Thoughtless for the Day

The Greatest Book Ever Written (in 1895)

2010-02-07T22:16:46Z

"I tried to read 'Twilight' but it got boring, like, the second page. There are no pictures, so I'm not reading it." - Snooki

A few weeks ago, Vienna told me she'd had a dream in which a new horror movie was not only selling out in theaters but also causing its audience to go insane. Despite this, in her dream, Vienna was really psyched about seeing the film. I can't say I blame her as it did sound much more exciting than Avatar.

"I guess it was kind of like that episode of Masters of Horror, you know, Cigarette Burns." Vienna added, referencing a TV show in which a man searches for a lost film which causes everyone who comes in contact with it to lose their minds. Except, of course, for Udo Kier, who has been typecast as a nutjob since his first kindergarten play; so he just ended up wandering over to another section of the Disenchanted Kingdom.

"I imagine," I said (and these are the sorts on conversations that go on in our house), "that you could also make a case for the movie in your dream being like London After Midnight. After all, some guy strangled a woman in Hyde Park after seeing it; he claimed that Lon Chaney's make up drove him insane. And London After Midnight is a lost film, so that ties it to Cigarette Burns"

"Then," Vienna said, "you could also argue that the movie in my dream was like the book in The Mouth of Madness."

"Well, the plot of that movie was just a rip-off of The King in Yellow."

"The what?"

"The King in Yellow. It's a book about a book, also called The King in Yellow, that causes widespread insanity. I read it about twenty-five years ago, and I don't think that I've met anyone else who has ever read it. I think in was written between-the-wars, around 1920 or so: which is really creepy because one scene takes place in the 'future' New York of the 1930's, which has been ethnically cleansed, and is now free of 'all Semitic peoples'. Antisemitism wasn't just popular back then, it was endemic."

As it turned out, I was wrong (hey, it happens) about two things: The first was that The King in Yellow was not published in the 1920's, but in 1895: you'll find out why this is remarkable shortly. The second was that, in the book, all Semitic peoples are not banned from New York City in the 1930's. No, America just passes a law forbidding all foreign-born Jews from entering the country: which was actually a pretty liberal attitude for 1895; especially when you consider that it was that year when Alfred Dreyfus was sent to Devil's Island.

The King in Yellow usually gets categorized as Horror fiction or, occasionally, as Fantasy, but I think the best to description is "just plain weird". The book is a collection of plays and short stories all loosely tied together by the King who can either an actual person, a book, or a symbol. While I highly recommend that you read all of the stories in the book, I implore you (I'm begging here) to read the first story in the book, The Repairer of Reputations (you can read it online here), which is a truly twisted tale that was decades ahead of its time, not only in its perspective on madness, but also for its ability to slowly build an atmosphere of terror while also creating a very convincing alternate history. It even manages to brilliantly juggle two competing narratives. And it did all of this thirty years before H.P. Lovecraft began putting pen to paper.

"In the following winter began the agitation for the repeal of the laws prohibiting suicide which bore its final fruit in the month of April, 1920, when the first Government Lethal Chamber was opened on Washington Square." - From The Repairer of Reputations.

By the way, Robert W. Chambers, the author of The King in Yellow ended his career writing romance novels. Which, if you think about it, would be a much more appealing delivery system for mass madness than a horror novel. After all, there's something wonderfully joyous about the idea of a suburban mom reading The Viscount's Betrothal and then running amok with a meat cleaver.

Who knows, maybe Harlequin Romances or Chicken Soup for the Soul really are part of a secret plot to drive a large segment of the population crazy. How else could you explain this piece of spam that turned up in my inbox:

[Thanks, unknown spammer! Now Dr. Who and Viagra are forever linked in my mind.]

The again, I guess the idea of a book which could transform its readers into raving paranoid lunatics is a pretty far-fetched idea.

You're Thor? I Can Hardly Sit Down.

