💾 Archived View for clemat.is › saccophore › library › ezines › textfiles › ezines › CON › v06.con07… captured on 2021-12-03 at 14:04:38.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Capital of Nasty Electronic Magazine Volume VI, Issue 7, AD MMI Monday, September 24th, 2001 ISSN 1482-0471 ------------------------------------------- Disney's Tarzan Untamed Sounds like a porn movie. "Hey Jane, baby. Bet you thought this was an elephant's trunk, didn't you?" ------------------------------------------- Goatboy 00:01: Somehow the conversation shifted in me saying "You've got breasts that prove gravity exists" and her stating "Your butt is gay, that's why you only get men to ask you out on the street". Strange. Jester 00:02: There is nothing wrong with your ass. Goatboy 00:02: Apparently it's big. Hard to comment on that. I can't see it. Jester 00:02: Be proud of your ass. Go to the window right now, shove it out and scream "I love myself, for I am beautiful!" Goatboy 00:03: Do I beat my chest, while I do that, or my butt cheeks? ------------------------------------------- 1. Editorial 2. I Nerdicus 3. CoN at the Movies 4. I've Never Seen Anything Like This ------------------------------------------- This week's Golden Testicle award: http://gard.scriba.org/page/333 She called me a racist! ------------------------------------------- 1. Editorial By Leandro Asnaghi-Nicastro I'm beginning to think I should set up the Internet Fascist Police, or INFAPO, for short. The INFAPO would have a very simple job. Hunt down people that, armed with Internet access, demonstrate to the world how stupid they are. Then beat them senselessly. As some of you may be aware, on September 11th, the whole terrorist thing popped up. The "War on Drugs" was quickly replaced with the "War on Terrorism" and we had to endure long news reports sucking up all the drama, making special reports and so on and so forth ad nauseum. I'm sure the rescue workers found it real helpful to have camera crews running around while they tried to do their job. Fortunately some people caught this by the ball, and quickly found ways to make money out of it. That same night, various religious channels offered Prayer Hot Lines, where one could call and pray for the victims of the World Trade Centre, for the humble cost of 95 cents per minute. Or in New York's Time Square, where people immediately began selling "I survived the WTC" T-shirts. And of course, students that had a room with a good view of the ruins of the WTC, charged a modest $20 per person in order for people to take photographs. I'm always glad to see that death never goes in vain in this part of the world. But here is where the INFAPO would come in: shortly after the news events spread, and CNN bombarded us with the "dramatic" footage from "ground zero", several dozen people began sending me the classic examples of Internet stupidity: 1) I'd like to thank everyone that sent me the Nostradamus quote. There are a few things I have to say about this: - I find it amusing that some non-sense rambling referring to "twins" and the "city of God" could be associated with New York. Mind you, I always thought that God's city was Jerusalem. - Most of Nostradamus' predictions have come true about 50 times each already dating back about a zillion years. "When the City of God is surrounded..." Jerusalem? Surrounded? That happens about 50 times a week. - I did a quick search at the library in a Nostradamus book, and yo and behold, I found no such quote. Now unless someone would be so kind to point out to me where they got it, I could come to the awesome conclusion that it doesn't even exist. - I received it only 52 times. 2) This one is a classic already: "the day of birth for an aeroplane is the day it is registered. And on the birthday of one Aeroplane its fate was written in the registration no of that plane. Did you know that a flight number from one of the planes that hit one of the two towers was Q33NY. In MS Word, type in that flight number, Q33NY. Enlarge the font size to 26 Change the font to Wingdings and there is the future written by destiny which u will see". Okay, let me burst this bubble from our Nostradamus Junior: - The flight number is not something that a plane is born with and keeps for the rest of its avionic life. It's the route the plane takes. And chances are, since planes need maintenance and such things to keep them in the air, that different planes may serve the same routes at different times. - There was no such flight number. The flights were Flight 11 and Flight 175. - I've got this one through e-mail and ICQ so many times I've lost count. Fuck off already. 