Vaudeville (?)

One of my favorite old time performances was Spike Jones and the City Slickers. Of course, most of the jokes require the ability to play music to understand.

The absurd ones require no special training whatsoever.

Vaudeville

And now, for what is possibly the only part of AmCon that I will actually enjoy. Vaudeville. Marx Brothers. The Three Stooges. Great performances of great comedy and acting.

And here's historical footage.

 This is going to be fun.

On Statue of Liberty

Happy 125th Birthday Statue of Liberty.

Occupy Boston - An Eyewitness Account - Trailer

NOTHING HAPPENED

Seriously, Anonymous won the hype battle. That is all. There was nothing but hype and pepper spray going on in Boston. Oh, and also several thousand people protesting against unequal distribution of wealth, as well as a wider protest movement going on throughout the world.

Full story after I present this afternoon in AmCon.

But first: some pictures:

"Main Street"

Classic

My Sign Last Year at a Tea Party Rally

"This Speedo is Occupied"

Occupy Wall Street

As LDL pointed out in an earlier post, Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Boston are becoming important enough to mention in class. I am anticipating an in class discussion on this, and if there isn't, I will make one happen on Wednesday. I will ascertain this by occupying Boston over Fall Break, and then coming back with an eyewitness report on the proceedings.
Here is a repost from BoingBoing:

Most revolts are snuffed out well before their efforts impact the political scene – not because their ideas and issues aren’t relevant, but because the major institutional players within the system-that-is rapidly attempt to snag the power and energy for their own. In the eyes of the Democratic Party or the national environmental groups, this revolt is merely seen as an opportunity to assimilate newly emerging troops back into those groups’ own flaccid and ineffective organizing. After all, if those institutional groups have actually been effective all of these years, why the need for a revolt at all?

BoingBoing is a fantastic blog, and is my chief source of news as of right now. The reason why I sometimes giggled in class during Ragtime, whenever someone mentioned the author as being "Doctorow", was that the main contributor on BoingBoing is Cory Doctorow. If you want news on Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Boston, don't go to CNN. Don't go to NPR. Go to BoingBoing. They'll sort out the stuff from CNN and NPR for you and provide psycho-socio-economic analysis....as well as posting about the random stuff they find elsewhere. I have to warn you, though, that this is not for those who are easily offended by geeks and nerds.

On Camp - Part 4 - Refuge in Audacity (also Trope of the Week)

I have a story to tell.

On Camp - Introduction

Camp, I believe, is taking refuge in audacity. As I like to put it, there are nine states of mind a person can have, and camp is one of them. The mindsets are exactly like character alignments in tabletop RPGs. There are the morals: good, neutral, and evil. Then there are the ethics: lawful, neutral, and chaotic. Lawful good is a paladin, while chaotic evil are the old kind of villains we so rarely see these days.
Personality-wise, I propose the following sets. Sanity, neutrality, madness. Aware, doubting, unaware. Most people are doubting sanity. Camp people such as Lady Gaga, Oscar Wilde, and myself are Full Aware Madness. We are insane, we are aware of it, and we do not try to hide it. That is what gives rise to camp.
Alternatively, there are mindsets. The most stable mindset is being insane and knowing it, because you'll completely lose it if you are doubting your own sanity.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:The Cage

Coming Attractions - Yet Again

Once again, I have a backlog of posts in various stages of being written. I'm tempted to make this into a weekly rather than a triweekly blog.

•A longish series of my views on the idea of Camp (the style, not the place). Not being posted in order.
•A bit on Don't ask don't tell. CANCELED
•the beginning of a new series, Trope of the Week.

Each week, I will pull out an article from TVTropes.org, each of which will be related to the AmCon topic of the time. This will be every Saturday, timing will be decided. This week will be Refuge in Audacity.

R.I.P. Steve Jobs

 

Here’s to the crazy ones. The rebels. The troublemakers. The ones who see things differently. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

First thing I thought of when I heard Steve Jobs had died was the quote from Blade Runner, "The candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long."

His life was far too brief, but he did what most people can only dream about, which was to make it count in such a way as to leave the world a lot tidier than he left it.

Steve, you will be greatly missed. Goodnight, and goodbye.

For Gays Seeking Asylum in U.S., a New Hurdle - NYTimes.com

For Gays Seeking Asylum in U.S., a New Hurdle - NYTimes.com

And I quote: "After years of trying to conceal his sexual orientation back home in Brazil (where Fidela never made an appearance), Mr. Castro had been advised by his immigration lawyer that flaunting it was now his best weapon against deportation."

Ah, the New York Times. You can take a newspaper out of New York, but you cannot take New York out of a newspaper.

For those who aren't from the upper right-hand corner of the United States (namely, most of the people likely to read this), it is considered a common survival tactic to take "Refuge in Audacity".

We do not fly under the radar. We crash through the front doors and out the back doors of the radar installation in an armored car with sunglasses-wearing flaming skull decals on every flat surface and a Hieronymus Bosch reproduction on the door, hood-mounted machine guns blazing, Motörhead blasting on the jury-rigged PA system, the tires leaving tracks painting sex and violence on the floor and walls and one arm hanging out of the window making a rude hand gesture.