'Quasimodo predicted all this'

 

This America

Driving in the South of Market district this morning, I stopped at a traffic signal. I'd just been to the supermarket and then to a coffee bar and was on my way to a freeway onramp to come to work. I noticed a pedestrian in the crosswalk. He was a young man, no more than 25, and a little overweight. He had a shambling gait and was making weird motions, digging the knuckles of one hand into his cheek and jaw as if tightening invisible bolts; with each second that I watched him, as he slowly made his way across wide Bryant Street, I was more convinced that he was mentally ill. He wore a light jacket, not enough for the cold morning. But what struck me most was that, with the temperature about 42 F., he was barefoot.

One sees mentally ill people on the streets of every American city. The only thing that distinguished this guy was his youth and appearance. He wasn't dirty or unshaven; except for his shoelessness, he might have taken off that morning from whatever home or facility he lived in, a place where his clothes were washed and he was well fed. But his gait and general behavior revealed his illness.

I felt compassion, and thought of actually stopping and giving him my shoes and socks. I have hiking boots in my car which I could have put on, and a spare pair of socks at work. But I did nothing.

"What is hell?" asked Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamozov. "I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love."

Dept. of Don't Know Whether to Laugh or Cry: The "Dragon Tattoo" fashion line

I almost choked on my Wheaties this morning when I saw an ad pop up on the side of Gawker for a "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" fashion line. I guess it's supposed to be for young women who want to emulate the title character, who is a punked out Rooney Mara:

For the record, the fashion line is like this:

Somebody please help.

How collapsitarians find safe zones

On my favorite collapsitarian blog, today's post is a typical piece of baseless fear-mongering, so pointless I won't even describe it. And then the comments start.

First comment:

Most rural areas within a tank's worth of gas will be inundated by the Golden Horde. The few that can make it on foot will find their way through your retreat area and beyond scavenging, pillaging, and looting anything they can find to try and survive. No matter where you are you may get contact from people fleeing those cesspits that are major metro areas. Remember maintain good fields of fire/killing fields around your retreat and keep those mags topped off.

In the paranoid collapsitarian mind, once the Collapse happens, cities will become utterly consumed with rioting, leading some ("the Golden Horde," which I think refers to the people who have enough resources to escape the cities) to flee and attempt to find a safe place, leading to the now-hackneyed scenario described by the commenter.

The interesting part is the 4th comment down, in which someone creates a how-to for calculating the range of that "horde."

You have to draw lines out along every major highway from every major city, out to about 350 miles (the average distance someone could get on a full tank of gas, assuming all they do is drive). Shade all areas on the map to about 5-10 miles of each side of those highways from the 350 mile point, back to the city. Now draw a line about 30 miles out from the outer suburbs, and shade the area that it covers. You can throttle the lines back a bit for things like rough terrain, rivers, mountain ranges, and the like.

The result is the first two days of full-on zombie migration in your area. The outer edges will be lightly populated, while the inner ones will be heavily so (as traffic snarls up, etc).

However, here's the trick: Not everyone will be moving at the same time, or at the same rate. Also, not all situations would result in a mass evacuation. ...

It goes on like that for a bit, but you get the idea. At least someone has attempted to quantify the effects of this supposed mass migration.

Also, note how the term "zombie" is used for any individual who is part of this so-called horde. Cute of him, because you know what you do with zombies: shoot them in the head (or hey-ud, because I can't imagine anyone with this mindset not possessing a Southern accent). In the minds of the collapsitarians, any non-rightous person who has not armed himself and his God-fearing family and stocked up for ten years of apocalypse, who in the event of a Collapse therefore needs charity, is identical to a zombie -- that is, deserves to be shot on sight.

In fact, this is what they would secretly like to do now, before any apocalypse: kill everyone who is poor, in need of charity, anyone who might rob them or use up their tax dollars, which they feel is equal to stealing. But of course you can't have whole websites and crypto-fascist movements that openly advocate killing the poor, the disabled, petty criminals and the like, because that would make you a Nazi. So you just call the targets of your wrath "zombies," and pretend it's all about preparing for some societal apocalypse, and then you can talk about it all you want.

