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You Should Be a Joke Writer

You're totally hilarious, and you can find the humor in any situation. Whether you're spouting off zingers, comebacks, or jokes about life... You usually can keep a crowd laughing, and you have plenty of material. You have the makings of a great comedian - or comedic writer.

What Type of Writer Should You Be?

Welcome to the Brain-Drain

Or:  Worst Frickin' President EVER!

Which are the four words my dad and I use when we sit in the front room and watch the news together.

Seriously, I think they all need to go, his cronies, all of them...I know I have a tendency to get incoherently ranty when discussing the Bush administration.  This particular  pile of crap needs to be hurled at Alberto Gonzales, I think.

lupabitch

  alerted me to this particular news item, which deals with the psychological torture of people that wind up as inmates of our military prisons.  Apparently, they are pulling pages directly out of the MK-ULTRA playbook.

I've written a little bit about this topic before, but basically what MK-ULTRA was was a CIA program in the 1950's that utilized shock treatment and LSD to perform mind control experiments.  There are theories that Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan were both products of this.

Having been under psychiatric outpatient care at one point in my life, this is the kind of thing I can see myself getting very paranoid about.

What is very scary to me is that our military seems to be intent on learning as much about the effects of psychological torture as it can (and make no mistake, all of these stories about Abu Ghraib and Gitmo aren't stuff that just happened without rhyme or reason, there's a method to this madness) , possibly in the efforts to create some kind of master race of killing machine soldiers.  The kind of techniques that are talked about in the Alternet article result in ego destruction, a complete separation of a person from their very motivations, from what makes them who they are.

As Lupa talked about elsewhere, there is a healthy way of working with one's ego, of removing what doesn't work (or allowing it to be removed), of moving the mental furniture around, so to speak.  Those of us who do meditation and study metaphysics know that this kind of work can be painful but necessary.

I can only wonder what will happen if the next president is another friend of the Bush Crime Family...

It is perhaps a miscarriage of blogging justice that I haven't talked about or linked to this guy.

And I say this partly because I want to talk a little bit about one of the things I was doing with myself those three months I was away from LJ.  I became addicted to YouTube. 

I started looking at it, to find really cool Genesis videos from the seventies (this one includes Peter Gabriel as King Canute--which sort of pings me in a strong way, don't know why.) 

But then I started finding the vloggers--people who do a blog on video.  I found a couple that I would say were the best on YouTube, very well done, nicely edited work by these folks, like film makers some were.

But this Sean Bedlam guy, he came on the scene with nothing but a cell phone camera, and his own awesomeness.  And his raw talent is bigger than all of YouTube.  I am not kidding when I say this guy is going to be a star of the first order someday, doing standup comedy--I sometimes like to try to predict what the next big thing is, and my Spidey senses are tingling on this.

An example of his genius.

Here's what he did when a couple of nimrods left nasty messages on his page.

When I fully grasped the level of this man's talent and genius, after picking myself up off the floor, I did what to my mind seemed the only logical thing to do, I sent him a message asking him to marry me (!--I know, but that's the way my mind operates.)

He, being of stout character and sound mind, sent a message back that said "Nooo...we can be friends."  I could practically see him, looking at me sideways out of the corner of his eye, with a kind of squinty, "What's her deal?" kind of look.

Anywho, he continued to rock YT, and then someone even stranger than me (but with the added punch of having a shitload of $$$ at their disposal) actually contacted him and somehow got him to believe they were a movie producer, and that they had a movie they wanted him to be in. 

To make things more amazingly weird, he took them up on their offer to fly him from his home in Australia, to their home in Fresno, California.  After a while, it became evident to him and his girlfriend that there was no movie, there was no script, and they were holed up in the pool cabana of a seriously insane bitch lady.

I told him he and his gf were very lucky that they didn't wind up floating face down in the pool, like William Holden did in Sunset Blvd.

In a bizarre way, I think the experience was actually very good for him.  He managed to get away from the weird lady, and then he saw the US up close, with our poor, homeless people (as an SF Bay Area native, the homeless situation doesn't even register with me any more--his reaction to seeing it up close made me embarrassed to be so desensitized), with our soccer moms with their suv's full of screaming brats, with our crazy bitches with money they made from foreclosures...

And he's smart enough to realize that he can use this as fodder for  his  future comedy.  He's an Aussie with a  lysergically  snarky  attitude, and a well developed  hatred for the USA.  This man is the Next Bill Hicks. 

I had to stop looking at his videos so much and reading his myspace blog, because I got all uncool and stalker-y with him.  I'm hoping the amount of people I send to look at his stuff might make up for that.

Anyway, there I was, in YouTubia, and I started thinking, "Why don't I get one of those cameras and make my own vids?"  Sadly, this was a dumb idea, I wound up taking five hours to edit a nine minute video that, because of the setting I recorded it on (and there are like, three different things with 25 different settings on them, and you have to get a combination of just the right three--it was hopeless!)  came out completely messed up.

So I decided I made a better blogger than a vlogger.  It pretty much ended when I saw someone else make a "farewell" video, explaining that he was leaving because he hadn't done anything, no work or anything, for three months because he had become addicted to YT.  I realized I was in danger of that myself.

One more thing about the Sean Bedlam guy.  That last video I linked to up there?  Which I think you should all go look at, even though it was anti-American, but in a cool way.  There was  an equally cool  "American  response " kind of video,  that  is  a perfect  compliment to the first one, and I think everyone should see both of them, seriously.  Don't make me come over there. 

There was a comment on the response video, where someone said,

"So you're the American, what are YOU doing?", and rather than get misinterpreted and start a fight on there I thought I'd answer the commentor here: 

"He's offering motivation and moral support to us other Americans who also think things are fucked up with our government and that the Office of the Presidency needs a major ream job to eject a stubborn Turd.

Not a lot we can do, besides get pissed, protest, vote, and air our opinions in an interesting and artistic way, as this guy has done. "

 

I had a couple more things to say, but I've waxed on long enough for one entry.

I just LOVE Harry Potter!!!

Oh, the Christian moms won't like this one bit!

That was Daniel Radcliffe in a promo from his new theater gig.

And, Jarvis Cocker, doing an old Hawkwind song that always makes me wanna put on a cowboy hat and shake my moneymaker all night.