perfidy

The Ministry would like to extend felicitations to Murdoc, of Murdoc Online, which blog just celebrated its third blogoversary. We would also like to note that for all his shameless backpatting, the Ministry is still five days older, and wiser. If not nearly as popular.

Murdoc of Murdoc Online, skirting the edges of responsible journalism, has been recruited/drafted/shanghaid/volunteered for the job of MC for Winds of Change's new feature the "Military Transformation Uplink." In concert with Joe Katzman of the aforementioned WoC, professional publications Defense Industry Daily, Military.com's DefenseTech, and eDefense Online, Murdoc will be hitting you monthly with a barrage of high tech military linkage. (All of these sites are great resources for military type stuff, even the stuff that Murdoc doesn't link.)

The first edition is up now at WoC. If, like me, you have a hankering for things that go boom in a particularly high tech manner, go check it out. Murdoc outdid himself on this one.

I've been looking for this forever. Finally! Airline seat pitches, around the world. They oughta be showing this when you're buying your ticket on Expedia, or whatever.

Tired of boring crucifixi? Potbellied Buddhas with goofy expressions leave you cold? Magen Davids and Green Crescents fail to inspire?

Well, you can now have your own physical manifestation of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. With a few inexpensive items from the craft store, and whatever you remember from third grade elmers glue experiments, you can create a facsimile of FSM and his noodly appendages.

[wik] Hat Tip: Owlish, by way of Rocket Jones. Owlish also links to a crocheted FSM hat, a silver FSM brooch, and a plush FSM toy you can buy on eBay.

We're still a few painful years away from the desperately overdue, gasping death whimpers of what will be considered the worst Presidency of modern history. The sheer breadth and depth of the incompetence just takes your breath away, you know? It's such a sad tale of empty bullshit promises, excuse-making, and desperate reliance on short-term memories.

• The people who created and fucked up the war in Iraq are the same people that created current tax policy
• The Iraq crowd told us energy privatization would result in a healthy market. As a recent WPost article makes clear, they couldn't have been more wrong -- every objective of these efforts has been a colossal failure. Well, except for the real objective -- to make money for their buddies in the Energy industry. A-1 success there!
• The Iraq crowd tells us that deficits don't matter. They tell us that debt doesn't matter. They certainly act like neither of these things exist.
• The Iraq crowd tells us global warming doesn't exist. Now they're telling us it doesn't matter.
• The Iraq crowd rammed the "prescription drug benefit" for seniors through Congress. Who wins? Drug companies, of course! Who loses? Everyone else. The kicker is the GOP-inserted clause preventing negotiation on prices. Exactly how the fuck did that get in there?
• The Iraq crowd "handled" Katrina with the same efficiency, effectiveness, and compassion that they give to other significant issues.
• In six short years, the Iraq crowd has managed to convince the majority of the people on the planet to hate America. Much more worrying is the fact that they've made excellent inroads on their long term project of convincing the rest of the planet to hate Americans. If you're like Bush and never bothered to leave the country prior to becoming its President, that doesn't even register as a problem. Especially when you're armed with "quitters are traitors" bumper stickers.
• They're not against minorities; they're for whites. See the difference?
• They're not against gays; they're for families. See the difference?
• They're not against foreigners; they're for America. See the difference?
• They're not against other religions; they're for Christianity. See the difference?
• But mostly, and above all else, they're for themselves. They're laughing at, and mocking, the rest of America for not doing the same. It's business as usual, baby.

So why Evil Twin Theory? Bush's Chief of Domestic Policy, Claude Allen, was arrested last week for a bizarre scheme involving fraudulent returns of goods to department stores. It turns out that Claude Allen has a twin with a questionable past. Could Allen's twin have been the one doing the crimes? Beats me. But it also turns out that the popular drug Ambien may have certain equally bizarre side effects, including sleepwalking and sleep-shoplifting, or something like that. So maybe all those long, exhausting nights of doing exactly what Rove and Cheney told him drove Allen to take an Ambien now and again, and he went on a sleep-fraud spree. Twenty-five times.

Is Bush on Ambien? Does he have an evil twin? Because I can't for the life of me figure out why, short of sheer stupidity and/or complete lack of interest, an honest reason for the continuous stream of fuckups the most pathetic administration in modern times has generated.

Way back when I asked a simple question: Find one moderately complex policy initiative of the Bush Administration that was proposed (with its predicted effects), that resulted in a success and the achievement of the desired goals. Just one, please.

I'll give you moral relativity: Evil equals the mass of your bullshit times the square of the pain you cause.

I've been mulling over a concept I'm labelling birthright, and I'll have more to say on it over the next week. It's the root of the current political dysfunction.

Remember, kids: Birthright trumps ethics.

[wik]I am feeling harsh today, so let me apologize in advance for feathers ruffled. Please keep in mind that my conservative compadres here have about as much in common with Bush as they do with Castro. Your party has been hijacked by cultural terrorists and vandals.

