Tuesday, March 15, 2011

UNDERSTANDING THE WALL STREET BAILOUT

I didn't write this, and it's a little stale, but I think it makes a good point, so I figured I might as well share. - YOPJ

Once upon a time a man appeared in a village and announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for $10 each. The villagers, knowing there were many monkeys, went to the forest and started catching them. The man bought thousands at $10 and, as supply started to diminish, the villagers stopped their effort.

He then announced that he would buy monkeys at $20 each. This renewed the villagers efforts and they started catching monkeys again. Soon the supply diminished and people started going back to their farms. The offer increased to $25 each and the supply of monkeys became so scarce it was an effort to even find a monkey, let alone catch it!

The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at $50 each! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would buy on his behalf. The assistant told the villagers, "Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that my boss has already collected. I will sell them to you at $35 and when my boss returns, you can sell them to him for $50."

The villagers rounded up all their savings and bought all the monkeys for 700 billion dollars.

They never saw the man or his assistant again, only lots and lots of monkeys!

Now you have a better understanding of how the WALL STREET BAILOUT PLAN WORKS! It doesn't get much clearer than this.

THREE DAILY DIRT NANO-NOVELS!


The following three texts are shining examples of that new genre known as the naononovel, being a complete novel that is so tiny it can be published on Twitter, where there is a 140 character maximum. In fact, all three of these nanonovels were first published by yours truly on Twitter in the year 2009, and I reproduce them here, in their complete, unexpurgated glory, for your reading pleasure. Hope you enjoy them! And, of course, do feel free to use the comments section to publish some nanonovels of your own! 

The Last Man In The World
The last man in the world is sitting in his room. Suddenly, there is a knock at the door... 

Assassin, Kill Thyself
Time-travel groggy, you take aim. 4 km from target. Limbs pharmaceutically steady. Trigger pull. Target turns. Too late, you see it's you!

O Bigfoot! Where Art Thou?
Plane goes down in the Pacific Northwest. Savage albino cargo escapes... REVENGE! Oh, how the fur flies, when Yeti collides with Bigfoot!

QUOTE OF THE DAY

"I came here to warn you, the party may be over. They're coming after the Internet hoping to destroy the very thing that makes it such an important medium for independent artists and entrepreneurs: its openness and freedom.”

- Senator Al Franken (D-MN) delivers an ominous warning to "de yoot" assembled for this year's South by Southwest arts fest.

OH, AND BY THE WAY...

To all those of you who have written in telling me how much you miss the PRON element of the Daily Dirt, here's a little something to tide y'all over. Try not to sprain your wrists.

THE FIRST EVER DAILY DIRT DIASPORA CONTEST!

Alright out there, all you tune-smiths and song-birds, listen up! In honor of the Daily Dirt sorta kinda being back up and running - at least in a sort of radioactive half-life state - I've decided to run a little contest of sorts! What I'd like is for all you musically-inclined readers to come up with a short little ditty that could serve as the Daily Dirt Theme Song! Preferably, this song should have words to it, and preferably, it should be between 15 and 30 seconds long. Now, taking into account the fact that this blog is only two days old and we've only had a couple hundred unique visitors so far, I'm going to leave this contest open-ended for now. Once we've had enough submissions (please send to jerkyleboeuf@gmail.com), we'll choose a contest expiry date, declare some finalists, think up some half-decent prizes, then put it to a vote! Whaddayasay, gang?! Let's all chip in and put on a show!

WHAT KIND OF MEAT? COWBOY MEAT!

Ever wondered what kind of meat really makes up what Arby's euphemistically refers to as "roast beef"? Well, wonder no more! A while back, yer old pal Jerky thought his notoriously paranoid eye spotted something a tad tawdry in the venerable fast-food outlet's Wild West-inspired logo - a certain something he was able to tease out by applying the barest minimum of Photoshop trickery! So now I want y'all to be the judge... do my eyes deceive me? or has a big red COCK HEAD been surreptitiously snuck into the Arby's corporate logo? And, if so, well... just go ahead and insert yer own "special sauce" joke, here. Insert it good and deep, too, like, until it turns your belly button from an inny to an outty!

DAILY DIRT TOP 13 LIST!

A team of linguists at M.I.T. has confirmed what most of us already knew: Any words that can be spoken aloud sound up to five times "cooler" coming out of Samuel L. Jackson's mouth than anyone else's, especially when punctuated with everyone's favorite, incest-evoking urban expletive, "motherfucker".

Quite literally any assemblage of words, when spoken by Mister Jackson, has the potential to become what people in the movie business call a catch phrase, destined to be quoted by the pimply-faced adolescents and sexless thirty-something movie geeks for years - if not centuries - to come.

