Through everything that happened this year, I survived it, and so did almost everyone else that I know. Apparently we have that going for us.
Benazir Bhutto essentially committed suicide by returning to her home country back in October, so when the news that they had reached her, to quash the paradoxical dream of a democratic Pakistan, I wasn’t really surprised. Let me remind you that the killers ran up on her at the rally that had originally been postponed by her being placed under house arrest soon after her arrival.
Over the last couple of months she told everyone who would listen that if she were assassinated, that Musharraf was the one behind it. When the guy came out of the hospital to announce that she had died from her injuries he proclaimed, “she has been martyred”.
There is not much sympathy over here from me for her so called sacrifice. Her father and both of her brothers were all murdered by political rivals and she had been driven from office under dubious circumstances not once but twice before.
The writing was on the wall honey, those dudes were not down for you so why push it, which is funny because supremely educated women are usually such big sellers in the Muslim world. Go figure, just don’t try and go home again.
Despite the fact that I am limited to the network and local offerings plucked freely off of the airwaves, I still spend way too much time gaping vacantly at the machine an earlier generation called the idiot box. Old people are usually wrong about most things related to progress and in this case they could not be more so.
Advertising works and the fact that so many of us will sit for so many hours everyday, and allow images to be seared into our subconscious mind is nothing short of sheer genius. When the television writers walked out on November 1st, there were over 60 shows in production and the television season was doing what it is supposed to do, exciting and enthralling viewers coast to coast while brainwashing us to buy fast food and shop at Wal-Mart.
At this point pretty much all of the shows have stopped production and the only new fare offered by the networks are mostly inane reality programs and always insipid game shows. Without question the writers are deserving of a greater share of the pie and I support their quest to achieve equitable compensation for their efforts, it is after all quite challenging to sit down and conjure something from nothing.
Keep The Car Running, the song by a real band from Montreal called, The Arcade Fire, reminds me of the song On The Darkside from the movie Eddie and The Cruisers. In the 1983 movie, On the Darkside is performed by the fictional Eddie, but in real life the song cracked the top ten on the singles charts by reaching number seven.
Though merely a Springsteen sound alike, flash in the pan, John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band, were the actual band that got paid because of the songs success. They parlayed their noteriety by appearing on the sondtracks of two Stallone movies as well.
In Rocky IV, their song Hearts on Fire encourages Rocky to feel “no pain” during the memorable training sequence in the snow. Crime is the disease and Marion Cobretti is the cure, in Cobra, another godawful Stallone effort from the eighties that also features the band from Rhode Island.
And finally, you have got to see this, from the American evangelist and televised maniac, Jack Van Impe. He warns us all how aliens, are “the rage of the age”, and how “soon a star wars battle will rage among the planets”. Remember that when the aliens take over, you were warned here first.
Wacky Jack might be right though, as we learned from a BBC News report, that details how we might be facing a real life threat from above and actually be in danger of immenant invasion. A former UFO expert with the British Government declares that British air defenses are regularly penetrated my unexplained aircraft. Who knew?
Happy New Year everyone.
Please try to not act stupid 2008.
Racism is lame.
H8 everyone with equal fury.
Hate, create, or... 