I’m probably not alone in this opinion… but making money from a person’s death in the form of a tee shirt seems pretty low to me. Even if that person was a world famous rockstar… it’s still incredibly tacky, IMO.

But someone—based out of Thailand with the name “Nuchyk”—is doing just that by selling tee shirts on eBay with Kurt Cobain’s suicide note in its entirety printed on the front. Apparently this has been done before on Etsy with Cobain’s letter on shirts and baseball caps. Etsy quickly pulled the items from their site due to overwhelming complaints.

You can click here to read Cobain’s final letter.

Via AV Club

 
The alarmist punk-rock-is-coming-for-your-children episode of everywhere’s local talk show was practically a genre unto itself around 1980. They typically followed a template: a safe, comfortable, grinning suburbanite moderator projects his or her values onto a movement s/he doesn’t understand at all, and expects a handful of alienated, hobo-looking kids that the producer dug up somewhere to represent punk as a whole, as though a couple of random petulant runaways should shoulder the responsibility of justifying the existence of a broad international musical and cultural movement. On better shows, they found bright kids, and the hosts at least made an effort at understanding the new weirdness, instead of just hectoring their guests about their negativity, as though all art was invalid unless it existed solely to entertain them personally.

This is not one of the better shows.
 

 
Stanley Siegel was an interviewer of some repute, who fancied himself audacious and uncompromising, but was often really just kind of a showboating dick. In one infamous episode, Siegel physically restrained Timothy Leary before sandbagging him with a surprise phone call from Art Linkletter, who blamed LSD, and by extension, Leary, for his daughter’s suicide. So yeah, THAT kind of showboating dick. On his obligatory punk rock scold show (IS IT A DEATH TRIP OR A RITE OF PASSAGE?), he managed to book credible guests and proceeded to treat them with amazing condescension. In addition to the usual few aimless kids, Siegel landed Penelope Spheeris, director of the canonical L.A. punk documentary The Decline of Western Civilization, and artist Gary Panter, whose logo for the band Screamers is such an elemental piece of punk art that it’s probably much better-remembered than the band itself. He’d become even better known as a cartoonist for RAW and as the set designer for Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.

Spheeris, right out of the gate, is just not having any of Siegel. At first it seems like she’s trying a little too hard to affect disaffection, but soon enough, what looked at first like brazen posturing (“I’d like to be a hooker?” Really?) becomes more than justified by Siegel’s smug, curt patronization. Real quote: “This woman actually produced and directed a film!” Spheeris would go on to make the cult classic Suburbia and the mainstream classic Wayne’s World, and is still directing. Not sure Siegel’s career was quite so storied, but whatever. It’s all pretty eminently watchable.
 

 
More after the jump…

“Police Force Role Play Set for kids with Combat Vest, Riot Shield, Badge, Handcuffs, Machine Gun Toy, Grenade, Club & Knife”
 
I’m not actually particularly against “war toys.” Kids have violent little imaginations, and I don’t think there’s any causal correlation between acting them out and actual shootings—lots of kids have toy swords, but it’s not like we’re dealing with a rash of impalements. That being said, there is something about riot squad dress-up sets and riot squad vehicle LEGO sets that’s particularly gross, probably because it’s a much more literal representation of a visible violent institution. I mean, when kids play soldier, there’s the antagonist of a foreign “enemy” that keeps it a distant fantasy. Even when kids play “policeman,” it’s a kind of generic take on justice, like being a “sheriff,” but come on, a riot squad? What are they supposed to be doing, playing Ferguson?

I would expect this from a dress-up kit (costume companies are run by insane people, for insane people), but I feel so sad about LEGO stooping to this level! Look at those little minifig pigs! You have to wonder who among the children who will receive these toys will grow up to be dissidents, and who among them will join the other side, right? This is probably about as insidious as war toys are, of course, but can’t we at least agree there’s something creepy about tiny little running dogs of capitalism with itty-bitty riot shields?

EDIT: The “LEGO”-looking toys are not LEGO-brand, but a counterfeit block set, much to our relief. Apologies to readers for the misunderstanding, and apologies to LEGO for besmirching their noble name.
 

