The Fyre Festival was a trial run of the ‘B’ Ark

You all know the story of the Douglas Adams’ ‘B’ Ark, I’m sure. It’s about a planet that packed up a bunch of people into a spaceship and sent them off to “colonize” a new planet.

“Yes, so anyway,” he resumed, “the idea was that into the first ship, the ‘A’ ship, would go all the brilliant leaders, the scientists, the great artists, you know, all the achievers; and into the third, or ‘C’ ship, would go all the people who did the actual work, who made things and did things, and then into the `B’ ship – that’s us – would go everyone else, the middlemen you see.”

The subset of the population loaded up unto the ship were telephone sanitizers, account executives, hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, and management consultants. It seemed a bit overzealous — hairdressers and security guards at least are quite useful. Especially since I’ve discovered people who are far more useless than that lot. You see, I watched two documentaries about the Fyre Festival last night. Two of them — one on Netflix, another on Hulu — so you can just grovel in schadenfreude all night long.

You quickly learn that the most useless people on Planet Earth are ‘social media influencers’, people with the job of promoting ‘social media influencers’, and people who pay ‘social media influencers’ for doing nothing but looking pretty and posing. The guy who set up the grift called the Fyre Festival, Billy McFarland, is a compulsive liar who embodied many of the same shallow values as the people he bilked, but the difference was that he avidly ripped into the populace. He was like an animated gummi bear falling upon a bowl of barely set jello and devouring everything in front of him. He’s a terrible, awful, weak person who found his niche and then fouled it so badly that he is currently serving a 6 year sentence in prison.

Of the two, I thought Hulu’s Fyre Fraud was better at exposing the phony promoters, like FuckJerry (how edgy!), a company whose sole business is pumping out sophomoric memes and promoting self-promoters. Fuck FuckJerry. Netflix’s Fyre, though, goes deeper into the harm McFarland caused to good people with real productive jobs, like all the Bahamians who were lied to and tricked into working long hours of manual labor, scrambling to try and get this trash ‘festival’ assembled, and were then never paid.

And then the whole thing collapsed so quickly, as all the trust-fund babies and pretty people spilled onto the sand on the day of and discovered it was all lies.

I now know how easy it would be to fill up the ‘B’ Ark. All we need to do is pay Kendall Jenner $250,000 to tell the kinds of people who think she has anything to say to climb the boarding plank, and they’ll go, guzzling champagne and taking smirking selfies as they scurry aboard. Good riddance.

So that’s what they learn in private Catholic schools

I’ve always wondered what Catholic values were, and now I know. Covington Catholic school exemplifies them all: Disrespect. Contempt. Dogma. Oppression. Hatred. The students of that school made a spectacle of themselves demonstrating those values in Washington DC.

There was a lot going on in the Capitol recently. There was a “pro-life” demonstration going on; Covington Catholic, an all-boys private school, sent a mob of their students there, which is a problem in itself. Why are boys trying to dictate what women are allowed to do with their bodies? Next problem: they all seem to be wearing MAGA hats, which tells me where their wealthy parents are coming from, and what kind of indoctrination they received. And then there seems to be a definite lack of adult supervision for these kids.

The Catholic rabble then ran into another demonstration, the Indigenous People’s March. The Native Americans didn’t have a problem, they carried on with dignity…but the dreadful little Catholic children were something else again.

The elder is Nathan Phillips, an Omaha elder who is also a Vietnam Veteran and former director of the Native Youth Alliance. He is also a keeper of a sacred pipe and holds an annual ceremony honoring Native American veterans in the Arlington National Cemetery.

Jesus. I work at a university that was built on the site of a Catholic boarding school for Indians, where children were ripped from their families to learn white man’s ways and follow the Pope, and this is a history we earnestly feel here — we have reminders all over the school of that legacy. Seeing little Catholic assholes shitting all over other people fills me with anger.

And despair. Look at those faces. Someday you’ll see them again in Congress, and on the Supreme Court, and maybe even the presidency. Because that’s where they’re confident they deserve to go.

I maked a video

I’ve been naughty. I haven’t been keeping up with my intended schedule of one video per week. But finally I got something done.

There have been lots of distractions, but honestly? This is tough for me. There are days I don’t want to look at my face or hear my voice, and making these videos compels me to sit down and wrestle with my lack of charisma. I’ll keep plodding along, mainly as therapy — I do enjoy the process, it’s just that final step of subjecting it to the eyeballs of the world that is hard.

Oooh — “super blood wolf moon” coming

Check it out, lunar eclipse on Sunday night over a big chunk of the Earth.