2010-02-05T16:18:37Z

I have what is known as a "restless mind", which is a polite way of saying "short attention span". While composing the previous post, I had a series of thoughts run through my head then attempt to escape out my right ear-canal . I've since tracked them down, and have placed them on display below.

Thought Number One: Who started covering women up and why?
Think about it (if I had to, you should too); the burqa and the Duggars' swimwear (yes, there is a link to that site on the Duggars' site. Marion, Don't Look At It - Shut Your Eyes, Marion!) didn't just appear out of nowhere*: for thousands of years, men have been covering women from head-to-toe. This seems counter-intuitive at fist; after all, if you've got a small Bronze-Age village run by men, wouldn't it stand to reason that all the women in that village would be dressed like Raquel Welch in One Million Years BC[E]? Clothes might make the man, but men make the rules.

So when and why did men start forcing women to "dress modestly, with decency and propriety" (Timothy 2:9-10)? I honestly don't have a good answer. What I do have is a theory.

Let's say you're a guy living in the aforementioned Bronze-Age village wherein all of the women have been running around in fur bikinis for a century or two. You may have begun to notice that the warriors from the village on the other side of the marsh have a nasty tendency to regularly raid your village and carry off your women. So, you call a meeting of the village elders wherein someone comes up with the bright idea that if you cover up all of the women, raiding parties won't know whether or not they're carrying off Angelina Jolie or Angela Lansbury until they get home and "unwrap the goods".

Maybe this is why, in the ritual of the wedding ceremony, which harkens back to the days of arranged marriage, the groom doesn't get to remove the bride's veil until after he's said "I do"?

Oddly, this led me to...

Thought Number Two: The Worst Wedding Night Ever
Norse mythology (which used to be Norse religion) gives us the charming and equally disturbing tale of Thor's attempt to appear on RuPaul's Drag Race.

Somehow Thrym, king of the Giants, managed to get his hands on Thor's magic hammer (Paging Dr. Freud, Dr. Sigmund Freud to the white courtesy phone), Mjollnir.** Anyhoooo, Thrym offered to trade the hammer for the hand of the goddess Freyja (for whom Friday is named) in marriage.

At this point the god Loki gets involved in the story: Which, if you know anything about Norse mythology, means that something weird is about to happen. Loki somehow convinces Thor to put on a wedding dress, complete with veil (I don't know a whole lot about Thor's personal life, so maybe it didn't take much convincing), and off they go to the Land of the Giants, where despite the phony Freyja scarfing down an entire ox at a wedding banquet, nobody catches on until it's too late and the hammer is handed to Thor/Freyja as a wedding present (???).

"I'm an action transvestite really, so it's running, jumping, climbing trees... putting on make-up when you're up there!" - Eddie Izzard

All this talk of clothing and lack thereof led to...

Thought Number Three: The Emperor's New Clothes
The great irony of the fable of The Emperor's New Clothes is that it has been told to generations of school children as an example of the virtue of questioning authority, yet not once, to my knowledge, has some little child, upon hearing the story, raised his or her hand and said "Wait just one Odindamn minute! While the kid in the tale did manage to point out the emperor's swinging scepter, and no point did he also point out that it was a stupid idea to have an emperor in the fist place and that, perhaps, a parliamentary form of government might be a better idea. And while we're on the subject, if the same kid had pointed at either the Pope, the Dalai Lama, or J. Edgar Hoover and said 'Hey, look at that guy in a dress', his brains would be all over the sidewalk. Now where's my box of juice?"

* I should point out that the Muslims swiped the idea for the burqa from the Byzantine Christians, and the the Duggars' swimwear was probably inspired by...hmmmm...LSD in their water supply, perhaps?

** I don't know how Thrym did this. Yes, I've getting at least four books on Norse Mythology sitting only a few feet away, but I'm feeling too lazy to bother to look this up.

