Amusement.

Where half of the staff currently resides, it is in what might refer to as the snow belt of America. After a certain period of time, the darkness (and consequent lack of sunlight) assaults and overruns my sense of humor and sometimes, the reserve of hope I carry for nights starting at 3 p.m.

It is no surprise then, that my family has purchased for me, at great cost, a piece of technology I simply refer to as the happy lamp. I fully expect the nice lady to come around with the happy needle sooner or later. This, and other happy needles have been instrumental in my continued survival around here.

Augustine reminds me I gain little from telling you this. I note otherwise. It is my hope, readers, that you learn from what I am about to say.

You do not have time to spend your free time doing things you don't like. Your free time is valuable enough as it is. I realized this some time before playing Rock Band for 5 hours more or less straight. True, I do have other homework to do, and I had about 3 hours of sleep last night, but my mind hasn't felt that clear afterwards for weeks at a time. Yes, I had to wake up with a half can of Jeff Gordon approved energy supplement, but I felt (finally) like I was doing something worth doing. And, when the band got a sound guy and bodyguards, I took that as confirmation that something was going right.

Perhaps it was another misplaced urge to play some Hot Water Music songs and having to settle for Deep Purple, Blue Oyster Cult and Black Sabbath. (Toward that end, if I must pledge fealty to a Black something band, then I bend my knee to Black Flag.) It is not that Highway Star, Don't Fear the Reaper and Paranoid are bad songs, and the original bands are not good, in fact, quite the opposite. But, I don't really want to play a nice, clean guitar part with a singer who has, you know, notes to hit. I want to play a song where the guitar players are great, and the singer looks over at the crowd and passes them the microphone.

Alas, Rock Band in it's wisdom, does not understand this. I did, however, have a little leap for joy when I saw that singer's avatar now had a NYHC shirt on. I took that as a little tip of the cap and a secret handshake between someone at Harmonix, and anyone else from the punk and hardcore scenes who found themselves playing their game. And my heart sang, just a little, when I saw on Kotaku that At the Gates (From Slaughter of the Soul, no less!) was going to be on the March 4 DLC update.

As I write this, I have a couple other projects and assignments I should be turning my head to, including an interview with the Out_Circuit mastermind, Nathan Burke, in advance of his new disc Pierce the Empire With a Soundwhich is a fantastic little disc, perfect for wandering out in the deep, deep snow and getting lost with your thoughts and neuroses.

Brand New might still have the words "wake up, you are going to die" on their myspace page, and they hit the nail on the head for the first time since they wrote Moshi Moshi and Guernica, but this is Eleven Names, not Long Island, so I'll do this a little bit differently. Find something you enjoy. Find something that amuses you, and do it. It (especially around this time of the year for our readers in the Northern Hemisphere) is a cold cold world, and if you can make people laugh, then you have warmed it, if only for a moment or two. There is enough pretentious, humorless garbage floating around me that I can guarantee you with all my heart and soul, humor and joy are two of the few things still worth doing.

Carpe diem. Carpe noctem. But carpe something.

Dread Pirate Captains that No One Has Heard Of

And so, blasting past security systems with a MAC address stolen from a wii, I return to the internets. The last week has been a blur of mental activity and far too little sleep, but I promise I won't be leaving you alone with all these other classy indviduals for so long again anytime soon.

Which is perhaps the least meaningful sentence I have ever typed.

In the distant past, I promised you to discuss One Piece (the manga. NEVER THE ANIME). In the recent past, I promised to talk more about Mike Gravel.

I am beginning to suspect that they are secretly the same subject, as all things are.

Unfortunately, explaining that cryptic comment is going to have to wait for another day. I can tell you that Mike Gravel's alternative debate begins in half an hour, broadcast live on Internet by upstream.tv, and tthat unlike John Edwards, he shows no sign of being willing to step out of the race, even if it may be argued that he was never really in it.

The man has no real net worth. I think that he owns, perhaps, a car and some credit card debt, and that he would be by far the best president out of all the candidates. It doesn't matter, but if he turns to coastal raiding after he loses the election to finance his democratic efforts, I might be tempted to join his crew of sea raiders, as they journey across the world to find the lost treasure of the last King of the Pirates, and their dreams.

I promise there is a logical, semi-litaerary reason why I am conflating Mike Gravel and One Piece, and it is not just my brain imploding after a week with minimal sleep and maximal role-playing games. However, the viking mind compels me to go and devour the flesh of hundreds of innocent chickens now, as a warrior of Elbaph should.

