Initially I p-p-posted this on my twitto page and think its meaning did not come across consistently. Subsequently I reversed the order of the frames to make the suspicious nature more evident without outright stating “this is a joke,” even though from an artistic standpoint, which is to say artistically presenting something to seem not artistic, I like ending on “oh I am so embarrassed.”

By the time I got to THAT site, I thought it would be necessary to write “this is a joke” underneath it. I was “right.”

Incidootily the last frame is an excerpt from something so horrible that I did not post it here at any point. In part the joke was that it WAS so horrible, but I think people did not pick up on that, either. Or perhaps they just did not think it was a good joke. Maybe I should give up jokes!

In frak after all that, I still have not encountered, through the inadvertent channels I encounter everything else in, a solid case made FOR Clinton. Only against Trump, and in such an event people were never going to unite behind one opposition force, and trying to shame people into abandoning their alternate opposition was also never going to work. And Clinton still won the “popular” vote, because all that comes across is how popular she is and how good she is at knowing popular people. In New York and California. So make her president of New York and California. Ha ha ha I assure you the longer and bloated this post gets the less likely I am to make another!

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

With regard to my freak-up last week, I think The Media owes people either impartial reporting or a clear presentation of its biases. But they tend to assume that is not necessary and that their audience is already of one mind with them. Because they have to sell advertising, and advertisers need specific targets. Television news is complete trash. It was never presented to me as: here are the facts on these candidates.” It always came across as “our candidate is cool and we’re cool and you can be cool too! plus oh oh oh she’s a lay-deh” I suppose I should have put THAT in the spiteful little comic strip but the exact sources for each of my frustrations have been difficult to determine.
If Trump is dangerous, that ought to have been reported, and reported how so, not just show the Clinton club’s latest stupid celebrity selfie stunt. I don’t understand how I become a like a pariah for refusing to support either of them, given this climate of non-information.

I realize my current stage of distrust and discomfort came about in part to riding a hype wave to electing Obama. I wasn’t closer to any of those people afterward and felt let down by the result, and I hated myself for letting myself be led. This time, I rejected the hype wave, but I still hated myself because I have so many people around me who continued to ride the hype wave that seems to be the dominant public opinion. The difference is that I hate myself based on my own choices rather than inheriting them, so this is better, I think, I hope.
I am not scared of Trump, I am scared that I have no soul. Once I sort that out I will get back to you. Obviously I am white and in Connecticut. You know I am so bent up by this I keep forgetting that I didn’t actually vote for the guy or say a single bloody thing in support of him at any point. He is a goon. Maybe I just subconsciously relate to goons. Is my personal problem the biggest threat to the country? It IS because it underlines that I want to fight almost everybody for silly reasons. But I don’t fight them and I still want to. I don’t know any white supremacists but I know loads of people who are paranoid about white supremacists and really smug about condemning them and looking conspicuously angry about them, like that’s a challenge.

Breaking: the cast of Chess has vowed to take on Mike Pence’s support for a federal flat tax if he ever comes to Sweden.
I have no recollection of ever lacking for hamilton news, but i appreciate that it recognizes its solvency and would draw a line in the sand like that, and I don’t know what a dork like Mike Pence is thinking will happen when he attends a liberal mass service like that in person, and then when he tries to walk out while it’s happening. It’s like a scene from Rent.

I am SHOCKED and OFFENDED by Donald Trump, suddenly. I was really hoping he was going to put this jerky, misogynistic behavior behind him, but then he had to go and be even worse last decade. I didn’t support him through 2015 by scrutinizing any single thing he ever did or said, after ehhh. If I can’t hold him to a higher standard off camera eleven years ago than I could in plain view last week, how can I ever trust him?

Also, I am withdrawing my support for Jeffrey Dahmer because I just read that he was into necrophilia.

Worse, it turns out that reporters for Hollywood gossip shows are soulless smirklords who will march in any direction they are turned and nudged in. Who would have thought that caring who Angelina Jolie is married to requires a distinct lack of discretion and earthly purpose? Who would have thought that a member of the Bush family will put on any suit of opinions necessary to appease the richest person in any location?