When the bird flu apocalypse hits, all of you will be clamoring, whining and begging for a seat in the Ministry Catastratorium and Epidemiology Reserve. Suck up to us now, and get a good spot on the waiting list, because top bird flu maven Robert G. Webster is predicting a 50% chance of scattered flu epidemic in the coming year. When the grippe hits the fan, it will be too late.

If you can't get into the MCER, you can follow the advice in this helpful missive. Remember, when bird flu goes all apeshit on the human populace, it will be a lot like the black plague, except faster. If you hope to be the Boccaccio for the new plague century, remember that you'll have weeks, not decades, to write your decameron. Stock up on your skeleton and death themed decorations now and beat the rush.

Allan Janus: Puzzle or Enigma?

The Ministry realizes that most of its readership consists largely of rude and unsophisticated bumpkins, militaristic weapons fetishists, and bohemian music lovers with a sadly circumscribed mental horizon. As part of our ongoing attempt to provide at least a facsimile culture and erudition, we present part one of the Ministry Culture and Arts series.

Today, we focus on the works of Allan Janus, photographer, tintypist and occasional freelance dirigible pilot. A native of the Washington, DC, area, Janus cast a wavering eye on the life and landscape around him. He attempted to capture that vision on film. While the art establishment rightly ignored him, he soldiered on in near total anonymity. Over a period of decades, punctuated by the metronymic regularity of rejection notices, Janus acumulated an impressive (if only in bulk) body of work.

By far the most important collection of Janus' work is held by the Janus Foundation of Washington Grove, Maryland, which maintains the virtual Janus Museum. The Janus foundation is attempting to catalog Janus' work, but is hamstrung by a tragic lack of ready grant money or the generous support of wealthy and indiscriminate patrons.

Some examples from the Janus oeuvre:

Gaggle Advancing, Accokeek

Sheep may Safely Gaze, Accokeek, Maryland

Landscape with Devon Cow, Accokeek

Cheap Trick have always seemed pretty ludicrous to me. In part, I'm sure that the band meant it to be this way. The visual gag that pits the gawky geekiness of guitarist Rick Neilsen and the pudgy accountant chic of drummer Bun E. Carlos against the pouffy prettiness of bassist Tom Petersson and singer Robin Zander has been sustaining the band's stage presence for years. And anybody who shows up with five necks on his guitar isn't exactly going for gravitas.

But the rest of their ludicrousness is purely my problem. My first introduction to Cheap Trick came in 1988, when as an impressionable 14 year old, I thought that their big comeback hit, "The Flame" was the hottest thing in a long, hot summer. But even though I was young, impressionable, more than a little stupid and utterly oblivious to the finer things in life, the band's total committment to the drecky, schmaltzy silliness that was "The Flame" even then struck me as, well, pretty ludicrous. Around the same time they put out their cover of "Don't Be Cruel," a slight and little recording dressed up in studio trickery. One day it hit me; these guys are cheesy, they know it, and I love it.

But if Cheap Trick have run for thirty years now on an inexhaustible supply of silliness, loud guitars, and giant hooks, it is a testament to the durability of those eternal virtues. They are a band who have always seemed to be more than the sum of their parts. With the exception of one or two absolutely flawless songs that should be presented to future generations as emblems of perfection (I'm thinking of "Surrender" and "I Want You To Want Me"), I have always been hard pressed to define what makes Cheap Trick's music so compelling, so endlessly entertaining, when it is also so insubstantial.

Well, I think I've figured it out: it's a trick. Smoke and mirrors. The closer you look, the more it melts away and the more the baby unicorn behind the curtain looks like a badly malformed cow fetus floating in formaldehyde. But just as people never tire of Penn & Teller, David Copperfield, and the guys running the three card monte game outside the bus depot, I can't ever get tired of Cheap Trick. Take my money! This is fun!!

As part of their ongoing effort to monetize every niche and corner of their prodigious back catalog (it's called churn), Sony/Legacy have finally taken it upon themselves to reissue a number of Cheap Trick's mid-period albums in slick new remastered and expanded packages. The pick of these is probably 1979's Dream Police, which for my money is probably the last Cheap Trick album I'd urge anyone to run and by. Wait. That didn't come out right. It's not that Dream Police is a bad album, not that. What I mean is, it's the last solid album they made, and after 1980 the band's output became decidedly... let's be generous; uneven.

The reissue of Dream Police is a definite improvement over previous CD versions available in the USA. The new mastering job puts every instrument in its place, from the steely multioctave thronk of Tom Petersson's 12-string bass to the keening strings that overlay the title track. The bonus tracks too add value: live versions of "The House is Rockin' (With Domestic Problems)", "Way of the World", and "I Know What I Want" revisit the band's classic hard-hitting Live At Budokan sound, and a stringless version of "Dream Police" reveals just what a slight creation that song is.

