Bush is an Inspiration... No, Really!

Not only is Peter David one of the most accomplished pop writers of our time, I also like to turn to him for his take on politics. Oddly enough, for a guy who writes Star Trek novels like they're going out of style and pens comic book scripts that are head and shoulders above the rest of his peers, he's also got quite the knack for finding the lunacy in many a political speech. Take, for example, his take on this week's address by the President:

The absolute lowpoint was the following:

"Some wonder whether Iraq is a central front in the war on terror. Among the terrorists, there is no debate. Hear the words of Osama Bin Laden: "This Third World War is raging" in Iraq."

Am I the only one who finds this a hoot? What the hell has the world come to when we consider this: The credibility of the President of the United States is so non-existent, that if we won't take his word for it that the Iraq war was a necessary strike against terrorism, certainly we'll take the word of a murdering sociopath with the blood of three thousand Americans on his hands. Yes, that's right, kids: George W. Bush apparently believes that the words of Osama bin Laden have more street cred than his own.

Damn if that isn't a good point. I ended up watching most of the address while I was lifting since it was either watch that, infomercials, the televangelist channel, or ghetto rap videos on MTV2. I figured I'd watch what would give me the most motivation to stay angry and keep lifting, so George Bush's speech it was.

Now was it just me or did it feel like he said the same five sentences over and over again for about a half hour just with different words and in slightly different orders. "We must defeat terrorism, we need to help Iraq stand on their own feet, our troops are probably never coming home, I'm a friggin' tool, yadda, yadda, yadda." Between sets I ended up laughing about as often as I got frustrated. It still amazes me that this utter ass-clown somehow got elected as our president... twice. The United States is officially the most retarded nation in the world.

The only positive that has come out of his term as president, at least in my mind, is the resurgence of politically motivated songs in the punk, metal, and hardcore genres. When it was Clinton as president, songwriters were struggling for material to rant and rave about, but as soon as Bush rolled into the White House, there was more than enough material to go around. Listen to just about any recent rock cd and you'll probably hear at least one song making reference to something Bush did. Dropkick Murphys, Throwdown, Deadlock, System of a Down, Bane... I could keep going on and on. So thank you Mr. Bush for refueling the politcally flavored subgenre of heavy music! For everything else, you get the one finger salute.

Support Your Post Office

Reading this article from the Star Tribune I was reminded once again of how I love to take all of those credit card offers and other junk mail that I get and send them back to their owners--ripped, shredded, and sometimes with extra crap included. Since the credit card companies, loan consolidation companies, and other companies offering stuff provide you with postage paid envelopes, why not use them? What I have yet to try is what this guy did:

After checking with a postal clerk about the legality of stepping up his efforts, he began cutting up magazines, heavy bond paper and small strips of sheet metal and stuffing them into the business reply envelopes that came with the junk packages.

"You wouldn't believe how heavy I got some of these envelopes to weigh," said Williams, who added that he saw an immediate drop in the amount of arriving junk mail. A spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service, Gerald McKiernan, said that Williams' actions sounded legal, as long as the envelope was properly sealed.

Sheet metal. How awesome is that? I sometimes throw extra paper and stuff in the envelopes, but I've never done anything that extreme. I'm tempted now, however. You can be assured that from here on out I'm going to be stuffing every postage paid envelope full of whatever garbage I have sitting around. As long as it still seals shut, you're good. That'll teach the suckers.

The Most Amazing Picture Ever

So what's creepiest about this picture? The fact that it says "DrugTown" on the semi? Mr. Mullet Man himself holding a big ass trophy? Knowing that this is the guy that won a truck driving competition? Knowing that HyVee is responsible for the end of the world? I don't know about you, but all of them are pretty creepy to me.

It's moments like seeing this on my drive to work this morning that I'm glad I have an abso-freakin-lutely tiny camera that I just keep with me in my pocket. Just imagine, if I wouldn't have had my camera with, you never would have gotten to see this amazing image. Rock on, camera!

Dick Clark's Secret

No, I'm not talking about the Resident Evil movies. I'm talking about this article I found on slashdot that references this article which tells of scientists reviving dead dogs after three hours of clinical death. The article is pretty skimpy on details and there is hardly any actual science detailed in the article, but just thinking about the possibility of bringing back dogs from the dead is a little creepy.

