The Alternate Reality wall

The wall of my kitchen/dinette is covered with headlines clipped from the _Weekly Word News_, a unique gem among checkout-lane tabloids. Most of the other shit-sheets are full of scandal and gossip about celebs—sexual affairs (straight and gay), weddings and divorces, terminal illnesses, domestic abuse and other crimes, that sort of thing—about which I care much less than I do about the geology of the moons of Jupiter. But WWN is devoted to such bizarre, surrealistic absurdity that I consider it my window on an alternate reality—and as a sci-fi fan, I not only firmly believe in alternate realities and parallel universes, I also believe most of them to be far preferable to the one we’re stuck in. I’m particularly impressed by WWN’s coverage of news stories about space aliens, and over the 15 or more years I’ve been collecting these, space alien news predominates (although their coverage of this seems to have declined lately). Following are some of the better headlines, with notes and comments by me.

FIRST-EVER INTERVIEW WITH A SPACE ALIEN! Wish I’d saved what he said.

“I KILLED THREE SPACE ALIENS FOR THE *CIA*!”

IS SATAN A SPACE ALIEN? See Arthur C. Clarke’s _Childhood’s end_, in which members of a benevolent and superior alien civilization subjugate Earth (for our own good, to save us from our own stupidity) and actually do turn out to look like devils.

NEVADA HUNTER SHOOTS SPACE ALIEN! What was a space alien doing in Nevada?

SPACE ALIEN REMAINS FOUND IN DINOSAUR’S BELLY!

SPACE ALIENS ARE STEALING OUR FROGS!

SPACE ALIEN ESCAPES! From jail, presumably. I forget what he was arrested for. Perhaps for stealing frogs.

WASHINGTON THINK TANKS ARE RIDDLED WITH SPACE ALIENS! That would explain some of the ideas that come out of them.

YOUR DOCTOR COULD BE AN ALIEN! That might not be such a bad thing, particularly if his fees were reasonable. An alien couldn’t be much worse than a lot of human doctors, and would probably be considerably better than some. Remember, E.T. could heal with a touch of his glowing LED fingertip. And human anatomy and physiology would be a snap for them because they’re depicted as being about 95 percent humanoid themselves, except for weird eyes and skulls.

ALIENS THINK EARTH IS A BAD NEIGHBORHOOD! Well, no surprise there; so do a lot of humans. But this one, which is at least 10 years old (I’ve neglected to date any of them), is particularly interesting when compared with one only a few weeks ago that says “REDNECK ALIENS TAKE OVER TRAILER PARK! ‘There goes the neighborhood!’” Notice that at first, aliens think the neighborhood is bad before they get here, and then it’s the aliens coming that ruins the neighborhood. Notice also that the neighborhood is a trailer park, which is often considered so bad to begin with that there’s not much that could ruin it. Notice also the clever and subtle way WWN exploits the current paranoia and xenophobia about illegal “alien” immigration: space aliens equal illegal immigrants equal trailer trash. And of course there’s the fact that probably a lot of readers of WWN are rednecks and/or “trailer trash” themselves. (I can afford to be insulting because _I’m_ “trailer trash” myself.) And a common idea in sci-fi literature is that of alien civilizations sending their criminals and misfits to Earth precisely _because_ they think it’s a bad neighborhood to begin with. Remarkably sophisticated, multi-level writing for a rag that’s supposed to appeal to nitwits.

And several good headlines have nothing to do with space aliens:

A PTERODACTYL BIT MY ARM OFF!

ADAM & EVE’S SKELETONS FOUND—IN COLORADO! Well, of course—where else? Probably in Colorado Springs. I found out later that the picture WWN printed with this, showing two skeletons lying in a primitive burial site, was ripped off from a _National Geographic_ article about an archaeological dig somewhere in the Middle East or Africa. Or maybe Mt Vesuvius; I forget.

GAY CHIMP FALLS IN LOVE WITH CIRCUS DWARF! I guess it’s a toss-up as to who would be more insulted by this, the chimpanzee or the dwarf.

“Glowing image of Virgin Mary appears on radiator hose!” Well, she’s been seen on taco shells and toasted cheese sandwiches, why not a radiator hose?

“It’s a well-known fact that General George Washington lived on hamburgers while he was fighting the British.” Picture of the standard dollar-bill Gilbert Stuart portrait (painted about 15 years after George fought in the Revolution), on which is superimposed a picture of a lady’s hand holding a hamburger with a bite taken out of it. One source says the “modern” hamburger as we know it (and as depicted) was invented around 1916. (You mean Yorktown didn’t have a McDonald’s in 1781?)

