Knuckles Blog

Really bizarre crap I wrote probably while intoxicated episode 2

2009-11-16T14:17:00Z

Imagine you a lone man stranded on the surface of that former planet, Pluto. Why he is there -- how he got to this outer reach of our solar system -- is immaterial. He does not quite know himself. But stranded he is, stumbling bleary-eyed across the glossy rolling landscape, stubbing his toes on rocks unmoved since the cacophony of solar formation those billions of years ago. He is a cast-off man on a cast-off planet, and a doomed one.

Think you of Pluto, now. It is tiny even in a human's mind, though unimaginably distant. Yet think! In its own sphere, Pluto is a titan. It dominates the Kuiper belt like an abusive father, and holds three of his brothers as hostages. But on inspection, Pluto's proud, domineering ways are so much kabuki. Like the other planetoids and asteroids surrounding it, Pluto is trapped in a forever-winter; it is a black, dead place. Thus it is a reflection of our stranded man and ourselves at our worst: plunged headlong into icy despair, never to know verdure, never to feel warmth, never to think, to feel, to move again, but to lay forever in sad repose -- unmourned, unmourning.

On Pluto the sun is just a bright star. That which brings us light, and warmth, and life itself -- on Pluto delivers only the searing cold solar wind, not a wind, but a steady stream of particles that carry with them cancer and radiation sickness. The sun seems nice, behind the shield of an atmosphere, but like Pluto it is abusive, too. And Pluto is not its only victim, because the sun is all alight with its own troubles, is forever beset from within by gargantuan, catastrophic fits -- and uncaring, vomits upon its orbiting supplicants the byproducts of these internal passions. Do you still supplicate at the altar of the sun? Though it warms you after a cold night, though it is your brother (for you both are made from the same material), it does not notice your pleas for mercy, or if it does it hates you. Your fate is as certain as the stranded man three billion miles away. The sun will one day kill you. And one day, having hit upon some epiphany, and coming near death itself, the still restless sun will grow large, consume us all, killing us in one last act of animosity. What a luminous animus! Then, satisfied, finally and forever pacified, the sun will quit our charred corpses, and retreat into itself, and die, and become a cold husk, nevermore troubled, and nevermore troubling.

The man on Pluto does not think of these things. He thinks of his radiation-warped face, of his freezing extremities, of his failing spacesuit. He wants to think of home and everyone who loves him, but instead his mind, when it turns to Earth, is all clogged with thoughts of broken promises and debts he will leave behind. He relives the thousand lingering embarrassments that dwell within him, petty things, but anguishing. Are we not the same? When laid low by disaster, do we not hasten our final doom by artificially adding troubles to the pile, like tinder to the fire? Why must we relive our past failings, only when destruction draws most nigh? It is thus with the sun, and Pluto, and everything in this solar system, for as said before, we are all tempered by the same flame, and forged of the same material. The violence we do to each other is merely the violence within us turned outward, but never abated.

You demand: is it yet different elsewhere in the Milky Way, in those places that do not share our lineage? How can that be, when our ultimate origin itself shares an origin with all else in this galaxy? And all galaxies, in their unknowable immensity, yet just as surely share a common origin, and in one dimensionless point, no less. Oh, unkind universe! Nowhere can there be happiness, for the first cause is the wellspring from which all else arises, and it is a wellspring of despair!

One day I will buy a car. An old car, but hardy enough for a long trip. I will drive south as far as I can go, then swim the Panama canal, buy another car, and keep driving until I reach the end of South America's mainland. Then I will swim again, across the strait of Magellan, and walk across the Tierra Del Fuego, until I can see the shores of Antarctica. And then I will be brethren to the stranded man -- the archipelago, my Pluto, the archangelic grandeur of that primordial, universal despair my solar wind, battering me until the last.

