The Auction

What’s for sale?  Everything.  Tvngp would sell Texas to Mexico for 47 pesos.  I guess conservatives just love a white thief, even when it’s their own ass getting jacked.  Let’s play Orngdolph Shitler for a minute and call all the leaders of the world to Meryl Oggo to sell amurriKKKa’s gullible gluteus out, one hank of meat at a time.  Bidding is open!

Our land.  A ton of it is already owned by foreign investors, but let’s start forking over government land as well.  Six Flags Over Yellowstone, a subsidiary of Volkswagen-Daimler-Yamaha.

The Social Security Administration.  Home boy tried to nix the social security tax during his last year in office, which I don’t quite understand.  It’s meant to pay for this program, but as Dubya discovered in the naughts, you can also pillage it for other purposes with a rubber stamp congress of warhawking shitlords.  With this tax in place, when it’s not getting robbed for other things, the agency can actually make money.  That means it has value, which means somebody might be down to buy it.  The money that’s meant to keep you from subsisting on cat food when you’re too old to work, how would you like that turned into a hedge fund run by transnational casino owners?

Our nuclear power plants.  China owns a lot of US Treasury bonds, time to cash in those chips.  This one would amuse me so very much.

Our prisoners.  With private prisons already being a thing, some might already be owned by international corporations.  Reduce infrastructure costs and make it official.  Essentially if you get caught for jaywalking, you can be sold into slavery abroad.

The United States Marine Corps.  Army is land, Navy is sea, Air Force is air, Marine Corp is … what?  I guess alchemically they’d be fire, but that’s making them out to be cooler than they should be.  At any rate, they don’t make much sense to me conceptually, so you know damn well the Leather Lich doesn’t get it.  Sold!  I’d like to see what Denmark could do with a Marine Corp.  Maybe annex Yorkshire?

Our dignity as a sovereign nation.  Psych, he can’t sell this because we threw that in the garbage when we elected a linty ballsack as god-emperor.

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Life List: Ruddy Turnstone and Surfbird

What does it mean to you, birdies, to run in a mixed flock?  What are you getting out of it?  Who are these other birds, to you?  I’ve seen pics of caracaras that get a black vulture buddy.  Similar sized birds of prey that look extremely different from each other.  Caracaras have a rep for being smarter than the average raptor, and maybe that includes an unusual amount of social flexibility?  Then there’s escaped budgies flying with the starlings…  It’s intriguing.

Less remarkable is when the birds look extremely similar, like when goldfinches fly with pine siskins, or are just a drab pair in general.  The first time I saw ruddy turnstones and surfbirds together, I assumed they were the male and female of the same species.  They were identical, save coloration.  I took some notes the old-fashioned way, may still have been using a flip-phone at the time, and remember one species had yellow-green legs like pencils, and the other had bright carrot orange legs.  Do I remember anything else about their appearances, in shades of brown black and white like 99% of other shorebirds?  Not at all.  I remembered them long enough to make the ID and then lost the memory.

We had gone to Ocean Shores on the Pacific coast of Washington state around the time of my birthday.  I got a fat chocolate cake which felt pretty cool.  That was the occasion when I saw brown pelicans looking like pterosaurs, saw their long skinny wing feathers amid the kelp on the shore.  There was a spit, a kind of rock wall heading out into the water, and on that spit I saw a bunch of shorebirds flying from spot to spot, gleaning food from the rocks.  Shorebirds can be very hard to see in field environments or at distance, because their coloration is effectively cryptic.  Bold black and white head markings break up shape, skinny legs are like blades of grass.  These guys were highly visible on the rocks, some with black and white markings kinda bold under the wings in flight.  So I crawled out there and got a closer look, which was a good time for me.

Sometimes a post will make me think of a song, and I link the yewchoob video for it.  The only ones that jumped out at me were Queen’s “Friends Will Be Friends” and Dionne Warwick’s “That’s What Friends Are For,” and I low-key hate both of those songs (as much as i <3 4eva other things on the Highlander soundtrack).  I often suggest topics of discussion and people seldom bite, but here goes: What unusual animal friendships have you witnessed?

