HARD FOR JUSTICE!

VECTOR CHICK: "RED HOT [LAZY] CRISIS..."

Don't tell Bunny: Clever satire does not automatically equal sexist pornography.

(Also includes stolen Zombifrieze artwork.)

[untitled]

"Roy Barley presents..."

(Repost) Pyramid of Disbelief

or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying
& just Go with the Flow, man.

By W. Bill Czolgosz, (c) 2008





I'm a mediocre skeptic, at best. I'll admit that. I think many of us in the reading audience are on the fence about things. Maybe 60% of us. No facts or real stats here, just an educated assumption.
Bob believes in God, but not lizard People.
Shirley laughs at Wicca, but practices ear-candling.
Edwin reads both Hawking and Chopra.
You know how it goes.
We all have our beefs and biases. I can listen to Professor X ramble on for hours about who really killed JFK, but he'd slap me in the face if I ever got the nerve to ask him whether space aliens might have been involved. All of us perceive things differently, and we all have our particular bullshit thresholds.
Few of us are completely idiot-proof.
I like to picture a big ol' pyramid.
James Randi is at the top of the pyramid. This man, quite famously, believes in nothing outside of science. There are surprisingly few humans like Randi in the world. The followers of Sylvia Browne, by contrast, are at the bottom of the pyramid, providing the base, seemingly gullible enough to swallow anything. (We do love to pick on them, don't we?)
Most of us, I think, make up the bricks in the middle. Oddly, we are soft bricks, made of latex foam. The closer we are to the top, naturally, the more likely we are to read Skeptic and/or Skeptical Inquirer. I could provide an illustration, but even the dullest among us ought to be able to envision this wonderful structure. I will call it the Pyramid of Disbelief, or PoD. (Maybe I will trademark PoD and write a pandering book about it. Some variation of The Secret, but without all the horse doodie. Who knows?)
As a Middler on the PoD, I tend to lean different ways, depending on my mood or experience. Being a Middler is a bit like being a Waffler. We are Legion. We go where the wind blows us. (Too bad I started off with the bricks analogy, because bricks don't really lend themselves to being blown around. I really should have put more thought into my PoD.)
Point being, us Upper Middlers don't like being snookered. We know the Bible was written by Men. We can plainly see that chickadees might actually have been velociraptors, once upon a time. And self-proclaimed psychics, oddly enough, don't seem to win the lottery as often as they should.
Lower Middlers, those closer to the Sylvia-ites at the bottom of the PoD, have as much information as we Upper Middlers possess, but they opt to do less with it. Why wasn't there a T-rex on Noah's Ark? Did aliens co-opt the Delta Wing Fighter? How did Criss Angel manage to put that guy's arm back on? Ad infinitum. Lower Middlers tend to ask fewer questions, and they don't pay much mind to the answers they receive.
But us Upper Middlers love questions. We say things like, How could 3-D holograms knock down the Twin Towers? These conspiracy nuts are morons! But we also say things like, Well, how did nineteen passports turn up intact in the wreckage? Maybe the nuts have a point, after all.
We are misguided, often, and sometimes misinformed, and occassionally superstitious. Ghosts are for children, but my brother-in-law swears he saw Ogopogo.
We see things from multiple vantage points.
We read the skeptical journals because we want to be sure.
The PoD is a strange, confounding place.
We inbetween bricks are porous and malleable.
It doesn't help that the people who inform us, at both ends of the bullshit spectrum-- or, at the top and bottom of the PoD-- are not always the brightest bulbs.
For every buffoon who writes, The center of the Earth is hollow and has its own sun, or, Bigfoot lives in Saskatchewan, there's going to be a skeptical non-genius who writes stuff like, There is no such thing as a conspiracy, or, Science can only make the world a better place. [As I write, millions of folks from all levels of the PoD are fretting about the atom-crushing experiment currently taking place in Switzerland. So far, however, we have not been sucked into a black hole.]
Recently, Benjamin Radford, writing for Skeptical Inquirer, attempted to deride the legend of Rosemary Brown. It was Ms. Brown who famously, or infamously, claimed to have received musical instruction from the ghosts of famous composers such as Liszt, Bach and Beethoven. While Radford brings no new criticisms to the table, other than to chortle at the very idea of ghost phenomena, he does observe, sarcastically, “[these] composers learned to speak English after their deaths...” Which just goes to show that accomplished skeptics can be just as shallow as toothless UFO abductees.
I looked at a skeptical bar graph, once upon a time. I don't recall the publication or the date, but I do remember that the statistician who compiled it dismissed God, the Loch Ness Monster, UFOs, and the JFK assassination conspiracy with equal dismissiveness. This, it must be pointed out, is the problem with hardline skepticism: God and JFK do not equal monsters and aliens. And just because Loch Ness is not likely to harbor a giant, prehistoric lizard does not automatically mean that Castro didn't have an extra man in the Dallas book depository.
