."

And another user's group was titled simply "MCCAIN LOST! GET OVER IT!"

3. The Last Word?

Another Facebook user tried creating a group called: "I bet I can find 1,000,000 people who hate political Facebook groups."

It currently has just 19 members.

4. Funny Papers

Meanwhile, political cartoonists around the world responded to Obama's victory with images that were nearly identical. Twelve different cartoonists drew Obama with the Lincoln Memorial, while nine more drew him with Martin Luther King.

But the response wasn't confined to the U.S. In Mexico City, Angel Boligan drew Obama wearing a Martin Luther King t-shirt. In Australia, Bill Leak drew King in heaven asking "Am I having a dream?" And in West Africa, Tayo Fatunla drew King in front of a picture of Obama, adding the caption "Having a dream...is the audacity of hope."

5. A Cartoon Gamble

Wednesday South Park aired a story lampooning Obama's victory just one day after the election. The production staff "will be up all night working on Wednesday’s show," their blog announced Tuesday, and Trey Parker told the L.A. Times they'd decided that "we're just going to make the Obama version, and if McCain somehow wins, we're basically just totally screwed."

They were still dubbing in dialogue hours before the episode aired — including actual text from Obama's victory speech. But Parker told the paper he was sure Obama would win — because of the odds at a sports betting site where he gambles on football.

6. Radio, Radio

A celebrating college radio station in Oregon played nothing but musical mixes of Obama's speeches for over an hour.

"It's really great to see people happy again," the DJ explained. "That's what the whole Obama thing is about."

7. Gun Sales are Up

A Utah newspaper reported that "Local gun dealers quickly are running out of stock of magazines for Colt AR-15s and AK models." They're not stocking up for militias, but anticipating Obama's reinstatement of a federal Assault Weapons Ban.

"Pretty much anything with more than 10 rounds is in high demand right now," a gun salesman told the newspaper, noting that one dealer had sold 82 assault rifles in a single day.

8. The Internet Responds

Wednesday someone registered the domain Has Obama Taken Away Your Guns Yet . com. In enormous letters, the site displays a single word.

"No."

And in a smaller subtitle, it quotes a famously-misspelled protest sign.

"get a brain morans"

9. Catch-All Criticism

On Tuesday, a realtor in Georgia had also registered the domain I Blame Obama.com.

10. Flushing the Plumber

In the end, an ungrateful Joe the Plumber said "I was unhappy that my name was used as much as it was." In an interview with a British newspaper, he complains that instead "I think there were real other issues that should’ve been discussed during the debate.”

All the attention landed him a book deal, and he's launched a charity site — where he's promoting his book and selling "freedom memberships" to the site — though he adds that "I will honor and support my president, but there will be no free ride."

Ironically, the actual domain Joe the Plumber .com has belonged to a different plumber in Amarillo Texas since February of 2004. He's using his site to sell American flags, t-shirts — and advertising space on Joe the Plumber.com

11. History by Hanes?

He's not the only one selling clothing to "commemorate" Obama's victory. An ad on CNN argues that history was just made.

"And it comes in your size."

12. Wardrobe Malfunction?

"Dear Sarah Palin," read a sign in a picture framing store in San Francisco.

"We eagerly await your $150,000 clothing donation on Nov. 5th.

"Thanks in advance, Goodwill."

13. You Betcha

Andrew Sullivan supported Barack's candidacy, and celebrated Thursday by noting a sweet vindication from the state Pennsylvania. The county that Sarah Palin had called "the real America"?

"It voted for Obama."

14. No More Bushes

Blogger Steve Benen observed the historic moment with another startling discovery.

2009 will be the first year in 45 years without a Dole or a Bush in elected office.

15. Ebert Gives a Thumb's Up

45 minutes after Obama was elected, Roger Ebert wrote that "Our long national nightmare is ending."

The 66-year-old film critic was quoting a speech Gerald Ford gave after assuming the Presidency from Richard Nixon. "I agree with Oliver Stone," Ebert wrote, "that Bush never knew he had been misled [into the Iraq war] until it was too late.

"I blame those who used him as their puppet."

16. Predicted in the 60s?

After "new left" protesters clashed with police during the 1968 Democratic convention, Norman Mailer had predicted that a torn country "will be fighting for forty years." (One critic complained that "Here at our end of the forty-year war there are no Norman Mailers. Only pollsters. And consultants. And political scientists.")

But shortly before his death last year, 84-year-old Mailer had made one of the only political campaign contributions of his life — to Barack Obama.

17. The Ghost of Chicago

The violent clashes at the '68 convention haunted Democrats — but one liberal who never understood the protesters was Barack Obama's own mother.

"Emotionally her liberalism would always remain of a decidedly pre-1967 vintage," Obama wrote in The Audacity of Hope, remembering that his mother's heart was "filled with images of the space program, the Peace Corps and Freedom Rides, Mahalia Jackson, and Joan Baez."

18. Rebellious or reasonable

Obama gave his victory speech at the same park as those violent police-protester confrontations in 1968 — and pundits couldn't miss the symbolism. Obama "stands on the shoulders of the crowds of four decades ago," according to one protester. Now a sociology professor, Todd Gitlin told the New York Times that Obama's rebellion "takes the form of practicality. He has the audacity of reason."

But one injury was reported Tuesday night — Chicago Sun-Times journalist Lynn Sweet, who injured her shoulder rushing to cover Obama's speech. In his first press conference, Obama noted wryly that "I think that was the only major incident during the entire Grant Park celebration."

19. What took you so long?

The morning after Obama was elected, he was told he'd been expected by Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple.

In an open letter, the 64-year-old author wrote that Obama had no idea how profound it was for southern blacks, though America's first black president was already "with us" and "in us" in previous generations, and "Knowing this, that you would actually appear, someday, was part of our strength."

She closed her letter by saying Obama's smile "can find an answering smile in all of us, lighting our way, and brightening the world.

"We are the ones we have been waiting for."

20. I Have a Dream

In 2004, Martin Luther King's widow had witnessed Obama's first address at the Democratic convention. King's daughter remembered that night after Tuesday's election results, saying her 76-year-old mother had said "Bernice, come here.

"I think we got somebody."

See Also:

Bush's Last Day: 10 Ways America Celebrated
Iraq YouTube Battle Footage
Why Sarah's Sex Life Matters
Drugs and Sex and Susie Bright
How a Barack Obama Site Made Me Famous