Month: September 2003

My War With CJ

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Man I really want a “Six-dollar Burger” from Carl’s Jr. today… those things are great. I’ve been craving one for a while.

The problem is that every time I even get close to a Carl’s Jr., I think of their irritating “don’t be a chicken” ad campaign promoting their stupid chicken sandwich. Those commercials just piss me off; this kind of macho posturing is ridiculous anywhere and I sure as hell don’t want to deal with it from a fast-food company.

Experiments with the African mail

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I’m trying to send a comic book to Primrose, who is in the Peace Corps in Togo. However, as comic books go, it’s a big one- it’s the collected version of Box Office Poison, a character-driven “reality” comic book about 20-somethings living their bohemian lives in New York. It’s pretty good, but it is basically a complete soap opera… so the collected edition is pretty thick- 3 inches at least.

The thing about sending packages to Africa is they almost never get there. If your package looks valuable, it will get opened and stolen and sold. If not, it might just get forgotten. Primrose warned us not to send us anything worth stealing, but she sure would like some comics. So here’s hoping it makes it to her! UPS wanted over $100 to send it air mail, so I think it’s going by the good old fashioned US Postal Service.

In a related story, danh and some friends mailed a 30 pound box of comics and candy to Pakistan- danh took special care to black out all the scandalous scenes in the comics Pakistani censors might object to. They paid over $100 to ship it… it’s now three years later and it never got there.

Not that it has to be on a different continent to get lost in the mail- Once I mailed Rachel a bunch of Hate graphic novels at work, but I addressed them to an alias she was using at the time. She had forgotten to tell the receptionist about this… poof! About $60 in comics lost forever. She even went to the lost & found but they had completely vanished.

Grassy Knoll

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9-11 is quickly becoming the JFK assassination of our time. What really happened? Who was responsible? How much of what we “know” is wrong? However, unlike the JFK assassination, the trail has not yet run cold.

The official
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States is the one put together by Congress despite protest from the White House (although later Bush tried to take it over). But is that really enough? If there were even more embarrassing facts that turned up about the intelligence community, would we really find out? After two years of the subject being taboo, mainstream news may be starting to come back to life on this issue, although don’t hold your breath: in June, Salon published a fluffy article wondering why the current administration is trying to block ongoing investigations.

You have to ask yourself why we don’t hear about these stories on any of the national networks, because the stories are out there. Political commentator Mike Hersh writes an article which is a little more substantial, complete with links to mainstream news stories, and radio host Doug Basham maintains a page with more links.

This topic has given rise to entire on-line societies- 9-11 Citizens Watch is sort of a portal tracking this ongoing effort, alongside the interestingly-named The People’s Investigation of 9-11. Also interesting is the writers at
Unanswered Questions who have produced
this provocative Question chart to put on web pages, and my favorite, a detailed timeline of the events of 9-11.

A little more aggressively political is the Citizens for Legitimate Government and their List of 9-11 “Oddities”. And while we’re venturing into the specifically anti-Bush category, there is Resist the Bush Occupation who are “Proud Americans Resisting the Neocon Right.” These guys are intense! And they have T-Shirts!

It’s all about the cool paraphenalia you can generate to support your cause. Not as cool as the Georgy For Governor thong though.