Look at 9/11. The skeptics tell us that the official, government version of events is the true version of events because, well, dammit, the US government just wouldn't harm its own people. And that, of course, is as laughable as Barney and Betty Hill's driving-home story. (You don't need to track down a Leftist Kook to get the skinny on many of the horrific things the US has done to its own citizens. Shoot, you don't even need the Internet. Your public library will suffice.)
For a group that adheres pretty close to the Ohio slogan-- “Show me”-- they are doing just the opposite with 9/11. As soon as someone demonstrates that the Official Story is full of gaping holes, the hardline skeptic covers his ears and says, “I'm not listening.” (For the last time, fellas, WTC-7 fell and it wasn't even hit by a plane.)
But now I'm going off on a tangent.
Ahem.
The meat-heads at the bottom of the PoD believe in supernatural things. Angels and clairvoyance, flagships from Vega, vampires and Tarot Card readings. By and large, the devout skeptics are vehemently opposed to belief in the supernatural. These two groups will never be able to reconcile. Supernature is beyond reality and nature. The PoD-toppers live in the here and now. The bottom-dwellers live inside of the collective imagination.
These believers like to say, “We can never be proven wrong,” which, for example, assumes that God will either, a.) Show Himself to the world, one day, or, b.) He won't, and the latter option doesn't prove anything. On the surface, this seems to put all the onus on the skeptics.
However, the skeptics have a very similar out.
Non-science becomes science when it is proven.
If a flagship from Vega, full-up of green extraterrestrials, landed at the Mall of America tomorrow, the people at the top of the PoD would not automatically begin eating their hats. Instead, scientists from around the world would study the flagship's propulsion system, while politicians, social workers, and Oprah Winfrey would stage a huge getting-to-know-you with the green visitors, and suddenly the supernatural would become natural.
The warp drive works just like this... nothing super about it. The crewmen are carbon-based and they wear Spandex. Very blasé. No big deal at all.
In the end, the skeptics will not have been wrong.
They will say, “Our Vegan friends have finally made themselves known, they conform absolutely to the laws of physics and nature, and they listen to rap music.” Nothing supernatural about it. The fantastic becomes ordinary in less than a week.
Because that's the very nature of skepticism-- “Show me, prove it, tell me how it works, and I will believe you.”
The problem for those of us in the spongey middle of the PoD is that “Show Me” is a highly subjective proposition.
Show me what?
Photographs, pie charts, arguments, Greek razors?
My grandfather used to say, “Believe half of what you see and none of what you hear,” which confounded things, for me, even further.
Most of us have seen UFOs-- and, of course, UFOs are real, by definition; unidentified, that is-- but a startling majority of them can be explained away by good sense. Was it a bird? Was it a plane? Oh damn, it was Venus!
Same goes for ghosts. Is it a reflection, in the photograph, or a double exposure? And, while we're at it, Did I really see my Aunt Elaine on the way to the bathroom last night, or was I still half-asleep and dreaming?
The skeptics-- our friends, by the way, and God bless'em-- seek to remove the wool from our eyes when we seem incapable of doing it ourselves.
They don't want to see us conned by charlatans like Sylvia Browne and John Edwards. They don't want us throwing our money at Secret books, or cowering like scared rats simply because Nostradamus claimed the world was going to end in 1971, 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2012.
They want to help us.
Most of them, anyway.
Certainly, there are skeptics with agendas, just as surely as Jerry Falwell wants your banking info.
We are human, after all, even the grumpy old men at the top of the PoD, and we can become slogged down in the mire of our ways.
Will James Randi cry out to God on his deathbed? My money is on No. Further, if Buddha meets Randi in the Tunnel of Light, Randi will convince Buddha He doesn't exist. (And, I think, Buddha will buy it.)
I once heard the great Michael Shermer on the Coast to Coast AM radio program. Dr. Shermer squared off against two or three of the Kooks-- I really don't recall their names, but they were men, all of them, with otherworldy theories and nutty books to sell-- and, let me assure you, Dr, Shermer slayed them. Two of them couldn't put up any argument for their supernatural beliefs, at all, and both referred Dr. Shermer (and the entire radio audience) to their recently-published books, for sale at Amazon.com for $24.99 (plus shipping, handling, and taxes, where applicable).
I believe that Michael Shermer is so good at what he does-- debunking, that is, bringing reason to the table-- that he, like James Randi, could not be swayed by The Creator Him/Herself. And let us never forget that Shermer, and Randi, also have books for sale.
Am I saying that Skepticism is a racket, like Cryptozoology?
Well, no (maybe). But it's certainly a well-forged position.
The people at the top of the PoD are hard, pointy bricks.
The people at the bottom are dull and flat-topped.
Us in the middle remain soft and yielding.
That brings me to why I am a bad skeptic, finally. I said at the outset that I was mediocre, at best, but maybe I'm not even that. I love the crowd, I really do, the pointy-heads with their logic and reason and crusty arrogance. But something is wrong with me.