Middle School colon The Worst Years Of My Life might look like regressive uninspired trash but it is in fact based on the writer’s real life experience watching terrible movies about going to school.
In old bimshwel days I would look up who the actual writer was and try and make a point, but I am so detached and frazzled these days I cannot even be certain I am writing this now, which would not be good form when that writer took offense and tried to make me feel bad in my comment section.

Also, I posted this on faceboor last Sunday for some reason:

I saw the Saturday Night Live season premier for some reason I cannot wholly justify.
I think the program is in trouble when its only memorable characters, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, are just celebrity impressions and played by actors who aren’t in the cast or any other sketches.
Of course Saturday Night Live has been in trouble for about 75% of its existence, as 3000 nearly identical retrospective clip shows will remind you.
But does the present cast have any hope if all the attention, and presumably most of the money, goes to Alec flippindippin Baldwin?
Gosh is it fair to the actual credited host? Who even was that? I do not remember.
There was a sketch called “political family feud” that was just a mash of 9 different impressions with no time for a point.
And most of the camera time went to Kenan Thompson, who has been there for 13 years, and Darrel Hammond, who I guess just lives in the building now.
There was a Lin-Manuel McHamilton impression that was amusing just because they dared to mock that guy at all, but it didn’t really go anywhere and immediately afterward a notice stated that he is the host NEXT week, which means if that impression shows up again it will be in one of those character-meets-self sketches, which got old before I did, or far far worse, the impression meets real person and apologizes sketch, which should never have even happened once.
This is the kind of garbage MadTV was doing before it got cancelled. I distinctly remember a Buffy the Vampire sketch in which all these different characters had impressions done of them for one line but then just had to stand around dorkily while Buffy talked to Stuart or Ms Swan or whoever.
I realize I said television was “dead to me” a while back and it is. This means I do not watch shows on purpose and no long aspire to be on them or acknowledged by people who are through twitter. This makes an embarrassingly large difference.
I must also give credit to Bobby Moynihan, who joined the show right before I stopped deliberately watching it back in 200x or so, and 1) is also still there and 3) still hasn’t done anything I remembered afterward. The show in general is yet doing the exact same Kristen Wiig-style awkward chatter schtick it was back when I realized I wasn’t enjoying anything. Which would be fine for it if every ad on television and every movie in theaters (and likewise every ad in theaters) weren’t also doing it. And there is no sense to doing Jimmy Fallon-style no joke but the actors are laughing schtick either because he also has an equally non-innovative program on the same channel five nights a week.
Saturday Night Live’s only goal at this point is to stay on the air. It doesn’t have aspirations; it has a LEGACY, and more importantly no viable timeslot competition. It won’t die until somebody shoves a wooden stake through Lorne Michaels’ heart surrogate organ.

Oh deef what is this

Is it fair to joke about something that killed 300 people and destroyed 3000 homes? As long as it hasn’t killed anybody in the US yet, apparently.

Also apparently, it is better than my personal best. Far less depressing!

The hurricane edged me out by 0.13 points.

If you liked this, you obviously hate yourself, so here’s some stuff to help you realize you could be worse off.

The Donut Trump Skittles story is a ruse to distract from the real insult that Skittles at some point replaced good old lime with an awful apple flavor.

And if you want the lime flavor, you need to buy a bag that ALSO has a lame apple flavor in it. And Death too, apparently. Combined with the orange that’s two duplicate flavors and one flavor that should be in the red bag in the green bag. Inexcusable! Some brands of gummy bears did the same thing, which I complained about years ago, possibly pre-bimshwel. Back then I had real problems. I would still be furious if I had not at some point decided that I like having teeth and stopped eating gummy bears. But that does not help with Skittles since I prefer to swallow them whole rather than bite them, and so having no teeth would actually aid in the process. You might argue that I could keep one tooth and still prevent myself from chewing. However, then I would come across as quite foolish.

And I say all this as somebody who eats apples but does not eat limes. I rely on cheap fictional representations to fill the void. You might as well replace the yellow lemon flavor with a french fry flavor. Although if you are in the candy business and want to use that idea I will gladly accept royalties, and then I will be able to afford something with actual limes in it.

