Second in the new series

The second label for a product that doesn't exist.  This one is a mixed media collage on 8.5" x 11" acid free cardboard.

Get your facts straight

 Before you go around claiming that Obama's appearance on the Jimmy Fallon Show damaged the institution of the presidency, remember some of the things the idiot who preceded him did:

 kept us enslaved to foreign oil based dictatorships,

 mocked native peoples with his 'dancing,'

 took a record surplus and turned it into a record deficit in record time,

and then there was all of that stuff.  

Now, tell me, which president damaged the institution of the presidency, and our country more?

Reduce, recycle, reuse

A few years ago I did a series of mixed media pieces on 12" x 12" pieces of plywood that I really hated.  So I stuck them in a closet and vowed never to look upon them again.  But after my funds for canvas purchases ran low, I decided to paint over some of them in order that I could maybe come up with something I liked. 

I finally hit upon the idea of making mock ups of labels for products, mostly food, that never existed.  The idea stemmed from those great labels they used to put on fruit boxes. 

Here's the first one I came up with:

The slogan that goes along with this is, "Comrades, make Communist Cat Sardines part of your five year plan for healthy eating!  Or else."

A Monkey movie review

Will Ferrell plays an alcoholic who loses his job the same day his wife puts all his stuff out on the front lawn and changes all the locks before she leaves him.  He decides to ride it out and live on his lawn.  While living out there he encounters and befriends a young black kid, a new neighbor, and he reconnects with an old friend from high school.  Towards the end he discovers some not so nice news about his soon to be ex wife and it helps him get back on the right track.

This film is based on a Raymond Carver short story and I found it to be very good and very truthful, not to the story, I haven't read it so I can't comment on how true it was to the source material, what I mean is it felt true, the way Ferrell's character reacted to his dilemma felt true and natural.  It didn't feel forced.   This film is not a comedy, but it has some funny moments.  I found the whole thing to be charmingly melancholy.

The Will Ferrell you get in this film is not the wacky Will Ferrell of the Judd Apatow-ish movies, instead you get a restrained Will Ferrell and that's the perfect one for this film.  His performance in this one is very reminiscent of his turn in Stranger Than Fiction.  The rest of the cast is very good too, I didn't see a false note from any of them.  The story and the performances all rang very true to me.  And I quite liked all of it.

I recommend this one but those of you who hate Will Ferrell will stay away from this one no matter what I say, but you'll be doing yourself a disservice by being so stubborn.

The stupid, it never goes away

• An Israeli general says that Iran is not developing atomic bombs.  So of course that means that Republicans are demanding that we attack Iran. 
• A high school holds a 'dress as your favorite fictional character' day and before the first class can get under way they force a kid dressed as Jesus Christ to take off his costume.
• Someone at a major movie studio is seriously considering casting social disease Lindsay Lohan as Liz Taylor.  
• The TN state senate just approved a bill that forces all welfare recipients to get drug tested even though they are one of the groups of people who can least afford to buy drugs.  

The stupid, it burns forever.

I've got stuff to do today, so...

...please enjoy this photo of Kate Winslet while I get my business done.  Thanks.

Lightening fast TV reviews

 Lil' Steven plays a mobster once again.  This time he's a mobster who rats out his buddies to the FBI and he gets put into the witness protection program.  He chooses to go to Lillehammer, Norway.  Once there he gets involved with shady deals, Norwegian babes, and he runs afoul of a couple of Norwegian cops.

The best thing I can say about this fish out of water show is that the Norwegians who are in it are very good.  The Americans, not so much.  I recommend it only for the Norwegians and their beautiful country.

A well known Shakespeare festival goes through ups and downs and it's casts and crews go through many interpersonal dramas.  It's funny at times, poignant at others.  I liked the first series very much, the second was okay, and the third looks promising.

My favorite characters are Geoffrey, Richard, the ball busting American female exec in the first series, Anna, Oliver, Kate from the first series, Nahum, Sophie, Cyril, Frank, and Darren.  My least favorite character is Ellen, in fact I detest her.  I make it a point to root for older characters, especially older female characters, but I really can't stand Ellen.

