Gordon Gartrelle - A BLOG

moved again

2010-09-26T23:26:00.001-04:00

http://nehrujackets.tumblr.com

RIP gordon gartrelle + hello there, nehru jackets

2010-07-09T02:12:00.003-04:00

yeah, this blog's over.

it's been real.

thanks dap, kate, bob, tal, andrew, cf edley, kool a.d., jordan fish and despot.

it's been real. hasn't it?

maybe we'll get around to putting up a best of gordon gartrelle soon.

more likely than not it will be over at my new blog which you should go ahead and "follow' or whatever?

N E H R U J A C K E T S

BOOBTUBE: RIP DIO

2010-05-17T15:33:00.002-04:00

to celebrate youtube's 5th birfday, the laser's 50th birfday, and ronnie james dio's 1st deathday, here's something that combines all three:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MISTER WONDER!!!

2010-05-13T11:20:00.001-04:00

No words.

From THE ANNALS OF THE FLINTERNET...The Most Poorly Designed Glass

2010-05-02T04:52:00.005-04:00

I'm just going to keep writing stuff until you fuckers jump in and stop me. So here goes...

In modern mixology, there are only a few types of commonly used glasses. The Colling glass, named after the retro-cocktail the Tom Collins, is the tallish, normal-sized glass you'd get something like a gin & tonic or a Jack & Coke in. Most highballs are served in a Collins glass.

Then there's the Old Fashioned glass. This is the shorter and wider version of the Collins glass. If you order something like a screwdriver or a rusty nail, it'll probably come in one one of these stocky glasses. Most lowballs are served in an Old Fashioned Glass.

And then there are of course all sorts of specialty glasses such as brandy snifters, champagne flutes, shot glasses, and small rocks glasses for top-shelf liquors. But one of the most commonly used and, in my opinion, poorly designed glasses is the cocktail glass, also known as the martini glass.

This ubiquitous glass was designed expressly to do two things: get people wasted and ensure that they spill their drinks all over the place. I mean, if you get a martini, which is basically 3 shots of gin or vodka in a glass, you're trying to go from zero to sixty in 20 minutes or less. Add to this the top-heavy design of the glass, accompanied by the slim stem and narrow base, and you have disaster lurking in the shadows!

"Build a better mousetrap...", they say. So, people with design sensibilities, make us a better martini glass quick. These old ones are doing nothing but causing tipsy cougars to drench their paisley blouses. Bad scene.

FROM THE ANNALS OF THE FLINTERNET...Rock Stars and the Occult!

2010-05-01T00:19:00.010-04:00

A'ight, homies. I see how it is. I guess GG has become uncool and I'm the last to find out. But whatever, cause I still got shit to write about. And here's some of that shit...

So occult themes have been a major part of music since time immemorial. And certain contemporary musical genres put heavy emphasis on the subject (I'm thinking Black Metal bands and wimpy but rad gothy groups like the Cocteau Twins and the Cure, and Morrisey was way occulty. Also, think of folks like Skip James and Screamin' Jay Hawkins and Ozzy and Alice Cooper. All super into the devil). But there are three individuals in rock history who stand out as true students of the occult, in both a personal and academic sense.

Reg Presley - Lead Singer of the Troggs

His weird fascination - Crop Circles and Monatomic Gold (Alchemical White Gold)

Here is what Reg Presley looks like when he's rocking hard:

And here's where you click for a PDF of Reg Presley's free ENTIRE FUCKING BOOK on his inquiries into monatomic gold. It's an entertaining read. Reg's grammar is a tad lacking, and I'm not sold on the powers of white gold (if the substance even exists), but his enthusiasm makes up for it. And its just nice to see that someone out there is using their rockstar fortune to fund a pursuit into a super-specific and weird but also pretty fascinating endeavor. Reg Presley, you are cool.

Ed Sanders - 1/2 of the creative force behind the Fugs

Odd Fascination - The Tate-LaBianca Murders (The Manson Family Helter Skelter Shitshow)

I fucking love the Fugs. Look at how great they are:

Spoiler Alert: at minute 2:00 some shirtless shit goes down hard.

And here's that same dude's book about the Manson Family murders. Far out, no?

And, of course, there's good ol'...

Jimmy Page - Fucking Guitar Ninja of Led Zeppelin, a totally epic dude

Nutso About - Motherfucking Aleister Crowley!

First check out Page fucking SLAY Dazed and Confused back in '69

Make sure to stay tuned for the gnar-as-shit fiddle-bow-on-the-old-axe solo at minute 3:00ish. Then, at 4:40ish, the true shredding commences. And how fucking cool are Bonham and Plant!? And then there's good old Jonsey, the shy yet brilliant lad in the shadows. Can't we all relate to John Paul Jones just a little bit?

But, when not melting faces with his lightening fingers, Jimmy Page was WAYYYYYY into Victorian-era occult mega-star/perveroo Aleister Crowley. Here's his wiki. If you don't know about his shenanigans, I recommend that you read it. He was a real one-of-a-kind kinda guy, and very influential in early 20th Century western occultism (L. Ron Hubbard was a HUGE fan, btw). So not only does Jimmy Page buy Crowley's cloak at auction and start wearing it while recreating Crowley's Satanic sex rituals, he buys the guy's mansion!

Boleskine House, an 18th Century estate on the shore of Scotland's Lock Ness, was purchased by Crowley in 1899, at the height of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Look at this silly picture of Crowley:

So Page buys this dead sex-magician's dilapidated house, fixes it up, and Zeppelin spend a bunch of time there recording tunes, doing drugs, and effing babes. Good call, Jimmy Page.

That's it. Rock stars. Occult. Nuff said.

FROM THE ANNALS OF THE FLINTERNET...Jesus Fucking Christ!

2010-04-28T02:42:00.006-04:00

Doesn't anyone else contribute to this blog any longer!?! Gordon Gartrelle was once a hotbed of racial and political discourse. In order to stir up controversy and thus reignite Gordon Gartelle's primal fire, I have decided to post a list of offensive words and terms. Please comment on them or personally attack me as you see fit...

Nigger Poontang

Chernozhopyi (antiquated, and Russian)

Chink

Chink Poontang, Nigger

Kyke

Wetback

"Nigger, the Kyke on the Wetback mission Chinked all over our Spic reserve!"

Women

"If a cocksucking faggot ever tried to queer up on my wife, I'd shove my double-gage shotgun down his cornhole-fellating queermo mouth!"

Did you hear the one about the Muslim woman who took off her veil? (please submit potential punch-lines to this set-up in the comments section)

Jigaboo

Spictacular

"You people"

Niggertron (in the future, duh!)

I am trying so hard to be offensive. Please hate me. But actually, please love me.

I Love You All (even the Niggertron prototypes that Halliburton is developing),

Andrew

Also, check out this great list of out-dated and obscure racial slurs

FROM THE ANNALS OF THE FLINTERNET...'Member Shannon Hoon?

2010-04-19T01:26:00.004-04:00

He was groovy. Too bad he's dead.

Also, the terrible interviewer in this video looks like me.

A visit from Kate: personal digital anthropology

2010-04-18T14:52:00.007-04:00

Been awful quiet on here. Everybody busy livin life I guess. Good job y'all. On a personal note, here are some of the things I've googled in the past few months. Stars indicate I remember when and/or why I undertook the search. $ indicates a search that was in some way precipitated by a conversation with another GG blogger. Hyperlinks to results that were most relevant to my intentions.
This functions as a bizarre sort of diary, onto which I can map recent experience in a completely nonlinear way. E.g. I'm fairly certain I was drunk when I googled "quotes about life" but improbably sober and focused when I decided to learn more about "words that start with H." You should try it! Then erase it all!

aafia siddiqui
ahab with a whale (image search)
al franken map*
ayahuasca*
baby razor*
be there in a few knots (not actually a phrase)
best ab toning exercises
birdman* (also)$
brian eno tammy wynette*
can you train pigs like dogs*
cottage industry
death metal rooster*$
driving with dilated eyes*
eating whales
eureeka's castle
fastest magician in the world*$
free willy mj
flying squirrel suit
gore orphanage haunted legend*
gucci mane
gummy bears
halfcocked
history of jetpacks
hydration vessel
how to carmelize onions*
how to start a militia*
human ovulation*
i feel when you
ice cream paint job*
is there a real life mario big world*$ (I have googled some version of this on at least 4 separate occasions)
kim jong il chef memoir *$
killer whale attack human
letters to a young poet
mario lopez* (image search)
moneyshot
most amazing banana bread (really good)
"mr. pizza cake" $ (image search)
my clinique facewash smells terrible why*
naked chinese man attacks car*
ninjetti
no more monkey business
papi
places to smoke in newark airport* (remote googling for someone else)
puppy bowl lineup*$
put it on blast
proclivities
people got a lotta nerve
psychology of extreme sports
quotes about life
rap video
razor that won't hurt a baby*
ride my turtle
roberto kusterle*
runaway jury
shakin it for daddy michelle trachtenberg
showgirls 2
situation room
smurf x-ray*
stooges rider
talespin theme*
time traveling hipster*
terrifying frog*
toys for pot bellied pigs*
unblocking people on gchat*
verdi mart*$
(photographic proof)

was james mason a dbag*
wax rhapsodic
wayne's world dog costume
what is up with whales
words that start with h*
xanax $
young chuck norris
zepoli

BOOBTUBE: LOVE IN THIS COVE

2010-04-09T11:34:00.002-04:00

Author of the new book:
"Wet Goddess: Recollections of a Dolphin Lover."

http://www.nbc-2.com/Global/story.asp?S=12272502

An Evening with Baron Vaughn and Hari Kondabolu

2010-04-07T17:03:00.006-04:00

A stand-up comedy jam with Gordon Gartrelle homies Hari Kondabolu and Baron Vaughn. Two Minority Fest 2009 performers.

WHAT: An Evening with Baron Vaughn & Hari Kondabolu

WHERE: Comix NY (353 West 14th Street)

WHEN: Thurs.

COST: $20 Door, $15 Advance ($10 with Discount) and 2 drinks

ADVANCE TIX: http://comixny.com/event.aspx?eid=747

(SPECIAL DISCOUNT CODE: EWBH)

really the fire right now for cfe

2010-04-07T03:50:00.003-04:00

I do miss you guys a bunch.

FROM THE ANNALS OF THE FLINTERNET...Hang Out --> Passover --> Pass Out --> Hangover

2010-03-30T23:25:00.003-04:00

This year, my mother and I decided to host a Passover Seder. Unfortunately, none of my friends wanted to come.

4:28 PM – Upon mother’s request, I tidied up the house by hiding all unseemly items (Third Reich flatware, radical Palestinian literature, etc.) in the garage before the massive influx of judgmental Jewish retirees begins. Should I start drinking yet? Probably. Will I? No. One must learn the fine art of pacing. And of not blacking out in front of aforementioned retirees.

Fig. 1 - A rare image of North American Jews in their natural habitat. Note the presence of spectacles and red wine.

6:45 PM – Went for a burn cruise under the guise of “returning some video tapes”. Fortunately for my plan’s success, none of the other Jews were hip to the American Psycho reference. I smoked some hash, the unleavened form of marijuana. This seemed appropriate, since it was all Moses and his band of wanderers had to take bong rips of during their 40-year desert adventure.

7:19 – Seder in progress. Being the youngest person at the table by a margin of no less than 30 years, I had to read all Four Questions. Thing is, in the Haggadas we used, they weren’t phrased as questions, but rather as statements. So I had to amend each with a Seinfeldesque, “What’s the deal?”. BAM! Turned it into a question! So glad I got stoned.

7:37 PM – A vicious argument over what qualifies as a “macaroon” just erupted. I left the table without excuse.

7:51 PM – The lady with short, grey hair has some sort of hearing-aid device implanted DIRECTLY INTO HER SKULL! It is somehow complimented by a super Star Trek-looking ear piece. Baller. Except she can’t hear worth shit.

8:07 PM – The retirees have begun prying into my personal life. No good can come of this. I just chased two Klonopins with a swig of gin. That ought to shut them up (or at least make me misinterpret their verbal judgments as enchanting psychedelic folk jingles).

8:23 PM – Just had a rousing, 12-minute conversation with a Matzo ball. Nice guy. He said his name was Christian, which I found odd.

8:40 – The women are arguing over who saw Joan Baez live in concert the earliest. Right now the winner is Ellen, with 1963. I am currently overhearing two separate conversations about Bob Dylan……..

8:43 – Now there are two conversations about Judy Collins! They both evolved independently. I feel as though I’m watching the origin of land-borne life itself. Except everyone keeps saying really embarrassing things.

A visit from Kate: Poet Aydah Al Aarawi Al Jahani

2010-03-25T22:42:00.001-04:00

This is rad.

Sorry for ragging on slam poetry all those years.

But the game show element, it does help.

BOOBNEWS: FUCKBOOK

2010-03-24T23:16:00.004-04:00

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/7508945/Facebook-linked-to-rise-in-syphilis.html

YO WHATS GOIN ON TELEGRAPH, NO 'INTERNET VIRUS' PUN? YOU USED TO BE COOL.

BOOBTUBE: NAME THAT CELEBRITY DRUG

2010-03-14T23:36:00.004-04:00

so all these jawnny boys may have gone virallissimo, but i'd like to bring them back to the forefront for GORDON GARTRELLE'S FIRST ANNUAL GORDON GARTRELLE CELEBRITY DRUG (CON)TEST! It's up to you, the faithful reader, to figure out what (combination of) drugs each of these celebrities is on! Put your answers in the comments, and the best one will receive some sort of prize, probably a digital one that has no value in the real world or even on the internet. BUT IT WILL DEFINITELY HAVE YOUR NAME AND SOME BOOBS ON IT, SO IT WILL BE INVALUABLY COOL.

note that the other gordon gartrelle writers are NOT exempt from this contest, because without them, the contest would only be open to Mike Shamoon and the japanese spambots that really like bigsausagepizza.com.

first, obviously:

next, one of the most befuddling:

and finally, the most buhlarious:

LET THE COMMENTS COMMENCE!