Apparently we have to re-live the Jonbenet Ramsey story now. Last year we did the OJ Simpson story again. I suppose next year it will be Princess Diana and Monica Lewinsky again, then Macarena, whatever mass media tragedy is next in line to have a twentieth anniversary. Believe it or don’t, every one of them WILL at some point. And nobody the whole while will question why this is necessary or acknowledge that we just did this the year before. Can we get these stupid 1990s remakes out of our systems now? Toss in Y2K, Verne Troyer, Jar Jar Binx, whatever you have to do. You already had your chance to try and convince me I cared. I don’t want to be reliving Jay Leno monologue jokes for the next twenty years while simultaneously being expected to give a pumpkin about the latest sass-loaded personality-free multimillionaire who isn’t old enough to remember any of those things.

Additionally, yes, I know this television machine’s aspect ratio is horribly off. I was not in this house while its original control device still lived and don’t know what atrocities were inadvertently committed with it. My feeling is the less of its contents I can see, the better. A pity we can’t cut off 10%-100% of all the audio also.

The next thing I post here will be intended to be less depressing than this!

Especially if it comes at the expense of a fictional large-snouted-being’s depressing incidents.

I did not realize how fortunate I was to reside in Connecticut, where there are no major sport franchises. David Ortiz of the Boston Ruddy Stockings base-ball club was in the news every flippin dippin night when I was in Barnstead New Hampshire.

Tuesday there was controversy because people didn’t like the head-bobbling doll based on him, as best I could figure out, Wednesday he got hit in the leg. I think on Thursday he missed catching a wartortle in pokemon go (a video game in which people use their telephone’s global positioning software to find fake animals programmed to appear at certain spots inside the on-screen map corresponding to actual locations). Friday, a coworker probably looked up and spoiled the results of the gymnastics final prior the official broadcast.
In fact it was pretty much all sports and stupid tweet stories on The News while I was in this place. It would have been a great week to embezzle.

Which is not to say Connecticut reporting is particularly stellar. Yikes a month ago I made some so-themed remarks

And I was just being a contrarian jerko to try and offset the hypey demeanor of a group of people I was talking and thoroughly not relating to. Then the very same day this report appeared, detailing how some kid broke into somebody’s house trying to capture a stupid imaginary animal with no actual value and was fatally shot by the home-owner. Which is insane. And apparently that site is a joke, but not in a way that is discernible from its presentation. And now my site is also a joke, which is sadly too normal to be also insane. Nonetheless actual injuries have come about right? I heard about them on the teevee. While my next site entry is about how being near a teevee has thoroughly polluted my consciousness with horrid rubbish that ought not be true, I have to accept that they are, to some degree.
ASSUMING THAT IS THE CASE, you might as well rob a bank to see if there are really sacks with dollar signs on them piled up inside a vault. I did not expect that bodily harm would not only occur, but become the game’s legacy. In fact it is worse than I expected; apparently thugs of all sorts can deliberately place items at specific places as lures for real people. AND it isn’t even necessary since people will just walk off cliffs while staring at their dumb little screens of their own accord. Supposedly the actual game has a disclaimer that meets the bare bones legal minimum to protect the developers from wrongful death lawsuits.

Considering that the monsters at worst will faint when they get electric-shocked, set on fire, and shot amidst a break-in, Pokemon is likely the first Role-Playing video game franchise to kill more people outside the games than in them. The future is HERE. And it’s pretty boring. We’ll exterminate ourselves with electronics long before they develop the inclination to do it deliberately.

but Larnuik was overcome with inadequacy when its adversary casually walked into traffic.

I have heard the excuse “Pokemon Go gets kids outside!” And so does shoving them outta windas! Don’t say that like it is positive! That people are so wholly brand-indoctrinated that there is no way to move them without an eye-searing, corporate-property-approved incentive. And this game isn’t compatible with other ones, either, so this is not going to reduce the time anyone spends not moving when operating the next one.
I understand loving video games more than physical ones, and perhaps I should be glad there are a few that nobody can watch videos of and claim to have experienced, but it doesn’t seem like there IS much of a game here outside of hoarding. And then, I suppose, social media status-bragging about what you hoarded. Hey peeps every aspect of my personality can be explained in terms of some thing I bought! Gosh if you don’t have this game or care that I have it your life sure has no meaning to me! Which nobody ever said but possibly only because their lives are so product-saturated they can not even consider the existence of lives which aren’t. It’s just as bad as being obsessed with the flippindippin Red Sox except with an added degree of “this is more technologically advanced so I’m SMARTER” sometimes thrown in.