If you have any doubt that the main audience this appeals to is neo-fascist, just read the rest of the comments on that blog post. Holy crap.

There are no real vampires, but you do have bedbugs

Scores were sickened and one person died over the past three years in amateur efforts to rid their homes of bedbugs, the CDC announced.

This review of the film Contagion discusses how vampires and body-snatching aliens are metaphors for contagion. And I've said before that the current obsession with zombies is pretty much the same thing as paranoid apocalyptic fantasies of an economic collapse. But it never occurred to me that we have blood-suckers in our midst that are causing similar fears.

I guess with bedbugs, "shoot 'em in the head" doesn't really work that well as a strategy.

Cultural heroine, c. early 21st century

I ran across this image in the RSS feed of a young woman's blog. It isn't a picture of the blog owner, just a picture she posted, apparently one she likes, as she mainly posts arresting pictures of young women, many of them models:

Click the image to see it as posted. I think this picture pretty much sums up the current zeitgeist, everything popular culture is fascinated with or uses: Extreme youth and attractiveness plus anonymity (the goggles, wig and pose obscuring the model's real features) contrasted with exhibitionism (the underwear) plus narcissism (she's ostensibly taking her own picture) plus voyeurism (we can see much more of her than she "intends" with the picture she is "taking").

This image reminds me of the pictures posted on a rich young Mexican girl's blog I stumbled on many years ago (and which has long since vanished). She posted pictures she'd taken of herself on the toilet. In the pictures she was nude, but had arranged her arms and legs to hide her nipples and her pussy, thus controlling the extent of her exhibitionism. No name, and the postings were clearly just for her friends, whom she addressed through nicknames.

But the image above really piles on the memes. In addition to exhibitionism, narcissism and so on, we can even add nostalgia, if that is the right term for including the 20th century camera she is holding.

Be afraid, be very afraid

It's Expanded Terror Threat Day, informally (yet officially) declared every year around this time. As the L.A. Times story says:

U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials scrambled Friday to identify and find as many as three men who supposedly planned to travel from Afghanistan to detonate car bombs on bridges or in tunnels this weekend in New York and Washington. Officials said they obtained specific but uncorroborated intelligence this week that two or three individuals with close ties to Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan had entered the United States in a plot to disrupt events planned to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Vice President Joe Biden told morning TV shows that the intelligence came from a "credible source." ...

The men -- possibly including a U.S. citizen -- were said to have crossed by land from Pakistan to Afghanistan and then to have boarded a series of flights bound for the United States, possibly connecting through Dubai International Airport. ... The warning came from a single trusted source who has given correct information in the past, said a U.S. official who was not authorized to speak to the media. Intelligence officials do not have specific names or fragments of names of any suspects, the official added.

Really? With all the terrorist watch lists, several people crossed on foot from Pakistan to Afghanistan, flew blithely out of Kabul through Dubai and thence to the U.S.? Great. Meanwhile hundreds of innocent people can't fly on a plane at all for reasons they aren't even allowed to know.

While:

Traffic backed up at Manhattan's bridges and tunnels Friday as the New York Police Department set up vehicle checkpoints on nearby streets. Police searched parking garages and stepped up towing of illegally parked cars, and some officers wore portable monitors set to vibrate in the presence of unusual radiation. National Guard troops carrying assault rifles patrolled at Grand Central Terminal and Penn Station, the city's railroad hubs, and police officers increased checks of subway riders' bags. In Washington, police and federal law enforcement increased security around government buildings and monuments. Extra air marshals will fly on domestic flights this weekend, and foreign air carriers have been asked to step up screening of passengers bound for the U.S. In addition, the Transportation Security Administration will deploy more than 600 teams of bomb-sniffing dogs and bag inspectors on train platforms and subway systems around the country.

