So here’s a small sampling of both the inspiring and the cheesey — the first 9 were brought to you by Anonymous, the last 9 are my own attempts at capturing Courage Wolf’s amazing and perfect blend of rage and encouragement.

The Onion indirectly did the Trek franchise justice with this mock entertainment review of the new film:

Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As ‘Fun, Watchable’

Exactly. As much as that video attempts to be a jab at Trekkies regarding the potentially hard-to-love nature of one of the longest-running and most in-depth sci-fi franchises in all of television and film history, what it really does is underline how the new film is a pasteurized tribute to Die Hard that can be easily ingested by the masses regardless of their intellectual capacity. It’s not only a poor reflection on director Abram’s abilities to spin a good yarn that will challenge your perceptions, it’s an insult on series founder Gene Roddeberry’s knack for creating decent socio-political commentary, and the latter TNG’s tendency to create technically-proficient sci-fi. The new Star Trek’s attempt even at character development stinks of Lucas’ success at creating a Darth Vader we all came to despise not because he was a cold, mechanical, sadistic, murderous villain, but because he was a insufferable, snotnosed, irritating brat in the vein of Mozart. A Mozart who couldn’t act. And now we have a new Trek to thank for making the bold and clever Captain Kirk a pernicious upstart who functions less as a devious thinker and more as a careless reactionary with little regard for the crew under his command. Just what we look for in a leader…

I shouldn’t really even have to elaborate on how ridiculous this whole idea is. First, stop trying to impede the evolution of the English language with your petty political correctness, censorship, and failed attempts at morality. You’re turning the whole damn language gay. And I mean that exactly in the derogatory sense intended. Why? Because our language is evolving, kiddies – adapting to the frivolous social inequities you yourselves have created.

Remember when “lame” meant some kind of crippling physical impairment? Well, probably one day some manager was listening to their employee’s excuse for being late to work and decided that, while this employee wasn’t lame and therefore had no excuse for being late, the excuse itself resembled having a physical impairment, if only metaphorically, and thus was born the “lame excuse” and the entrance of “lame” into the modern day parlance, now pretty much being used only the way with which we all grew up. That’s just a theory but based on personal experience it seems likely…

“Retarded” follows the same suit, really. To put it into the simplest and most mechanical definition, ‘mentally retarded’ individuals lack functionality. Like your desktop PC with Windows Vista and only 1GB of RAM. And it highly resembles the definition of “lame”, only swap “physical” impairment with “mental” impairment. So it’s quite usable in most of the same cases. A “lame excuse” can easily become a “retarded excuse”. Of course, whereas a lame excuse seems pretty tame in weight, a retarded excuse is probably a bit heavier. Moving on…

Are you offended because you happen to personally be lame (physically impaired) or retarded (mentally repaired, in which case, no, you are not offended, you’re just happy licking your pet brick right now)? Well, too bad. These words weren’t adapted to their conventional uses to disparage you, personally, they were created to label and describe states of being, circumstances, etc., in as objective a manner as possible. If you’re going to get offended because I describe my vehicle as “lame”, you’re an idiot. It doesn’t even drive straight. It clearly is (it’s not me, I swear). If I’m watching the news and there’s a story (yet another) about our leaders not being able to balance the budget, and I react with “That’s retarded”, I am well within my linguistic rights to use that word. Can your mentally retarded kid balance the budget? Can he or she balance on one foot? Likely not. Therefore the expression is valid. Get over it.

Read the blog title. That’s George Carlin right there. He said, “There are no bad words, only bad thoughts.” Without evoking the frickin thought police out there on this one, in the video are the two young women being deliberately offensive? Are they using their words with intent to directly cause emotional distress on another human being? Really doesn’t seem like it. And personally I know that’s not the case for myself for at least 15 or 16 of the two dozen or more times a day I refer to something as “gay”.

Well, I propose that an emotional distress has, in fact, already been inflicted by the referenced parties: Gays. That’s right. If you’re gay, let’s face it: your whole existence is pretty much derogatory and it impinges on the comfort of the mainstream. Conversely, that lifestyle is also so laughable it has inexorably become the perfect label to surpass lame and retarded as a new pinnacle to describe things being totally not right. We didn’t do it. You did. Enjoy your gay.