But I Don't Even Own a Pornograph

2010-02-03T19:40:06Z

Is it just me, or has the cast of Cinemax's late-night series Naughty Cheerleader Academy just been "phoning it in" this season? I swear, that show jumped the shark shortly after the sorority rush episode in season two.

OK, now that the members of the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice have left the room in order to report me to Focus on the Family we can have a serious chat about a creepy subject. And like most creepy subjects, this one begins with me watching an episode of Antiques Road Show (Which I like to call "Rich people getting richer as saps, like me, watch") .

So, I'm watching the UK version of AR on BBC America and there's this woman with a 19th Century brass microscope and a collection of slides. The appraiser takes a look at the antique scientific equipment and basically says (and not only paraphrasing, but translating into "Philly Speak"), "Look lady; this microscope ain't worth squat. Get it out of my sight before I brain ya' with it. What I'm really interested in are these slides. In fact, I really only care about this one slide here..."

At this point, the appraiser holds up a glass slide with what appears to be a tiny brown square on it, and asks the woman if she knows what it is. OK, the unspoken truth about Antiques Roadshow is that "antiques" could be used to describe either the majority of items brought in to be appraised, or the majority of people who bring those items in for appraisal. The average "guest" on AR is 104 years old and has been mummified at least twice; add to that the fact that most of these ancient coots come from "old money" and it's easy to see why if you showed one of 'em a toaster and asked what it was, they're more likely than not to say, "I think Michelangelo carved that". So there's no way in Hell the old bat was going to get the question right, but at least she had the good sense to shrug rather than offer an opinion.

As it turned out, that tiny brown square was a mid-19th Century version of the microdot. In other words, it was a minuscule photograph that could only be viewed under a microscope. Well, that made the slide a little more interesting. And then the appraiser dropped the bomb: many of these tiny photographs were pornographic.

Shut the front door!

Apparently, upper-class Victorian men of Science would say to their wives, "Darling, I'll be retiring to my study now, in order that I may continue my research into the mysteries of Nature in the hope that I may cure Aunt Gertrude's dropsy", and then they would look at dirty pictures under a microscope. Let that sink in for a moment.

I should point out that I have no idea what Victorian porn consisted of (most likely, a glimpse of woman's ankle), but I do know one other disturbing fact about the Victorian mindset: They used to cover the legs of tables in order to keep men from having "unwholesome" thoughts.

By the way, during my research for this piece, I came across the following:

...in 1874, the Pimlico studio of Henry Hayler, one of the most prominent producers of such material was loaded up with 130,248 obscene photographs and five thousand magic lantern slides.

It seems that the same Henry Hayler was also the author of a secret journal.

Next time, I'll connect Victorian porn and the god Thor. Oh yeah, you'll want to read that!

Write text here...

Raphanidosis

2010-01-31T01:19:48Z

I picked a terrible time to focus on songwriting and neglect my duties here at RATYHTL, as the last two weeks have been packed solid with fascinating news: Pat Robertson blamed the Haitian earthquake on voodoo, whereas Danny Glover blamed it on Global Warming; James O'Keefe, the man behind the ACORN videos, was caught tampering with a Senator's phone, and a plane was forced to land at Philly International because the passengers had never seen a Jew before [OK, that's an oversimplification, but it looks good in print]. Oh, and there may or may not have been a cover-up of three murders at Gitmo.

But, for me at least, the most interesting piece of news to surface over the last few weeks was the arrest of one Charles Dyer for child rape and sodomy.

Dyer, a twenty-nine-year-old former Marine Sargent who lives in Oklahoma, had appeared in a number of videos on YouTube using the handle "July4Patriot": often openly referring to himself as a terrorist. Here's one Dyer's more interesting rants:

Dyer was also one of the founding members of a group called Oath keepers (Did they mean "oaf keepers"?) and spoke at several Tea Party events. As mentioned above, Dyer was arrested a couple of weeks ago for raping a seven-year-old girl. Which is twisted enough, but the icing on the obviously vanilla cake is that when the police raided Dyer's no doubt tastefully decorated home they found a 40-millimeter grenade launcher, which was apparently stolen from Fort Irwin, although Dyer claims it was "a gift from a friend" (and all I ever get are ties).