I recommend this series highly for the story, the acting, the gentle comedy, the takes on Shakespeare, and the Canadian-ness of it all.  It's very well done and if you're a recovering theatre nerd like I am, then you'll like it even more.

Turning the corner?

It looks like the French are going to run right winger Sarkozy out of office and they may elect a socialist in his place.  However, the strong showing by the ultra right proto fascist Marie Le Pen and her goons may complicate things.

You, Mr. or Ms. US Citizen, may be asking, 'Why is this important to me?"  Well, put down that super sized burrito burger nacho milkshake and turn off America's Next Top Idle and I'll tell you.

Our European trading partners, especially Germany's Angela Merkel have been pushing financial austerity as the path of the future for Europe's troubled economies, that means she's demanding little or no government investment in the private sector, massive cuts to social programs, and privatization of almost everything.  These policies, even though they've been thoroughly discredited and shown to be detrimental to economic recovery, are supposed to bring back the moribund economies of Iceland, Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain, Italy, England, and some want them in place here in the USA.  And siding with Merkel are the right wingers Cameron, Prime Minister of the UK, and Sarkozy, head right winger in France.

Now, if Sarkozy loses, Merkel loses a key ally in her quest to shove financial austerity up the asses of the working masses in Europe.  And if enough people take to the streets to protest austerity and the new socialist head of France puts his foot down and demands higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy, then maybe instead of making the poor and working folks pay to clean up the mess, they'll make the ones who caused it in the first place pay to clean it up.

If Obama loses a right wing head of state buddy in the G7, then maybe he'll stop swallowing the lie that we need financial austerity here in the USA.  Maybe this new French head of state will push back against the mania for balancing budgets and get us back on the path to bigger government investment in our economies, you know, like the kind that got us out of the Great Depression of the 1930's.

What's the opposite of rest in peace?

Convicted criminal, Nixon administration thug, and right wing religious bully Chuck Colson has died.  I wish there was a hell so he could languish there forever for his crimes against the people.  But alas, there is not and now we are free of him.  So I'll have to settle for that.

Putin around

This little scarecrow, it's like something out of Angry Birds.

My blog is this many years old now

I started writing this blog in the last days of the Bush/Cheney debacle that brought our country to the brink of financial ruin.  It looked like those crooks were never going to go, and then we got saddled with a little better class of crook, one who gave us a little of what we demanded but who still kept the worst parts of the past administration.

So I've been railing here ever since.

Sure, I toss in the odd review, the pop culture appreciation post, and the one liner every now and again, but my meat and potatoes is skewering the rich, the pompous, and the willfully stupid.  I do it with sarcasm, withering critiques, and gallows humor, because that's the best kind of humor.  I add photos of hot brunettes, fiery Latinas, and smokin' hot British babes because I'm a guy and I like looking at pretty women.

It's been a great five years on this blog.  I love writing it.  I love all the friends I've made writing it and  I appreciate all the commenters and those who read but never comment.  I don't post with the same frequency I did in the first few years but I still look forward to coming up with new posts and sharing things about my mundane life.

It's been a pleasure and if nothing else, at least I've kept myself entertained for five years.  Let's shoot for five more, shall we?

It's official!

I'm showing some of my art at a gallery in Asheville, NC.  It's called ZaPow! Gallery and Studio.  I'll be there through the end of August and I'll be adding stuff as we go, so if you're in the east TN, southwest VA, or northwest NC area, check me out!  The gallery is downtown and they're open every day except Tuesday.

Just a gentle reminder

President Obama is indeed responsible for everything that happens on his watch, just as Bush Jr was for everything that happened on his.  So, conservatives, it's time you all started blaming Bush/Cheney for letting our country get attacked on 9/11/2001.  Just like the rest of us have been doing all along.

