03.17.10
Posted in Phlogiston, Stumble and Fail at 11:36 am by George Smith
Today, fresh from the predatory career-advice industry: Traits that will guarantee you that raise in the US corporate workplace.
1. Think for the Boss
Find out the key initiatives your company president wants to achieve.
If the president said in the annual report that he wants to increase profit by 15 percent at the health insurance company, focus on that goal. Your work needs to be connected with what the company cares about right now. So get to work writing computer software that will sift clients for penny-ante mistakes on their insurance papers, so they can be targeted for cancellation immediately when they get sick.
2. Be a highly visible lickspittle, not just a cubicle toady
If you stay cloistered in your cubicle, you’ll probably be disappointed when raises are announced — no matter how hard you work. To ensure that you and your hard work are seen, request projects that will get you in front of others — like dunning your colleagues for your boss’s favorite charity — United Way — instead of letting him do it.
This will make it easier for your boss to plead your case to any necessary approvers. “If a boss is in meeting and says, ‘I want to give a raise to Bloor, it’s going to be hard if no one knows who Bloor is. On the other hand, if Bloor has been visibly helpful in collecting monies or in the newspaper defending the company against allegations of fraud or criminal misconduct, they’ll say, ‘Oh Bloor, he’s terrific!’”
3. Be a charismatic apple-polisher
Being a suck up is terrific. But if you really want to go places, your suck-upitude must be infectious, capable of spreading its enthusiasms to your co-workers. Executive coach Lisa Blankfein-Pandit says this kind of interpersonal skill plays a huge role when compensation is discussed.
4. Be subtle
No boss will ever actually come out and say, “I love to give raises to ass-kissers.” So how do you draw attention to this quality without seeming like a finagling braggart? The president and CEO of the National Association of Professional Employer Organizations says that giving your boss a quarterly report on his or the company’s milestones — be it downsizing 100 employees without experiencing any theft or damage to office equipment or how the chief executive figured out how to put a lot less product in a box that looks lots bigger — and asking for feedback is a subtle way to get noticed.
5. Feel for the Boss
The highest-earning employees understand that their job is to make their boss’s life easier. Think about the things that your boss doesn’t like doing — well, just about everything except collecting his end of year bonus or meeting high rent hookers at the Serbian Crown Room or Ruth’s Steakhouse — and ask if you can help by taking over those tasks. It’s also important to understand that your boss can’t always give you what you want, no matter how great your efforts have been to uplift his days. “Most people get keyed up to ask for a raise and when they hear ‘no’ they respond really negatively,” says one career-adviser. “If you instead say, ‘I understand, but when wages are unfrozen, please sir, I would like to be the first in line, remember the many good happy hours you had at the Serbian Crown Room,’ you’ll have a much better chance of getting the raise when they can give it.”
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03.15.10
Posted in Extremism, Stumble and Fail, Why the World Doesn't Need US at 2:24 pm by George Smith
Today, this in from Yahoo News on absurd potential changes in public school history textbooks for Texas. The reason being, as goes Texas, so everyone else must suffer equally.
A greater emphasis on “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s.” This means not only increased favorable mentions of Schlafly, the founder of the antifeminist Eagle Forum, but also more discussion of the Moral Majority, the Heritage Foundation, the National Rifle Association and Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America.
One would be hard-pressed to name one substantial thing the Heritage Foundation has contributed to the US.
Paul Revere’s? Uh-uh. Great inventors? No. Scientists? No. Great advancers and defenders of civil rights and the rule of law? No. Healers and philanthropists? No. Eradicators of smallpox? No. Discoverers of electricity? No. Great astronauts of our time or first makers of the electric guitar? No and no. Arms controllers and peace workers? No. House of Nobel laureates? No. Invented the Internet? Sadly, no. Heroes of bloody Tarawa or the Meuse-Argonne? No.
Haters of homosexuals. Yes. EMP Crazies? Yes. Despisers of Democrats? Yes. Upholders of old-right-wing-white-guys political club? Yes. Dumping ground and sounding board for out-of-power GOP pols? Yes. Bomb Iran lobby central. Check. Advocates of using lasers to battle pirates? Yes!