Let me state fifteen of my Middle PoD dis-/beliefs for you:
1.) Lake monsters. No.
2.) Extraterrestrial intelligence. Maybe.
3.) UFO abductions. No.
4.) Ghosts. Maybe.
5.) Card reading. No.
6.) God. Possibly.
7.) Telekineses. No.
8.) Sasquatch. Maybe.
9.) Changelings. Absolutely not.
10.) Conspiracies (9/11, et al.) Probably.
11.) Mediums. No.
12.) Hollow earth. ROTFLMAO, no.
13.) Life on Mars. Hmmm...
14.) Icke-y Saurians. Umm, no.
15.) ESP. Yes!
I don't know where to put item 15. Does ESP go hand in hand with Card-reading? What about Telekineses? These three seem, on the surface, to be related. How can I believe in ESP and not the others?
This is where we get back to my Middle PoD problem:
Remember “Show me”?
I would say that I have been shown.
For the record, I am not selling a book.
I am merely justifying my position. I would love to be a pointy-head at the top of the PoD, but now I never can be. I'm stuck forever in the bulky middle, soft and cheesy, presuming myself to be somewhat better than the blockheads at the bottom, and maybe I've sunk just a bit closer to them.
My destiny is to waffle forever.
I didn't see it, didn't hear it, didn't read it.
I completely experienced it.
We can never prove it in a lab, and I won't win a million bucks from James Randi's checking account, but I don't need to.
What happened, you ask.
It's a tiny thing, to be sure, but like a poisonous mesquite thorn, it has weakened and possibly crippled my system. (My bullshit system, that is, the software that once helped me to hold my position in the Upper Middle of the PoD.)
My daughter, 18, and I were vacationing at the family cottage.
She was in the spare bedroom, I was in the master bed.
We slept for the night, comfortably, then drove down the highway to see the waterfalls in the early morning.
I mentioned the dream I'd had.
I'd thought about it since waking. It was one of those Lynchian quasi-nightmares. Seems like an ordinary adventure, but something sinister boils just beneath the surface.
It was bizarre. I was managing a restaurant, the walls were not quite perpendicular, something was happening outside, in the sky...
My daughter said, “Was this restaurant two-storied?”
I said, “Yes.”
“And was there a bed, upstairs?”
“Yes. I got out of the bed wearing red long underwear.”
My daughter began to cry.
I turned all numb inside.
During the fifteen minute-drive to the falls, my daughter and I went back and forth detailing the dream that we'd shared. She was in mine, I was in hers, and the dreams were the same.
And it was vivid. Not general similarities, but details as complex as the vehicle that my dream-wife (her dream-mother) was driving. It was a brown station wagon, mixed somehow with a Ford Explorer, a dream-logic model, and, it goes without saying, a vehicle we'd never owned in real life.
Chewbacca (TM) was there. As were the Keebler elves (TM).
You know how dreams go.
Lurid detail upon lurid detail.
Too many for random chance.
My daughter jotted down all these details. (I still have the paper, for all the good it does.)
We spent the rest of the day analyzing this event.
The dream(s) hadn't been influenced by TV or movies, and we hadn't watched any, recently. The characters, the dream-architecture, the surroundings, the “story” weren't based in real-life events.
We came to two conclusions:
1.) An cosmically astounding coincidence, or,
2.) A shared dream. (And that implies ESP.)
Please remember that I'm not selling you anything.
Point is, I'm not looking for support or justification. My daughter and I shared an experience that defies conventional logic, one that will stay with us forever-- like a first crush, a demonic possession, or a really bad taco.
It can't be “debunked”-- we know what we know-- and I doubt that such a trifling experience is even worth the effort.
This story, which began as a simple letter, and which has gone on now for six pages in my word processor, is about how I have crossed over the bullshit threshold and can never go back.
The Pyramid of Disbelief is composed mostly of people like myself. There are Randis at the top, wackos at the bottom, and a whole host of Joe Sixpacks in between.
Jerry hates psychic healers, but he knows he saw a ghost, once.
Martha wouldn't be caught dead reading The Celestine Prophecy, but she knows that her grandfather clock stopped ticking at 5:13 PM, January 17, the precise time that her mother died.
Glen thinks Uri Gellar is a fraud, but he's also pretty certain that the Space Brothers put a tracking device up his bottom in 1982.
Perhaps the dream I shared with my daughter will make sense, someday. Maybe science will say, We've discovered the Milli-Meme, a proton-like nugget of cerebral information that passes from one human brain to the next, sort of like a Midi-Chlorian (TM). There's nothing supernatural about it. It's textbook stuff, now.
In that event, everyone will have won.
The wackos will be vindicated, the skeptics will be placated, and we'll all live in a universe that is somehow more impressive than it seems on the surface.
Call it God, call it nature, call it awesome.
Isn't there a song like that?
Clowns to the left, jokers to the right,
I'm stuck here in the middle [of the PoD] with you...
Addendum: If Shared Dreams is an actual field of study in the New Age realm, and if you are an expert in said field, neither myself nor my daughter want to hear from you. We fear you will just cheapen an extraordinary experience, and we prefer it just the way it is.
© 2008 by W. Bill Czolgosz

