Would you like Spam with your ultrasound training?

A spam ad for ultrasound training is received

Explosive opportunities ... and the rabbit's ears wiggle too...

I have to admit it. I love spam. Both kinds. That strange but tastelessly tasty food product and the email variety. Breakfast of eggs and spam, lightly grilled on both sides, with or without beans. Wonderful. But we’re here to talk about the email variety.

Now, in my youth (rather, my younger days on the internet), I used to rail at spam like everyone else. And when the first email spam filters arrived, I loaded them ruthlessly with rules to catch emails with subjects in all caps, with certain words, with strings of exclamation points. And then I discovered that none of these rules worked particularly well. Not only did the spam keep coming through as the spam-meisters came up with newer and newer ways to ply their trade, but all the emails that I had been eagerly expecting and expecting and expecting, could usually be found nestled in the spam folder, provided I got to it before an automatic flush.

So I turned off the spam filters and have gone back to the age-old delete button, which has the sterling advantage of never deleting anything I didn’t WANT gone. And if I accidentally do, command-Z takes care of that in an instant. And since then, I have been regaled by daily doses of Pamela being concerned about my size, or Cindy about my lasting power. Stock tips sent to “Fred” but seemingly delivered to me by mistake. How many opportunities I’ve been afforded to sneak currency out of falling dictatorships! Aid widows in securing their husband’s vast fortunes in some foreign land! The number of times paypal has needed me to log in to verify the account I’ve used for the last five years is astounding! Or my bank? Or banks I’d never even had accounts in!

There are more benign missives–like those advising me of the wonderful opportunities to be afforded by online universities. If you consider credit mills benign. And it was one of those I got last Friday. Become an ULTRASOUND TECHNICIAN! Wow, I thought, how timely! Ultrasound is truly a “coming thing.” Think of the explosion of state legislatures drooling at the thought of shoving a skinny rod into an unwilling orifice so that women can be forced into humiliated submission! Wow, there seems to be a new state every week whose legislature or governor is forcing these wands–well, not DOWN anyone’s throats, if you get the picture. Funny, all of them seem to be GOP. You know, small government keeping its nose out of your business. But not its wand up your hoohah. After all, if a woman has had the audacity to want or need to terminate a pregnancy, she deserves to have a foreign object inserted into her…the slut!

Because that is what all these legal ultrasound requirements are–a punishment for sexuality, the use of humiliation to force women to allow men to control their bodies. Violation without consent. In other words, legislated rape to enforce a code of morality that isn’t even in the Bible.

You have to wonder how these people, who so want the gummint out of their lives, are so willing to allow it into the lives of their women. And there lies the answer. THEIR women. Those uppity bitches who weren’t satisfied with voting the way their husbands told them to, they wanted to make up their own little minds. And had the audacity to work the same jobs as men and expect to be paid the same salary! That they wanted control of their own bodies and actually had it for over a generation was just too much! Time to force them back into the kitchen and the nursery. And the way to do that is to make them have that baby.

Unfortunately, much as I could use the excitement in my life, I’ll be foregoing the ultrasound training. At my age, the thought of starting yet another career leaves me flaccid. I’m much more interested in instant gratification. And after all, I won’t have to work once those surefire lottery numbers I paid for come in!

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Santorum: A Frothy Mix of Bad Theology and Worse Economics…

Jesus would no doubt approve of Rick's updating of his message.

Since Rick Santorum thinks that the United States is a theocracy instead of a democracy and that President Obama is unqualified to lead it because he has the wrong “theology,” we thought it would be instructive to review the Eight Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount, as re-written according to RICK’S theology. Further, we wish to start a fund to send Rick a lifetime supply of ipecac to aid in his digestive problem since the constitutional separation of church and state seems to make him ill. We’ll all need some if he manages to foist his theology on us…

Blessed are the uneducated, for you can’t wash an unused brain.
Blessed are the blah people, for they won’t get food stamps (I didn’t say black!).
Blessed are the rich, for they shall have even more money than you do.
Blessed are the K Street lobbyists, for they shall get what they paid for.
Blessed are the women who have been raped, for they are bearing a special gift from God.
Blessed are the gays, for I’m going to get back at them for that frothy crack. (Umm, did I say that right?)
Blessed are the impoverished sick, for that’s all the help they’ll get from me.
Blessed are the soldiers, for they will soon be spreading Christianity in Iran.

A special thanks to Fred and Bert Squirrel, who recorded his blathering while gathering some … nuts.

I had a great time at Katsucon last weekend. Thanks to Kevin who helped me at the table (after my adventures in oral surgery the week before, I really wasn’t up to running an artist alley table all by my lonesome) and to Kristen who also pitched in at some crucial moments. A further thanks to everyone who stopped by my table and admired my art–with a double helping for those who actually bought something And shouts to all the friends I saw, Murder Nurse, T, Tala, Charlene, Jasmine, Alicia, Peter and all my other friends who have their own tables! I’ll be posting my con schedule for the rest of the year as soon as I get a few more confirmations.

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First, an earthquake, then, a hurricane, then, a Deluge …

Damn, that iBook works underwater (don't try this at home)

Due to circumstances beyond my control, I am sharing my studio/office with three industrial blowers and a matching dehumidifier. My wife is trying to say something to me from the stairway … WAYYYYYYY over there … I can barely hear a word. HUH? I yell. She takes a few steps closer. Now I can actually hear a stream of unintelligible wife sounds. HUH? Finally, she gets next to me and I can finally hear her question. I just can’t understand it because there’s too much @#$%^&*( noise to THINK!