Really bizarre crap I wrote probably while intoxicated episode 1

2009-11-09T18:38:00Z

Inside a dank and poorly-lit bar at the edge of the city sit a great many patrons, to a man pathetic caricatures of proper human forms, cloistering themselves in the darkened corners of dirty booths. Their conversations bleed into one din that stifles solitary thought. They drink and wallow in their failure, these cast-off sediments of society.

Into this menagerie of hideous faces walks a towering beast of a man, bearded and fearsome, who commands with one brutal shout, "Silence!" But it's a redundancy; the ugly mass of people has already fallen silent at his presence.

The man wastes no time. From his person he produces 20 pieces of chocolate and a worn deck of playing cards. He issues a simple challenge. Whosoever bests him in a game of card-tossing may claim the chocolate for their own -- but whosoever loses forfeits their lives.

"Do not trifle with me!" Warns the grave and hauntingly beautiful giant. "I am no more man than card-throwing machine of the underworld, and as surely as the sun rises I can put all 52 of them neatly into any upturned hat for a mile. I can throw them that they land sorted by number, or suit, or into arrangements and patterns unthinkable to you slackwits. Who amongst you can hope to challenge me? Respond!"

The awful parodies of men assembled in the bar, having never heard of the sun or felt its gilded rays upon their cursed faces, are emboldened. They nod and grunt in ascent, ready to attempt the herculean feat set before them by this interloper.

The night drags on and all is bloody. One by one the bar's customers play. All fail miserably. At each new victory, the humongous challenger breaks another spine, casually, as if by rote, and beckons for another hapless opponent. In time the number of those living is outstripped by the number of those dead, who have been tossed carelessly into a pile of flesh adorning some remote corner.

At long last there are none left in the bar but a very drunk child of seven. The man looks down at him with a bemused grin. "And you, young one, you too wish to meet your end here?"

The child sputters and hiccups, finally managing an affirmation from his horrible mouth.

"Then let us begin!"

Into the dawn they toss cards, but at each turn the child is the man's equal. By this impossible twist, the child is unfazed, but the previously unstoppable mad giant becomes increasingly distressed. Eventually the distress manifests itself physically, causing the giant to throw amiss for the first time in what must surely be several millenia. The boy gives a wan smile and holds out his hand to accept the prize that now rightfully belongs to him.

But the crestfallen giant will have none of it. He merely slumps his shoulder and issues a groan that could shatter mountains. Then realizing what he must do, he grabs himself by his coatail and back collar, hoists himself up, and breaks his own back in two. He falls to the ground, a dead heap, a discarded husk of his former glory.

The child, gingerly, approaches the corpse. He reaches into the pocket of the dead man's overcoat, and pulls the 20 chocolate pieces out.

To the child's great disappointment, the chocolate is stale. He is too drunk to remember this disappointment for very long, however.

Sapeurs du Congo

2009-11-02T14:35:03Z

The Sapeurs adhere to a subculture of high fashion, often against a backdrop of extreme poverty. Many live in shacks bordered by stinking sewers in the southern suburbs of Brazzaville. Those of them who can, work double jobs; those who can’t must beg, borrow and occasionally steal; whatever it takes to strut in Versace, Prada and Gucci. Meet the Sapeurs of Congo.

In a country where many survive on 30 cents a day, Papy Mosengo is flashing $1,000 worth of designer clothing on his back, Dolce Gabbana cap and Versace stretch shirt to his spotless white Gucci loafers.

“It makes me feel so good to dress this way,” the 30-year-old said when asked about such conspicuous consumption in a city beset by unemployment, crime and homelessness. “It makes me feel special.”

But Mosengo can scarcely afford this passion for fashion. He worked eight months at his part-time job at a money-exchange shop to earn enough for the single outfit, one of 30 he owns, so he’ll never have to wear the same one twice in a month. He doesn’t own a car. He lets an ex-girlfriend support their 5-year-old son and still lives with his parents, sleeping in a dingy, blue-walled bedroom that is more aptly described as a closet with a mattress.

