My Exchange Server occasionally gets a hiccup in its spam filters, and stuff like this gets through:

Recently there has been a rash of spam spoofing CNN and MSNBC addresses with the subject lines like CNN - BREAKING NEWS: (insert random really outlandish news item).

PSA: As with all suspicious mails, don’t even bother opening these. Shift-Delete them straight into oblivion.

Whoever the social engineering/spam artist who came up with these subject lines “Police Raid Donut City” gets an “E” for the effort of being at least a tad clever.

The GOP must be getting desperate if they have gotten down to my relatively unimportant name on their mailing list. And as a result, I received a rather bland photo of Senator and Mrs. McCain which I have taken the liberty of making a remark on, and have sent back to the kind folks who first put it into the mail to me:

Click to enlarge…

In case my scrawl is impossibly illegible, it reads:

“Thanks, but no thanks. No McSame.

I’m voting for the Constitution.
I’m voting for Dr. Chuck Baldwin.”

That, and along with some creatively artistic flourishes with a Sharpie pen, I added some distinguishing facial hair to Sen. McCain’s ever so gentle visage. (I was tempted to add the same flourish to Mrs. McCain, but she is something of an innocent bystander, or at least, an accessory - who really doesn’t need any uglification. That would simply be ungentlemanly of me to do such a thing.

I did wonder why I received any mailings from McCain… I never got anything from Bush in 2000 or 2004. Despite the fact that I rarely if ever donate anything to any political candidate (I donated some to Fred Thompson’s ill-fated primary campaign, and that has somewhat soured me on making any further contributions to anyone else - given my poor track record at backing political winners).

I also donated a token sum to my local candidate to Congress, Kieran Lalor (NY-19) on the hopes that he can unseat first-term incumbent John Hall, whose victory in an otherwise Republican, conservative Catholic majority district was something of a protest against the former Sue Kelly’s ineptitude in her final term.

I think that might have bumped me up a few notches on the mailing list.

I have been rather opposed to McCain being the nominee — I would have rather have seen Dr. Ron Paul, Tom Tancredo or Duncan Hunter… or even Mitt Romney as POTUS before McCain. In fact, this wholesale unravelling of the GOP has lead to my embracing of the Constitutionalist movement, and finding my home in Paleoconservatism.

Or to paraphrased a much abused idiom - I did not leave the GOP, the GOP moved left and left me.

The alternate title for this post was “Hyperinflation, and Reptiles, and Nibiru, oh my!”… but somehow, that would simply miss the doomsday quality I wanted to present.

I’m not a prophet nor a son of a prophet, so please don’t take these “predictions” too seriously. These are more like loose trends I’ve extrapolated well beyond any meaningful point, and I am certain that most of these ideas are grossly misinformed.

This is more of a vent of some of my doomer tendencies that I’ve likely harbooured into my salvation, and which also, in the light of the gracious gift of salvation I have by the redeeming love the Blessed Father has shown us through His Son, our Lord, Jesus Christ… are not much of a thing to get worried about.

Here goes… by the end of summer 2008, I expect we will see:

• The Housing market continues to implode as $450k+ McMansions plummet to something closer to their true worth (depending upon local markets, possibly as low as 50% of the peak of the 2006 bubble — especially in oversaturated markets like North California and Florida)

  And having personally (helped) frame and build some of these McMansions, they really aren’t worth much more than the $20k lumber pack they are made from, if my opinion counts for anything.

• Gold creeping above $1500 an ounce (makes me wish I had listened to my gut feelings about buying some a couple of years ago when it was in the $400/oz range…. *urk*).
• The $USD falling under ¥70 JPY (Mrs. Seeker’s mum will be happy to visit us from Japan and buy several dozen designer handbags on the cheap while here, assuming hyperinflation hasn’t set in by this summer)
• The Euro (€) rising to over $1.80 USD (largely as a function of Fed cranking up the printing presses and the Red Chinese and most other people with a brain dumping the dollar as silently as possible … at first)
• The British Pound Sterling (£) trading at $2.40 USD
• Oil bourses switching to Euro, Russian Rubles, Saudi Dinars and Red Chinese Yuan Renminbi (RMB) over the dollar (this may serve to dampen the dollar collapse somewhat, but will also signal the end of American economic significance)
• Unemployment begins to ratchet up as layoffs cascade from a staggering economy, and the rise of tent cities (Bushtowns, ala the Hoovervilles of the 1930s, or perhaps if it takes effect in 2009, they might be Hillaryvilles or Obamaburghs)
• The distant rumblings of possible food riots in the Fall, and perhaps silent removal of overseas Army unit and National Guards units back to the States as grain prices skyrocket, and food generally creeps ahead of rising gas and diesel costs, (which will easily creep north and stay north of $125/Bbl) … oh yeah, and let’s not forget the rising cost of 30.06 and 5.56 ammo for the trusty weapons.