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Selection Selection

You can still join the RP by comment, open for two more players.  Catch up from the beginning here, just look at the most recent post, or whatever.

we know natural selection and sexual selection.  it’s pretty clear complex species have a kind of sociological selection, even if it isn’t the darwinism some would imagine.  what other kinds of selection could be happening?  all that’s needed for selection is a variable thing and another variable thing that filters the variety of the first.  what if there’s a kind of selection we haven’t identified yet that drives the cycle of mass extinctions?  people point to certain astronomical and geographical cycles but i’m thinking something more abstract.  i once wondered why diseases hurt and kill, when they could proliferate more if they did not do those things.  maybe what selects for them to cause harm is something we haven’t thought of yet (tho there were other explanations from commenters which seem more likely).

might be that sociological selection is understudied.  i could be using the wrong term and i don’t know the literature, don’t even know for sure that sociology is the field in which study would happen.  the way unregulated capitalism guts itself and ruins the world is actively selected for in some way.  superficially you can look at specific actions like the repeal of glass-steagall, but it’s part of a larger phenomenon which is out of control and strangling democracy.  i guess that one would be studied by radical economists, even tho it shouldn’t be radical because it’s blue-sky obvious from outside the schools that spawn alan greenspan clones.

i dimly recall some scientists believing that sexual selection was just one aspect of fitness selection and didn’t deserve equal footing.  people fond of the fascist version of natural selection would apply it very broadly, but i’m sure there are non-nazi justifications for doing so.  then again, that could just be humans trying to cram the natural world into neat little boxes for ease of understanding, when complexity and chaos are the true way of things.  If sexual selection is just natural selection junior, then natural selection (as fitness to the environment changing rates of mutant gene expression in populations) could itself be a concept nested within a larger framework, and in company with myriad categories of related phenomena.

i’m gonna start with the types of fitness i’ve discussed so far and list any others i can imagine off the top of my head.  feel free to add more in comments, or whatever you please.

type of selection — variable A — variable B / the filter
natural selection — mutation — environmental fitness
sexual selection — costly displays — weird fetishes
sociological selection — cultural behavior — success of the culture
invisible hand shit — supply — demand (lol fake)
political corruption — personal ethics — lobbyist money
sexy water droplet on laura dern’s wrist — goin different directions — chaos

i never did get at what i was feeling, something bigger… but that’s all i got for now.  waking up for work in six hours…

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Life List: Pileated Woodpecker

The pileated woodpecker is the largest woodpecker left in North America, not quite the largest remaining species in the world.  They aren’t especially rare, which is nice.  I’ve only ever seen them from down on the ground, while they were high in a treetop, or on a power line or utility pole.  I’ve heard the call a few times.  It doesn’t sound like Woody Woodpecker at all.  I’ve been lied to!

Woodpeckers are in a freaky offshoot of birdkind called Piciformes, which includes some guys you might not expect, such as toucans.  The tell is in the feet.  They have two front facing and two rear facing toes, allowing them to cling to the verticals of tree trunks more effectively.  OK, they are far from the only birds that do this -see parrots- but they do all have this trait in common.  Parrots are more closely related to falcons and songbirds than to woodpeckers, so this is a case of convergent evolution in funky feet.

It’s pretty cool that tha king of woodpeckin’ is so easy to find.  I’d like a better look at them, but the cost is costly.  My bipolar pater went big into birdfeeding, with specialized lures for the big boys, and was rewarded with some good looks at them, some photographs to commemorate it.  By the time he successfully brought them to the patio, neighbors were getting angry about the bird shit and noise.  It was one of the camelborne straws that caused him to lose that place, always trading down for something worse.

Who’s seen the pileated woodpecker, and did it cause you any trouble?

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DEIteenth

When Biden was in office, the house and senate were dominated by rethugs, one way or another, right?  It felt like it, whatever the makeup of those bodies.  Somehow Juneteenth was made into the law of the land.  I assumed it was by executive action, but no, except insofar as the vice president was the tie-breaking vote.  Federal holidays have to be approved by the legislature.  Thank you, Mrs. Harris.  Surely, this holiday is abhorrent to those people who wistfully pine for the days when chattel slavery wasn’t restricted to the prison system.

In fact, does it fit their nebulous definition of evil wicked horrible DEI?  Does that mean it must be expunged?  But it was passed into law by the legislature, and would need to be repealed through the shit-flinging simian action of those twin asshole repositories.  Surely they won’t get that done in time for the occasion tomorrow.  What then?

I wonder that shitler might use an executive order to try to rename it “Orange Americans Day.”  Or just leave the day intact but use its existence to add insult to some other injurious bullshit.  Of particular relevance, he could do something to expand the horrors of the prison industrial complex.  I’m composing this post on the 16th.  Let’s see what has come to pass by the time it comes out of queue…

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Life List: Downy Woodpecker

There’s this idea some woodpeckers evolve to look similar to larger / more dominant woodpeckers that live in the same area, to take advantage of rep established by a tougher beast, without having to invest in the body size to get tougher themselves.  I proposed in another article that “oregon morph” dark-eyed juncos may be doing the same thing with spotted towhees.  (My idea will be studied by actual scientists when hell freezes over.)  The go-to example in this area is downy woodpeckers trying to look like hairy woodpeckers.