The song remains the same

The testimony of the right wing Norwegian nut job who murdered 77 innocent people last year sounds remarkably like the kind of stuff you hear right wingers espouse on Fox News and on right wing/religious talk radio and TV every day.  They all spout the same xenophobic nonsense that Muslims are taking over, that tolerance is bad, that we've got to purge the evil foreigners out of our country.  That kind of talk fired up Brietbart Brevik and it fires up Pam Geller, the fat drug addict, and the crying Mormon.  It makes the flaccid cocks of Bryan Fischer, Pat Robertson, and the hate mongers at the American Family Association all twitchy.

What Brevik did was the end result of the constant bombardment of that kind of talk. Small minds soak up lots of hate and then blame every one else for their problems.  Can't get a job?  Those Muslims took it from you.  Can't get a girlfriend?  The gays are to blame.  Don't hear your language being spoken all the time?  The god damn Turks or Mexicans or whoever is to blame.

And when you've got the leaders of the right wing political parties like David Cameron of the Tories and France's Sarkozy chirping about how multiculturalism has failed, well then, that just affirms what the fellow travelers on the internet say and what the haters on the TV and radio say.  It all becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.  They scream that one day a race or religious war is going to break out unless something is done about the damn dirty foreigners with their backwards religion and then when one of their listeners, like Brietbart Brevik, goes out and tries to start a war, they act all shocked but they cluck their tongues and blame his victims because if they'd hadn't been running around being non-white and shit, then none of this would ever have happened.

Multiculturalism didn't fail.  Assimilation didn't fail.  What failed is patience and empathy.  We all live in a results now world where it's all about instant gratification.  If we don't see results immediately, then we get impatient and want to abandon whatever we were doing.  Our political leaders no longer look to the future or govern with the welfare of future generations in mind, they want instant fixes to long term problems that have arisen as a result of their insistence on focusing on the short term and doing what is popular and not what is right.  And they're driven to always seek the short term easy fix by impatient xenophobic right wing radio and religious 'leaders.'  They are living proof of the old saying that garbage in brings garbage out.

Meet the monkeys

I found a set of sock monkey cards at a store in Asheville and I fell in love with them. 

Boo hoo

George 'Murdering War Criminal' Bush, Jr. wants people to stop calling his tax cuts 'the Bush tax cuts.'  But if we don't call then that, what else can we call them?  Here's a few helpful suggestions:

• the Bush bankrupt the USA cuts
• massive giveaway of money that millions of people could have benefited from
• a Republican 'thank you' to their ultra rich supporters
• screw the poor and the working poor
• a Bush 'Fuck you!' to working people
• the Bush/Cheney cuts
• the 'Hey, look, we started two wars and now we're cutting taxes!' cuts
• the unkindest cuts of all
• Bilbo Baggins
• the 'this is better than having to suck the cock of every super rich person who supported my campaign' cuts
• the 'No, seriously, I'm sure this won't balloon the deficit (Holy shit, I almost said that with a straight face) cuts'
• Hey, look, a terrorist!
• Oh my gawd, they's a terrorist in our country! 
• Don't forget Bill Clinton got a blow job from someone who weren't his wife
• Sheila
• the 'God damn it, what do you expect? I've spent my whole life listening to Milton Friedman's bullshit theories, so of course this is going to work even though his ideas have brought disaster every where they've been implemented' cuts.

Yeah, go with one of my ideas.  Feel free.

A pair of recent art works

I made these last week.  They'll be in the gallery in Asheville, NC that's going to show my work all summer long.

It's bread

In a can. 
Can you believe it? 
Bread.  In.  A.  Can.
Yeah.  So, there's that then.

Working moms

I don't care if Ann Romney worked outside of the home, after all raising children is tough hard work.  And I salute all the maids, nanny's, cooks, and cleaning ladies who helped Mrs. Romney raise her five sons.  I'm sure those women had their hands full finding baby sitters so they could go outside of the home to work to help Ann raise and clean up after her kids.

An open letter to Ashley Judd

Dear Ashley,

I don't avoid your film and TV projects because you're puffy.  I don't go to inhuman lengths to never see you in any filmed project because of your appearance.  Really I don't.  And please don't misconstrue what I am about to say or label it an attack on all women who act.  Ms. Judd, I will never see any of your films or TV shows because I think you're a terrible actress and the projects you choose to make, more often than not, suck. 