My first thought is that you might be able to do this indefinitely, if it does actually work, until your body can in no way, shape, or form function any longer. Think about it. You have a heart attack because of a blood clot when you're 50. You clinically die. You are then taken in to a hospital. The doc looks you over, sees you died of a heart attack, fixes the blockage, does this zombification process, and then you go on your way. 10 years later you have another one and then they do it all over again.

On top of being able to be zombified to come back from the dead, maybe it'll also have rejuvenitive properties. Got liver disease? Become a zombie. Got AIDS? Turn into a zombie. Cancer? Solved through zombification. Zombification would be the answer to all our problems! And to think we've been portraying them as mindless, brain-eating, decaying no gooders in the movies.

The only problem you'd have to deal with is that over time you'd end up looking like this:

Ants? Ants Make Me Crazy!

So it seems that our office has been overrun with ants as of late. I don't know why. I don't know how they got in. I don't know why they stick around. All I know is that I'm continually crushing these annoying little suckers throughout the day. After complaining about it with some co-workers and finding out that they suffer the same affliction, I took it upon myself to make scorecards to track how many of the little bastards we kill.

Right now I've got my scorecard tacked up in my cube and as of this morning I've put down six of the little suckers. It's weird because they don't appear to be coming from any one area. A couple of them were by my book stack. Another one was by my monitor. Another by my keyboard. One was next to my phone. The last one was climbing the wall of my cube. Each met the same fate for invading my personal work area.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, I suppose) I'm not winning at the moment. Two other co-workers have put down quite a few more ants than I have. Supposedly our building manager is going to find us some ant traps or poison to take care of them, but until then the competition is still on!

Maybe Freud was on to Something

Rarely do I ever remember if I had a dream during the night and even rarer do I actually remember my dreams, but when I do they are often so vivid that they can quite easily have an influential effect on my day. I've been lucky enough to wake up some mornings feeling whole, fulfilled, and elated as I let the undeiably powerful and positive imagry of my dreams consume me. But then there are also the days where I wake up ready to kill, wanting to explode, and teeming with hate. Those are the days I have nightmares. One of those days was last night.

My nightmare was one of the worst I've had in quite some time. Waking up sweaty, in a panic, and physically overcome with anger and frustration is not a good way to start off the day, if you ask me. My dream very closely mimicked reality--my everyday reality--only slightly changing some of the details, changing them just enough to hurt me, to make me feel as though I was a toy, to make me feel hated. In my dream I was nothing more than a tool being used by those around me, by one of the people I most care about in my life, and my being used brought joy to this person. My torture was this person's pleasure.

I couldn't shrug off the feelings when I awoke and I was extremely angry at the real life version of the person that was manifested in my dream. I can undoubtedly say that when I woke up I hated that person with everything in me at the time. Slowly as I realized it was only a dream, the hate started to fade, but it's still there nonetheless, just diminished. Feeling this rage that was created by a dream did, however, show me things about how I view that person, as well as other people because I'd never really given into feeling that way about people before. Only could my subconscious rouse such feelings and in doing so, it showed me things I needed to see.

There is still lingering feelings of animosity swirling around inside of me hours after I've woken up. How amazing is it that my subconscious could stir up such feelings inside of me, feelings associated with real-life people, with a clever rearrangement of what I viewed as reality and showing it to me while I sleeped? It's unbelievably amazing.

Deadlock - Earth.Revolt CD Review

What makes a concept album? That’s an easy question, right? To most a concept album is simply an album that focuses singularly on one topic thematically or musically, much like the recent Armor for Sleep disc or classically such albums as Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon or The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Recently it seems like concept albums are the thing to do again after a period of being a taboo undertaking. Just like fashion, the much maligned concept album is hip again.

Earth.Revolt, as you quite easily have guessed from the introductory paragraph, is a concept album, albeit a slightly less tightly intertwined one than those of their peers, yet one nonetheless. Deadlock focuses almost exclusively on the degeneration of the human race and our society as a whole, examining the dirty underbelly of our world as it slowly decays because of our selfishness and lack of environmental etiquette. So is this offering on par with recently well acclaimed releases using the same thematic binding technique (but obviously not the same topics), such as the aforementioned Armor for Sleep album or Mae’s Everglow? The simple answer to that question is, “Yes,” but a better answer would be, “Go buy this cd now and prepare to be amazed.”