Riot Police Car, 325 piece set
 

Minifigs from above LEGO set

 
For some inexcusable reason, I have merged the first time I saw one of these Protect & Survive infommercials with watching kids TV on a Saturday or summer holiday morning. Let’s say, I saw them after re-runs of The Banana Splits and before My White Horses. I’m no doubt wrong but that’s how I like to remember these “chilling” ads instructing the plucky British nation on how best to “protect and survive” a nuclear attack. Fat chance, I hear you say, and I would certainly agree—as the government’s suggestion of some quick DIY (taking doors off their hinges to form a makeshift shelter) and stockpiling food, water and medical supplies within the allotted four minute warning before a nuclear attack was highly optimistic.

Twenty of these short Protect and Survive films were made in 1975, and were certainly screened at some point during that decade and during the 1980s. I know because I recall thinking it very unfortunate that my parents had glass doors throughout their house, which meant any unhinging or using of these doors as possible shelter was utterly pointless. It struck me then that such makeshift bunkers made from leaning a door against a wall and reinforcing it with furniture, suitcases, bedding and, er, sandbags (as if anyone had these lying around) were in reality coffins, graveyards for the millions of English, Scots and Welsh who would have been wiped out in an attack.

Of course the UK government knew this as they had secretly run a mock nuclear attack to estimate the actual number of dead and injured. Called “Operation Square Leg,” the exercise assumed that “131 nuclear weapons would fall on Britain with a total yield of 205 megatons: 69 ground burst; 62 air burst.” This would leave 29 million dead or 53% of the population; with 7 million or 12% seriously injured; and 19 million or 35% of the population remaining as “short-term survivors.” In other words, we were all fucking doomed.

Still, perhaps those in charge hoped these little films would offer a tiny glimmer of hope to those who thought the government knew best, or in my case some scary Saturday morning entertainment. The voice-over for these infomercials was supplied by Patrick Allen—-who was also at this time presenting a host of adverts selling timber-framed homes to first-time buyers. Some of his lines from these films were re-recorded and inserted into “Two Tribes” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood notably:

“Mine is the last voice you will ever hear. Do not be alarmed.”

 
Former Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush speechwriter, Pentagon official, novelist, TV commentator, columnist and idiot Douglas MacKinnon appeared yesterday on The Janet Mefferd Show to promote his new book, The Secessionist States of America: The Blueprint for Creating a Traditional Values Country . . . Now.

It seems that MacKinnon, who you might see on Fox News from time to time, was inspired by the recent referendum in Scotland to consider what might happen in America in a similar(ish) circumstance, after a recent poll found that nearly one quarter of us would like to secede (although not necessarily for the same reasons).

According to The Raw Story:

[MacKinnon] told the religious conservative host that southern states – starting with Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina – should leave the United States so they can implement a right-wing Christian system of government.

MacKinnon envisions other states joining, but he hopes to leave out Texas because “there have been a number of incursions into Texas and other places from some of the folks in Mexico.”

Sure the Confederate states got a bit of a bad rap back in the Civil War days, but hey, that was then and this is now, right?

MacKinnon told his host that the Southern states had “seceded legally” and “peacefully” before the Civil War and that it was President Lincoln who was in the wrong. The rightwing pundit also recommended that the newly-formed country be dubbed “Reagan,” in honor of his old boss.

Although slavery was not mentioned during the program, he’s got a major problem with gay civil rights. MacKinnon took up the “persecuted Christian” canard with a passion, declaring:

“If you do believe in traditional values, if you are a Christian, if you are evangelical, if you do believe in the golden rule, then you’re seeing all of this unravel before our eyes daily,” he complained.

Nope, no gayz need apply for a visa to “Reagan,” and you doggone Lat-teen-o-types, apparently you ain’t welcome either (hence the Texas snub).

Here’s some excerpts from the interview as posted by Right Wing Watch:
 

Frieda Walter: sentenced to three years imprisonment.
 
Though their actions were monstrous, they are not monsters. There are no horns, no sharp teeth, no demonic eyes, no number of the Beast. They are just ordinary women. Mothers, sisters, grandmothers, aunts, widows, spinsters. Ordinary women, ordinary human beings.