3) A letter it's making the rounds, thanks to those idiots that will forward anything to everyone else without even reading it. To make a long forward short, and sparing you the insultingly ignorant comments, the e-mail rambles on about how we should be upset at seeing "Egyptians rejoice on television" after the attack. The letter, it goes on, should be printed and faxed to whichever Senator, asking for "an end of American aids" to, I guess, Egypt. - I can't confirm this at the moment, but as far as I know, Egypt is not receiving any aids from America. - The people seen celebrating in TV were actually Palestinians, most likely from the Gaza strip. - According to indymedia.org.il, this is old footage, showing the happy Palestinians celebrating the invasion of Kuwait, during the Gulf War (however the dates stated there collide with history). The URL is: http://www.indymedia.org.il/imc/israel/webcast/display.php3?article_id=6946 - I only received it twice to date. I guess it's not as exciting as Nostradamus. 4) "Let's pray for the people in U.S.A plz keep forward...i didnt start this msg...i also didnt stop it forward to everyone on your list" - Gee, thanks, had it not been for everyone that ICQed me this one, I don't think I would've known what to do. - What exactly is praying going to do? Sounds like a cheap way to save yourself the trouble to contribute with something a little more substantial. - I did not forward the fucker. Oh, I know! I'm such a bastard! The INFAPO is now taking membership. Apply today! Fight Internet morons! ------------------------------------------- 2. I Nerdicus By Rolo Me Nerd. Yes I'm a nerd. Suffice to say I won't be the type to go trekkie conventions with Spock ears, but I sure do love to ogle at the Starships and read their specs. I guess I'm what you call a Sleeper Latent Nerd. Or a Part-time nerd. I do get out of the house, and I am active when I want to be. But thinking back. Nerds are very special. Like a true nerd I will never admit to it in public or in person. I in my spare time did play Games Workshop games as well as Battletech and dabbled as a GM in RPG's like Shadowrun and Earthdawn. What really bothers me these days is the invasion of commercialism into my little world. Playing fantasy miniature board games use to be a really great past time for me. Unfortunately it kept me from joining gangs, learning how to shoot a 9mm and spray paint gang tags, but hey, at least it was fun. I learned at a very young age to paint and mess around with miniatures. I think that's probably why I ended up with glasses. But I digress. I use to like playing these games. But now it's gotten' disgustingly commercial. Allow me to elaborate. Games-Workshop use to be a small nerdy operation based on Queen Street in Toronto. It stemmed from the Dungeons and Dragons genre of fantasy RPG's in that GWS made more detailed miniatures with a whole line of supporting products. It use to have a cheesy little cut n'paste magazine sporting gaunt scrawny nerds and flubby big guys with plain black and white hand drawings. Ahh, those were the days, miniatures and the fantasy games had a underground feel to them. You were special for knowing that there were more dice than a regular six-sided dice and its not a die. It's a 1D6. Get it right bitch. I use to enjoy playing these games because it involved an entire afternoon of coke and pizza. We'd automatically throw out the rules and make up some whacked out scenario. It was fun. It was loads of fun. But now that's all changed. Yes, I'm pissed about it. I use to go down to Games Workshop and play with the other nerds. We'd revel in each others glamorously painted armies, virtually kick each others asses and trudge off to paint our new "mini's", or work on a new tactic to beat the other guy. Since GWS has moved to the Eaton Centre all has changed. I quickly realized this when I was dealing a nice beating (rare) to my friend Joe. I looked around looking for that praise from my fellow gamers only to find I was surrounded by tourists. I found myself beating back and scolding the little throng of annoying children who were deposited by their parents in the store. "Hands OFF!" I'd say to the little gnat bastards who would frequently touch my precious mini's. They would gleefully snap off the painstakingly detailed weapons and parts and skitter away to their parents before I could swat them. Then there was the uneducated throng of tourists who had no idea of what this game was. The uninitiated. There was nothing wrong with them. Unfortunately it was now a tourist attraction. GWS had lost its nice grimy dark image with a commercial image. Those creepy gothic pictures were replaced by well painted artistic brilliant images. The old school gamers, the large twins Mat and Jeff? The Army vet guy, The toolboxes full of mini's. Dwindling. No longer do the ketchup stained T-shirt nerds exist in the store. The Guru's of AD&D and fantasy are gone now. Now replaced by plastic employees bred and trained to spew allegiance to Games Workshop and call each other "Brother Marines". My younger friend John is an amazing painter, he once tried to enter a Young Bloods painting competition only to loose because his model's base wasn't up to their standards of what Model Bases should look like. I was told that my goofy dark eldar army was to "disgusting". Okay fine. My Dark Eldar Army (Which GWS describes as a race of people are suppose to be grotesque disgusting and pain loving) had goofy little unit names like "Spawn of the Brown