Gobsmacked in America; or The Tweetering Inferno

Oh blog, poor blog, you have been mightily not been much present for the Dear Readers of the world in 2017.

It's not your fault. Wailing negativity each and every day has dominated the news and the talk and politics and the personalities which a battered modern America has brought forth are fairly depressing. I really do not want to add even more weight to the self-manufactured drowning stones being looped around America's neck. So I've kept my mouth shut, my keyboard untouched.

And the information flowing from the political distortions of reality presented as fact is a likewise river of sewage pretending it's a princess. The emperor may have no clothes, to quote the fable, but in today's world none care but we will video him with their phone as he goes walking past. The screen is running the show.

So I've just been working on real human interactions. Not writing about it, not observing, living. Such tends to severely limit writing.

And the good and the positive which I have encountered this year, I've kept clutched silently to myself, as if such things were tattered remnants of a nation once proud and mostly honest. Festering sores aren't much use to share with one's fellow humans. Though if your fellow human is indeed covered in festering sores, maybe one should speak to it.

In more simple terms. the cheese has fallen right off the American cracker.

It's on the floor, even if you like, clean it off, put it back on the cracker, you'll know.


PS - Fear not dear reader. Your  Cup of Joe is here, even when quiet. There's 12 years worth of archives to read - just click on a month in the sidebar on the right. You can see how many dead links and dead websites and music and video sites that aren't around anymore. But I am still here. I be back.

The Fans That Destroyed The Earth

Who should play the next James Bond?

Why should fans of 007 pick the next performer to play the role? Are they so scared in Hollywood or that lazy?

Too often the Internets gets blocked up with What Fans Want.

Well, if a Fan of some genre or media knows so much, why are they just Fans? Can't they get the jobs to make the stuff that gets Fans?

Fans churn out reviews of movies and tv and books that are old, new and unmade - like they're possessed, and yet it's always about someone else's works. Fans even make videos of themselves opening packages of what they are Fans of, and those videos have millions of Fans.

Perhaps we shouldn't have provided Internets space to Fan Fiction, Fan Movies and Mashups, just insane niches that feed Fan Entitlement. ("My Little Pony" has, for instance, expanded and distorted into a weird mix of Salvador Dali and Larry Flynt.)

I get it - we make things from the artifacts of our lives. I've done it, but not in any coordinated Fan Horde Attacks.

And the Internets is a machine that builds Fans. See this "Sexts, Hugs, and Rock'nRoll" article about the ongoing DigiTour of ... well, never heard of these folks until now so I'll call them Internets Idols:

"With full lips, Bieber bangs, and piercing blue eyes, Hayes has the unsalted-butter looks of the love interest on a CW show or the villain in a John Hughes movie. He dresses in the superficially alternative but fundamentally nonthreatening uniform popularized by Urban Outfitters and adopted by every (white) Cool Guy in every high school in America: jeans, skate shoes, graphic T-shirt or baggy tank top with the armholes cut low. He speaks slowly and indistinctly, with a soft North Carolina accent. He has beautiful teeth."

And all he (Hayes) does is make Fans.

Fan demands of casting and scripting are ridiculous, media makers use them for publicity, but it's too far - look what happened to the simple science fiction awards known as Hugos: a weird Fan Coup has butchered the proceedings.

You're a Fan of something? Great. Shut up. I'm working here. 

The United States Are All Sour, Claim Those Fake Folks Who Want to Secede

A large amount of fakery, led by the Right-Wing blog "The Daily Caller:, and followers of the woefully ignorant, refuse to believe the facts, and now suddenly claim that thousands of people (mostly all Southerners, including Tennessee) seem to think the best protest against our recently re-elected president is to secede from the United States.

First, all these 'petitions' are bogus and have no meaning at all - other than as expressions of the deeply disturbed.

As Ed Kilgore writes:

" ... we’re discovering that at least one segment of the GOP’s conservative “base” has found something to do in reaction to the election results other than engaging in a “struggle for the soul of the party” or discussing what its congressional representatives should do about tax and spending deadlines: petition to secede from the Union!

"Given the southern inflection of the secession campaign, you’d have to figure nearly all these petitioners are aware (it is impossible to grow up in the South without being marinated in the memory of the Lost Cause and its consequences virtually from birth) that we had a civil war over this subject a while back, which the secessionists did not win. So it’s an unusually dumb gesture, aimed less at Barack Obama than at their fellow-citizens."

The KnoxNews Sentinel writes:

"Brandon Puttbrese, spokesman for the Tennessee Democratic Party, called the secession petition "radical nonsense" that is "a direct result of the tea party extremism and intolerance we have seen from elected Republicans in Tennessee."

"Sadly," Puttbrese said, "this kind of extremism only breeds more of the division and rancor that is prohibiting our leaders from making progress on putting Tennesseans back to work and protecting middle class families."

But Chris Devaney, chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party, noted that nearly 50 percent of Americans voted against Obama.

"We can argue whether the petition is proper," Devaney said, "but it is certainly a signal that it's time for the president to show some leadership and work to unite America rather than divide us."

The petition drive is just a way for angry voters to let off steam after a highly emotional and divisive campaign, said John Scheb, head of the political science department at the University of Tennessee.

Not only is secession unlikely, it's not even legally possible, Scheb said.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1869 that states cannot unilaterally secede from the union. "The position the court took was once in (the union), always in," Scheb said."

It's called the 14th Amendment, people.

And it's pretty much the same as the fable of the Fox who sought in vain to jump up and grab some grapes the Fox viewed as most tasty, only to miss them and fail and fail again:

This Fox has a longing for grapes:

He jumps, but the bunch still escapes.

So he goes away sour;

And, 'tis said, to this hour

Declares that he's no taste for grapes