It was with Dyer's arrest that his Teabaggin' buddies shifted into high gear, reportedly threatening the Sheriff who arrested Dyer as well as anyone who reports on the story [Come and get me, you pansies!]

I will say one positive thing about Mr. (soon to be "Ms.", if those stories I've heard about what goes on in prison are true) Dyer; he vicariously managed to reacquaint me with a word I'd long forgotten. I was discussing the Dyer case with a friend who said, "You know what they out to do to that guy?", and - before my friend could offer up the punishment he had in mind - I blurted out a word I hand not used, or even thought about, for that matter, in many years: Rhaphanidosis!

Rhaphanidosis was the punishment in ancient Greece for adultery. Basically, it involved hammering a radish (which used to be ...um... larger and pointier than the ones we're used to seeing) up the accused adulterer's backside. It's where we get the sadly too seldom used verb raphanizein - meaning "to insert a radish into the fundament" - from. Come to think of it, the word fundament doesn't get used often enough either.

Aid or Invade plus Weekend Roundup

2010-01-29T15:45:22Z

Has it really been two weeks since my last post? Damn, time flies when you're an unstable misanthrope. Major apologies. Regular posts will begin immediately; starting with this mini-post:

The latest Aid or Invade was posted yesterday. Is it just me, or is AoI starting to run out of steam.

If you dare to brave the cold weather this Sunday, Decontrol, the Tough Shits, Hellbent Hookers, and many others will be playing at Fishstock at the El Bar.

Take us out international superstar Erika LaMoore...

Acapulcolypse Gold

2010-01-15T17:18:03Z

Like it or not (and, despite a small amount of of amusement, I'm firmly in the "not" category) we live in an Apocalypse Culture. This guy insists that we have until May 21, 2011 (my 48th birthday!), while this joker (and sad, lonely teabagger who discovered the previously unknown correlation between Gays and earthquakes) is convinced that the Tribulation began on 29 September 2008; and he has written a book that proves it! For the more scientifically oriented, there's Global Climate Change and asteroids. If the "experts" are correct, the odds are pretty damn good that you will be dead long before you finish reading this post. Good luck.

One of the more interesting aspects of End Times Mania has been the Right's new-found obsession with the bad investment opportunity that is GOLD. Now, I had intended to write a piece about why so many Right Wingers are shilling for gold companies, and why putting your hard-earned cash into gold is the worst idea since Charlie Daniels decided to make his deepest thoughts public, but I was beaten to the punch by Politico who recently published this piece

...and by The Colbert Report

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Prescott Financial Sells Gold, Women & Sheep

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Economy

Since I was feeling sort of lazy today, finding out that my work had already been done for me (and done much better than I ever could've) was like striking gold.

Them's Fightin' Words: Car Talk

2010-01-13T19:38:57Z

A few days back, I needed a new drill bit, so I swung by the hardware store around the corner. When the clerk informed me that the drill bit I required was out-of-stock, I quipped, "Well, it looks like little Billy won't be getting his fillings this week." The clerk then gave me that look: the look that says. "What sort of sick individual would even think something like that, let alone actually say it."

It's the same look I get whenever I mention that I have a deep-seated hatred for NPR's Car Talk.

I like to think that I'm a nice guy. I'm kind to animals; I never talk down to kids; my wife says that I'm a good husband; and I enjoy the simple pleasures in life, like a cup of yerba mate and reading my friend Brian's thoughts on that day's episode of Divorce Court. So why is it that I all I have to do is even hint that Cah Tawk is the least funny thing to grace the airwaves since FDR's wheelchair ignited during one of his fireside chats, and suddenly I'm having that "Joe Pesci in Goodfellows" conversation:

Friend: How can you hate Car Talk? I love Car Talk. Everybody loves Car Talk!