\\\im back \\\gordon gartrelle block spot\\\ THOUGHTS ON GIGGS

2010-03-13T15:11:00.002-05:00

giggs is coming out on the best label in the world xl records. giggs is the truth. this is the only rap i listen to right now and will listen to for the next 9 months. get familiar.

i half expect ALEC to finish this post with an "UPDATE" since he put me on to giggs and it took on a whole new meaning listening to it on his car speakers the other night. oh man, i felt so cool.

this joint "yeah", which we've since referred to simpy as "LOBSTA LUNCH", is what started my obsession with dude. pause. really only the hook:

"from sittin int he trap eatin monsta munch, to in a restaurant, lobsta lunch, yeah"

uk trap rap's the simple headline for his work but this dudes scarier than most trap rap dudes to me. he's not really inviting. alec accurately described him and his style as "that cat in class who would always breathe too heavy". or something like that. i believe this dude when he raps in a way that's akin to hell rell more than anyone else. i dont doubt the so icey cats in atl or jeezy or whatever trap rap you prefer being hard or whatever whatever, wacka flocka getting shot a minute ago seemed like good enough evidence (cause these days GETTING SHOT means you're hood, not AVOIDING GETTING SHOT), but they're also flashy in a way and incapable of painting the vivid imagery giggs does. when rappers rap about guns and then claim they're doing it to show people what their lives are like they tend to simultaneously glorify it. giggs rapping about moving weight sounds depressing as fuck, as it should.

heres what i think is dudes single f/ mike skinner, the streets

another thing that surprises me about dude is how he almost seems hell of awkward. thats not a good look for a rapper typically. even his name giggs comes from his childhood shy-ass giggle. every video i've seen of his involves at least 4 shots of him just looking at the floor. though i don't think that means he's not about grinding. we're almost brainwashed here into believing everyone that makes money is some charming, swagarific big shot talker. i never thought i'd quote memph but... I believe it was rapper Memphis Bleek who once said "the strong move quiet, the weak start riots". giggs strikes that nerve but maybe he's just a shy, awkward dude who also happens to move weight or whatever whatever. he's kind of the anti-swag rapper. THIS IS A GOOD THING

a final point is that english accents are cool. i loved s.a.s. because in the same way giggs reminds me of southern trap rap, new york's equivalent to the crunk and trap movement, dipset early-mid 2000s, has its own british equivalent in Mayhem and his brother who make up S.A.S.

but damn, giggs voice much cooler tho

CF Edley guess we all wicked busy?

2010-03-10T01:18:00.003-05:00

Well I know Boob is on tour with the Easton, PA H.S. Musical Theater Troupe running lights for their reportedly triumphant staging of the Broadway hit "Wicked," but what's the hold up with the rest of us posting and making each other synchronized-weepy? Hopefully nothing. Hopefully, we are all just depressed and uninspired. Even more hopefully, we all got stuck at the Winter Olympics. Vancouver is a hard town to leave. For serious.

And in this serious mood, in these serious, serious times, with the healthcare reform measures being pushed through Congress like a bag of Idaho potatoes up a anus-less preacher's ass, with the earth devestating the already devestated, with whale being served at premeir Santa Monica sushi joints, sad, sad whales, lonely stolen-from-the-great-blue-desert whales, sad giant beautiful smarter than us whales, with Jay-Z running our military, sadly, sadly I give you two versions, serious, serious sad-dubs, dubs that would make Lee Perry cry green tears, tears of mercury, tears of stone, serious tears:

What really?

AWESOME. Really awesome.

I love this job.

FROM THE ANNALS OF THE FLINTERNET...Mert Champagne

2010-03-04T02:51:00.005-05:00

FROM THE ANNALS OF THE FLINTERNET...Chatroulette!

2010-03-03T16:10:00.009-05:00

Has anyone yet to discover the amazing video chat phenomenon known as Chatroulette? A 17-year-old Russian lad created the site just three months ago, and it has since changed my life. Since early childhood I dreamed of a game in which random strangers were paired up with one another. In my daydream these brief encounters took place in an elevator. But on this fantastical website, you and a rando are placed face to face, glimpsing into each other's lives through the tubes of the internet. Here is a brief video outlining some of the interesting things I have encountered while spinning the unpredictable wheel of Chatroulette.

Chatroulette! from Andrew Flint on Vimeo.

LONG-ASS INTERESTING ARTICLE WRITTEN A WHILE BACK IN HARPER'S

2010-03-03T14:23:00.000-05:00

Below is a long-ass interesting article written a while back in Harper's I'm posting now so that I can later link to it in another blog in which I interview the writer Noah Cicero.

The black box:
Inside Iraq's oil machine

By Luke Mitchell

“A gasoline engine is sheer magic,” he said to me once. “Just imagine being able to take a thousand different bits of metal—and if you fit them all together in a certain way—and then if you feed them a little oil and gasoline—and if you press a little switch—suddenly those bits of metal will all come to life—and they will purr and hum and roar—they will make the wheels of a motor car go whizzing around at fantastic speeds. . . .”
—Roald Dahl, Danny the Champion of the World

The striking thing about the Rumaila oil field is that the land itself appears to be so completely dead. The hardpack plain is inorganic, barely even a desert. It had been marshland once, a refuge for night herons and water buffalo, but Saddam bled it dry so that he could more easily exterminate the rebels hiding in the reeds. It is hard to believe anything valuable remains. The engineers say there are at least 115 billion barrels of oil in Iraq, though, much of it right here beneath Rumaila. There could be more, too, maybe twice as much, but three decades of dictatorship and sanctions have slowed exploration, and the war has only worsened matters. Now it is dangerous even to extract the known quantities.

It was for this reason that we were driving across Rumaila late last winter in a convoy of four explosives-resistant SUVs, inside of which were ten employees of the British security firm Erinys, each of whom wore black double-plated body armor and carried, at minimum, a handgun and an assault rifle. The convoy had been arranged to transport a single engineer to inspect a single part of Iraq’s aging and frequently attacked oil infrastructure. Our driver had told us that Rumaila was “friendly-ish” but that there were still some concerns about kidnapping and roadside IED attacks. He drove defensively. Sometimes he would speed up to ninety or a hundred miles an hour in the left lane, against traffic. Sometimes he would pull off onto the hard dirt itself, driving across twin ruts or inventing an altogether new path. There were no towns or villages. In a few rare instances we would pass a low house made of cinder blocks, and sometimes we would see two or three kids running around in front. Our driver would always wave, even when the kids threw rocks at us.

The engineer, whom I will call Sam, was a “project delivery team leader” for Foster Wheeler, the Houston engineering firm the Army Corps of Engineers had hired to oversee much of the oil-field reconstruction.¹1. The Corps, with which I was embedded, asked me not to identify civilians in the field. His title meant that he spent a lot of time in convoys like this, traveling from well to well, inspecting our progress. Sam was precise in his speech and in his dress. His purple button-down shirt was tucked neatly into his jeans, and his boots were dusty but otherwise immaculate. The rest of us had been required to wear Kevlar army helmets for the trip, but Sam, like most of the engineers in Iraq, wore a white hard hat with his name printed on the front. He had been working here almost since the war began, usually eight weeks on, three weeks off, but as of today he had not been home to Texas in thirteen weeks and still had another two weeks to go. When he did get home, he said, he would do nothing for three days but sleep and watch TV.

Sam demonstrated a sort of dry enthusiasm for his work. What makes Rumaila oil so great, he said, is that it is light—its predominant hydrocarbons lack viscosity, which means that you can push them through a pipe and onto a ship without much effort—and it is sweet, which means that it contains only trace amounts of sulfur, which is hard on refineries and expensive to extract. Sam said the best way to know if oil is sweet is to smell it. Sour oil smells like rotten eggs. Sweet oil has a satisfyingly bituminous scent, like hot pavement after a light rain.

The oil in Rumaila is especially sweet, and we could smell it everywhere. For the most part, though, we could not see it. The crude was carefully sealed within the surrounding pipelines, mile upon mile of rusty tubing and oil-blackened flanges perched above the corrosive soil like balance beams. Even the wellheads jutting out of their hardened concrete pillboxes were really just vertical pipes draped with gauges. Sam called them Christmas trees. He said there were no horse’s heads going up and down like you see in Texas and Oklahoma because the oil in Iraq is already under such intense pressure.

The oil remains hidden within this vast arterial matrix all the way from the reservoir to the Persian Gulf. It flows by way of overburdened degassing plants and pump houses and into main lines that parallel the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and then follows their confluence along the Shatt al-Arab Waterway until, a few miles south of the port city of Basra, it plunges into the sea, runs along the ocean floor for another twelve miles, and finally rises abruptly to the surface at a barnacle-encrusted catwalk structure called Al-Basra Oil Terminal. From there it goes everywhere, but mostly to the United States.

I was making that same journey from well to terminal, and yet in all my time in Iraq I would see the oil itself only once. This was in a particularly empty patch of desert, beyond even the lonely cinder-block houses and the rock-throwing kids. We had sped past dry concrete canals and abandoned oil drums and rocket-charred tanks, past mile upon mile of flat dirt and rust, and then we found ourselves driving between a series of mirror-black ponds. These pools crept along both sides of the highway, and through the scratchy ballistic glass of our SUV it was hard to tell at first if the liquid within was oil or water. There were no ripples, though—the pools were thick—and the hot asphalt smell was strong enough that it had become a taste. Sam said the oil came from leaky pipes, that there is no EPA watching over Rumaila. “You have to give the devil his due here,” he said, meaning Iraq. “On a good day, they export 60,000 to 70,000 barrels an hour. If 500 barrels of crude spill on the ground here, what is that? Not more than a half minute of export.”

Oil was selling for about $60 a barrel at the time, and so that half minute of potential export was worth at least $30,000. But Sam was right, of course. Any competent engineer would recognize that these particular pools of oil, already disappearing into the distance, existed within a degree of precision that was irrelevant to the success of the larger project. And, truth be told, seeing the oil was a relief.

I had come to think of Iraq as a kind of black box. Not the black box engineers analyze after a plane crash to determine how the disaster occurred—though such a device would have some metaphoric relevance to Iraq—but rather the black box engineers speak of in describing a mechanism with a known function and an unknown method. The pig goes in one end, the sausage comes out the other, and what goes on in between is no one’s business. More and more of what happens in the world happens inside black boxes. It was not very long ago, for instance, that an interested observer could look under the hood of a car and determine that, yes, gas flowed in through this line, and these ceramic plugs probably sparked that gas, and these tiny explosions—you could practically hear the individual pistons!—were probably what was spinning that shaft. Now, of course, the inside of an engine compartment is almost entirely sealed off. Gasoline goes in, motion comes out, and when that ceases to happen the engine’s innermost ailments are diagnosable only by a computer, which of course is another kind of black box.

Drivers seldom think about how engines work, just as they seldom think about where they get their power. The foot goes down and the car goes forward. Easy. Indeed, discussing the source of our power has become more taboo than discussing the source of our meat, likely for similar reasons. We say the oil is a commodity. That it could be from anywhere. That it is more appropriately understood as a number on a screen, as an idea. We have allowed ourselves to believe that Iraq is not a nation-sized infrastructure with intricate workings—indeed, with many leaky pipes—but a kind of philosopher’s stone, as if through our engineering prowess we had found a way to defy the laws of physics as easily as we defy the laws of war, as if we really could flatten the world with a wish or melt all that is solid into air. This is obviously not true, and it is a dangerous fantasy. The mechanism may become increasingly complex, indeed the accelerating system may blur to invisibility, but every system must be understood before it can be controlled. And here at last, in this oil made visible, was the beginning of understanding.

The oil, according to the Iraqi constitution, belongs to “all the people of Iraq,” but the people of Iraq have never fully been able to exploit their national patrimony. Even when Iraq was at its most extractive—in 1979, just as Saddam was taking full control of the ruling Ba’ath Party—the best it could do was to produce an average of 3.7 million barrels of oil per day. Now, after three decades of advances in extraction technology, it is able to produce about 2.1 million barrels per day. The invasion in 2003 briefly interrupted that flow, but output today is essentially the same as it was just before the war began. Everyone agrees that this is unacceptable. Saudi Arabia produces nearly five times as much oil each day, and even the United States, sucking at the dregs of its own dwindling reserves, manages to produce four times as much.

One of the oft-cited benchmarks for success in Iraq is the passage of a national hydrocarbon law. Even more than the Iraqi constitution, such an agreement would address the major fault lines of the war and of the nation itself, primarily because it would address how the oil money is distributed. But agreement on the law has proved elusive. The Shia in the south and the Kurds in the north happen to be sitting on two very large oil deposits, whereas the Sunnis are concentrated in the center of Iraq, where there is relatively little oil. This trick of geological fate underlies an ongoing political dispute. The Kurds would prefer oil revenue to be distributed on a local basis. The Sunni, who make up a minority of the nation’s population, prefer what they call a federal model, in which all of the oil revenue is shared more or less equally. The Shia, who now control the central government, appear for the most part also to favor a federal model, but some clans in the south have suggested they might prefer to make their own deals. There are other divisions as well. A lively labor movement has emerged since the invasion, and in June some 600 members of the Iraqi Pipelines Union went on strike in Basra, calling for a redistribution of profits. Some union leaders have taken to signing their communications, “Long live the Iraqi working class.”

Whether the disputes are based on geography or religion or class, the result has been constant violence, both against the system of extraction and against the people who maintain it. Since the war began, the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security has tracked “attacks on Iraqi pipelines, oil installations, and oil personnel.” They counted 148 such attacks in 2004, another 100 attacks in 2005, and 101 more attacks in 2006. Some of these were minor efforts: “two rocket propelled grenades fired at exposed and leaking valve,” for instance, or an “explosion apparently caused by homemade bomb thrown under oil and gas pipes.” Some attacks were deadly. The report notes, for instance, that a “bomb blast during changing of the guard at an oil storage facility south of Baghdad in Al Latifiyah killed six Iraqi National Guard soldiers and wounded five more” and also that a bomb on an “oil pipeline near Kirkuk killed an Iraqi oil security chief and eight of his men, who were in the process of defusing another explosive device.”

For this reason, and because they are rich enough to afford it, a great many of Iraq’s native oil professionals have fled the country. The Wall Street Journal in 2006 called this flight a “petroleum exodus” and reported that about a hundred oil workers had been murdered since the war began and that “of the top hundred or so managers running the Iraqi oil ministry and its branches in 2003, about two-thirds are no longer at their jobs.” Now most of the engineers in Iraq are from Texas and Oklahoma. They earn double what they would in the United States, but there is still a shortage of talent in Iraq. The inevitable result is that the oil flows a little slower.

The convoy was taking Sam to West Qurna 7, which was also the next stop for the oil after it left the ground. As we drove, Sam explained that West Qurna 7 was a gas-oil separation plant. Crude oil at the well contained a great deal of natural gas and water and salt. The gas-oil separation plant was where those impurities were removed. Raw crude would flow in one end, undergo a series of thermodynamic processes, and out the other end would come a commodity as consistent and interchangeable as a bag of soybeans.

The first sign of the plant was the flares, three massive plumes of orange flame that smudged black smoke across the horizon. This was the liberated gas. The plant itself was almost entirely out of doors, a football-field-sized complex of pipelines connected to three clusters of compression tanks. Everything had been painted gray, and there was nothing else for miles around but flat plains of strangely abraded dirt.

We pulled to a stop and our driver greeted the Iraqi guards in English. He had to shout over a constant screech, like steel cutting steel, and Sam, also shouting, explained that the screeching was the sound of the oil itself. The crude was under so much pressure that it rattled all the loose parts of the system, especially the valves, as if they were reeds or uvulas. The whole system vibrated in sympathy, the oil-gorged tubes acting like amplifying throats or pipes in a church organ. Sam said the oil would flow more silently once the gas had been removed and the pressure lowered to atmospheric level.