The reason for this is no mystery. In movie roles from Jungle Fever to Pulp Fiction, from Unbreakable to The Impossibles, Mister Jackson has provided us with such abundant evidence of his coolness that he makes Fonzie look like Henry Winkler by comparison.

Don't believe me? Check it out for yourself, with this list of the...

TOP 13 THINGS that sound COOLER when SAMUEL L. JACKSON says them!

13. "Lather, rinse, REPEAT motherfucker!"
12. "Life is like a box of CHOCOLATES motherfucker!"
11. "Do not remove the tag from this mattress under penalty of LAW motherfucker!"
10. "I got the fever for the flavor of a PRINGLES motherfucker!"
9. "Neither rain, nor snow, nor sleet, nor hail, nor gloom of night, will stay these couriers from delivering the MAIL motherfucker!"
8. "No shirt, no shoes, no SERVICE motherfucker!"
7. "Kids under nine years old eat FREE motherfucker!"
6. "A, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, Z motherfucker!"
5. "It's not the heat, it's the HUMIDITY motherfucker!"
4. "Take two aspirin and call me in the MORNING motherfucker!"
3. "Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheeze, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed BUN, motherfucker!"
2. "I've fallen and I can't get UP motherfucker!"
1. "Sasquatch mambo Listerine petroleum BY-PRODUCTS motherfucker!"

NOT ONE, NOT TWO, BUT THREE!

You know how celebrity deaths always come in bunches of three? Well, it's too early to tell yet, but judging by the following three videos, maybe we're gonna have to come up with a similar law for iPhone apps. 

See, in this first video, we have a demonstration of the iSnort "cocaine simulation" app, which delivers all the ritual - and none of the psychoactive fun - of chopping up and snorting fluffy white lines of Bolivian Marching Powder...


A-and HERE we have "the competition", a rather shoddy knock-off called the Nose Candy Cocaine App. The virtual straw is particularly crap.


And, finally, rounding out our Hat Trick Trifecta of Complete and Utter Uselessness, here is the nSnort, which is nothing more than a complete hack-tastic rip-off of the iSnort, which at least had originality going for it.


As for yer old pal Jerky, I think I'll hold out for the iSmack heroin injection simulation app. I mean, if you're going to fake indulge, you might as well fake indulge BIG TIME, right? Right.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

"There is no end to the variety of Truthers' claims, but most of them believe that the United States government perpetrated 9/11 in an elaborate conspiracy to bring about the decomposition of civil liberties and the fortification of the American empire in the Middle East. They think this because, since 9/11, we've witnessed the decomposition of civil liberties and the fortification of the American empire in the Middle East."


- This 2-year-old article from The Utne Reader, by Paul Constant of Seattle's excellent free weekly The Stranger, makes a few valuable points about why the 9/11 Truth Movement, despite its many failings, should not be dismissed by serious-minded people.

Monday, March 14, 2011

QUOTE OF THE DAY

"The Second Amendment prevents the federal government from completely abolishing official state militias - nothing more, nothing less. Nothing in the Constitution prevents the federal or state governments, or both, from outlawing the formation of storm trooper squads on U.S. soil and limiting gun ownership to members of the National Guard. Members of right-wing paramilitary militias, of course, might claim a "natural right of revolution," of the sort invoked by the American patriots of 1776 (and by the Confederates in 1860-61), There is no constitutional right to revolution, however. There is, of course, a provision for instances where armed bands amass weapons and attempt to overthrow the federal government. The Constitution permits the death penalty for treason."

- Former conservative Michael Lind pretty much putting a stake through the heart of the NRA position on gun control in his book Up From Conservatism: Why the Right is Wrong for America

YER OLD PAL JERKY'S WORDS OF WISDOM #325

"I'm so overweight, I used to think that role-play during sex was when the hooker would flip through my fat rolls to find my penis."

THE DAILY DIRT TOP 13 LIST!

Anyone who’s spent any time in a bookstore recently, or taken the time to observe the reading habits of their fellow public transit travelers, has to be aware that deceased Norwegian crime journalist Stieg Larsson’s “Careless Girl” trilogy of novels is the pop-lit sensation of the day.

The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest are all pretty much ubiquitous these days. With the Nordic film trilogy smashing all European box office records and a North American cinematic re-boot currently being helmed by superstar director David Fincher, the probability of a series of posthumous sequels to be written by Larsson’s family and/or hired-gun ghost writers looking to feed the appetites of the notoriously undiscerning and easy-to-please fan market becomes more inevitable with every passing day.