Deadlock has created what may be one of the best melodic death metal releases in the last few years. Put quite simply, this cd is one of the most brutally beautiful discs you will hear this year and, more than likely, over the coming years. Never has a cd this heavy felt quite as beautiful at the same time. There are times where the drums will be beating your heart for you, the guitars are slicing you apart, the vocals rip through your ear drums, and the keyboards fuel an aggressive musical undercurrent that pulls at you… yet the song still feels tender and vulnerable at the same time.

This release has it all when it comes to black / death / prog metal. There are epic length songs, most clocking in over five minutes at the least and stretching out to over eleven at one point. The guitars are grinding, heavily distorted, and pulsing, yet they possess an almost precise, surgical feel. When you listen to the opening riff of “May Angels Come”, it feels like you’re slowly being musically disemboweled by a skilled axe-wielding surgeon; one that’s so skilled you can’t help but be anything other than fascinated as you watch your guts slowly being removed from your body and put on display. There are so many places on the disc where the guitars transcend the usual clichéd death metal approach and become a force to be reckoned with.

On top of the precision guitaring, the rest of the instrumentation is utterly superb with the only fault being some repetition, but that is something to expect from this genre anyways. Beyond the guitars and instrumentation, the vocals are simply a treat. Augmenting the death metal growls on a few tracks, most notably “Awakened by Sirens”, is the addition of enchanting melodic female vocals. The interplay between the growling aggression of the male death metal vocals and the haunting, yet forceful female vocals leads to a couple of unbelievably arranged songs. The combination of dark, grinding metal with stylistically beautiful vocals doesn’t feel out of place at all and the only actual qualm I have with the female vocals is that they weren’t used enough.

When viewed as a whole, Deadlock’s Earth.Revolt is a black metal masterpiece that anyone even mildly interested in metal, prog, metalcore, or heavy music in general should at least listen to if not buy as soon as possible. Be prepared for this album to show up on many metal top 10 lists come the end of the year. It’s already solidified a place on mine.

All You Bloggers Out There

Go take a survey. I did. I don't really know what the data is going to be used for or anything, but I love statistics so any time I can help participate and then check out the results, I'm happy. If you want to see the results of the survey, go here. To take the survey click on the image below.

Valedictorian

Over the weekend as I was getting a bunch of old newspapers together to go start a bon fire in my back yard with, I noticed an article that jump started a ton of memories for me from my high school days. It's not often that I look fondly back upon my days in high school since most of it was basically torture and I'd usually rather bathe in a pool of hydrochloric acid while simultaneously ingesting mutant piranhas that would eat me from the inside out, but this article brought back a few of the positive memories of high school.

The article was from the front page of Hayfield High School's school district newsletter (which is in newspaper form-all eight or so pages of it). On the front page were three pictures of students and a large caption that read "Hayfield Announces Honor Students". The pictures were of the two co-valedictorians and the salutatorian. Underneath each photo was a list of what the students were involved in as well as their future plans and what college each was attending. It was interesting to look at the activities that each was involved in since many times the valedictorians and salutatorians aren't involved in too many things since they're focused on being nerds, but these kids were very active.

Reading through their activities made me think back to when I was in the paper for being valedictorian. Yes, I was the head nerd of our class so go ahead and make fun of me now. I actually never expected to get it since I had pretty much gone into total slacker mode my senior year. I was more concerned with sports, being with friends, and trying to find my first ever girlfriend.

In about the middle of the third quarter of senior year I was called up to the principal's office during the middle of one of my classes, which was odd, but not too odd. I started rolling back the last few weeks in my brain trying to figure out what I'd done wrong and how I managed to get caught. You see, along with being the school valedictorian, I was also, in my high school career, put on field trip probation, suspended for a three day period, and was all in all the bane of a few teacher's existences. It was actually nice because I could goof off and get away with it for the most part. When I screw off in class, what's a teacher going to tell me? "Knock it off and focus on your schoolwork"? I don't think so since I was getting straight A's on everything. They just had to deal.