In the photographs they look shameful, guilty, scared, brazen, stupid, cunning, disappointed, desperate, confused. These women were Nazi guards at the Belsen-Bergen concentration camp during the Second World War, and were all tried and found guilty of carrying out horrendous crimes against their fellow human beings—mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, daughters, sons. Interesting how “evil” looks just like you and me.
 

Hilde Liesewitz: sentenced to one year imprisonment.
 

Gertrude Feist: sentenced to five years imprisonment.
 

Elizabeth Volkenrath: Head Wardess at Belsen-Bergen: sentenced to death. She was hanged on 13 December 1945.
 
More Nazi mugshots, after the jump…
 

 
An Iowa police officer named Aaron King is under fire after this video made the rounds on the Internet. King is seen giving a motorist a written warning for their headlights not working properly and then asks, “Why is it everybody that plays Frisbee golf smokes weed?” in an attempt to get the motorist to agree to a search of his vehicle.

The interaction is annoying as all hell. My blood was boiling while watching it, but the joke’s on Officer King, as the motorist quickly realized what was actually happening and that his rights were being violated.

“In the video taken by an occupant in the vehicle, the officer engages the driver in a line of questioning that is foolish and not representative of the Ankeny Police Dept.’s training or interactions with the public. This verbal exchange did not meet the level of professionalism expected of Ankeny police officers,” Chief Gary J. Mikulec said in a statement posted to the city’s website.

More than anything, it’s an interesting—even educational—video to watch just to witness a dickhead cop’s manipulative “wordplay” in action.

 
via NBC News

 
“Four dead in O-HI-O. Four dead in O-HI-O.”

Companies love to stir up a lil’ controversy. If you’re old enough, you’ll recall Calvin Klein’s “heroin chic” campaign as well as another late 90s campaign that was widely decried as “porn.” Well it’s one thing to flirt with such imagery, it’s quite another to jump off into the deep end into something so stupid that it turns people off to your brand, like Urban Outfitters has with their totally obnoxious “Vintage Kent State Sweatshirt”:

Kareb Farkas writes at The Cleveland Plain Dealer:

Urban Outfitters is facing a public backlash after offering for sale a “Vintage Kent State Sweatshirt” with red blotches that could be interpreted as blood stains.

Twitter lit up as people blasted the company for its insensitivity for selling an item citing a university nationally known as the site of the May 4, 1970 deaths of four students by the Ohio National Guard during Vietnam War protests.

“We take great offense to a company using our pain for their publicity and profit” the university said in a statement Monday. “This item is beyond poor taste and trivializes a loss of life that still hurts the Kent State community today.”

The tragedy at Kent State was a national disgrace, inspiring Crosby Stills Nash and Young’s “Ohio” as well as DEVO, whose Jerry Casale was an actual witness to the event. Casale told the Vermont Review in 2010:

Vermont Review: Going back to your early days. You were present at the Kent State shootings in 1970. How did that day affect you?

Jerry Casale: Whatever I would say would probably not at all touch upon the significance or gravity of the situation at this point of time—it would probably sound trite or glib. All I can tell you is that it completely and utterly changed my life. I was a white hippie boy and then I saw exit wounds from M1 rifles out of the backs of two people I knew. Two of the four people who were killed, Jeffrey Miller and Allison Krause, were my friends. We were all running our asses off from these motherfuckers. It was total, utter bullshit. Live ammunition and gasmasks - none of us knew, none of us could have imagined… They shot into a crowd that was running away from them! I stopped being a hippie and I started to develop the idea of devolution. I got real, real pissed off.

VR: Does Neil young’s “Ohio” strike close to your heart?

JC: Of course. It was strange that the first person that we met, as Devo emerged, was Neil Young. He asked us to be in his movie, The Human Highway. It was so strange - San Francisco in 1977. Talk about life being karmic, small and cyclical - it’s absolutely true. In fact I just got a call from a person organizing a 30th Anniversary commemoration. Noam Chomsky will be there and I may go talk there if I can get away. I still remember it so crystal clear, like a dream you will never forget . . . or a nightmare. I still remember every moment. It kind of went in slow motion like a car accident.

