WEEKLY DISPATCH #17
7-23-04:
LINK OF THE WEEK. Time Travel Machine Plans
I don't know if you realize this, but I care about each and every one of you very deeply, as if you were my children, and it pains me to break this to you, so brace yourself.
Time travel isn't real.
Not only is it not real, I think I'd safely say it's impossible; the more logical theories about it ignore the fact that time is not space and that it's impossible to define one by the other, to say nothing of the fact that it would go against everything we know about nature and we don't really want to do it anyway. Time is a one-way street.
I saw this kid online a few years ago who ordered a time machine from some shady EBayer. Terrified, he "used" the thing once, walked around for a minute in his bedroom, then returned to the present and told everyone on Usenet about it, convinced he'd been to the future and that he would not decide to redecorate for quite a while. It's not nice to take advantage of idiots like that.
The gentleman who ran this webpage, which sadly is no longer online, decides to multitask. "I sell an instrument which can be used for both, out of the body time travel and can also be used to help heal the sick."
Like seemingly everything else on the internet, this quack is politically motivated. He would like all illegal immigrants to be executed. He responds to a study linking breastfeeding with a reduced risk of breast cancer by saying "We can thank the femikazis for ALL breast cancer! A world-wide class-action lawsuit should be filed against every femikazi organization that urged mothers to NOT breast-feed." Wow, talk about taking something and running with it, and by the way, the anti-breastfeeding wackos I've seen are mostly just religious nuts, much more in the vein of this guy than the, er, "femikazis."
But here's the funniest thing I've ever read, seriously. "The New World Odor femikazis are responsible for the deaths of 13,500 women in England each year and tens of thousands of other women around the world. They MUST be prosecuted for conspiracy to MURDER and when found guilty -- EXECUTED!" and then, in the next paragraph, "Ignorance is NO excuse to commit mass murder!" Damn straight, future boy! Now back to that time machine of yours.
No photograph is offered of the device, just a vague description. The meat of the site, in fact, is an interview conducted by the most prestigious piece of journalism in all media, Strange Magazine.
Mr. Gibbs: "I got a letter one day when I was up at Norfork and it was supposedly from my other self from the future. I wasn't sure if it was a joke or not, because there was just no way the letter could be written up so fast...it was the first day I was there. I just went to the restroom for a few minutes after we got done playing a game, and I was just gone no longer than 3 or 4 minutes at the most, and when I got back Brian Johnson said that "somebody had dropped off a letter on top of this table that was signed to you." It was a full-length letter and it just made the hair curl on my back when I finished reading it. Well I found out that I didn't send it when the date arrived so evidently it might have been quite possible too that either the person I knew back then wrote the letter and knew what was going to happen to me in the future, or else my alternate double contacted me from an alternate future universe and decided to drop the letter off to me back on that date. I would imagine from the way the letter was written that it was from this guy back in '81 from the way it sounds. Because they knew...believe it or not...they knew what I was going to accomplish in the future. And how they knew that I had no idea. Brian Johnson wrote that letter because he knew I was going to write all those time travel reports and stuff and he was trying to get me motivated."
Can you imagine what real-world relationships are like with a guy who talks like this? "He travelled into my future and he saw an event that was going to transpire in the month of January where two people come up here who look like ordinary farm people and they clunk me over the head and they send me something like one million years back into Earth's past so I can't interfere anymore with these secret societies that are trying to take over the planet." Gene Ray is starting to sound like Tom Hanks.
Disclaimer: "THERE IS NO WARRANTY OR GUARANTEE ON THESE UNITS. THESE UNITS ARE ONLY SOLD FOR EXPERIMENTAL AND RESEARCH PURPOSES. THERE IS NO MONEY BACK GUARANTEE." Well, that's such a bad business decision you just know this guy's trustworthy! For all his schizophrenia, at least Ray never tried to sell anything. This guy's a sleazeball. Next!
VOCABULARY WORD OF THE WEEK.
tenderfoot (n.) - one not conditioned to outdoor life
She accused him of being a tenderfoot when he refused to perform cunnilingus on her in the forest.
I FOUND IT ON THE ROAD.
I think this is about erections at inappropriate times. What's your guess?
I have absolutely nothing else to say about this.
FROM THE ARCHIVES.
The great thing about AOL is that they always know the right questions to ask.
ENEMIES LIST. Joanne Cantor
I think the great division in the country is not between Republicans and Democrats or liberals and conservatives or men and women or blacks and whites or gays and straights. It's between people who mind their own business and people who want to tell everyone else how to live their lives, in keeping with their own simple-minded value system.