The word “Sapeur” is derived from SAPE, an acronym for the movement itself, Société des Ambianceurs et Persons Élégants. The word sape, perhaps not accidentally, also means “to dress with elegance and style” in French.

The roots of the movement can be traced back to 1920s and 30s when the first privileged Congolese who had spent time in France returned with wardrobes of dapper suits. However, it wasn’t until the 1960s and 70s that the cult of style really took off, thanks to musician and singer Papa Wemba.

Multiple trips to Paris in the early 1980s only fueled his fever for French fashion, and Papa Wemba soon developed a flamboyant, exaggerated style that was in direct opposition to the Mobutu-approved uniform, the dreaded abacost (from the French “à bas le costume,” or “down with the suit”), a dull Zairean version of the three-piece suit. He called his new style Ungaru, and it was a throwback to the elegance of the 1930s—complete with tapered trousers, brogues, neatly trimmed hair and tweed hats worn at a rakish angle. For Congolese all over the world, the look was irresistible. SAPE was born.

Héctor Mediavilla Sabaté has been studying and photographing Sapeurs since 2003.

A Sapeur, by definition is a non-violent person, despite the 3 civil wars that have taken place since the independence. They stand for an exquisite morality, but as they say “There can only be Sape when there is peace”. They represent an illusion that has been supported by the government itself, trying to normalize a post-war situation. The SAPE interrupted its activities when the civil war started in 1997, and did not reinitiate its activities until 2002. Their motto became “Let’s drop the weapons, let us work and dress elegantly.”

Old school Sapeurs often spent years saving up for outfits.They started out by renting or borrowing suits from their more established peers. However, many of the new generation don’t like to wait that long, and they’re not so fussy either when it comes to sources of income to fund their passion, as Edmund Sandars reports:

Indeed the great Papa Wemba himself needed more than concert fees and album royalties to pay for his stylish gear…

It is obvious that there is an inconsistency between the way they live and the way they dress.” Even wealthy Papa Wemba had to resort to tricks to keep himself in Cavalli—soliciting money for working the names of fellow sapeurs into his songs and, recently, charging upwards of US$4,000 for smuggling Congolese men and women into Europe disguised as members of his band, which led to his arrest in France in 2003 (whereupon there were riots in Kinshasa)

Within the SAPE movement there are rivalries and affiliations. Paris vs Brussels, Brazzaville vs Kinshasa, Bacongo vs Mungali. It is total fashion warfare. The rules of engagement also differ from gang to gang. The Brazzaville Sapeurs tend to follow the three colours only rule. Meanwhile in Kinshasa it’s all about going overboard. Sapeurs don’t dress up all the time either. “Fight days” are limited to once every week or so, and the combat arenas are the local outdoor bars on Avenue Matsoua.

Ironically Papa Wemba converted to Christianity whilst serving his prison sentence. He is no longer an advocate for 5,000 dollar suits. A number of his contemporaries now also express sadness at having spent so much money on SAPE. King Kester Emeneya lamented, “I really regret it. We set a bad example. If I had invested my money instead, I would own several houses. It was like a drug.”

However, judging by the amount of Paul Smith suits on display at club La Main Bleue on Sunday nights, the younger devotees have no intention of turning their backs on the “cult of the cloth”.

(article source: AfricaFeed)

GI RGCaSTWCS FAQ BBQ

2009-10-07T21:19:23Z

OK so I wanted to explain the concept of the Rupert Grint Cultural and Societal Terrorism Warning Color Scale a little bit further before I do any more updates. From the first post:

"The Rupert Grint Cultural and Societal Terrorism Warning Color Scale, or RGCaSTWCS (pronounced "RG cast wicks") is a metric designed to measure the current level of cultural decay in the United States."

I understand that probably raises more questions than it answers, so here is a handy-dandy FAQ.

