HOORAY!

This post is in honor of the newly self-employed, His Holiness Baron Brownbottum.
CONGRATULATIONS!

The Horrors of Nerd-Prom

My buddy Lonny & I went to the NYC Comicon this weekend. We managed to get into a packed Q&A session with Grant Morrison, which was pretty great. Naturally, I took pictures of the costumed freakery for you people. Enjoy:

The panel discussion to use room E08 after the VERTIGO panel we sat in on was about
"Gothic Lolita" costumes. It's not nineteenth century Jon Benet-itus. It's called "Gothic." "Lolita."

Ray and Catwoman, together at last

You might be surprised how often The Batman has need of a mini-Maglite

Who doesn't need a really sweet steampunk pistol?

They managed to replicate in resin how our generation *remembers* Carrie Fischer

Adamantium skeleton and super-healing,
completely un-manned by a purple merch bag

No, I haven't seen any Bothan spies around here, please turn that thing off

Dr. Jones knows the difference between leprosy and really, really bad psoriasis

Somehow Lonny sensed the mortal danger he was in

Before the NYC Comicon, wearing skin-tight leather in public
usually was an indicator of your promiscuity. Within the
confines of the Javitt Center, skin-tight leather and promiscuity
enjoy no correlation whatsoever

Embiggen Your Wordability

This post is in honor of my friend Steve Broberg, who first turned me on to use of this word:

Despachos de Paraíso - Day 5

Monday, March 18, 2008

Thursday March 13
The Last Bitter Morsel

Suddenly it's Thursday, and we are leaving tomorrow. Our time here has been endless hardship, a blur of violent struggle. If they were to make a movie out of this ordeal, it would have to be called "True Grit." Our story would be known as "True Grit," and any other movie that happened to share the same name would be called "That Pussy Version with John Wayne, the Mincing Faery-boy." We have battled against drowsy-making weather, seductive ocean sounds, and impossible restaurant choices. Few have resisted the temptation of an after-breakfast nap for as many long minutes


as we have. Why, yesterday? We walked four kilometers before we called a taxi, and not all of it was in the shade. Would that drawling ponce John Wayne has lasted half as long? Few could credibly suggest it. And take today: we walked around the block twice in search of an elusive ice cream shop. Would John Wayne, that blue-suited Nancy, have so long endured on behalf of mint-chocolate? The answer can only be "No."

typical breakfast fare for Ticos is *sigh* rice and beans. but my baby
needs WAFFLES! Bread & Chocolate was our favorite breakfast joint

And so it is that tomorrow we will pack up our electronics, our lotions, and our many travel pillows. We will carefully stow our brownies and take leave of this raw outpost of humanity. And to our midnight chatterers, the kinkajous: we bid you adieu. We loved you more than was healthy for us.

Despachos de Paraíso - Day 3

Monday, March 18, 2008

Tuesday March 11
Greek Gods Will Shit on Your 401k

Carla is sleeping upstairs. I've had too much coffee, so I'm up with lappie and my TUC Radio (Time of Useful Consciousness) mp3's, which for me is like a glass of warm milk. Tonight I'm listening to Gray Brechin's conversation with Chalmers Johnson—and jungle sounds, naturally. In 2007 Johnson was stumping in support of his new book. I say "stumping," but really his footfalls were pretty soft. With a title like "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic," he was pretty much relegated to coverage by channels like C-SPAN 12: Apocalyptic Book Reviews.

purty sky things over the Playa Negra

Nemesis is the greek goddess of revenge, the attacker of hubris & arrogance. She is classically portrayed as a bright young woman with a whip in one hand and a scale in the other, but Renaissance artists seemed to like her with a sword. The Greeks have, as only the Greeks can, given us the image of someone with a score to settle. She is often shown astride the wheel of fortune, or the head of some punk-ass who had it coming. Astride it, literally: she rode the Wheel of Fortune around like a unicycle. She wasn't some some fucking messenger-boy like that fruit Hermes, either. Nemesis was a high-class broad. Her sister was Eroto, the goddess of love poetry. See? High-class.

vengeful and patient: Nemesis waits for her moment

Chalmers contends that Nemesis is "in the house," that she is in-country, biding her time, waiting to attack those who have shown incredible hubris.

The essential argument of Johnson's book is this: History shows us that there is no more unstable configuration that the United States today — that is, an internal democracy and an external empire. You can do one, or you can do the other, but you can't do both. These two enterprises are fundamentally in conflict with each other. Examples he sites of civilizations that have attempted this are the Roman Republic (which is important to us because so many of our Constitutional provisions are adapted from the Romans) and former British empire.

orange explosions!

