My views on politics, life, death, the army, and other things too miscellaneous to mention here. This is a personal blog. This blog is 100% factual.
Bill Duckwing
Poet, Author, Journalist
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Your Super-Cute Daily Terror Alert Update Will Be Forevermore:
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"There are some myths and untruths surrounding the role God plays in our daily lives. To say that religion and politics do not mix, is certainly a myth, unless you ask a liberal. Anything that affects a Christian (and voting is one of them) — enters into the religious realm. Trying to separate the two is like trying to separate oil from a glass of water, it's impossible to do. "
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Thursday, December 30, 2004
2004: Year of the Numa Numa Dance
I originally considered writing an in depth rant about all the things that sucked or were cool about 2004.
And by in depth, were talking about 30 single-spaced typewritten pages! That is a lot of suck for one year!
But then I saw this video on Newgrounds, and you know what they say, a webcam lip-sync of "Numa Numa Dance" is worth a half a gazillion notes or written pages attempting to glean the essance of a new dead year.
This video represents 2004 (click on "Watch this Movie" to see what I'm talking about) -half-baked, full of it, at the same time very entertaining.
-duckwing, at 8:52 PM
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Tuesday, December 21, 2004
The Approaching NFL Post Season Blahs...
To be honest, I haven't been watching football as much this year as I had in previous years. I'll catch a couple Sunday games every week, then read the papers about who one or lost. That's about it. Compare this with previous years where I'd monitor player stats and the injured lists every freaking day, and you get what I'm saying.
I think the main reason for this is that my two teams in the NFL that I'm big on, namely the Pats and the Eagles, are just too competitive to really generate any excitement for me. I expect them to win weak after week, especially put up against a plethora of pretty weak teams (say, the entire NFC east sans Eagles) to really get too involved with the games when it so happens that they get cast here on FOX or CBS during the year.
And with that being said, I'd like to say -shit.
It's not like Terrell Owens getting injured is the end of the world. He might get to play again in Super Bowl, if they make it, and there's super hope in the fact that the NFC isn't the killer league it once was. The Eagles are still a great team in a kinda sorta way overall, except their passers stink, plus the fact that without everyone on the opposing team on defense covering Terrell out there like it was their money means, well -maybe McNabb's passing game will have to be rethought. A lot.
But maybe not. I'm certainly not an offensive coordinator, and I'm sure they got a few tricks up their sleeve. I mean, if McNabb were injured, like real bad, that'd be a fucking travesty, but I know that they must have a backup plan for that, too.
The Patriots debacle last week I think is just a case of bad...something. I think most people, Hunter S. Thompson included, are taking this way too seriously, actually. I mean, Tom Brady had four fucking interceptions, and they still lost by only a point. Granted, it was against the Miami Dolphins, who aren't even close to hot, but still, against nearly everyone, the Patriots aren't really the kind of team that clobbers you into submission. Most of their games are pretty tight -the reason why they win is because they'll play you tough and will match you point for point, but they won't make the mistakes that you will. The Patriots are not the hottest team in the NFL, but they'll make sure you eat a whole pie full of crow before they'll let you start writing those obits.
Regarding the Patriots competition for a place at the Super Bowl, I'd say we have the Colts and the Steelers. And in away, this almost feels like a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. Patriots beat Colts, Colts beat Steelers, and Steelers beat Patriots. It all depends on who plays who first.
Actually, if only it were that simple. I'd say all three of these teams could beat anyone in the NFL, if the winds are blowing in the right direction and the stars stay fixed in whatever house of good fortune these teams individually ally themselves with. And ultimately, it is up to God, and also, the hideous devil imps employed by Satan, who often cause misfortune and the "accidents" that eventually lead all good players to the Injured Reserve list.
I'm going to shut up now, before I actually do summon up the ghost of Grantland Rice with all of this nonsense. For simplicity's sake, I do think they all have a chance for a Super Bowl ring, and no, I don't any have any inkling of who is the better team, and that is all.
-duckwing, at 6:34 PM
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Friday, December 17, 2004
Wow!
So I finally figured out what was causing the long loading times for this site via my little experiment with socialism. It was Feedburner, a crappy RSS feed service that really isn't necessary at all. It seemed like it required an extremely long communication with their server before it would load the page at all, so I took it off permanently.
Wow!
Sometimes all it takes is a brief conversion to plebeian socialism to figure out what makes things tick, y'know.
-duckwing, at 10:03 PM
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Thursday, December 16, 2004
Did we just lose the Washington Nationals?
