Month: May 2024

34 is the magic number

New Yorker was ready for this well in advance.
Art by John Cuneo

In news that actually does surprise me, Drumpf just got found guilty of all 34 charges he was facing in the Stormy Daniels case. JESUS FUCK. I actually am kind of stunned by this. TRUMP, of all people, actually being held responsible for something? Who even knew it was possible? Joe, my housemate, told me he was tempted to wake me up with the news when he read it this morning, and I almost wished he had; what a way to start the day…

Anyway, the cult of Convicted Felon Donald Trump are reacting as predictably as you might expect, and I have a feeling the election is going to get REALLY ugly… there’s been a few Republican figures who have been hesitant in interviews about whether or not they’ll accept the election results, and I think this will just solidify the “no” position; there will be few if any Republicans that will accept if the election goes Biden’s way. And I kind of understand Steve Shives’ hesitancy to get too excited if an appeal makes it to the Supreme Court, which has been bought and paid for by the Republicans to save them from this sort of thing. Whatever actually happens, they won’t let this pass easily. At the same time, Steve’s right: let’s enjoy the moment nonetheless, cos Convicted Felon Trump’s got a ton of other charges in other trials still to come, and mocking him is never not fun…

Something curious

I’ve been doing a wee bit of research on chaos magick and other things esoteric lately, cos for whatever reason that’s the way my useless brain seems to be turning at the moment, although when I say “research” I mostly mean these two videos:

These come from a channel called What Magic is This?, and they have a bunch of other interesting-looking stuff (I also quite liked their video on William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin).

Anyway, midnight last night rolls around after watching the second video, and there’s me doing the latest Wordle… and the word of the day is, well, “chaos”.

I’d like to apologise to anyone who hasn’t played today’s games, but tough, I’m not going to. Anyway, that was… odd, to say the least. It’s not necessarily the oddest thing like this to happen to me; I used to call these “synchroincidences” cos they struck me as falling between those two stools, in that maybe they were meaningful (which, as I’ve always understood it, is what separates synchronicity from just coincidence) or maybe they were just shit happening. Who could tell which was which? It was when they started piling up that things really got weird, but that’s another story. This story is odd enough as it is. If I were inclined to think in terms of omens, I might consider this one… albeit an omen of what exactly, I don’t know…

Satan’s what now?

I am not a Biblical scholar or theologian, but I do know there’s more than one set of Ten Commandments in the Bible and there’s some debate over which of them is the “proper” one. But most people evidently agree that there are, in any event, ten of them… as opposed to this chud who seems to think there’s only nine:

A former Park Rapids School Board member wants to display the 10 Commandments on school property, carved in stone.
Dennis Dodge’s 32 years on the school board ended in 2022. On Monday, May 20, Dodge presented a monument that he proposes to donate to the school district, to place on school grounds in Sept. 2025, after the landscaping is completed for the school improvements currently under construction.
Concept drawings of the stone monument, to be constructed by Dakota Monument Co. of Fargo, N.D., show a display of the 10 Commandments on one side and the words, “We must put God back into our educational system before we lose our children and this great nation,” and text crediting the donation to Dodge and the Dodge Legacy Group. […]
In his presentation, Dodge argued that current society is in a war between good and evil, and “Satan seems to be winning because we are allowing him to,” by allowing God to be pushed out of government, churches, homes and schools.
“Our society has lost its moral compass, its values and its respect for each other,” he said, adding that “if we can save even one child from Satan’s grapes, it is worth every cent we spend on this donation, because God’s children are priceless.”

Let’s not worry too much about what the fuck “Satan’s grapes” are supposed to be (I found this via Friendly Atheist on YT, where one of his commenters suggested the article’s author somehow misunderstood the words “Satan’s grasp”, which does make sense… but what if he did mean grapes?), and look instead at the proposal art:

You may notice that the one about not bearing false witness (or, depending on what version of the Big Ten you accept, the one about worshipping false idols) is conspicuous by its absence. Now, I’m going to be charitable and assume that our Dennis is just remarkably stupid; I mean, the idea itself and his insistence that it won’t actually break the laws prohibiting this sort of thing are foolish enough, but putting only nine commandments in a “Ten Commandments” monument is special. I am going to assume, though, that it was an honest mistake that will be corrected on the finished work if it goes ahead, cos if it was deliberate then it’s about as perplexing as Satan’s “grapes”… what does it say about Dennis’ theology that—again, depending on which version you use—he either refuses to not worship false idols or to not bear false witness; at least one of those things is an unacceptable command for him… and I feel like he would otherwise be one of those Christians who would insist on others obeying all the rules in the book…