Portal" "Children of Self Defication" "Protectors of Necrofilia" and "Enforcers of Bestiality" with nifty little hand painted banners depicting this. And yes my army did have a miniature goat as its mascot. (Leandro we salute you!) The reaction from every single veteran gamer in that place was absolutely fantastic. They loved it. It was hilarious. It was even more fantastic when everyone realized that one of the figurines was oddly posing in a "Who's your daddy" pose. The entire store had its shits and giggles with that goat and that miniature. Until the bloody tourists and kids with parents came along. Now my carefully crafted Army of mini's offends GWS family sensibility. Its silly really. Considering GWS owes its existance to such underground dark beginnings. Not to say that GWS started with bestiality, necrophilia or S&M. Its the fact that GWS has turned commercial and professional, GWS was rooted in skulls, death, and gothic Imperial undertones. Everything has been simplified and prettied up to sell to the parents, and the 5 year old artsy kids. Paying $60 bucks for a decrepit piece of plastic that looks ugly is not my idea of a good buy. Especially when I can make something entirely my own creation that would suit my tastes. But wait, I can't show case or use my scratch-built pride and joy, because its "not a Games Workshop product." My favourite game Battletech has mutated into a commercial half-bred of "collectable miniatures" brought to us by Wiz-kid. Everything is cheap plastic and quick spray painted by some sweatshop in Asian now. I enjoyed the technical side of it. The detail made it real. Now its over simplified and watered-down for the layman and the commercial "I can't paint to save my life" fool. To all those fantasy buffs out there. There is a difference. To the purist the godfather of AD&D and fantasy as we know it is J.R.R. Tolkien. To the nieve, its Magic the Gathering, Collectable Trading Cards Game. It's like the original Star Wars versus the new Jar-jar Binks Trilogy. Or the original old school die-cast metal (Throw at someone and cripple them) Transformers versus the new highly breakable "Beasties". There is a clear difference between what fantasy gaming was and what it is now. Unfortunately its just one less thing I'll be doing in my spare time. Is there nothing safe or sacred anymore? -- Rolo likes to tromp naked around his room, looking important, while singing "Blue Moon" and stroking his pussy. ------------------------------------------- 3. CoN at the Movies By Jeff Wright NOTE: The following article, is being written at gunpoint. Leo's angry at me, cuz I was supposed to write this while he was on vacation, but didn't. Because I have a gun up my nose, my writing shall be brief. Movies to Watch: GHOST WORLD (A great little film. Go see it before it's out of theatres. It's the best thing I've seen this summer aside from MOULIN ROUGE, which is in its own league of awesome-ness.) JOHN CARPENTER'S GHOSTS OF MARS (It's a dumb, fun, popcorn movie. Enjoy the limb severings, and shut your mouth.) A BETTER PLACE (It's now available as a great and feature loaded DVD. It's a small independent film about teen violence, that's worth seeking out. This is what you can do with $40,000 folks.) LOVE ON A DIET (The new Andy Lau and Sammi Cheng comedy, in which they play fatties. It's dumb, but really funny. Plus, Sammi gets skinny and hot by the end, so who's to complain?) KILLER KLOWNS FROM OUTERSPACE (Just released on special edition DVD. COTTON CANDY COCOONS!!!) BATMAN: THE MOVIE (New DVD available as well. When I get some money, I shall buy it, and be a much happier person.) SHOGUN ASSASSIN (I think it's only available on an out of print VHS tape, but search it out. Super cool re-edit of the first two LONE WOLF AND CUB movies, dubbed into English, with a funky, funky score.) BROTHER (The latest Takeshi Kitano film. It's really not that great, but if you see a VCD copy of it for cheap somewhere, it's a decent time waster.) Movies Not to Watch: JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK (I'm a big Kevin Smith fan, but this was just a retarded piece of stoned nerd ass.) RUSH HOUR 2 (Zhang Zi-Yi is hot as hell, but is that really a reason to go see a movie? It's boring.) PLANET OF THE APES (But you knew that already, didn't you? We all learn the hard way.) JURASSIC PARK 3 (It was free. Shut up!) Canadian Music to Buy: MASS ROMANTIC by The New Pornographers GIRL VERSIONS by Emm Gryner LAST NIGHT WE WERE THE DELICIOUS WOLVES by Hawksley Workman That's it for now. Tune in next time for Toronto Film Fest coolness, including a review of ICHI THE KILLER, the new film from Japanese director Takashi Miike. WOOHOO!!! --- Jeff is gonna be in the same room as David Lynch on September 10th. How cool is that?! ------------------------------------------- 4. I've Never Seen Anything Like This By Eric Rosenfield I am holding in my hands a piece of paper from the World Trade Center that I found lying on the ground in the financial district. It is an expense report from a company called "Cantor Fitzgerald", written by a