If you have been following my "Around the moronosphere in 60 minutes posts" you may have heard this already, but since I have sitemeter I know you haven't and this is so full of cheesy goodness I have decided to abuse Ace's open blog hospitality and post it here also.

In the 80's Fabio apparently wasn't content with women orgasming at the mere site of him on the cover of the latest romance novel. No, he needed to branch out and let the world enjoy the full breadth of his talents. First he published three romance novels of his own, notable only for causing seizures in their readers, and released an album Fabio After Dark. Despite being chocked full of 70's porn music and pearls of wisdom such as "When it's dark there is no time table for us", this masterpiece of musical seduction didn't immediately rocket to the top of the charts, and would have been doomed to obscurity if it hadn't been for the magic of the internet.

Here is a taste of the love elixir that is Fabio - About Romance

Just a Tidbit [Ace]: Fabio is "one of us." Not that that really makes a difference.

Update: (chad) It has come out in the comments that Fabio was a paratrooper. That doesn't change the fact that the album was cheesy but it earns him a beer if I am ever in a position to buy.

Posted by: Open Blog at 12:23 PM | Add Comment
Post contains 247 words, total size 1 kb.

Lazy Sunday.

Lately I have decided to fully regress to my 8th grade self -- reading "Conan of Cimmeria" (all of the early, real R.E. Howard Conan stories in one volume (of three total)) while listening to Genesis (esp. abacab and turn it on). I didn't actually read much Conan as a kid, finally, as an adult, getting around to the reading I was meant to do as a child.

Interestingly, essays at the end of the book explained how and why Howard created his "Hyborian Age." As to the how -- he had a copy of Bullfinch's Mythology, and simply raided it for names and even plots (or at least story seeds) on occasion.

As to why -- that's more interesting, and, in a strained way, says something about the social good of capitalism.

Howard was basically a writer of historical pulp fiction. He did a lot of Westerns (which some say are superior to the Conan tales, but that's easy to claim, since pretty much they're impossible to find). And occasionally he'd do knights in Merovigian France or 1001 Arabian Nights type stories.

But his problem was that researching the details necessary to get such historical fictions at least passably versimilitudinous took a lot of time. Time he didn't have, because the pulps paid jack-shit, and to make anything approaching a living at the trade, he needed to put out volume. He just couldn't spend a week researching ancient China just do do a short story set there.

His solution? Well, why not just invent a world where no one could cry "anachronism!" or "inaccuracy!" on him, because the world simply did not exist, and he, as the inventor of it, was the greatest -- and lone -- expert on what was historically accurate or anachronistic in the world.

And so he made up a world which had a country like Medieval France, which he called "Aquilonia." And he had a country like pre-Norman-Invasion Britain, which he called "Brythunia." And he had a country like Rome after the fall, which he called "Argos." And Zingara, kinda-sorta Spain and Portugal, and Zamora, kinda-sorta a country ruled by Gypsies, and Asgard and Vanheim, kinda-sorta the Vikings, the Angles and the Jutes.

And Egypt -- Stygia -- and the Turkish Empire -- Turan -- and ancient China and India and Africa too (Kitai, Vendhya, and Kush/Zembabwe/the Black Kingdoms).

Cimmeria, the gray and moody home of Conan, was the land of the Celts and Scots, which is a bit Mary-Sue, as I think that was Howard's own bloodline.

And he even had a place for American cowboys and Indians stories -- the border lands near the Black River, where the outposts of civilization clashed with the tribal, shamanistic, war-painted Picts. Pirates of the Caribbean stories too -- he just took the infamous pirate base Tortuga and called it "Tortage."

He cleverly justified this by explaining this was a "lost age" of the real world, the reason that races, cultures, and names are recognizable in a slightly-altered form is that, after the Cataclysm destroyed this world, names and mythology (and discrete racial groups) from this age endured into our own pre-history. After the Cataclysm, history basically repeated itself, as it often does, but this time without all the sorcerers and man-apes and devils from the Outer Dark.

So he created a world in which he could pretty much visit any historical epoch on any place of the real globe, and set a story there with almost no research whatsoever, except for raiding names from history and Bullfinch's mythology which sounded vaguely Roman, or vaguely Celt, or vaguely Greek, etc., as the locale demanded.

And then he began putting out quite a few stories in rapid succession, no longer restricted by actual history nor slowed by the need for research. And, as the conceit of the world and character of Conan proved popular, he actually began making a smallish amount of money, not a lot but okay, I guess, for a West Texas pulp writer in the Great Depression. (Not okay enough, as it turned out, as he ultimately blew his head off at an early age (28?), but I guess it was enough to keep him housed and fed for a time.)

So, the moral, I guess, is that real-world economic imperatives and the need for productive monetization of his talent would up with a very interesting solution, the creation of one of the first real "fantasy worlds" in literature. Without the need of actual money, he'd've never invented Conan or his world.