The inspection consisted of making sure that the equipment that needed to be installed—in this case, a desalting unit—had in fact been installed. But Sam also wanted to check the overall condition of the plant and seemed pleased to describe the function of its various components. We would walk and Sam would point to something and shout a brief explanation and then we would move on, surrounded at all times by our security team, half of them walking backward, all of them sighting their rifles into the distance.

We approached a rack of four submarine-sized compression tanks. “Basically, after the well,” Sam shouted, “the crude goes through one of these production trains.” We could hear the crude gushing into the first tank. Sam said the field manager controlled the relationship between the entry and exit valves such that the tank never quite got full. Per Boyle’s law, this increase in volume caused a decrease in pressure, and the decrease in pressure caused the “gas”—which at that point was in fact a liquid in solution—to boil to the surface. You could see the same principle at work by popping open a bottle of Coke. Under pressure the carbon dioxide would remain suspended in solution, but as soon as you decreased the pressure (by opening the bottle), it would boil to the surface. In the first tank, the pressure was lowered just a bit, which caused lighter gas, such as methane, to boil up and out. In the next tank, the pressure was lowered again, and heavier gas, such as propane, would rise from the mix. Finally, the pressure was reduced to atmospheric level, which caused even the heavy butane and pentane to separate. You do it in stages, Sam said, because big pressure drops tend to eat up the equipment.

The next step, as we had seen from the highway, was that the newly liberated gas was flared off. This was not the optimum engineering solution. A more elegant approach would be to send the liberated gas through another series of pipes to a natural-gas liquefaction plant, where it could be further refined and then sold. Some plants in Iraq did just that but many did not, for the simple reason that no one had ever gotten around to building the necessary infrastructure. The result, Sam said, was that Iraq burned away at least $10 million worth of gas every day. Indeed, due to its lack of domestic refinery infrastructure, Iraq is a long-time net importer not only of natural gas but also of gasoline, kerosene, fuel oil, and all of the other much-needed products that may be obtained from raw crude. (This is one reason Baghdad has so little electricity, which is generated in most Iraqi power plants by burning fuel oil or natural gas.) Rectifying this problem has proved difficult not only because of the war—and the looting and the years of sanctions—but also because the entire system had been allowed to collapse under Saddam. Every engineer I met in Iraq seemed to have a special loathing for the former dictator simply because he had taken what was, by the standards of the 1970s, a fairly good industrial infrastructure and run it into the ground.

Saddam’s legacy was everywhere around us at West Qurna 7. As we wandered past another production train, Sam pointed to a yellowing notice that had been glued to one of the tanks. The text was entirely in Russian. Other notices on other tanks were in English. This patchwork of documentation was possibly evidence of Cold War gamesmanship or perhaps just the switch to a new low bidder. Sam was pretty sure the company that built the plant itself was based in Ukraine, but it was hard to know because engineers working under Saddam were reluctant to keep detailed records, and many of the records that did exist were looted or destroyed after the invasion. The current contractors had spent several weeks trying to track down the Iraqi engineers who built the plant just to find out what worked and what didn’t.

We wandered further into the maze of pipes, and Sam paused in front of another tank. This was a desalting unit. Sam said the groundwater in Rumaila is so salty and alkaline that if you put it in your mouth you would gag and probably throw up. The crude that flowed into West Qurna 7 was full of this salty groundwater. Desalting the crude was a fairly low-tech process that also, conveniently enough, involved removing the water. The main problem at West Qurna 7 right now was that some of the desalters were not working, and replacing them had turned out to be a typically convoluted process. The Army Corps of Engineers had hired KBR—which at that moment was in the process of spinning off from Halliburton—to buy new desalters, which would in turn be installed by engineers from South Oil Company, or SOC, which itself was a part of Iraq’s many-tentacled Ministry of Oil. The good news was that SOC was just about finished, which is why West Qurna 7 was able to generate so much noise. It should be noted, though, that there are fifty-two gas-oil separation plants in Iraq, as well as three major and fourteen smaller refineries, fifteen major pump stations, and 1,600 wellheads, all of which are attached to 4,350 miles of rusty and ill-maintained pipeline. None of it works very well.

We continued through the maze. One of the Erinys men warned us to duck as we passed under some low pipes full of newly degassed oil. It was quieter now, and I could hear the static of his radio. Sam pointed to a cluster of concrete buildings in the distance and said they housed transfer pumps. Behind the pumps we could see a series of towers that carried high-tension lines off into the distance. After the oil had been degassed and depressurized it had no more natural momentum. Moving energy requires energy, though, and these pumps, driven by the equally embattled electrical infrastructure, would invest the dry crude with the power it needed to continue its journey to the Gulf.

The United States has committed less than $3 billion to repairing Iraq’s oil infrastructure, which is not very much money. The government of Iraq could reinvest its own oil income—just over $30 billion in 2006—but oil and international aid are pretty much the government’s only sources of income, and the country has several other pressing concerns, including the need to rebuild its failing agricultural, educational, electrical, and medical infrastructures. Iraq also owes various creditors about $100 billion and owes Kuwait an additional $250 billion in reparations from the first Gulf War. (Some of that debt may be forgiven.) Meanwhile, the engineers I spoke to said it would take tens of billions of dollars just to get the oil infrastructure up to international standards and as much as $100 billion to fully exploit the nation’s potential oil wealth. The extent of that potential wealth is unknowable, but at 115 billion proven barrels times, say, $60 a barrel, it is in the neighborhood of at least $7 trillion and probably far more than that. (As of this writing, the price of oil has climbed to more than $80 a barrel.) All of this puts Iraqis in a situation familiar to anybody who has ever had a check on the way but needed a lot of money right now. They can get the money, but it will cost them.

I asked Sam about the reconstruction and he had fairly strong views on the matter. He said Iraq should use the best available technology, the expensive kind, and it should use that technology as quickly as possible. The Iraqis could probably upgrade the system on their own—they were smart enough and ambitious enough—but it would take them twenty years: “They need the horizontal wells, they need the secondary, tertiary recovery processes, they need access to capital, and all of those things rhyme with foreign oil companies.”

Sam seemed to understand that he was suggesting something controversial. The oil companies certainly have enough money. Six of the ten largest corporations in the world—ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Total—are in the oil business, and those six companies together earned $1.5 trillion in 2006. ExxonMobil, which last year made $40 billion in profits alone, could start drilling advanced wells within a few months of signing a contract. But no major oil company thus far has been able to strike any significant deal with the government of Iraq. The Kurds have made a kind of separate peace with several American and European oil companies in the past few months, but the central government in Baghdad says such deals will not be legitimate until Iraq’s parliament passes the draft hydrocarbon law. The law itself is foundering, however, in part because of disagreement over how such deals should be structured.

The current draft of the law calls for “production sharing agreements” between Iraq and its potential oil-company partners. Such agreements are rare—they divert an unusually large portion of oil wealth to the oil companies—and typically are struck only in unexplored regions where a large capital investment would represent a significant gamble on the part of the oil companies. Much of Iraq does remain unexplored, but no one doubts the country’s oil-producing potential. The risk in Iraq stems from the war itself and from the clear instability of the government, which at times appears to lack the support even of its American sponsors. Such a government could fall at any moment, and whatever entity replaced it could “nationalize” a company’s investment or require a new tax on exports or simply push the country further into genocidal chaos, all of which would be bad for business. The proposed agreements basically amount to a risk premium, and the proposed premium is steep. A 2005 joint study by the Global Policy Forum and the British research group Platform noted that any agreements signed “while the Iraqi state is very weak and still under occupation” would last twenty-five to forty years and ultimately cost Iraq between $74 billion and $194 billion.

The people of Iraq could wait for better terms, of course. Their oil is only going to become more valuable. Sam called this “the theory of saving stuff for the grandchildren.” When the East Texas field was developed, he said, there were a lot of operators who didn’t want to run their wells at capacity. They were in no rush to get the oil out of the ground because they thought: Hey, we’re already filthy rich—let’s save it for the grandchildren. Now, that might make sense from the perspective of achieving maximum value over time, Sam said, but achieving maximum value over time doesn’t always make sense. He had spent a few days working in the fields near Sadr City once, for instance, and a lot of the people up around there (“old boys,” in his Texas parlance) didn’t even have running water or indoor plumbing or really anything at all other than their tents. “So on the one hand they’re saving for the grandchildren,” Sam said. “But on the other hand, ask that old boy down there who only has two hours of electricity if he wants to save it for the grandchildren.” Sam’s guess was that he probably would not. And indeed in October the New York Timesreported that Iraq’s electricity minister, Karim Wahid, had signed a $150 million contract with Sunir—an Iranian company—to construct a 160-megawatt power plant in Sadr City. “This is a free marketplace,” an anonymous U.S. military official explained, “so there’s not much we can do about it.”

Many of the engineers in Iraq live at Basra Airbase, an immense interruption of the empty desert that is honeycombed by mile upon mile of precast concrete barriers. These barriers are everywhere in Iraq, and sometimes you can see a parade of eighteen-wheelers transporting a few hundred more of them to wherever someone or something needs to be stopped. I was told that whenever a rocket was lobbed over the top of the tallest of them a siren would go off and the security guards would announce that we were in condition red. This had happened 160 times in the previous three months.

The base itself began as a simple regional airport and has evolved into an intricate assemblage of functions, a literal military-industrial complex. The government of Iraq operated the commercial airport at its core, the British Royal Air Force operated a separate military airport, and several other military or quasi-military units, including the Army Corps of Engineers, had their own Quonset huts and white single-wide trailers, all of which had been configured, Lego-like, into hundreds of offices, bunkhouses, dining facilities, and latrines. KBR had a large camp there as well, which housed not only the KBR staff but also several Foster Wheeler engineers (including Sam) and two lone U.S. officers.

One of those officers was Steven Loken, a youthful Air Force lieutenant colonel who had been transferred from Hawaii to manage the oil program in Basra. This morning I was sitting with him and Erich Langer, a public-affairs officer from the Corps of Engineers who was accompanying me as I traveled in Iraq, in a fluorescent-lit cubbyhole of an office and learning about how the reconstruction worked. Colonel Loken began by warning us that he himself had arrived here only six weeks ago and that he was learning most of what he knew from private contractors like Sam. Moreover, he was an electrical engineer, so he did not want to claim any special expertise in oil extraction. He had already learned a lot, though. Moving the oil from the ground to the ship involved billions of dollars in capital development and the ceaseless labor of thousands of accountants, electricians, engineers, pipe fitters, security guards, and others. The repairs alone involved hundreds of companies working under contract to dozens of agencies, all of them with varying degrees of access, expertise, and honesty—Axsia, BearingPoint, Boots & Coots, Eastern National Oilfield Services Company, Erinys, Gas Packing Company, Iraqi Drilling Company, KBR, North Oil Company, Oil Pipelines Company, Parsons Iraq Joint Venture, South Oil Company, Wild Well Control, Inc.—as well as the Army Corps of Engineers, the Department of Energy, the State Department, soldiers and representatives from a dozen other coalition member countries, and, of course, the people of Iraq.

Colonel Loken pointed to a whiteboard behind his desk where he had written in Magic Marker the names and cost of the projects he oversaw. The list was divided into two columns. On the left were projects under contract with KBR and on the right were projects under contract with Parsons Iraq Joint Venture, or PIJV, an offshoot of the Pasadena-based construction firm Parsons. The projects were organized by Army task order. Task Order 11 was the $136.7 million upgrade of several natural-gas liquefaction plants, which would help reduce wasteful flaring and provide the country with significantly more cooking fuel. Task Order 12 was to repair desalters (including those at West Qurna 7), at a projected cost of $91.6 million. Task Order 22 was a series of well workovers: $69.6 million. Some projects were more mysterious. Task Order 28, for instance, would cost $7 million and was labeled simply “chemicals.”

Erich, the public-affairs officer, was from Oklahoma, the son of a petroleum geologist, and he seemed as fascinated as I was by the inner workings of this complex bureaucratic mechanism. Loken continued to describe the chain of command, how the State Department intersected with the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office and how the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office intersected with the Army Corps of Engineers and how the Army Corps of Engineers intersected with dozens of private contractors—some American, some British, some even Iraqi—and how all of them, in turn, intersected with the government of Iraq, which had its own set of complex and evolving bureaucracies. Erich, who had been in Iraq almost from the beginning of the U.S. occupation, added that once all of the projects on the whiteboard had been completed, the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office would close up shop. All of the subcontractors would go home or, more likely, contract directly with the government of Iraq and continue their work. Most of the projects on the whiteboard were slated for completion within the year, but those projects did not by any means attempt to address the full extent of Iraq’s restructuring concerns. They were just stopgaps. Moreover, the war would continue. Some of the projects, once completed, would simply be re-destroyed. I had heard someone mention that the British would take over the KBR camp when KBR finished here and that the U.S. State Department would take over the PIJV camp. It would take one to three years to accomplish the turnover. But who knew? “It’s like building an airplane as you fly,” Erich said.

About an hour into our conversation we heard what sounded like someone dropping something very heavy on the floor above us. Erich and Colonel Loken looked at each other and I remembered that we were in a one-story building. “Whoa,” Colonel Loken said. “That’s incoming.” A high alarm began to sound and Colonel Loken suggested we move to a bomb shelter. On the way out I noticed that the twin clocks in the hallway told Iraq time and Houston time.

We joined several other engineers in an open-ended concrete box known as a Scud bunker. The weather was perfect, a beautiful California afternoon, and the mood in our bunker was strangely upbeat. We crouched on our benches and analyzed the situation. The attacks, one of the engineers explained, rarely came more than one at a time. The bad guys would get their hands on a 105-mm mortar round or an old Russian Katyusha rocket or even an American rocket left over from the Iran-Iraq War, and they would lean it against a low wall and light it up like a Roman candle and then run like hell. They hardly ever hit anyone. All we had to do was wait for the all-clear siren.

As we waited, our discussion, still in the analytical mode, turned to the strange ways of the Iraqis. One engineer, a Scotsman, recalled the Iraqi practice of sacrificing an animal anytime a new plant was opened. It was a hell of thing, he said. Blood everywhere. Erich nodded and said he’s seen a ceremony at a plant up north where the Iraqis had killed four sheep. They had dipped their hands in the blood and then walked through the industrial corridors, painting bright red streaks on the walls. It was all part of the blessing, he said. The bigger the plant, the more animals you sacrifice.

Not all of the oil makes it to the Gulf. There is the spillage, of course, but there is also the matter of theft. The Ministry of Oil has a tradition of bribery that long predates the current war, and the American contractors too have seen their share of corruption charges, though their tendency is to steal money from Americans, not oil from Iraqis. Most of the smugglers, in fact, are local operators. Some simply drill a hole in the pipeline and fill modified pickups directly from the source. Others bribe officials to look the other way as they load eighteen-wheelers at inland terminals. TheGuardian reported in June that one clan was netting $5 million a week selling stolen crude to local refineries, $250,000 of which went right back into paying gunmen to protect them from other smugglers in other clans. Many believe that smuggling profits are funding the insurgency. The underworld battle between various criminal elements has itself undoubtedly led to considerable violence, and certainly has added a not very well understood layer of political intrigue to the hydrocarbon-law negotiations. One Mahdi Army fighter told a researcher for the International Crisis Group that “All parties, without exception, steal and smuggle oil. I mean all of them.”

