GOOD GRIEF! CANCER BOY!

"This lost classic short film of 1990 is a post reunification Nihilist allegory of the tensions between the immigrant worker population of Germany and the natives who still long for Heimat. When foreign bullies cajole a young German man into trying to kick an American football. Hilarity ensues."

My friend Todd Graham made this video, as well as the legendary mash-up video Apocalypse Pooh. To find out what he's working on these days, read this recent profile from Ozy.com.

MEDIAVORE: COMICS ~ "ANNIHILATOR", "CROSSED + 100", "IMPERIUM" 3X6

I've recently finished reading the first six issues of three new titles, all from separate publishers, and have a few brief thoughts to share about each of them.

ANNIHILATOR #1-6 (Legendary, $3.99) ~ Originally billed as a six-part miniseries from writer Grant Morrison and artist Frazer Irving, publishers Legendary Comics dropped a tiny bombshell on readers in the sixth issue, proclaiming that no, this wasn't a stand-alone series, but only a prelude to an ongoing, unlimited comic series to come. That might have been welcome news had this tale of washed-up Hollywood screenwriter Ray Spass coming into contact with cosmic supervillain Max Nomax, who's recently escaped from a jail orbiting the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy (the Great Annihilator), had any sort of payoff. Instead, all six issues felt thin and stretched out, with one chase scene dragging on for almost three issues. The same dialogue gets spoken again and again throughout these six issues, with Oscar Wilde-lookalike Nomax spouting off ever more grandiose rhetoric without much of consequence ever really happening. The art is fantastic though... almost worth the price of admission in and of itself. You'll have to decide for yourself if that's enough. Personally, I won't be picking up any subsequent series.

CROSSED + ONE HUNDRED #1-6 (Avatar, $3.99) ~ Another title, another publisher, another last minute switcheroo. Originally billed as a 12-part mini by Alan Moore set one hundred years after "the Surprise" of the hyper-sadistic Garth Ennis-created "Crossed" universe, with the sixth issue it was revealed that Moore would not be writing the rest of the series, which would no longer be limited to 12 issues. Well... that's certainly a twist, isn't it? And not a good one, if you ask me, except for the fact that I've been looking for a reason to drop this title, and this gives me as good a reason as any. Why have I been meaning to drop it? Well, a few reasons, chief among them being a) the Riddley Walker, Clockwork Orange style invented language continues to be a cumbersome and unwieldy device even after six issues. With verbs as nouns and nouns as verbs, for me, it felt like a noble experiment that just didn't pan out. Also, b) the snail's pace storytelling has been grating on my nerves, with it taking a full six freaking issues for ANYTHING of consequence to happen (although to be fair, when it does, it's pretty fucking devastating). Finally, c) I'm not a fan of the artwork, much preferring the clean lines and vivid emotional expressivity of the original series' artist Jacen Burrows. I guess if you like brutal, horrific, dystopian science fiction, the six issues might be worth reading in one shot as a collected work. It might work as a whole, but the first five issues in themselves might end up boring you to tears and leaving you feeling ripped off. And, again, I don't like being lied to about creative teams and series lengths. If Moore was going to go on writing the last six issues, I might have stuck with. But not now.

IMPERIUM #1-6 (Valiant, $3.99) ~ Finally, an unmitigated winner of a title! This is the story of super-powered "Psiot" Toyo Harada, and his efforts to bring about a future Paradise on Earth, whether the inhabitants of said planet agree with his plans or not. In these first six issues, the art is very good, but the writing is absolutely fantastic, with one beautifully visionary scene from the first issue literally bringing me to tears with its power, poignancy, and subtle grace. Meanwhile, subsequent issues have featured scenes of breath-taking action, sinister subterfuge, unbelievable corporate evil, otherworldly woo and, ultimately, the ethics of (super)empowerment, all written with equal skill, wit and power. The characters, their motivations, the plot twists, all are absolute first rant. Simply put, Valiant's Imperium is easily the best science-fiction / super-hero style comic being published today. Now, with the first six issues being bundled into an affordable trade paperback edition, there's never been a better time to jump aboard the Imperium bandwagon.