(I should note two other economic imperatives that drove him: The need for a scantily-clad slave girl in a story that would give him a shot at the cover illustration of the pulps, and the need to weird his stories up, as he primarily published in frequent-Lovecraft-publisher Weird Tales. To comply with the latter need, he avoided using Gothic or traditional monsters, in favor of the Cthulesque blasphemies favored by Lovecraft and well-liked by the Weird Tales readership. He often described a monster's eyes as "vampire-red," and yet never actually featured a vampire. Instead, he fought man-apes, dinosaurs, and strange alien gods from "the Outer Dark." An odd thing that, this historically-based sword-slinging fiction so often featuring bizarre "gods" of tentacles and plasm and non-Euclidean geometry, but an interesting twist. Pretty much, all around, the interesting and innovative and crowd-pleasing stuff in Conan was dictated by market economics, by what the customer wanted, and not necessarily what the vendor wished foremost to produce. And it seems to have worked out pretty well.)

Anyway, might have to hit the bookstore to get Volume Two of the collected stories. Right now I'm reading a book I never got around to, a collection of of stories about Fritz Lieber's Ffafhrd and the Grey Mouser. With Billy Squier's In the Dark playing on YouTube.

I'm living eighth grade right this time.

Another Influence... Was the hard-boiled detective pulps. Conan is "Hard-boiled fantasy" or "noir sword-and-sorcery," taking the basic jaded, misanthropic attitude of the detective pulps and sticking it in a fantasy world. Conan isn't really a hero like Gandalf or King Arthur; he's not "good," per se. But the rest of the world is so bad and wicked that he's a hero by default. As Chandler observed (approximately), the noir hero is not the best man in any world, but he's the best man in the dark world he actually lives in, and a good enough man for any world.

In one story -- "Rogues in the House" -- he cribs twentieth-century hard-boiled slang in referring to Conan's "punk" -- a punk being a sexual subordinate, usually used in a prison context, and usually referring to homosexual partner (on the receiving end).

Of course, this being Conan, Conan's "punk" is in fact a scantily-clad slave-girl thief-whore. The punk rats him out to the cops, who imprison him, and after he escapes, he gets his vengeance. Oh, he doesn't kill her; Conan is bit chivalrous with the wommenfolk. But he does kill her boyfriend, and then drops her from a third-story roof into a open sewer pit steaming with human waste.

Kinda odd, that, using such anachronistic slang, but it works. It jars, but in a good, interesting way. We're put on notice from the word that this is a Conan version of a Dashiel Hammett story. With, you know, monsters.

Another example of Howard emulating a popular genre of fiction just to make some bread -- and it adding to the appeal of his work.

If You Haven't Read Conan, or Haven't Read Him in a While... Beyond the Black River is often called his best story. It's basically a Western, with the Picts standing in for Indians and Conan standing in for the one Texas Ranger patrolling the savage frontier.

Posted by: Ace at 11:17 AM | Comments (2)
Post contains 1327 words, total size 8 kb.

Give it 30 seconds; it's not immediately clear what the tune is.

Thanks to John Chris. more...

Posted by: Ace at 09:40 AM | Add Comment
Post contains 24 words, total size 1 kb.

CNN permits a lot of YouTube videos of its news (and "news"). Apparently they consider them free advertising.

But here, they've claimed copyright.

The question of whether an excerpt is fair use does not, and cannot, turn on whether the company claiming copyright feels the excerpt is helpful or harmful to its corporate cause.

Posted by: Ace at 09:26 AM | Add Comment
Post contains 82 words, total size 1 kb.

Just posting this so when the MSM decides to do its monthly look-at-how-crazy-the-comments-are-on-the-right-wing-blogs column, they bear in mind that a good fraction of those comments are posted by leftwingers.

David Lane gave his life to defend our country against ZOG

Ted Kaczynski fought the technological society and the culture that alienates individuals from nature. He is a great libertarian. He acted.

Randy Weaver defended himself against assholes trying to take his guns away.

Same goes with Koresh. 82 dead.

Rudolph defended the lives of the unborn.

McVeigh's action was indefensible, but his impulse for revenge is understandable.
Posted by: Kenosha Kid at April 19, 2009 11:38 AM (2CFkQ)

The hashmark at the end -- 2CFkQ -- is a unique code derived from a poster's IP address. The code in question here is one used lately by our resident Obama-defending communism-enthusiast "erg."

Posted by: Ace at 09:15 AM | Comments (2)
Post contains 161 words, total size 1 kb.

I can't believe it has been so long. Fourteen years ago at 9:02 in the morning a truck parked outside the America's Kids Day Care Center exploded. The blast, fueled by a fertilizer-diesel mix, was felt up to sixty miles away. It obliterated the day care center and brought down a third of the building. It shattered the windows of nearby buildings, killing or injuring many outside the target.

I'm talking, of course, about the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Ultimately, 168 people, including 19 children, were killed. Three unborn babies were also killed.

I was in junior high school at the time, in Stillwater, Oklahoma. It was a Wednesday and for some reason I was out of the classroom. I don't remember if I was running an errand for a teacher or what, but I do remember that I was on my way back to class when I passed the main office. Unusually, the TV was on, and quite loudly. It looked like everyone was gathered around it. So I wanted to see what was going on.

There was much more confusion that morning than is remembered now. Now we know that there was only one bomb, the Ryder truck. But back then there was a series of bomb scares during the rescue efforts. That was the first thing I saw and the strongest images I have of the bombing.