No one knows how much oil the smugglers take from the system. The Iraq Study Group reported that “150,000 to 200,000—and perhaps as many as 500,000—barrels of oil per day are being stolen,” and that estimate has since been repeated in other news reports. It is a very large claim, and as I was eating lunch at an oil facility one day I overheard a Navy engineer ridiculing it. He said moving that much oil out of the system would require something like a thousand tank trucks every day to transport their loot to a refinery or across the border, and that they would have to do this without being detected in what is possibly the most heavily surveilled country on earth. The engineer seemed fairly confident in his scorn—he suggested that maybe the real culprits were little green men—but my own sense was that you could move a lot of trucks around in Iraq before someone figured out they weren’t part of someone else’s mission.

There is another failure of accounting that may explain the massive smuggling estimates. Two U.S. agencies report on how much oil Iraq produces. The Department of Energy keeps track of production everywhere on earth and has a standard reporting method. The State Department, which is ultimately responsible for the reconstruction, also generates daily reports, but only about Iraq. The Government Accounting Office compared their data and found a large discrepancy. The State Department was consistently reporting higher production than the Department of Energy, often by as much as 300,000 barrels per day. When the GAO first announced its findings last spring, many news outlets saw this gap as evidence of smuggling and corruption. The Department of Energy noted in the GAO report, though, that the discrepancy could also be explained by a perhaps even more dispiriting phenomenon: the Department of Energy does not count as “produced” the significant amount of oil that Iraq extracts and then, for lack of an alternative, simply injects back into the ground.

This might seem an improbably Sisyphean twist, but it is true that Iraq is now somewhat better at producing oil than at exporting it. The northern pipelines have been shut down by saboteurs for most of the year, and one of the country’s two off-shore terminals is barely functioning, while the other, Al-Basra Oil Terminal, has been operating at far below capacity for decades. Iraq also has very little oil-storage capacity, so any oil that cannot be exported or refined immediately must be returned to the reservoir. This is called reinjection. One engineer told me that Iraq is the only country in the world that still reinjects. The process is not only frustrating and wasteful; it is also bad for oil fields. Further complicating the accounting is the fact that some of the oil is partially refined before it is reinjected. Refiners strip the gasoline from the oil, sell it for local consumption, and put the remaining, now-cruder crude back in the ground, where it devalues the entire field.

Plausible as this explanation for the accounting discrepancy is, it is impossible to know whether it is correct, or how much smuggling goes on, or even how much oil is pumped out of the ground or back into it, because—almost unbelievably—the entire system lacks meters. At no point is the flow of oil measured within Iraq. The GAO report notes that the United Nations “first cited the lack of oil metering when Iraq was under U.N. sanctions” in 1996 and that Iraq had in 2006 signed an agreement with Shell Oil Company, which was to “advise the ministry on the establishment of a system to measure the flow of oil, gas, and related products within Iraq and in export and import operations.” But still no meters. Measuring a flowing, transforming, regularly spilled, and often stolen product as it makes its way across a war-ravaged desert is not easy. The best Iraq could do was to track the oil as it left the terminal, but the meters there have not worked for years, and so the technique was not precise. A Navy lieutenant explained the method to the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. He said they “guesstimated” the output based on the displacement of departing ships: they would watch the waterline, and each centimeter the tanker sank represented another 6,000 barrels of oil. “So you can imagine,” the lieutenant said, “a couple of inches could equal 180,000 barrels of fuel.”

There were improvements in the works, though. One of the projects on the whiteboard in Colonel Loken’s office was Task Order 16. The $42.6 million contract was in the PIJV column, and it had been awarded in 2004. The goal was to refurbish the terminal, improve worker safety, improve loading capacity—which, not incidentally, would help solve the problem of reinjection—and fix the meters. Progress had been slow, but as it happened, Colonel Loken and his boss and his boss’s boss were flying out from Basra Airbase to the terminal to inspect PIJV’s work, and he said Erich and I could fly along and see for ourselves what they had done.

When Erich and I arrived at the Royal Air Force helipad, our Sea Hawk was already fired up, and the whack-whack-whack of the rotors made meaningful speech difficult. Colonel Loken gave us a shouted introduction to his boss, Captain Fritzley, who was noticeably short, wore rimless glasses, carried his cell phone in a holster, and, until the National Guard called him up, had run a fifty-man logistics team for Boise Cascade in Idaho. I noted the complexity of the contracts he must be negotiating right now, and he laughed and said, “I’m an engineer, not a lawyer.” Captain Fritzley’s boss was General Abt, who showed up just a few minutes later—leathery skin, shaved head, identical rimless glasses—and was accompanied by several silent aides, one of whom kept his dog tags twined into his shoelaces.

The journey from oil field to terminal with a two-star general is somewhat less complicated than the same journey for crude in the pipe, but it is still difficult and dangerous and done in stages. We crowded into the Sea Hawk, bound up in our body armor and oddly constrictive Navy lifejackets, and before I could finish buckling everything together we were off. We flew fast at about a hundred feet, rising only to pass over the occasional power line, and the combination of low altitude and high speed caused the already indistinct landscape beneath us to blur into a reflective field. The brown-and-tan flux was so smooth that it created the illusion of a rippling desert ocean, an illusion that was dispelled only by the occasional set of tire tracks, and then the brown ripples turned a shade lighter and we really were over the Gulf. We could see rusty fishing boats and the occasional freighter, and the sea deepened to a steely gray and we lost sight of the shore. We flew in odd lines, rolling left then right, the better to confuse would-be missile attackers, and then—as abruptly as we had taken off—we landed. We were on the flight deck of an Australian frigate, the HMAS Toowoomba, rotors still whacking, and an Australian seaman was shouting a greeting and hustling us quickly to a lower deck, where we disentangled ourselves from our armor, and another seaman lowered an orange rope ladder over the side and we climbed awkwardly down, hanging under the high ship for the last few rungs, and onto a twelve-man rigid-hull inflatable boat, which, as soon as the last passenger had tumbled aboard, raced off across the open sea. Then it was all bouncing and waves, a dozen men in a rubber boat in the ocean, until—and this had all taken about ninety minutes—we could see the terminal.

It was a spidery arrangement low on the horizon, a central platform about five stories tall with two long catwalks extending a half mile in opposite directions. At the end of each catwalk were two berthing stations, and attached to each berthing station was a very large oil tanker. As they loomed closer we could see their names: the British Pride, the Tiara, the Front Crown. The last of them, the Universal Hope, was low in the water and beginning, with the aid of two tugboats, to pull away. Captain Fritzley looked out at the oil-gorged tankers and said that if you wanted to shut down Iraq, this sure would be the place to do it.

There were no concrete barriers here, just latticework catwalks and ladders and miles of pipe. The workers, from Texas and Oklahoma and also from Iraq and Kuwait, wore bright yellow coveralls and American-style goatees or bushy sideburns or handlebar mustaches. The security came in the form of four massive, twin .50-caliber machine guns, one on each corner of the central tower, manned by the men of Mobile Security Squadron Seven, a part of the U.S. Navy. A little plaque noted that the guns had a maximum effective range of 1,829 meters, which—along with several Navy warships just over the horizon—had been sufficient to defend the terminal since the war began. For all its intricate scaffolding, the terminal seemed solid. The dozens of lines that held the ships fast were thicker than my well-fed arm.

As we walked along the catwalk in the direction of the departing Universal Hope, Captain Fritzley told us about the terminal’s past and future prospects. Saddam Hussein had hired KBR’s corporate predecessor Brown & Root to build it in 1973, six years before he took full control of the Ba’ath Party. Iran had bombed it several times in the ’80s, and it fell into further disrepair under U.N. sanctions in the ’90s. It was theoretically capable of loading 4 million barrels a day, but it had never operated at anywhere near that level. In the past couple of years PIJV had worked to improve the safety systems, train the workers in how to use them, update the power systems, fix the loading arms, and fix the meters. They had made some progress, but the meters still weren’t working. This was a concern. (“I’ll tell you what,” General Abt muttered to another officer as we wandered down the catwalk, “I’ve had more ass kicked in the last two weeks than in the whole rest of the time since I got here.”)

I later learned that the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, or SIGIR, had just issued a report in January severely criticizing Parsons’s $75 million Baghdad Police College project—the inspectors found, for instance, that failed plumbing had somehow caused several overhead light fixtures to fill with urine and feces—and was about to issue another report criticizing the Parsons-built Iraqi Civil Defense Headquarters in Baghdad, citing faulty security systems and more leaky pipes. As a result of the investigations, the inspector general was considering barring Parsons from future contracts with the Army. SIGIR was investigating the terminal project as well, and in another report, issued just a few weeks after our visit, it would note deficient concrete pours, substandard plumbing installation, and unsafe electrical wiring. The more satisfying news, also noted by SIGIR, was that all four berths were in operation, which was a major breakthrough in Iraq’s export capability, and the meter project was on track for completion. (Erich later wrote to tell me that PIJV finally completed its part of the project in May, at which point it closed up shop and sent its engineers home.) Still, there was much to be done, and the work would likely continue only in fits and starts.

Erich and I climbed a four-story spiral staircase to the crow’s nest, the highest point on the platform. Some of the stairs were loose and the railing did not seem entirely reliable. The view was worth the risk, though. The sun had come out and the sea lit up in a brilliant cerulean wash. The station itself had been painted in Tonka truck primaries: bright red, yellow, and blue. I could see at least two tankers near the horizon, high on the water and waiting their turn.

That the black box works at all is a significant achievement. Yes, the crude is impeded by friction and siphoned by thieves and thousands of barrels fall along the way, victim to leaky pipes and relentless saboteurs. But the machine, the vast engine of transformation, continues for the moment to function. The sparks ignite and the pistons pump and the desert crude is transformed into heat and light and motion, and also into money. All of this is the work of engineers. They overbuild and create backups and fail-safes, and after a while it seems as if their systems could never go awry, no matter how poorly maintained, no matter how overburdened, no matter how corruptly constituted. The engineers have made a machine, though—not a miracle—and a machine can always fail, or be made to fail, or simply be turned to some other purpose.

This is how the last war began: Saddam invaded Kuwait, largely in order to control Kuwait’s superior oil-production system. He had overseen much of the construction of his own oil machine and likely believed he had an engineer’s understanding of its inner workings. He knew that Kuwait and Iraq both were part of OPEC, whose member nations had for many years controlled international oil prices by agreeing to limit how much oil they produced. And he knew that Kuwait was producing (and selling) far more than its quota. This meant more money for Kuwait and, because it drove down the price of oil, less money for everybody else, including Iraq. The invasion was meant to shift the gears, so to speak. With Saddam in control of Kuwait’s oil machine, Iraq not only would increase its oil holdings but also would considerably improve its refining and export capacity, and ultimately add billions of dollars to its national wealth. And it would do all of this even as it kept oil prices at OPEC-preferred levels, which would go a long way toward muting protests from Iraq’s oil-producing neighbors.

Of course, Saddam was no more adept at manipulating the regional oil system than he was at maintaining his own infrastructure. The neighbors complained, the United States intervened, and Saddam had no choice but to retreat. But even in retreat he worked what levers he could. And here is where we see the violence that can spill forth from within the black box. Saddam ordered his retreating army to set each of his enemy’s 700 wells afire. Great jets of flame shot into the sky, and the oil that wasn’t turned into heat or light poured back down as black rain, a demonstration of thermodynamic transformation that seemed at first to be immeasurably more wasteful than the gas flares of West Qurna 7. And yet Saddam aimed to control the force of those fires just as a driver controls the force of the thousands of miniature explosions that occur every minute within the internal-combustion engine of his car. By destroying Kuwait’s oil machine, he would drive up the price of his own reserves.

Saddam proved to be a poor engineer in this regard as well, however, and so came the inevitable ironic turn. He was forbidden to sell his nation’s oil until the United Nations established the Oil for Food Programme in 1995—and by then Kuwait had managed to repair and indeed significantly improve its own infrastructure. In the end, Saddam had failed to appreciate the true complexity of the systems he was attempting to master, not an uncommon problem.

Prometheus and the citizens of Babel discovered long ago that hubris generally is followed by disaster. In this land of lifeless desert clay, though, it is the tale of the golem that seems most fitting. A rabbi with knowledge of the secret name of God, the story goes, could transform an earthen statue into an unstoppably powerful ally. Every wish of the rabbi was answered by the strength of the golem, who in many instances would defend the rabbi’s village from outside danger. Sometimes the story ends well. In many golem tales, though, the inventor suffers for his knowledge. One such tale has the rabbi crushed by the weight of his collapsing creation.

It seems to me that in this non-mythical world, this immutably Newtonian world, the golem turns on us not because we know too much but because we know too little. We are punished not by the gods or by fate but by our own willful stupidity. We make our machines and then forget they are our creations, there to be understood and controlled, perhaps because knowledge of their methods also brings knowledge of their purpose. We stand agog, self-paralyzed, even as all that is solid moves ever more quickly, blurring indistinguishably like the war-scarred desert beneath us, a golem drawn from the dying ground and running beyond our control.

The trip back from the terminal was much faster. We passed over a town—the first inhabited place I’d seen in Basra—and the coastline was suddenly complex. Railroad depots, grain elevators, a gravel lot mysteriously gridlocked by a hundred identical brown pickup trucks. Freighters loitered along concrete ports, and the gradation between land and sea was perfectly sharp. Then we flew inland across the desert and, surprisingly, the sky filled with a light mist of rain. It was dusk now and I could just see the hazy outline of a refinery in the distance, pipelines extending in every direction, a dark tangle of oil and water and gas that flared bright orange smudges on the violet horizon.

Later that night, back at the airbase, Erich asked me if I had noticed the rain. I told him I had. I thought it softened the desert to the point where it was almost beautiful. Sure, he said, but smell it. It doesn’t smell like rain, not like back home. I couldn’t see his face very well—the camp was kept dark at night to discourage snipers—so I couldn’t tell if he was taken aback by the perversity of the weather or simply alert to an unusual inversion of the natural order. Erich was the son of a geologist, though, and it was clear that he had considered the matter carefully. He said the rain down here smelled like dirt. And he was right. If such a thing was possible, the rain smelled dry.

DREAM POTATO, REAL LIFE CONSEQUENCES

2010-03-01T03:25:00.000-05:00

I had a dream where I was eating a baked potato and I woke up with my face covered in drool.