Ahhhh, the last few weeks. An earthquake, a hurricane–and then a deluge. The earthquake was relatively fun for me. I’d never been in one before and I was taking a nap for a headache on a bed with one of those memory foam mattress pads. Suddenly, I awoke to find myself on a huge square of Jell-O. As consciousness seeped into my brain, I wondered if it was an explosion–nope, lasting too long, OMG is THIS what an earthquake feels like? Should I get up and stand under a doorwa…whoops, it’s over. I understand it was scary if you were in one of the highrises in the area or one of the areas with a nuclear plant, but from my vantage, it was a very brief theme park ride. Whheeeeee!

The hurricane was more serious for more people, but again, we had it easy this far inland. Over-prepared. Took more time to undo the storm preparations than the storm actually lasted. But last Sunday, the start of the Deluge from the storm in the Gulf. FOUR DAYS of torrential rain and on Wednesday night, the drain in the back stairs silted up and the water started coming into my basement–where my office is. It’s Nowell’s flood. Whose?? You’ve heard of Noe’s flood–well, this one’s Nowell’s.

Now, some people will tell you that I am all wet anyway. And I don’t wish to dampen any opinions of my work, but this week I will throw a sop to my critics and admit that my wit is not very dry at the moment. The plumber came quickly and re-opened the drain, but my new roommates have been going full blast all weekend. It sounds like an airplane hangar.

Obama gave a speech about doing something to create jobs. I’m afraid I didn’t listen because I was in the middle of flood recovery at the time. Not to worry, Eric Cantor said they would only pass the parts that our corporate overlords liked. That should really help things. That is, if you really want an unemployment rate above 10%–which the Republican party wants because they think it will all be blamed on the Democrats–and especially Obama–and more people will be willing to take jobs at ridiculously low wages–which they won’t get because those have all been sent to India. This is because the Republican Party loves America.

Speaking of loving America, we’ve just had the 10th anniversary of the horrible event that caused ten years of national insanity. For a week, everyone wrote about 9/11. We’re still fighting two wars, neither of which were particularly useful in solving the cause of 9/11. And both of which actually made our reputation worse. We’ll probably be throwing money away on both of them for the next decade. We’re still taking our shoes off to get on an airplane. Which means we’re still #$%^&*( insane.

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Beckstianity 101–Social Justice is un-American

Glenn Beck casts stones at Jesus for being a commie Nazi for preaching social justice..

Hey, Glenn Beck also listened to Born In The USA's lyrics for the first time too.

Now I don’t like to knock a guy twice in the same week. Not that I think it’s unfair, but it always strikes me as a lack of imagination on my part. Surely there’s someone ELSE you can lampoon, Greg. Oh, of course there is–and stop calling me Shirley. But Glenn Beck, bless his pointy little head, has managed to do so.

Of course, last Thursday’s cartoon wasn’t really a mock on der Beckstein (although the text was ). Getting Eric Massa on his show SEEMED like a good idea at the time. How was Beck supposed to know that a Democrat might not be disloyal to President Obama? Or that he would think that male-on-male tickling orgies might be misconstrued as sexual in nature? Or that he would take little Glennie to task for the alacrity with which right-wing commentators and Teabaggers call everyone they don’t agree with Nazis or socialists?

OK so his counterparts on Fox News all told him so. Can’t blame a guy for trying, right?

But he also managed not only to reveal that he never actually listened to the lyrics to “Born in the USA”. I guess for the last 25-and-a-half he’s been looking at the FRONT of the album cover with The Boss’s tight-jeaned butt smiling at the camera in front of a flag, head-banging along and singing BORN IN THE USA every time it came around. Yeah, Baby, Born in the USA! And for 25.5 years he never actually “listened” to the lyrics to find out what Bruce Springsteen had to say. Well, I can understand that, sometimes even us boys from Jersey find it hard to understand New Jersey. But to ADMIT IT, as if he just found out something everyone in America already KNEW! that just boggles the mind.

Only to be topped by his warning to the faithful. Now if you thought 25+ years of cluelessness was bad, check out the evidence of a LIFETIME cluelessness. He told his audience that if they heard the words “social justice” in their churches, they should run away as fast as possible to find some other church that did NOT believe in “social justice”, because “social justice” was nothing less than a codeword used by Nazis and Socialists! Now I’ve commented before on the peculiar form of Christianity some people espouse, the Calvinist belief that the poor are miserable, not just because they deserve to be, but because they WANT to be. Because if they didn’t “want” to be poor, why they’d just pull themselves up by the bootstraps and make a Horatio Alger success of themselves. So any talk of “social justice” actually allows them to go along, living off unemployment and welfare. This he says, in the middle of a recession where 1 out of 6 people of working age is either unemployed or underemployed. Way to go Glenn!

But the corker is that hitherto, lots of church leaders thought Glenn was the bee’s knees. Now, they’re up in arms–because if there’s one thing that Christian churches have in common, it’s preaching charity, helping your fellow man, fighting for social justice, because their founder, that #$%^&* liberal Jesus Christ, said it was important. More important than praying as a matter of fact. Even the Mormons, who most people figure on being iffy Christians–and Glenn Beck, having been raised Catholic, converted to Mormonism in his adulthood. Looks like SOMEBODY hasn’t been paying attention in church for a long long time. I mean, we all try to not listen to sermons, but usually some of what was said sinks in after a few decades of repetition. But it’s just like Born in the USA. Glenn Beck just doesn’t pay attention. He’s off in his own little world, dreaming dreams no man ever dreamed before, because they’re too #$^&*( crazy to begin with.

Well, Glenn’s finally “clarified” his statements–I think now he says he meant Big Government instead of Nazis–and apologized in the standard approved format and his faithful congregation have returned to the fold, knowing that Glenn didn’t really mean what he said, even though he did when he said it. But myself, I’ve got to wonder–does this man even HAVE an attention span?

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