If you needed proof that even the Republican party considers the next presidential election to be a "gimme" for Obama, look no further than the decision today to run Sarah Palin as Vice President next to John McCain. From the great state of Alaska, where every politician is either under investigation or already indicted for corruption and fraud, Palin is under investigation herself for firing Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan because he wouldn't carry out a personal vendetta for her and fire her former brother-in-law from the state police.

They may as well have thrown Keith Richards or Miley Cyrus up there with McCain. That's how clear the message is: "We do not expect to win, so who gives a shit who the vice presidential nominee is?"

It is all so laughable, your politics. What a sad, sticky circle jerk of twitchy, insecure cocksuckers, ridiculously unqualified to do any kind of real work. Politicians, radio "personalities," circus clowns, used car salesmen - what a wonderfully talentless ghetto of petty idiocy and drooling pandering.

You can elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or the corpse of Tammy Faye Baker president for all I care. No politician has ever done anything for me. They have done things to me, and to you as well. But invariably they are doing for themselves. If you can't see that, you are --- well, you're a typical American voter. Or perhaps one of those genius Hillary Clinton supporters who now say they will vote for McCain (I think there are only about 20 of them, really, but some never-say-die Republicans have suckerfished themselves onto those 20 in a sadly desperate attempt to sway what I (and they) can only assume is some sort of "profoundly retarded" voting bloc).

It's all so meaningless and scripted and all of these assholes are the same. All of them. From your precious savior Barak to anti-women's rights zealot Palin. They sway whichever way the polls blow, and they blow whoever they have to in order to sway the votes they need to fatten the wallets of themselves and their cronies.

So, you go girl! Yay Sarah! Yay John! Two more footnotes.

Yesterday I had a domain in a Moniker.com/SnapNames auction that "sold" for $19,000. Pop the champagne corks, right? Not so fast, kid! Today the auction results do not include a few of the names that "sold" yesterday, mine included. All I can gather from that is that the sale didn't go through.

So what is this shit? Were they letting people from the bar stumble in and raise their hands to bid? Just another example of the awesomeness that is the internet: you can bid on something at a live auction and then just say, "Yeah, you know - I don't think so. I changed my mind." Maybe the $18k bidder or the $17k bidder would have paid, but there's no way of knowing that now.

Well, it's always good for the soul to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, right? The upside is now I have a general valuation on the thing, so I can make a private sale, and the imbeciles at Moniker/SnapNames won't get to take a 15% "commission" off the total.



Update: the domain did sell. The results page is fucked up. Thanks to my good friends at Moniker and SnapNames, the most honest and marvelous company on the internet!

Yep.

Maybe I should wait until I get the check to say that...

How much do you know about databases? If the answer is "not much," consider yourself lucky.

I don't much about them either, but that hasn't prevented me from creating and maintaining half a dozen large databases. I ran into what you might call a big problem with one of them over the weekend.

When I created this thing I knew even less than I do now, and I put all the data into one table. Problem is, one table doesn't really handle complicated entries very well. So after adding items to the database and using it online for 5 years or so, I decided to fix it.

I came up with a new layout (or schema, if data organization turns you on) that consists of 10 tables. That right there should give you some idea of what a mess the original one-table database was. Anyway, I set up the new layout, wrote a simple little script to migrate the data from old to new database and set out populating the new database.

One row at a time.

The script was a click-through deal that allowed me to verify the info for each entry as I went along. Verifying each entry required at least four clicks (and evaluating the information on each click). There were 5600 entries to validate/move. I spent about 3 years on and off, here and there, moving the data over. Hey, I'm obsessive and patient!

Well, when I came up with the new database layout, one of the primary cool features was the ability to identify and compare items that might be the same, yet were titled differently. That means populating a separate table containing the associations between the two titles.

Bored yet? Well, stay tuned for the comedy!

So if, say, the same poem was published under different titles (not uncommon for this author), both of those titles should be in the database, and another entry in that mysterious association table would link them together.

But for some reason, from the beginning, I did not use that association table. Don't ask me why. Maybe I wasn't quite sure how I was going to do it, so I pretended it wasn't there. Whatever the reason, while I was migrating that data, line by line, over 3 years time, what I did was this: if the same poem had two titles, I would replace the "newer" title with the older one.

I didn't stop to think what a ridiculously bad idea that was. I just kept plowing through. It was a very big job, so I just did it the way I did it from the start, hoping to some day put the whole nightmare behind me.

Long story short, the new database is now - to me - essentially worthless! Har har har.

The way the new database is now, if someone searches for a poem with a newer title, they may or may not find older appearances, depending on how the title has changed.

So, yeah, I spent 3 years replacing a bad database with a not-much-better database.

I still have the original database (it's still being used on the site), so it will be possible to fix some of this. Though the fix is going to require another item by item script. And another script to add the associations. I don't know if I have enough years left in my life to actually finish this fucker, I gotta tell ya.