That brain implosion theory is looking more and more likely!

Your Pets Hate You and are Secretly Plotting Your Demise

Ahoy there sailors! It has been a while since I last graced the pages of elevennames. I had a good reason, I swear, but cant remember it right now . . . . something about updating twice a few weeks back.

It has been an unusual few days for those of us in north western P.A. You see, on Tuesday we woke up to temperatures of 40+ degrees and sun, which promptly melted our think blanket of snow. The next day was no less sunny, but temperatures had dropped to 15 degrees with a wind chill of -3. Suffice to say that many a person was startled Wednesday morning when they stepped out in to the shinning sun and freezing wind. And all of this crazy weather has put me in a mood to do something I dont often times do:

clean
(dramatic flashes of light and music)

I wouldn't consider myself to be a messy person, just cluttered. And to be honest because I was sick for like 11 days I hadn't been keeping up with the accumulating used tissues, empty water bottles, and medicine containers. And sometimes I look around mine or my friend's apartments and cant help but think that if we let things progress much further we are going to have to worry about leprosy. It doesn't help that one of Zach and James' roommates recently acquired a pet rat. It is cute in that nocturnal rodent type way, but I cant help but worry that it is carrying the Black plague .

Which causes my stream of consciousness to jump to another topic: people who give their pets asinine names. There is something to be said for an original pet name, something with character, class, a story behind it like Moses Killsie Puff, or Herr Milch Mann, or even Squizgar the Untouchable. But naming your pet rat anything that involves the word cunnilingus is just too far. Rats and oral sex should never been in the same sentence. EVER! Its like cheating at a game of Candyland with your 4 year old nephew, or saying you are going to vote for Rudy Giuliani, its just wrong on so many levels. And dont get me started on the people who put their pets in little outfits. It is a secret fear of mine that one day our pets will rise up, take over the world then dress us in tutus and little clown suits and rename us idiotic things like Foxy and Spot.

Well, thats enough babbling from me today. Really I was at a loss for what to say after Project Runway was a rerun last night.

Next week, hopefully a new theme to guide our ramblings.

Je Voudre un Croissant

A thousand apologies, saheb. There was no update on my part yesterday, due to homelessness and Project Runway heartbreak. In response, maybe two updates today? Maybe not (already I no longer pine for the days when my prevarications alone dominated these pages). I am in the city of Pittsburgh today, a town built on the bones a hundred thousand steelworkers and coke forges, now known for having a lot of hospitals and robots. Also, terrifying mill-towns! Crystal meth says Hello I Will Rot Your Teeth Out But At Least You Don't Have To Sleep! It's certainly a strange place - old dead billionaires who called in Pinkertons to bloody the noses of nascent labor movements were also responsible for libraries, symphonies, and a seemingly infinite crop of tiny theaters (as well as Andy Warhol's haunted tomb).

Also, ketchup!

Tourism aside, it's a place that you kind of feel guilty for being in, because a million disapproving Polish ghosts are singing Sondheim-esque songs of working in steel mills and in the mines and you're like "I just want to play my gameboy in peace!" Also, everyone here is kind of sarcastic. That may just be because it's cold, or because they're all from somewhere else and had to come here because of their job - you'll recall my previous statements about the damned basically just getting on with their lives.

Right, wait, what? Bridges everywhere?

Rejoice, liberal schweinhunds, for Giuliani has dropped out of the race for president! So did John Edwards, who seemed to be genuinely kind of good hearted, but can't compete with Obama and Clinton's celebrity. Like any good reality TV show, the time has come in the race when the Bradley Baumkirschners of politics are tossed to the wind and allowed to come to rest outside of our purview. Which is always sad. I don't know why the producers always let the biggest jerks stay until the end, y'know?

Whoopity-Doo, Tarantula Town!

Discovery: Celery cures my headaches. Or at least lessens them. So that's good to know.

Did you ever consider the Medicis? I mean, duh, of course you have. The whole idea of rampantly pro-family Italian bankers pleases me to no end. Here is an entire family of people (who all had the gout) who were so obsessed with getting their clan ahead in life that they were basically facing damnation at the hands of the church way back in the 14th century. Is it any wonder that the church then claimed that the plague was the punishment for usury? And why these same usurers then just doled out some of their ill-gotten usury to the anti-usurists at the Church for plenary indulgences and blammo! Get out of purgatory free. It was a pretty sweet they had going. I mean, unless you were poor (it always sucks to be poor).

