Saga of Huckleberry Dick

Sammy Davis Jr. on drums & vibes

Leon Theremin playing his own instrument

And Would You Care For Some Tea

WE WISH YOU EXTERMINATION 
WE WISH YOU EXTERMINATION 
WE WISH YOU EXTERMINATION
AND WOULD YOU CARE FOR SOME TEA

Merry Christmas Game Nighters!

¡No Pasarán!

  I had come to Spain with some notion of writing newspaper articles, but I had joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do. The Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing. To anyone who had been there since the beginning it probably seemed even in December or January that the revolutionary period was ending; but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said ‘Señior’ or ‘Don’ or even ‘Usted’; everyone called everyone else ‘Comrade’ and ‘Thou’, and said ‘Salud!’ instead of ‘Buenos dias’. Tipping was forbidden by law; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and all the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loudspeakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no ‘well-dressed’ people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls, or some variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for. Also I believed that things were as they appeared, that this was really a workers' State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled, been killed, or voluntarily come over to the workers' side; I did not realize that great numbers of well-to-do bourgeois were simply lying low and disguising themselves as proletarians for the time being.

George Orwell - Homage to Catalonia

Not historically accurate

Franco moves to attack

Thanks to the splendid heroism of the working class, which was unshakeably determined to fight to the death to prevent the victory of fascism, the military insurrection was crushed on 19 July in Barcelona, Madrid and Valencia. Thanks to that prodigious heroism in the battlefields by thousands of workers who immediately and enthusiastically joined the militias, Franco was unable to achieve the victory which he thought quick and certain but which, after ten months of civil war, appears less and less likely.

At the same time as the fascist insurrection was crushed in the most important cities, and the military struggle at the front began, the workers formed revolutionary committees and seized control of the factories, the peasants took possession of the land, they burned down convents and churches – the centres of fascist reaction – in a word, the revolution began, and the old organs of bourgeois power were turned into phantoms. War and revolution, therefore, appeared inseparable from the first moment. Having defeated the insurrection, the workers set about the revolutionary work, whose conquests they defended, and continue to defend, in the trenches. To claim, as the Spanish Communist Party and the PSUC in Catalonia do, that the workers at the front are fighting for the democratic republic, is to betray the proletarian and prepare the ground for a new and victorious attack by fascist reaction.

No one should accept the argument that the struggle in the rear for the socialist revolution favours the plans of the enemy at the front. On the contrary, only an audacious revolutionary policy in the rear, one that is unequivocally socialist, is capable of giving the fighters the courage and moral strength that will make them invincible, and of organising the economy and the war industries with the efficiency necessary to achieve a rapid and overwhelming military victory.

Andrés Nin - The May Days in Barcelona

LONG LIVE THE COMMITTEES FOR THE DEFENCE OF THE REVOLUTION! LONG LIVE THE WORKERS’ AND PEASANTS’ GOVERNMENT!

Xmas with the Addams Family

The Mysterious Game That Foretells The Future

ka-bala

1967

Happy Birthday, Sammy!

Boy Meets Girl, a photo by Link.n.Logs on Flickr.

Spaziando tra gli Spazi

A COLLECTION OF ITALIAN BOARD GAMES (MOSTLY 19TH TO 20TH CENTURY)

Time shall unfold what plaited cunning hides

Game Kings in the frigid darkness


The frosty November edition of Game Night finds the Kings in contemplation of a pair of well known conundrums: how should a super villain balance the success of his evil schemes against the satisfaction of gloating before his adversary and just how much can a time traveller allow himself to change history by altering its pivotal events? The case against gloating is well known and hardly requires repetition in "Renamed". Although I may have been distracted by the shapely, redheaded scuba spy.

Scuba


By taking a time out for expostion of his plan the criminal mastermind commits two errors. He reveals that which absolutely depends on secrecy for success and he grants, without being compelled, essential time to his adversary who has otherwise run out of just that.

Criminal Mastermind


But, surely, in punishing the gloat so decisively (only one bad guy got away with one miserable gloat) "Totally Renamed" misses the point. What does it profit a prince of malice to conceive and carry out in total silence a plot to rule the world, or, at a minimum, make off with a criminal million or so? If that were his ambition he had only to attend the right business school and get a position in investment banking, a thing completely lacking in glory. A true mastermind must capture and taunt a worthy adversary. It is the very crown of his career, what he has been striving for since rocking in his evil cradle. It is better to gloat and be destroyed than keep one's peace and rule a world where no one gives a rat's ass about your brilliant plan.

Ok, there were a bunch a redheaded spies. Is that a requirement?

Redhead Spy


Chrononauts


Now we step from our evil lairs into our time machines. As with any new toy we took our chronowhatevers in hand more in the spirit of fun and adventure than with any thought to the responsible use of our ability to alter the course of history. Naturally everybody's first thought is something along the lines of "Let's kill Hitler".



But all we were really accomplishing was to generate a bunch of time paradoxes along with a pair of quick and heedless winners.



The hard lessons of time travel, at last, led us to the wisdom of patching our paradoxes and thus to an era of responsible and productive manipulation of history.

Remember, only you can prevent contradictions in your time line!

Jon Pertwee - The Buxom Country Maid

More 50th anniversary fun

Roh oh

Of course, no such being exists!

Original cover art by Jack Kirby from Black Cat Mystery #57, published by Harvey Comics, January 1956.

Hello. It is Christmas time and I am sitting here by my TV.

