I'm a loner, Dottie: a rebel.

Matt Taibbi ain't buying what John McCain is selling.

At least that's the impression I get. It's a little ambiguous:

Rather than serving up the "straight talk" he promises, McCain is enthusiastically jumping aboard with every low-rent, fearmongering, cock-sucking presidential aspirant who's ever traveled the Lee Atwater/William Safire highway.
...
With his chameleonlike, whatever-gets-you-through-the-night ideology, McCain intends to use the same below-the-belt, commie-baiting, watermelon-waving smear tactics that Clinton used against Obama in the Democratic primaries, except at tenfold intensity.

More from Planet Fucked

Massachusetts teens enter suicide pregnancy pact.

As summer vacation begins, 17 girls at Gloucester High School are expecting babies—more than four times the number of pregnancies the 1,200-student school had last year.
...
School officials started looking into the matter as early as October after an unusual number of girls began filing into the school clinic to find out if they were pregnant. By May, several students had returned multiple times to get pregnancy tests, and on hearing the results, "some girls seemed more upset when they weren't pregnant than when they were," Sullivan says. All it took was a few simple questions before nearly half the expecting students, none older than 16, confessed to making a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together. Then the story got worse. "We found out one of the fathers is a 24-year-old homeless guy," the principal says, shaking his head.

Mark my words: pregnancy pacts will be the rainbow parties of 2008.

PandaPandaPanda

Picking up where we left off a while ago (with the panda bears, not the bearded showtunes fan and the basement dwellers who love him), Beijing-based graphic novelist Coco Wang has produced a series of comics about the recent earthquake in China and its aftermath, including one on the aforementioned pandas. Moving stuff.

(via Boing Boing)

Bring the noise

This overview of a recent gig showcasing what passes for musical talent here in Vancouver made me want to put a bullet in the brain of the whole damn scene. I'm not shooting the messenger here; I actually want to know who creates and who enjoys stuff like this:

their "set" was completely different at Pat's (it involved eight people amongst the crowd blowing on rape whistles while Josh Rose fired sampled whistles back at them).

Honestly: what the hell? It seems to me that this electro noise punk bullshit is pretty much all there is out here these days. I guess pop songs are too hard to write.

Speaking of gigs, I just returned from North by Northeast in Toronto, which was memorable more for the misses than the hits. Young Rival, The Golden Hands Before God Conduct Incredible Magic Band and the Spirits, and The Hoa Hoas were all pretty great. However, we missed out on what were apparently great sets from The Rural Alberta Advantage, modernboys moderngirls and The Danks, among others. I guess that's the risk you run when you base your selections off 30 second song snippets off of MySpace. Bands that sound great in passing can genuinely stink live (yeah, I'm looking at you AMIT and your fucking 20 minutes of faux jazz piano wanking).

Rampant gun violence aside, Toronto itself is swell (and keep in mind that, coming from a born'n'bred Albertan, this borders on blasphemy). The demands of the festival kept me from doing the tourist thing, but that just leaves me something to do on my next visit, assuming we're not back to traveling by steam locomotive and horse and buggy in a year's time.

Pfff...Christ....

For some reason, the reaction to my last post reminded me of this:

On occasion, I read the newspaper and/or the internet.

Yeah, I know that by entertaining complaints over speech and opinion, Human Rights Tribunals as we know them are overstepping their original mandate to investigate and settle complaints of discrimination in employment and in the provision of services. But that’s not the worst part. By calling infamous high-school drop out, musical theatre aficionado and right-wing shitnugget Mark Steyn onto the carpet following a complaint by the Canadian Islamic Congress (among others) over the publication of excerpts of his farcically paranoid white-power fantasy “America Alone,” Human Rights Tribunals manage to achieve the heretofore impossible task of turning loathsome wretches like Steyn and the toad-like Ezra Levant before him into figures of public sympathy, feeding their persecution fantasies and stoking the fires of their egos to unbearable levels. And that is the greatest crime of all. Sigh.

On a different tack: OMG! PANDAS!


Above: Nom, nom, nom.

*BONUS BEARD FETISHIST UPDATE*
Um, you morons realize I'm on board with the whole "no prosecuting speech thing" right? Of course you don't.