Off on Labor Day?

In a stunning development, I actually have off on Labor Day. My 'weekend' is typically Monday and Tuesday, so I usually have off on Mondays, and we have adequate staffing so there's no 'all hands on deck' situation. The organization pays time-and-a-half on holidays at any rate, so my part-time subordinates are actually happy to work. One of the guys told me about a bunch of car repair and maintenance bills he has coming up, so he's eager for all the hours he can get. I'm content with loafing around all day in order to celebrate my status as a worker. I had a conversation with a bunch of co-workers today about working on Labor Day, and the general consensus is that the job is rewarding... one important factor is working for a not-for-profit is 'buy in'. None of us is making a ton of money, but we value our work and we cherish our workplaces. That being said, I don't mind having the day off.

In the past I've linked to the Dead Milkmen's song Stuart, which I consider a perfect distillation of right-wing conspiracy theorist fringe paranoia. In their snottier early incarnation, the Milkmen excoriated the Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon with their song Labor Day:





As an added bonus, in the hope that taco trucks will indeed materialize on every corner, here's a doubleshot of Dead Milkmen, Taco Land segueing into Big Lizard in My Backyard:





Now, if only I had a taco truck on the corner, I know what I'd be having for lunch on this lazy Labor Day. Hope everyone is having a good time.

Funny, I've Never Posted This At My Blog

I have a confession to make. Tonight, I posted links to the song Stuart by The Dead Milkmen on two other blogs. I have linked to the song on my own blog, but I have never posted the video of the song. Tonight, I rectify this grave, grave error.

Stuart, originally released on 1988's Beelzebubba album, is a perfect evocation of the paranoid streak in American culture in under two-and-a-half minutes. Whenever I read of FEMA death camps, black helicopters, chemtrails, and the like, I always think of Stuart. The "narrator" of Stuart is the sort of guy who'd subscribe to Ron Paul newsletters, the kind of guy who'd consider voting for Rick Santorum, a typical John Birch Society, Lyndon LaRouche, Ron Paul, Alex Jones whack-a-doodle. Stuart, almost a quarter-century after its release, is one of the great political satires (even if not originally conceived as such) of our modern era, when the lunatics have taken over the asylum. Plus, the song starts out with one of the all-time greatest opening lines in the history of pop music everything:

You know what, Stuart, I LIKE YOU. You're not like the other people, here, in the trailer park.

The 'Milkmen have recently reformed, so here's a clip of them performing Stuart in Brooklyn:





If you find the lyrics hard to understand, there's always the brilliant album version... so many hilarious lines, all crammed into 2:21.

Mars Needs Women Sanity

Wow, there are a couple of 'cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs' stories regarding the Red Planet lately- the first is that the main purveyor of lunatic fringe right wing buffoonery has featured a guest who claims that there is a pedophile ring on Mars, claims the resulted in a response from NASA to the contrary. For the record, the purveyors of this lunacy received White House press credentials from Vulgarmort. I know I've posted the Dead Milkmen song Stuart on numerous occasions, but this 1988 release perfectly encapsulates the lunatic-right worldview:





It's appalling to see how 'normalized' this sort of idiocy has become... far from a small operation based from a P.O. Box in Pueblo, Colorado, this shit is now big business.

The other whacko story is the President stating that he wants to land a human on Mars within his first term, probably using a coal-powered spacecraft. This stated goal doesn't mesh with Trump's general attitude toward science and education.

If Trump does decide to land humans on Mars, I suggest that he starts by sending a corps of right-wing conspiracy theorists to investigate the Martian pedophile ring- these people did such a bang-up job at Comet Ping Pong.

The post-title riffs off of this piece of glorious Sci-Fi cheese, which starred the dear, departed Yvonne Craig:





The movie inspired a gloriously cheesy 1980s song of the same title by Peter Wolf:





The movie also inspired the Hoodoo Gurus' song Mars Needs Guitars, a personal Bastard favorite:





Anyway, I wouldn't mind seeing Trump sending an 'Ark B' to Mars... it's not like anybody needs a telephone sanitizer anymore.

Plum Dumb

One of the big local stories this week concerns Donald Trump's desire to buy Plum Island, off the eastern end of Long Island. There is speculation that Mr Trump wishes to build a high end golf course on the island, but I have my doubts about that.

Plum Island once housed the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, an institution with the stated goal of studying animal pathogens, especially pathogens which affect livestock. The center looms large in conspiracy theory circles, mainly claims that the island was a center for biological weapons programs. The Animal Disease Center has been moved to Kansas, in the heart of farm country. What could possibly go wrong? Some wags opined that the "Montauk Monster" was an escapee from the Plum Island research center.