They look similar enough, how can I know which one I’ve seen?  The one I distinctly recall was seen at a very great distance, which is precisely where my sense of scale breaks down.  Can I be sure I could tell the difference between a woodpecker six inches long and one that’s eight inches long, from seventy feet away?  It just seemed like such a small bird, I have to think it was the smaller of the two.  I could very easily be wrong.

Where was this rare beauty?  Near the top of a tall scraggly tree amid concrete on concrete, the Federal Way Transit Center.  There was more appropriate habitat for it in parks and residential area around lakes not far at all, as the bird flies, but that’s not where I saw it.  They could look almost like any old songbird, with more sparrowish proportions than most other woodpeckers, but they’re all black and white, not especially cryptic, and they hang onto trees vertically, without the flattened posture of a creeper or nuthatch.

Not an amazingly exciting bird, but it’s nice to know they’re around.  And that’s not a bad gig, impersonating a more successful person to gain their social cachet.  If I got a toupee and wore foundation, I could kinda look like Matt Damon, hawk crypto on Superb Owl Sunday, make a bank full of funny money.  Watch out!

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Surreal Profundity and Philosophical Materialism

I didn’t really get the fact that recognition is a feeling and that feeling can be utterly mistaken, until I witnessed a guy having auras all day, ahead of his first grand mal seizure.  He kept “remembering a dream” in drowsy moments, followed by a rising sense of nausea.  It felt like he was remembering a dream, but he clearly was not.  One of them referred to a piece of media we had consumed together after the last time he had been asleep.

So déjà vu.  Being reflexively materialist, believing in nothing supernatural, I presumed there was an explanation for it that nobody bothered to mention, and this was it.  You can feel like you’re remembering or recognizing something that you have no prior experience with, very easily.  This can be associated with epilepsy, so get yer brain scanned if you have that feeling a lot.

That brings me to the point of the post.  There are other feelings that can be misled, can be a trick of the light.  The sense of the profound, of deep emotional meaning, that one can feel in a dream or in a piece of surreal art – that feeling can be total bullshit.  Yet it moves.  In fact, I’m kind of a junkie for it.  I love surreal art.  Touch the dreamsauce, feel some type of way.  It feels deep, but it almost certainly is not.

Does recognition of this diminish its power?  Perhaps.  Then I have to move onto the hard stuff.  David Lynch not enough, gotta pound Andalusian Dog into my weary veins.  That’s just consumption of the stuff; what about production?  I’d like to make art that feels important the way returning Excalibur to Betty Boop can feel important when you’re asleep.

How can I do that if I don’t genuinely believe it is important?  It’s like writing romance when you feel unromantic, writing comedy when you have cancer.  All I have for this right now is a question.  No answer.  If you have any ideas, hit me up.

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Brainjackin: Abbott Handerson Thayer

Another type of post to add to the rotay, so I don’t run out of birdposts and dreamposts and discposts: Thunks I Stole from My Husband, aka Brainjackin’.  These won’t necessarily all be original thoughts or observations of his, run thru the filter of my misunderstanding.  Sometimes it will just be Things I Wouldn’t Know About if It Weren’t for Him.  Like this post, about Abbott Handerson Thayer’s hot idea.

OK, this idea might have crossed my horizon before, but it didn’t take root in my memory until my husband mentioned it to me one random evening.  Early 20th century painter Abbott Handerson Thayer was very successful in his own time, a man of letters as well as visual art.  Seems like everybody had to have big opinions about everything, and he put forth an idea on the topic of zoology, which may have been a good example of people talking outside their expertise.  According to Thayer, even boldly colored animals were actually adapted for camouflage.  After all, predator or prey, you have good reasons to wish to remain unseen.

In support of this idea, he used his exceptional painting skills to illustrate a book.  Very beautiful pictures of not-at-all cryptic (camouflaged) animals, in just the right circumstance that they could fade into a background.  Por ejemplo,

I think this guy was more famous for paintings of pretty girls, but this stuff is a lil more memorable in the scheme of things.  At least, to me.  Were peacocks adapted to blend in with bushes and trees?  Probably not, but the idea was at least good for producing some very cool art.  Thank you, Hander Thaybotson Randers.  Aw shit, I’m losing it already…

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When the Shit Goes Down

Said Cypress Hill, when the shit goes down, you better be ready.  Today is that big No Kings biz, which shitler has promised to respond to with brute force, while he’s doing Kim Jong Il cosplay in a monument to Rome built by slaves.  Meanwhile, Israel has expressed its desire to turn the whole middle east into a smoking puddle of blood, Pakistan and India are still nuclear powers skirmishing as well, and Russia is still trying to turn Ukraine into Russia Junior with more mutilated human remains inside.