I feel so safe I could fly. Just not on a plane.

A typical screed from a paranoid right-winger

I often note the posts of collapsitarians, but today let's look at a typical blatt from one of your basic paranoid right-wing racists. It's titled Lone Wolf False Flag or Real Mumbai-Style Active Shooters?

"False Flag" is right-wing-paranoid lingo for an act blamed on one group but secretly perpetrated by their enemies in order to defame them. The classic example is the Reichstag fire, blamed on the Jews, but actually done by the Nazis. Ever since they blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City, almost every act of terrorism is said by one foamer or another to be a "false flag" act, or in other words, a terrorist act secretly enacted by the government and blamed on right-wingers. You get the idea. Without further ado:

As the media and Spokesman-in-Chief, President Obama, warn us of a "lone wolf terrorist event" on or around September 11th, I can't help but think back at all of the articles I've written or posted regarding a "Mumbai-style Attack" or an active shooter scenario such as Arizona's Jared Loughner and the Oslo, Norway event. Many on the far-right continue to believe that this incident will portray a typical causcasian of the conservative swagger to be the trigger man in an effort to further demonize the "Patriot movement" (which has withered into the Old Republican Guard 2.0, ala George Bush-esque Rick Perry and Palin's successor: war-mongering, former IRS tax prosecutor Michelle Bachman) and alleviate pressure on the Middle East and "Obama's homeland." ...

Gun bans. Permanent renewal of the PATRIOT ACT. Orwellian pre-crime thought police. Internet censorship. Even further widespread eavesdropping and wiretapping. New "terror laws" regarding assembling in groups, limits to free speech and access to firearms. This would be one of the cheapest and yet most effective terrorist plots in American history. And with it, broad, sweeping political powers for the Elite.

So that's their basic paranoid take on things: All regulation exists to limit the rights of true patriots, and because any serious terrorist act would only lead to more laws and regulations, which are in the interest of the government, it follows that only the government would be behind terrorist acts.

This is the train of thought of the 9-11 conspiracy nuts, who go to great lengths to demonstrate that only a well-trained crack government effort could possibly have produced the destruction of Sep. 11th, 2001. I won't even both to link to any such blatts, you can find them yourself in ten seconds if you try. They are entertaining for a few minutes and then simply tiresome. Look for them to peak next month, and then if anything remotely terroristic happens in the next, oh, 20 years.

Today's fake: Speculators pursue the Bitcoin, but ... whaaaat?

Last decade's virtual-goods mindfuck was the gold farming industry, in which American entrepreneurs went to China, hired educated but out-of-work tech grads, and put them to work for 12 to 16 hours at a time on repetitive tasks which generated virtual goods in the World of Warcraft game -- goods which could be sold for real money to game players who didn't want to put in the time and effort it took to accumulate those goods within the game. (These goods, such as a "magic sword" object, enable players to play the game at higher levels more successfully.) China made the practice illegal, but that hasn't stopped provincial prison officials from employing prisoners as gold farm slave laborers. So that's still going on.

Then there's the Zynga empire, which essentially turns all its games' players into slave laborers for the company's profit. In a way it's much simpler than the gold farming scheme, which is essentially a parasitical practice on a much larger operation (the WoW platform); Zynga simply creates an addictive product ¹ with no raw ingredients and a potentially worldwide customer base. Zynga is equivalent to a tobacco company which claims cigarette smoking isn't addictive, except it doesn't have to go to the trouble of buying raw materials, manufacturing cigarettes, and shipping them to wholesalers. It simply creates a compelling internet experience and collects an almost unlimited profit stream. It's like putting a video slot machine in everyone's home, only it's a slot machine that never pays out but simply provides its user with the mind-numbing experience of playing.

