Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Goodbye.

This is the final post of I Fling Poo. Today I quit.
It's not in me anymore.

If you want put on a list of being notified if I ever return to the blogging, send me ann email at kid dot twist at gmail.com. I'll try to remember.

Friday, January 19, 2007

...And You Will Know Us By The Pool Of Dead.

The Mayor of Mt. Holly sent me a Myspace bulletin. Seems Donnie won the Mount Holly City Hall sponsored Deadpool 2006, slipping in at the end with the prescient choice of Leslie Lynch King, Jr. Then the mayor very personally invited me to join for the new year.

So I did. My ten:

Muhammad Ali
Margaret Thatcher
Zalmay Khalilzad
Sir Edmund Percival Hillary
Jack Kevorkian
Lindsey Lohan
Ariel Sharon
Monty Hall
George Carlin
Abigail Van Buren

Looking at it now, I do believe I have one too many a political figure. I’d probably lose Khalilzad first.
Most of the famous and larger Deadpools allow you to choose whomever you wish. Since this pool is much smaller, it is suggested that you only chose people who haven’t been chosen before you.
There two people on my list that were snatched before I posted:
Fidel Castro
Billy Graham

Them’s the breaks. And if you don’t know what a deadpool is, I’m sorry, you’ll have to figure that one out on your own.

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Red Wings Have A Good Logo.

Among the numerous ways that the world can be split into two groups of people, a clear divider is cars. There are car people. And there are those who just as clearly aren’t.

Soon after high school, a large number of my friends became car people. And I became a car people by default. Danny and Rusty took me to an autocross event. Kent sold me his Sentra SE-R. My dad bought a Triumph Spitfire and an ancient Prelude convertible. Cars I grew to like.

Detroit has two things. Motown and The Big Three automakers.
Detroit had two things. One has been reduced to Erykah Badu. The other was eaten by imports. I’m ok with both. I’m a white farm kid. We drove Honda Accords and beater American-made pick-ups only because Honda didn’t yet make a truck.
I do respect movements to retain American labor. But we’ve long failed at making not mind-bogglingly stupid vehicles.

Saturday was my first and last visit to the North American International Auto Show.

It was grey and cool and rainy. From Toledo to Detroit is dirty. Smokestacks, abandoned warehouses, weeds, methane burners, Wendy’s litter. It literally smelled bad. Detroit itself doesn’t do any better. Wan, faded, sad. That town is ugly.
I’m glad I went. Not because the show was good, because it wasn’t. But because now I know. I came, I saw, I puked.

There is something stultifying about seeing too many of something. When something is rare too be seen, it is good too look upon. Zoo animals are only cool cause we don’t ever see them. To the right person kitties and pigs are probably just as interesting.
To see four hundred shiny new brilliantly lit and prominently displaced cars was mind-numbing. To see a Gallardo on the freeway is neat-o. To see a Gallardo next to a Bently next to a Rolls next to a Ferrari is boring.

On top of that there were hundreds of cars I couldn’t give a hot damn about. Minivans and over-sized trucks and concept cars. Yes, concept cars are awful. Art for art’s sake. The shark has been jumped. Start building better cars, not designer’s wet dreams. This wheel makes no sense:
The coolest car there was an aging Volvo with it’s original engine and turbo. It was the first in America recognized as a 1,000,000,000 mile car. Pretty girls braying about the Camero’s MPG rating is not nearly as enthralling.

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Braaaaaaaaains!

Have we learned nothing from zombie movies?
Google News. Regular morning internet stop.

This morning, found under the heading of science:
BREAKHROUGH!1! Genetically engineered cows are free from mad cow! AMAZING! Science wins again! HURRAH!!

It appears that Japanese and American scientists bred 12 calves from cells that had the protein prion-making gene removed. They don’t appear (yet) to be unhealthy, nor, in theory should they be able to contract mad cow. Media feeding frenzy ensues.
"This research is a huge step forward for the use of animal biotechnology that benefits consumers," said Barbara Glenn of the Biotechnology Industry Organization…
Oh, my god, this is infantile.
I’ll try to be brief:

Cows are bovines. Herbivores. Ruminants. Built to eat grass. Very good at eating grass.

Cows can only contract mad cow from eating another animal who has it. Cows do not willingly seek to eat each other.

There. I’ve quite calmly shown this to be moronic, but here:

Farmers everywhere have for years fed to their cows other animals. Chickens, pigs, other cows, etc. Not steaks and thighs, but the waste products from processing, brains, tendons, feathers, and the like. Utterly useless waste except that it’s high in proteins. And cheap. Even if it is wholly not what Nature intended. Along comes her reply: mad cow.

We humans, it seems, have decided one up Nature. Take out a gene, see what happens. Where are the fucking klaxons and warning lights and tornado sirens? This ain’t right. We have a very simple problem, with a very simple solution, and yet we’re spending money over here in a lab trying to bend reality so we can go along fucking things up? Why was every single article on Google News happy and crowing about this? Are we all this blind?

You want mad cow free cows? Don’t insist that the waste meat products your future steak is fed has been properly irradiated, insist that your future steak ISN’T FED MEAT!
Vote with your mouth. This is crazy.