Me: Why? Why do you like it?

Friend: I dunno. 'Cuz it's funny?

Me: Funny how?

Friend: I dunno. It's just...funny.

Me: Oh, I see. So it amuses you. It's your clown.

Now, it's usually at this point - right about when I'm ready to pull a gun - that someone feels the need to remind me that humor is subjective and rarely, if ever, do two people see eye-to-eye on what is funny. I couldn't agree more. I'm am not an expert on what is funny. What I am is an expert on what is not funny: Schindler's List, for example is not funny (despite the presence of some very silly German accents). Puppy mills are not funny. Cardinal Bernard Law getting away scot-free was not funny. And Car Talk is not funny.

Unlike the people who enjoy Car Talk but can never seem to provide a coherent reason as to why they find it amusing, I can tell you exactly why it isn't funny: Car Talk labors under the misguided notion that "regular people" laugh at dumb humor in much the same same way that the Yuppies behind A Prairie Home Companion have deluded themselves into thinking that residents of rural communities have a rustic, folksy charm that those of us who have actually encountered them refer to as "Cretanism".

In other words, and I'm sorry if this offends any of my friends, I suspect that the people who laugh at Car Talk are, in a way, saying, "'Dewey, Cheatum, & Howe!' Hahaha! See? I'm not so stuffy and well educated that I'm not above laughing at dumb jokes." It's like when a nuclear physicist laughs at a Three Stooges short. He or she knows damn well that the Three Stooges are slightly less funny than Stevie Wonder performing a colonoscopy, but they laugh anyway in a fruitless attempt to connect with... I dunno...people who laugh at the Three Stooges, I guess.

The truth is that you are above laughing at dumb jokes. That's nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, you should take pride in that. It doesn't make you a stick-in-the-mud or a snob if you don't laugh at fart jokes. It just makes you an adult.

And who the Hell takes automotive advice from people who live in Boston anyway? Have you ever been to Boston? If so, did you see how the people there drive? It's like asking a Scotsman for culinary tips.

Normally, I would just ignore Car Talk in much the same manner as I ignore American Routes (AKA "The White offspring of the Privileged Class listen to The Blues), but the problem is that, here in Philly, Car Talk immediately follows On The Media and This American Life (two shows that are roughly six billion times more funny and informative than Car Talk could ever hope to be) - which is like following Monty Python and The Young Ones with Benny Hill. This means that as soon as TAM ends, I have to leap across the room and turn off my radio before either one of the humorously-challenged hosts of Car Talk can utter a single syllable. Silencing them is well worth the effort.

Why Things Suck and How to Fix Them Part 462: The History Channel

2010-01-11T19:06:21Z

If you're like me - and, these days, who isn't? - then you can remember a halcyon era, not too long ago, when MTV and VH1 showed music videos, The Learning Channel was bereft of chocolate-making Little People and deranged helmet-haired Talibangelicals, and the History Channel showed actual programs about History. Sadly those days, much like Charlie Daniels' few remaining brain cells, are gone.

Now, in the case of VH1, replacing Poison videos with a cruel social experiment involving Brett Michaels and a group women who were found hanging around the Modesto Free Clinic actually improved the network. Come to think of it, Teen Mom is much more of an "alternative" show than MTV's 120 Minutes ever was. And anyone who was surprised that, in the land of anti-intellectualism, a network called The Learning Channel would eventually morph into a Freak Show would also be shocked to learned that we almost elected a Vice President who didn't know that Africa was a continent.

But The History Channel? The History Channel was something different. It was the lifeboat many of us crawled into once PBS, suffering from a lack of government funding, began ceding airtime to thinly veiled infomercials and WASPs Gone Wild (aka The Antiques Roadshow). And while The History Channel still presents many wonderful programs like Cities of the Underworld, Ancient Discoveries, and Bad Girls Club, The History Channel has also become home to such as moronfests as MonsterQuest, UFO Hunters, and countless "specials" (as in short yellow bus "special") about Nostradamus and the Antichrist (AKA Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Pope Benedict XVI, Emperor Nero, and/or Barack Obama) .

