The Invisible Library

Fidel Castro has resigned as Supreme Grand Poobah or whatever of Cuba. Yippee. His hip younger brother, Raul Castro Ruz, 77, will take over and maybe Fidel will start blogging or something.

Not to belittle the plight of the Cuban people under that horrible dictator Fidel, but, really the man wasn’t a complete monster. Swap out a Castro here and there, so long as the US maintains its embargo, not much is going to change there. Crippling poverty and a complete and total lack of freedom. Or The US under President McCain.

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As you may have heard, we’re having a bit of a drought here in Georgia. It’s not so bad in Savannah as it is in Atlanta. We just can’t water our lawns, while Atlantaians are about 90 days away from running out of water altogether. And what is Governor Sonny Purdue’s solution? Why, to ask people to pray for rain, of course.

What the Fuck, Sonny. Seriously. Pray for rain? That’s your bright idea? Not, hay guys maybe we should conserve water? Or hay, could someone loan me a few truck fulls of water? Or, anything sensible? No, let’s just hope it all works out.

Oh, and Phil Plait makes a funny at our expense.

I’ve got to get the fuck out of this state.

By now you’ve all heard the news that Dumbledore was Gay. Rebecca Traister* talks about how this is not necessarily a good thing:

I am a devoted reader and admirer of J.K . Rowling, and it honestly pains me a bit to say this, but from a literary perspective, she’s out of control here. Her abundant generosity with information is surely a response to a vast, insatiable fan base that does not have a high tolerance for never-ending suspense, ambiguity or nuance. As she told the “Today” show’s Meredith Vieira back in July, “I’m dealing with a level of obsession in some of my fans that will not rest until they know the middle names of Harry’s great-great-grandparents.” Rowling naturally wants to provide answers for these heartbroken obsessives who perhaps are too young to know the satisfying pleasures of perpetual yearning and feel that they must must must know how much money Harry makes and whether Luna has kids.

It would also be understandable if, after more than a decade of telling stories about this world and these characters, Rowling is unable to stop. She has been a great and comprehensive builder of a fictional universe, and she’s famous for keeping reams of folders containing the back stories and astrological signs of every major and minor character ever to appear in her pages. One of the things that made the Potter books so good was the sense that Rowling had utter mastery over every corner of her realm. Who could blame her for wanting to keep the kids happy by doling out bits of it? It’s not as though Rowling would be setting a precedent: J.R.R. Tolkien spent much of his post-Middle-earth life tinkering with the details of the world he created, and delighting and gratifying his adherents by providing them with additional information about it.

But when too much of the back story (and, more disconcertingly, the future story) gets revealed –- especially in an age in which an author is not simply sending letters to readers as Tolkien did, but making utterances that will be disseminated and analyzed by a global network of Web sites — it seems to have not so much a gratifying effect as a deadening one.

On one level, I completely disagree. As Neil Gaiman points out, sometimes, there are these great details and scenes that you want to put in your stories but they just get in the way and so get cut. You want to share them and that’s a good thing. I like the idea of having a novel that, like DVDs, has extras, all those little bits and pieces you wanted to add but couldn’t for the sake of story telling. A blog would be handy for just such a thing.

But. Wizards, like Genni, cannot be put back in the bottle, or the closet. And while the politically active side of my brain says, “Wahoo! Good for Dumbledore! Way to go!” there’s a part of me that sees what Rebecca Traister is getting at. As fun and geeky cool as knowing that Harry and the gang all turn out fine, there’s something to be said about a little wiggle room that feeds the imagination. Spelling out all the secrets removes that wiggle room. Your vast, expansive universe is now a tailored suit that only fits one way and starts popping seems if you breath to hard or gain more than a few pounds.

So, in this instance we have exciting confirmation of a detail that was there in subtext all along, if you know where to look for it. But let’s not go too far and spell out everything. Hopefully, Rowling will leave something for the fan’s to drool over and imagine for themselves. Otherwise, Harry Potter will suffer the same leaden fate as Star Wars and become so bogged down with unnecessary details that the story and characters suffer form too much exposure and it all becomes about the niggling factoids, Midi-chlorians and all.