So how was your weekend?

I watched the movie Rockers again over the weekend. This is absolutely and unequivocally tied for my favorite movie of all time. Rockers is my Woodstock, baby. Shot in Jamaica in 1976 and 1977, the golden age of reggae music, this film is packed with legendary roots musicians as "actors," great music, a wicked revenge story that culminates in a sort of shantytown crissmass mornin', iya!

If you don't have an ear for Jamaican patois the movie can be hard to follow (even though it is subtitled). It's easy to miss a lot of the subtleties in the subtitles. So to speak. But if you love reggae music of that era, there is no other film that tops this. The Harder They Come gives you a good look at Jamaica at the beginning of the 1970's, but musically it is almost pre-reggae, made during the days rock steady was turning into the reggae style that Rockers is steeped in: the golden age roots rock reggae music that crept up seemingly out of nowhere and took the world by the scruff of the neck.

Rockers is the story of a man and his motorbike. That man being Leroy "Horsemouth" Wallace, one of the greatest reggae drummers ever to pick up the sticks and come forward with him licks, seen? Well, mafia bad boys thief him bike, and him well vexed over that. Who wouldn't be? He seeks solace from Winston Rodney - aka Burning Spear - and in a moment that may just send shivers up your spine, Spear takes Horsemouth down to the shore and they sit on some rubble and Spear sings Jah no dead to Horsemouth with the waves crashing in the background.

I can guarantee you that you will never see anything quite like that scene anywhere, in any movie. That alone is reason enough to take a peek at Rockers. Listen, I'm biased. Reggae is in my blood. But get this: it debuted at the Cannes film festival the same night as Apocalypse Now, but Rockers was on the front page of Le Monde the next morning because a riot broke out when 3000 people showed up to see it in a theater that held only 300. Le Monde's review started with; "This is not merely film making, this is cinema."

I will add that it's very funny as well. Some of the comedy may be buried in the language, but there are more than a few scenes (that I won't spoil for you) that are funny as hell, and one near the end that you will not forget for a long time. The people, the place, the music - it was a very brief moment in time, and it's gone now. The fact that Rockers documented it is a minor miracle in my book.

I don't know if you'll like Rockers, but you should rent it and get yourself relaxed one night - however you go about that - and drink it in. Even if you don't know what the hell is going on half the time, it is still a beautiful experience that anyone who loves reggae music, Rastafari, Jamaica, humanity or just good old rough and tumble indie style movie making - excuse me, cinema - will enjoy.

"What is any political campaign save a concerted effort to turn out a set of politicians who are admittedly bad and put in a set who are thought to be better. The former assumption, I believe is always sound; the latter is just as certainly false. For if experience teaches us anything at all it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar."

- H.L. Mencken

The only sad thing about the death of ex-Senator Jesse Helms is that it didn't happen 40 years ago, before the idea to run for public office entered his spongy, bigoted, narrow, inbred, addled, shitlike brain.

I take great joy in his death. If you find that distasteful, you just don't know enough about him. I take great joy in the deaths of everyone like him - that entire breed of drooling idiot dinosaur rapists that have had their way for far too long. That includes every member of the current U.S. administration, by the way. Just in case that wasn't clear.

And if that breed includes you - sayonara, sucker. I will piss on your grave too.

HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY!

Now where's my independence?

Way back in the olden days (January of 1995) I signed a fancy looking contract with Mother Road Publications for a book of poems and short stories. It was a long and drawn out birth (as these things usually are in the small press) but finally, in April of 1997, alternative man appeared. It was my first book and I was pretty excited about it. When the first 5 or 10 copies came in the mail I opened one of them and smelled it. "Yeah, that smells like a real book," I thought. Hey, you do weird things when it's yours.

Mother Road Publications put out the late, great ATOM MIND magazine. I had been writing poetry for less than a year when I sent them a stack of my work, and much to my amazement, they took some for publication. A lot of little lit mags took poems, and to me it was just the most strange and incomprehensible thing. "Well, this is easy." Of course, over time I came to realize that those magazines had to fill their pages with something, so it wasn't that big a deal to land a few poems in dozens of them.

But ATOM MIND was a cut above most of the slapped together zine-y mags of the mid 90's. It was large, thick, perfect bound (that means the spine is flat, the pages are not folded and stapled), and most importantly, it had a very small percentage of fat. After the first few batches of work I sent, the publisher, Greg Smith, brought up the idea of doing a book. He was embarrassingly complimentary in his letters to me, and while I couldn't really understand why, I decided not to worry about the "why" and took him up on the offer immediately. Then came the aforementioned contract, a few months of me sending him more and more work, then the long wait for the book to become real.

Oy, get to the meat of the melon already, willya mjp?!

Okay, okay. Well, Greg had a pretty good distributor that got the book to a lot of independent book stores around the country, reviews were starting to come in - the whole thing looked like it was going to go very well.

Then he dropped off the face of the earth.