If you’re in a directly impacted part of the world, my condolences.  That feels like the emptiest of gestures.  I can’t throw away my life to save yours, and that feels like the only gesture that would have any meaning, when you’re looking at people whose lives have been chucked in the meatgrinder of political greed and bloodlust.  May all the responsible world leaders magically develop consciences tomorrow and die from the agony of guilt.

For the rest of us, we’re all weighing the risks coming our ways, tho they pale in comparison to yours, and thinking of what we will do, what we can do.  Within that, it’s important to keep a sense of perspective.  For much of the world, life goes on, and we’re obliged to our families and friends, to those who depend on us, to keep going on as well.  To those who can fight, long live the fighters.  To the rest of us?

Try to remember you’re still shopping for groceries, paying your bills, going to work, feeding your pets, watering your plants.  Stay with us.  Don’t give up.  For 99.9% of you, the shit is not imminent.  Your world will still be there next week, regardless of what happens now.  Much love.  See you around!

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Discolology: Dead Milkmen III

My rip-roaring revue of the entire catalogue of The Dead Milkmen proceeds according to plan, now entering the last era when I paid any real attention to their new releases.

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Not Richard, But Dick (1993)

This one came out when I was in high school, and I even remember my first girlfriendesque situationship acknowledging its existence, tho I don’t remember her opinion, which is another point illustrating I did not yet know how to fully regard women as human.  No bueno.  Back on topic, the only single from this that I was aware of getting any radio play – and only on college stations – was “I Dream of Jesus.”  There are songs on this album that are so much better than that.  A real shame.

Overall it’s kind of an interesting album.  I think the previous albums were a lot more unified musically, but this one has some more successful genre experimentation – especially in “easy listening” territory, which it shares with parts of They Might Be Giants’ excellent album Factory Showroom.  As I tried to categorize these tracks, I realized I feel a lot more conflicted about most of this album than the others.  Few songs get an unequivocal rating.

Classics

***** “Jason’s Head” is an unequivocal classic.  What is this song even about?  Seems like some weird guy was feeling jealous of his easy-going girlfriend who had to kill him in self defense, and the narrator is joining a group of friends on their way to see the body?  This song is so musically good.  I can’t say why.  One of their best, and my husband agrees.  It’s one of his two faves by the band.  He says it has more of a post-punk vibe than anything else they’ve done.

***** I love “The Infant of Prague Customized My Van” an awful lot, but was very conflicted as to if it should be Classic or just Good Stuff.  Musically, this is very old school DMM, by this album’s standards, seeming like it could be sung by the redneck storytime guy on Metaphysical Graffiti.  And yet?  It’s so clever and funny, it is way better than most of their older songs.  Short and sweet too.  But here’s the question – would other people regard this as well as I do?  By the way, I always misremembered the title as “The Infant of Prague Customized My Minivan” for some reason.  The title is a reference to The Butthole Surfers’s “Some Dispute Over T-Shirt Sales.”  Wait.  Ministry’s “Jesus Built My Hotrod.”  That’s the one.

***** “The Woman Who Was Also a Mongoose” is also an unequivocal classic.  So great.  They played it at the concert I went to and the band kinda forgot to play the last verse, which the audience felt bad about.  We had to suck eggs on that deal.  At least we could go home afterward and listen to our CDs.  One of their songs that mentions brothers, so bonus points from me, a brother-haver.  My husband rates it as his second favorite DMM song and says it is the ultimate furry ally song.  “Chasin’ after field mice running thru the high grass, that’s what she loves to do, And if she’s happy as a mongoose, it shouldn’t bother me or you.”

Good Stuff

*** I almost rated “I Dream of Jesus” as Filler, but I admit it has a sort of iconic quality and isn’t as obnoxious as their worst stuff.  Pretty good.

*** Again, I almost rated “I’m Not Crazy” as Filler, this time because it’s just another of the “imma crazzy guy lol” songs that are nearly as common as paranoia songs in their oeuvre, and it’s more mellow than I prefer.  But I like the music, and the yuks amused me.

**** “Let’s Get the Baby High” has me more conflicted than most of the album.  It’s tasteless and gross and musically obnoxious, so I’m tempted to rate it as Garbage, but I do find it very amusing.  On a bad day I will skip it tho.  The obnoxion is sans pareil.