It's always been an attitude, the idea of Family First, that has unnerved me since I read Dante's Inferno and there were about a dozen crispy critters lying around being sodomized with flaming sulfur, and the only thing they could think about was like HEY DANTE HOW'S UNCLE TONY DOING? DID HE STOP SMOKING LIKE HE SAID HE WAS GOING TO? OW OW OW OW? TELL MARGIE THAT HER NEW HAIRCUT LOOKS NICE! You'd think that people in Hell might be a little more concerned about being in Hell, but I guess they're pretty relaxed about the whole damnation thing. This metaphor is infinitely applicable to life in modern America, BTW - the country may be going on a non-guided tour to Hell in a handbasket, but at least the family is defended, and the gays can't marry.

I mean, you have to have your priorities.

Short post today, for tomorrow I embark upon a voyage. A voyage to find an apartment. In a place. Maybe across the hall from my sister - we'll see.

Your Body is a Shattered Hellscape

So I engaged in the serious task of manscaping today. It was a nightmare. To sum it up, I no longer have the nose hairs of a mad Victorian industrialist. My sinuses now flow free and unfettered, visually glorious in their lack of hair. Another thing about such an activity is that it is painful. The act itself is, in essence, ripping the parts of myself that I feel others might find offensive off. Of myself. Which is, in essence, fucking ridiculous, because people will find anything offensive anymore, especially my own leering and bat-like visage. WHY MUST I CHANGE MYSELF FOR YOU PEOPLE? Oh right, because I have body issues. Continuing on.

I was speaking with Cathleen (never Catherine!) today, talking about specificity of studies, to wit; what can you do with a BA in English? It's really bullshit, the idea that your area of speciality makes you uniquely suited to a particular path in life. Not that it's false, no, just that it's bullshit. We live in an age where investment bankers basically investment bank, and view that as the sum of their lives. Authors write and write and write (horribly in some cases, DON DELILLO), and never really do anything else. We seem to have a kind of diversification caste system out there, where movement from one area to another is hardly possible. Angelina Jolie, maybe, and her gestalt Celebrity/Activist/Attractive Freak is a good example, or Philip Levine's Autoworker/Poet thing. For others, though, our areas of speciality are doing us no favors.

Consider Wal-Mart, or nearly any other chain store. These are buildings constructed by cold efficiency and logic, where the whimsy and wonder and other costly architectural super-fucking-fluousnesses (LOVE SAYING THAT OUT LOUD) have been surgically extracted by the cold scalpel of, I guess, the trolls in accounting, leaving behind a raftered box with an entry, and exit, and a lot of space. An entire division of art turned, basically, into a dvd player. They're structures that, one can only hope, would have never come into being if Sam Walton was able to see the visual atrocities that his sons inflict on the world at large.

Also, guess what? You just lost the game!

Regardless, one must consider what lies always beyond themselves, what happens when sculptors start painting or plumbers start singing or when bloggers start self editing (answer: neurosis). To this end, I long ago made a personal vow to try things that I know are oftentimes uncomfortable to do.

Which I guess places me back at square one, ripping out my own nosehair for your aesthetic pleasure. I hope you're happy with all the enlightenment I'm projecting your way, interblags. Catch y'all later.

The Internet on Tom Cruise on Tom Cruise: Scientologist.

I'd like to apologise for my failure to be offended by the Tom Cruise Scientology video. I should remember that when the States were a series of colonies, we were an experiment in religious tolerance: that the most absurd, most conservative religious sects of Europe were deposited here, and that our national tendency towards superstitious, hateful evangelism is a direct result. Although I should have noticed by now that tolerance of any kind is clearly a terrible idea, I seem to keep doing it anyway. I'll never learn. I'm deeply sorry.

I'm also entirely wrong about all of this because, as many of my fellow nerds will, I think, agree, I don't find a religion based on the writings of a science fiction author to be all that strange. Last night I had a dream in which Storm and Beast appeared to me as gods, and Marvel isn't even my preferred universe.

Being a fool, I think that most of what Tom Cruise says doesn't seem particularly crazy, simply enthusiastic. Which is what happens to most people who find a faith, rather than being born into one. The person who can see that this thing they found, simultaneously incomprehensibly ancient and brand new, this thing that really works, that makes such perfect sense, is the correct thing for them, rather than the correct thing, full stop, is exceptionally rare.