In the Zooming

Rocky

I always thought I'd see Rocky Horror at a midnight cinema with full audience participation. And then my son [we'll call him Tobe] went off and did it by himself.

That's how the streusel crumbles.

Next up: Trying to move my bowels. Fuck me. Why do I have a perfectly-functioning In-hole and a broken Out-one? There should be some correlation. This is gay.

Color of Funny

There was a brief, beautiful dream of setting sail with Sink Bunny Graphics and producing hundreds of second-rate funny pages . And then it died.

Whore, Me

The picture is supposed to be saying something about discovering one's true nature while digging about in an ocean of bloody toxicity.

Right on.

---
Looks like you've been diagnosed with lightning cancer of the brain and you'll be dying before the season changes. It may have crossed your diseased mind that no one will know you ever existed unless someone pens your biography. (Or your autobiography. Wink.)

Or maybe you were abducted and sodomized by drunken blue aliens in June of '68 and you finally decided that you want the whole world to know. Or perhaps you've got a paper due next Monday--5000 words on Jimmy Carter, Russian biker-surgeons and the curse of the electric sun--and you'd rather spend the intervening moments trying to shed your cursed virginity.

Whatever your needs, celebrated author W. Bill Czolgosz is the man for the job.

He's the handsome, respected author of the novels Anna Karnivora, Eat @t Zero's, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn & Zombie Jim (with Mark Twain), the graphic novel Zombifrieze, and numerous short stories including High Time Paper, Dreem Home, and The Reiser Account. (He is not the author of Lolita, Portnoy's Complaint, The Tommyknockers, or Twilight: Almost Noon, however--those titles are only mentioned here for the sake of the search engines.)

Rates are negotiable and satisfaction is pretty much assured.

Contact wbczolgosz@gmail.com

---



That's the spiel. I'll do virtually anything, but you can't kiss me on the lips.

-WBCz

Has Anyone Seen My Tape?

It is lost, man. Lost!

Birch, Birch, Birch

Basically, a little fella was told to colour a picture of autumn leaves, and he decided to draw a couple faces on them, instead. Sounds perfectly logical to me, but the teacher decided to send a disciplinary notice home to Mom and Dad. That sort of shit just doesn't fly--this is my submitted response to the code-red situation.