A VISIT FROM AUNT BOOB: ALL EYES ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL

2010-02-28T17:43:00.006-05:00

i just got a two dollar bill as change from a gas station (only in new orleans?) and i noticed something:

TOMMY JEFF HAS TOTAL CRAZY EYEZ!

What the fraggle rock, right? What's even weirder is that apparently no one else on the internet has ever brought this up. Here are some similar pics of him with his whiffle ball of a left eye, but clearly these artists had a little more discretion about the dude's ocular misfortunes:

that's it. go back about your normal business.

"The End" Title Card from Casablanca

2010-02-27T23:43:00.000-05:00

A VISIT FROM AUNT BOOB: WHEN TRANSTURBATION'S LOST ITS FUN

2010-02-26T17:21:00.007-05:00

so i guess there's a new "airquotes" trend that is sweeping up the young internet surfers and boogie boarders: typing shit into Google Translate (or your internet translator of choice) and converting it through several languages then back into English (or your first language of choice), much like that game "Telephone," which Wikipedia ironically calls Chinese Whispers.

I've been recently alerted to this by many friends, and that somewhat alerts me. did not everybody do this way back in the early days of the innaweb? i dont wanna sound like i'm sayin i started the trend or nothin, i just remember being in middle school and going to altavista and bouncing the phrase "Barry Schatz Sucks Rusty Wieners" through a bunch of languages until something like "Black Barstool Fingering Hamburger Koala Cock" came out. Of course, we called it Transturbation, which isn't really a good pun name, but it stuck, because we were in middle school.

and even though I wanna call Old Hat on this shit, I still think it's pretty funny, so I took a new stab at it with a story written by me and the wonderifulous necrolander David MacNutt, called Disgusting Dog Island, which is already one of the most non-sensical and unintelligible pieces of drivel put to e-paper. first I transturbated it through five funny languages and it's now called Total Inujima (which I guess is a place in Japan whose name is written with the kanji for Dog and Island [go fig]), but then I went for the gold (pun intended for Dave and Andrew only) and transturbated it through every single language that Google has to offer, in alphabetical order, now called Kennel Barley Island (way worse name).

Needless to say, the story reads just about the same.

Oh shit, I just remembered that we had to have internet pen pals at some point in middle school, and I convinced this kid in Belgium (who spoke perfect English) that I was from the Ukraine by writing only heavily transturbated emails. Sorry Dirk.

I can't wait for open mic nights to be flooded with poets simply reading printouts of their latest livejournal entries transturbated a couple times. i literally cannot wait.

A DRAWING FROM DAP: BANANAMAN THINKS OF HOME

2010-02-25T02:45:00.008-05:00

Bananaman Thinks of Home (2010)

click to enlarge

Woke up after having a dream somewhat like this. I was forced to wear a banana suit at a large party where people were drinking purple drank and I kept kept getting incredibly sad thinking about people I had known, frolicking with them in some sort of meadow? I couldn't draw that so I drew this shitty apple + grape combo balloon instead. ENJOY!

Using some Crayola "Pip-Squeaks Mix 'Ems" markers my 4 year old cousin left here instead of the old markers.

Also, big ups to the homie CFE:

Wikipedia (2010)

2010-02-25T02:18:00.004-05:00

CF Edley Been A Minute Minute Assemblage

2010-02-24T19:29:00.002-05:00

Hey guys, whassuper? I've been having a great time! The east was really fun. I like people there a bushel and a peck. But it was busy, and I didn't have much time to spend on yotub. But now I do. And I kinda came across a bunch of things I like a lot. Can you find the psycho-narrative golden thread? Or should I say, golden threat?

Starting off with my original GG charge [Reggae etc.], here's a really confusing Big Youth John Holt version:

I think that's just wonderful! What do you think?

Okay, cool. Did you know I have a favorite sweatshirt? I do! It's a Pierre Cardin sweatshirt that Pierre Cardin made at some point in time. Boy, don't you sometimes wonder what Pierre Cardin was really into in 1973?

That really cleared a lot of things up for me! Like that darker chicks should have to hold their necks on when it's windy on the roof. I didn't know that before!!

This song is good, but don't tell anyone you agree, cuz they'll call you CRAZY:

This thing is something nobody knows what to think/feel about:

What a genre! What endurance!

Okay, here's something really nice to end it with:

Don't you just love that?!

Okay, so yeah guys and guydettes, this has been great for me. What was I talking about?! I don't even know. Really I do hope you've had a fun time too! If you have any ideas you can put them in the comments section. I'd love to hear what you are thinking about! It's always really interesting for me to know what other people try to think about. People are fascinating!

Also, I should say thanks to all the lovely people who I had fun with back east, again. Really. Thanks a lot a lot a lot!

love,

cfe

A DRAWING FROM DAP: WELCOME

2010-02-24T16:53:00.006-05:00

Welcome (2010)

click to enlarge

Not too happy with this one. Just got new markers, they're not very good and I'm getting used to using them. Grayed out the background. Also messed up a few times drawing in a rush. But whatever, way more to come, already have a couple of ideas for the new markers that won't expose their weaknesses (more like WACKnesses, am I right?) so much.

Weird (F'd Up) Dream I Had

2010-02-24T00:47:00.005-05:00

Had a dream that Jim Belushi on According to Jim asked his brother-in-law to jerk off in a cup, and Jim threatened to quote-unquote "take it" from his bro-in-law if he didn't comply. Then his bro agreed only if Jim ran around the neighborhood in drag, as recompense. Then I woke up on the couch and realized I'd heard the episode exactly correctly. Weird, right?

MY OWN PRIVATE RHIZOME

2010-02-23T12:33:00.002-05:00

(via Rhizome dot org)

I could watch this a few too many times.

GORDON FISH RITES!

2010-02-23T11:11:00.002-05:00

(via Visual-A.I.D.S. (via Endless Suffering))

FROM THE ANNALS OF THE FLINTERNET...A line from the Allmusic.com biography of Roky Erickson:

2010-02-23T05:36:00.002-05:00

'In 1982 he signed a legal affidavit declaring that a Martian had taken residence in his body, and gradually disappeared from music as the decade wore on."

Awesome.

A VISIT FROM DAP: SUPERGROUP IN THE PARK

2010-02-22T17:33:00.004-05:00

Just had a dream that GG homie Chris had assembled a supergroup to perform in a scenic park. Members of several bands had come together to form a supergroup a la Spanish Broads. I was playing "timpani" which was actually a steel drum I played exactly like a normal drum kit and the sound resembled an electronic drum kit. This part was AWESOME. I was playing next to a composite East Asian man who was a combination of two people I've known in the past. Three songs in, the East Asian man's guitar broke and Chris frustratedly asked him what happened. They tried to swap out guitars but the new one didn't work. Shortly afterwards Chris ran into the woods that were behind us in the park and hundreds of members of the crowd and the band followed him. He literally turned into Pan (the mythical half-goat creature, not this man from Suckers) and started leading everybody in a song I cannot remember.

A VISIT FROM AUNT BOOB: THE PARIS KENTUCKY PEACE ACCORDS

2010-02-21T19:53:00.007-05:00

speaking of transcendent, here is an actual video of Henry Kissinger doing the weather on some morning schlock show on CBS. Unequivocally bizarre.

JORDAN FISH WRITES!

2010-02-21T18:15:00.004-05:00

Just watch. This is transcendent. Love the foppish shock from dudebag.

THE NEW GORDON FISH TIMES: GANG SIGNS WITH PLASTIC BAGS ON HANDS, 2010

2010-02-19T13:24:00.003-05:00

Brad Troemel is a artist. youtube / tumblr.

FROM THE ANNALS OF THE FLINTERNET...The Pope Digs These Jams

2010-02-18T19:03:00.023-05:00

In a recent issue of its newsletter, L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican, not unlike countless entertainment organizations before it, released its "Top 10 Albums of All Time" list. More shocking than what made the list, perhaps, is what was omitted. Where is the Benedictine Monks' classic "Chant", or good ol' what's-her-name's album with that song "One of Us?" (I can't restrain myself from commenting that, if God really were one of us, he'd give Joan Osborne a copy of Strunk and White).

But seriously, folks, this is the motherfucking Vatican we're talking about, and what they say is holy decree for a lot of folks. So let's take a look-see at what the world's smallest country with the world's biggest dick thinks are the best tunes in history...

#10 Carlos Santans - Supernatural

LAME! Listen, Santana had his time and place, and it was 1970 in a bong smoke-filled Persian pillow lounge. But it's been a while since then, and now Santana apparently has terrible taste in music. 'Member the single from this album? The one with Rob Thomas singing about, "...my Spanish Harlem Mona Lisa"? Just terrible.

#9 Oasis - (What's the Story) Morning Glory?

BULLSHITE! Back in the mid 90s I kinda fell for it all. I lamented Kurt's death, I held on to Pearl Jam as tight as I could, and I cringed as Smashing Pumpkins, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Pavement, NIN, and whatever Perry Farrell was doing kind of fell apart at the seams or got boring. Dark times for us all. But I never bought into Oasis because, I mean, fuck Oasis. Feuding, egocentric brothers making played-out, overblown Brit pop? I can't believe this album made the list and Richard D. James Album and Odelay, released at about the same time, didn't. Pope ain't got no freaky groove. Tyler Perry should write a terrible movie about it.

#8 U2 - Achtung Baby

NOPE! I like "New Year's Day", but aside from that, I think U2 has amounted to a dumpster full of turd. They seem to have made quite a name for themselves, and I'm told that Bono is very active in politics, so perhaps they deserve a begrudged footnote of semi-significance. But are they truly worthy of the Pope's official finger-wiggle of approval? Eff no!

#7 Paul Simon - Graceland

FUCK YEAH! This proves that there's at least one chill bishop on the Pope's "appropriate music finding" committee. From "I Know What I Know" to "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes" to "You Can Call Me Al" to "The Boy in the Bubble", and featuring throughout the indispensable vocals of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, this album was the best soundtrack to 1985-1990 that a boy could hope for. A+, Vatican.

#6 Michael Jackson - Thriller

Really, Vatican? Didn't any of your guys see the "Thriller" video? Do you guys even get MTV there? Or the internet? Well Michael Jackson ain't the most Bible-abiding figurehead you could have chosen. It's called homework, guys.

#5 Donald Fagen - The Nightfly

Never heard of him, so I looked him up. Used to be in Steely Dan. Eh. I watched a video on Youtube, and it astonished me that the Vatican would endorse an artist whose videos display such drunkenness and promiscuity.

Could this whole list be the handiwork of a wayward intern at the Vatican, overworked, underpaid, and weak of faith? It would certainly seem so. And the best is yet to come.

#4 Fleetwood Mac - Rumours

I can't for the life of me figure out why the Vatican would have picked this gem of youthful rebellion, but they did. And I give them an A+++! Ponder this lyrical nugget: "Won't you lay me down in the tall grass and let me do my stuff?" Uh, I dunno, Stevie Nicks, because I have no fucking idea what you're talking about. Cocaine? Are you talking about cocaine? Whatever, hippie. But the songs really are quite pretty, so I give it an enthusiastic thumbs up.

#3 Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon

Are you fucking kidding me?!? The Vatican chose Dark Side to be number three on its top ten? Aside from being the most overrated band in history, Pink Floyd stood to many as the antithesis of the Catholic Church. If they'd picked a Syd Barrett album I'd be whistling a different tune, cause at least he knew how to cram some unhinged, ramshackle spirituality into his jams. But Pink Floyd was soaking in bathtubs full of LSD and ego splooge when they made this shit. It's really, really bizarre that this album made the Vatican's top 3. If they were trying to perhaps improve their image by selecting a seemingly rebellious and psychedelic album, they could have aimed much higher. Even within Pink Floyd's tepid catalogue there exist better, and more spiritual, albums (see: Wall, The). I'm guessing some under-cleric chose this album based on the cover art alone.

#2 David Crosby - If I Could Only Remember My Name

I'm glad to see good old "Crack Pipe" Crosby showed up on this list. Nothing says "I support the Vatican's values" more than the exact opposite of everything about David Crosby. Drug addiction, weapons charges, abandoned children. The only role I could picture David Crosby playing in any sort of Catholic pedagogy is if he were to appear as the comedic, faithless "Goofus" in amusing contrast to a pious, upstanding "Gallant". He impregnated Melissa Etheridge's girlfriend twice, on purpose. It was on the cover of Rolling Stone, which made a lot of people (me) incredibly uncomfortable and unhorny. But whatever, because the Vatican's number one fucking album of all time is...

#1 The Beatles - Revolver

AND WE HAVE A WINNER! There's not a single disparaging thing I can bring myself to say about this record. "Tomorrow Never Knows", "Eleanor Rigby", "Love You To", "She Said She Said". Masterpieces, all. But, once again, we must ponder whether the Vatican knew exactly what it was doing when it endorsed Revolver as "the greatest album of all time". It is on this very album that John Lennon tells us to "make love all day long", and paints the picture of a lonely old church lady and the dottering Father McKenzie who prays for her fruitlessly. Not the most pro-Catholic jingle out there. This album also served as in undeniable milestone in the integration of New Left ideals into mainstream American culture. Albums like this and their cultural impact, it could be argued, have damaged the power of the Vatican just as much as certain rival religious organizations, or even a string of scandals.

In conclusion, this list is very real and is fucked up. I'm bewildered, and have nothing more to offer than that. Thoughts?

The New Jordan Fish Times: Grandmaster Flash - Sign of the Times (1984)

2010-02-17T22:54:00.007-05:00

Grandmaster Flash - Sign Of The Times
by jpdc11

Directed by Zbigniew Rybczyński, an Academy Award winning filmmaker and pioneer in HDTV technology. This was his first music video. I think they programmed that jumping floor contraption to fire precisely on every downbeat which is kinda insane.

Via Channel 53's linkage to this weird reel of Zbig's later experiments:

A VISIT FROM DAP: HARI THE COMIC VIDEOS

2010-02-16T20:53:00.013-05:00

My brother made a couple of videos while he was in San Francisco, here are two of them.

I like the end of this little jammy.

This one's great.

Here's some crummy shit I made to fuck with that played-out blank eyes thing. New drawings this week!

(click to enlarge)

THE NEW JORDAN FISH TIMES: Hot Sexy Nintendo Wii & Zelda ACTION! NAKED! NUDE! XXX!

2010-02-14T22:19:00.004-05:00

And then you click on it and "instead" it's just some totally actually interesting footage of people working in a Nintendo factory, putting Wiis into boxes, living lives as humans. Wait... is the joke that the automated machines in the second-half are sexy? Sexier than the peoples? Nerds are weird.

All right, back to searching for "real" Zelda porn cause sometimes I gets down like that.

BOOBNEWS: GIRL WITH NO VAG GETS PREG FROM HEAD

2010-02-10T22:02:00.007-05:00

do you know my friend Ben EC? his dick once got me kicked off facebook. he's also a scientist. and it was his science brain that found this very real scientific report:

Oral conception. Impregnation via the proximal gastrointestinal tract in
a patient with an aplastic distal vagina. Case report.

