random reflections

ohhhh, i am so tired and wired and braindead...
and i was going to write about the demonstration, but i can't even put together anything coherent, just random thoughts.
first of all, just as i logged onto AOL, why does the headline say "big brother standing guard"? keep in mind, this is a REASSURING headline, as in the gov't is protecting the people from terrorism. is anyone that ignorant that they would not understand what the reference signifies? or have we entered the world where orwellian=explicitly good? or is this some subversive shit? i think some subversive shit has been going on on TV today. CNN was doing all this pro-demo coverage, and they actually showed people getting arrestesd and beaten and riot police driving their horses into the crowd. and comedy central was running a marathon of "That's My Bush" which i don't think they have shown since 9-11. and SNL got better than it had been in the last few bush-lapdog months.
it's amazing how many people showed up today. of course, as usual the media downplays it, saying it was 100,000 or so, but BULLSHIT. it was at least half a million people. really creative people, at least some of the time. here are my awards for best/worst demo props:

best: valentine's day poster showing Bush making out with Blair, reading "Make Love Not War"
runner-ups: a poster I saw on TV covering the L.A. demo, saying "I See Dead People," and two that I saw here in NYC saying "How Did Our Oil Get Under Their Soil" and an impromptu synchronic made poster saying "I Survived 63rd and 2nd" where some people took down a police barricade.

worst: T-shirts donned by hippies near Times Square saying "My Bush Makes Love Not War"

anyway, i am exhausted and my foot hurts. somebody stepped on it with a big orange traffic cone while everyone was running away from the horses and then it got twisted. it makes more sense than it sounds like. then i got shooed off this fence i was standing on, and i think i strained it more when i jumped off. it was really chaotic, with the police creating chaos and then getting off on it. i think it was their revenge for being scared by the people, because at certain points they really seemed overwhelmed and scared by the demonstrators. and those horsies were really scared by the buses with the flashing lights. of course, the "new york boldest" riot police rode them into the crowd without any warning, blocking everyone off in such a way that people had no places to run and pretty much got squished against walls of the block, stomping all over each other to trickle out onto the next block through a narrow space between the barricades. oh yeah, and of course according to Fox news 50 people got arrested. yeah, right. i saw at least 30 people get arrested and manhandles into prison vans in one place. somehow i doubt it was localized to that block.

and why, why, why were Fox news headlines running on the Fox building not related to the protests or the inspectors, but instead informing people that a certain number of the British people listed Jedi as their religion on the census? and that the Jedi outnumbered the Jews and the Buddhists? what about Jews who are Jedis? do you mean to tell me that Luke Skywalker was not a Jew? i am so disappointed. he was all chosed and stuff.

and why does the cover of yesterday's New York Post have a headline about UN Weasels and above the caption has a DOCTORED PHOTO of UN reps, with actual WEASELS imposed over the French and German chairs?

there any many more questions, but i am exhausted, so i will stop this free-associative ranting for the moment.

(no subject)

first--two addendums to the dyslexicon

1) Poma--post-markist

2) Pinternet--the internet (in any incarnation) when undergoing the effects of The Vortex (see The Dyslexicon)

Also, I think that Jack Nicholson is a possible candidate for Children of Mark, or at least for honorary Children of Mark. This is because, apparently the woman he thought was his sister for all these years turned out to be his mother. Also, it happenned to him when he was 37 years old. Really. It's like he is begging to be a Child of Mark.
This is the article on it from snopes.com, a website that specializes in debunking urban myths, so they are all color-coded (like the Terror Barometer! Ooh! A Terrometor!) based on accuracy, and there are explanations of how they arose. Anyway, apprently the Easy Rider's weird little bio tip happens to be true.

Claim: At age 37 Jack Nicholson discovered that the woman he'd always thought his sister was actually his mother.

Status: True.

Origins: He's a superstar of the screen and a bad boy extraordinaire, so it's hard to imagine the details of Jack Nicholson's life could be any more complicated than his celebrity and style of living made them. Yet they are, for 37 years into his life, he discovered the woman he'd been calling "sis" was actually his mother.

In [Here's Johnny!] June 1974 the mystery of Jack's birth came to light, just as his movie Chinatown was scheduled to open in theaters. In preparation for a cover story on Nicholson, a Time magazine reporter phoned Nicholson to check on the extraordinary information that had been unearthed: Jack's "sister" June was in fact Jack's mother, and a man claiming to be his father was alive and well in Ocean Grove, New Jersey. The news about Nicholson's parentage turned out to be true: Jack, born on 22 April 1937, had been the illegitimate child of 17-year-old June Nicholson. Nicholson had spent his life up to age 37 assuming that his biological mother, June, was his sister, and that his maternal grandmother, Ethel May, was his mother. Even on their deathbeds, neither June nor Ethel May had offered up the truth.

His reaction to the news? The Glasgow Herald reported:


"It was in 1975 soon after June died. I was making The Fortune for Mike Nichols and someone called me on the phone and told me. Ultimately I got official verification from June's sister, Lorraine. I was stunned."

[Note: Nicholson is clearly misremembering here. His mother June had been dead for about ten years by 1975.]

Oddly enough, Nicholson's experience mirrored that of another Hollywood figure, singer Bobby Darin. In 1968 the then-32-year-old Darin discovered the woman he'd been calling sis all those years was actually his mother. Darin had been contemplating a career in politics, which prompted his "sister" to come clean about the circumstances of his birth.

A teeth cleaning led to heart-patient Darin's death in 1973. He neglected to take antibiotics before the procedure.