MEDIAVORE: COMICS ~ "18 DAYS" #1, "CREEPY" #20

GRANT MORRISON'S 18 DAYS (Graphic India, $1.00) ~ Comics Renaissance Occultist Grant Morrison has been working on this Western-style re-telling of the great ancient Sanskrit epic Mahabharata (billed as Lord of the Rings with Star Wars technology) since 2010. Its first incarnation was as a series of animated shorts that showed up on Youtube without much fanfare or success in 2013. Viewership is still in the low five figures two year later, which must be a disappointment to investors considering that over a billion people are intimately familiar with the source material. Anyway, July of 2015 saw the rebirth of the work as a comic book, which quite frankly is a format that better suits the gravitas of the story. You want to be able to linger over and savor each panel, jam-packed as they are with beautifully rendered details. Art-wise, it's like Jack Kirby has taken a whack at Hindu mythology, which is a damn good idea when you think about it. And at a mere ONE DOLLAR per issue... how can you go wrong? Easily the best comic book value of the month, if not the year. I will definitely be picking up the rest of the series.

CREEPY #20 (Dark Horse, $3.99) ~ I remember the Creepy Magazine of my youth as being a much darker, more sinister affair than this collection of pet-related horror shorts, beefed up with a few inconsequential single-pagers from Peter Bagge. The highlight of this issue is a reprint of an old Rirchard Corben chestnut, presented here in full color. So it's not like I didn't enjoy this issue, or won't consider buying future issues, but I definitely would like to see a return to the pitch-black evil of the late 70's Warren title. Perhaps I'll give Dark Horse's recently released "Collected Creepy" volumes a try, when they come down in price. Who knows? Maybe I'm mis-remembering the tone?

MEDIAVORE: COMICS ~ GOD IS DEAD: BOOK OF ACTS, ALPHA AND OMEGA

GOD IS DEAD: BOOK OF ACTS: ALPHA (Avatar, $5.99) There's grisly fun a-plenty to be found between the pages of these two collections of deity-themed short tales that loosely fit into the God Is Dead comic book universe, wherein all the world's various pantheons have returned to do battle after the murder of the Big Kahuna Himself, Great God Almighty. The longest story here - and the only one spread between the Alpha and Omega issues - features a crazed mix of Arab, Hindu and Christian mythologies, and provides a bit of back-story for the wider series. If you've ever wanted to see Ganesha going toe-to-toe with Satan, then this is the comic for you.

GOD IS DEAD: BOOK OF ACTS: OMEGA (Avatar, $5.99) The second issue of this double-shot contains stories of a decidedly darker tone than the first, which features more comical tales, including one written by Alan Moore and starring his personal deity, Glycon, an obscure Roman puppet-god. The second issue, in contrast, features brutal torture, demons being skinned alive, satyr-babies exploding full-grown from pregnant bellies, and other assorted horrors. All in all, one of the better "dark fantasy" anthologies that I've had the pleasure of reading in recent months. Highly recommended, if you have a taste for the dark stuff.

MEDIAVORE: COMICS ~ RICHARD CORBEN'S "RAT GOD"

RAT GOD (Dark Horse, 5-issue mini, $3.99 each) ~ In the world of illustrated horror and dark fantasy, it just doesn't get any better than Richard Corben, multiple-award-winning Eisner Hall of Fame inductee (2012), tent-pole artist of Heavy Metal Magazine's late-70's Golden Age, and one-time High Priest of the comix underground. Whether he's working with established characters and storylines--his Luke Cage and Hulk minis for Marvel were both excellent and influential in ways that are only now beginning to be appreciated--or creating entirely new ones, as is the case with this awesome new title for prestige publisher Dark Horse, Corben is one of the most iconic and essential comics artists working today. It's always cause for celebration 'round Chateau LeBoeuf whenever the Master decides to put out a new title... and that's an understatement.