VR: You said that the Kent State shooting sort of served as a catalyst for your theory of Devolution, which spawned Devo—

JC: Absolutely. Until then I was a hippie. I thought that the world is essentially good. If people were evil, there was justice… and that the law mattered. All of those silly naïve things. I saw the depths of the horrors and lies and the evil. The paper that evening, the Akron Beacon Journal, said that students were running around armed and that officers had been hurt. So deputy sheriffs went out and deputized citizens. They drove around with shotguns and there was martial law for ten days. 7 PM curfew. It was open season on the students. We lived in fear. Helicopters surrounding the city with hourly rotating runs out to the West Side and back downtown. All first amendment rights are suspended at the instant the governor gives the order. All of the class-action suits by the parents of the slain students were all dismissed out of court, because once the governor announced martial law, they had no right to assemble.

And now it’s an ironic tee-shirt for dipshit hipsters! Urban Outfitter’s “Helter Skelter” fashion line inspired by the Manson Family murders are on hold for now, apparently. They may want to rethink those “beheaded journalist” and “Jerry Sandusky Telethon” tees, too.
 

 
via Daily Kos

 
The Fatberg!

Beneath the busy streets of London lurks a monstrous hideous man-made creation that is slowly engulfing the city’s sewers with its gross oily bulk.

The Fatberg!

Soon this monster will be oozing out of the sinks in kitchens and toilet closets, encasing everything it meets in lard!

The Fatberg!

When you see it—you’ll scream “No, no, no, no!”

You can run but there is nowhere to hide from the hideous Fatberg of Old London Town!

This may all sound like the trailer for some 1950’s sci-fi feature, but the “fatberg” is a very real threat to Londoners and their Victorian sewerage system.

The “fatberg” is created by stupid, inconsiderate and selfish people pouring cooking oil down kitchen sinks, and flushing wet wipes and sanitary products down the toilet.

The cooking oil mainly comes from the restaurants, and those innumerable fast food outlets that have spread like cancer thru-out England’s capital.

Last week, a giant “fatberg” the length of a Boeing 747 jet was removed from a sewer in west London after it threatened to send effluent and waste spurting back into homes. It took Thames Water workers four days to clear the foul-smelling blockage from over a 260 foot stretch of Shepherd’s Bush Road.

Dave Dennis, Thames Water sewer operations manager, told Sky News:

“The sewers serve an important purpose - they are not an abyss for household rubbish,” he said. “Fat goes down the drain easily enough, but when it hits the cold sewers, it hardens into disgusting fatbergs that block pipes. Wet wipes cling to the fat. Fat clings to the wipes. And pretty soon your fatberg is out of control and sewage is backing up into roads, gardens and in the worst cases flooding up through toilets and into homes.”

Yuk!

Last year, a 15-ton fatberg (the size of a bus) was removed from a sewer in Kingston upon Thames, southwest London. If people (that’s you restaurant and fast food fuckwits) don’t wise up London will one day fall under its own mass of waste.
 

 

 

 
You wanna see more? Well, here’s a report on last year’s massive fatberg….
 

 
H/T Arbroath

 
So you want a shitty amateur tattoo, obtained without the hassle or expense that can accompany experienced professionals and sterile environments, but you’re not SO obtuse as not to fear the Hep C, tetanus and necrotizing fasciitis you can get from using a safety pin and ink harvested from a ballpoint pen? Stick and Poke is here, claiming to render safe your brave and likely idiotic choice with their home tattoo kits, containing sealed needles, basic sterility supplies, and vegan ink, which is important for some reason.
 

 
WHAT I AM NOT GOING TO DO HERE:  There will be no tattoo shaming. I’m inked, so I’ve obviously got nothing against the practice. There will be no hipster straw-manning, as I’m arguably in a glass house on that count, too. There will be no ripping on vegans, even sanctimonious ones. There are far worse things in this world than a food scold. All I’m saying is the trendlet for tiny little homemade blackline tattoos all over one’s self has already saturated to the point where Miley Cyrus forfuxsakes has a bunch of them on her hands. Is that who you want to be like? Miley Cyrus? If there’s any doubt that this is aimed squarely at over precious, faddish tweepeople, check out the flash they offer, which look like the study hall doodles of an inapt 7th grader.
 

