I am an Iraq War Veteran.
I am guilty.
I am alone.
I am drawing for peace.
The artist here is Aaron Hughes, who served in iraq in 2003-4, with the 1244th Transportation Company Army National Guard, and who is now an art student here at UIUC. You can view his webpage if you’re interested to see more of his work.
Since the death of Steve Irwin, I’ve been mulling the idea of an elaborate blog post on gigantic masculinity and parodies thereof. One could mention Fargo and Paul Bunyan, or less weighty send-ups of masculine giganticism such as Chuck Norris Jokes or SNL’s Bill Brasky skits.
But you’ll probably never get that post, exactly (apologies to Mr. Irwin). Instead I present George Washington, which I think I first saw a year or so ago. I have to confess to finding this pretty amusing. One thing that’s neat about it (unlike those lame Chuck Norris jokes), is that this video tells a true story. Or one that puts on a platter the conventional notion of the first President of the United States, which is pretty disturbing in its own right, if looked at with even a little attention.
While the historical GW may never have held the hand of an opponent’s wife in a jar of acid, and probably had fewer than thirty goddamn dicks, but Wikipedia’s version of Washington differs from the one offered above by Brad Neely only by degree.
Strangely mute, since Martha burned his letters, Washington’s always been kind of weird and horrific. Making the ladies swoon, while grinding his food with wooden teeth, he inspired garbled legends like the one about the cherry tree, or the story that the threw a silver dollar across the (mile wide) Potomac River. And the story of his political life is darkly inexplicable too. He sought promotion in the British army, but was declined as a rustic provincial (bad idea, Brits). Washington soon enlisted in the Continental army, and was sent to go fight in the French and Indian War. His chief accomplishment in this war is to find a group of Brits on a diplomatic mission. Washington kills them all. Then he returns to Virgina, before seizing the chance to smash the empire that had turned him down for a job.
Then, I hear, he threw a knife into heaven.
I’m trying to do some grading now, sitting in the Quizno’s on Neil, where it turns out they have Wifi. I’m looking out through the window, where someone is standing in a Quizno’s costume, waving down traffic next to the busy street. Since there’s only one couple in here aside from me, the costumed waver has not had much success. But in any case, I’m a bit worried, since it’s very windy outside and this person is wearing a gigantic plastic costume that looks like an enormous drink cup. This person continues to wave and jump around, buffeted by the wind, as cars zoom by, sometimes giving a friendly toot of the horn.
If this person is hit by a car she will become the saddest ghost in Champaign—adversiting for Quizno’s at the edge of Neil Street until the day of judgement.
This may be better a better fate than that of poor Harry Houdini, who promised to promised try to convey little messages to various people, if he could manage to become a ghost. Neither very ambitous, nor impressive. Perhaps he’s still working on that somewhere.
Should I be lucky enough post-partum to have a shot at ghostdom, I know how I’m coming back. I’ve been reading from a book I found this morning at the Friends of the Library Book Sale, for 50 cents. It’s Haunted England, by Terrence Whitaker (1987). For your pleasure I here provide the first sentence from each section of Chapter 5, Whitaker’s chapter on what we all know is certainly the classiest sort of remanent spirit: the screaming skull:
For over 200 years the skull of Thephilus Brome has been kept at higher Chiltern Farm, Chilton Cantelo, near Yeovil in Somerset.
A skull at Brougham Hall, near Penrith in Cumbria, is said to have given inhabitants many hours of fear.
Still in Cumbria, one of the most popular folk-tales aroudn Lake Windermere concerns two skulls which could not be destroyed, although several attempts had been made.
One of the best known hauntings surrounding one of these ’screaming skulls’ is the ghostly female who haunts the old Hall at Burton Agnes, on the A166 road a few miles from Bridlington on the North Yorkshire coast.
Collecting skulls was a passion for Dr. John Kilner.
The Screaming Skull of Bettiscombe Manor, near Lyme Regis in Dorset, looks harmless enough, nestling in a cardboard box.
‘Dickie,’ the resident skull at lonely Tunstead Farm, at Tunstead Milton, near Chapel-en-le-Frith in the Peak District of Derbyshire, is another determined soul.
Still in the Peak-District, at Flagg Hall, about ten miles south-east of Tunstead Miltonm there used to be a skull which, despite its anonymity, was celebrated in the neighborhood and preserved in a glass case.
Warbleton Priory Farm, near the lovely village of Rushlake Green in Sussex, was blessed with not one but two skulls.
The County of Lancashire has a fair crop of screaming skulls also.
At Appley Bridge, near Wigan in Greater Manchester, there stands a rather strange house, known as ‘Skull House,’ riddled with mysterious cupboards, leaded windows decorated with skulls, very low ceilings with thick skull-bearing beams, boarded-up cellars adn various odd nooks and crannies, including a priest’s hide.