So it's one thing to create something of value out of nothing, or rather, out of electrons and human sweat. How could you go one better? How about creating nothing out of nothing, putting a value on it, and then having the unlimited greed of speculators do all the work for you? Well, it's happened. Behold the Bitcoin, a virtual currency with no meaning, no tie to any governmental or corporate entity, much less a game or virtual world. It is simply a computer algorithm (no doubt copyrighted) which permits licensees to generate units of valuation.

Bitcoins are snippets of code that use encryption to prevent counterfeiting and double-spending. Complex algorithms control the money supply, in theory replacing the need for banks or a central regulator. Right now Bitcoins can be generated -- or "mined" -- by running a program on a powerful computer. This task requires exponentially more time and processing power as the number of Bitcoins grows, and the absolute number of Bitcoins is capped at 21 million, mimicking the scarcity of gold.

Yes, you too can buy the code and generate your own Bitcoin, but notice that caveat about the "exponentially more time and processing power" needed to do so at a meaningful scale. Indeed:

One college student sustained permanent minor brain damage due to heatstroke after he dozed off in his room next to four computers furiously mining Bitcoins. "I wish I was joking," he said in a forum post that was reposted on the website BitcoinMiningAccidents.com.

Yes, there is a website devoted to "Bitcoin mining accidents"!! It's at this point you wonder what the world is coming to.

Certain cynics and libertarian critics of the monetary system -- the kind who yearn for a return to the gold standard -- would say this isn't much different from the current state of affairs in which we endow pieces of paper, some printed with "1" and others printed with "100," with value simply because we agree to. And they would also point out the similarities of limiting the total number of units of exchange and the ability to produce it. (Only the government can print money, and it controls the supply; in the same way only those holding the code for Bitcoin can generate it, and the code contains a self-limiting feature which will prevent more than a certain amount of Bitcoin to be "mined.") To them, our whole monetary system is a similar hoax.

I see this trend continuing. Last week lots of people were transfixed by the "fake lesbian bloggers," and there are still postings and articles being written on its implications for identity politics, online activism, and the whole question of online identity. At root of this issue is the question of whether or not there is substance behind what we value. The fact that Bitcoin exists and that apparently rational people are investing in it calls this into question even further.

Meanwhile, on Gawker just now: A virus that scans computers for Bitcoin and steals it.


¹ The piece on "my Farmville addiction" is not that informative, but notice the article's raison d'etre: the writer is explaining to his readers why he disappeared for two weeks. In other words, he went into a k-hole, or rather an internet hole, and didn't come out for weeks. Because he was playing Farmville. And couldn't stop.

A killer app for millionaires

A recent article in the New York Times documented how rich Chinese are buying and flying helicopters even though flights in most Chinese airspace are severely restricted. Rather than complying with regulations, some simply pay the fines and keep on flying.

Now comes the news that new jetpack technology allows up to a 30-minute flight. (The headline is about the lift speed, but I think what everyone wants is something to commute in, a need hinted at only toward the bottom of the story.) Although the machine includes "a ballistic parachute outfitted with tiny explosives that launch the canopy into the air regardless of how far the user has fallen" -- I love the statement which follows, "The parachute has been successfully tested, the company said" -- yes, you'd hope so, wouldn't you! -- I see death in the future for a bunch of millionaires who seize the chance to become, in the words of the story, "rocketeers." A form of natural selection, maybe.

More on copywriting

Last Wednesday I mocked an advertisement that promised big money in the copywriting game. But I didn't really know what it was talking about.

That same day the New York Observer ran this piece about the career of someone who made money in the way they may have been thinking of:

Bryne Hobart learned the vagaries of Google rankings while working at Blue Fountain Media, one of the biggest SEO shops in New York. The 24-year-old college dropout had hoped for a career finance, but the market implosion of 2008 nixed that idea. Instead, he scored an internship writing copy at Blue Fountain, eventually working his way up to managing director of marketing. ...