A reduced scope for Latino history and culture. A proposal to expand such material in recognition of Texas’ rapidly growing Hispanic population was defeated in last week’s meetings—provoking one board member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out in protest. “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist,” she said of her conservative colleagues on the board. “They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.”
It’s a damn shame when the last and only way to learn about the intertwine of American and Mexican culture — like if you don’t live in California or Arizona — is through the record catalog of ZZ Top. I heard it, I heard it, I heard it on the X!
A more positive portrayal of Cold War anticommunism. Disgraced anticommunist crusader Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator censured by the Senate for his aggressive targeting of individual citizens and their civil liberties on the basis of their purported ties to the Communist Party, comes in for partial rehabilitation. The board recommends that textbooks refer to documents published since McCarthy’s death and the fall of the Soviet bloc that appear to show expansive Soviet designs to undermine the U.S. government.
Can we have a shout out for Roy Cohn, too, while you’re at it?
Language that qualifies the legacy of 1960s liberalism. Great Society programs such as Title IX—which provides for equal gender access to educational resources—and affirmative action, intended to remedy historic workplace discrimination against African-Americans, are said to have created adverse “unintended consequences” in the curriculum’s preferred language.
Thomas Jefferson no longer included among writers influencing the nation’s intellectual origins. Jefferson, a deist who helped pioneer the legal theory of the separation of church and state, is not a model founder in the board’s judgment. Among the intellectual forerunners to be highlighted in Jefferson’s place: medieval Catholic philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas, Puritan theologian John Calvin …
How Calvinist. Stoning should have never fallen out of favor.
[The] recommendations include an entry listing Confederate General Stonewall Jackson as a role model for effective leadership, and a statement from Confederate President Jefferson Davis accompanying a speech by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln.
A recommendation to include country and western music among the nation’s important cultural movements. The popular black genre of hip-hop is being dropped from the same list.
To DD this is more richly amusing than dismaying.
In education, we could get exactly what we’ve been working to deserve. If one believes in a God, he apparently has a very finely developed dry sense of humor.
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Posted in Phlogiston, Stumble and Fail at 9:58 am by George Smith
Part of one new business strategy for making money from nothing is career advice.
At any one moment it’s easy to get the impression that half the on-line revenue in advertising now comes from either offering courses for retraining or the sale of job-hunting advice.
Nowhere is this more obvious than at my hosting provider.
Yahoo relentlessly bombards browsers with ads, columns and stories on getting a job.
For instance, the daily ‘apply for a training grant and go deep into debt to get a 2-year degree or you’ll never get a job’ pitch.
This weekend the New York Times finally latched onto the idea that it’s the latest variation on an American business Ponzi scheme.
Call it working over another subprime crowd of suckers, a lure that promises reward, never to be adequately delivered, if only you’ll go deep into debt to get some kind of vocational training certificate at whatver for-profit little school is offering them in your area.
Or, there is the ‘The 10 best-paying jobs are … post.
And then the always favorite variation on what not to do during a job interview.
Typical advice, condensed: Scrupulously avoid being human and capable of error.
All of these work off the guilt-trip assumption that high unemployment in this country — more specifically, the reader’s lack of it — is the result of character and skill set faults in the job-seeker.
It’s hard to imagine a worse article or one more demoralizing than the link I’m going to post. How not to f— up an interview in 50 — that’s fifty — easily digestible bon mots.
Why only 50 Why not 100? Why not 200?
Doubtless fifty was probably thought to have the best chance at getting linkbacks and ‘most e-mailed’ status among the busy bees scavenging for jobs.
Remember, these advices and articles only work by leveraging desperation. Their ubiquity now guarantees they provide no service or common sense advice that people haven’t already considered.
They work for an industry that needs everyone to believe that American economic calamity is the fault of an inferior US worker.
DD has done the theme up previously here, here and here.
Don’t smell like a cigarette, it advises. Don’t fail to demonstrate the proper qualities of a lickspittle. Don’t smell like this or that. Don’t ask too many questions or talk too much but don’t appear mum. Don’t sit down wrong. Look at the boss but don’t look at the boss.
