Salt City Sinner

posted 10/31/2012 by the Salt City Sinner Perhaps the best political or literary take-down of my generation was penned by Matt Taibbi in response to Thomas Friedman's "The World Is Flat." In the review, Taibbi notes the peculiar quality that distinguishes Friedman from the usual beltway idiots ( link ): The usual ratio of Friedman criticism is 2:1, i.e., two human words to make sense of one word of Friedmanese. Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent passages invite feature-length essays...Thomas Friedman does not get [metaphors] right even by accident. It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always  screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest detail without genius. in a like manner, Paul T. Mero, alpha brain at Salt Lake City's conservative Suth...

During the month of October Gardner Village, located in West Jordan Utah, shares the Halloween Holiday Spirit in a fun and exciting way with WITCHFEST!   Calendar of Events for Witchfest Several nights during October the village "Gathering Place" hosts an evening dinner show "Witchapalooza" where guests can enjoy a lovely meal and a wickedly entertaining theatrical perfomace. As you enter the front doors of the Gathering Place you are greeted with amazing photo opportunities, pirates and pumpkins, an old world feel.  I almost felt like I had been transported to the old Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney Land!  (Truly magical!) Inside the theater the tables are numbered for the reservation you made when the tickets were purchased.  Ticket sales for Witchapalooza open on August 1st annually and sell out very quickly.  There are two options, a dinner theatre and a late night showing of the theatrical performance with no meal. ...

posted 10/25/2012 by the Salt City Sinner Okay, let's get this out of the way first: I am NOT a libertarian, big L or small. I suppose you could consider me a civil  libertarian, as I support the maximum possible amount of personal freedom (i.e., free speech, an end to the "war on drugs," gun rights, etc.). However, the economic views of libertarians (end the welfare state, deregulate industries, lower taxes on corporations) are extremely repulsive to me, since they amount to the opposite of consumer advocacy and the mirror image of activism on behalf of poor, working class, and middle class people. My ideological relationship with libertarianism is complex. Any ideology consists of a subset of emphases. One of my favorite college professors of all time used the metaphor of a room that consists of a certain set of furniture: given said furniture and said room, different people arrange the furniture differently, placing greater emphasis on this or that aspect of...

posted 10/23/2012  by the Salt City Sinner Greetings, wage slaves! If there are two things I love (there are a lot more than two things I love), they are breakfast and science fiction. In this very special edition of Salt City Sinner we will examine a few slightly more (or less) esoteric science fiction television programs in terms of what breakfast they represent. What were my criteria for picking this show instead of that? Don't ask any damned questions, just roll with it, and feel free to comment. First up! nice LaserDisc you have there Series: Any Star Trek Pros: Functioning positive example of Socialist government (oh wait, all of Europe before the Eurozone crisis also qualified/s) Cons: Ferengi ear-sex is mad creepy Breakfast: Two eggs fried over easy with bacon and white toast. Reliable, sensible, old-school. Series:  Any Star Wars Pros:  Seriously awesome set design and internal cohesion (pre-prequels) Cons: George Lucas Breakfast: ...

posted on 10/22/2012 by the Salt City Sinner I like to while away the lonely hours of my days by occasionally (read: obsessively) listening to WNYC's wonderful program RadioLab ( here ). RadioLab featured a podcast in April called "The Loudest Miniature Fuzz" ( link ) about the music of Buke and Gase ( link ). Buke and Gass are Arone Dyer and Aron Sanchez. Hailing from Brooklyn, the duo (who actually used to be a couple but are now strictly musical partners and friends) are notable for a few things. First off, the instruments they play. The name "Buke and Gase" comes from the two primary instruments they use: a modified six-string baritone ukulele (a "buke") and a guitar-bass hybrid (a "gase"). In addition, Sanchez stomps on a kick drum with an attached cymbal and Dyer shakes an anklet of bells in time to their music. This is pretty impressive considering the idiosyncratic time signatures they prefer, and the rapid changes in ...

posted 10/16/2012 by the Salt City Sinner Think of me as a Tarot Card. I represent "Opportunities About To Arise." They did some very interesting and downright inhumane experiments with rat colonies, Neville.  They found when certain population limits are reached, all it takes is the addition of one extra rat...  and the whole community slides into unstoppable chaos. One little rat and Utopia turns into Rwanda. So here we are, America. Two presidential debates down, and what more could possibly be at stake? Two men in expensive and identical suits have engaged in a hideously pre-ordained set of talking points ( link ), focus groups engaged and "dial-polling" (thanks, Frank Luntz, you inhuman sack of excrement) purified. Truly, this is the end of days, if popular culture is to be believed. The rise of pop-culture's embrace of the zombie apocalypse, the rise of survivalism since the 90s: everybody from your friendly local securalist to...

posted 10/5/2012 by the Salt City Sinner Greetings, sheeple, from my stronghold high atop the Wells Fargo Building in downtown Salt City, where I type this before a massive, glowing bank of monitors that display the ongoing progress of my 23-point plan for complete social control. Whether you want to demonize me as a "liberal," or prefer the Glenn Beck update "progressive," we all know the truth, and it's time to pull the curtain aside: like all left-leaning persons, I am actually a member of the Illuminati. How else to explain how much power my side of the aisle wields in U.S. American politics? According to conservatives, liberals/the Illuminati control the media * , science * , academia in general * , public schools * , public radio * , pretty much anything "public," the courts * , and Hollywood * . Hell, we pretty much control everything except for scrappy, underdog operations like WND and Fox News, or quiet, marginalized voices like...