The lunar event will last about four hours, beginning at 9:36 p.m ET Sunday, Jan. 20 and ending about 1:50 a.m. ET Monday, Jan. 21. The beginning of the total eclipse phase will occur at 11:41 p.m. ET, according to NASA. The duration of totality will be 62 minutes.

Unfortunately for me, we’re predicted to have a couple of days of snow around that time. Question: if the sky is socked in with gray clouds everywhere, do I still get to turn into an extra-large, extra-vicious werewolf that night?

Are they all racists on the right side of the aisle?

Not to let the left side off the hook, but the right seems to be full up with scum who aren’t shy about letting their bigotry fly.

Rep. Jason Smith (R-Missouri) has been identified as the Republican Congressman who told Rep. Tony Cardenas (D-California) to ‘go back to Puerto Rico’ during a debate on the House floor.

According to The Hill, Jason Smith shouted at Cardenas in the midst of a chaotic procedural debate on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday.

Everyone should make sure Smith doesn’t get his hands on a cane.

It’s not so bad to be Tiffany anymore

I’m having a weird reaction to the revelatory Buzzfeed News story that Trump is a lying crook. I’m not surprised that he’s a fraud, that he directed his lawyer to lie under oath about his corrupt business dealings with Russia, and that the article is cautious and sober while pointing out that Trump was committing felonies. Nobody is surprised by any of that any more.

No, it may be silly and trivial, but my brain had a hiccup every time it ran across the word “children”.

And even as Trump told the public he had no business deals with Russia, the sources said Trump and his children Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. received regular, detailed updates about the real estate development from Cohen, whom they put in charge of the project.

In his plea deal with Mueller’s team, Cohen acknowledged that the conversations he had about the project with Trump exceeded the three short briefings he testified that he gave the president and that he also held more extensive discussions about it with other members of the Trump family. The sources said Cohen gave Trump’s children “very detailed updates.”

Maybe it’s just me, but the word “children” has nothing but positive associations for me, and it was jarring to hear about children scheming to commit crimes, even as I know I am a child of my parents, and I knew Ivanka and Jr are grown-ass adults. Great big criminal grown-ass adults with undeserved wealth and unwarranted power, who lied at every step of a federal investigation.

A spokesperson for Ivanka Trump’s attorney wrote that she was only “minimally involved” in the project. “Ms. Trump did not know about this proposal until after a non-binding letter of intent had been signed, never talked to anyone outside the Organization about the proposal, never visited the prospective project site and, even internally, was only minimally involved,” wrote Peter Mirijanian.

Donald Trump Jr., meanwhile, testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 7, 2017, that he was only “peripherally aware” of the plan to build a tower in Moscow. “Most of my knowledge has been gained since as it relates to hearing about it over the last few weeks.”

I think, though, I’ll be able to overcome my qualms at sentencing children, and will be able to find grim satisfaction in their trials. Lock up the whole damn crime family.

Except Tiffany. And probably Barron. Probably. At this point I wouldn’t be surprised to learn he was a courier for conspirators, hiding bag money in his teddy bear.

I wanna go to Mexico now

My wife and I have been watching this show, The Final Plate, on NetFlix. It features these talented chefs competing against each other for something or other — they basically ripped off Iron Chef. It started off interestingly, but is turning into a bit of a slog, and jeez, I’m really disliking the emcee and those obnoxious, pointless pauses (“and now … … … … … begin!”). I’ve developed a few other gripes, as well. But this isn’t about the show!

Fortunately, before I began to sour on it, one of the early episodes featured the cuisine of Mexico, and oh man, I started pining to visit Mexico again. If nothing else, just for the food. I still dream about real Mexican food.

Then I saw this video.

It is silly — I don’t know how you would test for Mexican ancestry, since the people there are such a melange of different origins. Spanish? Native American? Black? All those other Europeans who have migrated there? I don’t think any test is going to find that I have much in the way of Mexican ancestry — I’m a blinding white mixture of Scandinavian and English (although 23andMe does say I’m 0.6% Spanish), so I’m not going to get any discount from AeroMexico. Unless loving the place would give me some honorary, spiritual association. Or the test is only a random number generator, which wouldn’t surprise me.

The video ends with some guy saying, I’d go to Mexico, if they had Taco Bells on the street corners down there. He would be disappointed. Taco Bell is terrible greasy cheesy glop — real Mexican food is diverse and complex and wonderful and the kind of thing I would dream about. Maybe more Americans should visit the country and learn more about it.