Well, that’s just grist for the doomer mill, I reckon… fit only to be mixed in with those reports of reptilian aliens, CFR and Bohemian Grove conspiracies, and Planet Nibiru popping in for its 3,600-year reunion with our solar system in 2012 to usher in the “end of the universe” according to the I-Ching, Nostradamus and some gigantic Aztec calendar stone with pretty carvings.

I’m sure the Annunaki and a pile of outsized cannibal Nephilim will nip on over for some tea, biscuits, and human cattleburgers to set things up for the Final Antichrist while their planet is in the neighborhood too.

…

Really, I got to start reigning in the dumb web sites I visit at night.

Today’s internet derives tons of revenue from advertisements served up by third-party providers. Sometimes, the results can be amusing. I had poked Dan Riehl once or twice about his MSN code he has occassionally serving up McCain ads (while he was more-or-less speaking up for Mitt Romney’s defunct campaign prior to Super Tuesday I).

But then you get the really funny mismatches of banner ads to the sites sponsoring them:

RedState’s Obama Advertisement

I know it seems like I’m ragging on RS a bit more, but I just happened to stumble across this.

Hopefully the mods make a note of it and see if that ad can be pulled.

I never knew that the old trend I ran into during my high-school days (late 1980s) would see much traction: mid-state New Yorkers tend to lag a great deal behind their much more stylish cousins in “The City” (namely, New York City and in particular, Manhattan).

I mean, to put this into perspective from a Manhattanite, there is “the City” (specifically, Manhattan south of 96th St.), the “Bridge and Tunnel” dwellers (BNT’ers: people from the outer boroughs like Queens, Brooklyn, etc.) and then the “rednecks from up north”.

Ed. Note: Up until the 1980s, this was largely true - Rockland and Westchester counties were the bedroom suburbs, and Orange-Putnam-Dutchess and any county north of that were largely farmlands and apple orchards except for a few selected large towns. Until all the yuppies decided that the Lower Hudson River Valley was “the new Hamptons” and started buying up everything in sight, especially during the sub-prime mortgage frenzy… now you can drive three miles without running into a WalMart or a TGIFridays.

Manhattanites were always the cutting edge of fashion, and often we’uns up here snickered at some of the fashion ideas coming up out of the City. Brooklynites, New Jerseyans, and the other BNT’ers would adopt to some degree what the Manhattanites did, albeit with discounted or non-major brands and labels, or waiting a few months for the labels to come down in price.

We up here though, are the Long Tail of Fashion: I mean, people up here (only one hour north of Manhattan) were sporting pegged-leg jeans and stonewashed denim as late as 2000, along with (mostly late 30’s-early 40’s) women with that awful NJ big hair look.

Coming back to the main topic, Popped Collars on polo shirts were kind of cool (along with stonewash denim and pegging the legs of one’s jeans, as well as the “Mandana” - a bandana worn on the head as a hat-kerchief thingy) in the late 1980s.

On rare occasion you might find a rare instance of some guy now in his late 30s or early 40s who does the popped collars with his golfing ensemble at local golf courses, or on college students at nearby SUNY New Paltz, or Pace University down the river. Again, youthful indiscretions are what they are.

And sadly, the widest demographic of polo shirt collar-poppers tends to be younger men with an overinflated sense of self-worth that results in an arrogant demeanor, and a general sense of being posers out for attention. For the sake of my eyesight and general human kindness… please don’t be like this guy:

And yes, he is wearing - count them - FOUR polo shirts - with each collar popped. All he is missing for the complete effect would be the slightly tilted visor or ballcap worn backwards.

After years of watching my wife customize her avatar via Yahoo! Japan’s chat interface, I’ve always found myself slightly envious that the Japanese Yahoo! offered such a thing. Her avatar is very, very accurate (or rather, she has accurately chosen which combinations of facial features and accessories and hair to most accurately serve as her “virtual” face to the world).

I don’t use YIM or AIM or much of anything else aside from the occasional visit to a few Linux-oriented IRC channels (of course, since I am constantly breaking stuff, erm… recompiling kernels)… so I cannot tell for sure if YIM (the American version) has gotten around to using these avatars within itself. But… Yahoo! America finally does have the avatars.

I’ve never realized how exactly addictive these little things are… customizing the various options and such.

And, it is a terrific way to kill an afternoon.

Here is an accurate (if I may say so) representation of myself, which will have to do as I am probably not likely to ever post my face on the net.

Not too shabby, eh? It’s accurate from head to toe (as I actually have dark brown-bordering-on-black hair cut in a Caesar-style with a flip, a dark grey turtleneck, an overly long off-white scarf, navy blue jeans, and the sneakers (well, they are actually black Converse All-Stars).

And there’s a generic sushi place a few miles down the road from me that kinda-sorta resembles pretty much any sushi place like the one pictured.

Close enough for gum’mint work, anyway.

Run for the hills, the Germans are back running amok in Poland!

No, it’s not what you might have thought… the German Army Band was participating in what appears to be a musical performance. But then again, I’d imagine that any seniors that might have lived long enough to remember the bad old days might have had a sudden shock at seeing a German Army unit marching downtown to the beat of the Regimentsgruß.