Wut.
The whole thing is a convoluted excuse for showing off certain news stories that I find particularly interesting or odd, and giving my own commentary on them. If the stories I pick for a certain update are generally negative, the alert level rises. If they are generally positive, it lowers.

Why Rupert Grint?

Why not Rupert Grint? I came across the image I use as the scale a few years ago in some arcane corner of the internet, and realized it would work perfectly as a warning system, because Grint's expression gets progressively dire from right to left. Plus for some reason his gaunt, perpetually worried visage is the perfect emblem of cultural decay. And that's not to mention how totally dreeeeamy he is:

This is what Dav wishes he was.

How do you decide if a story is positive or negative, and therefore when to change the alert level?
Actually, I don't. The news stories I select are run through an enormous vacuum-tube computer called GRINTVAC, as explained before. I constructed GRINTVAC myself, using a mixture of my own derring-do and secret government plans (mostly the secret government plans). It is the size of a small house and weighs 27 tons, requiring constant maintenance by an armada of IBM engineers kidnapped from the 1950s. The algorithms it utilizes to determine changes in the threat level are incomprehensible to mortal man, and are very probably satanic. GRINTVAC's specific recommendations are printed out on ticker-tape and reproduced at the end of each update.

If he doesn't fix that cathode, he doesn't ****ing eat.

What does GRINTVAC stand for?
Gauge for Ranking Intrinsic National Terror Values with Accurate Colors. (That, or North American Man-Boy Love Association. I'm not sue.)

How often will you update?
Whenever the hell I feel like it, dad.

What's the deal with airline food?
I know! 12 bucks for a pack of peanuts and a wafer-thin "steak" monstrosity. Ridiculous.

Rupert Grint Cultural and Societal Terrorism Warning Color Scale update #1

2009-10-05T02:06:11Z

All in all it's been a pretty interesting week in news. Directors have been arrested, seals have been relocated, and the whimsically insane are free to ply their wondrous trade. Unfortunately, the overall picture is a grim one. Readers are advised to stay indoors after 8:00 PM and report any suspicious activity to the proper authorities. Here's a quick summary of events:

Fire hydrants in Roseville, California are being stolen. Authorities are investigating the mysterious disappearances, but he local K-9 unit has nothing to go on.

Famed director/child rapist Roman Polanski was arrested in Zurich. Public unable to separate art from artist; defend child rape, vilify great movies.

Manson Family member Susan Atkins died in prison. She was convicted in 1970 on seven counts of murder and nine counts of using lettuce as buns.

A seal in Hawaii loves to swim and play with people. The bad news: he loves humans so much, he could someday love one to death. Literally.

A 17-pound lobster was set free from an Ohio grocery store because everyone decided was too big to sell. I want to punch everyone in this story, including the children. Those clueless *** hicks have no idea what they've done. I'm sure they'll change their tune when America is invaded by giant sentient lobsters.

Someone on Facebook started a poll asking whether Obama should be assassinated. Of course, GI had to settle for a poll on whether Lyndon LaRouche should be assassinated.

Some dude is suing Bank of America for "1,784 billion, trillion dollars." He's also asking for $200,164,000 on top of that. He apparently does not understand that this is akin to demanding a penny on top of $200,164,000. He does not, apparently, understand much of anything:

"Incomprehensible," U.S. District Judge Denny Chin said in a brief order released Thursday in Manhattan federal court.

"He seems to be complaining that he placed a series of calls to the bank in New York and received inconsistent information from a 'Spanish womn,'" the judge wrote. "He apparently alleges that checks have been rejected because of incomplete routing numbers."

"These are the kind of numbers you deal with only on a cosmic scale," said Sylvain Cappell, New York University's Silver Professor at the Courant Institute for Mathematical Sciences. "If he thinks Bank of America has branches on every planet in the cosmos, then it might start to make some sense."

High school students are eating poorly. Also listening to bad music, keeping messy rooms. Film at 11.