So I finally get to the school's office and walk in to see the principal, asking why he wanted to see me. He sat me down, looked at me sternly, and congratulated me! I was initially shocked, but after a little while, I realized that there wasn't really any way I couldn't get it since I'd gotten straight A's on everything all through high school... except for one A- in choir. So I can't sing, but I tried.

I was sitting there, just told that everything I did academically in high school finally paid off. It was a very unique feeling, almost like having a quick bout with a superiority complex, but it faded moments later when I realized I'd have to write a speech for graduation. Then it faded even more as I started thinking about all of the expectations that would now be heaped upon me. I'd have to go to a good college, get a degree in some smart kid major, get a high paying job, and show everyone that high school wasn't a fluke.

For the most part, I think I fulfilled those expectations. I went to St. John's University. I graduated with a 3.6 GPA and a BA in both computer science and philosophy. I initially found employment as a technical writer for a year and now have just recently been promoted to the position of business analyst. I seem to be on the right track. Where will I go from here, though? That's a question I wish I knew the answer to.

DC Solicits for September

I, like almost every other hardcore comic book nerd, pore over the solicitations for future products every month, often anticipating a little too heavily some items. Also, much like every other comic book fan, looking over what is coming down the road a couple of months in advance helps me to plan my budget so I know what I can afford to buy and what I'll have to let go. If you want to check them out yourself, you can look at DC's September solicits here. Below you will see what I will plan on buying, what I am thinking about buying, and what I think sounds utterly stupid.

Must Buy:
ALL STAR BATMAN AND ROBIN, THE BOY WONDER #2 (It's Frank Miller, for crap's sake)
BATMAN #645 (Who wants to be the Red Hood ISN'T Jason Todd?)
BATMAN: WAR GAMES ACT 3 TP (Simply to complete the collection. I bought the other volumes, but have been somewhat unimpressed)
SUPERMAN/BATMAN #23 (This series is pretty much big, dumb, superhero fun and I love it)
ACTION COMICS #831 (Because I get all of Superman's titles)
ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN #644 (Because I get all of Superman's titles)
SUPERMAN #221 (Because I get all of Superman's titles)
JLA CLASSIFIED #12 (Ellis is the man)
MANHUNTER #14 (So far this series has been a pleasant surprise)
OUTSIDERS #28 (Another title I've really liked)
SEVEN SOLDIERS: GUARDIAN #4 (Grant Morrison is crazy... in a good way)
SEVEN SOLDIERS: MISTER MIRACLE #1 (Same as above)
THE INTIMATES #11 (I'm surprised that DC keeps soliciting more issues considering how terrible sales have been)
EX MACHINA #15 (Everyone should be reading this)
SILENT DRAGON #3 (Diggle knows his action)
A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE TP - NEW EDITION (With the movie coming out and a tiny $9.99 price tag, why not?)
THE LOSERS #28 (I wonder how close we are to the end of the series)

Might Buy:
GREEN LANTERN: REBIRTH HC (I never read anything Green Lantern, but maybe now's the time to get in on the game)
VIGILANTE #1 (Hmmm... Bruce Jones is pretty hit or miss with me and this seems like it'll be him doing Punisher in the DC universe)
WILDCATS: NEMESIS #1 (I heard so many good things about version 3.0 that maybe I should give Wildcats a try again)
BLOODY MARY TP (Ennis has always been good in my book. It'll depend on how much extra money I'll have)
THE QUITTER HC (I just watched American Splendor again this weekend and I'm intrigued by Pekar so this might have to get bought)

Sounds Ridiculous:
SHAZAM/SUPERMAN: FIRST THUNDER #1 (There was just a crossover with Superman and Shazam. Do we need another already?)
GREEN LANTERN CORPS: RECHARGE #1 (Green Lantern overkill anyone?)
WRAITHBORN #1 (Just the title makes me cringe and it sounds lame as well)

After looking that list over, I realize I buy way too many titles. Thankfully I didn't get drug into the whole Infinite Crisis crossover thingy as well or I would have to take out a loan just to keep up my comic fix. Thankfully I don't order much from Marvel anymore since they are putting out less and less that interest me each month.