Creeptastic Thursday
Good morning, everyone. Since I’m about to start on a Sooper-Sekrit Projekt as well as a guns-blazin’ edit on Redemption Alley, with wordcount each day on Weasel Boy, it’s official. I’m not even going to have time to breathe. But that’s okay. The living dead don’t need breath, do they? And “living dead” is pretty much how I feel this morning, even after coffee. I feel like I could be in a Romero flick, cocked head, drool, and weird shambling gait included.
So, how about some creepy stuff? Buckle yourselves tightly, dear ones. We’ll start with something small. Something only a little creepy.
Here’s Schiller’s skull. Only, not really. They’ve done DNA testing and it’s not Schiller’s skull, though it was exhumed from a mass grave where the poet was buried and thought to be his. DNA testing has said neither of the candidates for Schiller’s skull are actually his. Neat, huh?
That’s about the last level of creepiness that has some cool attached to it. We’re going to go deeper, into the creepiness that has NO COOL WHATSOEVER.
Now that we’ve stretched out and warmed up, take a look at this publishing scam directed at teens. Yes, for $2500, your teen can become a member of a pyramid scheme/cult! This reminds me of the thing just out of high school, when my young friend got a job selling knockoffs of designer perfumes. Huge bottles of them, and the kids had to work parking lots and mall entrances (running the risk of being in trouble for soliciting without the approval of the property owner) and hand over their earnings to the person who signed them up for the job. In essence, it was pimping perfume. It sounded too good to be true, and truth be told I was kind of glad she did it, because we both needed the lesson. It ended up with her being stranded in California because her car had broke down and they wouldn’t let her come home–but that’s another story.
The creep factor here is way, way higher than Schiller’s skull because these people are targeting teenagers. Ugh. Teen writers: please, please keep Yog’s Law in mind.
Next up the ladder of creepiness is something exponentially worse. How about scaremongering by the Air Force? The absurdity of “throw money and your children at us so we can use and abuse both to guard against fictional terrorists!” is reaching all-new heights. In SPACE!
Now, military recruitment is not and never has been an art of complete unvarnished truth, mind you, but this is an all-new height of untruth. In other words, flat-out, baldfaced, epic lies. Which shouldn’t be necessary to induce people into the patriotic and honorable institutions of the armed forces. Except, well, I’m not sure our armed forces are being used for patriotic or honorable ends.
As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure they’re not. Which just adds insult to injury.
I don’t know why I’m surprised, considering the last (and worst) item on our Creeptastic Parade today. Did you think break-ins by the government stopped with Watergate? You’re wrong. And now arson’s added to the mix as well.
Basically, the story is this: remember the news stories about Republican Party apparatchiks pursuing political “investigations” of anyone in the Justice Department who didn’t toe their political line, or anyone who tried to do their jobs? (Not so incidentally, those jobs might include watchdogging and prosecuting government corruption, something that’s at an all-time high with Rove, Cheney, and Boy Monkey in office?) The news coverage of such things has quietly vanished from the mainstream media. And those political “investigations” have been aided by break-ins, arson, and at least one alleged attempted vehicular assault.
The mainstream media would rather cover John Edwards’s haircut, Obama’s bowling score, American Idol, and Miley Cyrus photo shoots. Arson, break-ins, and vehicular assault by our own government is getting a huge pass.
Yeah, that’s the creepiest thing of all. The Fourth Estate is no longer really our friend, fellow citizens. They’re part of the narcotic drip meant to keep us anaesthetized while the super-rich buy even more power and entrench themselves even further as lords of earth and latifundia.
How’s that for creepy?
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