Joanne Cantor is a writer and, ahem, "researcher" who uses her vast knowledge of "media impact" on children as a sleazy springboard for her own brand of tomfoolery, pushing her own decisions about what is right and wrong for children to see onto parents who don't know any better. The sort of parents who would buy her book, disgustingly titled Mommy, I'm Scared: How TV and Movies Frighten Children and What We Can Do to Protect Them (read first chapter), probably are beyond help anyway, but what kind of a bitch does it take to greedily prey on the naive like this?
What's especially sad is that Cantor probably isn't sleazy; she's not a psychic or a politician, she probably actually believes what she's saying is true! She honestly believes that it's better to shield children from the news and what is happening in the world, and she seems convinced that this is a new problem as though the Cuban Missile Crisis, race rioting, and plenty of gory assassinations didn't happen forty years ago.
I think another great divide is between people with an inclination toward or an appreciation of, for lack of a better word, art, and people who hate any kind of intellectualism, including "art," or alien lifestyle, in other words pop culture, right down to Sylvester Stallone movies and Teletubbies.
If I was Steven Spielberg, I would revel in the fact that there are people who claim they couldn't go near the water for months after seeing JAWS. That would be a crowning achievement, to have that much of an effect on people, and I would feel great about having terrified mass quantities of people. The ability to move someone psychologically on a flat screen, or musical notes or any other indirect medium, is extraordinary and a real privelege to us in modern times.
But people like Cantor wouldn't be able to see the refusal to swim for what it is -- growth as an individual, coping with fear and with separation of reality and fantasy. Experiences like this are exactly what makes a person levelheaded about what they see on the telly.
Not that I would consider them ticking timebombs anyway. I still refuse to believe that television or film or any media has ever independently caused a person to act irresponsibly. It may -- and I still doubt this -- have affected someone with the capacity to do it anyway, in which case they were going to drop the bomb sometime. Some people are fucking nuts, and that is not a good reason for us to stop leaving our kids the fuck alone and letting them learn how to be people.
To her credit, Cantor isn't scared of teenagers -- which, to paraphrase Robert Christgau, would be ideal since she's the kind of adult they hate -- but she is convinced that any kind of adversity is bad for the youth of the nation. "Children's fright reactions are surprisingly intense and produce an alarming array of side effects, including nightmares, stomach troubles, aversions to common animals such as dogs, cats, and insects, and refusal to engage in common activities such as swimming. Throughout the book, there are vivid examples of how disruptive and long-lasting the effects of television can be--examples that are all the more compelling because they are described in a child's or a parent's own words. For preschoolers, even something as short as a movie promo can cause nightmares." Jesus, there must be more whining pussies in this book than the fucking animal shelter.
It is far from my ability to decry people who can't reconcile hard cold reality with something created by bored visual effects supervisors to briefly entertain. Some people are just like that. But it's also far from my ability to understand it, and those people really have no right to complain because their irrational fears are not shared by the rest of us. Actually, they have every right to complain but what they really should do is change the fucking channel.
Yes, I do sympathize with children who get freaked out because they don't want to watch NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 8: FREDDY DRINKS TOO MUCH AND PASSES OUT, and those children should be sent over to do something else if they say they can't handle it. If you don't want to watch something, turn it off or leave the room. You don't need a fucking book to tell you that.
The rest of the book, from what I saw, is even dumber. When she's not complaining about TV news -- wouldn't want the media to tell us what's happening in the world or anything, and how many kids do you know who go straight home and turn on MSNBC? -- she's confronting us with the startling revelation that television shows are rated now! And explaining what the ratings mean! I didn't have that hammered into my head in 1997 or anything!
To prove it's all bullshit, dig this paragraph: "Are these children reacting to the bully who threatened them at school? Are they worried about the child molester who tried to entice them into his car? Are they anxious about the burglar who just broke into their home? Probably not. Most of these children are reacting to something that never even happened to them. They are traumatized by something they saw on television or in a movie. It's as simple as that. What is worse, the anxiety they are experiencing may not go away in days or even weeks. Often it will last months, years, and even longer." WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THIS CUNT?? HOW DID SHE GET A GODDAMN PUBLISHING CONTRACT? IF YOUR KID WAS ALMOST MOLESTED AND SEEMS REALLY FUCKING UPSET, IT AIN'T THE FUCKING X-FILES THAT DID IT, YOU IGNORANT, BONEHEADED, NOSY, MALICIOUS FUCKING WASTE OF OXYGEN! TAKE YOUR KID TO FUCKING THERAPY IF S/HE'S BEEN NEARLY MOLESTED! THEY'LL NEED THEARPY FROM LIVING WITH A DIPSHIT LIKE YOU ANYWAY! I HOPE YOU CHOKE ON YOUR BREAKFAST CEREAL, YOU ROTTEN WHORE!
Conclusion: loser. This week will forever be known as Week of the Losers.
Just a little thing,
n.