poem: the vault

You spend decades, slowly
Building the vault around your heart
With rebar walls and titanium lining;
But your loved ones are safecrackers.
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Painting: The acid bath

Click painting to enlarge.
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A salute to Radio Shack for innovation in firing 400 workers. . .by email

RadioShack Corp. notified around 400 workers by e-mail yesterday that they were being fired immediately.

Employees at the Fort Worth headquarters received messages Tuesday morning saying: "The work force reduction notification is currently in progress. Unfortunately, your position is one that has been eliminated." The Associated Press story can be found here. All This Is That salutes the innovators at RadioShack Corp. who made this process almost pain-free for the managers and winged monkeys whose duty might have been to look those employees in the eye as they were "letting them go."
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The Devil made them do it says The Vatican. Hitler and Stalin were possessed by Satan.

According to The Vatican's chief exorcist, a/k/a 'caster out of demons,' Adolf Hitler and Russian leader Josef Stalin were possessed by the Devil. Father Gabriele Amorth , Pope Benedict XVI's Chief Exorcist made his comments during a radio interview.

"Of course the Devil exists and he can not only possess a single person but also groups and entire populations.

"I am convinced," Father Amorth said, "that the Nazis were all possessed. All you have to do is think about what Hitler - and Stalin did. "

"That's why we need to defend society from demons."

According to recently released and long-time secret Vatican documents, the wartime Pope, Pius XII attempted a telepathic exorcism on The Fuhrer, which was never successful.

A Daily Mail article published yesterday evening made this curious relevation.
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President Bush performs encore of his Katrina song from one year ago, and as to the cleanup of New Orleans, declares "Mission Accomplished!"

Today, on the anniversary of the Hurricane Katrina landfall, President Bush reprised the same song he performed last year, and declared that the rebuilding of New Orleans and Mississippi was complete. He made a call to his old confederate "Brownie," reminiscing about the heady days last August and September when The President, in concert with F.E.M.A., hit the ground running and practically beat the hurricane to New Orleans, with a massive supply airlift, logistical support, and engineers. According to The President, the operation was nearly flawless.
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Jesus: The Missing Years--John Prine's take on Jesus's missing 27 years

Between the ages of 12 and29, Jesus Christ fell off the map. No one knows (or ever wrote about) where he was or what he did. The Bible does not tell us where he was or what happened to him for those long 17 years...

A lot of people have theories on The Missing Years. This is John Prine's:


Jesus.... the missing years
by John Prine


It was raining. it was cold
West bethlehem was no place for a twelve year old
So he packed his bags and he headed out
To find out what the worlds about
He went to france. he went to spain
He found love. he found pain.
He found stores so he started to shop
But he had no money so he got in trouble with a cop
Kids in trouble with the cops
From israel didnt have no home
So he cut his hair and moved to rome
It was there he met his irish bride
And they rented a flat on the lower east side of rome...
Italy that is
Music publishers, book binders, Bible belters, money changers,
Spoon benders and lots of pretty italian chicks.

Chorus:
Charley bought some popcorn
Billy bought a car
Someone almost bought the farm
But they didnt go that far
Things shut down at midnight
At least around here they do
Cause we all reside down the block
Inside at ....23 skidoo.

Wine was flowing so were beers
So jesus found his missing years
So he went to a dance and said this dont move me
He hiked up his pants and he went to a movie
On his thirteenth birthday he saw rebel without a cause
He went straight on home and invented santa claus
Who gave him a gift and he responded in kind
He gave the gift of love and went out of his mind
You see him and the wife wasnt getting along
So he took out his guitar and he wrote a song
Called the dove of love fell off the perch
But he couldnt get divorced in the catholic church
At least not back then anyhow
Jesus was a good guy he didnt need this shit
So he took a pill with a bag of peanuts and
A coca-cola and he swallowed it.
He discovered the beatles
And he recorded with the stones
Once he even opened up a three-way package
In southern california for old george jones