And that (along with about a million other things) is what really melts my s'mores. Look; you don't have to make up History in order to make History interesting. Mount Vernon is a fascinating place - it's where the Father of Our Country grew hemp and made booze. You don't need to send a couple of cretinous "Ghost Hunters" out there in the dead of night to help the spirit of Thomas Jefferson find his bong. that's not exploring History. That's not popularizing History. That's polluting History.

If the general public thinks History is dull, then that's only because no one has told them that Francois Rabelais used to wipe his butt with a live goose (Let's see that on Animal Planet. The guy made Michael Vick look like Betty White). If you can find a way to make that tidbit more interesting by tossing in two old farts and a Ouija board, I'm all ears.

Household Hints for Historians

2010-01-04T22:40:20Z

A few months back Vienna and I noticed that we were washing clean dishes. Often, when one of us was out of the house, the other would look at the dishes in the dishwasher and, not knowing whether or not they were clean or dirty, run them through the wash cycle again, just to be on the safe side.

In order to combat this wasteful tendency, we developed an iconographic method for keeping track of the state of our dishes. What makes this method fun is that it's based entirely on Vienna's great respect for Catherine of Aragon ... and her deep hatred of Anne Boleyn (whom Vienna refers to simply as "The Great Whore"). When dirty dishes are placed in the dishwasher, a small framed portrait of Anne Boleyn with the word "Dirty" inscribed upon it is displayed on the counter top. Once the dishwasher is turned on, the portrait of Anne is replace by one of Catherine marked "Clean".

If it were up to me, by the way, I would've used Emperors Constantine for "Dirty" and Julian for "Clean".

For me, the best thing about this method of keeping track of cutlery cleanliness is explaining it to mystified house-guests who spot the portraits in our kitchen.

The Greatest Book Ever Written (in 1972)

2009-12-29T13:41:50Z

While other critics are currently busying themselves with their "Best of the Year" and "Best of the Decade" lists, I'd just like to take a moment to enlighten the entire world to the ponderous tome that is When All the Laughter Died in Sorrow by Lance Rentzel.

Until a few weeks ago, when I stumbled upon WAtLDiS (or "WaltDis", as I like to call it) at a flea market, I was completely ignorant (and as the Rozz Tox Manifesto clearly states, "Ignorance of one's own culture is not considered cool") of the slow-motion dioxin-car-carrying train wreck that is the life story of Lance Rentzel. If, like me, you were also absent from school on the day when your classmates were ushered into a crowded auditorium to hear The Cautionary Tale Lance here's the scoop:

Lance Rentzel was a professional football player who had been a wide receiver for the Vikings, the Cowboys, and the Rams (coincidentally, the original Vikings employed a device known as the "cowboy ram" to batter down the doors of the Alamo).

Lance Rentzel was briefly married to "entertainer" Joey Heatherton. For you youngsters, Joey Heatherton was not a dude. Joey was a sort of proto-Paris Hilton who was "famous for being famous". Today, Joey is best remembered for inspiring the SCTV character Lola Heatherton. Bring da noise, Joey:

Lance Rentzel would also, on occasion, expose his private parts to children. This proclivity for show and tell led to Lance getting busted on two occasions. The fist offense was quietly swept under the rug, but the second killed Lance's marriage and nearly ended his career

Now, by today's NFL standards, that last item item may not be so shocking, but what you need to remember is that Lance was arrested in 1970 - long before the public's begrudging acceptance of the fact that the overwhelming majority of America's star athletes are raincoat clad monsters who hang around playgrounds. Which brings us to the book itself...