It’s here — furnished by someone named Karen Burns who knows how to make a job out of leveraging the joblessness of others.
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03.11.10
Posted in Stumble and Fail, Why the World Doesn't Need US at 7:45 am by George Smith
Good news, lads! Good news! Between Wall Street and the way things are done here, the US is getting set to march proudly into the future. Home-schooling for everyone! Fire more of those slackers with three months off in the summertime.
“The urban core has suffered white flight post-the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. the Board of Education, blockbusting by the real estate industry, redlining by banks and other financial institutions, retail and grocery store abandonment,” Brooks said to applause from the standing-room-only crowd.
“And now the public education system is aiding and abetting in the economic demise of our school district,” she said. “It is shameful and sinful.”
Under the approved plan, teachers at six other low-performing schools will be required to reapply for their jobs, and the district will try to sell its downtown central office. It also is expected to cut about 700 of the district’s 3,000 jobs, including about 285 teachers.
“The Kansas City school board voted … to close” fifty percent of its schools to avert bankruptcy it sez.
More than a year ago I coined a phrase that seems to have made its way into the econolexicon; writing about how cutbacks at the state and local level would tend to undermine fiscal stimulus at the federal level, I said that we had fifty Herbert Hoovers.
Krugman
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03.03.10
Posted in Phlogiston, Stumble and Fail, Why the World Doesn't Need US at 8:55 am by George Smith
Little Tommy Friedman discovers – probably for the hundred or more time — LAX is a rotten place to be.
I was traveling via Los Angeles International Airport — LAX — last week. Walking through its faded, cramped domestic terminal, I got the feeling of a place that once thought of itself as modern but has had one too many face-lifts and simply can’t hide the wrinkles anymore. In some ways, LAX is us. We are the United States of Deferred Maintenance. China is the People’s Republic of Deferred Gratification. They save, invest and build. We spend, borrow and patch.
Whenever looking up at the intellectual giants in the sky I never have to strain to see little Tommy jetting about the country (or world) to interview some really big corporate swell. Some person whose boots are always to be licked, be they a wizard sipping strawberry lemonade with Friedman on a patio at Caltech or a king of the corporate world, for it is these people who are packed with wisdoms the rest of us shits cannot fathom or appreciate.
I had a chance last week to listen to Paul Otellini, the chief executive of Intel, the microchip maker and one of America’s crown jewel companies. Otellini was in Washington to talk about competitiveness at Brookings and the Aspen Institute. At a time when so much of our public policy discussion is dominated by health care and bailouts, my public service for the week is to share Mr. Otellini’s views on start-ups.
Yes, I think we can all agree, Intel is quite the start-up. And who better to hear such a man leader than more wonderful and smart people at Brookings or the Aspen Institute, places where the rest of us are properly forbidden to go.
You can guess what comes next.
The same old story: America costs too much compared to China, a real laugher if you’ve been reading any stories about the many medium-sized towns in America emptying out and collapsing as a result of our current national sickness.
What Americans aren’t is too expensive. It’s just damn inconvenient to use them after their wages have been compressed for two decades, because the Chinese are still cheaper and one doesn’t have to worry about pollution, really squandering energy, the occasional pesky union, or dumping hydrofluoric acid into the back lot in plain sight until the silica in the earth catches on fire.
Give us more R&D tax credit, from one of the most successful companies in the world, says the guy who runs it.
Would someone tamp a cigarette out in his eye?
If the government just boosted the research and development tax credit by 5 percent and lowered corporate taxes, argued Otellini, and we “started one or two more projects in companies around the country that made them more productive and more competitive, the government’s tax revenues are going to grow.” With the generous research and development tax credits and lower corporate taxes they receive, Intel’s chief competitors in South Korea basically have “zero cost of money,” said Otellini. Intel can compete against that with superior technology, but many other U.S. firms can’t.
We must eat our moldy peas “because smart, skilled labor is everywhere now. Intel can thrive today — not just survive, but thrive — and never hire another American.”
To change this, of course, wealthy corporations must receive more tax credits, government incentives and rewards. So while you are eating your crappy-tasting peas this year and the next, implies little Tommy, you must hope our government smartens up enough to realize it must give much more to those who have everything before it trickles down to those of us grubbing around in the dirt.