Some dipshit is suing PZ Myers for a bad review of his silly book.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden at Making Light beat me to the punch (and the post title I was gong to use) but has all the pertinent links and info, as usual.

If anyone can explain how a bad but fairly polite review of your book can be considered assault, let me know.

It’s hard being a satirist these days. No matter what great little idea you come up with to poke fun at the powerful and well connected, it pales in comparison to the tinfol hat, bat shit snorting insanity that actually is the Right Wing Media. Take Bill O’Reilly’s latest fantasy:

A “national underground network” of pink pistol-packing lesbians is terrorizing America. “All across the country,” they are raping young girls, attacking heterosexual males at random, and forcibly indoctrinating children as young as 10 into the homosexual lifestyle, according to a shocking June 21 segment on the popular Fox News Channel program, “The O’Reilly Factor.”

Titled “Violent Lesbian Gangs a Growing Problem,” the segment began with host Bill O’Reilly briefly referencing for his roughly 3 million viewers the case of Wayne Buckle, a DVD bootlegger who was attacked by seven lesbians in New York City last August. Deploying swift, broad strokes, O’Reilly painted a graphic picture of lesbian gangs running amok. “In Tennessee, authorities say a lesbian gang called GTO, Gays Taking Over, are involved in raping young girls,” he reported. “And in Philadelphia, a lesbian gang called DTO, Dykes Taking Over, are allegedly terrorizing people as well.”

In Bill O’Reilly land, lesbian gangs wielding pink pistols are terrorizing heteros and children, driving them into a life of depredation, sodomy and crime. I think it’s the pink pistols that really puts it over the top. If I wrote a story in which I described this sort of thing, no one would believe it. Honestly, I couldn’t have come up with something so bizarre and perverse if I tried. I haven’t heard anything so fucking weird since the last time I read Naked Lunch. Thing is, William S. Burrows was out of his mind on heroin when he wrote about talking assholes and jism drinking alien sodomites and even then he meant them to be satirical fantasies. But Bill O’Reilly was stone cold sober, people. Think about that. Even more far fetched, Papa Bear wants you to consider this, not just as a fantastical bit of absurdest commentary, or as some dark and perverted fantasy, but as an actual, factual and verifiable event in the material world. David Neiwert, via the link above, has all the pertinent details on how this is complete fascist bullshit, in case you’re concerned.

We need stronger satire people, because reality is catching up.

I wasn’t going to post about Scooter and his get out of jail free card but well, damn it, I’m pissed off. No, seriously. I know you can’t tell by my lack of punctuation but there are just not enough capitol letters available on my current keyboard to emphasize how angry I am that this traitorous fucker gets to walk. Wordpress and the Internet does not support thousand point fonts. I suppose I could hop in my crop duster and write “GO TO HELL, SCOOTER” across the sky but it would still only express a fraction of the disgust and contempt I have for Libby, The President* and our governmental system as a whole. Perhaps a laser capable of sawing ten mile wide letters in the moon. Maybe that would express it. Or a gravity pump capable of moving stars, so I can spell out my disgust across the cosmos, so that future generations and civilizations eons hence will know how feverishly displeased I am that this slimy little pig fucker can put on the Benedict Arnold Hat and walk away like it was just some rude e-mail he accidentally sent to everyone in the office instead of just his equally degenerate buddy down the hall.

Many other people have added their piss to the wind but John Rogers wins the Internets for nailing the reason this despicable behavior was no real surprise:

Our representatives — and to a great degree we as a culture — are completely buffaloed by shamelessness. You reveal a man’s corrupt, or lying, or incompetent, and what does he do? He resigns. He attempts to escape attention, often to aid in his escape of legal pursuit. Public shame has up to now been the silver bullet of American political life. But people who are willing to just do the wrong thing and wait you out, to be publicly guilty … dammmnnnn.

We are faced with utterly shameless men. Cheney and the rest are looking our representatives right in the eye and saying “You don’t have the balls to take down a government. You don’t have the sheer testicular fortitude to call us lying sonuvabitches when we lie, to stop us from kicking the rule of law and the Constitution in the ass. You just don’t. What’s beyond that abyss — what that would do to our government and our identity as a nation — terrifies you too much. So get the fuck out of our way.”