In March, Mr. Hobart and Mr. Pierce formed their own company on the side, Digital Due Diligence. His first post, on Demand Media, drew tens of thousands of readers and was passed around internally at the content farm. Mr. Hobart began monitoring other companies that were relying on some of the shadier SEO strategies, and posting these findings online. The idea behind the business was to help hedge funds and venture capital firms assess the risk of investing in companies that relied heavily on search traffic.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Hobart's double game -- practicing SEO by day, exposing it by night -- soon proved unsustainable.

Then fun was had all around. This all just makes me realize I don't really understand SEO (search engine optimization, one of the dark, or at best grey, arts of the internet) and should read up on it. Dang, though, it's getting harder and harder to keep up.

World's greatest sad

While browsing the New York Times site, I was treated to a popup advertisement for something. In the 30-second ad, a teenage girl sitting in a bright bedroom typed the words "You're the World's Greatest Dad" into her smartphone. There followed several morphing animated scenes of a cartoon girl and her dad winning races, playing in the treehouse he'd built for her, and so on. At the end the ad goes back to "real life," showing the late-middle-aged father sitting alone in a dark book-lined study receiving the message on a laptop and apparently chuckling in pleasure.

But I thought, good God, look at this. Here's this girl texting her father. Clearly they're living apart now, in different houses. And he's sitting alone in this dark study -- it has to be his home, as he's wearing a lavender-colored v-neck sweater -- staring down at his laptop. He isn't working. This email from his daughter is basically the only thing he seems to have to occupy himself with. Is he chuckling at the end of the commercial, or crying?

Oh, and I missed noticing what product was being promoted.

Oh Mama, could this really be the end?

An essay on the blog Download Squad with the alarming title Facebook -- with or without Google -- will destroy the world as we know it explains the two companies' diverging strategies. It's interesting (though I can't get very worked up about yet another apocalyptic scenario, in which something from the movie Terminator is used to get across how frightening it is), but what I was struck by was this line (emphasis theirs):

In other words, Facebook knows who we want to be, while Google knows who we actually are.

How Dylanesque!

The article closes with this warning, which I find pretty believable. Referring to Facebook's announcement yesterday that it was going to offer the equivalent of Facebook email, the article cautions:

You will be given the choice of opting out, of course. But think about it: can you see yourself leaving Facebook today? Now fast forward a few months, a year. Imagine what it will be like once all of your communication goes through Facebook; quitting won't be an option.

Now, the thing is, I use Google mail, I collaborate with others using Google documents, I have Google voice pointing to my cell phone, I use the calendar, and so on. It seems as if I'm pretty wrapped up in Google. And yet I think if Google disappeared tomorrow, all I'd lose is my saved email and this month's household budget. My life would go on, for the simple reason that Google's mail system communicates with the rest of the world, while Facebook's is designed not to. A "walled garden" is the term commonly used for such an exclusive online universe. I can think of another word.

I'm glad I'm not a Facebook denizen; I never registered. It's like having gone through the 00s without having gotten a tattoo: once you participate a little, you're marked for life.

Quelle barbare!

This article in The Australian is about how the French love the "For Dummies" books (in French known as "Pour les nuls"), despite initial fears that subjects such as French poetry and history would not withstand the format. The funniest thing? Their publisher is a man named Vincent Barbare, which means "barbarian"!

Breaking news from the paranoid front

A website called The Survival Retreat -- you know, that well-stocked fuhrerbunker that will allow you to get through the supposedly coming apocalypse -- alerts us that now is the time to stock up on ammunition.

It just occurred to me that perhaps all the zombie movies and zombie TV shows are really about our anxiety about this eventuality, where there's total societal collapse, everyone attempts to flee, and the well-stocked right-wing Christian survivalist is vindicated. (See my entry from yesterday. (Speaking of which, the title of a post from another collapsitarian blog says it all: The US Government Is Preparing For Unlikely Events Like War, Catastrophic Collapse of Society, and Even Asteroids -- Are You?.)

Related: the Seattle Times reports that it's a buyer's market for islands. Which might help protect you from zombies, who (which?) presumably can't swim, but not from the desperate marauders imagined by the apocalyptic collapsitarians whom I mentioned yesterday.

