Tag Archives: dan brown

Demonic DIA mustang Blucifer may be Bronco Blue, but eyes are Herring Red

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Bluecifer, Satan's Steed, the Demon StallionThe conspiracy theories deepen about cruel oddities at Denver International Airport, and much of the conjecture is now being scuttled with classic disinformation. Questions are substantive enough about DIA construction anomalies, without worrying about Blucifer the red-eyed stallion, his Egyptian pal Anubis, gargoyle luggage gods, prophetic end-times murals, inward-facing concertina wire, tent canvas of pure Kevlar, and the dastardly Freemasons behind it all.

It’s supposed.

Conspiracy freaks delight in pretending the Masonic Order cannot help but leave triumphant clues about its omniscience. The eyeball pyramid on US paper currency would seem demonstration enough, but conspiracy sleuths nursed on Dan Brown eat that up. And the confusion disseminaters are pouring it on. Who am I to pooh-pooh any particulars, especially conspiracies, of themselves too often scurrilously maligned, except to suggest that the less symbolism-intensive speculation about DIA is plenty obvious, and operatic enough.

The fact that excavation continues at DIA, years after the facility became operative should raise eyebrows. How much excavation is required to build runways on a near-flat landscape? Has DIA really displaced so much earth it’s become a significant fraction of what was removed to carve the Panama Canal? Apparently satellite pictures reveal a growing mound to suggest the extent of cavernous facilities being dug under and around the DIA. The evocative white tents were always for the nomads, on the plains, white settlers needed dugouts.

Where easier to install secretive accommodations than under the everyday lock-down of a post-9/11 airport?

Would DIA serve as a massive underground concentration camp? Ask yourself if a many mile buffered isolation is necessary for that, on top of being underground, or vice-versa. Area 51 remains a mystery without having to comprise buried facilities. We’ve already seen that Superdomes smack in the middle of urban centers make perfectly inhumane detainment centers. Imagine too, the isolation of DIA, without a railway for incoming. The Nazi camps did not predate flight. There would have been no Auschwitz without a railroad line.

A far more obvious application would be as a shelter from the public outside, behind miles of no-man’s land, the single entrance easily closed off. Far from even prying eyes.

Underground shelters have historically been carved in bedrock, NORAD in Cheyenne Mountain as an example. Could a man-made hole ever surpass a mountain range for protection? But perhaps the New World Order has the atomic threat sewn up. The mushroom cloud may still be evoked to frighten the masses, but I’ll bet that all the nuclear arms across the globe are as secure as Israel’s Security Council veto. This DIA shelter may need only protect against biological agents or fallout from an environmental cataclysm.

Old-fashioned bomb shelters have suffered obsolescence due to ease-of-access. What safe-room will save you if you cannot get to it? NORAD only protected those already inside it. What do you do to protect far-flung clients in the age of Twitter-speed atmospheric percussions?

An oversized airport like DIA certainly answers that requirement. While Coloradans might grouse about the interminable drive to DIA, they might one day rue its impenetrability. Meanwhile the jet set will gain admission by simple default of having wings.

Nothing terribly complicated about that setup. If you belonged to the billionaires club, you’d think of a provision like that too. The A-bomb age already prepped Americans for the contingency that a nuclear war would necessitate saving the more important among us. What’s the objection now?

TWILIGHT vampires resemble predators of the less mystical sexual variety

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stephanie meyer dreams of Babe the PigTWILIGHT- For those parents who have unwittingly encouraged their daughters to delve into Twilight, where our episodic fascination with Dracula lore is adapted for the young adult romance genre, be forewarned that author Stephenie Meyer may have fogged her rose-colored glasses with romantic nostalgia from her Mormon upbringing: old older men, arranged marriages, and, if you’ll pardon the dropped pretense, date rape.

DESPOILER ALERT.
Better you than your child?

Old fashioned matchmaking
First, Meyer’s teenage vampires are generations-old men, stuck reliving their teens, repeating high school to prey on each successive year of students. Matthew McConnaughey played it, minus fangs, in Dazed and Confused: “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.”

Off campus, some of the undead “imprint” on newborns. Want that explained? Meyer’s succubus babies are born fully-conscious, if that’s any excuse, but elders are able to perceive them as soul-partners, and claim dibs to pair with them later. When they are of consumable age, I presume.

Perhaps you find these details to be inconsequential “vampire” technicalities protected by Meyer’s un-poetic license. There’s a zinger in the fourth book which you may find less palatable.

Vampire sex
Because your tween-ager should know to make the distinction?

In book four, Bella marries the 117-year-old high school hold-back Edward Cullen, and finally he consents to consummate their marriage. He’s been withholding his afflictions for fear that vampire sex would kill her. By the way, that’s the romantic dynamic of the first three books, in case you wonder what’s titillating your acts-beyond-her-age young reader.

Typical of respectable novels, and the romance genre too perhaps, the sex scene is glossed over. Bella disrobes and joins Edward for a midnight swim, where he “leads her to deeper waters.” The narrative returns as the sun rises the next morning.