Or to translate for our feeble, god-fearing minds:

Beej baby. This chick's all preggers from spunk in her belly,
and she ain't got no snatch. Forreal.

100% truth, this is an actual report from the so-called "British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. September 1988, Vol. 95." It has a wonderfully auspicious first line:

"The patient was a 15-year-old girl employed in a local bar."

The story goes she got in a knife fight with her ex-dude and her new-dude and went to the hospital with a hole in her abdomen. The docs patched her up, but she came back 9 months later with a bun about to pop out of the oven. But when they went downtown to help get the baby out, they found she literally had no 'giner, there was "only a shallow skin dimple." So they cut the kid out, but were like, "wait what the fuck." [citation needed]

They say she got in the knife fight when her ex walked in on her giving some apparently miraculous head to the new guy, because:

"The patient was well aware of the fact that she had no vagina and she had started oral experiments after disappointing attempts at conventional intercourse."

In any case, stabs were exchanged. She got it right in the middle, piercing some holes right in the stomach, and thus giving those recently ingested spermies a chance to make a break for their animalistic mecca, the uterus. The report isn't exactly sure how they got there alive (hey doc, ever heard of THE BIBLE?), but further corroboration of the theory goes to the fact that the son at age 2 looked exactly like the lucky father.

Regardless, the story had a happy ending:

"The young mother, her family, and the likely father adapted themselves rapidly to the new situation and some cattle changed hands to prove there were no hard feelings."

mother nature sure is a maaaad scientist, jerry!

A visit from Kate: "Neurotic dream leads to introspection" -AP

2010-02-09T10:18:00.000-05:00

I had a dream that was pretty boring but I remember one section in great detail. I was sitting at a large table with many strangers who I had just met, about to celebrate someone's birthday. Despite not having had the proper number and type of mysterious tickets needed to order a drink, I received a cola, and I didn't speak up to right this wrong, because I was thirsty. The label had beautiful graphic design with bubble letters spelling COLA, in bright happy shades of blue, red, and orange. After the commotion had died down from the cake eating, I was sitting with a dude with a dressy vest on, over some plain shirt, whatever. And his friend, who was a baldy, blustery blondie, perhaps you know the type. His friend made a jokey disparaging remark about said vest and I seized my opening in the lull following his remark to make a "perfectly timed" (I thought to myself) joke: "Yeah, is there an echo here, or did we timewarp to 2010 and you decided that shit was BACK?" The friend laughed uproariously. I had the uncomfortable sense that this dude wasn't really sure what he was laughing at, or he was humoring me to get in my pants, or he was just dumb, because I knew the joke hadn't made sense or been funny.
Several things here. I am surprised at how clearly I remember that line and the incredibly specific feelings of discomfort afterward. The "joke" had a cadence that is eerily similar to how I say things sometimes, I think. Also- the attention to graphic design, which seems like something I might get happy about in a real life version of this situation. So, am I a caricature of myself in this dream? Am I making fun of myself in my dreams? Trying on personalities? If the dream version of yourself is socially awkward and hyper-aware like in real life can that still be a symbol for something else? Which of these scenarios would be preferable? I don't know!

FROM THE ANNALS OF THE FLINTERNET...Gordon Gartrelle Class of 2002 High School Yearbook Quotes

2010-02-06T02:40:00.032-05:00

"Go Pats!"
"Oh, isn't that beautiful? All the lowlifes in quiet city Boston start dropping dead and *you* think it's unrelated! Greenly, the day I want the Boston Police to do my thinking for me, I will have a fucking tag on my toe!"
- Boondock Saints
"The truth is you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. Life is a crazy ride, and nothing is guaranteed."
- Eminem

"Up the motherfuckin' punx!"
"Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit."
- Guy Debord
"This machine kills fascists"
- Woody Guthrie

"Behind every good man there is a woman, and that woman was Martha Washington, man, and everyday George would come home, she would have a big fat bowl waiting for him, man, when he come in the door, man, she was a hip, hip, hip lady, man."
- Slater from Dazed and Confused
"You don't love me. You just love my doggy style."
- Snoop Dogg
"San Diemos High School football rules!"
- Bill and Ted

"It ain't no joke I'd like to buy the world a toke and teach the world to sing in perfect harmony"
- Smash Mouth
"Every day when you're brushing your teeth you have to look yourself right in the eyes and think, what kind of man am I going to be today?"
- Grandpa Sal, R.I.P
"I won't quit skating until I am physically unable."
- Tony Hawk

"Some of the most wonderful people are the ones who don't fit into boxes."
- Tori Amos
"I swear to God this has got to be a joke."
- Sixteen Candles
"I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need. I wished to come here and say that I am a (wo)man who does not exist for others."
- Howard Roark

"You don't frighten us, English pig dogs. Go and boil your bottoms, you sons of a silly person. I blow my nose at you, so-called "Arthur King," you and all your silly English K-nig-hts."
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
"I wish it was the sixties, I wish I could be happy, I wish, I wish, I wish that something would happen."
- Radiohead
"...the point of public relations slogans like "Support Our Troops" is that they don't mean anything [...] that's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody is gonna be against and I suppose everybody will be for, because nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. But its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something, do you support our policy? And that's the one you're not allowed to talk about."
- Noam Chomsky

"I get satisfaction of three kinds. One is creating something, one is being paid for it, and one is the feeling that I haven't just been sitting on my ass all afternoon."
- William F. Buckley, Jr.
"Pardon me while I burst into flames, I've had enough of the world and it's people's mindless games. Pardon me while I burn and rise above the flame. Pardon me, pardon me, I'll never be the same."
- Incubus
"I just wanted to say that I'm a nerd, and I'm here tonight to stand up for the rights of other nerds. I mean uh, all our lives we've been laughed at and made to feel inferior. And tonight, those bastards, they trashed our house. Why? Cause we're smart? Cause we look different? Well, we're not. I'm a nerd, and uh, I'm pretty proud of it."
- Revenge of the Nerds (best movie ever!)

"It is the idea that people living close to nature tend to be noble. It's seeing all those sunsets that does it. You can watch a sunset and then go off and set fire to your neighbor's teepee. Living close to nature is wonderful for your mental health."
- Daniel Quinn
"When are you going to learn that you can't trust anybody, not even yourself?"
- The Wild Bunch
Voted: "Most Likely to Secede." (thanks a lot, pranksters from the History Club!)

"Pain is weakness leaving the body."
- US Marine Corps
"Bitches, I like 'em brainless. Guns, I like them stainless."
- Notorious BIG
"I never fucked anybody over in my life didn't have it coming to them. You got that? All I have in this world is my balls and my word and I don't break them for no one. Do you understand? That piece of shit up there, I never liked him, I never trusted him. For all I know he had me set up and had my friend Angel Fernandez killed. But that's history. I'm here, he's not. Do you wanna go on with me, you say it. You don't, then you make a move."
- Scarface

"Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected."
- Steve Jobs
"May you live in interesting times."
- Ancient Chinese Proverb
"All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth."
- Friedrich Nietzche

A VISIT FROM DAP: THE NEW NEW HOLLYWOOD

2010-02-05T01:15:00.003-05:00

A VISIT FROM JORDAN NATHANIEL FISH

2010-02-04T11:58:00.000-05:00

A VISIT FROM AUNT BOOB: DEATH BY OBAMA

2010-02-03T11:51:00.004-05:00

Once again I have invaded the dreamscape of one of my friends like Freddy Krueger, this time my good buddy Anthony. He contacted me via gchat this morning:

Anthony: are you alive i hope?
in my dream last night you were in a motorcycle accident
Anthony: during part of a parade
obama was driving the motorcycle with you and three others
were drunk, dangerously clinging to the back
you fell off and your spleen fell out
Anthony: seemingly you were able to communicate from beyond death,
since gmail, facebook, etc. technologies had massed enough
of your personal data and language
Anthony: there was a youtube video of the fall
me: so this in fact might be the e-spectre of bob talking to you
Anthony: it was exactly like this..
i think victor vazquez may have also been involved somehow
it wasn't clear if he was logged in to your gmail
Anthony: so I'm either talking to victor right now, or e-spectre
Anthony: is that distinction even meaningful?

Of course, Anthony just confirmed what doctors (esp. Ray Kurzweil) have been telling me for years – that my body is more internet than man right now, and if I die, I could ostensibly live forever, as long as Victor keeps me logged in to shit.

This post just added 17 minutes onto my life.

FROM THE ANNALS OF THE FLINTERNET...MTA Safety Video

2010-02-02T17:45:00.003-05:00

Watch til the end watch til the end!!!!!

I'm never riding the Long Island Railroad again because, "you may think you know when a train is coming, but don't count on it!"

KOOL KEITH IS A KOOL CAT!

2010-02-01T01:57:00.005-05:00

This new Kool Keith is breaking my whole mind up. 2 Scoops. So lovely. (I am right now writing a video treatment for it because sometimes you got 2 beli3ve in y4ur5elf.) (PS my own lady girl showed me this cool thing cause she's even pretty cool too (just like me).)

A VISIT FROM BOBKATE GOLDTHWAIT: DINOSAUR BONES

2010-01-26T18:29:00.000-05:00

We have an internet book club, which is to say, conducted on the internet and rarely involving real books. Check out this dino-erotica, from the International Jurassic Park Erotic Fan-Fiction Writer's Association, which has stories that cover pretty much every facet of JP-based dinorotica (why does blogger put the red squiggly line under that word?):

there's dino-egg-induced masturbation (starring Newman):

At the other end of the office, amidst the Pepsi cans and crisp packets, Nedry gazed at the stolen embryos on his desk, totally enraptured by the tiny unborn sex monsters. He was rocking a raging semi-on.

Almost without realising it, Ray had unzipped his trousers. Reaching down, he took his pulsing dinosaur devastator firmly in hand and, lustful eyes dancing across the erotic show in front of him, began to viciously choke his raptor raper with a furious passion.

which gets taken to a more psychosexual level:

As a single tear rolled down his shamefully fat face, he took a T-rex embryo and poured it into his mouth. Was ingestion the ultimate act of love, Dennis wondered? This action of consuming a beast, of being joined at a gut level, absorbing their life into yours? Was his love of eating just as pure and valid as his love for the park creatures? Right now, Dennis wasn’t as concerned with these questions, he just wished T-rex embryos tasted more like Pepsi and less like undercooked spunk.

Then tere's simple man-on-dino action (starring Goldblum):

Blood was just beginning to drip from the creature’s jaw as Malcolm exploded his unspliced, Mosquito free DNA down its throat and screamed “CHAOS THEORY!!!” at the top of his lungs.

And of course more complicated man-on-dino action:

It was this final image that threw Malcolm’s body into a sexual frenzy, his manhood erupting into his beast partner as tears fell down his face. He was in heaven, and yet ashamed of his appetites. He wiped himself off on the triceratops’s middle horn, kicked it in the face, and walked out slowly, leather trousers still around his ankles, tears streaming from his eyes.

But most of the shit is dino-on-man, often multiple sexosaurs ravaging one delighted human (starring Sam Neill and this thing):

He was no longer Dr. Alan Grant: Palaeontologist, he was Dr. Alan Grant: Keystone of a Massive Dinosaur Fuckfest! He would have had the hardest ejaculation of his life, if that hole wasn't currently filled with Gallimimus as well. [editor's note: what?]

Other characters tend to have as much of a fetish as the writers (starring the dude on the toilet):

The Rex snorted, and then slammed Genarro against it's fully erect and scaly Tyrannosword. It's brutal, dripping cockhead forced it's way between Genarro's soft, fleshy buttocks and pulled them apart into a diameter of roughly one and a half feet. Genarro bellowed with agony as the member tore through the lining of his colon and thrust it's way up towards his chest cavity.

Back in the first vehicle, Grant and Malcolm began to jerk off.

But really what's most impressive about these stories is the utter craft that the writers exhibit in their art:

The following happened in the space of three seconds: The T-Rex roared in pure sexual lust as it moved, it’s massive dong hitting Ellie in the chest and lifting her in a pole vault style, straight into the waiting raptor’s love hole. Ellie again attempted to scream, but her head was now completely inside the beast, and her lower half was quickly turned to a bloody pulp at the hands of the tyrannosaur’s frantic thrusting. The raptor receiver groaned in a mixture of pain and beastly approval of this three way.

As Ellie was discovering the true horror of being the condom in Tyrannosaurs/Velociraptor sex game, Grant emerged from the broken fossil remnants and preceded to teabag the dead raptor next to him.

And with that, I'll hand the reins back to Kate:

Personally I particularly enjoy the references to the ongoing conspiracy to keep quiet Sam Neill's on set affairs with velociraptors.
There's a facebook page

If you do enough trawling you come across these things from time to time.

dino on dino action

dino on car action

This dragon/castle encounter is particularly exciting, as it seems to me to document the crucial evolutionary step between the fairly mundane world of dinosaur porn proclivities and the sorts of backbarn ren faire encounters that get kids hooked on furries, LARPing, whatever it is kids are into these days.

An homage to male beauty by Etsy artist snew, the Michaelangelo of giant lizards.

Bob again, jumping back in with a related video haha:

There's also a more rapey version of that, and one starring a T-Rexxx, which is kind of dark, but you guys probably have your lights dimmed real low at this point anyway. Oh and it turns out to be factually accurate!

Oh one last thing: http://www.walkthedinosaur.com

FROM THE ANNALS OF THE FLINTERNET...Ruh Roh!

2010-01-26T04:23:00.002-05:00

A VISIT FROM AUNT BOOB: NON-IRONIC NON-EXCITING NICK CAGE DREAM

2010-01-25T13:50:00.004-05:00

last night i dreamt that i was at a small bar with some friends and we were standing around chatting when nick cage walked in, and not at all in like a celebrity-walking-in way, he just sort of strolled in awkwardly and walked up to our circle and stood on the outside, and waited a minute before trying to laugh at one of our jokes and say something just to say something. he was like a kid in high school who used to hang out but who went away for a couple years and now that he's back he realizes he wasn't really friends with anyone to begin with. it was also weird that he wasn't drinking, he just had his hands in his pockets. he also had a bodyguard of some sort hovering even further behind, and kept nervously looking back at him, for some sort of comfort. at one point he turned to me and said "i heard you like pizza" and of course i confirmed and then he tried to think of something to follow that up with but all he could muster was "cool." then he and i were talking and i realized that his bodyguard was actually a cop, and when he would turn to look at him it was out of fear that the cop would disapprove, cuz at one point he leaned in and whispered to me "do you have any aerosol?" and i said "i have some compressed air, at home" and he looked both disappointed and ashamed, and immediately left, with the cop in tow.

FROM THE ANNALS OF THE FLINTERNET..."Mexicans were having sex with my mare" - Mark Harrington

2010-01-24T20:05:00.008-05:00

So you guys probably know a bit about Prussian Blue, the musical sister act who use their Aryan angst to spread the message of white power. Blah blah blah. Old news. But did you know that Lamb and Lynx Gaede are FUCKING BONERLICIOUS!?!