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02.18.10
Posted in Stumble and Fail at 2:10 pm by George Smith
Best movie ever, today.
Bill Foster: I helped build missiles. I helped protect this country. You should be rewarded for that. But instead they give it to the plastic surgeons, you know they lied to me.
Sergeant Prendergast: Is that what this is about? Is that why my chicken dinner is drying out in the oven? You’re mad because they lied to you? Listen, pal, they lie to everyone. They lie to the fish. But that doesn’t give you any special right to do what you did today.
Falling Down quotes.
Joe Stack: Instead I got busy working 100-hour workweeks. Then came the L.A. depression of the early 1990s. Our leaders decided that they didn’t need the all of those extra Air Force bases they had in Southern California, so they were closed; just like that. The result was economic devastation in the region that rivaled the widely publicized Texas S&L fiasco. However, because the government caused it, no one gave a shit about all of the young families who lost their homes or street after street of boarded up houses abandoned to the wealthy loan companies who received government funds to “shore up” their windfall. Again, I lost my retirement.
…Nothing changes unless there is a body count (unless it is in the interest of the wealthy sows at the government trough). In a government full of hypocrites from top to bottom, life is as cheap as their lies and their self-serving laws.
I know I’m hardly the first one to decide I have had all I can stand.
Joe Stack quotes.
Somehow, though, after all the rant and effort, they never get after the rich guys in the golf carts at the country club. Just ruining the lives and/or families of the shift office workers or janitorial staff in the same boat.
Lived in Pennsy and SoCal the same time as DD.
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02.12.10
Posted in Stumble and Fail at 3:16 pm by George Smith
“Human Resources people are drowning in resumes and they can’t keep up,” says executive recruiter Mike Oily.
Help your resume win the attention it deserves by following these up-to-date tips from our collection of parasite job-hunting industry insiders.
* “Keep it short,” advises one resume expert. “Resumes are by necessity becoming crisper and more to the point. But also be sure to list necessary qualifications. So it has to be sort of long and short.”
With Twitter, texting, and a barrage of quick-hit multimedia messages, we’re getting accustomed to blip advertising. “Readers lose interest in resumes that are clear and well written. They make them feel inferior. And like newspapers, they’re too hard to understand. This goes for cover letters, too.”
* “Show some humor or personality,” says Jennifer Fonebone of Glabrous, a recruiting and staffing company. “I recently called a candidate, even though he didn’t match any current positions, because his online resume title was, ‘Can juggle a career, the wife, Little League coaching and a fuck buddy all at the same time.’”
* “Make your resume read like a news story,” suggests Sam Clamdandy of The Peckerwood Group. Pop an eye-catching headline like, say — “Will Commit Profit-making Crimes for Pay!” or “Knows How to Legally Steal from Clients!” and be sure to include a summary of qualifications.
* “Be results-oriented,” advises Erin Gobra, assistant director of career services at the Chapman University School of Law. Whenever possible, quantify your accomplishments. Example: Instead of simply writing “Drafted OSHA appeal,” she says, include results: “Drafted OSHA appeal completely eliminating an employer fine for employee’s serious permanently invalid-ing on-the-job injury.”
* “Show what sets you apart,” says Nancy Hu, a director of a Wall Street global executive search firm. “I like to see some indication of personal interests. It’s a good conversation trigger and provides some additional insight into who the person is.”
Another expert agreed: “It’s an opportunity to make yourself memorable as an applicant.” While an actual Personal Interest section is not usually advised, you can find ways to integrate your interests into your resume. For example, your interests should list volunteer activities.
But there’s a special way to do this. Find out the charity the boss likes to press his employees into contributing to — like United Way. Your volunteer activities and philanthropy should then mention you have a passion for giving to United Way.
* “Let others sing your praises,” says Deems Noteworthy, co-author of “Make Getting Fired Work for You.” “We add a section at the end we title, ‘What Others Say.’ Then we list five short statements — not necessarily true, but usually without attribution, that others have said about the person.” Examples: “Sticks with it long after everyone else has gone home,” or “The most creative apple-polishing employee I’ve ever had,” or “The most efficient and unprosecutable swindler of customers this company ever hired.”
