Pacificapocalypse

“We are made to believe when we cannot understand, and to obey so that we will never understand”

It’s been 30 years, and I still remember exactly where I was when I heard the news that a bunch of crazy people had killed themselves in some jungle somewhere. I was at the now closed James D. Phelan middle school in San Jose, and I had just turned 11 years old.

Crazy people in a jungle somewhere.

That’s all I knew then, but as time progressed and the story unfolded, I and the rest of the world, learned how absolutely bug shit insane the situation was.

I still don’t understand what really happened. There is, and always will be, a strong San Francisco connection to the People’s Temple. The majority of his followers came from Hunters Point, Bay View and Vis Valley and they still have relatives here. He had his fingers in City Hall and was courted and valued by politicians, as a guaranteed ‘vote getter’. So perhaps that’s why, people, good people, looked the other way (shame on you Chronicle, you fucking knew better) when word got out, before they fled to the jungle, that things were going very wrong inside the People’s Temple.
What force drives, what are to all expectations, reasonably intelligent people, to give up their lives, their homes and deny their families and move to a jungle, an absolutely primitive campsite really, thousands of miles away on an entirely different continent.
What makes committing, logically and methodically an incredibly illogical and insane act, seem reasonable?
They killed their children. They squirted the Kool-Aid down their throats and killed their children.

Kool-Aid in a jungle or new Nikes in San Diego. Something moves these people to commit these horrific acts.I don’t think I’ll ever understand, and frankly I’m not entirely convinced that I want to understand what drives these people.

There’s a lot of info out there; here’s a good place to start.
Jonestown 30 Years Later - SFGate.com

Flying car.
As fortold in the prophesy of the ancients.

Holy crap, I want this thing more than Christmas.

From the Times Online:

To Timbuktu by flying car: it sounds the most unlikely journey on earth; a sci-fi voyage from the pages of Jules Verne. But this is no fantasy. The car really flies. And the journey will become reality early in the new year when two explorers set off from London in a propeller-powered dune buggy heading for the Sahara.

Ok so it’s not the classic Jetson’s flying car but it has a certain Mad Max appeal.

DUDE! FLYING CAR!

So sad, after 92 years, a California institution, Mothers Cookies, is no more.

If you’re a fan of those pink and white frosted Circus Animal cookies from Mother’s, either stock up or start priming your nostalgia, because this week the company closed its doors abruptly. They’ve cited the expected reasons—the rising cost of raw materials, and an inability to borrow in the frozen credit market.

That sucks.

So, I did what so many of my generation do in times of grief, I bought a commemorative t-shirt online.
Got the package and couldn’t figure out why it rattled, open it to find that in addition to the shirt, they sent me a memento mori bag of cookies. Check it out!

Stopped by the Ocean of India last night, didn’t feel like cooking, and Farz whips up a mean Chana Masala Karahi and Saag Paneer.
While waiting for our dinner, I glanced through the pass through window and saw an absolutely beautiful whole leg of lamb waiting on the kitchen table. All lovely fresh oxygenated blood muscle red and fatty bone white. If you’re a vegetarian, that’s the kind of thing to send you into a weeping fetal ball.
But if you’re a meatatarian like us, it’s a thing of transcendent beauty, all lamby and delicious.

On a hunch I asked Farz if the lamb was Halaal. He seemed sort of surprised and pleased that I knew the term and said that yes it was; all the meat and poultry he uses in the restaurant is Halaal.
I think that’s nice, makes me feel good to know he’s using quality product.

I need to stop watching Kitchen Nightmares…

And remember, it’s the labor that cost the most, not the parts.

Jim Kunstler on the recent ‘economic unpleasantness’ and possible fall-out and the future; he’s a little hyperbolic and I’m not completely convinced about all the doom and gloom, but still and interesting take. I might have taken this with a slightly smaller grain of salt if he hadn’t recently penned a fiction novel that falls right in line with this prediction.

In the meantime, however, millions of Joe-the-Plumber types will have gotten their pink slips, slipped helplessly into foreclosure, watched the repo men hot-wire their Ford pickups, and eaten down the kitchen cupboard to a single box of Kellogg’s All-Bran (which had been sitting there for eleven years infested with weevils). They will be watching the official proceedings in the federal courtrooms with jaundiced eyes as they hunch in their tent cities, in the rain, sipping amateur-brand raisin wine bartered for a few snared rock doves. How long before the hardier ones among them venture out to Easthampton with long knives and matches?

I was joking before, but yeah, maybe I should learn blacksmithing and baking… you know, just in case this whole Mad Max thing plays out.
Or maybe I’ll just get another game for the Wii.

We Watch Movies: Quarantine

Ok let’s get this out in the open first: I’m over the docu/horror flick. Enough with the handheld camera work. Yes I get it builds a sense of place and realism, but I’m done. I’m really really done. ( I’m looking at you Cloverfield ).

With that said this movie scared the crap out of us. I mean damn, that was a scary flick. Here we are four years on from Dawn of The Dead (2004) where we got fast zombies and also six years out from 28 Days Later (2002) where we had, not quite zombies, but pretty damn close. And they were fast AND infected AND turned friendly happy guy into flesh ripping Mister Cranky Pants in, what was it? 30 seconds? Damn. Those two twists to the classic zombie paradigm really shifted everything.
They used to be slow, shuffling things who relied upon sheer numbers to eventually whittle down the plucky band of survivors. Now. They’re fast. They can run and climb. Oh hell no.
Since then there’s been little innovation in the cinema zombie, but Quarantine does manage to put a few new spins on the zombie schtick, setting it in a single sealed building was a neat idea for one, making the .gov a partner villain was another. What causes the pleasant residents to turn into mouth foaming killers is actually pretty clever as well as believable, I actually thought that part was one of the more intelligent aspects of the film. I mean, it’s pretty plausible.  Which is freaky.
Ok I *did* get a little tired of Jennifer Carpenter’s giggly cub reporter in the first part of the film, as quickly as I got tired of her, later in the film, screaming and freaking out unintelligibly. ENUNCIATE DAMMIT!. Right, you’re terrified. I get it. Sure I’d probably be babbling and peeing my pants as well, if I were in that situation, but GET A GRIP!.
Some great gotcha terror scare of the leap out and freak out variety, and a bonus sense of the creeping dread as the characters realize, that the .gov has written them off and they are NOT getting out of that building even *if* they survive the nastyness within it.

So yeah, good old fashioned scary film. Pretty smartly written and relatively believable.

Oh! And yet another movie with the greatest actor who’s face you’ve never seen, if only for the last few minutes.

Didn’t know what else to call this… showed up on the side of the EQ3 building next to the 9th Street off-ramp from 101.

Excuse the crappy  cam-phone from a moving bus pic.
Click for full size.

Seriously, I’m warning you, this gave me the absolute jibblies.

One word: spiders.

Now normally, spiders don’t particularly freak me out - I’ll admit to a certain unease, especially in movies that feature hundreds of the little fuckers. Dude! There’s no way to fight them! Guns are useless, you need like, poison gas or a freaking’ flame thrower.
But the occasional spider in the house doesn’t send me quivering.
This story and the accompanying pictures did.
Mouse over the link for an hint of the horrors that await.

You’ve been warned.

You, you are that false tingle, that lying trick of the nerves.
You are that feeling from a mobile device carried in a pocket, that’s set to vibrate.

And you *feel* the vibration, and you look; no missed calls, no new messages. Liar.

You are ‘fauxbration’

Until someone comes up with a more clever word for it.