Once yer used up you'll be: Sealed and abandoned

The US Energy Administration just wants you to know offshore drilling is easy to explain, all the big equipment is cool, and, don't worry, the industry is taking every precaution to make sure nothing could possibly ever go wrong.
"Offshore oil producers are always taking precautions to prevent pollution, spills and significant changes to the ocean environment. Since 1975, drilling in the EEZ has had a safety record of 99.999% meaning that only .001% of the oil produced has been spilled. Offshore rigs are even designed to withstand hurricanes"
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=oil_offshore#tab2

I'm so convinced.

Is .001% of 600 million barrels p/y (the total U.S. figure) an acceptable amount of crude to pour into the ocean? This week's offshore fire/explosion/sinking is spilling 5000 barrels per day (21,000 gallons) right now. 11 crew workers are dead and the oil slick can be seen from space. Disaster crews did a controlled burn yesterday to try to prevent the oil from getting to the coast.

How bizarre is all this considering that the U.S. exports 1.6 million barrels per day (that's a 2008 number and it's A LOT. And it was up about 30% from the previous year)? So many desperate appeals for our need to relieve ourselves from the need for foreign oil. So great, supposedly, that we should violate nature reserves to get at oil so inaccessible that it takes 5-7 or more years to extract it once its location has been discovered. It seems like a farce. I wonder what the official explanation is. I'm trying to find it. I suspect that it's disgusting vulgar greed.

The Obama administration is supposedly now reconsidering the expansion of offshore drilling that they authorized a couple weeks ago.

I've been doing much research about oil lately for my free-job and it's swimming in my mind, so I thought I'd share a little bit here. Anyways, check out this ostrich trying to eat a baby: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMO40vic-c0. I'm gonna paint it this weekend, you bet your bottom dollar.

Fraud Signals

if your bullshit detector is broken, you can follow this simple guide to tell see that someone is a fraud. I don't really feel that way about Nikes, but I feel like some people must.

Starter Culture: Library Haul Videos

So here's the business. As you probably know by know, the most serious internet phenomenon for anyone who is anyone is to make haul videos and put them up on youtube so that mindless drones can worship you. Just kidding. But really, these videos, that mostly young women are making, have thousands of viewers and they sometimes get paid to do it by youtube and lord knows who else if they are adored severely enough. What are they? Usually they feature a young women who has visited the mall and returned with arm loads of clothes and cosmetics and makes a video presenting their purchases and talking about why they got it and what they like about it, etc. Some people, who are jealous, accuse them of being spoiled, shallow, vein, and of showing off. But that's just not true, OK? I appreciate everything my mom does for me.

Eventually a rusty light bulb sputtered awake in the collective minds of me and some of my buddies and Vanessa and I decided to take action and make a haul video based on our findings at the local library. Vanessa is the psychedelic video artist. (Here's a link to a great radio interview Isabel Allende, the lady whose book I talk about, did with Michael Krasny yesterday 4/27/10: http://www.kqed.org/epArchive/R201004271000)

Here's some links for background education on haul videos. The excellent blog Threadbared made an ideal post about haul videos that encompasses every aspect of what I want to share with everyone I care about. It's discussing both the thing itself and how mainstream media gives it a typical bullshit treatment. It's here:

http://threadbared.blogspot.com/2010/03/incensed-beauty-guru-and-pop-feminism.html

All the other people who also had the same rusty light bulb are exclusively under the age of eighteen. What does that say about us? Here are a few:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2yvlzvasyk (She is doing it right)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEf8gy7Br4w&feature=related (He is going places)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjB8YpBirxU&feature=related (Her mom sounds like a B)

It's basically all vampire books. So what. Cute as hell.

Make yer library haul videos and send em to me or Vanessa. It's fun.

UPDATE: Presenting Angela Robert's library/Chinatown groceries haul

Like they say at the game store

This is the beginning of the end of the middle of my conquering of foldy books presentation science. I don't know if it's excellent or not. We'll see.
UPDATE: AHAHA FTW I made it better.

This will always symbolize my failure

dont wanna talk about it. fucking thing—sucks. i know how he feels. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tJjNVVwRCY

MANY HOURS LATER: OK, I'm ready to talk about it now. I was TRYING to use an application that would make these foldy books more legible and turny-pagey (you know, 3D) and explicitly made this comic in an attempt to use it, yet I failed. I'll keep trying.

Whys ketchup ketchup

Do they import bugs for monkeys in the zoo to pick off of each other?

Is that like how the CIA put more leaves in Ronald Reagan's pool for him to pick out when it was clean, because that was his favorite thing to do?

I heard that they did. Couldn't find anything about it on Snopes.

