• Swan Fungus reader Mark points out that, “Regarding Twin Peaks music [see yesterday's post]… There’s a band called Whitelodge. They’re not entirely based on Twin Peaks but are fucking amazing nonetheless. Most of their songs (in my opinion) deal with the same things Agent Cooper struggled with throughout the show: omnipresent evil, the beauty of simplicity, innocence juxtaposed against horror and those two principles contained in a very close proximity, etc. etc… One of those bands that makes me sad when I know that probably fewer than 100 people know/remember they exist. Check them out if you haven’t already, they’re on [Beta-Lactam Ring] and should still be around in some manner.
• My dear friend Jack sends this news report from the faraway land of New Jersey. Police in Clifton have arrested two young men who were dressed as ninjas and armed with martial arts weapons. Apparently the dynamic duo were trying to dole out some vigilantly justice by “sending a warning to drug users.” Upon reading this news story, five-hundred-thousand college student remembered the Ninja application tied to their Facebook profiles, and began mass-messaging their friends to join them in…whatever it is a Facebook ninja does. That part isn’t true, it’s just me expressing my disgust for people who flood my Facebook account with requests to become a pirate or a ninja or vampire. God, that shit is annoying. Which reminds me, have you all joined the Swan Fungus Readers Facebook Group? If you haven’t, you should. I haven’t, because that would be narcissistic, and I think we all know how people who devote three years of blogging to all things “me” are the last people on Earth who desire to be called narcissistic. [story]
• Questions about America’s future seem to be on all our minds these days. What will our nation do, going forward, about our energy crisis? How will we handle the weakening dollar, and lift ourselves out of this “economic downturn”? Will we ever again be respected by the rest of the world? None of these questions mater to TIME magazine. They just want to know, “WILL THE US DEVELOP A DEATH RAY?” And, quite frankly, I hope to God the answer to that question is “Yes”. Could you imagine if we had a death ray? Do you think the defense contractors responsible for such an awesome invention would develop them on a micro-level as well as a macro-level? Imagine if our country had an insane fucking death ray that we could point at anything on the globe and totally decimate it, but then all of us little people could go to a store and buy our own mini death rays? You know, they’d be just like a guns, I guess, only they’d be fucking death rays! Do you think if guns were actually called death rays TIME magazine would even be entertaining this question? DEATH RAYS. Which reminds me, when is the next Laser Sword Of Death show in LA? I haven’t seen them since the Wolves In The Throne Room show. [story]
• Five mysterious skulls. Are they human? Who knows! I, for one, can’t fathom why there is a photograph of old Asian man included beneath the skull that looks like the face of the giant bunny in Donnie Darko. Are they trying to say that his skull face is a genetic throwback to the one with the giant above-eyebrow projections? If so…how? [story]
• Arava, the 10-year-old Israeli tortoise, has been given the gift of new legs after her hind legs became paralyzed. Actually, they didn’t give her new legs, they just strapped a skateboard to her. [story]
• A cool top ten list (though certainly not as cool as one of my lists) ranks the ten best Science Fiction planets. Solaris tops the list, with Dune coming in a close second. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of any of these planets. I still haven’t seen Dune, or the original Alien. How come none of the Futurama planets made the list? I think Eternium would make a great addition to that list. It’s located ten miles west of the exact center of the universe! How cool is that? And the Nibblonians are so cute! No, wait. The Neutral Planet! Where everything is grey and the official motto is “Live free or don’t”. Yeah, that’s definitely one of the ten best Sci-Fi planets ever created. [story]
• Some writer lady who operates a website that reports news “of the Edge” claims that “the visitors” (you know the ones) are either the dead, from a parallel universe, or time travelers. Maybe all three! I don’t believe in “visitors”, but I did write a short story once about how they were time travelers from the future who would pay to take futuristic bus tours of modern day Earth (the bus would be what people perceive to be a UFO). It’d be like a Gray Line tour of New York or a Starline tour of Los Angeles, only instead of driving by important monuments or significant cultural artifacts you’d be flying above cities viewing things from afar. I think, in my story, there were references to actual “alien” contact or sightings being contact with time traveling humans wearing alien costumes as a post-ironic reference to how everyone these days is paranoid about aliens. The real reason for the costume was because if people wanted to pay to travel through time and visit themselves, they’d have to be in costume so as not to destroy the universe by fucking up the space-time continuum, as described in Back To The Future. The choice for said costumes to be alien costumes and not animal costumes or anything else was simply as an added bonus that could amuse the time travelers. Whatever, I was like fifteen at the time. [story]
• Lastly, but most importantly, my father’s secretary Melinda wrote me an e-mail asking that I kindly link my readers to a website she has created to help save her house. Apparently if she does not raise enough money to satiate the thirst of a money-hungry relative, her home (built by her husband’s grandfather) will be put up for auction and sold to a developer that will tear the house down. Please read her story, and if you feel like helping or know someone who could help, let them know about Melinda’s situation. She’s always been really nice to me and a great asset to my father’s business, which would probably be buried under stacks of unsorted paperwork if it were not for her. Here is the link to her website.
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