After the assassination of Julius Cesar and the rise of Octavian, the Roman experiment succumbed to military dictatorship and democracy did not return for at least a thousand years. In short: the Romans chose to keep their empire and in the process, lost their democracy.

On the other hand, the British had the question put to them pointedly by India. They realized that to keep the jewel in the crown of their empire, they would have to resort to administrative massacres, which in order to carry out, Britain would have had to transform herself into a tyranny. So the British chose to keep their democracy, and in so doing let go of their empire. Johnson suggests that this was relatively easy for the British to do, since the United States was waiting in the wings.

mrs sloth demurely presents us with her privates

That brings us to America. With a current total of 737 military bases in over 130 different countries, its almost impossible to deny that we have an external empire. And the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 notwithstanding, we have an internal democracy.

So Nemesis is in search of those who commit hubris. Stupidity, arrogance, things of that sort. Examples that Johnson offers which suggest that we are defying Nemesis to visit us with her whip: the Marine Corps spray-painting "Semper FI" onto the side of the ziggurat at Ur (and then guarding it with troops so that journalists could not photograph it), the destruction of the main gate at Nebuchadnezzer's palace, rolling tanks over tiles that were laid down by Alexander the Great, putting up two 10,000-foot runways next to the ziggurats at Ur, as well as a Burger King (the aroma of which is said to make our troops feel "more at home"). Not to mention Abu Grahaib, etc. These are the sort of things that will come back to haunt us.

pretty trees

Johnson suggests that there are only two possible outcomes for America: we lose our empire or we become a military dictatorship. What he considers to be the most likely is a financial whimper instead of a nuclear bang. "If you have a few thousand saved up, it's time to think about a down payment on that condo in Vancouver." Ha ha ha! Good times.

Despachos de Paraíso - Day 2

Monday, March 18, 2008

Monday March 10

Paradise: Noisy as Fuck-All

Sunday we both woke up in the middle of the night and could barely hear each other laughing. The din was somewhere between the decibel level of a noisy classroom and a jet engine. I no longer wonder what it would sound like if Jim Hensen was in charge of Mardi Gras. I will attempt to lay down the tracks for you:

Hola, Ban-yan

There are two constant sounds above and below everything else. To start with, there is the steady metallic ringing of the katydids. Imagine crickets with a cheap Peavey amp, except these crickets are made out of titanium. Then there is the surf, which sounds like 9/11 coming out of a seashell. We're at least half mile from the shore, but part-way up a large hill, so the ocean sound carries to us incredibly well. Call me sheltered, but all the oceans I've ever heard (17) have made gentle shushy sounds at night. The ocean here sounds like a 26-lane highway (not the reedy tenor of those elevated highways, either), punctuated by controlled demolitions under a gigantic woolen pancake.

A jutty-thing on the way to Punta Uva

Then there are about 600 kinds of intermittent shrieks, chirps, cackles, hoots, barks, beeps, howls, caws, rustles, thumps, crashes, and squawks from the various jungle creatures, which include but are not limited to dogs, geckos, frogs, all manner of insects

"Be-ware the White-Face Monkey!"

and birds, kinkajous, not to mention our "neighbors" — a camp of Nicaraguans who for some reason seem to extremely happy to no longer be in Nicaragua.

That's RIGHT, motherfuckers! Jesus was pure WHITE! And don't you forget it!

Despachos de Paraíso - Extra

Monday, March 18, 2008

The Mysterious 'Honey Bear'
(Or, "What the Hell is a Kinkajou?")

I've always found arboreal mammals to be fascinating, especially in the topics. I'm just an armchair critterologist, but my observation is this: it's not that there is necessarily so much for a mid-sized mammal to eat in the canopy, but it's a great place to not be eaten. So if you can learn a certain proficiency with the daytime trapeze, you can have your way with the fallen fruit & nut buffet at night.

Potos flavus: when you're really weird, you get your own genus

There are a lot of ways to describe the same naturally selective dynamics: "form follows function" is one. "The job makes the man" is another. In filling the arboreal niches, nature isn't choosy that you belong to any particular family. It doesn't matter if the applicant is a graduate of Primate U or the College of Applied Raccoonomics, after a couple thousand years on the job, successful candidates will inevitably take on a certain clingy look.

In 2006, Paris Hilton's pet Kinkajou "Baby Luv" did what
most alleged primates would do if given the chance (it bit her)

Kinkajous look like they would be a little out of place at almost any family reunion. I think their closest relatives are the raccoons, and since raccoons are already sort of a taxonomic "gay uncle," that is like saying your parents are part Gypsy and part Martian. If you put a monkey face on a raccoon and then injected 350 cc's of lemur, you're getting pretty close.