To clarify, I find video games amusing but they are not a fundamental aspect of my existence. I could fill a day without their guidance. I never want to feel like they are playing me.

I never changed the front page of this website to be general purpose and remotely respectable, like I implied I ought to a year or comparable period ago. However, I have added dumb trendy social meddlesome icons at the top of the page, thereby making it less respectable, in a quick hackly attempt to have the page not be immediately confusing to people to whom I swindle into taking my bizmitz cards.

Now somebody else’s corporate trademarks are all over my page. I feel like a nascar driver. Except I am not getting loads of money. But I am not having to drive nas cars either, which is a bonus I did not foresee.

The icons are terribly ugly, and since my design sense, and more importantly my css skills are terribly lacking, all I can do is place the things in a row. If you have good design sense you can get away with terribly ugly. I have tried to get away for years but they just keep coming.

Also, with disrespect to the business cards, on the same day I changed my twitter account name from zinkugel to bimshwel. I already had a bimshwel, on which I only posted what I felt were respectable things. Since that amounted to very few things, I printed the other name on the cards, so that a person who checked might be disgusted but at least not assume I had abandoned it. But now if they check zinkugel they will get nothing, since I thought it would be confusing and non-intuitive if I simply changed the former bimshwel into zinkugel. It is now “bimshwelcomic.”

Additionally, I had not wanted there to be two bimshwels and then a yimpinkilp. There would need to be at least 3 out of 4 as bimshwel. Just 2 looks bad. I have momentary flashes of design sense if they make my work harder and prevent me from getting results. I feel like the more stupid websites there are, the fewer people I know on any one of them. So now I have to put the exact same thing in 17 different places, to reach about 12 people. And of course the more time I spend doing that, the less I can concentrate on production of the things I am showing. So it seems like I am getting more and more enthusiastic about worse and worse things. Which would be great, if it were true; gushing about garbage is how you make friends in ternet, but in actuality I am just tired. No time to rest! However, for once this means safety conditions will improve because my “job” is to draw unfortunate beings getting hurt, and if I cannot do it well, everyone’s health should improve.

I was going to have the icons hanging from the inside of this moron’s wing-skin, as if it was trying to sell the things in violation of law, but I have no idea how to make individual parts of a picture clickable. Image-maps are a nightmare of 1990s era html. What I can do now is make separate images for each (like I have done) and enter x and y coordinates for each of them (but not their entire areas as I would need to with an image-map), and then figure out how to make them not jump around separately at different screen resolutions. But they would have to be very tiny, wouldn’t they! And that smiling big-snouted fool would need to be terribly prominent on my page. Although I like the idea of such useless trinkets being offered by such a clueless individual. Hey dork, nobody would EVER pay you for those stupid icons! And it would keep on smiling.

A recent visit with my niece has revealed the truth about McNuggets. Given the circumstances, I am surprised this bird is not angrier. I suppose it is numb to the matter.

I cannot determine if Secret Life of Pets is a ripoff of every pixar movie, half the newspaper comic strips or one specific cat litter advertisement. And determining the answer is not worth, to me, $18 and the private knowledge that I paid it. What seems to be important is that the only thing which changes through the decades is what song Vivaldi’s Spring concerto gets record-scratch interrupted by to let me know what a hip young rankler the interrupt-instigator is.

This does not strike me as a film that is designed to be “enjoyed.” It seems to intend to appeal to parents who think they are edgier than their own parents, and they will impose it on their own children, who will probably find it boring, but with all the extra admissions the studio will still have a huge profit. Meanwhile, the actual stuff aimed at kids is utterly sappy or phony, so that it will not be accused of promoting violence or hostility. I am not surprised they just fiddle with their telephones all the time.

Following up on the previous item, a very positive robot reviews a local government establishment.

This Sunday once again, I will be selling art at the Connecticut Walk for Autism event. As in past years I am raising funds to provide autism to those in need.