* “If your name is difficult to pronounce, change it,” says Heather Gotnohart, president of Rebranding Excrement, an executive search firm. “Companies are more likely to call you for an interview if you provide a name they can easily pronounce,” she says. If your name is something like Wrzbowski or Benalshibh, you can forget it. Change it to something immediately recognizable, like a celebrity’s name, say, ‘Brad Pitt.’
“Then at least the boss will be able to always make an office joke and say ‘Brad Pitt’ is under him!”
And take our free resume test to see if your resume has what it takes to make the cut. Please note: A one time ten dollar processing fee will be charged to your credit card.
Also take America’s #1 Free Career Test for help finding the best career for you. Please note: A one time twenty dollar processing fee will be charged to your credit card.
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02.11.10
Posted in Extremism, Stumble and Fail at 4:09 pm by George Smith
Good news, lads! Good news! The Teabaggers are offended by Captain America and his sidekick.
In response to Marvel’s explanation and apology, Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips told Yahoo! News that it “sounds less like a genuine ‘we’re sorry’ than it does a ‘we’re sorry we got caught’ statement.”
“When I was a child in the ’60s Captain America was my favorite superhero,” he said. “It’s really sad to see what has traditionally been a pro-America figure being used to advance a political agenda.”
The entire howler here.
Hey, there are plenty of right-wing extremist Marvel characters theoretically great for the Tea Party’s big tent.
Nick Fury, The Punisher, Hawkeye, maybe Thor.
Wouldn’t you rather be on the side of The Leader, the Super Adaptoid or Count Nefaria, anyway?
I would.
The best Captain America comics were always those featuring the Red Skull.
Everyone knows that.
And the best comic of all time, Watchmen, is loaded with heroes all Tea Partiers can love. The Comedian — basically Marvel’s Nick Fury, only better and the Nite Owl — who voted for Richard Nixon five times (’It was him or the Communists!’).
Plus DD’s favorite — Rorschach, who despises the prison shrink for his liberal sensibilities, dislikes homosexuals and utters one of the comic and movie’s most famous lines:
All those liberals, and intellectuals, and smooth-talkers; and all of a sudden no one can think of anything to say.
The Cap and Tea Party news also affords me an opportunity to reprint an old appreciation of Marvel Comics from the archives.
So for your repeat enjoyment:
SHAMED BY YOUR ENGLISH? 40 Years of X-Men will fix that; thigh-rubbing optional
Cyclops is in no position to give an opinion.The
Locust, one in a very long list of silly X-Men villains,
backhands him.
For a couple decades DD was an avid reader of Marvel Comics. Then grad school and the Eighties ended.
In the mid-Sixties, I thought the X-Men were thrilling. In retrospect, I was a pretty gullible kid. Although the X-Men movies have made the group seem hip to a mass audience, truth be told, much of the comic book run is dominated by long stretches of patience-exhausting and/or intelligence-insulting trash. (How ’bout the seemingly endless war against the Brood, interstellar aliens … copied almost directly from the “Alien” movies, right down to poor man’s H. R. Giger conceptions and eggs put in the bodies of characters? Or, Lockheed, Kitty Pryde’s pet fire-breathing dragon from the same stretch?)
If your impression of Marvel is dictated by what’s been recently made in Hollywood, the occasional glimpse of Stan Lee on the SciFi channel (”Who Wants to Be a Superhero,” more accurately entitled “Look At The Neurotic Egomaniacs!”) or articles in entertainment sections about the marvelous goings-on at comic book conventions, you’ve had no glimpse of this sad history.
Your host will dive into the barrel of X-Men fail for the best apples bobbing around in the bunch.
1. Pathetic and silly villains. See The Locust above, anile human! The Locust was one of many in the rotten swarm. (My opinion is that he was a feeble attempt by Marvel to duplicate the Beetle, an early arch-enemy of Spider-Man. The Beetle, however, was only barely worth more than the paper he was printed on, falling somewhere in weakness between the Vulture and Mysterio. In truth, one can really get going and rip a new hole in Marvel for use of excessively shabby villains in any decade. Do you remember Stilt Man from Daredevil, the Man Without Fear?)