man named David R. Meyer. The Cantor Fitzgerald Web Site is down, but according to a cached Google page it is "historically known as one of the largest third market firms", and according to another cached google page it was located in the World Trade Center. There are names of people on this document and on these web pages who are probably dead now. How this piece of paper, along with the many hundreds I saw with it in the very heart of the disaster area, are in such good condition, I can only speculate. We had to jump a fence to get that close to the sight. It was Benjamin, two friends of his and myself, all of us determined to see how close we could get to the carnage. At Houston street I was very gung ho about it; I was thinking of myself as real investigative journalist, going to do some real investigative journalistic coverage of the greatest man-made disaster of my lifetime. A disaster I had happened to see out my own window. So that those of you outside of New York can get some idea of the geography, Times Square is at 42nd street. At 15th street there was a police barricade preventing cars from going through, and the all the subways end there now. At Houston street (which is essentially 1st street) there is another police barricade, preventing anyone from going further south without identification proving that they were residents of the streets below there. The World Trade Center is about 40 blocks south of Houston street, near Manhattan Island's southern tip. In other words, about half of the city's main borough is in total lockdown right now. You can't avoid seeing police; there're everywhere, twice as prevalent as the firemen, or the ambulances, or the civilians wearing dust masks, though all those things are common sights as well. Everywhere in Manhattan and Brooklyn there is an acrid scent, the scent of burning - putrid and ubiquitous, and the fire and smoke still billow from the horizon more then a day later. In Manhattan the smoke cloud dwarfs the skyscrapers, a monstrous Godzilla in gray and white. We got to Houston street and saw the Police checking identifications, so we walked west along the barricade line, to see if any of the streets were unblocked. None were, but an entrance into the courtyard of a housing project was wide open in the middle of a block, so we ducked in. We walked through the courtyard, past people milling about, children playing, and what seemed like an abnormal number of security guards, to the parking lot, the gate of which was securely locked up. Benjamin said "This is insane" every 15 minutes or so. The fence on the other side of the parking lot was about 15 feet high, and we ducked behind some dumpsters and scaled it. The other side was a completely different New York. There were no moving cars that weren't police or ambulances or fire trucks or construction vehicles or army units. Everything was eerily quiet. Mostly, the streets were empty except for the few locals we'd see walking about and talking, perhaps with a fearful glint in their eyes and an angsty gate in their step, though that might only be my own inference. In truth I couldn't tell what these people were thinking as they went about their lives in a suddenly protected and isolated part of the city. As we walked south the streets were gradually occupied by more and more police and the smell of the smoke got progressively stronger, until there were police on every block and the air was thick like a mild fog. Soon we were stopped. "Where are you going?" Asked an officer. "To see our Uncle on Warren Street." We lied, bold faced, "Do you know how to get there?" "I don't know, you should ask those guys over there." He waved toward some officers down the block. "Do you know if it's safe to smoke?" I asked, "I heard something about gas lines." I was genuinely concerned. The cop smiled, "You can smoke everywhere." I was about to make some crack about Mayor Guiliani but thought better of it. We headed under an overpass that led to the Brooklyn Bridge, and up a roadway. This was the point when I started noticing the thin layer of dust on everything. Everything was coated with it, and in the light of the dim New York street lamps it looked orange and brown. I looked down at my feet and my shoes were wading in it, and I started noticing pieces of paper littering the ground. And just as I was taking that in we saw the first car. The car probably hadn't been damaged where it was sitting, as the cars next to it were in reasonable condition, but this one car was a blackened hulk of twisted metal, hardly recognizable as a car at all except for the landmarks of the hood and tires. "This is insane." Said Benjamin. We took some pictures of the car and continued to walk. Then we saw another car, and then another, and another, black contorted creatures lining the sides of the roadway. There were tons of papers everywhere now, just dozens of them all over the place, and at this point I picked up the expense report from Cantor Fitzgerald and put it in my backpack. The enormity of what we were witnessing hadn't struck yet. My emotions were