Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here, or, Hell in a Handbasket

In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to
myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost.
Ah, how hard a thing it is to say what that wood
was, so savage and harsh and strong that the
thought of it renews my fear!
It is so bitter that death is little more so! But to
treat of the good that I found there, I will tell of
the other things I saw.

Call it karma or Newton's third law (MacGyver's favorite, as it turns out) or whatever you like, but the universe has a way of balancing things out. And because of that, I should have seen this thing coming. I mean, I don't want to endorse any sort of overly rigid distinction between high and low culture, but I think it's fair to say Spider-man becoming a Broadway musical isn't necessarily a lateral movement for the intellectual property. But the moment something so thoroughly pop culture is being "elevated" to theater, I assure you somewhere someone is raping a cultural treasure. And usually I can keep a wry distance from it. But no one fucks with Dante Alighieri (or puts Baby in a corner).

But apparently that's exactly what Electronic Arts is doing. EA, shirt collar wide open so the ladies can appreciate its chest pelt and faux-gold necklaces, slithered up to the Divine Comedy at the bar and offered to buy it an appletini. And now, some indeterminate time later, Dante is shivering on the corner at 3:15 am offering to suck your dick for a fiver so his pimp doesn't cut him another nostril. For those of you less well versed in the arcane cryptography of my metaphors, allow me to spell it out: they're making a video game of Dante's Inferno.

As I watched this seven minute interview with one of the criminals responsible for this abomination, I felt like someone had punched me in the gut. Sure, maybe I was a little drawn in, but I also slow down to rubber-neck at freeway accidents. And like my molars, which were slowly grinding one another to dust (and plaque, and the gum disease gingivitis), the details I remember from Dante's epic poem and the plot of this game ground together. The pilgrim (Dante) wanders through Hell with Virgil as a guide, until the poet's beloved (Beatrice) must take over Virgil's duty when the pilgrim ascends to Paradise; Digital Dante returns from kicking ass and taking names in the Crusades to find his sweet-heart, Beatrice, has been murdered and her soul dragged to hell by Lucifer himself, so he goes to hell alone to get her. The pilgrim is alternately terrified, infuriated, and seduced by the stories told him by the damned; Digital Dante kicks ass and chews bubblegum, along with the help of his giant fucking scythe (which they'll hopefully name 'Florence' or 'La Vita Nuova' or something). The medieval poem showed me what literature can really do and made me fall in love with poetry; this video game makes me want to strap on a diaper, jump in my car (which is stalled out in parking lot right now, but that's another story), and drive to the developer's studio where I can "get medieval" on each and every one of their pasty asses. I'll show you a contrapasso, you sons of bitches.

Maybe I'm getting a little worked up here, so I'll cut this short - despite my plans of meticulously combing through all thirty three cantos and parodying what I imagine those bastards at EA might do to the text. Come to think of it, though, somebody better check Dante's tomb; I have a feeling his skull is upended somewhere in a game studio and serving double duty as an ashtray and urinal. If there's any justice, those responsible will have an eternity of purging flames to regret their trespass. If not, I'll remind them when I arrive fresh from the Crusades, shotgun in one hand, chainsaw strapped to the stump of my other. Groovy.

Dick and Jane: All Grown Up, or More Phun Wif Wordz

Honestly, does no one take a step back and read these things before actually putting them up? Perhaps the parties responsible for this little double entendre are simply so naive, so pure of heart, that alternate meanings do not present themselves when they proudly stand aside and gaze at their handiwork. Not so for the rest of us (sorry to drag you down to the gutter with me, dearest reader). Don't get me wrong; despite my alternate reading of this public declaration, it still amounts to the same message. Oh yes, the love is still in this relationship - we may just have a discrepancy over semantics.


Happy Anniversary, Dick and Lisa. To think you've come so far from those golden, childhood years when you two strolled through the neighborhood and, apparently, discovered perverts hiding in the bushes.