 

Over the course of its five issues, RAT GOD tells a story that is both familiar and yet completely sui generis, combining elements of Lovecraftian horror (territory with which Corben is intimately familiar) and Native American lore. In a nutshell, it tells the story of Clark Elwood, a bookish Miskatonic University professor who falls in love (sort of) with a Native American co-ed named Kito Hontz, who hails from a strange small town in the Pacific Northwest. After a nasty tiff that puts the kaibosh on their burgeoning romance, Kito splits from campus and a regretful Clark decides to drive out to her homeland to try apologize and win her back.

The story is quite good, with exciting action, convincingly concocted and original esoterica, a number of intriguing characterizations, and odd plot twists a-plenty. It also contains surprisingly mature and measured riffs on Lovecraft's all-too-human flaw of racism, and the human wreckage such beliefs can cause. You can learn more about what Corben was attempting to do in this interview with Comic Book Resources.

Of course, RAT GOD's biggest draw, as is so often the case with Corben, is the artwork.

Running the gamut, from the gorgeous lush greenery of dense evergreen forests to the grisly, gruesome carnage of rat-infested sacrificial death-pits, Corben clearly put everything he's got on the pages with this, his most visually satisfying long-form work in well over a decade. His use of color to set an emotional tone in particular has never been more assured or successful.

The fourth issue, as an example, has Clark sneaking his way into an "Eyes Wide Shut" style costume ball, and it features some of the most beautifully evocative costume designs that I've ever seen. Each costume was unique, but they all felt of a piece, as though whoever created them was harkening to some long-forgotten esoteric aesthetic... which, considering this is Corben we're talking about, probably isn't that far from the truth.

If you missed this series, which ran from February to June of this year, don't despair. I imagine a reasonably-priced volume collecting all five issues in a single book will be hitting bookstore shelves within a month or two. When it does, don't fight the urge to splurge. RAT GOD is going to go down in comics history as one of Richard Corben's finest works, which instantly puts it in the running for Best Limited Series Comic of 2015.

MEDIAVORE ~ WEEKLY COMICS HAUL REPORT

Welcome to the first in what I hope will be a regular, weekly Mediavore-branded sub-series, in which I give recommendations from, and bullet reviews of, my weekly comics haul.

WE STAND ON GUARD #1 (Image, $2.99) ~ This is an odd new title from Image, in which veteran scribe Brian K. Vaughan presents us with a grim vision of war between the United States and Canada. The story kicks off in 2112 (a nod to Canadian prog power-trio Rush), when the States' military obliterates Ottawa via missiles, then launches a land invasion, ostensibly in retaliation for a September 11-style terrorist attack that somehow gets blamed on the Great White North (I figure it's going to be exposed as a false flag attack ginned up as an excuse to go after Canada's fresh water supply in a future issue). Jump ahead a decade or so, and a rag-tag team of Canuck survivalists dodge interceptor drones and bring down giant manned robot "mechs" with little more than their wits and their tremendous Canadian balls. The combination of angry, paranoid polemic and crazy sci-fi action/adventure is a tough sell, and I'm not sure if I'm buying yet. I'll give it another issue or two to decide once and for all.

STRANGE FRUIT #1 (Boom!, $3.99) ~ Speaking of angry polemic, here's a shockingly good idea that I'm surprised hasn't been done before: What if Superman's alien craft had crash-landed in rural Mississippi in 1927, just as the KKK was getting ready to go into the Black part of town and fuck shit up? And what if he emerged from that craft a full-grown Black man? Named after Billie Holiday's legendary anti-lynching song, this series by J.G. Jones and Mark Waid is rendered in a gorgeous, painterly style throughout, and considering the book's final image is of Black Superman covering his nudity with a Confederate flag torn from a Klansman's standard, it couldn't be more timely. If the first issue of this four-issue miniseries is any indication, I predict that Strange Fruit will be winning multiple statuettes come award season next year. Well worth checking out.