Don't get me wrong, you're well within your rights to make any film or TV show you like and I hope you keep working as long as you want because we all know how tough it is for a woman in Hollywood to make films and TV shows after the age of 30.  Many females see their career over even before they hit 30 because they committed the most grievous sin in the eyes of Hollywood, they had the gall to age.  So seriously, go for it.  Keep working, make as many films and TV shows as you can while they'll still pay you to work.  Just don't expect me to watch any of them and don't act all hurt when I tell you I think you're a Z grade actress who got lucky.  Let's face the facts, if your mom and sister weren't big country stars, you would never have gotten where you are today. 

In closing, best of luck to you and I hope you work until you drop, if that's what you want.  And I'll continue to never see the dreck you're in.

Sincerely yours,
Dr. Monkey

Reviews

Game of Thrones is the epic miniseries adaptation of the George RR Martin Song of Ice and Fire novels.  It is indeed epic and it's even better than the books because it condenses all that is good in the books, and I've read the first two, and adds great performances, stunning sets, and since it's on HBO, boobs.  It more than met my expectations and it left me wanting more.  Thank goodness I bought it on an instant view channel on my Roku so I can watch it over and over again at my leisure. 

I highly recommend this one even if you're not into the fantasy genre. 

The only thing that handicaps this immensely enjoyable and highly readable book is the fact that there is so little that is known about the blue whale, the largest animal on earth. Mr. Bortolotti laments that fact early on and I lamented it as well as I tore through his book.  It's full of the history of how the blue whale was hunted to near extinction, the efforts to stop that hunting, and the state of how the blue whale is bouncing back, albeit very slowly.  I wanted more scientific and natural history info about the whales, their habitat, their mating habits, etc, but it's just not out there.  Hopefully if we let this huge animal make a complete comeback, at one time they estimate that over 300,000 blues were killed in the years leading up to WW2, we can study it more and learn all the things we don't know about now.

I remember life before ESPN.  Sports reporting was spotty and often given short shrift on local and national news shows.  That all changed when the first 24 hour channel devoted to nothing but sports hit the cable scene back in the late 1970's.  I remember the first time I saw ESPN was when I went to college.  I remember being transfixed as they showed sports like Australian rules football, minor league baseball, and other oddities.  I lapped up Sportscenter and wished that I could have been a part of the whole scene.  So when I saw that there was a oral history of the network I was excited and intrigued.  But when I finally got my hands on the book I was highly disappointed.  They focus too much on the business side of the network and not enough on the sports reporting and the on air personalities who made the channel a hit.  I read about a third of this one before I gave up in disgust.  Someday, maybe someone will do a better job of telling the story of ESPN. 

How's that austerity budget working out for Greece?

 "I'm with a debtor bank that gets paid by the IMF, so it's working out great for me."

 "I'm no fan of Greece or Greeks, so all the wailing and gnashing of teeth is music to my ears.  Suck it you Hellenic cry babies."

 "Just so we understand each other, we're not talking about anal sex here are we?"

 "I just bought three Greek islands, a truck load of classical Greek statues, and half of the Acropolis, so it's working out great for me.  I am 100 percent behind this austerity stuff for the Greeks."

"I used to have job and house to live in.  It was nice house.  Family used to be happy and productive.  Now with austerity from government, we have nothing.  We live in our car and must depend on the kindness of monkeys for our meals.  My country gave you art, beauty, literature, democracy, and you give us capitalism that kills us.  Also, I have to give monkey a hand job so he won't bite us or fling his poo at car, thanks, thanks for nothing IMF, World Bank, Europe, and Germany."

The Talk (a white guy to black folks edition)

I'm a nearly 50 year old white guy who's lived in the north and the south and here's what I can tell African Americans about us white folks:

• Don't trust us white people, especially white men, especially white men  who claim they speak for a god.  We lie all the time and we'll do just about anything to get what we want.  One look at history will tell you that. 