My, oh my. The grow up so very fast.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Harbinger of the Apocalpyse

Oh crap! The world is about to end. There is no other way to explain this. None. I mean, I can read articles about atrocities committed in third world nations by militias and dictators, I can watch an administration systematically strip away constitutional rights and perpetuate their power on a platform of fear-mongering and misinformation, I can even wrap my head around the fact that our media culture seems determined to perpetuate Paris Hilton's celebrity instead of euthanizing her, and still believe that our world will somehow continue to limp along blithely. But then I read that they're making a Spider-man musical, directed by Julie Taymor with musical score by Bono and the Edge, and my brain just...

...where am I?

Dammit. I was hoping that I had suffered some sort of blunt-force-trauma to the head and was waking up in a hospital bed in a universe where this sort of absurdity wasn't increasingly common. No such luck. What's that? You don't believe me? You insist that I am actually sitting at my computer with a book of Mad Libs open on my lap, and I thought it would be delightful to combine a superhero comic, half of the Irish rock band U2, and the creative force behind such films as Titus and Across the Universe? But no, such is not the case. There isn't enough crack for me to smoke to come up with that one on my own, though apparently others are happily "hittin' the rock" and maintaining their positions of creative control on Broadway. And who the hell okayed this thing? If you came to me and pitched this idea, I'd stare at you like you had a penis growing out of your forehead.

And come on. Spider-man, Turn Off the Dark is the best they could come up with for a title? Good God! It's like one of my remedial students wrote this thing. Perhaps next we'll be treated to Andrew Lloyd Webber's Aquaman: I Humped a Shark. Jeez, Bono, did you run out of starving people to help? Shouldn't you be busy wearing a dashiki at a press conference in the Sudan or something? I need to stop thinking about this - I'm giving myself an aneurysm. Honestly, I kinda want to kill myself a little bit now. I think I'll go watch Step Up 2: The Streets and remind myself what real art is all about.

Because Working at a Car Wash Isn't Bad Enough Already

This little exposé details, in rather business-like fashion, a charming little "snafu" some local car wash owners have gotten themselves into. According to the author, these intrepid titans of industry have been treating their car wash employees like "indentured servants" because, you know, having to tell people you work at a car wash isn't quite shitty enough. Apparently this husband and wife duo "worked [their employees / indentured servants / butts of some cosmic joke] without overtime pay, rest or lunch breaks, drank water from a washing machine, received no proper medical treatment for cuts and burns, and were harassed if they tried to unionize." Most of these I can wrap my head around: while not exactly living the Gospel, I understand that virtually all of these infractions were the result of pushing their employees to be more productive. Fine. I get it. But making them drink water from a washing machine? I mean, it's not like we're talking about a laundromat here. Hell, at least let them drink from a hose or something. Of course, this is also the revelation that makes me giggle the hardest. "What? You want a drink? Well, I just started a load of whites ten minutes ago, so just wring out a pair of underwear and see how much water you can get from that. Oh, and I'm docking your pay while you're lapping up that charming cocktail of soap-and-crotch water. Cheers."

But what I really appreciate about this story is how it puts into sharp relief the simple reality that people bring different philosophies of management to the workplace. The owners / operators felt that denying these workers their legal rights an expedient shortcut to greater profit at, admittedly, their peons' expense. Meanwhile, their immediate subordinate (the site manager) used a different approach: he is "accused of using a machete and a baton to threaten workers and unionizers." No one's going to accuse this guy of being subtle, but hell, that washing machine is looking better and better, huh? Complain all you want, but you can't argue with results.

So, dear car wash owners and manager, I salute you. And rest assured that the law will evaluate your various infractions with the utmost diligence and scrutiny, resulting in the most equitable decision possible: that go-getter with the machete and baton (the latter, I pray, filled with water and glitter so it caught the light magically as he threatened to sever a hand if you didn't buff that hood like a genie was going to pop out of the exhaust pipe) "faces 2 1/2 years in jail if convicted," while the husband and wife duo (the family that oppresses the proletariat together stays together, right?) are staring down the barrel of "nearly 86 years each in jail if convicted." Bet they're wishing they stuck with the family business and opened a Nike factory right about now.