When he sounds a bit off, it seems less a result of the religion itself, and more because he, as an individual, is a smug bastard. My favourite parts of the video are the late remembrance that Scientologists can be female, as opposed to being Tom Cruise, and the hesitation before saying "us" when clearly he'd been thinking "I".

I suppose you're intimidated by the flashes of culthood. Complete compliance is demanded! You must not be a spectator: take action! Bring more people to the truth! Alas, I seem to lack the tools to be sufficiently intimidated by this. Having endured thirteen years of religious education for two different religions, both of which I stopped following by the age of thirteen, I seem to have developed the notion that people are intelligent and strong and usually can't be made to believe things they don't want to believe. Could Tom Cruise make you a Scientologist? Did he? No.

The element of the video that I find to be disturbing is the simple fact that Scientology is, of course, exploitative and charges people for enlightenment and knowledge. This is despicable. Tom Cruise's first words in the video, "I think it's a privilege to call yourself a Scientologist, and it's something that you have to earn," is nought but a sales pitch.

Of course I don't think that people should have to pay in order to feel sane or healthy, to rise in a hierarchy, to gain knowledge. This is why I also distrust privatised health care, weight loss programs, Louis Vuitton, and academia. Yet again, Scientology fails to bother me. I've grown far too accustomed to tolerating capitalism.

In which we Become a Celebrity News Blog

So how about all this Tom Cruise hullabaloo? All the moral vindication of mourning Heath Ledger without all the dulling "I'm a hollow husk of a human being" side-effects of placing idle bets as to when Britney's gonna shuffle off, sans culottes, into the ether. But this whole Scientology business? With Anonymous's's "threatening" youtube video? In response to Tom Cruise's's flipping out over his spf or whatevs? What is up with that? Is there some kind of turf war? Has the internet gone all Warriors? That would be awesome. FUN MINI GAME: DESIGN THE ELEVENNAMES GANG OUTFIT.
I am uncomfortable, though, with the idea of a bunch of people essentially terrorizing a slightly legitimate religion, in much the same way I am uncomfortable with the Westboro Baptist Church being criminalized. I wouldn't mind too much, of course, but it sets a dangerous precedent that we as a culture would inevitably fuck up to justify whatever kind of skullfuckingly inhuman atrocity our most deviant minds can come up with.

So, I mean, can we just get along? Maybe? No?

The real problem I have with the whole scientology thing that's out there is Tom Cruise. It's a testament to the man's celebrity power that when he acts like an idiot, people stand up and take notice. John Travolta and Kirstie Allie (and maybe Will Smith?) cannot arouse this level of interest and attention in popular media, because they seem too wholesome or well-balanced. No, it takes a truly disturbed and charismatic individual to peak our interests, as any internet satanist (or even worse, aforementioned Westboro Baptists, whom I despise too much to even link) everywhere will tell you.

It's the tyranny of our own sick fascinations. Tom Cruise is a handsome man (he still looks like he did in effing Legend!), who is rich and powerful. Will Smith, Kirstie Allie, and John Travolta all have terrible flaws to them, weaknesses we use to reaffirm their human status as flawed, struggling individuals. Rich, handsome, energetic Tom Cruise exists like one of the aliens he doubtlessly worships, a strange visitor that normal humans can't quite understand. And what we do not understand we humans hate and destroy. I'd feel much better about the whole arrangement, too, if Tom Cruise were devoted to some sort of non-hateful sect of an established religion, instead of the warily litigious Church of Scientology, last seen in the public eye making South Park edit their one episode where Chef goes away. So it's easy to hate them.

The hullabaloo, then, becomes a function of a highly visible (insane) celebrity with and intensely unlikable church that relies as much on lawyers as it does on belief. Tom Cruise is the focal image, then, that we can use to view the event, much in the same way that the image of devastated african americans "looting" from a sunken grocery store is what we remember of Hurricane Katrina. Which is, of course, always inaccurate to my thinking - things are always so much more complex than our brains are wired to understand (thanks Google) for whatever reason, and that these oversimplifications are the starts of where wacky, obviously flawed rumors become agreed-upon facts. Without concrete knowledge of anything, then, it is impossible to make a rational judgement.

And we know this, as people. If you question your perceptions, everything is suspect. But that doesn't mean that we, as a culture or as an anonymous, don't take such suppositions seriously. The same sort of groupthink fever becomes widespread around elections and football games - it's just a function of our identity as human beings.

Anyway, my current identity is of "tired guy who can't write for shit today", so let's stop this where it is, and I bid you good day.