To call WAtLDiS "unflinching" is like calling Joey Heatherton "a bit of a ham". Whereas contemporary ballplayers, attempting to redeem themselves in the eyes of the public, might have a biography ghostwritten for them in which their misdeeds are tersley dispensed with in two small paragraphs on page 179, Lance Rentzel dives right into the muck and mire from the start and keeps returning to the trough with delirious regularity. Here's Lance, just a mere six pages into WAtLDiS describing how his second arrest for public indecency triggered memories of his first arrest for public indecency:

I got dressed and the fear dwindled, replaced by speculations,. I wondered what might happen, trying to figure out an approach, but my mind kept referring to the past. I'd been in this exact spot before. In 1966, when I was playing for the Minnesota Vikings, I was at practice, and it wasn't my mother, it was Coach Norm Van Brocklin who broke the news. He brought me into his office, trying to figure me out. It was one of the few times I ever saw him ill at ease. He said to me, apologetically, "I hate to ask you this, but did you expose yourself to two small girls?"

Talk about your yes or no questions. And with that, WAtLDiS establishes its own habitual pattern of exposure. On page 56, Lance regales us with a tale of young love:

My first affair was with a lady of my choice - an attractive girl from another school. Once we bagan (and it was the first time for both of us), we made love frequently, wherever [sic] we could find the time and privacy. Inevitably there were problems [emphasis mine], like the time we were in the back room of my house and heard someone coming; we quickly gathered our clothes and rushed into the bathroom. We dressed hurriedly, frantically, silently, only to come out and see my mom holding up a forgotten pair of panties.

While we never learn whether the panties belonged to the young lady or to Lance, we do get a glimpse (on page 29) into Lenny Bruce's dark legacy:

"Say, did you hear that Lance Rentzel's problems have been solved?" Henny Youngman began telling audiences. "Sure, he's just been traded to the Montreal Expos."
"There's no doubt about it anymore," said singer Don Cherry at a nightclub in Oklahoma City , "Lance Rentzel can really handle the fly pattern." My older brother, Del, was in the audience with his wife, Kay, and some business associates.

Ahhh, you can almost hear the rim shots over the weeping of Del and Kay.

While you have to admire Rentzel's brutal honesty (if you doubt he's got a pair of balls, just ask the kids at P.S. 154 - they've seen 'em), you also have to be equally dismayed at Lance's repeated naming of the father of the young victim, as well as his decision to have his psychiatrist, Dr. Louis Jolyon West, pen the book's epilogue.

In the end, WAtLDiS is best enjoyed as a mildly deranged historical curiosity (not unlike The Malleus Maleficarum or Going Rogue): a strange time-capsule from the dawn of the era of celebrity tell-alls and power couples.

I'll let Lance's mother have the next-to-last word:

I am convinced that civil rights are only for minorities and mass muderers.

Phun Phact: Cyclist Lance Armstrong was allegedly named after Lance Rentzel.

Reading Rainbow

2009-12-22T15:17:35Z

Here's a completely random listing of interesting things I found on the web:

Slate has a piece about my favorite TV show of the moment: Hoarders

a look back at the accomplishments (and lack thereof) of The Replacements

The Onion has created the greatest "Area Man" piece of all time
Same-sex marriage is now legal in Mexico City!!!
and the genomes for two different types of cancer have been mapped

December Caption Contest: Another Failed Attempt

2009-12-20T17:12:24Z

Once again, I have failed miserably to conceive a caption which has even the slightest chance of winning this month's Biblical Archaeology Review Caption Contest.

Weekend Roundup 12/18 & 19

2009-12-18T05:41:18Z

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The Big Mess Orchestra (featuring Dean Clean, Joe Jack Talcum, and about 100 other people I know) will be playing on both Friday and Saturday nights (I'll be there on Saturday night) at the Troc.

The Holiday edition of the Punk Rock Flea Market will be held on Saturday from 10 am until 5 pm at the Starlite Ballroom on 9th and Spring Garden.