Repeat chorus:

The years went by like sweet little days
With babies crying pork chops and beaujolais
When he woke up he was seventeen
The world was angry. the world was mean.
Why the man down the street and the kid on the stoop
All agreed that life stank. all the world smelled like poop
Baby poop that is ..the worst kind
So he grew his hair long and thew away his comb
And headed back to jerusalem to find mom, dad and home
But when he got there the cupboard was bare
Except for an old black man with a fishing rod
He said whatcha gonna be when you grow up?
Jesus said god
Oh my god, what have I gotten myself into?
Im a human corkscrew and all my wine is blood
Theyre gonna kill me mama. they dont like me bud.
So jesus went to heaven and he went there awful quick
All them people killed him and he wasnt even sick
So come and gather around me my contemporary peers
And Ill tell you all the story of
Jesus...the missing years

Repeat chorus:

We all reside down the block
Inside at ....23 skidoo.
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Are you a psychopath? Take the psychopathy test.

Are you a psychopath? Take the psychopathy test. Remember. . .no cheating, although if you are indeed a psychopath, you would have no compunction about cheating.

Robert Hare's Psychopathy Checklist-Revised is the psycho-diagnostic tool most commonly used to assess Psychopathy.

Disclaimer: Your scores may have important consequences for your future, and this test should only be considered valid if administered by a qualified and experienced clinician under controlled conditions. As a life-long student and observer of abnormal psychology, I am emminently qualified to administer the test (further disclaimer: I would also consider myself qualified to perform surgery, having carved a few birds and beasts over the years). And what could be a more controlled environment than All This Is That?

Psychopathy Checklist-Revised

This is a clinical rating scale contains 20 items. Each item is scored on a three-point (0, 1, 2) scale according to specific criteria through file information and a semi-structured interview. A value of 0 is assigned if the item does not apply, 1 if it applies somewhat, and 2 if it fully applies. The items are as follows:

1 Glibness/superficial charm
2 Grandiose sense of self-worth
3 Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom
4 Pathological lying
5 Conning/manipulative
6 Lack of remorse or guilt
7 Shallow affect
8 Callous/lack of empathy
9 Parasitic lifestyle
10 Poor behavioral controls
11 Promiscuous sexual behavior
12 Early behavioral problems
13 Lack of realistic, long-term goals
14 Impulsivity
15 Irresponsibility
16 Failure to accept responsibility for own actions
17 Many short-term marital relationships
18 Juvenile delinquency
19 Revocation of conditional release
20 Criminal versatility

The cutoff for psychopathy is 30 points or greater, although some studies recommend 25. If you scored even over 10, I'm not saying you're ready for the rubber room at the laughing academy, but I'm not sure I want to have you, say, babysit my children either.
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Dumb as a board? Try smarter than 98% of the people reading this. Paris Hilton is outed as a genius and Mensa member.

A family member close to Paris Hilton revealed to All This Is That yesterday that Ms. Hilton is a member of Mensa. Contrary to the image she has carefully developed over the last several years, Paris Hilton has an I.Q. of 144, and is in the top 1% of the population in I.Q.

"It's one of the best-kept secrets in the world," the source told us, "and probably the last thing she wants known." Ms. Hilton joined Mensa in 1997, at the urging of her parents, when she was 16 years old. The family had known about her intelligence for many years, and finally, urged her to take the Mensa qualification test. She had already racked up stratospheric scores on I.Q. tests taken during her early school years and easily passed the Mensa qualification test.

Mensa was founded in England in 1946 by Roland Berrill, and Dr. Lance Ware to create a society for bright people, with the only qualification for membership being a high IQ. They hoped to create a utopian group that was non-political and free from racial and religious distinctions. The society includes members from every walk of life whose IQ is in the top 2% of the population.

