O Anthropos

James Bond is a crier.  The former apex of man-cool has capitulated.

Even the Vatican is on board, but this comes as little surprise.

Seventies Bond was well-established.  In 1971 I was a few thousand beers away existence but I would like to think the world was sane then. Still, thousands of empties, stubby brown bottles later, recycled a thousand times over by the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, God knows I've probably drank from the same glass reconstituted glass as my father.

I suppose if my family remains in the general area of repeated reproduction, my great-grandchildren, assuming they've the discerning palette of their provaus augusti (moi), will drink beer from the same recycled receptacles.

What a legacy. A queer assumption of beer consumption.

In the early seventies, my father had probably just learned to drive and was selling mickeys of rye for a small profit to his high-school friends between math and shop class.  Nepean entrepreneur.  He and my mother were high-school sweethearts.  Captain of the football team and the head cheerleader, says the math book with inscribed hearts, that gathers dust in my basement.

That same year, Charlton Heston starred in "The Omega Man".  Clearly my father never saw it.

It was a remake of the 1964 film "The Last Man on Earth" starring Vincent Price.  Forty years later, Will Smith would star in a remake called "I Am Legend".

Admittedly there is some crying in that version.  Tough guy crying, but eye-leaky nonetheless.

The word 'Omega' incidentally, in addition to being the last and 24th letter of the Greek alphabet, literally means the "Great O".  Heston, before he became rifle-weilding pariah of the apologist social-justice-warrior movement was the "Big C."   Baritoned, chiseled with a mouthful of teeth.

Heston was Ben-Hur and Moses, for Christ's sake.  He stood up to an army of speaking apes once.  Shirtless, bearded and wearing a loincloth, he represented what is now considered to be an archaic example of manliness.

If Hemingway were alive today, he would be internet-shamed for his love of hunting.  Journalists would speculate why his mother dressed him in girls clothing.  Experts would hail-mary transgender theories.   The only thing Hemingway's burger recipe is missing is a tiger claw and rusty nails.

Heston is a relic today.  His legacy been cherry-picked by a lazy liberal media. Often overlooked, Heston was a civil rights advocate long before it was fashionable, and LONG after it went out of fashion.  He was the bell-bottomed, frilly-shirt, perm-sporting voice of the US Constitution.

His death in 2008 was undoubtedly a relief for today's thought-police, who mistook his NRA affiliation for right-wing fanaticism.   He was, at least in his prime, an articulate, suave, critical thinker.

Here is Charlton with some of his contemporaries discussing civil rights in America.

In the film "Omega Man", Heston does not soften. He loses hope, he becomes frustrated. Between showering the black-cloaked-undead with bullets,  he finds time to cook and have chess games with mannequins.

He's just a doctor dammit, just looking for a cure.

After a long, drawn out story of loneliness and survival, peppered with more sub-machine gun fire, we discover that Heston really isn't the Omega Man after all.  The movie ends when a truck pulls up filled with uninfected, cherub faced survivors.  A handsome young fella emerges.  Heston gives him a large vile of blood containing the cure.  He dies, Heston's character, bloody, in a christ-like slump hanging off a fountain.

Judeo-xtian chop.

Zero tears.

The last-man-on-earth narrative is a misnomer.  We simply can't imagine a world where we're totally isolated and alone. In practically every film ever made on the the subject the protagonist is never and can never be the last survivor.  Extinction is not an option.  The human condition, as absurd as it is, must be shared with other humans.

All last-man films require the hero to pirouette through the motions of solitude.  Collecting supplies.  Making fire. Talking to himself.  Blah blah. It's the original two-way mirror. Who didn't weep when Tom Hanks had to abandon his bloodied soccer ball confidante?  We wait though, as hopeful and desperate to find another living soul with which to talk to.

I'm going on a hike.


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The Swear Jar

..is a bottomless pit.

Book burning

Ozymandias.

The quandary of archiving is always an afterthought to the technology.   What'


The music industry over the last twenty years

You might have the hard copy, but you will always need the machine to play it.

I've even read they've been working on ways to



In 1930's French Guyana, the prison at Devil's Island (in addition to its many establish cruelties and torture) had implemented a very effective form of behaviour correction.   Solitary confinement, not an original method had taken on a new twist at the infamous prison.  The French had developed a system, where they could look down on the prisoners in solitary without being seen.  As the prisoners would never know if they were being watched or no, the concept was that they would invariably behave better and could be controlled with fewer guards, outbursts of insanity, etc.

There is a maelstrom of information out there now.  The book, the vinyl album, .   All malleable, editable formats.  Wiki is a good start it seems for any subject.  Of course, if I don't like what it says I can attempt a change.


Google Earth.
Drones (with facial recognition software)
Cell phone GPS (and now the ability to use the battery as a source of tracking.
Credit cards

I suppose it all comes down to accountability. If you have something to say, sign your name to it.

Indeed, my favourite movie of all time "Papillon", featuring Dustin Hoffman and Steve McQueen touches on the concept of solitary confinement and its effects.
Charriere eventually escapes to freedom, having left a trail of adventure longer than a Janice Joplin bar tab.


Anonymity on the web.
With the exception of a few (all with bounties on their heads) the irony of ISIS members covering their faces, while fully committing to the cause

It's no wonder

Governments wanting to have a better hold on every method of communication is no

I had the opportunity to witness the operation of a drone in Kandahar, Afghanistan in 2010.