Reposted from Bunny's blog.

Thet Old Black Magick

BATMAN > 2012 < ARMAGEDDON

Golden Wheaty Bun

Looks like I have returned to this place. It's the land of big skies and angry farmers. The place where Mini-Wheats (sans sugar topping) come from. The French Indians called it Lac du Merde in the years before the vile terrorist, Louis Riel, was hanged at Moose Jaw.

Good history, here. I'm all the way full of it.

Yesterday, my wife, Bunny, and I couldn't figure out if people from this awful place, Saskatchewan, were called
Saskatchewanites, Saskatchewaners,
Saskatchewanians, Saskatchewanooniens, or
Saskatchewananas. Somebody came along and suggested Cousin-fuckers, and we all had a little chuckle.

We are Manitobans by birth, Bunny and I.

There was a time when I thought that Manitoba had more Ukrainians than the Ukraine, but then I relocated to Saskatchewan and... Holy crow! Most Saskatchewaneggers are Ukrainian or part Ukrainian, and the ones who are left over, and some of their cousins, are from Scandinavia. Every meal is lefse and pirogies. But I look at the words Scandinavia and The Ukraine and wonder if those were combined to make the word Saskatchewan. (Somebody says it's actually a Cree word meaning, "to mince fish with one's toes," but I don't believe it for even an instant.)

People in Saskatchewan, those pesky Scandiukrainian varmints, like to eat dinner at lunch-time. This is a pretty big deal for them--some will come right out and scold you for referring to supper as dinner. "Dinner is lunch, you imbecile." Maybe the word Chutzpah comes from Saskatchewan, too. Naturally, one would wonder if the dinner date, dinner and a movie, or dinner theater happen to take place around high noon in Saskatchewan.

Make a single bestiality joke in the presence of five middle-aged men and notice that--while there is some healthy, polite laughter taking place--there's a whole lot of secret winks and nudging one another in the ribs. I'm only pointing it out.

Why can't everyone be Saskatchewanese? All the Asians get to use the suffix -ese. Chinese, Taiwanese, Polygonese, Samoan, etc. Are they better than us just because they're clever with hotels and real estate?

What a wacky province! Living here is like being bonked on the head and waking up in a German submarine. They despise trees and have spent the last hundred years trying to eradicate them. When they come across a stagnant, filthy slough in the middle of the prairie, they get together and build cottages around it. And Jezus, last I checked, is still hailed as the chief rain-god and master of the world.

It is illegal, allegedly, to pray using the hand you last wiped your ass with. (Perhaps I'm thinking of Newfoundland or Saudi Arabia.) But the last time they had a lynching was 1992, when the last of Riel's band of criminals was finally rounded up at Valparaiso, so one doesn't need to be too careful.

Oh, now comes the answer: Saskatchewanian. Apparently that's the official term.

Wait until I discuss British Columbiers.

Stay Away from my Intellectual Property

Hello again. If I didn't already tell you, listen up: Mars is my baby. There's no skirting the issue. I decided this a long time ago and there's no going back. I'm pretty partial to it--got some nice comix, pictures, yarns to spin, you name it. Hands off of my planet!

SK

Happy Saturday, Friends

Why haven't you sent me money, yet? Isn't that what the Inter-Web is for?

TRUE Sympathy Card

-Commissioned 9/15/2011,

West Kelowna, BC.

The Wacky Space Brothers

W. Bill Czolgosz is the brainy one. He writes the stories, plans the cartoons, drafts the punchline, and nails all the cougars.

wbczolgosz@gmail.com

On the other side of the coin, Sean Simmans is the dullard. He makes pretty pictures and funny pictures and pretty funny pictures. And sexy ones, too.

simmans@gmail.com

Both men are "real" in the sense that they have had success in their respective fields, books and comics published, et cetera, whoop dee doo, and that each one maintains his own email address (see above). Bill prefers roast pork over all other foods, and Sean is a dark coffee buff. Sometimes the rest of the details get fuzzy.

Bunny Czolgosz is married to both of the, but maintains, "One of them isn't a real person, so it's not much of an issue." She also says, "If one of them was more inclined to get righteously stoned and then put the moves on a bejewelled gypsy belly dancer, well, it's not the one who spoons with me.

"Unfortunately, Bill makes the bigger paychecks."