• If you have something we want, we'll find a way to steal it.  We stole the land from the Native Americans and then we stole your ancestors from Africa to work it for us, and we did all that so we could have time to enact laws and shape religions that allowed us to steal more stuff from you.

• We'll do anything to stay on top.  Literally.  We'll start wars so we can ship off soldiers of color so they won't be a problem here at home, we'll convince poor and working poor white folks that you're to blame and not the crooked system we set up to keep you down.  We'll flood your neighborhoods with liquor stores and cheap drugs so you'll stay sedated and leave us alone.  We'll invest heavily in sports and music and allow a few of your people to achieve in those areas so that millions of other black folks will dream that they can succeed there too, which of course they won't.

• Your lives mean nothing to us but we want you to keep making babies so we can have someone to do our dirty work, someone to fight our wars, and someone to entertain us from time to time.

• If we have to pit you against other minorities in order to keep you down, we will.  

• We control the legal system, the major religions, and the media.  And we'll use all three if need be to keep you in line. 

• Even though we go to great lengths to keep you down, many of us either want to be like you or to have sex with you.

• If you want things to change and to make the USA, or wherever you live, because seriously, racism is every where, then you have to stop obeying.  

•  Stop believing the lies the corporate media tells you, especially the ones that says if you work hard enough, you'll become rich.  

• Start grabbing every government benefit you can, because honestly, that's how rich white people got so rich, Ross Perot, Mitt Romney, Bill Gates, and Wall Street fat cats, they all took advantage of government contracts, tax laws, and loopholes to make their money.  You're not going to get wealthy off businesses that make things for or cater to people who have little or no money, the real money is in the government, especially the Defense department. 

TV series review

We first watched this winning slice of life comedy back a few years ago.  It's about a guy from London who meets and falls in love with a gal from Wales.  Their friends and family move in and out of their lives as they navigate getting engaged, getting married, and then the trials of trying to have a baby.  We share their ups, downs, and the foibles of their quirky friends and family.  It's a double fish out of water comedy that is immensely fun and entertaining.  We laughed out loud during every episode of the show.

The only problem was they never aired series 2 of it over here in the USA and they never released it on DVD.  BBC America did show series 3 but they didn't release it on DVD.  And we never got to see the mandatory Christmas episode, all successful BBC shows do an hour long Christmas episode.  So we saw series 1, have the DVD which means we've watched it multiple times, never saw series2, and saw series 3 once.  But all that changed when I signed up for a free trial of Amazon Prime via our Roku.  While looking at the shows we could watch for free for a month I noticed that they were offering Gavin and Stacey 2, the Christmas special, and the third series for unlimited streaming.  Well quicker than President Obama can sell out his progressive base, we began to watch all the ones we'd missed and or seen only once.

And we loved them.    Ruth Jones and James Corden, who star in and wrote the show, are fantastic.  They're just the type of people who would never be allowed to star in or write comedies like this for US television.  Rob Brydon as the awkward Uncle Bryn steals every scene he's in.  Julia Davis and Adrian Scarborough are divine as the long time married couple who are either desperately in love or having the most vicious fights ever.  Margaret John as the elderly sexpot Doris is a hoot.  And the leads Joanna Page and Matthew Horne are cute and winning.

The two other series are as well written and acted as the first one is.  I highly recommend this show.  It's exactly the kind of show that would never ever get made or appear on US television and it's the kind that the BBC does so well.  It's a crying shame they never released all of it over here on DVD but it's available on Amazon Prime for you to watch on your computer or other streaming device. 

One finds the weirdest, creepiest stuff in antique stores

 This bunny would give any one nightmares.

 The creepiness of this piece is astounding.

 There.  Are.  No.  Words. 

And get a look at this creepy fat bastard.  Is he going to eat or break that horse he's sitting on?

Eat healthy this weekend

Or you can eat what ever the hell this is:

I may be imagining things but...

...after the abnormally warm winter we just had, it seems to me that the robins are huge this spring.

If the religious nut jobs aren't supporting Romney, then who is?

