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January 06
January 31, 2006
I think it’s fair to say that Brokeback Mountain was a very straight homosexual movie — a movie that singlehandedly redefined what’s “gay” versus what’s “homosexual”, whereas THIS SITE, and the documentary it’s promoting, 10 MPH is just plain gay, regardless of the sexual orientation of its creators, who are probably heterosexual because I can’t imagine any gays who’d do anything this gay. Basically, it documents two guys’ journey across America on a Segway. Here’s how they describe it:
The film: 10 mph
Two guys quit stodgy corporate jobs, scrounged up all the savings they could, collected credit cards, and stepped - or better yet - scooted forward to follow their biggest dream: to become filmmakers. Josh Caldwell rode a Segway from Seattle to Boston, while his buddy Hunter Weeks directed a film they both shot about the experience and about the moments leading up to this crazy twist on the American road trip. From cubicle farms to the open road, the film will chronicle how these guys ultimately changed their lives forever. They did what so many of us have always wanted to do - gave it all up for the passion inside.
More like a Seg-gay!
Posted by: darksandal in Uncategorized | Permalink Comments
January 31, 2006
Some thoughts as I continue to read the Bible at an average of 1/3 page per day:
1). Many of the Biblical names that have since been discontinued and purged from the baby name books would make great pet/large working animal names:
“Here Shem … Here boy!”
“Sorry, but Aprachshad only eats WET food.”
“And it’s Ur of the Chaldeans by a nose!”
2). By Gum, if the creationists are right about this whole intelligent design thing, then every-last-fucking one of us is a Jew. Seriously, though. Maybe I just haven’t gotten to the unJewifying chapters yet, or maybe there’s a subsequent select Jewification at a later stage. ???
3). Models of “Traditional” Marriage Thus Far Illustrated in the Bible (keep in mind we’re only 13 chapters in):
-Incest
-Polygamy, and, in Chapter 13 …
-Wife Swapping/Pawning Your Wife off on Rich Dudes (a slightly modified version of the Indecent Proposal Protocol).
Check it out:
When [Abram] was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife Sarai, “I know well that you are a woman beautiful in appearance; and when the Egyptians see you, they will say, ‘This is his wife’; then they will kill me, but they will let you live. Say you are my sister, so that it may go well with me because of you, and that my life may be spared on your account.”
Good lookin’ out for yourself, Abe — let the Pharaoh fuck your wife for a while! Good thing she had VD:
But the Lord afflicted Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai, Abram’s wife.
And where do you think she picked that up? Pharaoh then asks a perfectly logical question and finds a logical solution:
“What is this you have done to me? Why is my thing thing burnin like this? Why did you not tell me that she was your wife? Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’ so that I took her for my wife? Now then, here is your wife. Get this bitch up outta my face.” (Genesis 12:17-20).
Posted by: darksandal in Exe-Jesus | Permalink 3 Comments
January 31, 2006
Non-Prophet has yet another amazing guest blog from an illuminippie. This time it’s psychedelic drug guru Ralph Metzner on the collapse of civilization. Peep it HERE
Posted by: darksandal in Uncategorized | Permalink Comments
January 31, 2006
I had a really nice blogcation last week, but I’m glad to be back. The new issue is out and we’re working on some redesigns of the site and switching over from TypePad to MovableType so we can host more online ads and lots more goodies soon.
If you’re interested in advertising on the blog and site here, please email us at advertising@toiletpaperonline.com.
Posted by: darksandal in Uncategorized | Permalink 1 Comment
January 31, 2006
First of all, I was camping and suddenly, well, I was in my tent, roasting marshmallows with my friends who were teenagers (and who were my friends). Suddenly we had weapons and we ran into a giant sloth. It was so big that we had these giant old weapons and we went charging at it with our swords .. actually, spears. And suddenly we had an idea: We put up a trap … actually, a cage. And we had an idea: We could put some bait … actually, some food in the cage and the sloth would be hungry and that was our idea. And we could put some fur on and then we had an idea: We could stuff the fur and hang it up on and that was all we could do. It was very cool. Well, my cousin’s names were: William, John, Michael and, not Peter Pan. First of all, we had an idea: We could put some water in and a big old kitchen in that big old cage. And that’s all we could do. We put some things in that cage: we put some shelves and water and that was all he would need. And we put some things in the shelves and that was what we did. We didn’t have anything to do then. And then we put some fire in so he would have light at night time. Then we went back to our tent. And then we put a flag on top. And that was what we did. And then the next morning we ran into a momma sloth, a dadda sloth and a baby sloth. There were too many. We were surrounded. There were daddies and babies and moms. And then we had an idea: The cage was giant that all of them could fit in. And then all the shelves were in and everything they needed. And that was all we did. We put the piece on the part of the cage so they couldn’t escape. We put in our big old fort and those were our pets. And that was all we could do. And that was our idea. And our fort was about 50 and a trillion and 54 inches long, and that was very good. And that was all we could do. And we had our bows and arrows and that was all we could do. And we had so much lunch that we had 50 and 54 and a trillion gallons of food. And suddenly there was a giant big shadow, but it wasn’t a sloth. It was a giant Bigfoot. And then there was a frightening thing. Everything was surrounded by Bigfoots. Then we saw another big cage, and they fitted into the fort too, and those were our pets too, and then, until now, we lived happily ever after. And they had enough food to eat.