Click through to see the full-sized version.

And as a further insult, announced by tonight’s Colbert Report guest, astronaut/NASA bitch proxy Sunita Williams, Stephen Colbert will still gain infamy in space as a piece of orbital exercise equipment. That’s right, folks: the name Colbert will be immortalized as a treadmill, the retardedly-dubbed Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill — the COLBERT. Here’s a clip of the segment from the show:

So as a reward for Stephen Colbert doing his part in what has been announced to be the “International Years of Astronomy” to get the mob interested in space ventures, NASA decided it would be more prudent to flip Colbert’s own mockeries on him and grant visitors to the ISS the dubious pleasure of quipping things like, “Well, I got to go hop on the COLBERT for 20 minutes!” This is really just another in a slew of NASA PR and strategic disasters to which I’ll have to dedicate an entire separate rant, and that have ultimately decided for me to place both my faith and support in both Russia’s and China’s space programs, as both those nations seem signficantly more intent on making actual progress than the USA in space matters. NASA has placed itself in the position of being the cousin-with-Down’s-Syndrome of the federal budget for years and when one of their half-baked publicity stunts backfires, instead of actually taking the path of least resistance, they balked and spurned everyone who actually made an effort to support one of their nation’s causes. Way to show the love, douchebags.

I hope the Russians or Chinese invent a reusable transatmospheric/transorbital spacecraft that surpasses NASA’s dilapidated space shuttles in every way, and they name the first one Enterprise. Seriously, eat a dick, NASA. All you’re good at is blowing up space shuttles, neglecting the technologies that inspire people, like the Hubble Space Telescope, and blaspheming the democratic process. Time for someone who knows what they’re doing to take over.

There are some things that we can’t explain
Why we didn’t die when we died that day
But one thing I know that’s true
Is that forever I’ll be with you.

Holding your hand while our bodies decay
I’ll be by your side as we waste away
Eating brains by the light of the moon
Forever I’ll be with you

And don’t we all want to be with someone with whom we can share an eternity of brain-eating? It’s so romantical. I seriously just listened to it twice while writing this post. I also love the samples of La Croix from Forever Knight they included. Inspired choice.

While that’s all well and good and fairly entertaining, what’s disturbing is NASA’s whole position on the matter, a là Contest Rule #4:

NASA will take into consideration the results of the voting. However, the results are not binding on NASA and NASA reserves the right to ultimately select a name in accordance with the best interests of the agency, its needs, and other considerations. Such name may not necessarily be one which is on the list of voted-on candidate names. NASA’s decision shall be deemed final.

In layman’s terms, they reserve the right to bitch out on democracy. Granted, I perceive the inherent need to protect the integrity of the space program… hold on… Sorry, I had to perform a self-Heimlich. I mean, we wouldn’t want a complicated piece of orbital hardware that cost tens of millions of dollars to be burdened with some offensive moniker like the Spongebob Squarepants Module or the Hana Montana Node (and yet terrifyingly “Xenu” made it on to the list of voter suggestions, anyway). What’s most irritating about this is a comment I read this evening by some amateur that NASA shouldn’t honour Colbert’s victory in the naming contest because it would in essence be “free advertising” and inadvertently lend support or credence to the commercial entity that is Comedy Central.