By the way, can you guess which famous 1960s musician wrote a song about this topic? None other than Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul and Mary, whose 1971 song "John Henry Bosworth" imagined the same riots, flight from the cities and suburbs, and survival on a remote piece of property -- but minus the guns and with a much more truly Christian vision than the apocalyptic right-wing Christianity the survivalists apply to their fantasies.

For another optimistic alternative, see this April 2009 NYT magazine article about what was called the Transition movement, which I linked to before. It says something about the appeal of the more horrific fantasies that they're 99 percent of what you hear and read about.

Desert sojourn, day 28

On my long drive yesterday -- about seven solid hours of driving, all the way from Joshua Tree to Laughlin, NV and back (click for map) -- I listened for a while to right-wing radio foamers. I usually can't stand listening to them for more than about 30 seconds, but I was kind of a captive audience -- I couldn't get anything else on the radio. Plus, it's material for my book, which in part involves characters who have adopted a paranoid view of the state of things. Man, it's all just fear, fear, fear. One guy repeated what he said he'd heard from some right-wingers in the U.K., some tall tale about Pakistani drug gangs and their enslavement of 13 and 14 year old English girls -- white English girls, of course. The American commentator repeated this blather not only without critique but as if it were an oracle of what was about to happen in the U.S. And it all comes from building mosques, he said.

Just an example. I won't waste my time even saying how stupid it is, or how classically xenophobic and racist. What struck me was not the paranoid fantasy, but the enthusiasm -- spoken in a voice trembling with fear and loathing -- with which it was repeated and the explicit prediction that this is where the U.S. is headed.

And I had to remind myself -- Obama isn't even up for re-election for another two years! What will it be like after another two years? How far can they ratchet up the hysteria? Then I realized: that's exactly why terrorists blow shit up, to stoke exactly this kind of hysteria. Thus the right-wing foamers' talk becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Or at least that seems to be the only place it leads to.

Let me say one more time -- I never can stand to listen to this stuff. So it's really true that I've never heard it before, not full-force for a couple of hours. And the millions of people who thrill to this stuff listen for hours, all day every day. Kind of an astonishing moment in the history of the U.S. experiment with democracy, really. A real test of the question "How much free speech can we stand?" (Coincidentally, the Fred Phelps cult went before the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday so the court could address just that question.)

Today's fakes: internet vigilantes who entrap and humiliate

This is one of those stories I learned about very late. It started when I saw a piece of news on c|net, but that's the end of the story. To start closer to the beginning, it seems there's a vigilante group called Perverted Justice. Started by a geek who wanted to act out his feelings of rage against an alcoholic father (according to this 2007 Rolling Stone article on the group), they began online flirtations with men, claiming to be underage girls, then publicized the hapless men's pictures and chat transcripts. This was so successful (successful from their point of view) that they began partnering with MSNBC on the show "To Catch a Predator," turning their online stings into a reality TV show. The show resulted in the conviction of over 200 men for attempted sex acts with underage girls, even though there never were any underage girls, just adults posing as girls for the sheer purpose of entrapping would-be molesters.

If these tactics sound dubious to you, the D.A. in a Dallas suburb would agree -- he refused to press charges against two dozen men who were netted by these antics after one of the men who was ensnared (but who didn't even show up at the house of the supposed jailbait), a prosecutor in a neighboring locality, shot himself.

Okay. So along the way, one of the people who became angry at the tactics of Perverted Justice was one Bruce Raisley. He embarked on a campaign to publicize and embarrass the organization, leading the founder of Perverted Justice to retaliate by posing as a woman -- not even underage this time, but using the same flirtation tactics which had proved so successful -- and getting Raisley to leave his wife and show up at an airport with flowers ready to meet his internet love. The P.J. founder sent a confederate to take pictures of the hapless Raisley, and then posted them on its website with the taunt: "Tonight, Bruce Raisley stood around at an airport, flowers in hand, waiting for a woman that turned out to be a man... He has no one. He has no more secrets... Perverted-Justice.com will only tolerate so much in the way of threats and attacks upon us."