My crack team of pollsters and quiz masters has found out that the following groups are supporting Mitt Romney even if the religious right 'family values' voter is not:

• the wealthy
• the super wealthy
• the really really wealthy
• Mormons
• people who pleasure their indoor cats in heat with pencils and the sharp end of darts
• people with a shitload of money
• yacht owners
• people who use tax loopholes
• CEO's of big corporations
• sex offenders
• ex sex offenders
• raw head Rex defenders
• the easily manipulated working poor who routinely vote against their self interest
• gypsies
• tramps
• stevedores
• wealthy dowagers
• Mark Twain impersonators
• those who have to pay inheritance taxes
• greedy folks
• people who want to kiss Suzy Kolber
• pretenders to the throne
• people who have thrones

As you can see that's a quite diverse base Romney is pandering to, so it's no wonder why he flip flops more than a pancake at a church fund raiser.

Brunette of the week

Emilia Clarke

Lying liars and the wars they cause

So the Iraqi defector Curveball finally admitted his lies, the lies that took us and other countries to war.  The war that's made our national debt soar.  The war that's taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and maimed and shattered the lives of countless others.  The war that in part took our civil liberties from us in the name of protecting us from terrorism.

The bastard finally admits he made all that shit up so we would go in and remove Saddam Hussein from his country for him.  And his lies were the central reason Bush and Cheney and their gaggle of blood thirsty pig fuckers gave for going to war.  And Bush and Cheney and their cabal of war boosters knew his lies were lies and they took us to war anyway.

All those people dead, millions of Iraqis homeless and displaced for most likely forever.  Hundreds of thousands of our military people have had their lives shattered, their physical being shattered, their minds ripped and riddled with PTSD because of the lies told by this Iraqi scumbag and because Bush and Cheney took his lies and built a case for war based on them.

Can we prosecute all of them now?  Is it not evident that the whole thing is a huge crime against humanity?  Will the Waffler in chief in the White House put his Attorney General on this?  The Iraq war has been a debacle from the start, a disaster that's still affecting us.  It's bankrupted us and made us less safe.  It's past time for those who led us into it to be tried for their crimes.  And now with the admission of the defector, we have most all the evidence we need to prove how guilty the men at the top are.  It's a fucking crying shame that I'll win the Mega Millions and the Powerball jackpots before those lying murdering thieving bastards go on trial for their crimes. 

Bait and switch

This book is shit.  It won some kind of award in the UK for something or another but it's still shit.

It's not about whales or the search for them, it's about the author who's got a boner for Herman Melville.  He wants to be with Melville, build a time machine so he can travel back in time to hang out with Melville, make the beast with two backs with Melville, and quite possibly become Melville if he could.  Seriously, it's a non fiction book about whales, so what does this writer do?  He connects all things whales to Melville and instead of searching for whales, he searches for how to connect anything whale related, however remote, to Melville.

I was willing to forgive his overly chatty and chummy style until it became apparent to me the depths of his homoerotic love for Melville.  Holy fucking Christ Hoare, just write a book about how much the author of Moby Dick gets your motor running and how you'd love to be his love slave and stop pretending that you're writing about whales, the sea, and our relationship to it.  Fess up to your unrequited love for ol' Herman and move the fuck on.

The only way I can recommend this book to anyone is if all other books and reading material on earth and any surrounding planets has been destroyed.  And even then I'd have my qualms about it.  I'm keenly interested in learning more about whales and I mistakenly thought this book would teach me more about them, it didn't.  It taught me to avoid books by Philip Hoare.  And to never read Moby Dick.

Hoare, you're a bastard.

Eat it, eat it all you honky

This man will never be president, much less the nominee of his party of he man woman hating racists.  So calm down America. 

Goodbye dear friends

We've come to the end of this blog.  I've run out of things to say and I've shared all the opinions I have.  I don't have any more jokes left in me because after almost five years, I've told them all.  It's quite a chore coming up with new material every day for this blog and frankly, I'm tired of it.  I'll leave the blog up for a few days but after that I'll be taking it down and moving on. 

Thanks to all those who read me every day and to those who commented.  You've been great.  I hope to see you around sometime, but if not, then you take care. 

Bye bye.