There is my table from last year plus my relation Big Ian Sea. in case you thought I would be tasteless without also meaning it. Also, until further notice, that is his theme music. OBVIOUSLY that person is not me; he is using a Mac-book! I may have autism but I am no fool. Incidootily I caught it from eating some undercooked salmon. That is the real reason I never order fish.

And I tell you of this not because I am proud I am attending or because I expect you to attend: you could not possibly, on such short notice, from your location.
In fact Ian has his own event this evening at some place or another, and that is what I made that “music” for, but I am so frazzled by all the backed up nonsense in my life that I only got it sounding like THAT just now and it was worse earlier, and consequently I can only justify its abrupt existence by showing it to you, bimshwel. I cannot show it to anyone else until it is much better than that, which it will have to wait in line for.

Although increasingly I identify myself as bimshwel, which makes things confusing when I talk to you, bimshwel-the-website. I do not address myself by my name when I talk to myself; That makes me uncomfortable. And for a few years I have tried to dissuade myself from calling myself bimshwel due in part to the conflict with you, but I keep coming back to it. Maybe it is YOUR name that is wrong, bimshwel-the-websit.

Yes, another final fantasy 8 post. I cut this off from the previous installment and I have to use it because there is one joke in it that I like at all.

I wanted to get into the game’s story a bit. Because I already wrote all this, so it would logically follow that this is what I want. In fact the story is really grim: it is about a bunch of kids at school being trained to kill kids from another school. You don’t realize they’re kids because they look to be in their 30s, except for Quistis who looks closer to 40, but the instruction manual insists all are 17 and 18 years old. Quistis just looks old because, as I indicated last time, she is possessed by a 30,000 year old malevolent hate spirit and I suppose she is holding up rather well, overall.

The heroes soon get assigned to kill the president of Galbadia, the nation/city/tiny isolated village on a huge empty world map that the other school is from. But then that school forgives them when the president teams up with the evil sorceress Edea, so then the kids try to kill the sorceress. They fail and somehow end up fighting against the school that forgave them earlier anyway*.

Then the sorceress Edea forgives them because they are all orphans and she was actually their muppet-baby-like nanny from years ago, and actually married to the principal Cid of the school that trained them, whose original purpose was to train kids to kill Edea who Cid is married to. The real enemy is actually Rinoa, the hero’s love interest, who is, after Edea (the orphanage sorceress), next in line to inherit evil from a different sorceress, Ultimecia, from the future, who wishes to be reborn in the past and therefore present. So then everybody goes to the future to kill Ultimecia, including Rinoa, her reborn self from the past, who has become more powerful but resisted becoming evil, but not Edea, the first sorceress, who is also not evil but doesn’t seem any worse for having received enough power that her husband started an army with which to kill her and therefore useful to have on your own side in a fight. And then I wonder why not let the evil sorceress give evil power to everybody since they seem to shake off the evil without losing the power fairly consistently and within a short time frame. By the way when I said the story was grim I meant uncomfortably ridiculous.

And you have a hard time wearing a complete sweater. We all have deficits to work on.

One of the secondary heroes, Irvine, is from the Galbadia school and the only cowboy in the world, complete with a big stupid hat and riding chaps, which typically goes unmentioned because in addition to lacking other cowboys, the world also lacks both horses to ride and cattle to herd. There are chocobos, strange large yellow birds, but you only ever see Squall riding one and his regular leather pants seem sufficient. Also, from my recollection, despite taking approximately forever and being out of character with everything else in the game, completing the side-quest that gives you access to the chocobo doesn’t actually confer any manner of benefit, since there is no place for the bird to go apart from places that your space ship can already land next to, and you need the space ship to find the bird.

Irvine, despite being from the other school, doesn’t seem bothered massacring his former, conveniently-anonymous helmeted comrades. Which I could also tie into Star Wars 7 but hopefully I won’t because by now that movie is two months old and nobody is going to care. Though it must be said that Finnegan only switched sides in the first place after he saw his chum get shot by the guy he later broke out of prison.

Irvine is the love interest of Selphie, who dresses for the complete opposite weather that Irvine does. Also, even though in 1999 nobody said “selfie” to refer to uninteresting photographs of yourself, Selphie in the game is still adequately annoying. I don’t feel like getting a picture of selphie! I don’t need a picture of everything I describe! And I’m telling me that, not you! Although sometimes I call me “you.”