Well, that would piss me off, all right. And Raisley was so angry that he downloaded some software and launched botnet attacks on several websites, such as Rolling Stone and other publications which had reported P.J.'s trick on him. And today, to bring this to a close, Raisley was convicted of computer crimes and faces ten years in prisons and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. Here is a more detailed story.

The Perverted Justice group (archive of stories about them here continues its antics. As far as I can tell, they've never been accused of a crime or suffered any negative consequences as a result of their activities.

"Really though, at this point, who's to say what's real anymore?"

Last year the actor Joachin Phoenix famously appeared on David Letterman's show, and in other public events, looking completely fucked up and saying he was quitting acting. Well guess what -- it was all a hoax or, as they're calling it, performance art, in service of a mockumentary called I'm Still Here.

In this post on Mediaite, about how Phoenix went back on Letterman's show and got a "scolding" from the host, a despairing blogger asks (emphasis mine):

Letterman took Phoenix to task for tricking him (he made the actor admit that he [Letterman] hadn’t been in on the joke or scripted) as well as using most of the footage in the film without paying The Late Show a licensing fee. He even (jokingly?) told Phoenix that he owed him $1 million. When Phoenix, playing along, asked if they could discuss it in private, Letterman took a hard swipe saying they could go to one of I'm Still Here's screenings.

Really though, at this point, who's to say what's real anymore? Maybe Letterman wasn't mad and this was all a hoax.

Such are the dangers of piling air quotes upon sarcasm upon satire upon irony. We're now approaching Andy Kaufmann territory, where a performer constantly spoofs and tricks his friends and family along with his fans so many times that even those closest to him don't know what to believe. You know, if I were going to venture into those rarified levels of hoax, I think I'd set up a secret website for my closest friends and family, where I'd promise to post the real truth, at pain of amputation of my privates. (Of course, if you're actually dying, like Kaufmann was, I guess at some point you might actually go so far as to risk that penalty.)

King of Hawaii (the verb)

In researching my latest novel, I hit upon a gold mine of material just published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit whose main mission is to monitor and report on hate groups. Among the articles they published in the September issue of their publication Intelligence Report is a list of leaders of the "sovereign citizen" movement, which is a loose group of people with a magical belief in an alternate legal system. The most amusing profile contains this information:

A former tool-and-die maker, the man who writes his name as ":David-Wynn: Miller" — or, as he amusingly says it verbally, "David hyphen Wynn full colon Miller" — came up with his "truth language" scheme as a result of a frustrating court experience in 1988, when he was going through a divorce. In short, all truth language sentences used in court filings must begin with the preposition "for," contain at least 13 words, and use more nouns than verbs to be effective (he has claimed that only nouns have legal authority). David Wynn Miller considers himself a "Plenipotentiary Judge" in the Unity States of the World, and has named himself as the King of Hawaii, a feat he claims he accomplished when he converted Hawaii into a verb.

That is awesome! And this guy is not even a performance artist. God, I love this country.

It's August, isn't it

It's silly season, so we have choice articles like this on Salon.com: "Why I got the male Brazilian wax" job -- or, as the story says, the "brozillian." (That's different from a "brozillion," which simply means Brooklyn.)

It gets really good about halfway through, where we learn that people have all sorts of projections about the gender and power relationships between men and those who wax them. At first, "women were not comfortable with their husbands and boyfriends getting waxed by other men." So they hired women. But then the guys think it's too much like a massage parlor and start asking for extras. This leads to a hilarious incident at the Ted D. Bare Salon in San Jose, Calif:

Once, she was forced to taze a guy who wouldn't stop misbehaving. "He got really aggressive and kept insisting that I perform certain favors on him," she said. "So I tazed him in the thigh. He fell right off the table."

And it only gets better from there.

Previously: Ripped from the headlines