Amos Moses Griffin says “I’m going pink,”

Breast cancer is the most common form of cancer affecting one out of every nine females up until the age of 90. Although rare, one in 1000 men are also diagnosed with breast cancer as well. Educate yourself and consider a small donation to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. If you feel inclined to enter your own website in celebration of Breast Cancer Awareness month, check out Pink for October or try out the Pink October theme or the Pinky and the Brain theme

email from some nice folks thanking me for the support but kindly asking me to take down my pink monstrosity as it was more an embarrassment than anything. So I resigned myself to silent acknowledgment from afar. That is until I noticed a few bloggers releasing pink themes.

As a blogger I live off the kindness of strangers. I can rearrange the furniture pretty well but I can’t create something from scratch. I’m reliant on other good folks for themes and plugins and suck hungrily on the teat of goodwill. This morning I noticed Derek Punsalan released a free pink theme so others who may not be technological inclined can nod a show of support.

So really, why not? It’s a bridge I’ll jump off. FunkWad is going pink for October. The switch to a new theme will require ironing out a few wrinkles here and

Thanks to Cowtown Pattie for this link that got me all riled up.

It’s back to this. In the late sixties I did a quick real estate survey of downtown Madison, Wisconsin and in addition to all the land tied up by governmental and educational institutions, an appalling amount of the best locations and the fanciest architecture was in the hands of religion. The most valuable land was - and remains - off the tax rolls. Now huge evangelical republican shrines are being built across the country and generally they too are separated from this community obligation by the very laws they’re trying to neutralize when they meddle in civil marriage concerns, sexual health issues, scientific advances in medicine, and the public school curriculum. I say give them a shot at banning all the books they want. Let them bring it to a vote, book by book. But if they’re flushing their turds down my sewer and drinking my municipal water and increasing traffic on the public streets every Sunday when their flag decaled and magnetic ribboned SUVs caravan to their tax sheltered places of worship, then let them pay the taxes and be governed by the same rules that the rest of us follow.

In god’s name, can’t we tax and regulate the poor benighted ignoramuses before they swallow up the country like some plague of locusts? Roughly one third of Americans are stupid enough or twisted enough or suffered enough abuse that they believe that evangelical crap. Why should two thirds of us have to suffer under their oppressive nonsense? Tax them. Let them render a little unto Caesar for a change. The freeloaders have been sucking our communities dry long enough.

the world plays jazz when you’re quiet
October 3rd, 2024

Ancient Chinese symbols fog up the mirror.
Freud not yet born or else still musing
across the bathtub at his lovely mother.
Black lace drapes the white window.
The crickets slow down like they’re
running out of batteries. The I Ching
rolls in the corner pocket. One last
fly backflips from the ceiling.
The machines clink and halt
and come to a rest. If you listen
you can hear the sighs of the dead.
Lose yourself in the season’s first breath.

I’m familiar with Howard Stern, I saw a movie about him. Or a TV show or something. He’s a talk show guy. Thinks he’s out there. And I knew there was an Anna Nicole Smith… something to do with Paris Hilton, I think, and I saw the green Paris Hilton vid where she’s naked and everything.

So I had a connection to this news that Howard Stern and Anna Nicole Smith were to marry. Sort of. And during this morning’s idle clickage, I ran across a Salon link to the People magazine million dollar photos of the happy - sort of - couple. Her post partum depression couldn’t have been eased much by the death of her twenty year old son, but that’s a thought that came after the exposure to the People Smith/Stern Bahamas shoot, since before the exposure I really knew neither about the baby nor the son nor the life and times of Anna Nicole Smith. Now that I am better informed, I have to admit that I was surprised to discover that there is another Howard Stern… surprised and disappointed.

On my way through Salon to the Smith/Stern sort-of-nuptial photos, I saw the following letter to George W. Bush from his (ardent) admirer, Belacqua Jones. It explains things. Sort of…

Dear George,

One symptom of the Corporatist State’s emasculation of the media is the public’s belief that if a story is heavily covered, it is important, earthshaking, and trend setting. The opposite is true. The more coverage a story gets, the more trivial it is. The saturation coverage of John Mark Karr, JonBenet Ramsey’s alleged murder proves the point. Then there is the possibility that the midterms may turn on the size of Mark Foley’s pecker. The beauty of the trivialization is that it draws media attention away from your misdeeds.

Goebbels is in his grave kicking his own ass for not coming up with the sound byte that does more to corrupt a free press than the strictest state censorship: If it bleeds, it leads.

But the media’s greatest act of trivialization is their breathless willingness to lap up your rhetoric. You have given them the one morality play that plays well in Peoria, the Hollywood Western, a study in a celluloid morality for a celluloid people. Iraq burns, the Constitution dissolves, the Geneva Conventions are “quaint,” while the media sloshes here and there looking for the next trivial Dingleberry they can hold up to the pubic as if it were a nugget of gold.

The key is to keep the media preoccupied with mindless drivel until after the midterms. Maybe Tom Cruise could jump on a few more couches, or Brad could start seeing another woman. Never forget the golden rule of media relations: The media feeds on the trivial and chokes on the important stuff.

Your admirer,

Belacqua Jones

UPDATE: Wikipedia marks the critical distinction between Howard Allen Stern and Howard K. Stern (no relation, I think, to Howard K. Smith, although they were both in the show biz game at one time or another). Without Wikipedia, I probably never would have heard of the movie “Wasabi Tuna,” which grossed $7,950 in US ticket sales after its release in 2024.

There is some confusion now about whether or not Howard K. Smith and Larry King are the same person, and the earlier reports of Howard K. Smith’s death were part of an elaborate insurance scam.