Experimental film called The Debate

Don’t know if you were watching TV last Friday evening, but if you were, you noticed that all the network channels were running this bizarre experimental film called The Debate. It featured a 90-minute stand-off between two men of opposed characteristics—black vs. white, young vs. old, tall vs. short, handsome vs. hideous, and so on. Andy Warhol used to make this kind of film; one of his, called Sleep, is an eight-hour shot of a guy snoozing.
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Today’s Defendant: Bugs Bunny

Statement of the Grand Inquisitor: In seeking an example of sterling virtue worthy of canonization, one name clearly shines out above the rest: Bugs Bunny. In this humble rabbit we see the spirit of a god.
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What is it with Cindy McCain’s eyes? Everyone’s noticed that there’s something odd about them. Even Katie Couric was caught in an unplugged moment omigodding about how weirded-out she was by Cindy McCain’s mysterious, odd-looking eyes:

“She looks like a husky, those weird blue eyes,” [Couric] said. “Cindy McCain has the most intense blue eyes … They were so intense, I couldn’t stop staring at her. She must have thought I was weird.”

To anyone who has ever enjoyed the opium poppy plant’s many wonderful by-products–Vicodin, Percocet, heroin, morphine, methadone, Codeine cough syrup, or just plain opium to name a few–Cindy McCain’s “weird blue eyes” are about as much of a dead giveaway about her real condition as, say, the folds in Trig Palin’s down-turned eyes are a giveaway about his Down Syndrome. (more…)

Today’s Defendant: Clay Aiken

Statement of the Grand Inquisitor: It has come to our attention that there is an abomination known as “Clay Aiken” who is taking up space in the world that we require for other purposes. We are assured he is a real person—as of yesterday, a real gay person, according to every news source in the galaxy—but it’s hard to believe that such a roiling, reeking stew of foul error could be contained in a single sac of human flesh. His gayness turns out to be the only endurable thing about him.

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Today’s Defendant: Indian Mob

Statement of the Grand Inquisitor: “CEO murdered by mob of sacked Indian workers” runs the newsflash going around the internet, and we regard it in the spirit of gentle approval. Beatifications all around, perhaps?
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Today’s Defendant: Pixar

Statement of the Grand Inquisitor: Our eyes are not dazzled by your state-of-the-art animation; our hearts are not softened by your supposedly wholesome family fare. Disney pulled the same shtick in order to spread the same insidious blasphemy: the worship of graven images, really appalling ones, though still only 2-D.

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This is my third entry on the big blast at the Islamabad Marriott. God, the name says it all: “Islamabad Marriott.” Talk about two words that don’t fit together very well. The town just wasn’t big enough for “Islamabad” and “Marriott,” especially when you see pictures of Marriott’s big sign, in fancy Disney letters. You can have an Islamabad or you can have a Marriott, but you can’t have both—not for long.

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Today’s Defendant: Mickey Rourke

Statement of the Grand Inquisitor: The heretic in question is just about to make a major comeback in The Wrestler, a new movie by that tick Darren Aronofsky (pi, The Fountain) which is currently wowing everybody at the film festivals. But that’s nothing compared to the infamous act he’s charged with: praising the actions of the current scabrous git of an American president. Rourke is on record with the following statement: “George is doing a hell of a job during very difficult times, more power to him. Screw all them people who don’t like him.”

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Gervais confronts his mortality in laxative form

Jeez, it just doesn’t pay to get your hopes up, you know? You see a preview for a movie about a guy who hates people and then sees ghosts and hates them too, and he’s played by Ricky Gervais, and you naturally think: hot damn! For once they got it right. What could be more soothing at this moment in our history, what could be a better match for our mood of frenzied loathing than this little celebration of abhorrence? But it’s all a scam. It’s sickening how they lure you in with Gervais’ porcine blandishments!
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Here’s the deal: I’m going to blog this Islamabad blast every day for a while, try to talk honestly about how to sift through the crap to try to figure out what’s really going on.

It should be a good case study, because there are all sorts of rumors flying around, and I’ve already learned some surprising stuff, found out I was wrong in the guesses I made from the first reports.

Of course, if you’re really slow anything’s a surprise. There was a headline today, “Al Qaeda suspected in Islamabad Blast.” No, ya think? Sure it wasn’t the Basques? Maybe the Corsican Liberation Front?

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BREAKING WARNEWS!

You’ve probably heard by now that Al Qaeda just zapped the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad. A truck blew up while security was going over it with sniffer dogs. At least the dogs died happy, I suppose. Those sniffer dogs aren’t the furious anti-drug or anti-explosive types like you might think. They get a Milk Bone every time they find cocaine or fertilizer bombs, so the last sound heard by the tired foreigners bedding down at the Marriott last night would have been excited yipping and yapping, “Oh boy, this thing is so big they better give me a kennel-full of Liva Treats!”

The early reports are that these Teamster jihadis were looking for the Prime Minister’s house, where everybody who’s anybody in Pakistan was having a big hands-on feast. But they were “discouraged” by heavy security around the mansion and decided to head for the Marriott instead. (more…)

John McCain is making a big show of criticizing the government “bailout” of insurance giant AIG. But it turns out that AIG, which received $85 billion in US tax dollars earlier this week, is one of the largest donors to McCain’s pet think tank, the comically named “Reform Institute,” which he co-founded in 2001 “in direct response to the millions of Americans who, during the 2000 presidential campaign, expressed profound disillusionment with corrupt fundraising activities.” Indeed. (more…)

Meerkat: Heresy; Elephant Shrew: Orthodox

Daily Inquisition: The Animals

Statement of the Grand Inquisitor: A child believes in many creatures unworthy of its faith, like the Komodo Dragon, revealed on mature inspection to be a mere hypertrophied alligator lizard which kills with its Petri-dish saliva. At last the animist’s thwarted crush homes in on the first perky quasi-biped it can find on the Discovery Channel. Hence the Penguin Cult now in obscene fervor, and the overexposed Meekrat Cult. Those Kalahari sentry-weasels are the false deities of many a suburban brat.

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No this isn’t from the mugshot section of Smoking Gun. These are official portraits of the men in the Russian Duma, which is what they call the parliament around those parts. Looking at these caring faces, you just know that these guys have only one thing on their mind: making the world a better place for children and all living things.

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Joe “Strummer”: the hippie behind the mohawk.

Today’s Defendant: Joe Strummer

Statement of the Grand Inquisitor: The damnation of this walking forgery is a matter of choice: for which of his many unpunished crimes should he be damned? For the fact that his entire life was a lie? This busking pauper was Christened (by his country’s venal garrison church) John Graham Mellor. He was the son of a diplomat and the grandson of imperial vampires who raised their social status on the backs of the Indians they robbed. It was these striver’s skills which allowed little John to become Joe Strummer when he saw that the smartest move available was downmarket, to sell a harmless version of the truly dangerous, crypto-Catholic nihilism pioneered by the Pistols. (more…)