Yonkers in the News Again

Two Yonkers residents were arrested in the Russian spy ring sting that has been dominating the headlines yesterday. I must admit, my "spider sense" is tingling when I consider this case- these people don't seem to have accomplished anything. The plot, described in the article on the local website, seems to be amorphous and inconsequential:

According to court papers unsealed Monday, the FBI intercepted a message from SVR headquarters, Moscow Center, to two of the defendants describing their main mission as “to search and develop ties in policymaking circles in US.”

Intercepted messages showed they were asked to learn about a broad swath of topics including nuclear weapons, U.S. arms control positions, Iran, White House rumors, CIA leadership turnover, the last presidential election, the Congress and political parties.

Hell, it sounds more like a think-tank than a spy ring... they are not being charged with espionage. Dumbasses should have registered with the Attorney General's office.

I also get a kick out of the media coverage of the "sexxxy superspy", femme fatale Anna Chapman- uh, she's cute (I wouldn't kick her out of bed for eating crackers pelmini), but she's no Diana Rigg. We'll see how this whole thing plays out, but for now, the overblown coverage of this Russian spy ring is good for one thing- it gives me an excuse to post this video:

Swampy Weather

Yesterday, I had a bad hair day- it was that gross out. I had to work outside in the evening, and a torrential downpour of short duration had done nothing to alleviate the humidity. It was the kind of day when one's eight-hour deodorant gives up four hours into the struggle.

As much as I dig swamps, it's nice to be able to leave for drier climes. Last night, I had no such luck. Adding to the swampy nature of the night, I was serenaded with the twang of a green frog, accompanied by the basso notes of a bullfrog, freed from the diurnal tyranny of a great blue heron which had taken up residence in their pond, and feeling their batrachian wild oats.

Inspired in part by Thunder's comment on my previous post, as well as the triple-digit heat index.

Funny, why don't the right-wingers mention this run of really hot weather? They sure made a big deal about the snowstorms this winter (which, ironically, were fueled by increased water vapor in the air due to, you got it, global warming), but they're strangely reticent now.

I'm used to dealing with this sort of weather in August, not late June. Now sit tight, and listen keenly to a brand-new weather-appropriate musical biscuit from the Specials:

Yesterday Was Pride Day

Yesterday, the gay pride parade took place in New York City. One of the grand marshals was Constance McMillen, the Mississippi teen who caused a kerfuffle among the bigots when she wanted to attend her prom with another girl. Once again, the bigots' small-mindedness has backfired on them, as Ms. McMillen has received national attention, scholarship money, and a free ticket out of Palookaville. Good for her.

I am going to take a moment to say that I am not gay, I never have been gay. That being said, my iPod is definitely bisexual:






The song, by Canadian duo Kon Kan (jokingly named after the Canadian Content laws in our Socialist Northern Neighbor to the North), is a glorious mess, incorporating the melodic "hook" of Italo-Disco Diva Ivana Spagna's Call Me, the chorus of Lynn Anderson's I Beg Your Pardon, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, a vocal sample of Get Up And Boogie (That's Right) by Deutschdisko group Silver Convention, and (hilariously) a snatch of Elmer Bernstein's The Magnificent Seven Overture.

Now, watching that video is almost guaranteed to turn you gay, so beware!

The frivolity aside, I just want to give a hearty "Boo Hiss" to all of the bigots who love to try to make life miserable for gay people. You're losing the battle, bigots, and your followers will hopefully awaken to the reality that they are being fleeced by you. The fact that you are spending some of this money on gay prostitutes is merely the hallucinogenic, unripe mulberry on top of your hypocrisy sundae.

Oh, and by the way, evolution is real, assholes!

Happy belated Pride Day, people!

Morning Mulberries

In keeping with my "foraging" resolution (made last summer), I have been greedily stuffing my face with "feral" mulberries, which are plentiful in this area. Like the mighty silkworm, I have a gluttonous addiction for these things, dating back to my childhood, when my siblings and I would spend a good deal of time climbing a mulberry tree in our backyard, occasionally snacking on the incredible berries to be had:





The berries stain surfaces they contact pretty badly- better my sausage fingers than some poor sap's car:





Everything seems to be ripening early this year- the mulberries started ripening a couple of weeks ago (they never ripen all at once, so I'll have delicious berries for another week or two), and I actually saw some really early (but unripe) wild grapes this morning, and some pinkish staghorn sumac "berries". The wild raspberries look like they need another week or so to ripen.