Showing up in Uncanny X-Man #24 in 1966, the dialog in this issue is often WORSE than “Away clod! You shall be the first to feel the bite of the Locust!”
On page 4, the Locust is introduced, overseeing his pet giant grasshoppers eating through a corn field. Spell-binding!
“Eat heartily my six-legged subjects!” exclaims the villain. “Too long have lesser mortals lorded it over the abundant planet! It is not the weak who must inherit the earth … but the strong! And we are the strong!”
Stan Lee, in a separate explanatory box, adds: “If, as you read on, it seems to you that our orthopterous antagonist has a distinct fascist fixation, please forward all analyses to mighty Marvel…”
Uh, no, I won’t do it.
Second place for wretched villain from the Sixties mag was Count Nefaria. The Count was a prop across a number of Marvel publications. With no obvious powers — a good beating by any strong man could have taken him out — for X-Men 22, the Count assembles a team of even more unmenacing villains than himself: the Unicorn (a refugee from Iron Man), the Scarecrow (another Iron Man castoff), Plantman, the Eel and the Porcupine.
Nefaria would show up again in 1975 with a crew of flunkies called the Ani-men. One of these was a man-frog, reinforcing Marvel’s early yen for pulling villains from the ranks of the most unthreatening specimens of the animal world.
The bronze medal for worst villains goes to … Frankenstein. Marvel editors were apparently desparate for filler in 1968. It’s a mistake they wouldn’t repeat for more than a decade. Until pulling Dracula from the mothballs for one issue in 1982.
2. Dialog. Closely related to silly villains, it’s consistantly dreadful, even by the hokey corn pone standards of comic books.
“If only I could tell [Jean Grey] the words I really want to say,” thinks the teenage Scott Summers in 1964’s issue 8. “How gorgeous her lips are … how silken her hair is … how I love her! But I dare not!”
Equally horrible was everything that came out of the word balloons written for Hank McCoy, the Beast. The Beast had a double handicap: He not only talked too much, he also looked bad — a man with the physique of a disproportionately tubby gorilla thrust into an ill-fitting uniform. Had they never seen Mighty Joe Young!? Marvel saddled the Beast with the affected vocabulary of a supernerd, one who would never use one word where two with a total of six syllables would do. The only thing Marvel editors couldn’t deliver for him was head-turning bad breath.
“It’s a pleasure to be divested of the encumbrance of our X-Men uniforms,” McCoy says in issue #7. “I wish you would learn to speak English, Hank,” says Ice Man.
By this time, even the most devoted readers were thinking: “I wish Magneto would kill you in this ish, Hank!”
3. Dealing with female characters.
By the Eighties, X-Men was dressing most of its superheroines in variations of dominatrix gear. Marvel Girl had started the original Marvel tradition of women with pathetic powers. Making too much use of her telekinetic abilities often made her weak in the knees during a fight, just like the Fantastic Four’s Invisible Girl.
By the late Seventies, however, Marvel overreacted, turning her into the Dark Phoenix, a woman creature with the power to destroy worlds. But just before that (and killing her off as a menace to the galaxy), they put her into a black corset, G-string and spike-heeled boots. (Think of it as Marvel jerking Jean Grey between the two poles of stupid-looking nerdy girl and menacing sexual predator.)
The way DD figures it, this was catering to the growing X-Men fanbase of young white men, guys who secretly harbored desires their girlfriends — if they had them — would never consent to: The trampling of their johnsons under thigh-highs, smothering, face-sitting, things of this nature.
(See also “Two Girls Out to Have Fun” — issue 189 in 1985. Corsets, bondage collars, maid uniforms, fuck-me spike-heels and fishnets — it’s a thigh-rubbing fest of superhoines in soft pornographic jeopardy. The only thing missing is a frank girl-on-girl sado-masochistic erotic play scene, presumably ruled out by the comics code.)
