[18:04] <GOD> whats a good usenet downloader?
[18:05] <Wesper> greeks use musenet
[18:05] <Wesper> the SWAT team uses fusenet
[18:05] <Wesper> Kyle uses jewsnet
[18:05] <Wesper> pastors use pewsnet
[18:06] <Wesper> Katie Holmes uses cruisenet
[18:06] <Wesper> hahaha

Only one example has nothing to do with religion (unless you ask Bush)!

Have you ever had an amazing thought pop into your head: one that just begged to be shared, but that you would never ever be able to share without people looking at you like WTF because there is almost nothing that you could possibly happen upon that would serve as an appropriate segue into this novel thought?

I just had a thought like that and I don't know where it came from. (You already think I'm nuts, no doubt, so I'll share it with you.) I was getting dressed after showering after mowing the lawn and suddenly I thought:

Tapirs look like penises.

Yep.

Now, for further hilarity, keep that comment in mind as you read this excerpt from Wikipedia's entry on the tapir:

Tapirs are forest animals that love water. Although they frequently live in dryland forests, tapirs with access to lakes or rivers spend a good deal of time in and under the water, feeding on soft vegetation and taking refuge from predators. The Brazilian Tapir often sinks to the bottom of a stream and walks along the riverbed to feed. In forests, they eat fruit, leaves, and berries.

Tapirs are largely nocturnal and crepuscular. The smaller Mountain Tapir of the Andes is generally diurnal, but all four species react to hunting pressure by retreating deeper into inaccessible regions and becoming more nocturnal.

I'm still laughing.

Been a while since I posted some of my goofy fanart drawings on the blog, so here we go. Click either of the pictures to open a slightly larger version in a new window.

Quick picture of the TMNT's Rat King that I worked up yesterday, mostly based on the action figure (minus the centipedes and spiders and whatnot). I like how the development of the little one-eyed rats turned out -- I'm going to have to use that style whenever I finally do something with Ratlantis.

And here's a drawing of PYRAMID HEAD, largely based on his incarnation in Silent Hill the movie. It's the same picture that appears in Scary-Crayon's Dusty Plastic HELL: Hot Flash #80 plus a grain filter and sans the interview text and cartoon Wes.

Excelsior!

So I'm in this chat room
and the guys are talking about having problems
with some program called Alcohol
and needing to uninstall it.
And I type:

the only way to uninstall alcohol is by vomiting

I'm so funny.

Hope y'all have been well. Still hard at work with my writing projects -- given that the longer one was primarily and obviously based on my personal experiences, I've decided to turn it into an avowed memoir. That means that (for the most part), the science fiction elements and mythological backstories are out, but there should still be room for social commentary (a la the discussion below, but peppered with my own experiences) and a bit of humor. As much humor as can be in the life story of a suicidal wackjob constantly plotting his own demise, anyway. 7K words so far and counting.

Posted the first Hot Flash in a while over on Scary-Crayon, too, so check that out if you find my drawings and comments to be amusing and don't mind minor Silent Hill spoilers, since that's the subject of the latest comic. See the attendant entry in the SC blog for my assessment of the film.

On another note, I was looking for an article/transcript from an interview with James Earl Jones that one of my commenters referenced and came across the following film quote:

But you think of yourself as a colored man. I think of myself as a man.

That was from Guess Who's Coming To Dinner, released in 1967: and while I go even farther than that -- I think of myself as Wes, id est, myself -- I want to know what the hell happened to that progressive mentality. I listened to Cornel West's annual sermon at Howard University this morning, and while he made a few good points and employed a number of humorous analogies, I couldn't help but notice that throughout the speech he constantly and consistently referred to people with respect to the color of their skin -- except he was hardly employing the term in a purely descriptive fashion. He lavished praise upon Tavis Smiley's new book, The Covenant with Black America, but given that it obviously continues to regard individuals as being "black people" first and foremost -- or at least fails to address the issue at all -- I am convinced that its effect on the nation, if it has any lasting effect, will be decidedly negative.

In the midst of one supposedly racially motivated controversy, I once wrote to the president of the Concerned Black Students at Yale group and asked if they might better serve their aims by encouraging all students to get involved in these issues. I questioned whether a group called Concerned Students at Yale, with the right kind of direction, might have more success. She wrote back that the organization was so named because its intent was to explicitly exclude students who were not part of what she called "the Black Family." She described the actions of the group as being a "for us by us" movement. But if that's how these people think, why should anyone else care? How does that mentality encourage progress? As long as the concept of racial separatism -- which, arguably, necessarily attends the concept of race -- is championed, there will be no progress in this country.

So I want to know why so many supposedly smart and educated people are unable to grasp the simple concept that the color of one's skin should not define one's behavior, interests, or causes. If the problems in our society are to be solved, it will not be because of appeals to racial brotherhood and unity, but because all people recognize that something is wrong and needs to change. I am sick of hearing community leaders preface their speeches by stating what "we as black people" should do. I have no doubt that Smiley's book will be touted as being a book that no black home should be without, but how about it being a book that every person committed to social justice should read? Why not make an appeal to persons with compassion for their fellows and an interest in improving the nation across the board? Perhaps, like Hitler, these people feel that the concept of race is a far more powerful tool for promoting unity: but the Nazi regime didn't exactly do away with racism, did it?

I was looking for a statement that I actually think came from President Bush -- something to the effect that there shouldn't be a black or white America, just America -- but I couldn't find it. When I keyed "there should not be a black america" into Google, I didn't get a single hit. So let this be the first. People should not define themselves and others with respect to the color of their skin, nor should they let themselves be so defined, nor should they privilege shared skin color over personal interests, beliefs, etc., when grouping themselves. There should not be a black America. And while I recognize that to some extent the heavy concentrations of so-called minorities in inner-city environments encourages that mentality, the abolition of these ideological racial divisions doesn't even appear to be an intended goal of these so-called activists' progressive plans. It should be.

Hopefully that'll tide y'all over until my next post. Ja ne!