Wardley house, near Swinton, also in greater Manchester, has a resident skull preserved in a niche in the wall of the staircase.
The manor at Turnton, just off the Darwen road north of Bolton is said to have been granted by William the Conqueror to one de Orell, for services rendered during the conquest of 1066.
Perhaps the most terrifying story concerning a screaming a human skull comes from Staffordshire and Hatherton Hall, which stands about a mile east of Cannock on a lonely part of Cannock Chase.
That took longer that I expected! The Quizno’s cup has returned safely to the indoors, and I’d better return to my papers.
No, not the band. What I mean is: did you see this thread on cursive over at Mefi? Pretty interesting.
My own attempts to write using cursive are amusing, since my cursive is no better than and is in fact identical to the cursive I haltingly produced in the fourth grade. In any case, please be assured that I continue to regard those of you with beautiful handwriting with implacable and bitter envy.
This wikipedia article was written mostly by gun-lovers, but nonetheless seems to reliably indicate that Wisconsin and Illinois are now the only two states where people in general can’t walk around with loaded guns hidden on their bodies.
Having lived mostly in Illinois, this was sort of shocking to me. I mean, I expected this sort of thing would be the norm in, say, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming, but everywhere? I think that from now on I’m going to be slightly freaked out when whenever I encounter human beings outside Illinois-Wisconsin. For saftey’s sake it seems prudent to assume that such outsiders are likely to be packin’ heat and fixin’ to use it.
Peter Ward, writing for Scientific American, proposes a new mechanism as the explanation for many of Earth’s mass extinction events, which accounts for the fact that such extinctions occurred simultaneously on sea and land. The culprit, Ward argues, was a horror from the deep:
Today these microbes are found, along with their cousins, photosynthetic purple sulfur bacteria, living in anoxic marine environments such as the depths of stagnant lakes and the Black Sea, and they are pretty noxious characters. For energy, they oxidize hydrogen sulfide (H2S) gas, a poison to most other forms of life, and convert it into sulfur. Thus, their abundance at the extinction boundaries opened the way for a new interpretation of the cause of mass extinctions. [. . .]
Calculations by geoscientists Lee R. Kump and Michael A. Arthur of Pennsylvania State University have shown that if oxygen levels drop in the oceans, conditions begin to favor the deep-sea anaerobic bacteria, which proliferate and produce greater amounts of hydrogen sulfide. In their models, if the deepwater H2S concentrations were to increase beyond a critical threshold during such an interval of oceanic anoxia, then the chemocline separating the H2S-rich deepwater from oxygenated surface water could have floated up to the top abruptly. The horrific result would be great bubbles of toxic H2S gas erupting into the atmosphere. [. . .]
Studies indicate that enough H2S was produced by such ocean upwellings at the end of the Permian to cause extinctions both on land and in the sea. And this strangling gas would not have been the only killer. Models by Alexander Pavlov of the University of Arizona show that the H2S would also have attacked the planet’s ozone shield, an atmospheric layer that protects life from the sun’s ultraviolet (UV) radiation. Evidence that such a disruption of the ozone layer did happen at the end of the Permian exists in fossil spores from Greenland, which display deformities known to result from extended exposure to high UV levels. [. . .]
As the H2S gas choked creatures on land and eroded the planet’s protective shield, virtually no form of life on the earth was safe.
Volcanoes, Ward writes, could serve as triggers to such toxic events, which have left distinctive geological traces that cannot be otherwise explained. Which is worrying enough. What may be more worrying still is that volcanoes are not the only possible trigger for such asphyxiating events:
The so-called thermal extinction at the end of the Paleocene began when atmospheric CO2 was just under 1,000 parts per million (ppm). At the end of the Triassic, CO2 was just above 1,000 ppm. Today with CO2 around 385 ppm, it seems we are still safe. But with atmospheric carbon climbing at an annual rate of 2 ppm and expected to accelerate to 3 ppm, levels could approach 900 ppm by the end of the next century, and conditions that bring about the beginnings of ocean anoxia may be in place.
This would seem to call into question the wisdom of ignoring global warming, at least for those not in the service of Great Cthulhu and his anaerobic undersea minions. My advice? Forget about this “reducing carbon emissions” baloney, and get your affairs in order.
Which I have absolutely no time to fix just now.
It’s old news now, but like Christie Clinic, the Salvation Army is leaving downtown Champaign. I’m not sure about the move myself, but the people I spoke with there felt that the move (to what was once a furniture store on the East side of Marketplace Mall) would not impair the organization’s ability to provide shelter and services to those who need them.
The Homeworks second-hand furniture and stuff store will move into the Salvation Army’s old facility. No word on what will become of the gnome.