A few impressions from a day of thinking too much...

     Some lions in Africa are bred and raised to be hunted.  Rod Serling might've written a Twilight Zone script using the premise, but he would've had a lion hunter, played maybe by Jack Warden, shifted into an alternate reality in which humans are bred and raised to be hunted.

     The Republican Party is controlled by right-wing fanatics who couldn't accept the very conservative Kevin McCarthy as the next Speaker of the House.  Paul Ryan, who doesn't want the job because it'll hurt his future presidential ambitions (considering his performance as vice-presidential candidate in 2012, there will be many jokes to be heard if he aims for the Oval Office), may have to take it, since he seems the only one who can gain enough votes.
     Meanwhile, John Boehner, who hoped to retire this month to become a lobbyist, will have to hang on to the job he evidently hates.  Rod Serling might've written a Twilight Zone script using the premise of a man who achieves his dream job, Speaker of the House, has a huge new gavel carved for him, but finds himself unable to achieve anything due to the crazies in his party.  He then finds himself stuck in the job with the uncooperative nuts.  The camera moves up and up to show him inside a chamber filled with gibbering and fighting politicians, all surrounded by blackness, and the impotent sound of the huge gavel.

     It's fun to watch squirrels eat.

     The Pentagon program, costing half a billion dollars, which was to have trained Syrian rebels to battle ISIS, has failed utterly.  Only a few recruits were trained, and I mean a few.  Weapons ended up in enemy hands.  Taxpayer money was wasted on a program applauded vigorously when Obama announced it during a State of the Union address.
     Sometimes things that seem brilliant, like they can't go wrong, are fucking insane.  As soon as he spoke of the plan in the address, I thought of the Contras and how well that went.  Rod Serling might've written a Twilight Zone script in which a nation at war is so seriously fucked up, with no solutions possible, a race of deities removes the country from Earth and places it under a dome on Mars.  The combatants don't realize they're no longer on Earth.  Even the gravity is that of Earth.  The protagonist, maybe played by William Shatner, realizes something's up when his sergeant gets blasted by machine gun fire, and the man's blood runs down an invisible barrier.  Then what happens?  I don't know, I haven't seen the episode.

     One nice thing about really cold weather is that drunken college students don't walk around town then, shouting and kicking things.

     Looking at news items on the Internet today, I saw a teaser about a Picasso painting discovered recently.  I didn't read the article or take a close look at the painting.  I don't really care about Picasso's art.  If a newly discovered Max Ernst painting, or one by Mark Rothko, among others, were discovered, I'd read the article and examine the painting.
     This reminds me of John Grisham, the lawyer/bestselling novelist.  The ready availability of his work, I mean.  Picasso is so famous, even though his stuff is radically weird, but it's a weirdness gone mainstream.  Grisham isn't weird, but his books have been assembled from several forests, so numerous are their copies.  One of these copies, of the novel The Client, was in my ex-girlfriend's bathroom for a while.  I sat on the toilet one night and read the first few pages.  I decided to read the book whenever I took a shit at my girlfriend's apartment.  I didn't get beyond about twenty pages, having lost interest in the project and the book, but I still associate John Grisham's writing with literature to shit by.

     I saw a teaser for some entertainment news program: the Kardashian women sitting for interviews and smiling, along with the narrator saying, "The Kardashians.  Do you know them as well as you think you do?"
     Is there more to know?  Have they reserved a trace of dignity in the past decade and now they're going to give it away?  Did they decide to hold back their opinions on some subjects when doing their various shows?  Are they more intelligent than they seem?
     The constantly regarded Kardashians constitute something like a religion.  A devout Christian can picture Christ on the Cross, Jesus baptized by John, Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, Mary Magdalene washing and anointing Jesus's feet and the Apostles giving her a hard time about it.  These stories never needed television to make images in worshippers' minds.  They had cathedral windows.  The Kardashians are a modern religion, in high definition imagery, for those looking at what it might be like to live mundane lives in mansions and luxury hotels--Heaven to the materialistic mind.
     Self-obsessed Armenian-American idiots whining about their interpersonal relationships make another version, perhaps, of faux Serling's battle torn nation transferred to Mars.  The Kardashians are stuck in a prison they volunteered to inhabit, and their options, apart from working in the fashion industry or living from the cushion of their money, are few.  Go to YouTube and listen to Kim Kardashian singing if you want to realize the lack of talent we're dealing with here.  Should she have the flair and voice of Beyonce Knowles?  No.  But she isn't even as good as Kei$ha.
     The Kardashian talent is performing "reality" in lives under surveillance.  They're rich, they represent an aspect of the American Dream, but not all dreams are interesting.
     I didn't tune in to find out what I may not know about the Kardashians.  Rod Serling might've written a Twilight Zone script in which the Kardashians prove to be paid actors, moving on now to other acting gigs after a long successful run with their show.  The actress who played Kim was excellent, the perfect dingbat looking for love and fulfillment in marriage to self-obsessed men.  The actress who played the mother, Chris Jenner, managed to come across as wise at times, but also pathetically driven to be a pal to her progeny.  The actor who played Bruce Jenner turned in a stunning performance as the low key, chilled out man with a secret desire to become a woman.
     The Serling twist?  We're all acting.  Watched by cameras, under automatic suspicion by the NSA, stuck in reality--just don't get typecast.

                                                                               Vic Neptune