Ring Shout

Book #13 for 2024, which means that, by the end of May, I’ve now read as many books as I read in the whole of 2023… so maybe the great reading plan isn’t working out quite as well as I’d hoped it would, but I’m still doing better than last year? Yay? Anyway, Ring Shout was perhaps a slightly ironic choice after Some of Your Blood; in that book the horror ultimately proves to be unfortunately natural and human, but in this one the human monsters (i.e. the KKK) actually prove to be very much not of this world. Our heroes are a group of “Ku Klux” hunters, particularly our narrator Maryse, working in the American South in 1922, a few years after the moribund Klan was revived by the success of The Birth of a Nation; as the book progresses, it becomes apparent that Griffith’s dubious masterwork will soon have another part to play in bringing something even worse into the world. (I don’t know if Fritzi Kramer at Movies Silently has read this book or not, but with her antipathy towards the Birth I imagine she would approve of it being a plot point in this fashion.) It’s a perfect fit for the Horror May-hem thing on Booktube, which is all about shorter books, but I did feel at times like maybe it could’ve done with being a bit longer; it kind of follows the classical action movie pattern of a big opening and big ending and one other big setpiece, maybe it needed a bit more to flesh it out. Having said which, though, it does generally use its comparative brevity to its advantage, does what it needs to, and comes to an unexpectedly epic climax. There’s not a lot of humour in this book, apart from a semi-running bit with one of the characters using the N-word with a capital “N” vs a lower case “n”, and the last chapter teases a sequel where Maryse and co might have to face off against H.P. Lovecraft (which I would absolutely read if Mr Clark ever feels inclined), but what it does offer is very good indeed. Been meaning to read this for a while, glad I finally did so.

My billionaire playdate will go on

Let’s try that Titanic thing again…

Nearly a year after the implosion of the Titan submersible, a real estate investor has announced that he’ll travel in a submersible to the Titanic to prove it’s a safe journey.
In June 2023, an OceanGate submersible imploded underwater, killing the five people on board and raising alarms about the safety of extreme tourism. Not everyone’s given up on exploring the Titanic, though, and a new sub from Triton, a company that makes personal submarines, will take Larry Connor, a real estate investor, and the company’s CEO down 3,800 feet into the ocean depths to visit the iconic shipwreck.
“He called me up and said, ‘You know, what we need to do is build a sub that can dive to [Titanic-level depths] repeatedly and safely and demonstrate to the world that you guys can do that, and that Titan was a contraption,'” Patrick Lahey, co-founder and CEO of Triton, told The Wall Street Journal.
Lahey told the publication that the OceanGate submersible implosion had a “chilling effect” on interest in Triton’s vehicles. He added that it brought up “old myths that only a crazy person” would go underwater in one of the vehicles.

Titan, Triton… near enough as makes no difference? From what I can see, Lahey seems to be doing this mostly out of spite that the OceanGate debacle hurt his business, so I hope for his sake (and for the sake of real estate dude) that spite drives him to do a better job of things than Stockton Rush did; Lahey was one of the latter’s many critics (and Rush evidently deserved them, of course) after the Titan expedition went tits up, so he’d better be doing his best to avoid the same outcome. Not that I actively wish harm on them, but I also wouldn’t be shedding many tears if history repeats…

Some of Your Blood

Book #12 for this year. Not pissfarting around this time! Another one easily read in a single hit… but how “horror” is it? It’s a somewhat vexed question, cos it both is and isn’t obviously a horror novel. It’s in the Horror: Another 100 Best Books list, so it’s on my own to-read list, but I don’t have that actual book so I don’t know what it specifically says about it. Anyway, the setting is “wartime, or something very like it”—Sturgeon is a bit coy on whether this is supposed to have been the Korean War or something else entirely—and our main character is George Smith, who’s been delivered to a military psych ward for attacking an officer. Part of therapy involves him writing the story of his life to that point, but gradually we start to realise George may not be the most reliable of narrators. The book is a bit of a slow burner, and George’s narrative takes up enough of the book that I did start to wonder when it would get to the point, but I will say the second half leads to a sufficiently satisfying climax as the unspoken parts of George’s story are brought out; ultimately the horror proves to be, well, human in the worst way, and though George may be the nominal “monster” he is pretty more sinned against than sinning as someone or other once said. If I did have doubts about the book in the first half, I was pretty happy with it by the end.