I'm sorry, we've been knocked around for years, and it certainly isn't going to stop with the DC council reneging on a deal with MLB to publically finance a new stadium on the Anacostia River.
I was kinda amazed by Michael Wilbon's column about the whole thing, saying he knew someone who had ties saying that Linda Cropp had an ace in her sleeve with this or something.
Unbelievable.
Y'know, I accept the fact that the DC Council was duplicitious about the agreement between Mayor Anthony Williams and MLB, but at the same time I got to fault Williams for not taking an accurate pulse of the city.
Almost as soon as the deal got made, people started comming out of the woodwork with signs and posters to protest the deal, and I knew we were going to have some trouble with the stadium right then and there.
MLB isn't even biting a bit. They feel hornswaggled, and rightly so. So it's up to the DC Council, because in effect by sticking to the Dec. 31st deadline, baseball is giving the District another chance.
They can either vote again on another proposal, and lose some face. But they end up going down as being a bunch of stuckup bluffers, and having their bluff being called. And as everybody knows, that's absolutely the worst way to go in politics. They equivalent of annoucing a group of poker players, "Holy shit, you doubled your bet after I doubled mine! Fuck you, I fold!"
Not a perfect analogy, by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, the reality is far stupider.
Or they can be jackasses and hold firm, and cost the city another baseball team for another 30 years. And I mean, think about it -we've already been begging for thirty. We've already been whining forever about this, but now we're whiny and a bunch of liars. I'm sure the MLB will keep us in the the ol' address book for when they need to relocate another team in the future.
Still, despite my premonitions, I'm actually pretty stunned by this. I have nothing else to say, except that I'll be putting my old template back up probably tomorrow or something, so you commie haters can rejoice.
Edit: Even though I love the commie sig below. Man, I'll miss that...
-duckwing, at 10:13 PM
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Wednesday, December 15, 2004
The Plebeian Uprising is So Totally Not Working Out
But we're getting better, I think. I'm sorry...I'm tired. I need a nap. Staging a peasant revolt takes time and energy, and I'm trying, but there's only so much Trotsky I can read in an evening and still hold a full-time job and not pass out from sheer exuberance.
We haven't had a peasant revolt in ages. Did you know that? I mean, you look at America, like the history, even gleaning a bit back into the lost days of the 20th Centruy before everything changed and whatnot, and still...
Not a ton of peasant revolts to even really comment on.
I mean, even back in the uber-capitalist supra-reactionary Middle Ages in Europe, one of the most hotly debated topics is the Peasant Revolt in Flanders of 1381. While mostly was a revolt against taxes, and...oh shit.
Well, I mean, as long as we don't have to pay taxes and shit anymore under Bush, we're all cool!
I won't even go there. Because obviously spending obscenely huge amounts of money while not taxing the populace while relying on the goodwill of borrowers knocked out by your historical superpower status actually makes a ton of a lot of sense.
It's all faith, yo!
I want kids to join in on this Uprising thing. That's the big thing, because I've given up on the others. And also because I think "Teenage United Workers Super Wild-azz Riot" is a pretty cool way to induce a little generational alienation.
But we need some real slogans. I'm racking my brain right now, and aside from the communist teddy bears I keep seeing on the internet and on late night tv, I'm for the moment out of ideas. I mean, we can't really go with Josef Stalin or Mao as the symbol of our new unity, and Trotsky, while a little less blood-stained, always looks a little too unnerved to feature too much in our party propaganda, like a really stern and insecure Colonel Sanders.
So we need a logo, a slogan, and a mascot.
Oh, boy.
Oh yeah, gotta link to this before I call it a night. It'll take about an hour to get through, but I'm willing to consider that a good waste of leisure time just as long as you pledge to spend the rest of the evening devising some form of plebeian propaganda for the masses.
-duckwing, at 10:06 PM
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Monday, December 13, 2004
Holy Fucking Mother Of Lenin's Ghost!
I'll admit, y'know, that I was a little blind to all of this. Actually, a lot of us were. For many conservatives, liberalism is da new communism, or terrorism, or whatever. Y'know? Actually, this isn't new at all -in fact we've been demonized for years, but y'know what? Well, now they have a mandate, and so there's absolutely no holding back!
So comrades! Get your fucking hammers on! Join the Revolution!
I have officially dubbed myself Chairman of the Plebeian Socialist Workers Party. We will be getting together this Saturday for a Trotsky reading at my place, and donations of course will be accepted. But, rather than give me your hard earned money, I ask you -why not buy a bale of hay? Or seeds? Or an ass to hitch your plough?