FUTURE IMPERFECT #1, #2, # 3 (Marvel, $3.99 each) ~ There's not much that I like about Marvel's ongoing, continuity-wide "event", Secret Wars 2015. With every single Marvel title taking part in this deeply flawed, pathetically transparent, and ultimately misguided attempt at copycatting Game of Thrones, the entire superhero dynamic is thrown out of whack. I mean, it's basically game over. The heroes failed and the Multiverse has collapsed into nothingness, leaving behind only Doctor Doom's personal AD&D game, populated with amnesiac versions of characters that we USED to know and love... some of them barely recognizable as such, and many of them present in multiple versions of themselves. I mean, Captain America is a barbarian who roams the various wastelands of "Battleworld" with his pet, King Dinosaur. And there's a region populated by nothing but Hulks. And there's a Great Big Wall that separates all the "Zones" from the Marvel Zombies and the Ultron Annihlation Wave... except it's on the SOUTH side of the map, so it's not another Game of Thrones rip-off! No way! Anyway, my main question about this iteration of Secret Wars is, why should we care about these heroes if there's no normal people left for them to protect and save and be heroic for? I'll have more to say about this mess in later columns, but for now, I just want to say that I picked up the first three issues of the Future Imperfect 4-part tie-in series exclusively for Greg Land's excellent renderings of both the Maestro Hulk and The Thing (even though this Thing is... ugh... General Thunderbolt Ross). I guess I'll pick up the fourth issue, even though the story is pretty much for shit. This goes to show you... good art goes a long way in comics!

"THE LAST HALLOWEEN" BEING FEATURED ON ELI ROTH'S CRYPT HORROR!

As lifelong horror fanatics, my creative partners at Red Sneakers Media and I couldn't be more excited about the fact that Eli Fucking Roth, the twisted mind behind Cabin Fever and Hostel, has chosen to showcase our most recent short film, The Last Halloween, on his new cross-media TV-channel-slash-website-slash-Vine-platform-slash-mobile-app The Crypt! I mean, we're actually on the front page of the website part of that ambitious enterprise, right fucking now! Also, the whole Crypt team have been Tweeting the ever-loving SHIT out of our little movie! Thanks guys!

It should probably go without saying that I urge each and every one of you reading this, if you are a fan of horror entertainment and are interested in its new media evolution, you NEED to get a CryptHorror.com website account and follow them on Twitter. There's some interesting stuff going on over there. I'm getting a real Super-Deluxe vibe from them, and you're gonna want to be around when this shit finally achieves lift-off.

"HEIR" GETS AN EXCELLENT NEW TRAILER

Marc Roussel, my life-long best friend and partner-in-creative-crime, is one of the producers behind HEIR, the latest and final short film from Richard Powell and Zach Green, collectively known as Fatal Pictures. HEIR caps off a trilogy that began with WORM and continued with FAMILIAR; both excellent films in their own right.

One of the things that Marc brings to the table is his extensive editing experience Therefore, he was able to put together a very effective and tantalizing trailer for HEIR. You can watch that trailer here and now. Prepare to be creeped out... and ENJOY!

DDD SUGGESTED READING LIST ~ JULY 24, 2015

1. Back in the later days of the Magazine Renaissance of the 1990's, one of my favorite regularly published indie political/cultural journals was Thomas Frank's The Baffler. Each issue of this slightly-bigger-than-digest-sized quarterly seemed like a beautifully hand-crafted piece of whip-smart critique. Thus, I was both delighted and relieved when I stumbled across an article from a recently-relaunched online version of the The Baffler. Delighted because the article, entitled Flakes Alive, is superlative, and relieved because it totally lived up to The Baffler's high standards, in all respects (attitude, quality, iconoclasm, entertainment). Here's a hilarious selection that will hopefully entice you into reading the entire, extremely worthwhile article. I'm serious, here. You should definitely read this, even if you self-identify leftist or liberal. In fact, you should read it ESPECIALLY if you self-identify as leftist or liberal. Check it out:

A few weeks back in Manhattan, hundreds of socialists, communists, anarchists, and even few decent “small-d” democrats shuffled into the unlikely venue of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice (ironically, best known as a “cop school”) for Left Forum 2015. ... This year’s confab boasted 1,300 speakers and four hundred events under the salient title of “No Justice, No Peace: Confronting the Crises of Capitalism and Democracy.” 