England continues to beat the US in the "kicakss apple" department.

In response to this half-red, half-green abomination of modern science, American researchers are hoping to breed an apple cultivar that grants wishes and performs oral sex on command.

David Letterman did the nasty with some of his staff members; someone tried to blackmail him over it. Not over the sex itself mind you, but the fact that when he did it, Letterman insisted on having Paul Shaffer in the room saying "yeah, yeah" every time Letterman said "oh yeah."

The US no longer owns the internet.

But the fresh focus will give other countries a more prominent role in determining what takes place online, and even the way in which it happens – opening the door for a virtual United Nations, where many officials gather to discuss potential changes to the internet.

I'm in favor of this, as long as the Internet UN is a proboards forum. Just so I can see world leaders writing poorly-spelled, thousand-word missives about how Buffy could beat Wonder Woman in single combat.

Glenn Beck doesn't want the awful truth to come out. He's suing the owner of glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com. Here's the response brief, quite possibly the most amazing legal document ever drafted. Certainly the first to use the term "HOMOSEXUAL BLOOD ELF."

Placenta teddy bear. PLACENTA TEDDY BEAR.

----

GRINTVAC SEZ: AFTER ANALYZING THIS WEEK'S STORIES I HAVE COME TO THE CONCLUSION THAT AMERICAN CULTURE HAS DETERIORATED. WHILE THE STREETS ARE SAFER FOR 13-YEAR-OLD GIRLS NOW THAT ROMAN POLANSKI IS IN CUSTODY, THERE IS A SIGNIFICANTLY INCREASED RISK OF CRUSTACEAN APOCALYPSE AND GROSS TEDDY BEARS. SUGGESTED ACTION: RAISE THREAT LEVEL TO GREEN.

Rupert Grint Cultural and Societal Terrorism Warning Color Scale explanatory update

2009-10-04T01:41:29Z

The Rupert Grint Cultural and Societal Terrorism Warning Color Scale, or RGCaSTWCS (pronounced "RG cast wicks") is a metric designed to measure the current level of cultural decay in the United States.

The scale's default is Blue, or Exorbitantly Guarded Optimism, pictured above. This signifies a general lull activity, neither good nor bad. Purple and Loooovely Purple, to the right, signify positive changes in American culture. Green, piss, orange, and red, to the left, signify negative changes.

The current threat level is determined by taking recent news stories from around the country and running them through a complex algorithm calculated by an enormous vacuum-tube computer called GRINTVAC. If GRINTVAC finds that there are significantly more negative stories than positive ones, the threat level will rise by one or two levels; if there are more positive stories, however, the threat level will lower.

Look for the first update later on tonight, or perhaps tomorrow if I am lazy.

Here is another entry no one will read

2009-10-02T21:21:02Z

Are you having a good day, nonexistent people? Here are some things I think are Interesting this morning:

Haters gonna hate.

I wish I had a copy of this. I would totally post it!

I just want to make sure you all understand. This is definitely a deer pooping out deer babies.

DISTURBING VIDEO OF THE MO:

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Signage

2009-10-02T21:20:29Z

Introductions, poultry killing

2009-10-01T22:02:22Z

So I find weird stuff on the internet all the time. It's just a thing I do. And now I have a place to post it.

That's all this blog will be -- found images, video, and all that jazz. I figure that's more interesting to you guys than how my day went or how many shabbitybops I lillypalooed last week. Sometimes my posts will have a theme, but mostly it'll just be a random assortment of whatever I found cool at that moment.

Most posts will have a lot more than three images but this is just an intro, and I'm testin' *** out.

This is a poultry killer! It kills poultry dead. The one on the box seems distressed.

Sometimes you see a thing and you're not sure why it even exists. This is one of those things. Strange Things will be a recurring motif here.

I don't even know.

DISTURBING VIDEO OF THE MO:

(Please visit the site to view this media)