Texan Zombies Declare Nefarious Political Allegiance...Other Than Being Texan

The liberal media is determined to let the zombies win. One of the fundamental tools we have to avoid - or at least survive - the coming zombie apocalypse is our ever-present vigilance, and thus to present a hero's attempt at warning his community of imminent attack as mere vandalism hurts us all. Of course, it hurts the people who get eaten more, but my ideological pain is nearly as acute, if not so bloody. And it doesn't involve me screaming desperately for mercy that will never come, either. Or rising some time later, an undead mockery of my former self, to maraud the streets for flesh. But they are still reminiscent of each other. On a certain, abstract level.

But I digress. Last Monday, a champion put himself or herself in the line of fire to reprogram two electronic detour signs in Austin, TX with such warnings as CAUTION! ZOMBIES AHEAD! and even more chilling, NAZI ZOMBIES! RUN!!! The "journalist" who reported this incident offered no details on whether the undead have begun dabbling in sinister political ideologies or if these zombies had simply persisted since 1942 Germany, though I imagine the presence or absence of helmets with pointy spikes on top would pretty much answer that one for us.


What did become clear, though, was that the reporter's ignorance of zombies was second only to her ignorance of how difficult it is to reprogram a sign. The author, who I'll call "Katie Petrosky of All Ablog Austin," reports that "the hacker could be a computer genius from UT." Now, I've become accustomed over the years to the imprecise uses to which people put the language, and sadly, I've become relatively resigned. I remain mute when a stranger says a hamburger is "fucking fantastic," when clearly it is neither "extravagantly fanciful" nor do they have their penis in their entree. I smile reassuringly when a student confesses a paper "sucks," knowing that it is less an evaluation of the composition's quality as how reading it drains the light from my life, nay, my very soul. But even the most resigned of men must draw the line somewhere, and so when some Luddite deems the reprogramming of an electronic road sign the work of a "computer genius," I must protest. Just because you think the spirits living inside your laptop are playing pranks when you accidentally erase the email from that Nigerian prince you've been meaning to help out doesn't mean the guy who broke open an orange lock box and entered a pass code is a "genius." It does mean you might be retarded, though.

If these warnings were genuine, though, we have little to worry about the reporter passing the idiot gene to what would have undoubtedly been a nigh-Biblical amount of offspring. You see, her parting quip was that "with any luck, Tuesday night’s cold front killed off any undead with ghoulish plans to invade the city." Okay. Calm down. Count to ten. Now: 1) zombies don't really have "plans," so much as an inescapable instinct to gorge themselves on human flesh; and 2) the cold won't do a good God damn thing to them, seeing as how they're already dead. Of course, their fingers may be a little more blackened and stiff as they drag you from your Starbucks laptop station, but I assure you, their jaws are still strong, and their teeth sharp. Would I could say the same about your intellect.

My thanks to Tina for passing this little gem along to me, and to Ryan for giving me dibs at venting my spleen at this poor reporter. I feel considerably better now. Not, you know, about myself, but at least about this whole thing.

A Fuzzy Yin to the Pederast's Yang

Alright, I'll admit that the last post wasn't in the best taste, and while one might observe that I had nothing to do with creating that unfortunate design, I suppose one could distort logic in such a way that, in a certain time and place, passing along such images might not be considered "awesome." To that I would simply point out that, strictly speaking, the word means "to inspire awe," and the magnitude of the oversight involved in actually putting that logo on your building most definitely does fill one with awe.

That said, the universe likes balance, and so to even things out, I've decided to post a picture of a koala bear taking a bath. I hope you have a good dentist because this little guy is so sweet he'll give you a cavity. Also, because koala meat is a little tough, so there will be some chewing involved. And while not nearly so delicious as panda, the koala is well worth the effort.


Ha, ha. Stupid photographer. He has his camera set to the 30th month, and everyone knows 2009 isn't a leap year.

Great Moments in Design

This is...unfortunate.