Posted by: darksandal in Ursen | Permalink Comments
January 28, 2006
Noel asked me to blog about the time I met Timothy Treadwell, the late bear activist who’s the subject of Werner Herzog’s wonderful documentary The Grizzly Man.
Don’t want to overstate my experience as I probably spent all of a half hour with him. But it was in Katmai National Park in Southeastern Alaska. Treadwell’s home turf, where he spent thirteen summers and where he was killed in the fall of 2003.
I met him in the summer of 1998 when I was on a bear viewing trip from Kodiak Island. For what it’s worth, I’ve always had a thing for bears. Not like Treadwell, mind you as I’m about as “outdoorsy” as Woody Allen. But there’s something about being near these animals that’s… how do I put this without sounding like I’m from Boulder… let’s just say transformative. More recently, I went to Churchill, Canada to watch polar bears. Even though I was with a tour group comprised mostly of retired dentists who thought they were funny, it was still unbelievable.
At Katmai I was with a family of German tourists who spoke next to no English and our guide, who was nice but rather stoic. I got the sense that Treadwell hadn’t spoken to anyone in a few days. So we talked bear…
He told me about when a bear runs near you you can actually feel the ground shake. He told me how he often had to get out of his tent and bluff charge curious bears head on. His rationale was that if a bear stumbled on him inside his tent, it would get scared and kill him. I read his mawkish and barely readable book Among Grizzlies in which he talks about forging alliances with older bears who’d chased off less friendly bears.
He also went on this rant about how fucked the man bear relationship was. I’m paraphrasing here, but I recall him saying: “Imagine if I came into your home and you had to die because I fucked up.”
Ironic in light of how his life ended.
In short, I ate our conversation up with a fat fucking ladle. The fact that his sidekick, Timmy The Fox (pictured below) trailed lovingly at his feet lent him a gravitas roughtly the equivalent of the Pied Piper meets Jeff Spicoli.
The fact that he was even there at all, in the bush, in a place only accessible by boat or float plane... it really was the last thing I expected to find. I often compare it to the scene in Apocalypse Now when Martin Sheen and company finally reach Kurtz in the middle of the jungle and bam, there’s Dennis Hopper.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved seeing the bears but they were sleeping mostly and grazing on sedge grass. (Imagine a pasture full of BIG brown cows with mountains and glaciers in the background). And yet, the first time one of them stopped grazing and ran across the meadow, I instinctively grinded my feet into the ground the same way I do on airplanes when there’s turbulence. Somehow I think this will protect me from crashing.
The bears were a good 75 yards out, but just knowing there was no fence, no ranger, no gun…. no shit, huh?
I spoke to Treadwell over the phone in the summer of 2001. I was in Brooklyn and trying to write a piece about him for an online magazine. It was May and he was getting ready to head back up to Alaska. He said he had a low opinion of journalists. He also said that I knew his location and that made cooperating with anything I wrote potentially dangerous. You see, Treadwell didn’t want word to get out about, uh, Katmai National Park. As if it was some sort of secret. As if I didn’t find him without trying.
The irony of our conversation was that he talked to me for half an hour about why he didn’t want to talk to me. He did mention that his friends thought he was due to be picked off any season. He also said, and I know I’m not the only one he told about this, that if he died he wanted his body thrown in the woods so that the bear that killed him wouldn’t be destroyed. This, of course, was preposterous. The park service barely tolerated him to begin with, that they weren’t going to ignore his carcass, much less keep around a bear with a newly forged association between people and food, it was just spin for journalists with no experience in the wild.
I know Treadwell was a bit delusional. I’ve read The Grizzly Maze by Nick Jans and by Mike Lapinski. I know his media narrative was crap. He wasn’t protecting the bears from poachers any more than I’m currently protecting my manhood from the hordes of bikini models who wish to rape me.
Lapinksi argues in his book that Treadwell was bipolar. That when he was up, it was like the bears couldn’t, or wouldn’t, touch him. When he was down, he didn’t care what they did. It’s just one theory and it doesn’t explain everything. I found this observation to be particularly telling, it’s from a nature photographer Joel Bennet who logged weeks with Treadwell in the wild. As told to Lapinski:
Think of Tim out on that coast, hunkered in a leaky tent, always wet or damp, no fire to dry clothes or cook on, bug-bitten, living on peanut butter. Alone most of the time, no one to talk to — and this from a guy who loved company… Day after day, weeks at a time, season after season for thirteen years… what sort of a man would do this?
Exactly.
Treadwell’s life is fascinating because he embodied so many American pathologies, good and bad. He ran away from middle class normalcy, changed his name, changed his accent for a time and then ran into the woods. He was both selfless (he taught school children about bears and the environment for little to no money) and a total self promoter, who hustled sponsorships from celebrities to finance his lifestyle. He loved nature, but it killed him.