To beat the conservatives, we must beat them at their own game! We must trump their means to capital, and we can only do this by living completely independent from the services provided by big business. Lest this seem completely impossible to the city dwellers out there, I would remind them that I myself am a city dweller, and it does not seem incredulous to me.
Because we can beat the cities. With hammers we can smash their paved streets up into little rocks. Then we can clear the little rocks with shovels and shovel them deep into the various ditches and valleys of the land. With ploughs and asses we can seed the fertile dirt underneath. And with language we can feed the minds of those hesitant to join us.
So listen up.
And grab your lattes, and your beads and rattles. Reject Jesus Christ. And get ready to sweat, because the Plebian Socialist Workers Party will be hitting up your town soon!
-duckwing, at 8:30 PM
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Friday, December 10, 2004
I'm Totally Writing the "Ocean's Twelve" Sequel in 2007
I am so sexed up about the new Steven Soderberg movie, "Ocean's Twelve," that I've started writing my own little screenplay, which I think will blow Hollywood away. Here's some excepts:
"Brad Pitt, I've got this crazy idea -for a new heist. But we're getting old, so it's going to be difficult for our original eleven, plus Catherine Zeta-Jones, which makes twelve, to pull this caper off. So we're going to need to dig deep into the underworld and recruit a whole lot more people. A small city's worth of people."
"How many more people, George Clooney?"
"Brad, it'll take exactly 25, 988 more people. That's a lot of people to recruit. And we'll have to change the name of our gang again.
'Ocean's Twenty-Six Thousand!'"
Most of the plot of course, will be in the exposition. Probably at least 4 or 5 hours of a 5 and a half hour movie, at least. We'll presume that Danny Ocean -actually, we're going to change his name right now. There is no way twenty-six thousand people would follow a guy with a name like Danny. It's too informal and goofy. So, his name is John now. John Ocean. A Biblical force of fucking nature.
Brad Pitt: "I don't know, John...that sounds like an awful lot of people to recruit and keep control of..."
"I know Brad..." (yeah, I'm going to keep calling him Brad, because I don't remember the name of the character from the movie). "It won't be easy, it may take years - decades, even - to run down my list of twenty-six thousand names and scedule a time where we could all get together to discuss this heist. But if we pull it off, Brad...well, wow..."
And then we could cut to a the obligatory Hitler set-up with John Ocean screaming in German to throngs of people chanting his name in unison.
"Mein People!!" John Ocean screams at a lecturn in front of a dizzying array of accompices (maybe using CGI effects, like in Alexander) "Twenty-Six Million! Mein Twenty-Six Million! The population of a medium-sized European Country!"
That would be cool.
-duckwing, at 6:56 PM
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Wednesday, December 08, 2004
Dennis Miller Sucks!
I won't try to grok too much into what his show is about, but I can only say that Dennis Miller has aged badly. Why is he still on the air? Well, I guess the CNBC gig is not the once high spot he held on HBO or whatever made him supra-uber famous, but still...
I mean, his news thing that he uses to open his show, which is kinda like a cross between his rants on HBO and the news thing he did on SNL, it almost reminds me of like, well...like vaudeville or something.
"Here we have Ted Kennedy and his liberal monkeys balancing rubber balls with their snouts! Get it? And here in my hands I hold a Boston cream pie! I'll leave it up to the kids out in TV Land to decern what kinda post-modern pastiche I am thinking up with this ultra hot premium matieral, ladies and gents!"
And I am so not a hipster about shit either -like I'm very much well into my thirties, thank you very much, and I still very much totally into the Beach Boys and Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Culture Club and stuff, so fuck you.
Are you kids still doing that hackey sack shit out on the commons in college? Like, I owned that game, back in the day. Back then, we were less fucked up on the drugs and more fucked up on transcendental meditation and natural highs like trees and grass and hackey sacks. We blew out our minds either naturally, or else heavily medicated. I don't remember now. That's how far back I seed, man. That's just how far back...
The A.J. Jacobs interview thingy was actually kinda funny though, totally thanks to A.J., because he said "intercourse" and also, "wife." Jolly good show, young ironic non-fictionalist!
Anyway, I'm writing this up during the Charles Barkley interview, which is supra interesting. I think he said he was going into Alabama politics or something. I think Dennis chided him by saying he'd be stirring up shit by entering the political scene in Alabama. I don't get it. Did I miss something?