 

 

 
Understanding that people have been doing this on their own forever and will continue to do so, it’s surely better that it be done with a modicum of safety in mind, so I sought the opinion of a qualified, long-standing professional in the field to pick his brain about these kits. Ladies and gentlemen, meet The Human Furnace, singer for hardcore/metal lifers and Relapse Records artists Ringworm, and co-proprietor since 1997 of 252 Tattoo, now with two locations to better serve Northeast Ohio. I asked him for his take on the safety of these kits, and while I expected he wouldn’t be fully on board with them, I didn’t quite expect him to projectile-vomit a nest of hornets:

Wow. This is pretty hilarious. I particularly like the page of the manual that warns “Consult your physician before getting a tattoo. Consult a professional tattoo artist before getting a tattoo.” Huh? What’s this kit FOR, then? Isn’t the entire “WARNINGS” section one giant oxymoron? And the “professional vegan ink” has such a nice ring to it. This pretty much takes the whole “kit tattooing” thing to a more ignorant level, as a tattoo machine is too technical for some, and let’s face it, sometimes the spare room in your mother-in-law’s trailer doesn’t have any outlets. Just stick ‘em with a needle!

Basically, someone just packaged up about $3.50 worth of crap in a box and is marketing to the extra large percentage of idiots around the world. On some levels, I enjoy things like this because its soooooooo enjoyable to make fun of the results when people fly the huge “Hey look! I’m an IDIOT and I don’t even know it” flag, so I appreciate them saving me some time in getting to know them. I’m a busy man. And, I must admit that there was a time (a loooong time ago) that I was hand-poking The Germs (O’s) tattoos on my buddies shoulders on front porches in the summer time while drinking crazy horse malt liquor and listening to the Exploited, but things where different then. I dunno. Perhaps I’m wrong. Tattooing and the whole tattoo industry was completely different 25-26 yrs ago. It wasn’t hip. The prom queen, star quarterback and student council president didn’t have full sleeves of Sailor Jerry tattoos or Mumford and Sons song lyrics written across their ribs. And, as much as this type of stuff amuses me, it really just takes another bite out of the professional tattoo industry. Young Idiots like myself and many many others worked really fucking hard to get tattooing to a legit level. It’s disheartening sometimes to realize that crap like this is just a by-product caused by the mainstreaming of tattooing.

Should this type of thing be illegal? There’s a strong case for it. Professionals have to be certified (and these days, certifiable), have blood-borne pathogen classes, follow codes, follow professional standards, ethics (well, maybe not ethics, but that’s a whole other story) etc. Will this type of thing ever BE illegal? Fuck no. You’ll never be able to stop this type of stuff. As long as there is an angle to make some cash and exploit some popular trend, somebody’s going to do it. So, Get in on it while ya can folks! Make extra CA$H from Home! Why pay outrageous professional prices? Fuck your best friend up! Fuck your brother up! Fuck your sister! Oops, I mean, fuck your sister up and even fuck yourself up with the Stick and Poke Tattoo Kit from Ronco! Fun for All Ages!.....ughhhhh. Someone come get me when this is all over. I have some tattooing to do. On the bright side, our hospitals are going to be getting a nice influx of staph and sepsis cases to keep them busy. We’ve got healthcare now right?

So there you go, straight from a pro. A smartass, rant-prone pro, but among his many points, he’s got a damn good one about the expense. The kit goes for $40—a “bargainous” $70 if you get the nauseatingly precious “partners” set—but fifty tattooing needles in sterile packaging retail for about $6, ink for about $3, and much of the industrialized world already has gauze, rubbing alcohol and bandages socked away in the bathroom cupboard. This is an expensive box of bullshit, made of unbleached brown paper so its dainty consumer can feel planet savingly eco-friendly about the completely wasted packaging. But I guess it doesn’t matter how that handlebar mustache gets on the side of your index finger, just as long as it gets there.
 

 
I would totally let Beth Piwkowski use one of these kits to tattoo Foot Foot on my neck in gratitude for this find.