It was live footage in the street near the Murrah building. I remember seeing people sitting or standing, most of them crying or clutching injuries. There was blood. There were EMTs and firemen. And then suddenly so many people were running away. It wasn't immediately apparent why they were doing that--and then the cameraman started running too, which added another element of confusion.

It was all very hard to believe. Not just a bombing in Oklahoma--really? Oklahoma? But an on-going attack. I was so confused because the people I'd seen on TV were already hurt and the EMTs and firemen were already there. When you're a child you think, "Okay, the good guys are here; you can stop being afraid." But that wasn't the case, and I only realized it that minute. If I had to list the important formative events in my life, that would be right near the top.

When I got back to the classroom I didn't say anything to anyone. I didn't know what to tell them and I could hardly believe it myself, even after seeing it live and hearing the people in the main office crying. It was the same experience I had six years later during 9/11 when my first thought upon turning on the TV was that they were showing a movie clip on FNC. This cannot possibly be happening.

Sometimes I still feel that way.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 10:04 PM | Add Comment
Post contains 474 words, total size 3 kb.

No, it’s not about the Seattle P-I this time. (That dead horse has been well-beaten enough). This is the “sad” tale of the demise of The Minneapolis Star Tribune as told by Nicole Russell in yesterday’s “American Specator.” Of course it’s following the same path as the P-I did on its recent one-way tip down the drain (damn gravity!), but do you ever get tired of reading about them? Remember, each of these is simply a lead-up to an eventual “V-NYT Day.” Try to think of this as an “island-hopping” campaign.

”Minnesota's most liberal newspaper, the Star Tribune, filed for bankruptcy a few months ago.”

“But soon-to-be displaced Strib employees are now clinging to the sinking newspaper's last life preserver. Earlier this month, a group of them launched SavetheStrib, a website designed to help them find a new owner for their "essential community resource too valuable to lose." In addition to their pleas for help, they've proposed a new business model, one that Minnesotan and Hot Air blogger Ed Morissey said "would certainly set off screeches of class-warfare howling in the Strib's editorial section if any other corporation tried it."

”The revamped business model is the brainchild of the Minnesota Newspaper Guild:"

”The Guild is supporting federal legislation in Washington that would include newspapers among businesses that offer a "social benefit" to the community under current Internal Revenue Service rules. This would pave the way for a unique hybrid ownership model called an L3C --a low-profit limited liability corporation -- that qualifies as a charity under IRS rules, but is operated as a for-profit business. “

“Perhaps I need a more liberal worldview to read that correctly, but I believe the Strib would like to make a profit and then be exempt from paying taxes on it. Who knew that newspapers were charities rather than businesses? “

Tonight’s overnight open thread is sponsored by the delightful Blobfish.(Photo courtesy of “sickinmass” who also sent photos of 23 other freakish critters which will be featured on the overnight for the next month or so) Thanks s.i.m., I think.

Notice: Posted by permission of AceCorp LLC. Please e-mail overnight open thread tips to xgenghisx@gmail.com. Otherwise send tips to Ace.

Posted by: Open Blog at 05:15 PM | Add Comment
Post contains 468 words, total size 3 kb.

From what I can tell, this sounds like a favorable outcome.

The settlement was on two levels: the 6 boys and girls (under 16 years of age) who either were not charged or were given desk appearance tickets and later dismissed without appearing, but were in custody from two to six hours, cuffed to a pipe or a Snapple machine, each settled for $9,000. The older ones who had formal charges issued against them for unlawful assembly and disorderly conduct settled for $20K.

All of the criminal charges against these 16 were dismissed.

One of the engineers I worked on the Space Shuttle with at Rockwell back in the 80's, who happened to be black, was walking down the street in Downey one day toting a new battery for his car and the Downey PD swooped down on him with guns drawn. Their excuse was there had been a robbery and he fit the description of the perp. Pretty lame. What sort of perp is going to flee the scene of a robbery toting a heavy ass car battery? The cop's excuse didn't pass the sniff test.

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 04:25 PM | Comments (2)
Post contains 217 words, total size 1 kb.

I hate the future. more...

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 12:06 PM | Add Comment
Post contains 37 words, total size 1 kb.

Idiots who think Tea Parties were staged by FNC and the Republican Party to protest black President hit hardest.

Rep. "Gresh" Barrett (R-SC) has been taking heat for supporting TARP. Thing is, the guy has a lifetime rating of 98% from by the American Conservative Union. I don't think ACU ratings are the end all and be all but they are a pretty good guide to a legislator's general ideological bent. If 98% isn't getting the job done, we have issues.

More: For those who don't like the ACU ratings, try the National Taxpayers Union's rating. He's gotten an A from them every year he's been in the House.

I never heard of him today but I'm pretty sure he's not the type of guy we should be spending 2 seconds on going after. In fact, I'm willing to guess he's the kind we need more of.

If we decide to ruin solid records over one vote, we're going to wind up with a David Frum sized new majority.

Posted by: DrewM at 10:21 AM | Add Comment
Post contains 187 words, total size 1 kb.