And on Sunday there's the not-to-be-missed Punk Rock Xmas Xtravaganz (Featuring Decontrol and another 100 other people I know) at Kung Fu Necktie from 3-7 pm

Mid-Week Religious Roundup

2009-12-17T14:54:14Z

Here are the latest religious stats as of 9:00 AM EST on 12/17/09:

Oral Roberts is still dead (and, perhaps partially responsible for our current financial crisis)
Speaking of financial crises: Rod Parsley is going broke
Ray "Banana Boy" Comfort is in trouble
Charlie "Is it me or the outhouse?" Daniels is still an idiot
The Catholic Church may have killed the sequel to a movie that nobody saw
Idiots toss kid out of school for drawing Jesus (although the kid seems to have confused Easter with Christmas)

Dream Money

2009-12-15T01:39:49Z

The eminent philosopher Joe Jack Talcum used to own a copy of a nineteenth century "dream book". Basically, if you had a dream about - let's say - a horse, you would look up "horse" in the book, and next to the word "horse" would be some advice like "Now would be a good time to check in on a sick relative". Oddly, if you looked up "cheese" the book informed you that nothing good could ever come from a dream about cheese. Even more oddly, a recent study found that eating different varieties of cheese can help you choose your dreams.

For centuries our ancestors thought that dreams were visions or veiled prophecies which, if properly interpreted, could reveal the future. In the early twentieth century, Sigmund Freud hit upon that idea that our dreams were trying to tell us something ourselves: that our dreams were a window into the sub-conscience. This was of little comfort to those people who regularly dreamed of hot-dogs and donuts.

Today, we know that both of those theories are wrong (OK, most of us know those theories are wrong. This guy is still a holdout...and his website says nothing about cheese!). The current understanding is that dreams are evolution's way of allowing us to test our reactions to different scenarios and to learn from those imaginary reactions. This seems to make a great deal of sense, since many mammals dream, and I have yet to meet a cat who needed the gift of prophecy or a dog who had unresolved issues with its mother.

If you need further convincing, think about nightmares for a moment. When our ancestors roamed the plains of Africa, tens of thousands of years ago, having the occasion nightmare in which one was chased by lion might turn out to be useful if, during the dream, the hunted escaped by climbing up a tree and remembered that strategy latter. This might also explain why small children still have nightmares in which they're being chased by monsters.

In a way, our dreams are like the appendix, something that once had a useful function, but that, over time, has become obsolete, at best, and downright dangerous, at worst (my wife's nightmares have caused her to pop me in the face approximately a dozen times. Or, at least she says it's her dreams that are making her do this). While it's nice that our dreams are still trying to teach us things, there really is only one survival tactic that's useful for modern humans: Have plenty of cash on hand. And that's why RATYHL is proud to introduce Dream Money:

Image via Wikipedia

Dream Money works on a similar principle to "Joss paper",(or "ghost" or "hell" money, as it's more commonly known) - a representation of real money which is burned as an offering to the dead in some Asian cultures - only Dream Money a lot more "Sciencey".

The first thing that you need to do is print out several copies of the bill above and either burn them in your fireplace or stack them next to your bedside - they make excellent bookmarks, by the way (I keep plenty of Dream Dollars of these around the house, just in case I eat the wrong kind of cheese). Then, before you go to sleep, just remind yourself that, at least in your dreams, you have plenty of pocket cash. This way, if you should find yourself having a nightmare in which some crazed, deformed mutant is chasing you with an axe, all you have to do is whip out a wad of dream cash and settle on the exact amount needed for Mr. Mutant to curtail his murderous activities. Or you could use your dream money to purchase a "dream Uzi" and deal with the issue in a more direct manner. It's that simple.

OK, since I've gone and done something really swell for humanity by inventing a currency you can use in your sleep, I'd like all of you who try Dream Money to write in and let me know how it works (or doesn't work). You see, I'm hoping to finally achieve my lifelong dream of winning the Ig-Noble Prize for Economics.