Jesus the Vampire's Landing Spot

  We've all known talking potatoes--at least that's my favorite name for the those who seem so unthinking and unreasoning that we might as well be talking to a vegetable. It turns out that it's not really such an an inexact parallel. If we really examine the potato closely, it turns out to have many of the traits of humans that we've likely failed to notice. Samuel Butler, in his famous volume "Erewhon," elaborates the traits we have come to think of as human, and how these traits are also to be found in the potato. Butler's explorations were in the context of consciousness and machine learning, which would one day become what we know call Artificial Intelligence. So, next time YOU call someone a Talking Potato, just remember, it might be a bit generous of a comparison. From The Book of the Machines: Even a potato in a dark cellar has a certain low cunning about him which serves him in excellent stead. He knows perfectly well what he wants and how to get...

June 15, 2020 David Lee Roth   has shared several pieces of original artwork which were inspired by the COVID-19 crisis. For the past two months, the  VAN HALEN  singer has been posting paintings on his  Twitter  account that reflect the times and channel the mass anxiety around the novel coronavirus. You can find them below. This is not the first time  Roth  has shared some of his visual art with the public. Back in 2009,  Roth  released dozens of his own drawings and artwork, which he called at the time "authentic originals and incompetent imitations." He offered them up as "an official answer to the question 'what do you do in your spare time?'" According to the  Van Halen News Desk , the  VAN HALEN  frontman always been into art. Throughout his whole life, while touring the world, you could find him doodling on just about anything — setlists, tour riders, female body parts, etc. He was always a major part of the visual side...

One time while in the Army I was waiting in the orderly room to talk to the First Sergeant ("Top" or "Topkick", the second-highest enlisted rank and the senior Non-Commissioned Officer in most battery/company/troop-sized units in the U.S. Army) about something that I wasn't in trouble for, for once. Top was dealing with someone else (who was in trouble) and while waiting I blankly looked around. A particularly asinine and moronic buck sergeant (For those familiar with M*A*S*H , think of a black Frank Burns) who was the Charge of Quarters ("CQ") suddenly walked in and demanded to know what I was doing there. After telling him facetiously that I was on an intelligence-gathering mission, he replied "Well, there's no intelligence here." No fuckin' shit, Sherlock. I cracked up because Colonel Flagg sprang to mind.

  The original model for Air Force gloves? There he was, standing tall before "The Man". He knew he was in some serious trouble. He knew all-too-well that he had violated several regulations that usually carried stiff penalties for doing so. The seriousness of the situation was amplified by the fact that "The Man" was a two-star general; general officers usually have more important things to do than to discipline lowly lieutenants like him. The general reviewed the list of crimes committed, reminded the young officer of all the trouble he caused, and shared with him the fact that he had to smooth things over, from the Governor on down. The general looked serious and was about to pronounce sentence. Dishonorable discharge? Turning big rocks into little ones? What would it be?   Mean and not-so-mean machines: Photo-recon and fighter versions of the versatile P-38 After a few moments of tense silence, the general let him have it: “By the way, wasn’t th...

Lennon doing his Manson impersonation. If only Charlie had a better agent! When a religious nut named Mark D. Chapman pumped four bullets into John Lennon's musical British guts on December 8, 1980, sending him to the big “love-in” down below, almost the entire world recoiled in shock and horror. How could someone gun down this wonderful, peace-loving, generous, and marvelous person? Who in their right mind would subtract such an addition as John Lennon? As Lennon himself said back in the 60's, the Beatles were bigger than Jesus, which provoked a huge backlash against the Beatles in general and Lennon in particular, so it shouldn't have been very surprising that one of Jesus's loyal homies showed Lennon's lime-sucking ass who was really the capo tutti capo of the masses that make up approximately 99% of the human population that both claimed to represent, and, most important, TO LEAD AND TO RULE. Much like the Kennedys, Lennon apparently fucked with the wr...

Ian Fleming's James Bond Thanks to the tragedy of the current pandemic and the miracle of modern technology, I’ve been watching a lot of old and new shows, with The Prisoner being the next candidate for binge-watching. Among the myriad choices is another long-running franchise brought to us by EON (Everything Or Nothing) Productions and many others and starring the baddest-assed Straight White Anglo Saxon Male this side of where the planet Krypton used to be: James Bond, MI6 Agent 007. A few years ago a friend asked what I did over the weekend, and I made a confession of sorts. I admitted that I watched a bunch of movies; the kind that I don't normally watch, but once I watched the first, I got hooked and watched several more. She looked on with an increasingly disturbed expression forming as I continued; movies that are made primarily for men, although some women are known to enjoy them; men run the show and have all the power and all of the fun, while women ar...