“Was my husband reincarnated as a tarantula?” This was probably a question asked of the staff psychic, who is called something like Serena. I forget what it was about the tarantula that reminded the questioner of her husband; maybe they both had hairy legs. In terms of the Hindu doctrine of the transmigration of souls, the guy must have had some pretty bad karma.

“FACE ON MARS IS TRYING TO TALK! The lips are moving! say stunned scientists.” Get HAL to read it. Of course it’s talking in English. My note on this says Mars is saying “Get these dinosaurs off me!”, so there must have been a headline that I failed to save, about dinosaurs being found on Mars.

ZOOKEEPER SUFFOCATES IN 200 POUNDS OF ELEPHANT POOP! Picture shows an elephant squatting over a 3-foot-high pile of what we’re supposed to believe is shit, with human arms and legs sticking out from underneath. I’ve recently been interpreting this metaphorically as referring to the GOP suffocating the nation under six years of their shit, but WWN published this years before the Christo-fascist Republicans came into power, and the paper has a decidedly rightwing slant anyway.

However, my favorite one, which raises so many issues that I’m saving it for a separate rant: in 2-inch-high letters on a double-page spread: “Captured space alien’s grim prophecy: GOD WILL DESTROY EARTH IN THE YEAR 2000!” (This is not the same alien who escaped after being arrested for stealing frogs.) Well, the most obvious question in 2006 is: what happened? What does this say about the journalistic integrity of WWN? Stand by for breaking news analysis and commentary.

Although I’ve spent several days writing this, it’s being published on Thanksgiving (or, as I fondly call it, Emu Day), even though it has absolutely nothing to do with Thanksgiving or emus. I could say a lot about Emu Day (like the Pilgrims telling the Wampanoags, “Gosh, thanks for saving our miserable, stupid asses from starvation; now I think we’ll return the favor by stealing your land from you and genocidally murdering most of you.”), but I may save that for later, too. And I’m not going to wish you, dear reader, a happy Emu Day. You can just be thankful that I’m finally signing off.

Now what do we do?

I'm not going to say I hate raining on the rather hysterically triumphalist parade of the victorious Donkeys, because actually I'm going to enjoy raining on it. I'm a pessimist, cynic, curmudgeon, grouchy grinch, Eeyore, and insofar as possible, a pus-filled zit on the face of every cheerfully grinning sweetness-and-light imbecile. So I'd just like to ask: After six years of the so-called Democrats acting like sniveling, gutless, spineless, castrated patsies who let the forces of evil bring this country and most of the world so perilously close to disaster without making the slightest effort to impede them and in many instances happily cooperating with them, how can anyone realistically think they're going to suddenly start growing some guts, spine, and balls (metaphorically speaking for women, of course, Nancy) and stand up and do what they're supposed and expected to do? (Prize-winning train wreck of syntax there. I've been reading John Stuart Mill lately.) On the contrary, they seem all too ready, after being insulted, lied about, kicked, bludgeoned, raped, and generally brutalized, to come crawling out of the emergency room waving an "olive branch" of reconciliation and "bipartisanship," of all things! This is NOT what we elected them to do. We elected them to KICK ASS!!! and they're obviously not going to do it.

Years ago, before things had gotten anywhere near this hopeless, Jim Hightower made a statement which has become one of my favorite quotes: "Some people think what this country needs is a good third party. I think what we need is a good second party." And after all the blood, sweat, and tears we spent getting them back in the driver's seat in Congress (though not yet in the Weisshaus), we still don't have it. It was N-O-T for this dismal, disgraceful, disgusting, fucked up mess that Jefferson, Washington, Adams, et al. pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. They're looking down on us now and weeping.

Whence the name

In my first post, I said I might tell where the name "dull dull boring dull" came from, aside from the fact that I am.

Around 1979-'80 I became briefly involved as keyboardist in a nihilist-anarchist punk band whose name I hesitate to mention on the web for fear the web Nazis may find it and visit me early some morning and take me away to a re-education camp. We could never get any public gigs because no theater or club would publicize our name outside their place. This may lead one to surmise that the name was scatological; more accurately, it was proctological; that should give you some hints for speculation. (My involvement with the Church of the Subgenius began about the same time, which may give a clue that I was in a somewhat unstable mental condition. I usually describe the period as a combination of a nervous breakdown and midlife crisis.) My association with the band was brief because I was the only one in the band who could read music - a quite unusual skill in garage bands, and, as anybody can tell who hears most of them, quite unnecessary. Certainly the other members were competent enough, in total absence of any formal musical training, to do what they wanted to do, which was to make as much ear-splitting noise as possible. But I think they secretly resented me for my elitist skills and eventually found a devious way to nudge me out of the band: they held "practices" without telling me when they were and then told me I couldn't be in the band because I missed practices - as if what they did needed to be practiced anyway. This was among the nicer things they did. They were all (4 others besides me) mental and physical basket-cases in one way or another, the most extreme being so psychotic that she'd become violent if she forgot to take her meds and would come roaring out of her disgusting hovel of a room in a paranoid frenzy and run around the house screaming hysterically and waving a knife. I count myself lucky that they simply marginalized me and didn't seriously maim me and burn my house to the ground in a fit of pique. In fact, the "band" completely disintegrated soon after they booted me, simply because the members were too screwed up to keep together even such a minimalist act as that. Actually, although the talents were minimal, the equipment was anything but. The "leader" was a techie-freak who spent a small fortune amassing a huge battery of equipment in order to maximize the amount of ear-splitting noise they could make. It was an interesting group, while it lasted.