Cat-fights were also big. Callisto, the leader of the Morlocks, who lived in the sewers under New York City, dressed in tight leather pants and boots. With eye-patch and a got-it-at-Heidelberg-style dueling scar on her face, she was always ready for a close-in knife-fight with Storm, who’d be wearing almost nothing.
Even characters not originally cast in their underwear were dragged into things. The handling of Kitty Pryde surprisingly encompassed both the icky and the prurient. For one adventure, she was left behind as a hostage in an alien spaceship — in her bikini swim suit. What, no other clothes or bedsheets on the Shi’ar spaceship?
In “What Happened to Kitty?” (Uncanny X-Men #179), the answer is given in the first full-page panel. Well, Kitty Pryde was knocked woozy in the previous issue, dragged into the sewers by Callisto’s crew, stripped and dressed in a torn wedding gown slit to show a garter belt and stockings. Two punkettes in similar wear restrain her, presumably to keep the girl from running to the sex crimes division.
Why is Kitty dressed like this? To marry some weird living-in-the-sewer asexual ogre (pulling back on the thigh-rub at the last minute) named Caliban — another famously pathetic X-Men character. Caliban has mercy at the last minute and says he still wants to be her friend. Kitty says OK, because putting her in a Hustler mag bridal gown while she was unconscious was just so much water … through the sewer.
Now all of this has probably given you the impression I don’t like X-Men.
Far from it! Electronically paging through the collection furnishes a touchstone to many things forgotten. If you collected these issues before a parent threw them out in a fit of pique, you’ll have a similar experience. Things long buried in the mind jump up in their musty old sockets as one revisits comics long vanished themselves from near memory. At the very least, it furnishes proof the brain is not yet crippled by dementia.
Indeed, there’s much to like about “40 Years of X-Men.” And, for the purposes of this post, I haven’t covered any of it.
Advertisement from your Marvel mags, ca. early Seventies.
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Posted in Rock 'n' Roll, Sludge in the Seventies, Stumble and Fail at 11:48 am by George Smith
“Why Dontcha Do Me Right” — here.
The above is a song dating from around the time of Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention Absolutely Free album.
And — “Walkin’ for Bumwine in Pasadena Blues,” an instrumental as virtual B-side — here.
Inspired by the two bum wine selling markets on Villa.
From an earlier post here:
Most people think Pasadena is very upscale, a place where it’s hard to find bum wine.
Not true!
In at least one spot, made up of two small markets at the intersection of North Wilson and Villa, Thunderbird and Night Train Express are in stock.
These beverages served and serve a purpose. They’re for when you’ve really hit the skids. And because they are fortified with about 18 percent alcohol by volume, they’re bona fide painkillers.
Yes, it’s been a very bad year here in Pasadena and it looks to only get worse.
Gear: Roger Linn Adrenalinn III
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02.10.10
Posted in Predator State, Stumble and Fail at 12:31 pm by George Smith
Good news, lads! Good news! President Obama has cozied up to the banksters, calling them savvy businessmen for looting the country, wrecking the world economy and rewarding themselves with huge bonuses.
Sign No. 11 that you live in a dysfunctional country: Your President turns into a nauseating suck-up.
The Prez: Oh, the banksters will take all their money to the Republicans later this year! Tell me what should I do, Timmy and Larry?
Timmy & Larry: Bow and scrape.
Being republished thousands of times around the web right now:
President Barack Obama has praised the bosses of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan as “very savvy” and insisted he does not “begrudge” them their success and wealth, in a significant softening of the White House’s attitude towards multimillion-dollar Wall Street bonuses.
Once a staunch critic of outsized pay packets, Obama adopted a strikingly consensual tone when asked this week about a $9m (£5.8m) bonus awarded to Goldman’s Lloyd Blankfein and a $17m (£11m) payday granted to JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon.
“I know both those guys, they are very savvy businessmen,” Obama said in a interview with Bloomberg’s BusinessWeek magazine. “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free-market system.”
What you mean by ‘most’, Kemosabe?
Prediction: After ridicule by everyone except the banksters for a week: “What I meant to say was [mumble]…” And it won’t make a difference.
Reward the parasite class, that’s the strategy!
“Oh. My. God,” sez Krugman.
Previously on How To Know When To Quit Your Country.
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