Your head is very busy all the time to calculate and put it all together into one picture. And then because you're so busy doing that, you don't watch very carefully what the program you are watching is really about. So you become hypnotized. So all that's on TV, it just goes directly into your brain and you stop judging it's right or not.

JPop cover of Train Kept a Rollin'

Thor: The Tin Marx World

MARX: 1968 THOR Tin Lithograph Friction Car

The beginning, Dominant Species

The beginning..., a photo by mortenjohs on Flickr.

The Night of the Doctor: A Mini Episode - Doctor Who: The Day of the Doc...

Marianne spins some wax

Books Smell

Frightening indeed!

Thor: The Pink Scooter World

Sure it is

Audrey Tautou as The Doctor

Liberace shows off for the ladies

The Champ wants to play Monopoly

I Walk On Guilded Splinters

Some people think they jive me
But I know they must be crazy
Don't see dey misfortune
Guess they just too lazy

I rolled out my coffin


Drink poison in my chalice


Pride begins to fade


Put gris-gris on your doorstep


Soon you'll be in the gutter


Melt your heart like butter


Je suis le gran Zombie


My yellow belt of choison


Ain't afraid of no tom cat


Fill my brains with poison


Walk on pins and needles


Walk on guilded splinters


King of the Zulu




Coco Robichaux
Come on down to my soiree
Bring your parain, your Marraine, your Mamie, your Daddy, your cousin
And the whole family
No fine de cose bonne?
La jovial la chandelle?
C'est la fée Carabosse
Coco Robichaux
Coco Robichaux
Padre diablo?
Gran come the bride?

With your Coco Robichaux
With your Coco Robichaux

'Til I Burn Up ,'Til I Burn Up, 'Til I Burn Up ,'Til I Burn Up

'Til I Burn Up ,'Til I Burn Up, 'Til I Burn Up ,'Til I Burn Up

Come Get It, Get It, Come, Come
Walk on guilded splinters
Come Get It, Get It, Come, Come
Walk on guilded splinters

Coco Robichaux
Dine at the soiree on the bayou....

Zappa Ouvre Medley - 28 years, 34 albums, 134 seconds

Why is the government open and why did it shut down?

"Dear Mr. Speaker,
I hated the Iraq war. I think I hated it as much as you hate the Affordable Car Act. [...] In those days, when President Bush was Commander in Chief, I could have taken the steps that you are taking now to block Government funding in order to gain leverage to end the war. I faced a lot of pressure from my own base to take that action. But I did not do that. I felt it would have been devastating to America. Therefore, the Government was funded."

Thus Harry Reid on why the continuity of gov't operations and the credit rating of the U. S. Treasury outweigh any opposition to an illegal and unpopular war. That being so what does justify a shutdown within the logic of American politics?

The Republican Party is clear on its motivation: the defense of America against socialism. The Democratic Party will deny it with reason. Obamacare was designed to protect the private healthcare industry and deflect demand for a single payer system. But, as the party of vigilant capitalism, the Republicans should be given their due. Whatever level their analysis of Obamacare is operating on it does point at an underlying fact. The demand that healthcare be affordable and universal is unmistakably socialist.

The Affordable Healthcare Act owes such mass support as it may have to its admission of this principle, however nominal that may be. And the Democratic Party, five years into the systemic crisis which placed it in the White House, has little else to boast of to its working class base whose socialist instincts are rising to the surface. Conversely, the Republican Party cannot retreat from its stand against Obamacare without sustaining substantial damage with its own mass base even as its strategy loses support within the heights of capital. The "tea party" is separated from its rival base by its ideological inversion which makes the program of the working class, socialism, the greatest threat to itself. But its circumstances are closer to those of its enemy than to its own political allies in the business class. It isn't ideological hostility which drives the animosity of the tea party to the "official" GOP, it's the lack of a comfortable distance protecting it from the economic crisis.

With the historic organizations of the working class weakened capital senses historic opportunities. It sympathizes with the struggle against socialized medicine but, by and large, and, with varying motivations, has thrown in with ACA. The Republican Party has been weakened nationally as the business class finds itself more and more comfortable with the Democrats. As this happens the relative weight of the purely reactionary section of the party has increased, as the budget standoff illustrates. However, the approach of the debt ceiling resolved the standoff by devaluing the contest between the party brands and asserting their identity as defenders of capital and empire.

This underlying identity lies behind the safe for all settings opinion that the politicians should "do their job" and keep the government up and running for the sake of us all. Hidden in this non-partisan vent of frustration is a real deterioration in the standard of living for most in this country; a situation that will not always be resolved by the nostrums of the media or contained within the current partisan landscape.

Digging it, CJ

Ghar Aaya Mera Pardesi - Nargis - Raj Kapoor - Awaara - Lata - Manna Dey...

Zombie Harlan Sanders stalks the unwary

Untitled, a photo by Joey Harrison on Flickr.

Oh, Carolyn

Wolverine Gets His Ass Fired

What's happening here?

Spook's Trip

Anne Francis, ahoy!

Write Your Own Title Here

The Titanic


and...
Wall Street


No, you will not find me rushing in where you, wise reader, have no doubt already trod. I only ask what subversive soul selected these for Game Night.

Right, that guy.

So the great ship went down and I was the first in the water (hey, I had passengers with me). 

But soon found myself bereft of food and water.



Not this sailor.



Likewise I was first overboard here.



Really? $50,000?



And so, dear reader, be of good cheer.
The lifeboats are full.
But Halloween is near.