Anyway, enough about the band for now; I may expand their history later, and will probably at some point discuss the one member I stayed in contact with after the band folded, up until he died recently. The relevance here is simply that "Dull dull boring dull" was the name of one of the "songs" in their repertoire. I can't even remember the names of many of the other songs, it was so long ago. One, for instance, was called "Kill your parents"; they were all, in one way or another, about violence, mayhem, alienation - all the lovely things which psychotics pride themselves on. Oh, and incidentally, at the same time I was associated with this pack of raving maniacs, I was organist in the most conservative, uptight Episcopal church in Boulder - what might be called leading a double life. It was an interesting period.

Yes, I'm dull and boring.

Really, reeally, REEEALLY dull and BORING!! Excitement makes me nervous and edgy. In conversations, people sometimes interrupt me as if I weren't talking at all; they don't seem to hear me. In the musical "Chicago," one of the characters sings the poignant song "Mr Cellophane" because people look right through him as if he isn't there; I'm Mr Cellophane. I often talk to myself because I'm the only person who seems to pay much attention to what I'm saying. That may be why the idea of blogging appeals to me. Blogging is tantamount to talking to yourself, since you have no idea, in absence of any feedback, whether anybody is reading you. I talk to myself a lot anyway because I live alone. I talk to my dog, too, and although he sometimes answers me in dog-language, it doesn't make for scintillatingly intellectual dialogue. Blogging is quintessentially narcissistic because not only is it basically talking TO yourself, it is also to a great extent talking ABOUT yourself--another reason it appeals to me, since I'm notoriously narcissistic.

It is also quintessentially narcissistic to think anyone should give a flying bleep what I think about anything, but as I AM narcissistic, this is not the first time I've made such an assumption. Back in the period 1986-'89--back before the Internet, when we communicated by impressing cuneiform characters on clay tablets--a sort of predecessor of blogging was something called rant-zines. During this period I edited and published about 10 issues of a rant-zine called "The Occasional Journal of Nothing in Particular" (short title, OJNIP), and like most rant-zines, it consisted of narcissistic ravings about the fascinating ideas of my marvelous mind. Before the Internet, of course, publication meant snail-mail, and although postage then was nowhere near 39¢ a piece, it was enough to add up when you had a mailing list of about 20 or 30. OJNIP did have, if I may be so modest, some rather interesting articles, my favorite being a scholarly discussion of shit called "The Summa Scatologica." Slightly below that were things like a take-off on Henry Adams' "The Dynamo and the Virgin" called "The Dynamo, the Virgin, and the Dobbshead." OJNIP was a spin-off of my brief infatuation with the Church of the SubGenius, the mythical leader of which was "Bob" Dobbs. (I blush to admit now that I was naïve enough to be infatuated with something so stupid for as long as I was.) In fact, most of the mailing list, outside my own small circle of weird, psychotic friends, was taken from a SubGenius publication called "High weirdness by mail," which consisted of a directory of, among other things, other weird rant-zines. Oddly enough, OJNIP died of its success. To my great surprise, a number of the recipients gave me enthusiastic and voluminous feedback, as well as copies of their own rant-zines, and as the mailing list and feedback grew as a result of coverage in "High weirdness," I actually became a little nervous about being so successful, as well as more burdened by the mushrooming postage costs, and I ceased publication in 1989. But it was fun while it lasted, and has now emboldened me to try my hand at new and far more boring narcissistic blather via the Bloggosphere. So here I am. Bow down before my vast and fascinating intellect and tell me I'm wonderful, ye plebeian masses!

Over and out.

O gawd, not another blogger!

Yes, another blogger. Why? Because my guru told me it would be good for my soul or mental health or some such thing, and he is my master and I do everything he tells me to--within reason. Why "dull dull boring dull"? Because I am, although the name actually derives from something in my history, about which more later, maybe. Right now it's almost 2:00 in the morning and I'm tired and cold. Over and out.