Moon Musings

Fueled by yerba maté, I'm working the graveyard tonight (it makes juggling jobs easier these days), and the moon is full. The moonlight has been so bright, one could read a newspaper without artificial illumination. Maybe my mention of the Black Rabbit of Inlé in my previous post was subconsciously inspired by the fact that the moon would be full tonight. Without giving away any secrets, (in connection with another post earlier this week) another silly scrap of doggerel comes to mind on this, the night of the full moon:

Overhead, the moon is screaming
White as turnips, on the Rhine

That's a takeoff on the Serenade from The Student Prince, a musical I know mainly from a Benny Hill spoof of the song Drink! Drink! Drink! (I can't find the Benny Hill video on teh t00bz).

Another poem, a riddle, comes to mind- I don't know if it's a traditional one, or one written by a guy named Lawrence Schick, but here it is:

Round she is, yet flat as a board
Altar of the Lupine Lords.
Jewel on black velvet, pearl in the sea
Unchanged but e'er changing, eternally

Enough of my lunacy, here's a little lunatic ditty from my favorite evangelists, St Joey, St Johnny, St Dee Dee and St (at this point in their career) Richie:




Oddly enough, Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics produced the song.

Postscript: I'll have to read this post tomorrow, after I've had some decent sleep- it looks pretty grammatical at 4:25 AM, but that's not reassuring.

Stealing Thunder's... Uh... Thunder?

I'm taking a big chance here, because I am risking Thunder's wrath. He's the go-to guy for pictures of lagomorphs on the web. Thunder's rabbits are eldritch, terrifying creatures- they make the Black Rabbit of Inlé look like a Hello Kitty sidekick. My rabbit friend, on the other hand, is (as a crazy former co-worker would put it) the cuteation:

No Sunflower This!

A line in Smut Clyde's latest post reminded me of a classic, underappreciated series of "weird tales":

It is a tribute to their perceptual acuity that they headed straight for a "King in Yellow" sunflower with their cargo.

Robert W. Chambers was an author of "genre fiction" whose career straddled the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While he was a prolific author of romance fiction, he is best known today for a collection of "weird tales" published in 1895, which revolve around a play, The King in Yellow, which can drive its readers mad. Mentioned in the ficticious play are various locales cribbed from Ambrose Bierce's 1891 short-short story An Inhabitant of Carcosa.

The first tale in Chambers' King in Yellow cycle is The Repairer of Reputations, set in the futuristic world of 1920, a world in which suicide is legal, and every town has a Government Lethal Chamber available to the despondent (NYC's is on the south side of Washington Square, a bad location due to the presence of stressed-out NYU students and losing chess players). The protagonist of the story has succumbed to the fatal charms of the play, which has all the seductive, yet damning, characteristics of an opiate:


During my convalescence I had bought and read for the first time "The King in Yellow." I remember after finishing the first act that it occurred to me that I had better stop. I started up and flung the book into the fireplace; the volume struck the barred grate and fell open on the hearth in the fire-light. If I had not caught a glimpse of the opening words in the second act I should never have finished it, but as I stooped to pick it up my eyes became riveted to the open page, and with a cry of terror, or perhaps it was of joy so poignant that I suffered in every nerve, I snatched the thing from the hearth and crept shaking to my bedroom, where I read it and reread it, and wept and laughed and trembled with a horror which at times assails me yet. This is the thing that troubles me, for I cannot forget Carcosa, where black stars hang in the heavens, where the shadows of men's thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the Lake of Hali, and my mind will bear forever the memory of the Pallid Mask. I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with this beautiful, stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth -- a world which now trembles before the King in Yellow. When the French government seized the translated copies which had just arrived in Paris, London, of course, became eager to read it. It is well known how the book spread like an infectious disease, from city to city, from continent to continent, barred out here, confiscated there, denounced by press and pulpit, censured even by the most advanced of literary anarchists. No definite principles had been violated in those wicked pages, no doctrine promulgated, no convictions outraged. It could not be judged by any known standard, yet, although it was acknowledged that the supreme note of art had been struck in "The King in Yellow," all felt that human nature could not bear the strain nor thrive on words in which the essence of purest poison lurked. The very banality and innocence of the first act only allowed the blow to fall afterwards with more awful effect.


As Chambers incorporated motifs from the work of Bierce, Lovecraft and his imitators incorporated motifs from Chambers' works. The very notion of a destructive, madness-inducing book is a common plot element in the tales of the "Cthulhu mythos". While the idea that a book could endanger one's soul is an ancient one, such terrifying tomes as The Necronomicon or The Book of Eibon owe a greater debt to Chambers' King in Yellow than to the Papal Index.