Our only contact had been through the mail, so I had no idea what happened to him or the press. ATOM MIND disappeared, no answer to letters - nada. Eventually I gave up trying to contact him. In the years since I have moved three times, so I knew there was no way he was going to find me. That was that.

I sold my small stash of 100 or so books through the site and here and there, up until March of 2005 when I shipped the last one out. After that I never thought I'd see any more copies. I figured they were landfill in New Mexico or baking in an abandoned desert storage unit, somewhere out there in the wild Southwest.

But a couple months ago I started to notice an unusual amount of Mother Road stuff popping up on eBay. I contacted the seller a few times but never got a reply. Every couple of weeks I would email again. The auctions kept coming and going, but I wasn't getting a response. Then, a couple of weeks ago, Greg wrote me back.

He had been out of the country (his son was doing the auctions), and he told me the horror story that explained why he disappeared (that's his story to tell, so I won't go into it here). In my messages to him I had been asking if he had any copies of alternative man left. It was obvious from the auctions that he still had access to his inventory, so I held out hope that the answer would be yes (funny, you would think I'd have been happier if he said, "No, sorry, sold them all!"). Anyway, he told me that he did indeed still have copies of alternative man fresh in the box, so I bought a giant stack of them from him, and they arrived on Wednesday.

It's odd to have them here. They are like old, familiar ghosts to me. But they are here, so naturally I am going to sell them to you! Looky here! I used to sell them for a premium, but now that I have fresh stock I will sell them at the cover price, which is $8.95. A small price to pay for a ghost book, I can assure you. If you buy it you can see a picture of what I looked like 15 or so years ago, and ridicule me for my outfit, attitude and writing. Your $8.95 buys you that right. Or you can just ridicule me here for free. Your call.

But if I was you, I'd buy a ghost book. I'll even write my name in it, and scribble a picture that looks like something a troubled second grader would nervously scrawl on a bathroom wall with a crayon!

You can't get shit like that on Amazon, babies!

All hail the Mother Road.

Well, this is pretty cool; youvebeenleftbehind.com.

In a nutshell, this guy - Mark Heard - is running a service that will contact your loved ones for you, via email, after the "rapture."

The rapture, in case you didn't know, is when JESUS comes and takes all the boys and girls who have behaved and eaten their vegetables up to heaven to prance around forever in white robes and watch the rest of us suffer an eternity under the thumb of the beast SATAN (don't know what that means? Imagine you're the guy in Apocalypto who's being chased, only instead of running for a day or two, you have to run forever and the guys who are chasing you keep shooting you with arrows and spears and you're bleeding and stumbling and you can't breathe, and all the time this is happening your wife and kids are drowning in a pit full of wet howler monkeys she had to beat to death with a stick, and you can't get to them to help - I think it's kind of like that - forever).

Now, by Mark's logic, if you can send an email to people after JESUS has taken you away, they will be convinced that you weren't full of crap with all the JESUS talk, and they will then, naturally, pledge their lives to JESUS somehow (I guess you will send them instructions), and be SAVED. There's lots more to it, of course. For all the fascinating details of how it works, you really should go read the site for yourself. It will only take a few minutes. Mark is not the long-winded type.

But first, I have to ask you rapture-ites; what's the deal with this rapture of yours? I mean, first, it happens, right? Everyone who is "chosen" is taken away, ascending a beautiful beam of light and traveling up to the mothership, just like in those UFO movies or 1970's Parliament-Funkadelic concerts, right? Okay, but then how do I follow you up a few days later? Will the beam make a second appearance? Is this rapture open for a certain number of days? If so, how long can I wait? Doesn't a second chance kind of defeat the purpose of believing in the first place? Will these questions be answered in the email?

I want to believe (you could say that I pray) that this is an elaborate hoax. I think it's very funny, hoax or not. And even funnier, I suppose, if a gaggle of glassy-eyed jackasses PayPal this dink $40 for the privilege of uploading their sensitive financial documents to his server. Or rather, to the shared GoDaddy server that his site (and thousands of other sites) lives on. This is actually only another weeding out of the stupid if it's for real, so what the hell.

But it got me thinking about this rapture thing. I always assumed it was biblical in origin, but actually it is not. It was cooked up by shysters in the 1830's. That's right, there's really no part of the bible describing this rapture that the rapture-ites believe they will experience.

Well, let me take that back - there are those who believe that it is indeed there in the new testament, and those who do not believe it is there.

So, bottom line, people who believe that the bible is the unassailable word of GOD can't even agree on what it says. That isn't surprising considering the Rorschach-like "whatever you think it says" vagueness employed throughout the book.

Ah, I do love people who pray to JESUS! I tell you, I can't get enough of them. They're the best show out there.

I just need to start a movement to convince them that JESUS doesn't want them to vote, drive cars or procreate. Once I have that licked, it'll really be paradise on earth. Well, in the U.S. anyway.

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