Classy enough for this lowbrow storytelling, except that Meyer earns no credit for obscuring the steamy bits, because the exact details are lost on her post-coital heroine as well. A fog of amnesia covers Bella as she spends the morning trying to reconstruct what exactly happened to her. With only her bruises for clues.

Meyer describes Bella waking feeling as if her skeletal-structure has been crushed like a wishbone, “but in a good way.” Bella discovers that she’s covered in bruises which grow still darker in severity, obscured by a dusting of feathers. Nevermind the injuries apparently, why the feathers? Her ravisher reveals he had to bite “one or two pillows” to keep himself from eviscerating her. For this act of consideration, Bella, and the readers, find Edward all the more endearing. Since vampires kill humans, how sweet that Edward merely vampire-man-handled her.

Bella survived the Twilight climax, and although she doesn’t remember the act, she’s feeling sexually satisfied. I’m open to the possibility that a gender gap might be confusing me. About what is Bella all aglow, if she doesn’t recollect what happened? Conquest? Having hosted a smashing party? I’ll tell you what I think has quenched Bella’s desire, if the Mormon motif is any indication. She’s fulfilled her biological drive. Not to possess Edward, but to become pregnant. In Meyer’s grandiose predestined sense, Bella is triumphant in having attained motherhood.

Do these themes fly over the heads of her impressionable readers? Why put them there.

The scene reads to me like waking from a date-rape drug, although the experience might more likely describe a young Mormon girl coming out of the state of shock induced by the violence of her older experienced polygamist husband rapist. At the least, how she might cope with having endured the brutality of a sexual drive unmatched by her own, and beyond her comprehension.

Men are not to blame, they are but slaves to their monstrous sexual urges. Obviously this is where Meyer looks for humanity in her vampires. Your daughter’s assignment? Assure her presumptive taker that she’s up for the worst he can unleash. She can favor the monster who feigns leniency.

Four books versus two
You may not have to worry about your child reaching the S&M sex, pregnancy, and monstrous-birth scene of Book Four. There’s a good hope that your young sophisticate will tire of Meyer’s underwhelming literary skill before the end of the first tome. There’s an even more likely chance that books three and four will bore her into maturity. Even Meyer’s fans hate the vacuity of those stretches.

Apparently the fourth volume was written as the original sequel, but was rewritten later to make room for the two filler episodes. They upped the Twilight movie take by fifty percent. Every fan is saying you appreciate the movie the most if you’ve read all the material.

What a great publishing scheme! The movie tickets are eight dollars, but the requisite quartet box set, sets you back $100. Ravaging the innocence of America’s tweens? Priceless.
Edward Cullen Robert Pattinson
Twilight the Movie
The biggest anxiety I heard expressed about the movie, was not if it could do the books justice, but whether the character of Edward could possibly live up to his physical perfection in the novel. Judging from audience reviews, film Edward was an exact match, which means Meyer left no room for a reader’s imagination. Is that what young-adult fiction is about?

Stephenie Meyer’s dream crush, as cast in Twilight the Movie, resembles the fittingly abusive Stanley of A Streetcar Named Desire, literally Marlon Brando’s brooding stage turn as the violent husband, wearing an Elvis wig, on lithium, as viewed through a camera lens smeared with Vaseline, probably also a polygamist staple.

How about just a bite?
You might be thinking, what’s wrong with just the first book? Can’t a girl luxuriate in the hyper-romantic swoon over the opening story?

I don’t know. I’ve often been perplexed about the teen Goth living death fixation, nihilism and teen suicide. I suspect they get fuel from mall rat romantics like Stephenie Meyer.

You be the judge. I was able to wrestle a few minutes with our household copy, to see that Meyer opens with this quote:

But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
Genesis 2:17

Does that equate vampirism with the forbidden fruit of knowledge? Meyer followed Dan Brown’s example to find a biblical passage to provide coded authority. More proof that insipid writing multiplies with inbred fiction authors.

In the spirit of taking guidance from a quotation, I entreat you to sample the preface of Twilight, because the Amazon Look Inside sample astutely skips it. If you’ve already read Twilight, please slap yourself on the cheek and try to extricate yourself enough to look at these paragraphs one by one.

Here it is, adulteration entirely courtesy of Meyer. Even if she was twelve when she wrote this, I hope your daughter can show more acuity than she.

PREFACE

I’d never given much thought to how I would die — though I’d had reason enough in the last few months — but even if I had, I would not have imagined it like this.

I stared without breathing across the long room, into the dark eyes of the hunter, and he looked pleasantly back at me.

Surely it was a good way to die, in the place of someone else, someone I loved. Noble, even. That ought to count for something.

I knew that if I’d never gone to Forks, I wouldn’t be facing death now. But, terrified as I was, I couldn’t bring myself to regret the decision. When life offers you a dream so far beyond any of your expectations, it’s not reasonable to grieve when it comes to an end.

The hunter smiled in a friendly way as he sauntered forward to kill me.