I can’t help but have fond feelings for Treadwell even though I probably shouldn’t. He did have a big hand in getting his girlfriend Amie Huguenard killed. And to say nothing of the fact that two of his beloved bears died because he went into their house and fucked up.
Posted by: johndicker in Uncategorized | Permalink 99 Comments
January 28, 2006
Frank Black is my hero!
Posted by: suedebritches in Music | Permalink 3 Comments
January 27, 2006
This week in podcasts. This is an interesting interview via WNYC’s Leonard Lopate with Clinton operatives Begala and Carville. Specifically, their comments on the bungled Kerry campaign are worth the download. Apparently the Kerry mafia forbid anyone from so much as mentioning Bush by name at the 2004 convention, ensuring it would be as forgetable as the one in 2000. At least that one had the Gore on Gore deep throat action.
I agree with their point that Dems can win by being centrist or liberal, but not by being weak. Unfortunately they discredit themselves by insisting that Hillary Clinton, aka Joe Lieberman with a vagina, and Harry Reid are “strong leaders.” Shit, I’d hate to meet a genuinely “weak” Democrat.
There’s also some decent analysis of Dems in trouble here on WBUR’s On Point, a podcast must.
In less wonky podcasts, The Onion’s news brief is available via podcast. It’s short and sweet.
If anyone besides Noel is reading this and likes Podcasts, I’m all ears and iTunes for your recommendations.
Posted by: johndicker in Uncategorized | Permalink 1 Comment
January 25, 2006
Death of Hope: A Culinary Review
Sitting here with a Singapore Sling in hand, or more properly, located just to the right of this electro-mechanical contrivance, it’s hard for me to believe the banality of my recent epicurian experience.
–Cut to–
Some hours or days previous, our intrepid triumvirate ventured to the deep
reaches of suburbia to partake
of requisite sustenance and to otherwise entertain our jaded and cynical (liberal) minds and bodies. As the Fates saw fit, the winds of fortune took us to some
celluloid copy of culinary experience, such as can be found in any of the multifarious
strip malls and enterprise
zones of fearful lacklustery. At the’aforementioned monstrosity of cuisine moderne, we three ordered the following: tenders, chicken, avec hot sauce;
sandwich, chicken fillet, also with hot sauce; hamburger, sans bun due to a hereditary condition effecting the gastro-intestinal constitution.
Some thousands of televisions filled the flat and uninteresting fuckscape of decoupage. Intelligent conversation could just barely pierce the otherwise oppressively soulless atmosphere, if "atmosphere" is not too ostentatious a word to describe the ambiance therein. After an absurd passage of time, the waitress (to be known hereafter as "Piggy") returned with victuals such to be deeply troubling to those with any kind of
minimally-reasonable expectation.
Appearing very drab, almost grey in colouration, all three entree’s appeared to have been purchased in bulk from the (very nearby) Sam’s Club, and hoisted upon the unsuspecting consumer with the kind of brazen disregard that I generally anticipate in only the most hardened politician.
All three of our assemblage were famished approaching the point of madness, and so we attacked the victuals with abandon. Our meals were served in thin,
basket-shaped, cardboard vehicles, accompanied by no fewer than two (2) plastic
knives wrapped in plastic, and precisely no (0) forks. A spiciness lacking any
depth or complexity in my chicken fillet was enough to call for refill of my
beverage, our dear friend Padraig also needed draught. Very proud of herself,
Piggy recalled our respective beverages, pointing out to us her singular achievement.
We were all beaming at her accomplishment.
Late in the meal, conversation turned to the similarity of the establishment to Red Robin, only with less taste and flair. Then we escaped into the night, whereupon good liquor and better company provided respite from these otherwise
dark and void (Gen. 1:2) impulses.
We’ve only fate and hunger to account for our choice of food vendor on that evening, but at least we can offer the public the following (hard-learned) lessons:
1. One must never allow hunger to be reached such that it adversely affects judgements on important culinary matters.
2. The elixer of alcohol can solve many of the more troublesome culinary problems that afflict mankind.
3. Piggy cannot and should not be trusted.
4. Avoid at all costs the chain restaurants of the suburbs. The fact that they are the soulless creations of Moloch can be forgiven; the fact of their subpar fare cannot.
Posted by: tscardgage in Uncategorized | Permalink Comments
January 23, 2006
I know the traffic on The TP Blog skews south, but for all of yous inclined to break north on the I to the 2 to the 5, please come to my pub quiz. That’s right, I host an authentic pub quiz Tuesday nights at Nallen’s Irish Pub: 1429 Market St in the so-called LoDo section of so-called Denver.
This week we’ve got a visual round on gay cartoon characters, a music round on songs about guns, a regular old round on words that sound dirty but aren’t, like angina or my last name.
We give away lots of free beer and random crap. It’s quite fun. If you like it, please tell Alexis at Shugas that she should bring us down for a trial run.
Oh, and check out our website.
Posted by: johndicker in Uncategorized | Permalink Comments
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