So Neal Pollack is going to talk about "Ocean's Twelve?" Because that was the intro to the "Varsity Club." Holy shit what kinda suck is that? Or was that just a promo?
No, they're talking about steroids, which is a nice kinda seg.
So let me seg here, because we were talking about Dennis Miller, and I'm not sure if I'm qualified to comment on him anymore since he shot his career all to hell by endorsing Bush and by endorsing Judeo-Christian values, which are of course both anthenma to the beliefs held by the cool in our elistist culture.
And until Dennis Miller decides to "go cool" and reject his newish-found conservativism, I'm afraid he's got less than a nano-chance to get his ass back on to things like HBO, or writing editorials for the American Prospect. Maybe c'est le temps to stick a finger in da wind, to tell which way it blows, eh Denise?
-duckwing, at 9:55 PM
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Saturday, December 04, 2004
I Always Get Chapped Lips in the Month of December
It's true. I totally don't get this stuff, it's always like this seasonal thing that goes on that I have no input or control over. I always think to myself, "Maybe this is the year that I don't get chapped lips," but to no avail. And since I never keep a thing of chapstick hanging around year-round, I always end up getting fucked the first time December rolls around.
It's the suck.
A couple of other things. I got about halfway through my novel for Nanowrimo this year. I'm not exactly pround, nor tired. But I don't think it's all that bad, and hopefully I'll get around to finishing the thing in the next couple of months.
Also, Neal Pollack is going to be on Dennis Miller on CNBC, which should be fun. I hope he finds a way to work in what he wants to say on the program.
-duckwing, at 8:19 PM
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Thursday, December 02, 2004
Let's Encourage Dan Rather to Get All Weird and Stuff as He Approaches Retirement
Well, not exactly retirement. We all know Dan is going to stick around for awhile doing investigative work, or whatever. But still, given all of the crazy shit I've been hearing about this guy lately, we should all give him our approval in the event that he does decide to go all Howard Beale on us and play the bonkers card out on national television.
Of course, that almost certainly won't happen. While I've never been a huge fan of national network news, and almost never watch it if I can help it, I've made it a point to catch CBS's Evening News lately, mostly because of Tom Brokaw's retirement (I know that's a little weird, I'll just say that his retirement has proactively influenced me to actually care about network news, at least for a week), and as I previously stated, the focus on the internet over Dan Rather as a truly insane nutjob with palpable liberal bias issues.
Well, from my standpoint, I don't know what you guys are talking about. CBS Evening News is just as boring as any other network newscast. And Dan Rather certainly isn't pushing any boundaries to the nth degree that any cable newscaster you could name doesn't do on a daily basis. I mean people can get outraged and shit about Rathergate, or whatever they're calling it, but when sites like this get Google Ranked into the stratosphere, I begin to get concerned. I mean, if Dan Rather, who is no less boring than Jennings or Brokaw's replacement Brian Williams, is America's most politicized journalist, then -well I don't even know what to make of the claim. It gets me a bit frazzled with its sheer lunacy.
Some people claim that network news anchors are susposed to be boring and placcid and flaccid and are not meant to ruffle feathers, and these same people claim that Dan Rather somehow breaks the mold of the news anchor in two different ways. One -he's too liberal. Two -he too weird.
I'll say two things to that. One, he probably does have a liberal ideology. I guess that's probably true. But in the time I've watched him, he hasn't deviated in either under reporting or over reporting any story that's been already beaten to death, and then buried, and then mourned over 60 thousand times by the time it hits the evening news. On the second thing, I do think he has this kinda haunted look to him, like a guy that's been beaten fair and square. But that's a subjective view, one probably reinforced by other people's opinion of him on the net. Still, given the fact that he's a man about to retire in disgrace, I wouldn't consider that all that weird.
I don't have any real great respect for Dan Rather, besides the notion that he seems to be a talented journalist. And for that I perhaps fault myself -I just haven't followed CBS news in great enough detail to generate any kind of opinion about him. But I almost wish I had. Dan Rather gave us one of the really Great American non-sequitor catch phrases with his story about how he was mugged in New York by a guy who introduced himself by saying "Kenneth, what's the frequency?"
I personally like the idea of a guy who can bring an anecdote like that to the attention of the nation without feeling all that weird about it. And that's why, if I were Dan Rather, nearing my retirement, I would just go ahead pull an all out Howard Beale on the American public. I mean, that's just me, but why not?
I mean, if he does have some sort of agenda, as everybody claims, why not go public with it right before they put you out to pasture?
-duckwing, at 11:28 PM
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