Archiving


There is one remaining form of


The Fisher Space Pen.
Acid-free paper has a shelf life of 1000 years.

Gettin' Hitched.

On long drives I could listen to christian radio for hours. Rhetoric and bombast. Brimstone and hellfire with commercial breaks.  My kind of crazy.  Grown men with deep, smooth voices with soothing music, quoting scripture.

Sunday mornings, after the Coronation Street omnibus, I'll spend some time flipping through faith-based television.  Incredible production values, massive venues, slick hosts, white teeth. The snake-handlers still occupy the local stations in poorer areas (I loves me a good forehead slap to cure spinal injury), but the Joel Osteens (net worth 40 million) and the Joyce Meyers (8 million) cater to the moderate christians with no real affiliation or pointy-hatted leader.   Lots of sweaters, nods, laughter, as the non-demoninational self-appointed preacher sympathizes with the plights of the everyman.  Thirty-five dollars for a ticket to get you sooth-sayed.

These days dating sites like Christian Mingle tout that you can  "Find God's match for you".  No longer will you need to go to church to meet your mate.  For about twenty dollars a month you sign up for god-sanctioned booty-calls from nice christian girls.

The BBC reported last week that the Pope condones the smacking of children by parents -  if dignity is maintained.  Regarding the never-ending sex abuse scandal, the robed leader of the self-eunuched brotherhood decrees in the same breath that it was "hard to believe" that men of the church would commit such atrocities to children.  An old virgin draws lines on abuse?  Cute.   The "moderate" pontiff throwing a few hail-marys to see if they'll stick with the cool-kids.

The moderates are enjoying a break from criticism right now.  Extremism, particularly of the islamic persuasion has left most of middle-earth exempt from deconstruction.

I wish I had one one-hundredth of the capacity of Christopher Hitchens.  I joined the party far too late.   I am still catching up, stamping my slushy boots clean of the effects of a childhood of catholic dogma.

YouTube is replete with religious debates featuring inept, ill-equipped believers pitted against Mr. Hitchens.  It is usually ends in a bloodbath, with our atheist-anti-hero holding the scalpel.  He was never left speechless.  No um, uhs, or non-lexical filler to formulate a counter-attack.  Calm, exacting precision in every point he made.

The crown king of atheism passed away in December of 2011.   His epitaphal book "Mortality", maintained his every position to the very end. His accounts of dealing with esophageal cancer are harrowing.  I have poured over all of his published works, sift through his many contributions to Vanity Fair, and through youtube I stream his debates in my home-office, pretending to be productive.

To this day he remains unrivalled by anyone who could challenge his logic with the same temperate manner and massive vocabulary.  By the time Hitchens had finished his soliloquy of reason before a hall of christians (usually peppered with atheist sympathizers and hitch-sycophants), if not turned godless, all would be charmed.  His penchant for alcohol may have aided him pre-debate, but I imagine his addiction to cigarettes may have driven him to finish an opponent all the sooner so to be out the door for another puff.

One would be hard-pressed to say he represented the left, whose atypical modus operandi is to challenge the right-winged 'nutter' of the god-fearing persuasion. Liberals on the whole would scoff at some of his ideas.  It's easy to love Hitchens if you come from academia, live in a gentrified neighbourhood, drive a Prius and believe you're well-read, but you'd be hard-pressed to embrace everything he had to say.

Hitchens (net worth 2 million), could be of some use right now.  He was not a part of any team.  He was not a scientist, though he was often grouped together with reasonists like Dawkins and DeGrasse Tyson.  Today, there are a few who are able to speak or freely without incurring a fatwa, or worse to be made a pariah on state-media for thought-crimes.  Not even his rat-pack of the  atheist roundtable can really make the stark unapologetic claims he could.  "Religion", he believed "poisons everything". Hitchens spoke out on his own, pandering to nothing.  Roguish might have been an apt description for him, if he had not already devised every escape route from every burning house he entered.

As far back as 2005, Christopher Hitchens predicted many of the headlines of the past six months.  Sadly, he is not here for an i-told-you-so, nor to debate, to dissect opinions from the left and right.

The recent demise of Ottawa's Sun News Network this week has left many a western apologist/bleeder cheering.  Their uber-conservative type of journalism was tiresome but entertaining.  I half expected explosions, dancing girls or slide-whistle during an Ezra Levant-rant.  Levant attacked the people liberal Canadians hold dear. Thanks to the SNN, I learned things about David Suzuki I didn't want to know. I discovered there are actual jihadists living in my country.  The Sun had the gumption to invite talented liberal critics onto their show too, like the ever-irritating Warren Kinsella. Kinsella delivered a level-headed eulogy to the death of the right-winged charlatans today that was surprising and refreshing.   Kinsella stated that when journalism disappears "democracy will diminish".  Amen.  He does not shit where he eats.   Leftist mouthpieces need conservative media and vice-versa.

If you piss in your pants, it's only warm but for a moment.

All points of view are to be heard, debated, no matter how crazy. Above all, we're in need of someone who can debate them all.   And they must enjoy cocktails.  

But there hasn't been one since 2011.

If you'll excuse me, I'm in the middle of a another Hitch Youtube marathon.

I'm pretty sure I know how it ends.