The odd pause in the middle is curious as well, but the band recovers nicely before moving on to its next location.

This one has probably seen a few rounds… a “Spirit Video” from the USNA (Naval Academy) Class of 2003.

Ya ain’t helping to dispel the old saw about you navy boys being… erm, not quite right in the head.

All in good fun though… watch and enjoy.

I was never much of a comic book reader, much less a collector. Most of my reading falls into the Star Wars graphic novels (particularly the Clone Wars collection) which is best done ala mooch-reading-at-Barnes & Noble while the wife is off shopping (and quite possibly making a better investment of her time, and of course, our money).

My first comics I remember reading around age six or seven… were from my parents’ collections. Well, they weren’t so much of a collection as they were several recurring titles in no particular order.  Sadly, most of these perished in our various overseas moves between the US and Germany.

The titles they like to read were probably geared more to an adult audience … as they were somewhat morbid or (to my young eyes) rather scary affairs like Jonah Hex or Ghost Rider, and those old Captain America issues where he was fighting against the Nazis and Red Skull - occassionally with Union Jack. 

The scarier stuff creeped me out sufficiently not to bother with them until many years later stuff like Tales from the Crypt and its related franchises. That, and it almost seems that the artwork from that era was just right for conveying that scary edge.

A few were positively campy (and for some reason , I was vaguely aware of campiness, even if I did not know the proper word for it) such as Iron Fist.

Iron Fist was a Caucasian kung-fu master in this green and yellow outfit that was quite queer and funky for its time… oh wait, that was in 1975. It seems that most things were a bit more queer and funkier. Yet the dude wore skin tight capri pants, lemon yellow slippers, and the pimpest butterfly collar ever… as part of his costume:

I mean, one had to possess a certain amount of personal courage to wear that get-up. Of course, if I were a (superpowered?) kung fu master with a killer physique… I probably would not worry much about what people thought of my costume either. 

And of course, no comic "collection" would be complete without Superman. In what was probably my first subconcious identification with (albeit comic based) sexuality… Supes stood out head and feet above the rest. In fact, he was probably overdone in his hypermasculinity, save only for the outrageous ultra-muscularity of selected characters like Hulk or Juggernaut.  Before the first Superman movie debuted, I had already built up this mental image of what Superman in the flesh would look like: needless to say, when Christopher Reeve donned the super-suit for the silver screen* I was a little disappointed. Arnold Schwartzenegger might have better fit my mold of Superman (in terms of physique at least), but he was being cast as Conan around that same time, or collecting bodybuilding titles.

After much discussion of the current user of the super-suit… in particular, Mr. Brandon Routh’s alleged over-endowments… this has lead me to look at the artwork a little more closely than I had done in the past.

Within the mainstream of industrial comic book artistry… very, very few male characters have a bulge. By contrast, most female characters have boobs you could poke your eyes out with if you weren’t careful. 

Okay, I am not looking for anything along the lines of Joe Phillips (his work tends toward the opposite end of the illustration of malehood) or the like… but if you are out saving the world from itself and the occassional super villian dressed in tights, one would expect there to be at least the suggestion of something down there.

Although some artists are working on that item. Take this guy (Northstar) who is one of the first out-of-closet gay superheroes to be regularly featured… and the faintest hint of something in his pants.

I would guess that the disproportionate balance of lean body mass (huge muscles) vs. minimized wee-wee will likely remain a feature of male comic characters. I would reckon that the industry and the artists would draw some heat for drawing a character with a cruise missile in his tights. 

That is probably a good thing then … I am not so sure I would have handled a Brandon Routh sized package in my 1970s Superman comics very well.  After all, kids do read these things… and often from a very early age.

Side note: Ever notice that almost all drawings of a superhero/villian just standing around almost show the fists closed in a loose grip, with the forefinger extending over the thumb? Check out Northstar’s right hand. I learned that this is a gimmick most comic illustrators use in case they need to draw in a weapon of some sort (usually a gun) or other object on short notice.

It is also a good thing that we kids do not read between the lines as we will later learn to do. I am sure that the writers meant this in all innocence… :

(my apologies to whoever’s blog I found this on… but it was too funny not to share elsewhere). Poor Bats… between that horribly campy 1960s show and the Saturday morning cartoons from the 1970s, neither he nor his alter ego have outgrown thier (apparent) pederastic tendencies. Imagine the scandal it would cause the Wayne Foundation if it were ever leaked to the press that Bruce Wayne was a card-carrying member of NAMBLA…

At least Aqualad and Bucky (Capt. America’s sidekick) were retired somewhere between the Golden and SIlver Ages, before our current jaded generation started making such conclusions. Tsk, sign of the times, I suppose.  

Although this photo may be faked, or possibly a mis-framed capture of Bush doing something like scratching his ears…

I get the impression that this could be indicative of his true feelings about the America, its people, and indeed, the world.