This is the world map. Notice that there are only about 15 land marks on it, which are the only points you can engage with. And that is fine; you can’t expect to go everywhere in the world. What is annoying is that the game makes not the slightest effort to imply there is more to the world than the places you can enter. Of course having a superficially place-filled world that you could not go anywhere in would also be annoying but that only feels bad on my side. This here looks bad on their side. The two southern land-masses seem to have one destination between them.

Late in the game you come to esthar, which looks like this. And it’s great. In the context of a first generation low resolution playstation role playing game it is great, I mean. You have to travel on the highway a while before magically switching to the “inside the city” view. You can see neighborhoods and roads beneath the highway. You feel like there’s stuff going on. That’s exactly what the other cities should do.

Although even this abruptly ENDS at nothing instead of tapering off into less densely populated areas.

And earlier Irvine claims to have searched the entire continent looking for the city while his associates take a Gogurt break (on railroad tracks). The city is holographically hidden from view, but the game text outright states that there is nothing in existence that you cannot see from the world map, and that the speed you move on the world map is not artistic license to keep it from taking weeks to walk from town to town. Gosh that’s the third thing I hated about Earthbound. It’s supposed to be so modern and hip and with it but only the main characters have houses and only one town has a school and I didn’t actually finish it because I only rented it once and didn’t care much and thought it was ugly anyhow.

Also apparently it has the world’s biggest game box and costs twice as much as the next most expensive cartridge on the secondary market, if you are insane enough that you think playing a console rpg on native hardware without speed acceleration when you don’t have to isn’t the world’s biggest empty time-sink and worth spending extra money and living space for the privilege of and also on tracking down a 24 year old super Nintendo system that still works AND the last remaining gamepads that nobody ever stepped on. As if this is more honorable to the Nintendo company in some way than emulating the game, even though it isn’t because Nintendo doesn’t get a cut of resales and has re-released numerous games like this one as pay downloads that it gets FULL proceeds from, that are a fraction of what the games cost new in the 1990s, which was a fraction of what resellers are sometimes charging for them old in the 2010s. Hooray for a hipsterism based economy! We honor the cutting edge technology of our youth by treating it like the antiques of our grandparents’ youth! We honor the advancements that astounded us in the past by treating improvements on them with the obstinate backwardism of an author who takes it as a point of pride to still use a typewriter!

I know somebody who criticizes me over my use of the commercial applications photoshop and fl-studio for artwork and music when there are free alternatives with ostensibly the same capabilities. But the commercial software does what I need in efficient, non-backward ways that I already understand, and typically have larger existing support bases. I know people who can explain to me how to use that stuff. I pay extra for convenience. You don’t buy a super nintendo game on a cartridge in 2015 for convenience. A typewriter is superficially more efficient than a computer to somebody accustomed to typewriters, but a typewriter does not have the same capabilities.

And then six paragraphs about how much I hate Fisherman’s Horizon, Shumi Village and Trabia, the most boring and endless mopey, exposition-only areas in any video game, and the stupid boring card game that for whatever reason needs to be played the most in the most boring areas of the main game. I need convenience NOW to make up for all the time I wasted on THIS kind of stupid garbage back when I had time. And I need even more convenience because I wrote all those paragraphs and will never use them.

That’s no way to talk to somebody who has it all figured out!
(I put the paragraphs here)

This is a very thematically incongruous website!

—————-

This was already half-written when I posted the last one. Backing out was not an option.
I suppose my previous item is more a criticism of “news” in general than the individual humans I mentioned. I am meant to take “news” more seriously than “tabloids” or tv shows about boring people in mansions, but it has no journalistic standards. It promotes the two party political system and the associated agenda of fearmongering. CBS news was on that day instead, but presumably ABC did the same thing: When reporting on the recent, widely publicized San Bernardino murders, carried out by supposed Isis sympathizers, beside the reporter were displayed pictures of convoys of dark-hooded people in deserts riding in jeeps carrying huge guns. San Bernardino is not in a desert! The shooting was done by TWO people, who look JUST THE SAME as anybody else, in a NORMAL city like any other, just as we have HUNDREDS such mass bullet murders yearly. One of those people is from HERE, United Statia. And the other had been here for a solid year, and was considered a permanent resident. We have a murder problem HERE, done by people who live HERE. 3000 angry druids did not drive jeeps across two oceans and start firing freedom-seeking missiles as soon as they touched blessed American dirt, and if they continue to not do that it will not be because Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump or Ronald McDonald stood at The Border, like that is a place, and stopped them.