*** “Nobody Falls Like” I almost rated as filler for the same reason as “I’m Not Crazy.”  It’s their four hundredth song about being paranoid.  But I’m amused and don’t hate the music and it’s short.

*** “I Started to Hate You” is very repetitive, as a basic concept, but I do like the lyrics.

Filler

** I almost rated “Leggo My Ego” as Good Stuff but the title is too obvious and some of the lyrics are too annoying.  Good music, generally.  You might like it a lot.

Garbage

– I almost rated “Little Volcano” a bit higher, as Filler, but it feels twee in a way that does not work for me.  Yeah, “Woman Who is Also a Mongoose” is more twee than that, but the music on it is way better, the story as well.  Something about this feels more repetitive than it is.  I just don’t like it at all.  The music isn’t as bad as my personal rating suggests.

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Chaos Rules: Live at the Trocadero (1994)

This album could be a greatest hits album.  Decent recording quality, great track list.  At the show Rodney was cranky about anti-abortion protesters including a guy named Steven Friend (Stephen? it’s a very common name actually), working references to the dude into a few songs, some talky bits between songs.  It’s alright.

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Stoney’s Extra Stout Pig (1995)

This was right about the time the band first called it quits, over a combination of industry frustration and the severe tendinitis of their bassist Dave Blood.  The three non-tendinitis-having members of the band played in other musical projects in the interim.  This would have been their last album.  Later, when I’ve listened properly to all their reboot tracks, I’ll be asking myself the question – Should they have quit at Pig?  SESP was less musically experimental than NRBD, but carried forward that album’s glossier production – just applying it to a more old school Milkmen style.  There’s paranoia, crazy™ narrators, and songs ranging from dope to highly obnoxious.  Welcome back Kotters.

Classics

**** “When I Get to Heaven” is about the afterlife or lack thereof, alternately about how The Shags were underrated and you should really go out and buy “My Pal Foot Foot” at your earliest convenience.  I dinged it a star for that, but it’s pretty iconic.

***** “Chaos Theory.”  Hey, I’ve talked about this song before.  I don’t like working.  That makes this song my jam.  Y tu?

Good Stuff

*** “Peter Bazooka” is the main conspiracy song here, and leads off the album with a bang.  Kind of a hoot.  Velvet Underground reference on the refrain.

***** “Train I Ride” is a pretty excellent song about the crappy crap we’re living with every day.  Within the context this train is literally that, but also metaphorical for the runaway nature of shit, the inexorable progress of evil.  Darkly hilarious.

*** “I’m Flying Away” is a twee song about flying to see your lover, with woodwind like that on “Woman Who is Also a Mongoose.”  Might be too much sugar for the average mood.

*** “The Blues Song” is just a cynical fake blues song with a lot of rude jokes about the subject.  Pretty funny ones tho.

** I think my brother liked “The Man Who Rides the Bus” better than I do.  Another Joe Jack Talcum theory about god.

*** “Don’t Deny Your Inner Child” is a paranoia / crazy™ song, but not a bad one.

**** In a way “Big Deal” is a reprise of “Life is Shit,” but less doomed.  Like the narrator of “Life is Shit” turned forty while dating a very nice sad sack and feels resigned to being alive now in a way they hadn’t before, but still not loving it one bit.  Good way to end the album and could have been the last song we ever heard from them.  Could have been.

Filler

* “The Girl With the Strong Arm” and “Helicopter Interiors” are random Rodney psychedelia and not especially entertaining, nor redeemed by great music.

** “I Can’t Stay Awake” is a song about a maddening circumstance that is well done, but in a way that can itself be maddening.

** “Like to Be Alone” can be kind of decent if you’re moving the right speed, or it can be as charming as “I Like Traffic Lights” by Monty Python.

Garbage

* “Crystalline” and “Khrissy” are musically fine, I don’t usually skip them if I’m letting the album run, but why do they sound like back to back songs about crystal meth?  Did we need this?  Was this expressing your heart’s condition circa 1995, Joe Jack?

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Death Rides a Pale Cow (The Ultimate Collection) (1997)

With the band broken up, the label had to get a few more bucks.  Pretty good compilation, but the selection might say some things.  Why not a single track from Soul Rotation?  And what the hell is “The Brown Nose” doing here?

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Cream of the Crop (1998)

This compilation is shorter and sweeter, more fan faves by fraction of the whole, but a few headscratchers.

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Now We are 20 (2003)

Wait.  This is just that earlier compilation with the R-slur song, and a few bonus tracks?  MotherFUCKER.

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To be continued…

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