And I think that's the key to Cheap Trick. When Bob Dylan writes a song, he builds you a 12-cylinder Duesenberg - a juggernaut clad in steel and burlwood that purrs and roars and can top 200 miles per hour. When Cheap Trick write a song, it has two pedals and a little propeller on top, and if you pump your legs fast enough and pray, you might get airborne and not die. Songs like that rely completely on the strength of the personalities behind them, and dedication to minimalism is Cheap Trick's greatest strength. No matter how you slice it, "Dream Police" is a ludicrous song, practically sub-Spinal Tap in its lyrical complexities and burdened with a hook that labors a little more than it should. But it all works in spite of that. Minimalism means not burdening songs down with more than they can carry, and there is an underappreciated art to that. I defy you to listen to "Dream Police" all the way through and not be gripped with an inescapable urge to keen out "Police, Police!" with Robin Zander during the rideout chorus. The band have enough charisma, enough goofy-pretty conviction, that the primary colors they work with end up seeming as subtle in their way as Van Gogh's "Starry Night."

The album itself is enough of a hooky ride to make it worth having, with the unsubtle thrills of the grinding "Gonna Raise Hell" (about raising hell), the barely restrained throbbing of "Need Your Love" (about needing love), and the Beatles-meet- Alice-Cooper rocker "I'll Be With You Tonight" (which is about how tonight he's gonna be with her, tonight). But the bonus tracks do act as welcome reminders of the greatness that was Cheap Trick on stage, and the track-by-track commentary notes by the band in the liner notes are more informative than most. While I will probably wait a lifetime to read liner notes as brutally honest as the ones Elvis Costello wrote for the Rykodisc reissue of Goodbye Cruel World, which began "Congratulations! You've just purchased our worst album," it is still fun to read Bun E. Carlos' thoughts on Cheap Trick's songwriting, or to discover that the band in general agree that the album would have been better if they'd have laid off touring so much during recording.

It is also a surprise to realize that the band started recording Dream Police before they hit it big. If you listen to the albums in order of release, it definitely seems like Cheap Trick hit their stride with 1977's In Color and 1978's Heaven Tonight. After that came their commercial breakthrough with the platinum smash of Live at Budokan and then their first dealing-with-success album, Dream Police, which seems a little forced; the ideas just a little thinner, the songs not quite as transcendent.

But that chronology is wrong. Cheap Trick recorded started recording Dream Police before they toured Japan. They surely weren't feeling the pressure of following up a smash hit at the time. Therefore if Dream Police is cheesier and kitschier than their four prior albums, it because the band were rushing to put out a followup; it's an intrinsic part of Cheap Trick's nature, part of what made them who they were. No, their first true post-success album was 1980's fairly wretched George Martin Production, All Shook Up. And although they would continue to produce albums of varying quality, becoming ever more professional as they went, it's pretty clear that sky-high success was too big a thing for the little band from Rockford, Illinois. (The runaway success of "The Flame" notwithstanding; all four members of the band have expressed regret, saying they hate the song. (Of course, it's easy to say that when you're sitting on a big pile of money.))

Not that Cheap Trick ever really seemed like they needed success. Their act was never arena-sized. If you see Cheap Trick today, you will get what you always got; a pudgy accountant playing drums like Gene Krupa, a skinny weirdo in tapered trousers with a five-necked guitar, a bass player who covers three octaves at once, and a big-voiced singer delivering giant choruses. Cheap Trick are a quintessential bar band, one who lucked into grabbing the brass ring and nearly let it undermine them. Dream Police is a slight but rewarding artifact of late-70's power pop. What more do you want?

(This post also appears at blogcritics.org)

Chef has departed the sunny highlands of South Park, Colorado for parts unknown. The reason? South Park has become infested with religious bigotry. While I might sympathize with Isaac - religious bigotry is not a pretty sight - one might have made with equal force the claim that South Park is banal and tasteless. Or homophobic, racist, speciesist, discrimatory towards those with mental, physical and spiritual handicaps, and in general highly offensive to celebrities.

In the words of Nathan Arizona (nee Huffheim), "that's its whole reason de etra." But is this the whole story? Did Chef realize only last Tuesday that the show is offensive to the faithful? SP co-founder Matt Stone has a different perspective:

He didn't come right out and say the word, but Stone is hinting strongly that Hayes is being a hypocrite when he says he's leaving "South Park" because of the way it treats religions. Stone says he feels Hayes' beef with the show stems only from the fact that the musician is a Scientologist and last year, the show began poking fun at his religion.

Stone said, "This is 100 percent having to do with his faith of Scientology. He has no problem -- and he's cashed plenty of checks -- with our show making fun of Christians."

Stone said they never heard a peep out of Hayes until they did a show on Scientology.

Well, if that is the case, I am not particularly surprised. Scientologists are a prickly lot. I imagine this is a natural result of maintaining faith in an artificial religion created by a hack science fiction writer on a bet.

I haven't watched the show in years, so Chef's departure will cause me no pain. Nevertheless, I am sure that the Ministry will join me in wishing Chef well as he ventures into the wide world beyond the borders of South Park. And maybe convert to a sensible religion, like The Church of Elvis, or the Mormons.

No one on Mars would have believed in the first years of the twenty-first century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than and yet as mortal as his own; that as Martians busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency they went to and fro over this red globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter...

At most they there might be other men upon the blue world, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this Mars with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the new millenium came the great disillusionment.

Google Maps has now embraced the Red Planet.