This San Bernardino mention, I should add, came amidst a story about a man with a KNIFE and a FAKE BOMB who ran into a POLICE STATION in Paris. That idiot had a note declaring allegiance to Isis. That’s the dumbest story I heard all year, and even half a month in that’s saying something. I could duct tape a colecovision to my chest and get shot, too. That I tried doesn’t prove anything, and that you shot me to death only proves that I cannot be questioned. You could shoot me first and write a note that says “I is Isis I hate good guys signed me ps. only true patriots can stop me and prevent forest fires” and I couldn’t stop you. When The News is going to report on stuff like that, they need to present it so that I don’t assume they made it up.

Just this week there was a suicide attack in Istanbul. Isis supposedly claimed credit. First of all, since it was a SUICIDE attack, the attacker is dead so Ladysmith Black Mambazo could claim credit. This story I saw back on good old ABC again, and the graphic showed TANKS this time. Isis is not driving 50 tanks into Southern California to back up those jeeps it also isn’t sending! When are we going to stop thinking of these conflicts in World War 2 terms? This is not us vs them. It is us vs him and him and him and mostly him and her and him and on like that. There is not an organized military infrastructure to target, that tells you when it is coming, and that is itself all on the same “side.” USA is obsessed with world war 2 because that is the last war that it looked good in, because that was the last war it understood at all. Millions were dying in Europe for years and the US came in late to be heroes. It had casualties but not on the level of any other country involved, and consequently learned nothing from the conflict except “we’re always right and we’re always the strongest,” which it already believed. And so all our policy makers grew up continuing to believe that. Network news programs showing me armored hoards advancing in formation in daylight when it talks about murderers hiding in crowds and blowing themselves up has two purposes: to make me afraid, and to make me seek safety in conventional western military counter-measures, and likewise to trust the reports I get of that military’s accomplishment.

Even Nazi Germany was a western power, which used western tactics and western rules. The US does not know how to engage what is actually out there now, but its military industrial complex knows how to keep getting paid to make big dumb expensive things that can fly around and kill random people, and then boast about all the “enemy combatants” that got blowed up. We bombed crucial Isis installations! We killed Al Qaeda’s number 2! We GOT the BAD GUYS! So why are there more bad guys than ever? Either we aren’t really getting anyone, or whatever we are getting is making more guys go bad. We hear about French or Turkish forces striking back after recent supposed Islamic State attacks, but why is there anything for them TO back-strike? Why did they WAIT, and why didn’t they finish?

And we don’t even necessarily have real pilots involved who can personally verify or be held accountable for anything. We are sending robots to kill and trusting whoever runs the robot to tell us what they thought the robot saw.

Even scarier is considering that such an absence of outcome is deliberate, that there is no intention of resolving or concluding conflict. So I am scared anyway, doubting the people who try to make me afraid. And they are afraid. Always terrified that some other country not aligned to American interests will build an atomic bomb, and convinced that any country with the means to do so will, since that is what Americans would do. Americans are afraid of the force that they set the precedent for using.

Which is not to say the US is alone in perpetuating warfare to keep its own interests on top, but as the one with the most soldiers and the most distance and safety from the countries it is trying to control, when this stuff goes wrong we suffer loudest and venge least discriminately.

These are the conclusions I reach, quite on my own, when my information is delivered so clumsily, and the clumsiness seems deliberate. And if
addendum for 12-31-2016: I have no evidence of ever having completed that sentence nor recollection of starting it. If I intended to conclude on “and if,” I have no idea why I did so.