That’s why yer old pal Jerky thinks the time is ripe to suggest some titles for these sequels, which – if we’re lucky – will continue to chug along in the fine literary tradition established by the post-Fleming Bond novels, the dozens of Dune novels published after Frank Herbert’s death, and all those Middle Earth books published by the estate of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Recently, Larsson's commonlaw widow - who was screwed out of any inheritence because she and Stieg never married because if they'd married Stieg would have had to disclose his home address and if he'd disclosed his home address he would have put both himself and his family in peril as he'd made many dangerous enemies in his days as a crusading anti-fascist reporter in Sweden - has claimed that she is in possession of a nearly completed but untitled manuscript for a fourth "Girl" novel. Now, whether this is true or just a ploy to secure some kind of settlement from Stieg's estranged biological family - the damn thing still needs a title. Come up with a winning title and you're pretty much half-way there! And so it is in the spirit of benevolent bonhommie that I present to you all the first Daily Dirt Top 13 List of the New Millennium...

TOP 13 TITLES FOR THE POSTHUMOUS SEQUEL TO SCANDINAVIAN AUTHOR STIEG LARSSON’S “CARELESS GIRL” TRILOGY!

13. The Girl Who Ran With Scissors
12. The Girl Who Didn’t Use The Handrail
11. The Girl Who Swallowed Gum
10. The Girl Who Never Flossed
9. The Girl Who Crossed The Road Without Looking Both Ways First
8. The Girl Who Didn’t Close Lid Before Striking
7. The Girl Who Combined Common Household Cleaners
6. The Girl Who Ordered Her Hamburger Medium Rare
5. The Girl Who Removed the Tag From Her Mattress
4. The Girl Who Wore White After Labor Day
3. The Girl Who Went Swimming Less Than One Hour After Eating
2. The Girl Who Counted Her Chickens Before They Were Hatched
1. The Girl Who Got Screwed by Sweden's Fucked Up Estate Laws

Sunday, March 13, 2011

DAILY DIRT TOXIC MEME WATCH #0001: REBECCA BLACK'S "IT'S FRIDAY"

For this inaugural edition of the first new Daily Dirt section since Lewd Lexicon, yer old pal Jerky has chosen to highlight the frankly tragic musical efforts of one Ms Rebecca Black. The song in question is titled "It's Friday", and it is rapidly developing a reputation as having the most - and please pardon the unavoidable use of a word that some might find offensive - RETARDED lyrics of all fucking time. There honestly are no words in the English language to accurately convey the levels of atrociousness reached in this most atrocious of all sub-mongoloid musical atrocities ever to be inflicted upon the human ear. It is literally physically painful to sit through this song. As I watched it, a number of questions blasted through my skull. Questions like, "How did this song get beyond the status of idiot lipstick scribblings on the back of a food-court napkin?" and "Why, God? Why?!" No answers were forthcoming. Unfortunately, a quick perusal of Youtube turns up a number of slow-downs, speed-ups and cover versions of Ms Black's sure-to-be-immortal ditty. Furthermore, GawkerTV and other online tributaries of the mainstream are vectoring it to a far wider audience than it otherwise might have earned on its merits. This means a Saturday Night Live parody is probably in the works as I type this, which means "It's Friday" has breached the barricades of mere curious novelty, metastasizing into a full-blown Toxic Meme. Consider yourselves warned! In the meantime, if you feel that you have stumbled across a clear and present danger to the collective meme-pool, please send it along to yer old pal Jerky at jerkyleboeuf@gmail.com. I will assess the situation and, if called for, alert the masses.

OPEN LETTER TO MY FRIEND, THE SCHIZOPHRENIC MESSIAH

Dear friend-who-shall-remain-nameless;

My sincerest apologies. It has been far too long since we last shared brainspace. I also apologize for taking so long to respond to your long and detailed letter regarding Ingo Swann, your experiences as a remote viewer, and your assessment of the post-9/11 milieu in general. While I will be keeping your original missive private, I would like to respond to it publicly, as yours was not the first message of its type received by me. I used to receive them on an almost daily basis back when The Daily Dirt was up and running, full force.

I have always maintained as I still do now that, while I believe in some degree of quote/unquote "supernatural" abilities/entities/forces, it is my personal belief that Ingo Swann has been truthfully exposed as a pederast and a charlatan who used the aura of his supposed, self-declared-and-never-truly-tested "powers" to lure luscious young male anuses towards his penis, and nothing more. He is worthy of no further attention from me. I have seen and read enough to know about both him and his type (and believe me, he is of a type). Nor, despite my personal affection for you, can I bring myself to believe that you once cured a fellow psych-ward patient of amputation (or was it 3rd degree burns?) only to have a nurse re-amputate or burn the poor beneficiary of your then Messianic-level healing skills, as described by you.