Featherweight thinker, too

UFC fighter says he’ll home-school son so he doesn’t ‘end up turning gay’

American mixed martial artist Bryce Mitchell said he will be home-schooling his infant son because he doesn’t “want him to be gay.”
“We’re going to have to home-school all our kids or they’re all going to end up turning gay,” Mitchell, 29, said in an Instagram video Wednesday while holding his son, Tucker, who he said was born on March 29. “That’s the reason I’m going to home-school Tucker, because I don’t want him to be a communist. I don’t want him to worship Satan. I don’t want him to be gay.”
Mitchell, a 16-3 UFC featherweight fighter whose nickname is “Thug Nasty,” made the homophobic remarks right after he encouraged his nearly 500,000 Instagram followers not to vaccinate their children and just before he complained that public schools don’t have students reading the Bible.
“They took it out of the schools and replaced it with Edgar Allen Poe, who shacked up with his cousin,” said Mitchell, an Arkansas native who works as a cattle farmer when he’s not in an MMA cage. “My son ain’t going to be reading no Edgar Allan Poe, OK? He’s going to be reading the Bible.”
It wasn’t clear whether Mitchell — who has shared publicly that he believes the Earth is flat — plans to home-school Tucker himself.

So, “an American man is fucking stupid” hardly constitutes news, especially when he’s also an MMA fighter. I’m not even surprised by him being a flerfer. It’s the… particular antipathy towards E.A. Poe that’s striking here, cos I can’t believe schools are actually teaching Poe somehow and I also can’t believe Mitchell’s actually heard of him or knows anything about him. That’s quite possibly just my prejudices talking, of course, but in any case I still find the singling out of Poe quite bizarre. Cos if Mitchell’s offended by Eddie shacking up with his cousin, I can only presume he’s never read about Abram/Abraham in the Bible and who he was married to… and he couldn’t even say “well God must’ve been OK with it” cos that specific sort of marriage later gets outlawed in Leviticus. A peculiar story, which I hope ends with baby Tucker being taken away from his manifestly unfit father…

Witch House

Book #11 for 2024. So much for that reading plan, hey? And it was Horror May-hem again this month, too, and I had a whole list of potential things to read for it, none of which I’ve looked near… yet again it’s been Other Things Getting In The Way and I’m getting a bit tired of me being unable to overcome that…

Anyway, Witch House was published in 1945 as Arkham House’s first proper novel, and according to its Wiki entry took nearly two decades to sell out its one and only print run of about 3000 copies. And it’s great, so the people who slept on it in the mid-40s missed out on some quality gothicism; it starts out as kind of a haunted house affair, it looks like there might be ghost action, but as the book develops it becomes apparent that the titular house is only slightly less fucked than the House of Usher and something rather more unholy is going on with this family of bad blood… It’s got a bit of occult detective vibe, too, I suppose, although our hero, Gaylord Carew (sorry, but who on Earth ever found Gaylord an acceptable first name even before it became homophobic slang?) is a doctor rather than a detective as such; he’s learned some tricks, however, in the course of his medical studies, and good thing too cos he’ll need them. I had a lot of fun with this, and I’m glad I powered through it in one sitting.

66.7 metres

Outstanding episode of Who this week, even if in some respects Rusty kind of retreads “Turn Left” in this one… is that a spoiler? Possibly, but who’s reading this anyway? A good plot to retread in any case, I’ll overlook it. Actually, the most interesting thing about the episode was the way the trailer for it last week proved to be almost completely misleading… It must be said that, if nothing else, the lead casting for the new series really is stunning; Gatwa’s already well and truly proven himself, so this episode lets Millie Gibson demonstrate her ability in the lead, cos the Doctor is notable by his absence from most of the episode… Mind you, good as it is, it does very much demonstrate the problem I’ve always had with the 2005-onwards series, i.e. the way the episodes often aren’t allowed to breathe as much as they should, and if ever an episode could’ve done with another ten minutes or so (particularly to establish Roger ap Gwilliam a bit more… who IS he so determined to use nukes against and why?), this was it. Still, on the whole, super solid.