I bet Stephenie Meyer cannot even gag herself with a spoon.

Would Dominionists murder for Palin?

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While we’ve been speculating whether lotto-winner candidate Sarah Palin measures up to big “C” Christian standards, lo, church ambitions of old step in. A minister friend of mine offered Ides of March for November and President-elect John McCain: Having a Christian Dominionist in line for the US presidency would mean curtains for the septuagenarian as soon as he’s sworn in. It doesn’t take Dan Brown to imagine religious zealots would stop at the proverbial nothing to raise one of their own to supreme power.

Whether syphilis takes John McCain or whether it’s Sarah’s poison lipstick, we’ll be Sieg Heiling President Palin, whose signing statements will be taken straight out of scripture. Then where will the poor world be? I’m thinking RBs. Revelations and nuclear bombs.

My friend envisions the remedy will be an urgent Palin impeachment leading to a Pelosi ascent. A circuitous Democratic Party re-coup to be sure, amidst global catastrophe from which it’s difficult to imagine our world will escape. No wonder the rich have privatized spaceship R&D.

Let me show you Bad Writing

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New Life self awarenessPoor Richard writes that his bookstore will neither carry the Ted Haggard expose nor host a book signing by its author Mike Jones, sex worker to reluctant habitue, Ted Haggard. Skorman can do what he wishes, but to say the reason is because the book is badly written is a cop out. Any bookseller in this city has to admit they carry a not inconsiderable mass of atrocious dreck. Bad books sell, and alas Richard’s stand for a higher literary standard is the first to my knowledge.

I think Jones’ choice of an incompetent writer to ghost his Haggard Days memoir is likely spot-on for a Colorado Springs audience. What’s the best selling book here? The home-grown LEFT BEHIND series! I guarantee you a fourth grader has not encountered less inspired writing.

Not that our city is atypical, even today’s NYT bestsellers play to a descending literary IQ. From Dan Brown to whoever is your cheesy favorite I’ve no doubt. This phenomena was clocked most distinctly when Stephen King was given the 2003 National Book Award for his contribution to [the sales of] American Letters. What a banner year it was, 2003.

So why pick on poor male escort Mike Jones? I think it’s pure political cowardice. The New Life Crew and their fallen gay-bashing leader have done irreparable harm to the progress of acceptance of homosexuals. Here’s a chance to teach them something about from where comes their misplaced hatred, and Mike Jones stands without allies to do it. Jones is not an opportunist, he’s a hero doing a dirty job. Maybe the right man for the dirty job, to crack a cheap joke, but if Jones was truly out for himself, he’d have taken a mega-fortune from a conglomeration of fundie gay-hating institutions interested in keeping Haggard in the pulpit. Remember Bill O’Reilly’s non-consensual phone-sex while penetrating himself with a lifelike vibrating phallus? He and Fox paid an undisclosed fraction of a BILLION to make that story go away.

If I knew THE BOOKMAN could handle the heat of accusations that we were only doing it for the attention –we’ve exceeded our limit, thank you KVOR creeps particularly– my bookstore would of course host this reading and book signing. And I commend Jones for tastefully steering past whatever might have been the unwelcome lascivious play by play.

I believe the Ted Haggard comeuppance is of capital importance for Colorado Springs, not to gloat about Haggard’s suffering or about the humiliation of his flock, but to lift the veil from their self-hatred of homosexuals. Haggard is unrepentant about this by the way, and if I might offer a simplified analysis, he hates gays because he hates himself. What reason has he the temerity to suggest that we should hate them?

Let’s welcome Mike Jones to our town. Jones unmasked the Haggard hate monster, let him claim the lair. Jones can satiate our curiosity, feed the spectacle, accept our thanks for showing personal integrity, and move this story along. I most certainly think it took a lot of bravery for Mike Jones to do what he did. He showed the kind of courage we can’t even summon, as we deliberate about whether to extend him our hand.

Perhaps as a community of independent booksellers we can do it. Why ever are we afraid of the religious right? They don’t buy our books. When Christians do buy a book they buy it new from an Inspirational Bookstore, because it feels like a more deliberate investment in their faith, I’ve heard it explained, sort of like paying down on a tithe or Indulgence.

Do I fear the Fundamentalist wrath? If they’re under-educated, under-literate, bigoted ditto-heads, of course I do. I fear them like I would Brown Shirts or union busters. Fundamentalist have a terrible tradition for that kind of immorality. Ask anyone in retail, if a customer declares themselves to be a Christian, you actually have to watch them closely because experience has shown they are more likely to try to steal or cheat. Probably because that’s the sort of conflicted person who is drawn to simplistic religious dogma in the first place.

Of course I fear them. But Ted Haggard’s fall must not go without every spotlight we can summon. He’s still behaving like a bastard and we really should shout him down. Jones has given us Haggard’s Achilles Heinie/ [Meth]Habit, let’s use it! If no one is really going to step up to ask Mike Jones to town, I most certainly will. I’m sorry I came late to this discussion but good grief!