At its best, Left Forum remains a reassuring beacon of cameraderie and ambition. In addition to seasoned journalists, organizers and academics, it usually snags a few big public intellectuals, like Noam Chomsky, David Harvey, and Angela Davis, while also peppering the bill with high-profile activists like Harry Belafonte and Michael Moore. The organizers sometimes even lure the odd political success story, most recently Kshama Sawant, Seattle City Council member and open socialist... 

At its worst, however, Left Forum is Comic Con for Marxists—Commie Con, if you will—and an absolute shitshow of nerds and social rejects. There are bitter old codgers that will harangue you about a thirty-some-years-old internecine grudge, and there are politically unsophisticated kids with Che Guevara t-shirts and Adbusters subscriptions. There are sanctimonious Trotskyists, ridiculous Maoist Third-Worldists, condescending horizontalist anarchists, smug social democrats and a glut of ardent adherents to similarly esoteric ideological traditions, all competing for the title of Most Insufferable Anti-Capitalist... 

But the grumps and the brats, the blowhards and the sectarians, the narcissists and the pessimists—all of these people are bearable to me, some even charming. No, the worst part of Left Forum is the crackpots, the paranoiacs, the hysterics, and all the other truly dysfunctional personalities attracted by the conference’s most infamous policy: no panel submission will be rejected.

You can imagine where things go from here. Thankfully, you don't have to, as the article, as previously noted, is RIGHT FUCKING HERE. Read it, damn you. Read it and learn!

2. If the BBC is so hifalutin and sophisto, then why the Hellespont are they publishing articles with ridiculously ludicrous and misleading titles like The Strange Phenomenon of Musical Skin Orgasms? Because the article, good as it is, is really just about how some people experience really, really intense tingles, shivers and goosebumps when listening to their favorite piece of music. I mean, it's a great article. But a really shitty, exploitative, unnecessarily sexed-up title. I imagine you'll enjoy it as much as I did, though. So go for it!

3. And now, to cleanse the palate, here's a weird little article from sci-fi blog io9.com, all about The Five Best and Worst Demons to Get Possessed By. Please ignore the dangling participle, but do NOT neglect to close your magickal summoning circle and perform the proper banishing rituals once you're done with any and all workings! Because, I mean, come on... who could possibly resist summoning the likes of this?

4. SURGAT 

Many of the demons on this list are first mentioned in the Great Grimoire of Honorius. Who was Honorius? Historians aren’t sure, but they think that he was Honorius III, who was the Pope from 1216 to 1227. Whether he wrote the book or not, Honorius is famous among popes for deliberately doing ceremonies to summon demons so he could then banish the demons back down to hell. Apparently, he wanted to be ready to fight Satan at any time, and the demons were his sparring partners. Surgat, of all of these, earns his place on the scary list because he can’t be shaken. He’s described in Honorius-the-Professional-Demon-Ejector’s book with one sentence: “Surgat is he who opens all locks.”

 See what I mean about closing that circle?!

NATASHA'S DATING SITES ON "OTHER SPACE"

In the seventh episode of Paul Feig's excellent, Yahoo-produced sci-fi sitcom Other Space, the lovely, computer-generated ship's computer, Natasha, threatens to join a bunch of dating sites in order to make her on-ship romance object, the somewhat alien Kent Woolworth, jealous. The name of those dating sites flash across the screen. I decided to list them here.