Well let’s review that statement by first examining NASA’s in-house suggestions for names: Serenity, Earthrise, Legacy, and Venture. If you don’t already know the significance of “Serenity”, well, then, you’re a complete tool. But that can be easily fixed either by rapping yourself about the cranium with a heavy, blunt object or simply Googling “Serenity”. Notice how the first several results are all related to a certain film, which is related to a certain show, all of which incorporate a vessel named “Serenity”, itself named after a fictional valley in the TV series Firefly where a pivotal battle took place. First, if you want to be technical — and tasteful — save the frickin’ named “Serenity” for an actual spacecraft worthy of the name, preferably one crewed by an irresistibly ragtag band of mercenary veterans and unlikely heroes, and not some space toilet that in a few years’ time is going to de-orbit and incinerate in another one NASA’s eye-catching displays of global littering. Don’t let it be another Enterprise — you know, the space shuttle Enterprise— which thanks to a write-in campaign by the idiot public not unlike this most recent debacle, named a near-worthless test craft that never actually saw spaceflight and was later cannibalized for spare parts for use in other shuttles after the beloved flagship of Starfleet. It’s refreshing to learn their are plenty of nerds at NASA who can appreciate great science fiction but, please, let these names hold on to their historic and fantastic roots in our collective imagination and not be squandered on trivial technologies that share absolutely no relation to their namesakes.

Commence image-dump (click the images to see the full-sized versions; opens in new tab)…

If anyone happens to have the Family Circus one with the mother and son melding their tentacled faces together and the kid saying something like “I can see into forever”, throw me a friggin bone. That one was awesome.

UPDATE // 04.06.09: I found it! Thanks to KnowYourMeme.com, which also had a great Charlie Brown comic infected with the Nezperdian Hive-mind of Chaos… *saved*.

Also, it’s probably worth mentioning that I got a pingback from Zalgo Approaches, a new website (just registered 03.30.2009) that I hope will become a repository of what is quickly becoming my new favourite meme. Oops, it’s not a meme. Right.

UPDATE // 05.04.09: Added a ninth Garfield Zalgo I just found. And there’s a brief Zalgo analysis taking place at kbps.

]]> http://www.centernegative.com/2009/03/zalgo-he-comes/feed/ 4 http://www.centernegative.com/2009/03/a-heros-welcome/ http://www.centernegative.com/2009/03/a-heros-welcome/#comments Mon, 09 Mar 2009 18:14:36 +0000 Cent.Ex http://www.centernegative.com/?p=73 A great friend of mine, Matt Orphan (”The Orphanator”), is returning home to the West Coast after a hiatus in his hometown of Chicago for a few years to get back on his feet. Things were rough for him in California then, as bad as they are for me and many other people now, and I hope it turns out better for him this time around.

We were originally neighbours in an under-classed apartment complex but when one of his roommates moved out and my own friend and roommate bailed to join the military, I moved in to his place to fill the vacancy. We became great buds almost instantly and he showed this socially awkward goober the ropes. Our apartment became the venue for Tuesday Boozedays, weekly theme parties charged with some of the most sought-after drunken debauchery around that sometimes saw twenty or more people crammed into our three bedroom apartment (thereto after known as “The Orphanage”), sometimes without shirts, sometimes without pants, and always thoroughly trashed.

Matt was the prototypical Man’s Man; a sort of self-indulgent ruffian but whom always knew who is friends were, and often a whiskey-soaked baffoon who probably single-handedly kept the Black Velvet distilleries in profits through the early 2000s. And an enviable lothario who separated the sluts from the dames, like wheat from chaffe. Might seem like I’m trash-talking a bit but, despite whatever irritation factor there was in him being plied with liquor so often and using the community couch for his personal vagina sacrifices, I have more fond memories than not. Besides, as the over-used aphorism goes, he was young then. I’ve seen him and spoken with him since and he’s mellowed out and become an even better person than he already was.

And even back in those days there was a long list of positives about Matt, and he had a huge and likewise positive impact on my life. He never ceased being loyal, noble, and generous, and a stalwart man who would reluctantly say a bad word about anyone, even people who would call themselves his enemy. He was both violent and comical, and I almost never tired of hearing the sordid tales of his many confrontations, a few to which I was witness, and that invariably contained his unique comedic spin that could make light of nearly any situation. He treated me like a brother and introduced me to his own friends as a kindred spirit. And I’d dare to say we, his friends, have been at a loss these last few years for not having him closer.

So tonight it all comes together again and perhaps better than before. Good company and good times ahead. And in difficult times like these, when things are nearly at their worst, good friends are what we all need most. Hail to the King, baby.