Now, this brings us to a question of no small importance. Is the guilt that comes along with my physical attraction to these sisters due to their views regarding the varying shades and religious preferences of humanity, or to the fact that they are currently 17-years-old? I can perhaps assuage my shame by keeping in mind that they will, barring being killed in a firebombing, turn 18 on June.....uhhh.......sorry......all of my brain blood is busy rushing into my penis.

Watch this while I go releive myself of some, shall we say, racial tension.

A VISIT FROM DAP: PROPHET ELIJAH SAMUEL

2010-01-22T16:06:00.003-05:00

I got this email the other day. I'm surprised it worked it's way around the spam filter but I'm glad it did. I'm thinking about responding to Prophet Elijah Samuel, as long as his services run in the ten dollars or less range.

All Hail, MY name is Prophet Elijah Samuel, I am a Genuine psychic, i cast all kinds of spells, love spells, money spells, career spells, lottery spells,fortune spells and banishing spells. i also do psychic readings and spiritual help in all situations. I have worked for many people from different nations all across Europe,Asia, Africa and many others. Do not hesitate to contact me if you need any solution,fulfilled your heart desires. Nothing is impossible. my e-mail is: prophetelijahcoven@gmail.com Universal Favour Be Upon You

It's got a valid e-mail address and everything. What do you think?

(Peace to Corban Goble for snapping this flick with a Japanese Polaroid at Highline Ballroom)

A VISIT FROM DAP: DISGUSTING MAN IN OSCAR MEYER SANDWICH AD

2010-01-22T15:39:00.004-05:00

This fat loser is gross and has a racist vibe about him. I hope he chokes on that sandwich! (The "idea" of this man, that is, not the actual fat dude in the photograph). EWWW!

Also, that dude totally wouldn't say or think "goody". It's just a sandwich made with prepackaged sliced animal carcass you loser!

Oh here's a band and a guy and a band again good songs, CF Edley opines

2010-01-21T06:25:00.009-05:00

Laerry Levan, mentioned before, made this mix:

So I was excited because Central Line also did the sample from the World of Fantasy beat, but really

which some asshole idiot finally decided to link to the Wayne. Anyway then I don't remember quite how I found the myspace guy who played that session but it said he played in this band

and I was pretty taken. With how Internet works.

THE NET IS HELPING THE UNIVERSITY OF ASMARA IN ERITREA WITH BOOKS ON EVERYTHING

thanks guys

A VISIT FROM AUNT DEATH: TACO HELL

2010-01-18T15:42:00.004-05:00

RIP GLEN BELL, FOUNDER OF TACO BELL, AND INVENTOR OF THE TELEPHONE.

Now he can be reunited with his beloved Gidget!

A VISIT FROM TAL: CLAP 2010

2010-01-15T12:41:00.004-05:00

2010-01-14T04:11:00.003-05:00

Is this the soca-ization of grime or the baltimorzation of blogs. i mean grime. . :

Does anyone know about this and not tell me?
I feel so lonely.

A DRAWING FROM DAP: IT'S OVER, DARRYL!

2010-01-12T09:19:00.005-05:00

It's Over, Darryl! (2010)

click to enlarge

You can read either character's dialogue first, makes no difference.

First jammy of the new year. Drew it with a surgical skin marker and a Crayola marker. This'll be my last drawing for a bit, I need to get a 12 pack of Crayola markers somewhere, I can't use the colored pencils anymore, I don't know how to shade so it just takes too long. RUDE BWOY.

A visit from Kate: Cat's out of the bag I guess

2010-01-12T03:16:00.004-05:00

As to charges of being a traitor, I can't help it if I need more and more outlets to express things that less and less frequently resemble coherent thoughts. Blame it on the times. Also Andrew Flint has another blog but "you" hired "him" anyway? Double standard! Also, he gets paid more than me? the fuck? Gender discriminiation is out in 2k10, we're going to lose our fan base of high rolling tweens if we don't modernize, and then this blog will no longer be financially viable. Just sayin. AF's post is actually a good segue to this one, as it also asks hardhitting questions about the psyche of the male musician.

check it out though, i'm saving my smartest thoughts for y'all:

why do so many alt/indie musician bros like cats?
what does posing with a cat do for a musician bro's image/personal brand?
do u think u can tell the difference between a staged photo of a musician bro with a cat and a candid one?
do u think the "candid" ones are really staged?
are there fewer pictures of lady musicians with cats? if so, might it reflect a lower overall number of successful female musicians? or is it because bros seem more sensitive when posed with cats but ladybros run the risk of being called cat ladies? Don't be scared! Just do you!
is there such a thing as a digital cat lady? for how long do I have to focus exclusively on cat-related internet based content before achieving that rank? gotta be close right?
did you know audrey hepburn had a pet deer?

ernest hemingway and john cassavetes were cat lovers, and "lovable" "assholes." what can we extrapolate from this? i was going 2 put marlon brando in this category but i don't know actually if he was a dick. however, attempts to google it do come up with this famous picture of him sucking dick.
what is the relationship between masculinity, celebrity, and cats? what about between homosexuality, celebrity and cats?

are there any risks or downsides 2 making wild generalizations about cats, musicians, celebrities or anything else?
why do all of the real beatles have cute pictures with cats but i can only find a picture of ringo with a baby lion? what does he have to prove?

what about u?

when u start 2 many blogs, and get confused about which is which, does your cat comfort u?

Kurt Cobain duh

Wayne Coyne

Keith Moon

Morrissey, David Bowie

George Michael, Freddy Mercury

Beatles:

difficult creative types

Ernest Hemingway, John Cassavetes

Marlon Brando, Jean-Michel Basquiat

Morgan Freeman, Jimmy Smits

So the winners are...

Audience award- Jimmy Smits and Mini Me.
1st place- Paul McCartney. Unafraid of being outcuted by TWO kittens, or of being photographed flinging a cat at a camera. You really are the cute one Paul. Bonus points for this photo with gratuitous farmcat and mountain man beard.

Grand prize- Henry Behrens, who at the time this photo was taken was the smallest man in the world, and kept that shit in the house with him. Damn.

As a bonus, to show good faith, I'm going to reveal one of my tips for online journalism:

When doing research to confirm a "theory" always first attempt to google exactly the phrase you are thinking of. Here are some theoretical examples:
-is marlon brando a dick

-female celebrity with cats
-ed droste with a cat

-vampire weekend with a cat

-ringo starr with a cat?

-what is up with audrey hepburn and that deer

-famous midget with a cat

-was james mason a dbag

EXTRA BONUS:

I find celebrity pet calendars hilarious since looking into them minutes ago. This one unites Greta van Susternen, Steven Soderbergh, Jenna Fischer, Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, Paul Rodriguez, and Warren Buffet!

Here's another!

A DRAWING FROM DAP: TEEN QUEEN

2010-01-11T15:25:00.004-05:00

Teen Queen (2009)

click to enlarge

Just saw Bad Lieutenant (the Werny Herzy one). It was good, but I was a little underwhelmed with the level of wilding from Nicholas Cage. I expected more drug use, wilding, screaming, kicking of people, gun usage, etc. Although when he yelled "TO THE BREAK OF DAWN" a few times, it was almost enough.

Visit from Tal: Aaahh Real Monsters

2010-01-10T14:21:00.004-05:00

This is pretty thorough:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_monsters

FROM THE ANNALS OF THE FLINTERNET...Songs By Famous Men Who Think That Certain Women Are Pitiful

2010-01-10T11:28:00.005-05:00

There's this trend, I've noticed, among successful male songwriters who pen tunes about foolish, pathetic women. These songs share multiple things in common: they express disdain rather than sympathy for the woman, they perhaps suggest past romantic encounters that are retrospectively viewed as regretful, and they imply that the singer has no fond feelings for the woman any longer. This type of song, which pops up over and over again, is clearly a shared expression of some relatively specific feeling that famous musician guys get. They find themselves surrounded by starfucking babes and, well, some of them are lame enough to write songs about. It should be made clear that these are not torch songs, and leave little room for the possibility of the women in questions finding redemption. They just talk about why the ladies suck.

Here are some prime examples:

Beck - Nightmare Hippie Girl

Most cutting line: "It's a New Age let down in my face / She's so spaced out and there ain't no space".

Led Zeppelin - Livin Lovin Maid

Most cutting line - "Alimony alimony paying your bills / When your conscience hits you knock it back with pills."

Rolling Stones - Stupid Girl

Most cutting line - "The way she powders her nose, her vanity shows and it shows / She's the worst thing in this world."

Aerosmith - Sweet Emotion

Most cutting line - "Talkin' about things that nobody cares / You're wearin' out things that nobody wears."

Bob Dylan - Idiot Wind

Most cutting line - "You're an idiot, babe / It's a wonder that you still know how to breathe."

The Attack - Created By Clive

Most cutting line - "I've got feelings and I need love / Like you need a mirror and a powder puff."

Van Morrison - T.B. Sheets

Listen Here

Most cutting line - "Now Julie, there ain't nothin' on my mind more further away than what you're looking for."

The Zombies - She's Not There

Most cutting line - "It's too late to say you're sorry / How would I know, why should I care? / Please don't bother trying to find her / She's not there."

The Troggs - Evil Woman

Most cutting line - "You ain't got no feelin' / Just your dirty dealin'."

A DRAWING FROM DAP: ONE PANEL OF A RACIST GRAPHIC NOVEL (PART 1)

2010-01-08T11:20:00.003-05:00

One Panel of a Racist Graphic Novel (Part One)
(2009)

click to enlarge

Used a surgical skin marker.

A DRAWING FROM DAP: COMIN' 4 DAT AZZ!

2010-01-07T17:23:00.009-05:00

Been freaking out a lot today and thinking someone was in my house, hiding behind doors, etc. Without further adue:

Comin' 4 Dat Azz! (2009)

click to enlarge

Made this terrible piece of garbage with colored pencils and a surgical skin marker. The scans will continue to be very bad but will get ze point across. Auto-leveled in Photoshop.

Also, the homie Kate Bryant apparently started a new blog (ahem, traitor) with a clever name, check it out: http://softtacohardbody.blogspot.com.

UPDATE: Check out this drawing from the 7th grade. I cannot get over how bugged the main dude is. Also, I think I had that middle part in my hair when I drew this. Click to enlarge.

A VISIT FROM AUNT ROOB: GUEST DREAM BY ROB LEITZELL

2010-01-07T15:23:00.005-05:00

rob typed this about 90 seconds after waking up, which was like 5 minutes ago:

so i had this dream right
where ray [tintori, the famed caterer] and i were in france but it was iphone france and we were moving on the map like in mario with the dotted lines and all
and we ended up in this women's bthroom where we were watching ladies shower, and then ray got a call about this concert that was gonna be joanna newsom (he called her newsie-som) and the band neu playing together one night only. joanna was gonna play tulipomania [by the hit British Sex-Pop band Boy Crisis] in its entirety and neu was gonna play Ys [by Joanna]. so ray wanted us to put together the guest list and it was really important but we couldnt find any paper, so we took this back door that ray said "led to the sarkozy" which appeared on the map but i think was actually the louvre, and there was dorms there like fauver [at everyone's alma mater, Ohio Wesleyan], and i had to find paper cause ray wanted to go back to the showers, but there was this mom in the dorm room and she didn't want me to mess up her sons papers because he was an accountant, so i kept having to write on carbon paper into the floor, and then call ray and tell him what it said. i finally got done, and found some printer paper, and rubbed the floor writings into the printer paper, btu then i got back into the secret tunnel and went to shower but all the girls screamed at me and ray said he'd already made a list.

Alright you baby freuds! Dissect this mess!

A DRAWING FROM DAP: FUCKBUBBLES

2010-01-07T04:11:00.008-05:00

I will be posting very bad art a few times a week from now on. This scanner absolutely fucked up this colored pencil drawing that sucked anyway. Without further adue:

Fuckbubbles (2009)

Click to enlarge

The circles were drawn using a compact disc and a wooden token drink ticket from Pianos. I found the colored pencils and charcoal in a closet I was cleaning. Here's a scan of that token, which is way cooler than this drawing and which I might not redeem for a watered-down whiskey ginger:

A visit from Kate: You know what they say about it!

2010-01-04T20:30:00.006-05:00

If you don't have all the facts, shut up! Yer wrong!

http://sweetsurprise.com/
Their website is so bright and sunny. I wish there was a friendly website to counter this one with facts about obesity and corporate food lobbyists and stuff, but as far as I know there are only sobering books and articles. Anyone?
Soshman put me onto these, thanks lifecoach.

I made a Nicki Minaj animated GIF. Yo I made a Nicki Minaj animated GIF.

2010-01-03T01:30:00.003-05:00

Check it.

It's a freaking bitching Nicki Minaj GIF that's FUCKING ANIMATED*

*LIKE ROGER RABBIT, BISHES!!!**

**SHOUZ TO ALL MY HYPE BISHES!

Ooops-WHAT!? It's Dubten?! Shit. CFE done did it.

2010-01-02T19:50:00.004-05:00

Since my new years resolutions don't kick in till the 4th call it good that this is a best of 09 Gordy list or whatever.
Apparently Hima thought my whole life was about reggae and old soul. Turns out disco is pretty cool too though. Commas are asshole idiots though.
Order seems impossible. Shut up. Here's five really good tracks that i supposedly posted last year. I'll tell you which one's best at the end. Here's five really good tracks:

Slam Bam.

Saxon Sound is brilliant. Smiley Culture is the best name other than Carlton and the Shoes. That cut just goes on and on and hot. "Watch video more than television." Recently my friend asked me what language something was in, and then I translated the very buried english out of a Basement Jaxx song. So, maybe you won't enjoy that. But I hope you do. Silly skill.

Silly Games.

Janet Kay is a sadsweet genius. This song plays inside the chest. Rhythm like flutters. Get me rum, get me lambsbreath. Get me a girl in a hammock. Get me a shitty car and the wrong side of the road. Get me a rundown mansion full of silent bobo dreads.

Fire In My Heart.

Escape From New York? Really. This track changed my life a lil bit. But not as much as the next.

Yemmpa Aba.

Who the holy jerk is Ata Kak? Someone tell me something please. I love this guy more than anyone I've ever loved. I didn't really post this track, but did post the link to his catalog. Seriously about to call the Ghanaian ministry of culture and track the fool down, cuz he needs widespread exposure. Ata Kak is my artist of all time. Suffer the recording quality. Dance like a cripple. Swallow gasoline. Love your last cogent moments on earth. Ata Kak. Say it. I don't even care that this video cuts out before the song ends. Download it all cuz there's no telling how to get this fool guap.

So I hope that everybody had a wonderful party time and is ready for a better decade. Had a cool dream about eating a lot of raw meat on an airplane. Asked all my white friends how their faces stay on. Which is inappropriate, but still a good question. Glue? Static? Magic? Mine stays on with smoke. And with the knowledge that i can always dance like a lonely monster. Just copy the whole vibe of this dood in what remains in my eyes the best video ever:

2009 was an asshole idiot. Dubten gonna live bonk junks.