I think you can see where I'm going with this now... Trump doesn't want to build a golf course on Plum Island, he wants to discover the unholy origin of that thing on his head.

Post title yanked from an old Dead Milkmen song. Post cross-posted at Rumproast

Gonna Have to Re-Post This

It's been almost five years since I put up a post featuring the Dead Milkmen's song Stuart. At the time of the song's release, I thought it was a funny novelty song, a broad farce about a paranoid denizen of rurality, but in this age of fake news that the mainstream media is struggling to cover (where the fuck were they when they could have made a difference?), I have come to see it as one of the greatest political satires ever written, an amazing achievement considering that it is satirizing an age almost three decades in the future. Stuart remains as funny as ever, but there is now a scintilla of horror to the song's humor:





Who'd a thunk that the bullshit peddlers from Pueblo, Colorado would have such a vast audience? Once upon a time, one had to search hard to find the fringe, now it's become 'normalized' (another media buzzword).

Similarly, the comedy Idiocracy has now taken on the status of a horror film, perhaps a documentary:





Fuck, it's that bad... hell, even the days of We Have an Even Bigger Problem Now don't seem so bad.

I've Come to the Realization that this Album Is now Political

Earlier this year, I posted about the dangerous 'bleach cure' con. This is yet another 'miracle cure that THEY don't want you to know about' scam, but parents forcing their children to drink bleach is horrific. The strange thing about this particular scam is that there's a political component to it nowadays, as yet another right-wing nutjob jumps on the bleachandwagon. I guess that these people know that their audience is lacking in critical thinking skills and therefore is particularly vulnerable to affinity scams.

This brings me to a rather unusual subject, that of the 1988 Dead Milkmen album Beelzebubba. I had always considered this album a snarky comedy album by an irreverent, cartoonish punk band... then all of a sudden, conspiracy theories filtered into the popular imagination like so many psychedelic banana peels. The song Stuart, a perfect distillation of the intersection of right-wing conspiracy lunacy and anti-LGBTQ bigotry, took on a new meaning for me... this was perhaps the most cogent political anthem of the current zeitgeist.

Now, even formerly silly songs from the album take on a political edge in these bizarre times:





Thirty-one years after the release of the album, it is even more relevant than it was when it was released. Who could have guessed that a bunch of silly Philly punks would turn out to be so prescient? I thought the album was hilarious when it was released, but I'm not sure sure that it's all that funny anymore...

Q-Waitus Interruptus

I confess that I am afflicted with a morbid fascination with conspiracy theories, the more outré the better. So far, I have only written three posts about this Pizzagate-on-steroids farrago of Bircherite paranoia, satanic panic, blood libel, and sexual angst. The conspiracy theory, also known as The Storm, posits that Global Elites, mainly Democrats, Hollywood celebrities, and rootless cosmopolitans are running child trafficking rings for the purposes of pedophilia, cannibalism, and the production of adrenochrome, which is purported to produce super-highs.

Rather than consume coverage of HW's state funeral yesterday, I figured that I'd dive into the fever swamps of right-wing whackaloonery to see how the fringe covered the proceedings... Some members of the QAnon crowd, exemplified by genuinely mentally ill Liz Crokin, believe that this sickly 94 year-old man was executed by a military tribunal in order to cause the elite to assemble in one place for mass arrests/executions... which never materialized. The Q crowd was so hopeful that their December Death Day, D5, would come- they were excited that a charter bus with paper signs reading '5' and 'D' would whisk the evildoers off to a swift execution. Today, after the letdown of Q-waitus interruptus, they are backpedaling, claiming that the 'good guys' raided the homes of funeral attendees, some of them have decided, in true Camping fashion, that they forgot to carry the potato when they divided, so they muffed the date. I expect that the true believers will double down, in a true When Prophecy Fails manner... they really, really want their Pain. I would feel sorry for them if they weren't so damn bloodthirsty- I mean, these people are idiots who believe that Trump's chronic misspellings are coded messages.

Since this topic has the potential to be depressing to people who aren't as sanguine about this sort of lunacy, I figure I should end it with one of my all-time favorite songs, Stuart, by the Dead Milkmen:





It's the perfect distillation of right-wing lunacy- it captures the evangelism, condescension, paranoia, and Dunning-Kruger style self-assurance of the conspiracy theorist. Released in 1988, the song is even more topical these days than it was when it was written.