Paris Hilton is an American actress, fashion model, author and singer. Her rise to fame was as an heiress to the Hilton Hotel fortune, as well as of her father's, real estate fortune. She was skyrocketed to fame (infamy?) when a videotape of her having sex with her boyfriend became public on the internet. The video drew attention to her participation in a reality T.V. series, The Simple Life. That was followed by a series of personal scandals and publicity stunts. The notoriety enabled Ms. Hilton to publish books, release a music CD, and to launch a best-selling perfume, among other ventures.

Our source told us "She has basically shucked the public into thinking she was a hopeless airhead when in fact, she is a cynical manipulator and entrepreneur. She does nothing that is not calculated and scripted to enhance the image of the mornonic blonde skank. You know what she raked in off just her perfume this year? It's worked pretty well. Don't you think?"
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A Blast from the past: Conelrad. Tune to 640 or 1240 in case of emergency. . .

click concelrad image to enlarge

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all this is that

click image to enlarge

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Wally Wood's 22 panels that work

Wallace "Wally" Wood was an American comic book writer, artist and independent publisher mostly remembered for his work in EC Comics and Mad Magazine. He was born in 1927, and took his own life in his mid-fifties, in 1981.

He created hundreds of comic book pages and illustrated books and periodicals, as well as working in advertising, commercial design, product illustration, gag cartoons (I'm thinking of those risque little cocktail napkins from days of yore), and record album covers and posters.

He also worked on those fantastic Topps "Mars Attacks" trading cards.

Below, is a reasonably high-res. scan of his "22 panels that always work." He apparently created this as some sort of primer for others (and a reminder to himself). He described the panels as a primer, "interesting ways to get some variety into those boring panels where some dumb writer has a bunch of lame characters sitting around and talking for page after page."


click to enlarge, right click to save

A lot of his lessons seem to apply across the board--not only to comic illustration, but to easel art, trad. animation, and digital art--the whole tamale.

It's a little unclear who actually released this scan...BoingBoing says http://joeljohnson.com is the guy. He says he recently purchased the original very cheaply. He has some really high res scans on his site.
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Poem: Anger management is a slippery slope

click angry Jesus to enlarge


I keep worrying
That anger management
Is a slippery slope

In the march toward
Political Correctness
And the next thing you know

We'll be managing laughter
Because people not laughing feel left out
Or because there's so much to cry about

That laughter trivializes the anguish
And leads to the day
When horseplay clowning and japery

Are forbidden forms of expression
And the universal hand-wringing
Begins.
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Digital painting: a self-portrait -- something of a Chuck Close Experiment

Click image to enlarge

This is something of a Chuck Close experiment in painting. The portrait on the left is composed entirely of hundreds of mini-mes, colored and shaded differently. The portrait on the right is the portrait on the left, drastically shrunken and softened. Below is the photo I used for a starting point. I blew this picture up and replaced blocks of pixels with the shaded "mini-me" images.

the original source photo (left) and a detail of the painting (rigtht)
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Alien Lore No. 87 - The Greys at Roswell

I will not go into a lot of detail here. . . check out the links below to learn more about Roswell. I mostly just wanted to publish this picture:


click to enlarge

Celebrities on Roswell
Cheney, Bush & The Greys
Alien Bodies in possession of the U.S. government
Ronald Reagan,. Steven Spielberg, The Greys, & Roswell
The Roswell Flying Saucer and Alien Autopsy
The Alien Interview
Presidents (And Near Presidents) Who Believe In Or Have Seen UFOs: Carter, Nixon, Reagan, Ford, Goldwater, Truman
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Happy 60th Birthday Bill Clinton

The youngest President ever to leave office under his own power turns 60 years old today. Happy Birthday, Bill!

He was an inspiring President (if you discount a few rather tawdry and indecorous episodes). A warm man, and a great speaker, he can light up a room like no one in that office has since JFK. I have only seen him in a large crowd, but people I know who've been at gatherings say he is even more mesmerising in smaller venues. He avoided war, and balanced the budget (and began paying down the deficit). His politics, personality, and deep bond with the American people only shine brighter the longer his successor remains in office.
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