FLINTERNET: Top 5 Things That Will Happen in 2010

2010-01-02T17:41:00.010-05:00

5) Jaoquin Phoenix dies

4) Charlie Sheen receives oral sex from teenager

3) Tarantino says "nigger" a bunch in his next movie. Spike Lee gets his britches all in a twist

2) Well-behaved bear elected to California senate

1) Jews finally take a hint, all relocate to Israel "when they belong"

0) Just kidding about that last one

-1) Either people get angry or don't give a shit about the fact that I posted a picture of Muhammed

-2) Beer consumed by people

A VISIT FROM BOOB: BEST TAGS OF THE 00s

2010-01-02T04:03:00.004-05:00

apparently it was new years last night, which means Gordon Gartrelle has made it into yet another decade. To celebrate, I give you a non-ranking list of the best blog tags that we blog-tagged in the past ten years (with the number of times they were tagged):

about a dozen orange tabby cats lampin in a tree (1)
an umbrella that is also a condom (1)
an utterly racist but actually not that racist cyber experiment (1)
and fashion i guess (1)
animals without jobs (1) *
Antique Boner (1)
awkward existential moment (1) *
bad joke made by literally unconscious man (1)
baseball ain't just for fags (1)
BOYCOTT HUGS (1)
cats playing piano being respected like they were kings (2)
cooler brown dudez than dap and i (1)
Creepy Wiggle Party (1)
don't love the ocean too much (1)

• dreaming about blogging (2)
• dreaming about blogging about dreaming (2)
• dreaming about dreaming (1)

EVERYONE DUH (1) *
Finger-Blasting a Virgin (1)
finna blog more (1)
food is what we eat (1)
for real though? (1) *
friends that remind me of rap (1)
fuck every other country (1) *
funny pictures of people doing stupid shit (1) *
give Heems bank (1)
go homo (1)
HELL YEAHHHH (1) *
HELLA BORED AT WORK (1) *
hella gay stuff straight dudes do while high on herb as an ironic joke but really cuz maybe theyr hella sensitive dudes (1)
HELLA GOOD fictional cheese (1)
hima requesting journalistic qualities (2)
Hot Oprah cameo (1) *
i got fired today. (1) *
I never knew that web-slinging meant that (1)
INSANE CLOWN POSSE (1) *
internet. radio. drunk (1)
it's impossible to tag this photo with the word smoking without tagging giant skull smoking a giant spliff THANKS GUYS (1) †
landlord doesn't want to get involved in a rape (1)
less relish (1)
lolchair (1)
long ass posts (1) *
McDonald's sunroof (1)
money doesn't exist (2)
music and shit like that (2)
my wife an I are archeologists (1)
nacho man randy savage as a rap name (1)
NO ACTUALLY KILL ME IN REAL LIFE I MEAN (1)
not ever going to get laid (1) *
not hamburgers (1)
obama's extremities as cuisine (1)
oh homo (like oh yoko) (1)
Planet-sized Hamburger (1)
pointing out the sadness in others only to reveal the sadness in myself (1) *
pretty ok cosby jokes (1)
Random (1) *
raping the simpsons (1)
respectable negroes (1) *
ron artest is so hood but at rapping he is not (1)
Sleep with him (1) *
sloppy John Turturro (1)
slumberbubble? (1)
Sorry (1) *
sorry about the monkey joke Dap (1)
Swine Semen (1)
The "black CNN" (1)
THE FUTURE (1) *
the goddamn fuckin 80s (1) *
the sprite of sexiness (1)
theyr kids are prolly lame tho (1)
Ugly Ass Dude (1) *

• um (1)
• ummm (1)
• ummmmmmm (1)

very clever (airquotes) nyu student (1)
what the fuck is phil collins doing (1)
what the fuck is picard doing (2)
what's really good (1) *
what's wrong with my snake (1)
whore island (1)
wikipedophilia (1)
Wilding Failing Spell Check (1)
z behl dressed as pubes (1)
“You guys like rap music at all?” (1) *

* also nominated for Tags That Should Have More Than 1 Occurance
† the winner of this year's Gordy for Best Tag of the Decade.

A visit from Kate: Happy New Year y'all

2009-12-31T15:04:00.009-05:00

I'm gonna get in just under the gun here. End of year lists are so enticing to read, but so subjective, so crazy. Top 50 songs of the year? Who are you? Get out of town! So I thought long and hard and I feel I can only speak to the areas of culture where I humbly consider myself to be an expert, which limits me to :

a) facts about the large hadron collider
b) things I ran into while riding a motorized scooter on my family vacation
c) animals doing people things

Since I only ran into 1-2 things (car/lady with a prosthetic leg) before I wasn't allowed to ride the scooter anymore, and I don't feel like writing a lot of words, here are my top 5 pictures of educated animals. I heard 2009 was teach your pets to read year.

While I've been catching up on midwestern activities like collecting body piercings, getting drunk and breaking dishes, and eating deep fried grilled cheese sandwiches, I haven't forgotten my blogging duties. Look out soon for posts on guinea pigs, Mr. T, dinosaur porn, and celebrities with cats, and that's just for starters! Happy birthday 2010. We're going to be very happy together, or else.

TOP FIVE DREAMS OF 2009

2009-12-31T07:17:00.001-05:00

5. Werner Herzog's film adaptation of A People's History of the United States is just an 40-year-old white man in a red Mustang convertible parked on a suburban California talking to a blonde girl in a bikini
4. Me and Big Tigger and Julissa in a limosine watching a fictional Biggie and Mary J. Blige video
3. Swimming in the Japanese Underwater Museum and then flying around with a dolphin lady
2. Playing dominos on a giant manta ray in the Philadelphia airport
1. About a dozen orange tabby cats lamping in a tree

LAST VISIT FROM DAP IN 2009: ARBITRARY ASSEMBLAGE OF STORIES AND IMAGES VAGUELY CORRESPONDING TO THE LAST TWELVE MONTHS

2009-12-31T04:30:00.012-05:00

These are ten images and a few "stories" tossed together so I can get in a year-end list like everybody else. I love you all, faithful (and faithless) readers and would love for you to email pictures of yourselves to me immediately (or ASAP!). HERE. WE. GO!

one

Rob Leitzell (famous film director) was filming something for his NYU Film class at Chris, Kate and Ray's old place on McKibbin Street. Me and Hima had brief parts so while other filming was going on a bunch of us would sit in the hallway and eat pizza and smoke cigarettes and drink beer and be told to shut up. I took off my all-white Nike Blazers with rainbow laces and left them outside for maybe ten minutes. When I came back to get them, they were gone. Later that night, Hima was looking for his shoes that he had left inside. One was found but the other was missing. I had to wear a gigantic pair of silver glitter platform boots home all the way to Jefferson Street (several blocks away) while Mexican dudes laughed at me (which was awesome). Someone gave Hima pair of Pumas he still wears to this very day.

His other shoe was never found, even when they moved out...

two

One time I was coming back from Daniel Lynas' studio with Aleksey (Lakutis) and I started feeling faint (from days of not sleeping or eating) so we got off the train at 47/50 and we had to wait while I sat on a bench for twenty minutes. Aleksey had class early the next morning, what a loser!

three

One night Quinn Walker (of the band Suckers and general good-dudeness) repeatedly claimed to have gotten into a fight with fifteen (then twenty, then thirty) dudes outside a bar. He had no cuts or bruises and appeared to be in a very good mood.

four

I DID NOT PISS IN THAT BOTTLE, NOR DID I PUT A CIGARETTE OUT IN URINE.

five

I DID PISS IN THE SINK BUT NOT THE FLOOR. I ONLY PISSED IN THE SINK CAUSE I WANTED TO GET OUT OF THERE, EWW!

six

I spilled an entire frozen box of peas I had microwaved into a silverware drawer at some random's house, I was very drunk and began to clean the drawer. I cleaned maybe 80 percent of it, but then saw several roaches inside the drawer and freaked out and didn't finish. I don't think I did anything wrong but I'm sorry. SORRY ABOUT WASTING THE PEAS YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE!

seven

eight

nine

THIS IS A CLASSIC, FOLKS! ENJOY IT!

ten

Well that's all for me this year. Check out Stuffed Petite (part of the Gordon Gartrelle Group) in 2010 and if you're in the mood for more funny pictures, search for "A Visit from Kate" (who I hear now goes by DA BADDEST BITCH and has like thirteen piercings?). Adios!

...AND KEEP THE CHANGE YOU FILTHY ANIMAL!

A VISIT FROM DAP: FIERY AIRSHIP AND COMMON REJECTION

2009-12-30T04:46:00.004-05:00

I just had a series of a two interconnected dreams. In the first dream I was walking around an insanely terrifying and dilapidated neighborhood with my dude Lonny that vaguely resembled Canarsie. Lonny kept informing me that it was "Church Ave." As we're walking around (there were fiends and homeless people everywhere) we ran into an old white man in a tweed blazer (the tweed blazer is exactly the same as the one on the chair behind me that somebody lent me) started harassing me until I started kicking him in the ribs over and over again and ran away. It suddenly became day, I was alone in the "same place" but it no longer resembled anything from the night before and was actually quite beautiful. I was part of a gigantic film crew who were filming explosions across the predawn sky. At one point I started hearing screaming and the faint image of an airship (somewhat shaped like a cartoon fish) started appearing in the night sky. All of a sudden it exploded and huge chunks of it (which for some reason were made of concrete) started hurtling and rolling down the main avenues, crushing cars and destroying buildings. The next part of the dream is very hazy but I ended up at Madison Square Garden. I was part of some crazy refugee camp that was lying on the court and when I woke up I saw the rapper Common (who was like 7 feet tall) dribbling a basketball and running with another dude (both in Knicks uniforms) to practice. I said "WADDUP MAN" and he ignored me (even though in the dream I knew him well?) and I was pretty angry.

FLINTERNET: Top 5 posts from my other blog, 413some.blogspot.com

2009-12-27T12:05:00.006-05:00

5) Baby Animals: Cute or Not?
4) An Inquiry Into Notable Historical Figures #1: The Habsburg Chin
3) Can a Jew Catch Swine Flu?
2) Makin' Fun of People Who Are More Talented Than Me
1) Steven Hawking Has a Case of the Floaties

Dishonorable Mention:
Subterfuge at the Zoo!
Gazing Wistfully Toward the Future

\\\\\\ old noreaga interview

2009-12-26T20:15:00.003-05:00

i posted this in the comments but Despot's number 4 opening rap line he could think of at that moment because he could probably remember more

4. "Ayo we light a candle, run laps around the english channel" : Noreaga

reminded me of this old noreaga interview where he explains the gem:

LSD- Not to change the subject entirely, but can you explain “Light a candle, run laps
around the English Channel, Neptunes’ got a cocker spaniel”?

N- Well, when you light a candle, that’s saluting your dead peoples. Light a Candle.
And then, what’s the English Channel? It’s a big pool of water and it’s overseas.So I’m
trying to say that when I light a candle I’m that strong that I can run laps around the
English Channel. And Neptunes [producers featured prominently on Noreaga’s two solo
albums] have a cocker spaniel. ‘Cause they homo.

[Pause]

LSD- Oh. All right.

N- Neptunes is homo. You won’t hear another Neptunes track again on Noreaga again in
your life. I didn’t know that they hand was broken. [makes limp-wristed gesture]

LSD- Is this a recent discovery?

N- It’s a recent discovery after the “Oh No” video. After money had the tight choker on
in that video. And we started asking questions, and people from Virginia started telling
us that he’s a straight Flagrino. And he takes it up the ass. I cut him off.

LSD- Even though the beats–

N- Fuck the beats! [laughter]
I can’t fuck with nobody that Mohammed used to throw off the hill. You know,
Mohammed used to take all the homo niggas in the village, and he’d take ‘em to the top
of the hill and he tricked them. He’d tell ‘em ‘Yo, jump down there’, and when they'd
jump down there, they killed they. We don’t fuck with homo. I like lesbians,
though. I’ma stand up–I like lesbians and dykes. If you’re lesbian and dyke you’re okay
to me, but if you’re a homo, I don’t even like you.

\\\\\\\\\\ daniyal mueenuddin

2009-12-26T20:04:00.002-05:00

Type your summary here

Nah

Type rest of the post here

Nah again.

THE B(R)E(A)ST OF BOOBTUBE IN 2(o)(o)9

2009-12-24T01:42:00.000-05:00

okay so I guess us Gordheads are doing our oblogatory (i get extra points for that one) year-end best-of lists, because if we don't, then we'll be immediately ejected out of the blogosphere, and sent into the greater internet void that lies beyond (the farmville-osphere). So I now submit for the approval of the Permanent Midnight Society:

The 2009 Gordies for The Top Best Internet Youtubes of the Year of 2009, in IMAX 3D

(note: it's irrelevant whether the youtubes were produced or released in 2009 – it's that they were thrown up on GG this year. We outlive time, yo.)

• Best Youtube I Just Posted:
David Byrne Interviews David Byrne

Runner Up: Cecco Beppe (the thing with the futurist scratch-n-sniff cat)

• Best Youtube I Posted That Still Has An Absurdly Low View Count:
Dagsrevyen (description: "Music video, it is a murder ballad")

Runner Up: Eggroll on NY Public Access, 1987. Also James Brown's Japanese Miso Soup commercial.

• Best Music Video Only On Youtube:
Glitter Grit by Sharkula

Runner Up: The Passenger by a bunch of Dutch preteen girls

• Best Youtube I Posted That Someone Already Posted:
the She's Gone video by Hall n'f'n Oates [originally upped by heemz]

Runner Up: Hah! I only did this once! So far.

• Best Youtube I Totally Forgot to Post:
Andrew WK does the local weather

Runner Up: Robocop steals a Korean family's "fried chicken"

• Best Youtube Someone Else on GG Posted:
Floating Dog [via dap]

Runner Up: Highlights from Wildwood, NJ [VIA DAP AGAIN]

• Best Youtube Posted First on Everything Is Terrible:
Cat Massage

Runner Up: Don't Talk to Strangers singalong 4 kidz!

• Still the Best Youtube of All Time:
Toby y Sheila (the beagle and the duck)

Runner Up: Let's Paint, Exercise, & Blend Drinks! all at once.

And in the technical categories:
• Best Interview (between two different people):
Dallas Penn and the Tron Guy on the Tron Economy.

• Best Concert Ever:
James Brown, Michael Jackson, and Prince

• Best Music Video (that was somehow released somewhere other than youtube):
Don't Cry by Guns n' Roses.

• Best Training Video:
REMEMBER SMENS for cops.

• Best Youtube Under 20 seconds:
TIE BETWEEN Arnold and Verhooven's DVD Commentary AND Four Seconds in the Life of Jordan Fish

That's it! Thanks for tuning in.