PICTURED ABOVE: Varg (Burzum) coming out of volcano as ash fog and initiating battle on the pope, who is being driven around by a satanic vatican elf.

God is so angry with the cavemen

In ancient Greece there were some misguided cavemen who drank from God's magnificent pimp cup and fell ill because he sent his rage down upon them. One of them died as badly as Madame Bovary and the rest of them wept. An innocent bystander turtle on a Roman column became alarmed by their collective psychic t-bone steak and it became an apostle. The only thing that saved them all was my GRE scores.

CLIFF BAR NOTES: Madame Bovary is about a lady who loved romance novels and tried to live like one. She killed herself with poison, but it was way grosser than in the books made it seem. Foolish woman. Some other stuff may have happened, but I doubt it.

That time of the month

My Aunt MRR is visiting and I'm editing these grimy columns and encountering the strange logic of one longterm wingnut writer who considers his lack of boundaries a personal triumph. He brags about intruding on other people's conversations, slapping his teacher's perfect ass when he was a youth, and putting himself in uncomfortable situations merely because he must know what lay on the forbidden side of the wall covered in poisonous spines. And he's definitely right about 60 years old. This month I find his lunacy endearing. Mostly because it's amazing to know what he is thinking when he asks the lady on the bus how big her boyfriend's dick is, because I know what she's thinking—MACE!SLAP!MACE!
And he states that Dominican people have the best asses in the world as though it's a fact that everyone knows. Where are the impartial studies the support this assertion? This guy is trippin'. Cold hard science points to Semetic cheeks every time.

Check the "Ugly Buggin Me" track here to know how I really feel. Pay careful attention to every single lyric.

Ariel's column, however, about being XX and learning to play guitar is inspiring and fabulous and right on the money. I hope I can remember to put a link here when the time comes.

Mysterious market research

Why does the cereal company show me a picture of an ape in the jungle chewing on a banana leaf and ask me enigmatic questions about it? They want to plumb the depths of my subconscious mind They want the secret level jump directly to my brain. They want to knock on the doors that read "pleasure" and "fear" and when confused grandpa who was just napping in her house gown opens the door, they want to sucker punch her in the gut before she can say, "I don't want any." Because that's how you sell apple jacks, baby. BAM.

What I mean is, ape in the jungle is make me happy and barfing all together at same moment.

UNLEGIBLE:
In third frame at the bottom right- "Feel like you want to do something to make the world a better place?"
Whole forth box- "Is your love mostly complete? Is your love for the most part transcendent? Is your love empty and hollow? Is your love somewhat hanging on the cliff of failure at every moment?" PICK ONE.

Well isn't my butt red

Today, at a zoo in South Carolina, a daddy baboon grabbed and threw its baby baboon right after it was born while 50 zoogoers watched. Nature isn't all cute fun and games, is it? Watch the baby baboon die, damn you.
http://www.thestate.com/2010/04/05/1230788/newborn-baboon-at-riverbanks-mauled.html

All the really important things that happened this weekend

It was Matt Chandler's (aka Matt P) birthday so we talked about baseball and learned about this really awful story where a kid tried to catch a fly ball at a Padre's game and he really shouldn't have been doing that for some reason, so a bunch of people held him down while the Padre's chicken pecked at him with its dull plastic beak until he died. True story. No one believed me that there used to a be a horrifying Padres Monk instead of a chicken. They're hella stupid. Here is the Padres chicken suplexing the shit out of a professional baseball player.
Then I saw a beautiful scene in which there was a street lamp with a seagull sitting on each lamp. One was looking this way and the other one was looking that way. It was an example of true classic beauty. And the female reproductive system.
Then Brock asked me to make a hoodie for him with the following words on it in olde english font. It's inspired by the forbidden items he shouldn't have seen when he peeked in my drawer. Don't peek if you can't handle the reality, na wam sane?

And too many people at the at the goth club were trapped in this troubling condition. They look so serene even though a giant spider is probably just biding its time until it finishes them off. RIP goths.

Foreign customs or "French Hello"

This is a diagram explaining the French custom of meeting a new person and saying hello in the proper way. The first upper left illustration is when two neuters are meeting and how they say hello with butt touch, lip touch, and butterfly kisses. Next to the right is two masculine meeting with unblinking aggressive eye contact and staring and tongues mingling. Next is two very patriotic neuter citizens meetings and greeting in the proud French way. Next at the bottom are two feminines with lap sitting and finger sucking and crotch mapping. Hello, how do you do?

I wish I could share here the birthday card that I made for Tina Crimescene Horns. It featured adult content manga fan art, erotic male pregnancy, and baby throwing (ala MJ). It was disgusting garbage so I had to do censorship here. But happy birthday for Tina none the less. We made a terrible scene at the ice cream parlor for her.