And to a great degree, the White House is right. You peel this back, and you reveal that the greatest country in the world has been run, for the last six and a half years, by men who do not give a shit about the Constitution, or fair play, or honesty. No, not just run by corrupt men, or bribe-takers, or adulterers or whatever, we could handle that –no we’d be admitting It Went Wrong.

And that’s the country we now live in. It’s not that the Cheney gang was so stupid that they never thought they’d get caught. It’s just that they didn’t care. They realized they could exploit the system and come out on top because that system is based on human decency and the innate Homo Sapien pack contract that if you fuck up, you slink away for a bit until you’re forgiven, then work your way back up the ladder. But you can short circuit that, so long as you smother that part of your heart that feels shame and self respect. Once you’ve killed the fear, you can do anything, so long as you don’t blink.

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*And by President I mean Cheney. I’m still not entirely sure George W. understands half the shit that comes out of his mouth. All he knows is that he gets fifteen minutes on the X-Box every time he makes it through a whole speech without mispronouncing more than three words in a row. I’ve heard a lot of people lately wonder out loud, “how does that poor bastard live with himself knowing what he has done?” You’re assuming A) he knows what he’s done and B) that he cares. Sociopaths have no empathy. Other people’s feelings are as alien to him as they are to any Doctor Who villain. A Dalek cannot feel sorry, because feeling is something only tangentially related to his experience. He was the one who chose to shed his skin and live inside a can and make “EXTERMINATE!” a way of life, not just a catchy thing to say on a Saturday night. If you can’t see the beauty of that lifestyle, well, you’re just some emotional alien with two bleeding hearts and a sense of justice and self control.

That’s Iraq, since we Invaded.

I’d thought I’d mention that, just for perspective. Next time some Conservative dipshit whose birthing cats over Virginia Tech can’t seem to shed one crocodile tear for the Iraqi dead, you can bring this up. Try not to go deaf in the silence that results as they wrack their pea brains for an excuse (extra points if it involves some tortured argument against gun control).

Aguste at Pandagon has more disheartening stats for you.

Looks like Katie Holmes has been dropped from the Dark Knight, the sequel to Batman Begins. Which isn’t surprising as her performance (or lack thereof) was widely considered the week point in what was othewrwise a solid film.

However, discussing it with Elvira, we couldn’t help but wonder if maybe her new Overlord and all around crazy fuck, Tom Cruise might have had something to do with it. After all, Batman, especially the Christopher Nolan iteration, is one big primer in Abnormal Psychology and given Tom Cruise (and Scientology in general) having a rabid hatred for all things psychological (and rational) it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if he didn’t want his blushing zombie-bride even tacitly endorsing psychotherapy. Or getting too near that Heath Ledger. She might be reminded of what she’s missing out here in the real world.

Or people in Boston, which may just be the same thing. Since some people in your town can’t tell the difference between a bomb and a cartoon character, here’s a little guide to help you through the chaos:

Not a Bomb

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Bomb!

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Bomb! Wait! Fooled ya. He just looks like a bomb. Not an explosive device!

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Bomb!

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NOT A BOMB!

In real life, bombs do not look like bombs. They look like plain packages or unobtrusive things. Trash. Boxes. Sometimes shoes (but only once and never since). Or nothing at all because they are hidden inside other things that are innocuous, like cars or plastic bags or chijuajuas. They do not tick. They do not blink.

Bombs are not used as part of a multi-million dollar marketing plan for a movie, even one directed by Michael Bay. They are dropped on people, usually civilians, form a great height, or strapped to the chest of fourteen year olds who still believe in fairy tales. They are stuffed inside soda cans and thrown through windows or mailed to celebrities by a recluse living in a shack in Montana.

Bombs do not ever look like cartoon characters that give you the finger, which you deserve for being so fucking daft that you shut down a whole frickin’ city because the government has you so shit scared that some religious fanatic living in a cave in some lawless zone in Pakistan, using his hand as toilet paper, is going to somehow deliver a state of the art improvised explosive device to the underside of a bridge in the greater Boston metropolitan area.

And even if they could, it wouldn’t light up!

But hay, at least it distracted us all from that war with Iran that Bush is starting.