I am not being facetious. I am being blunt and honest because I can see through the haze that there is a strong intellect there inside you. But it seems to me that it's been buried under a pile of red herrings. Who knows? Perhaps even on purpose, and from a young age. Maybe you do have some psi abilities. I know for a fact that Occam's Razor isn't as sharp as some would like to think, and I am not ready to cast you off as a friend, or label you indelibly as a kook.

However, I believe I am a bit older and - if I may be so bold - just a little bit wiser in matters of philosophy, psychology, the occult, Secret Societies of all kinds and even government malfeasance than you are. I'm almost certain you'd disagree. Coming into close physical proximity with certain high-visibility and high-powered individuals in this culture often leads to the illusion that one has tasted and discerned more accurately and/or intensely of their essence than one, in reality, has done. And I believe this may have happened to you.

Do I agree that membership to Secret Societies should mean de facto banishment from all levels of public service - or even lead to charges of treason, and thus the perpetration of state-sanctioned murder against that individual? Friend, I hope you are not surprised to find out that I do not agree with this. I do not agree with this, because I have studied the history of man, by a wide variety of individuals using a wide variety of standards and criteria - from the academic to the esoteric to the lunatic and the ridiculous. And one of the conclusions to which I have recently come is that Secret Societies, in and of themselves, are about as good and/or evil as fire, water, wind or wheat.

What do I mean by this? Three simple things.

First, that some Secret Societies have mankind's best interest at heart and some, needless to say, do not. Just as fire can save you from freezing or devour you, just as water can save you from dehydration or drown you, just as wind can steer your ship towards new lands or lead you to disaster, and just as wheat can feed your entire family for a year... or explode in the silo, flattening your family home on a bitter winter night, a Secret Society is not - in fact, is never - only one thing.

Second, that Secret Societies are entirely unavoidable, and impossible to eradicate without literally the kind of slaughter with which all of history is rife, and which I would never hope to see repeated in my lifetime. The 16th century, I have recently realized, rivals the 20th for sheer bloodshed. Kill the Aztec! Kill the Spaniard! Kill the Mayan! Kill the Portuguese! Kill the Basque! Kill the Huguenot! Kill the Jesuit! Kill the Lutheran! Kill the Catholic! Kill the Sunni! Kill the Sikh! Kill the shah! The King! The guru!

Kill the man! Kill the movement! KILL KILL KILL!!!

The cure, dear friend, is almost always worse than the disease.

Allow me to play at being Devil's Advocate for a moment. What has "the Illuminati" - a term I use here purely for convenience - led to that you find so distressing? The warm bed in which you sleep at night? The ability of any man of ambition on this planet to circumnavigate the globe if he so chooses? The X-ray machine that found the pre-cancerous tumors in my leg?

The atom bomb? The nuclear bomb? The nutron bomb?

Swine flu? SARS? Backwards messages on Ozzy albums and hidden hieroglyphics on Beatles album covers? Really, friend? Is that the best they can do?

The Powers That Be have Babylon in their teeth, and I can't help but think of the dog that's finally caught that truck it's been chasing. What does it do now?

It's been almost a decade since 9/11, friend. Of course something is going to happen again, soon, because - as time passes - SHIT HAPPENS. And by shit, I mean things. Events. Occasionally momentous, history-shaping events like 9/11. And yes, these monumental events - however they come to pass, by destiny or design - put The Powers That Be in a position to "do something"; a position that, for some, might be hard to resist. A position to make a lasting change, to carve one's initials into - or piss into the snowbank of, depending on your metaphysical point of view - "Civilization Itself".

If 9/11 taught me anything lasting, it's that Ozymandias' lesson remains unlearned. It's probably true that the future will be littered with even more giant marble feet in forgotten desert ruins of black glass and poison sand. And there's absolutely, positively nothing anyone can do about it. Because that's how time works. That's how history works.

Modernity, itself, is the disease, friend. And it's terminal. Every man's death is an Apocalypse, now, for every man is everything and nothing all at once, now.

You can thank or blame Christ for that. I mean literally... thank him or blame him. Before him, time was wheels within wheels, cycles within cycles. The universe was a constant... no Alpha or Omega - no beginning or end. It always was and would so ever be. But then, we got smart. Our brains got big. And then Christ came along, and, just before dying, he - or, well, the faith that mushroomed from his corpse - told us he would be back, and he would be bringing his Father with him, and we would all be sorry because he was going to put the stars out in the sky. Just you wait and see.

We've been waiting ever since. We ain't seen nuthin' yet.