Farmermatch.com
Starsearch.net
Fine A Human Mate
e-Misery
Love 2 Go
Blender
Arby’s
Costco Dating Club
Bojoging Matchmaking
www.theboynextdoormovie.com
loveontherocks.it
Zuckerberg Industries
Healthcare.gov
Meet Your Mate
Hot Or Not Or Hot
HIMYM
Husband for Hire
Find Your Doppleganger
Marriage.net
Celebrity Livestock
Robots on Call
Computer Wife
Second Right Hand
JILM
AI Love
Something About Space
Dater King
Swanch
Freaks and Freaks
iPatch
Fake Plastic Treats
Dani, Dave- and YOU
Chew My Food For Me
Dangerous Pervs
MeetABaker.gov
MeetABaker.ca
MeetABaker.co.uk
AmpuTease
VacciNation
CheeseFans
Arraigned Daters
GuysNamedCharles.org
Long Torsos or Else
Swarthy Connections
DogLoverHaters
LoudMatch.com
It’s Computercated
West Fargo Singles
Dirty Blondes
Sal Eats Huevos Rancheros
We Have Hands!
Legless Hearts
Go Raiders
Quimber
MatchMatcher.com
Kind of Sweaty
Dinosaurs Rule
ZOIK HOTTIES
Digital Digits
It’s Just Smoothies
7 Guys, 5 Girls
Come Date Matt LaPointe
AsexualHealing.net
We Love Gonch
iTalians
Bi Jewish Farmers
Teethers
Sbarro’s Social
So Slacks Allowed
Deight.biz
Dandy Crush
Commie Mommies
Ex-Catholic Hookups
Hazel Eyes Only
Furrier
Pharmaceutical Reps

MEDIAVORE ~ STROPPY, THE LATEST FROM MARC BELL

As readers of VICE and alt-weeklies from around the world are already aware, Marc Bell is one of Canada's most intriguing and entertaining comics creators. His latest work, STROPPY, serves as both an evolutionary step forward and a tangential excursion from the trail he's been blazing for the better part of two decades.

As a draftsman with a Fine Arts background, Bell has earned renown for his charming, oblique sense of humor, his obsessive rendering, and his nigh unto psychotic dedication to minutiae. He typically fills every centimeter of his frame with intricate, pseudo-mechanical “things” that end up telling stories as involved as the narratives around which they orbit. Think Sergio Aragones meets Tony Millionaire by way of the Fleischer Studio... or not, it's totally up to you.

Anyhoo, as a long time fan of Bell’s work, I have always assumed that the labor intensive nature of his style is one of the main reasons why he’s kept his stories relatively short, running to, at most, a handful of pages. So when I found out that his latest book, STROPPY, would be telling a single, 70-plus page story, I was intrigued. Would he be able to pull off a long-form narrative and still retain the utterly bonkers style and sensibility that make reading his work a comics experience unlike any other?

Fortunately, it turns out I had nothing to worry about.

STROPPY is a complete success. Simultaneously playful and enigmatic, satirical and whimsical, beautiful and grotesque, base and transcendent… Bell manages to extend his enterprise with a minimum of artistic compromise and a maximum of narrative integrity. In his own sweetly surrealistic way, Bell even manages to drift in the direction of social commentary, exploring the socio-cultural underpinnings of the Late Capitalist Dream from which we are all desperately attempting to awaken.

Not that STROPPY is a polemic; far from it. I merely suggest that there’s more going on under the surface here than weird characters being weird to each other. There are all-too-familiar stakes and consequences for these characters—exploitative employment, precarious housing, class immobility, ambition in the face of hopelessness—which serve to make the surreal moments all the more effective.

Both a must-have addition to any established fan’s collection and an excellent starting point for anyone interested in learning what all the fuss is about, STROPPY is a triumph, and another superlative addition to Bell’s expanding oeuvre. Furthermore, Bell’s longtime publishers, Drawn & Quarterly, seem to agree, seeing as they’ve gone all out with this beautiful hardcover edition, packaged in the style of Europe’s beloved “albums de bandes dessinées”.

STROPPY is available at a ridiculously low price wherever quality comic books are sold, both online and off.

"AUTUMN HARVEST" ~ SHORT LOVECRAFTIAN HORROR FILM FROM NORWAY

OPEN LETTER TO THE MAKERS OF A DISTURBING 8-YEAR-OLD VIDEO

This is an Open Letter to "Zack", "Davi", and "Ty", three BMX-riding "dudes" from, I think, Connecticut, who filmed the video embedded above roughly 8 years ago.

Much time has passed since your encounter at "McD" with the individual you have baptized "Crazy Eyes", and I just wanted to know... did you ever come to the realization that you'd spent an inordinate amount of time mocking, humiliating and terrorizing someone with the mind of a toddler? 