somewhere else, some other realm that hadn't quite caught up the real world, and I was running on auto-pilot. I started rifling through the papers trying to find the best ones. This sort of horrifies me now, that I was doing this, but it's what I did. I wanted to find one that said "World Trade Center" on it. We found a pile of neck ties in perfect condition, that looked like they had been thrown there by some worker. Benjamin and I each grabbed one. "You shouldn't do that." One of Benjamin's friends kept saying as we were taking things, and sure enough, a police officer started shouting at us. "What are you doing?! Put that down, have some respect!" He said, and we put the ties and papers down. We emerged from the roadway into a major intersection, where a ramp led directly to the Brooklyn Bridge, several City Government City buildings stood, and City Hall was fully visible a block away. This was the "Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall" 1-9 subway stop. When I first came to New York City almost four years ago, I had come to this very spot to take pictures of the Brooklyn Bridge. One of the pictures I took of the bridge that day still hangs on my wall. It was a spot that the World Trade Center once towered over, only maybe 5 or 10 blocks away. I'm going to try and describe the scene I saw there now. The air was foggy and small particles hung in it like they were waiting for someone to tell them to fall. The entire square was caked in orange- ish dust and dirt, everything dyed monochromatic on the street. Papers, debris, glass and small shards were everywhere, and on everything. The place teemed with workers, police and firemen, and almost everyone was wearing a dust mask or a gas mask. Just behind City Hall and the tall, Romanesque City Government buildings, the fire-cloud clung to the sky like a white specter. The fire-cloud was bigger, by far, then the World Trade Center ever had been. The wasteland that I had talked about in my previous article, the one that we had all seen on television, was now here, right in front of my eyes; here was the disaster area; here was the war zone. To my relief, there were no body parts. The cops began to notice we were there. "Where are you going?" "To visit our Uncle on Warren street." "Down HERE? What are you, tourists? You better get out of here, if we catch you back here we'll lock you up." We started back north. Benjamin's friends had seen enough, and seemly justifiably shaken. They left, and Benjamin tried to convince me to go back in, west and then south this time. I sat on a stairway in front of a bank covered in so much dust that you couldn't read it's name, and decided to call it quits. "I'm going back in." Said Benjamin, and he headed west, while I headed north, walking past yet another long caravan of police, army and construction vehicles. Benjamin told me later that he actually made it to the Trade Center's remains, right in front of the rubble, and that he volunteered to hand out water and was given a white paper disposable suit. He said that he saw the morgue. He said the police kept hassling him, even with the suit. "This was the most unreal thing in my life. It was just surreal. It was like a movie, I felt like I was on a Universal Studios set. That's all I can say." He told me. I'm sort of astounded that he had the constitution to go that far with it, and I wonder if we are bad people for doing what we did. I'm still in shock from what I saw. I look down at my dust caked shoes and pants and can only think of the Walt Whitman poem, "This Dust was Once the Man". I look over at the Cantor Fitzgerald expense report and think of it being pushed out the window by the air pressure of a collapsing Twin Tower. What does any of this mean? -- This article is courtesy of Eric Rosenfield, and appeared in Yank The Chain. http://www.yankthechain.com ------------------------------------------- CoN would not be possible without the great help of Scriba Org. CoN: ((( UUCP where available ))) Capital of Nasty Electronic Magazine "media you can abuse" In memory of Father Ross "Padre" Legere Published every second Monday (or when we get around it) Disclaimer: unintentionally offensive Comments, queries and submissions are welcome http://www.capnasty.org ISSN 1482-0471 A bi-weekly electronic journal. Subscriptions available at no cost electronically. Available on Usenet newsgroups alt.zines and alt.ezines. This mailing is sent exclusively to those poor souls who chose to subscribe to the Capital of Nasty mailing list. Spread the word! If you have friends who would like to receive CoN, ask them to send email to join@capnasty.org. If you'd like to unsubscribe because such email aggravates your stupid internet users intolerance, simply send an empty message to leave@capnasty.org. Text issues of CoN archived exclusively by Disobey www.disobey.com Brought to you by C.C.C.P. (Collective Communist Computing Proletariat) Leandro Asnaghi-Nicastro Colin Barrett <leandro@capnasty.org> <tyrannis@capnasty.org> ZimID 708EC8D1 1994/09/14 EC B0 97 59 1D FE 7C 32 7E 04 2C 66 47 41 FB 7D