Once more dyed the rich red colour of sockeye salmon

real outfits for the lads: Smug Mountie is drunk with lemonade and power
real outfits for the lads: future redneck rancher is two seconds away from whuppin' you
real outfits for the lads: you can't see it, but this kid's wearing chaps.
Flashy Gene Autry sling style holster, with artificial firearm and Curse of Gene Autry
Real outfits for the panicked Home Front

Vitals

Written by the guy who hums to himself as he paws through the dumpster

Fueled by rage and fresh roasted peanuts

Design by
Die Schmutz

Worthwhile Palinode Pages:
Humpty's Menu:
one - two - three - four - five - six - seven - eight - nine - ten - eleven - twelve - thirteen - fourteen

Can't Stop the Link:
palinode's bloggier blog
The Modern Word
open brackets
smartypants
friday-films
luvabeans
buzzflash
new world disorder
sex & guts!
the memory hole
national pist
Milkmoney or Not
mirabile visu
The Web Revolution!

Fueled by rage and fresh roasted peanuts

watatatow!

I can't help but notice the connection that newspapers have enjoyed making connections between the oil fields of Iraq and the anti-war position of France. No such scrutiny applied to the States, of course, where the clarion call of democracy, like a light burning on a far-off high hill, guides them ever onward. No sir. Nobody in the Bush administration ever made $73 million dollars off of Iraq, unless you're talking about Dick Cheney, or allowed crooked electricity mongers to dictate energy policy. I have to say that I'm puzzled by politicians who decry government and vow to dismantle it if given the chance - would you hire a carpenter who refused to build anything, or a plumber with an ideological aversion to pipes? Bush and his cronies are not even carpenters and plumbers. They're junkies who scavenge the house for copper piping and fancy fixtures until there's nothing left but empty rooms.

But sometimes I think that that the prime mover behind Bush and his bunch really is an ideology, a fundamentalist neo-conservative melding of social Darwinism and the Book of Revelations. There's a scene in Scorsese's Kundun set on the eve of Mao's occupation of Tibet, in which one of the characters says, "We have dealt with the Chinese before". The other character responds: "These are not Chinese. These are Communists". And so it is with the Bush administration. These are not Americans, or even Republicans. They are neoliberal oligarchs taking their turn at politics, a fusion of the very worst elements of the American character - greed, fundamentalism, megalomania, paranoia, hypocrisy and empty eloquence. They are the spoiled children of power running amok with the delusion that they belong to a persecuted class. They are the champions of eschatological pragmatism, maximizing the profit margins on the End of Days, hedging their bets in the secret hope that you can, despite what their Sunday School teachers told them, take it with you when you go.

TODAY'S ROBINOPTICON

Robin's Donuts has adopted the carrot-and-stick method of marketing with a contest for its preferred SUV-driving demographic. The grand prize is the inevitable tropical vacation, as shown by gaily coloured prints of floating doughnuts with palm trees growing from their centres. In-store draws net you golf bags, hockey sticks and electric yard care products. Third prize is you're fired. Oh - do I have your attention now? No, never mind that bit.

Those prizes are only for the elite. For the rest of us, there are the pull tabs that award small savings on various Robin's items. Today I won a FREE Robin's thermal mug. It took nearly twenty seconds for PZOF-W (Permanent Zit On Face-Why?) to interpret my tab and hand over my mug. I declined the ceremonial offer of rinsing and took it back to work with me. Coffee, it appeared, was not included in the prize. Still, it was better than the bag of generic ripple chips I won at Safeway.

Now my prize - no, my consumption trophy - mug sits before me. I have to say that the design revolution that transformed even K-Mart has passed Robin's by. Their mugs are broad plastic cylinders with lids and handles dyed a horrible teal blue that mostly died off in 1989 and now persists only in the bargain pantsuit section. The barrel has been given a 'prairie scene' with grain elevators in the foreground, bursts of shrubbery and a silhouetted city skyline that looks unnervingly like Regina set against a lavender sky. The artwork actually looks like a demented last-ditch attempt by a substitute teacher to keep her grade 3 charges busy for an afternoon, a schoolglued assembly of watercolours, construction paper, parsley and process cheese. Somebody in the hierarchy of Robin's marketing decided that people who live in the Prairies want nothing more than to look at clumsy pictures of prairie landscape, which is a strange contrast to their resort vacation prize.

Retracted on 2003-02-27::6:01 p.m.


parode - exode


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