Did you ever figure out that, early on in this video, this poor lonely person seems like he believes that maybe, against all odds and contrary to everything that's happened to him up to that point in time, that on this night, he might somehow get to experience a degree of camaraderie and fellowship? That, despite everything, he still had hope?

And what did you choose to do with that hope? 

You ripped it from his grasp, held it up to his face and tore it in half. Then you wiped your collective asses with it, and forced him to swallow the shitty scraps. 

Congratulations. At 5:55 in this video - at the precise moment when we can witness the tragic spectacle of the final, bitter dregs of hope draining from his weary countenance, as you and your friends continue to mock, taunt and shame him - you succeeded in murdering hope. 

To you, it might seem like a minor transgression. However, I would argue that, for your victim, your relentless harassment made a lasting, perhaps even permanent, impression.

I am not a religious man, nor am I prone to sentiment. And yet I cannot help but feel a shiver on your behalf as I recall this timeless admonition: "Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."

And that's all I wanted to say about that.

Sincerely,

YOPJ

RISE OF THE SLEESTANUNNAKI?!

This is a Useless Eater Blog cross-post - YOPJ

Whilst perusing an article entitled Ancient Aliens in Iraq - Stone Figurines and Carvings of the Anunnaki on the 'Message To Eagle' website, one of the images presented gave me pause. The article begins:

This time our quest for traces of prehistoric alien visitations takes us to Iraq where we come across many stone figurines and carvings of the Anunnaki - "those who from heaven to earth came". The National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad contains remarkable artifacts that offer proof of ancient aliens. Some of these artifacts are more than 10,000 years old. The museum's huge collection tells the epic story of human civilization, from the earliest settlements to the rise and fall of vast empires. This is also the place where we encounter a number of stone figurines and carvings depicting otherworldly beings. Below you can see a strange looking figure with very big round eyes, odd arms, no lips and a weird elongated body. It has been dated to 4000 - 6,000 BC.

Personally, the first thing that came to mind upon seeing this intriguing bas-relief was the Sleestak, those terrifying bipedal reptilians that served as the primary antagonists for the Marshall family in the 1974 cult classic Saturday morning kid's TV show, "Land of the Lost".

For a primer on the Anunnaki - and on Nibiru, and on whether or not we'll be seeing either's "return" in our lifetime - check out this thorough breakdown from the 'Truth Be Known' website. It's absolute baloney of course... but it's damn tasty baloney!

And so long as we're on the topic of paranormal simulacra, the recent discovery of a "Cyclops statue" on Mars put me in mind of yet another famous face from our collective childhood... Sloth from The Goonies.

I mean, check it out for yourselves:

Ladies and gentlemen, the prosecution rests.

QUOTE OF THE DAY ~ JULY 6, 2015

"Liberals are afraid of Charleston because it's a preview of coming attractions. They’ve been given a vision of a time in some imagined but possibly not too-far distant future when all of a sudden, on the street or in their office, or in some trendy fern bar, or Starbucks, or wine-and-cheese boutique on the Upper East Side or in San Francisco, they will look up, possibly from the laptop, where they are typing up their day’s quota of leftwing, liberal horseshit, and they will see a young white man like Dylann Roof standing in front of them with no steroid-pumped policemen in blue to protect their liberal candy asses from the consequences of years of their own behavior. They will see in that young white man’s eyes, that he recognizes them. That he is now beyond deception or bullying or browbeating or Twitter-shaming or intimidation, that he knows them for what they are. And they will look down and see that he has something in his hand.”

- Harold Covington, right-wing science fiction author, Nazi hobbyist, and ostensible "leader" of the Northwest Front (a white separatist movement based in the Seattle area that may or may not exist beyond the boundaries of his fertile imagination), shares a particularly nauseating fascist masturbation fantasy about his "World's Biggest Fan", Charleston massacre perpetrator Dylann Storm Roof. Follow the link for a really quite interesting exposé of this particularly ornate frill on the lunatic fringe.