Strictly regarding frivolity that I understand, I previously griped about ABC news devoting extensive coverage to “leaked” Star Wars junk that could only possibly have been leaked by the people who tell ABC news what to report on. Incoming kardashian trashian facts are also desirable, and if there aren’t any, that is still a story. Each winter they report that it’s cold outside. Unless it isn’t cold outside yet, which means they report that it isn’t cold. When Pope Francis was in the US this September, that was the top story for a whole week even though Mr. Pope did the same thing each day of the week, which was to get driven around and address an audience. In fact the same exact stuff he does when he isn’t in the US. No other head of state gets that kind of coverage, but no other head of state has that many followers. So the story wasn’t what the pope was doing or does, just that he EXISTS and how popular he is. And people still think The Media has an anti-christian bias. That’s not it at all. The Media has an anti-substance bias. I pledge to you: If I have nothing to say, it will be nothing about me or nothing of personal relevance. I will not share the nothing of others, and will not ask others to distribute my own nothing.

A longer story of my year transition, of which I will tell a remarkably vague and short version, is that I was visiting my father at a hospital(s) from December 28 to January 6, and related duties then resumed or introduced themselves for the first time.

But what is this? Could it be the Yale New Haven Hospital was the point marked on corny cartoon treasure maps all these years? And nobody bothered to dig it up yet?

I’m rich! That means I no longer need to feel like my life is a complete joke when I see things like

This millionaire who is already famous and whose moderately tolerable and occasionally not completely dissonant songs have been played incessantly for the past five years really made the tough decision by agreeing to receive more money to appear in the front page cover story of this magazine about how she doesn’t do that and doesn’t she look so glamorous.

In related news, I have devised a test to determine sanity:

If you have ever spoken to the press about “haters,” even though there are actually people paying you just to do that, then the people paying you are insane. Especially if you only have a first name. If you are being paid just to exist and complain about people who don’t like you, you floating indistinguishable head, then congratulations, you didn’t win, but everyone else lost. Your silver spoon golden calf family gets everything and is not permitted to be criticized. How could I hate that? I should aspire to it. I will work really hard at being born to rich parents next time who can have frivolous surgery on a whim and be praised for it instead of because there is a mass of goop in their brains slowly killing them and without the confidence that they will be financially stable afterward.

This is the best advice I have ever received from a magazine rack.

In the interest of fairness, “Khloe’s” biological father, Robert Kardashian was killed by esophageal cancer at an age 4 years less than my own cancer father currently lives at, although I could say his quality of living has been rather crummy for over ten years, having already dealt with prostate cancer and continues to deal with a loss of motor skills inspired by cerebral ataxia, and he also never volunteered for the Orenthal Jingleheimer Simpson criminal defense team. Perhaps Kabloe makes the point “hey life is hard even when you’re rich careful what you wish for you just might get it mo money mo problems ok guys I’m literally terrified I’ll wake up tomorrow and still be loaded” but since I’d have to buy this stupid magazine and make some effort at comprehending the text to know, that will remain a mystery.

I remember months ago, ABC World News Tonight, at the start of the broadcast and before each commercial break, teasing an update on Lamar Odom’s condition. It was not specified who Lamar Odom was or what was wrong with him, so that his “condition” should be of interest. I listened for the story just to find out who he was, but that information was never delivered. When I looked up Kloby today, I saw that she was married to whom? Lamar Odom. So either I am supposed to know who Lamar is exclusively based on his Kardashian konnection, or the fact that I am supposed to know about him already is what made him kardashian-worthy.

In fact, they supposedly had a tv show together in which both lacked last names and were presumed noteworthy merely through being masses of cells.
Consider: one of the most viewed information programs in the country, if not the world, has 21 minutes to deliver all the information in the world, and it found cause to refer to this random basket-ball player –which, admittedly, is more of a definition than Khloe can achieve– four separate times possibly only because he did sex on a kardashian. And then the story itself was, essentially, “Oh, Lamar? He’s fine.” The dumb teases had as much content as the actual story. The story could have been delivered in the space of the first tease. “Tonight on ABC World News, Lamar’s fine, so we won’t mention him again and waste the time of people to whom he is not important.” But that wouldn’t happen because the news is just as fake as real reality. THAT observation is not even news! Clearly I need to observe less. Which we have established previously, but avoiding all information is not a realistic expectation. So I will try and reach a conclusion on this matter so that I do not not feel so compelled as I presently do, and can change from perpetually reporting on bad reporting that is perpetually unchanging.